GINSTER, by Siegfried Kracauer; translated by Carl Skoggard
War has long been described as a machine, but Siegfried Kracauer’s harrowing and hilarious German home front novel, “Ginster,” shows what machines really are: a massive conglomeration of many tiny, boring individual parts.
First published serially in 1928 — just like the famed novel that could stand as its antipodes, Erich Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” — and now in its first English translation, “Ginster” is the eponymous and semi-autobiographical tale of a young man who has long felt formless and stuck in his life, and whose misfit-ness only intensifies as the people around him bond and thrill over Germany’s 1914 declaration of war, as if all their mundanities have suddenly been given purpose, their boring lives thrown into italics.
“People went on and on about Life, and now they were discovering it in the war,” he observes. But war is not thrilling, as Ginster (a nickname that comes from a sort of German broom grass) immediately understands. War is train delays. War is rations. War is turning over your silverware, and your sons, to the fatherland. War is a pile of potatoes to be peeled. And in the middle of all those complicated cogs and levers, this novel is also the story of one man’s personal, miniature war, as he shifts himself across the no man’s land of the German home front, avoiding the real fight at all costs.
Ginster’s own life trudges on as his friends ship out to the front. Trained as an architect, he works to help design storefronts and, eventually, a military cemetery. He reads the daily death tolls in the newspapers. He gets hung up about things as minuscule as gravel in his shoes. He flirts with women, only to feel “as if he were a little railway junction where her express train was halting for two minutes. Bored, looking out the window.” His family at first encourages him to join the war effort, and is later terrified when he might actually have to.
But Ginster is kept from conscription over and over, even as the Great War winds on and the supply of suitable soldiers — Kracauer makes painfully clear how commodified young Germans become in the collective effort — diminishes. Scenes of draft exams are at once taut with meaning and devilishly satirical. As Ginster attempts to earn a medical exemption, the novel notes, “most draft dodgers seemed to have more talent than he did; above all, they showed more courage.” Even when he is finally conscripted, as a cannoneer, he doesn’t make it past training, and is soon relegated to peeling potatoes in a basement for the war effort. His interior train-track of thinking is particularly bizarre and beautiful during these scenes, at once mopey and optimistic, as he fails at every aspect of soldiering. It is a slapstick act perfected to high art.
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