“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

GINSTER

Siegfried Kracauer
Translated from the German by Carl Skoggard
Afterword by Johannes von Moltke

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?

Ginster will be the November 2025 selection of the
NYRB Classics Book Club.

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For three days only, Ginster is available at 25% off along with four other novels by twentieth-century German writers:

OUR PHILOSOPHER
Gert Hofmann

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AN ORDINARY YOUTH
Walter Kempowski

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ON THE MARBLE CLIFFS
Ernst Jünger

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THE SEVENTH CROSS
Anna Seghers

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