1 1

Ginster

Ginster

Written By Himself

by Siegfried Kracauer, translated from the German by Carl Skoggard, afterword by Johannes von Moltke

$18.95
$18.95
Available as E-Book Fiction German Literature
Format
This title can be purchased from your favorite e-book retailer,
including  many independent booksellers.

Buy on Amazon   Buy on iBooks   Buy on Barnes&Noble

The November 2025 selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club

Ginster is a war novel about not going to war; about how war, far from the front, comes to warp every aspect of outer and inner life and to infect the workings of language itself. The subject is World War I, but this novel by the brilliant twentieth-century sociologist, journalist, and film critic Siegfried Kracauer, first published in 1928, has as much to say about what it means to live under the sulking great powers and blood-imbrued satrapies of today as it does about the inflamed self-righteousness of late imperial Germany. In Ginster, as in Greek tragedy, massacre occurs offstage, arriving only as "news," but the everyday horror of a society engineered for the continual production of violence is not to be denied. Ginster, the Chaplinesque antihero, intent chiefly on saving his own skin, works hard to keep his distance from the war machine, and yet making a living, he discovers, is all about keeping it running. How different, in the end, is his dreamy self-absorption from the empty military language that has come to pervade every aspect of civilian life in the homeland?

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781681378145
Pages: 312
Publication Date:

Praise

Kracauer’s mordant satire has the caustic power of Celine but is less coarse and choleric. Sharp criticisms of patriotism, cronyism, and the war itself are tempered by the fanciful observations of a character who has the eye of a visual artist...The result is a tour de force of language enriched by gallows humor.
—Publishers Weekly Starred Review

Like Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Ginster appeared in time to mark the tenth anniversary of the armistice. If Remarque’s novel seemed to the playwright Carl Zuckmayer to capture with unparalleled immediacy the experience of a generation, Kracauer’s novel challenges the very premise of Zuckmayer’s enthusiasm. Which generation? Whose experience? [. . .] Ginster does not offer the moral security of All Quiet on the Western Front. The protagonist lives through a 'historic time' with an ironic awareness of the inadequacy of the vocabularies with which people understand their own time.
—Benjamin Morgan, TLS

Ginster’s name belongs with modern literature’s antiwar activists from the Good Soldier Švejk to Yossarian.
—Kirkus Reviews

Ginster is a scathing portrait, light on the plot, of German civilian life [during] World War I . . . [A] drop-dead hilarious anti-war satire.
—Artun Ak, Reading in Translation

The reissue of this novel now is valuable, beyond its considerable historical and aesthetic virtues, because it makes pertinent points about today’s world, bedeviled by war, misery, poverty, and the enticing lure of despotism as an answer to democracy’s shortcomings.
—Thomas Filbin, The Arts Fuse

View full details

  • Shopping for someone else but not sure what to give them? Give them the gift of choice with a New York Review Books Gift Card.

    Gift Cards 

  • A membership for yourself or as a gift for a special reader will promise a year of good reading.

    Join NYRB Classics Book Club 

  • Is there a book that you’d like to see back in print, or that you think we should consider for one of our series? Let us know!

    Tell us about it