An unquiet generation

Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966) is best known for his study of Weimar film, From Caligari to Hitler (1947). Writing in exile in the US, he assembled the film reviews he had written for the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung before 1933 into a new argument that read the films as symptoms of a collective disposition: namely, that Germans in the 1920s longed for an authoritarian leader. His novel Ginster (1928), available in English for the first time with an illuminating afterword by Johannes von Moltke, is thought-provoking precisely because its author had not yet developed a theory of collective psychology. Instead Ginster is at once more unsettling and more contemporary.

The novel follows the eponymous hero from the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 to the revolutionary turmoil of November 1918. 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 premiss of Zuckmayer’s enthusiasm. Which generation? Whose experience? First, Ginster never gets to the front, spending his time making architectural plans for factories being refurbished for military production, or training to be an artillery man while simultaneously starving himself so that he is finally too weak for active service. Second, the novel repeatedly questions whether one can in fact move seamlessly in one’s thinking between individuals and collectives: “Never had Ginster been introduced to a folk, merely to individuals, single human beings”. And third, Ginster has a troubled relation to the idea of experience. He doesn’t seem to share whatever it is that structures other people’s existences: “People take an interest in their lives, they set themselves goals, want to have things and achieve something. Every person I know is a fortress. Myself, I don’t want a thing”.

It is not easy to read a novel about a character who would rather “dribble away to nothing.” We follow Ginster as he observes his family, friends, acquaintances – and himself – with detached bemusement. The protagonist’s apparent indifference to his own experience, combined with the tone of light sarcasm with which characters are reduced to a metonymic rubble of clothing and disconnected gestures, gives the reader little to identify with – a far cry from the arresting first-person narration of All Quiet on the Western Front. Nevertheless, the novel is structured around two encounters that bring Ginster and his predicament successfully into focus, both involving Julia van C., “the wife of a left-leaning Dutch politician”. Ginster bumps into her unexpectedly at a lecture purporting to explain how the war arose from the conflicting “essential natures” of German and western peoples. He prefers his aunt’s explanation, which focuses on machinations by the Entente “and incompetent German diplomats”: “Misinformed [as] his aunt might be, at least she distinguished between good and bad human beings”. More importantly, his encounter with Julia van C. prompts Ginster to articulate what he has suddenly grasped. Realizing how wrong the lecturer is, he catches a glimpse of his own distance from the people who don’t understand as clearly as he does: “Everybody knows how to live, I see how they go on living without me, I can’t find my way in”. Something similar occurs when Ginster meets Julia van C. again in the novel’s epilogue, set in Marseille in 1924. Standing on the docks and watching people on the threshold of a journey gives Ginster a sense of limitless possibility – not that he knows what to do with the untrammelled vistas. He has experienced little agency, beyond the self-control of suppressing his appetite with cigar smoking. But in Marseille he can at least see through the phrases for which other people reach in “historic times”, like Julia van C. adopting the jargon of “capitalism” and the “proletariat” as she sets off for the Soviet Union.

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. He is not likeable, but the book avoids the trap of making his lack of heroism heroic. Instead, we are “forced to be honest”, where Julia van C. finally failed to be. “What sort of war comes now?” Ginster asks as the fighting stops in 1918. “Out of weariness he wept for his dead uncle, for himself, for countries and human beings.”

Benjamin Morgan is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Worcester College, Oxford

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

The post An unquiet generation appeared first on TLS.