An unheroic hero: Ginster, by Siegfried Kracauer, reviewed
Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) made his name as a film theorist. His critical writings have long been available in English, and now his fiction is finally getting its due. The first of his two novels – published in Germany in 1928, five years before Kracauer fled the rise of Nazism – uses as its title his journalistic pseudonym. The protagonist inherits other autobiographical details, too, starting from the opening sentence: ‘When the war broke out, Ginster, a young man of 25, found himself in the provincial capital of M.’ Germany’s descent into the Great War is sketched in vividly cubist images. One character ‘consisted of three spheres stacked on top of
