by Artun Ak
One does not think of fiction when one hears of Siegfried Kracauer, which is a shame. Most Americans who know of the man are acquainted with the two books on cinema he produced after escaping Nazi Europe for New York: the highly influential From Caligari to Hitler (1947), with its bold argument that Weimar cinema had foretold of German totalitarianism, and the tome that is Theory of Film (1960), which, as the enigmatic subtitle goes, tasks cinema with “the redemption of physical reality.” And a smaller, mainly academic bunch have encountered some of the essays initially written for the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung in the 1920s and later collected as Das Ornament der Masse (1963; appeared in English as The Mass Ornament in 1995) that wrestle with the rise of the masses and popular culture in interwar Germany, elucidating concepts such as boredom (Langeweile) and distraction (Zerstreuung) that are now commonplace in studies of modernity.
This is already a strong oeuvre, but Kracauer also wrote two novels, Ginster (1928) and Georg (1973, posthumous), and a handful of novellas and short stories, all of which have so far evaded the readerly radar on this side of the Atlantic, almost certainly because there have been no translations available. Thanks to the meticulous work of translator Carl Skoggard, however, this lack is now being rectified. Georg, about a reporter living through the collapse of the Weimar Republic, has come out with Publication Studio Hudson in 2018, and Ginster will be released by the New York Review of Books this summer (2024), when the Anglophone reader will finally have access to this drop-dead hilarious anti-war satire, which made this reader chuckle out loud quite a bit.
Ginster is a scathing portrait, light on the plot, of German civilian life between the July-August 1914 declarations of World War I, known merely as “the war” to those living through it, and of the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II and the founding of the Weimar Republic in 1918 as the public realizes that there is no victory in sight (plus an epilogue that takes place in Marseille five-ish years after the war). The eponymous character Ginster, a freshly minted architect managing to avoid the trenches, is rather appalled by the situation from the get-go, claiming a couple pages into the book that “people had been crazy ever since war was declared, no one talked any longer about important things” (9). This is sardonic, yes, but his comment also betrays the naivete, if not idiocy, that characterizes Ginster — what can be more important than a war that one suddenly finds oneself in? — and this is one of the quirks about him that made the Austrian writer Joseph Roth quip in a raving review, “Ginster in war: that is Chaplin in the department store” (quoted from Kaube). Another quirk is the same pathos that had elevated Chaplin from a great comic to a great artist, which comes through in the book when we stumble upon sentences such as “his own fecklessness despised him” (9), or “had he possessed comrades, he would have never have wanted to part from them” (251), or “and basically I liked having to pay for my love, since I had never yet succeeded at the unpaid variety; now at least I would be allowed to love unabashedly in exchange for money” (258).[1]
Chaplin, however, is not merely a sympathetic clown who occasionally triggers a pang in the heart. In the Germanic tradition, at least, there is a rich history of seeing a socially emancipatory potential in Chaplin’s goofiness, which leads to a certain re-evaluation of idiocy itself. The Hungarian critic Béla Balázs, who was a contemporary of Kracauer, describes Chaplin’s “difficult but victorious struggle with practical objects” as being “rooted in a grotesque and mocking indignation about our tool-based civilization and its estrangement from nature” (Balázs 86), whereas the filmmaker Julian Radlmaier, who is our contemporary, has defined the idiot as someone “who doesn’t understand why the world is as it is, and not different. Who is capable of imagining a different world, against all probabilities… represent[ing] the principle — one might say: the dignity — of fiction: the ability of creating a distance to the logic of reality” (Radlmaier, “Director’s Statement”). Ginster participates in this tradition of the critical idiot, for example when the narrator says on his behalf, “now they were all of them one folk. Never had Ginster been introduced to a folk, merely to individuals, single human beings” (3), and enabled, as it were, by the distance created through his incomprehension, he occasionally lapses into something akin to clarity:
At night in bed, he reviewed his situation, partly out loud and with a tender feeling for himself. Clearly, he was afraid — a coward. He did not want to be caught by some bomb or other which just happened to explode over him. What was important — always he came back to this — was getting at the reasons that had led to the war, straight through the lies and right through the stupid emotions. Ginster hated the emotions, the patriotism, the huzzahs, the banners; they obstructed one’s view and people were dying for nothing. Dread gripped him: how clueless he had been growing up, in a cocoon, always self-absorbed… Probably he only struggled to understand everything now out of cowardice, still it was important to understand. (81)
Adhering to the requirements of the silent film, Chaplin the “flat-footed acrobat” (Balázs 86) develops his critique of the present visually, and primarily through his body. There is certainly something cinematic in Ginster too, especially in the attention paid to the geometric and the corporeal throughout the work — and at times to horrifying effects: in a scene straight out of David Cronenberg’s mind, we read that “the narrowness of the room caused the parental flesh to come very close; it lay under a magnifying glass, its pores opened wide, and even the feelings consisted of flesh” (48) — but the book’s real forte is its linguistic slapsticks. To be clear, these moments are not merely for the giggles, as one of the major ways Ginster registers war’s effects is through the reformations and deformations in language: “The whole of German grammar had undergone a military transformation,” presumably due to “the need to express the thing-character of human beings” (157). But to put the war aside for a moment and attend to a less serious but nonetheless exemplary moment in the text, here is how we are introduced to one of Ginster’s colleagues, Wenzel, the hydraulic engineer:
Wenzel possessed a belly in his middle years and oversaw the municipal sewer system. Evidently the sewer water flowed off by itself, for again and again he showed up in Ginster’s office to pay visits lasting hours. […] Mostly he spread out like a puddle that was unwilling to trickle off. The entire city building commission was reflected in it. […] “Stinks to heaven,” he yawned softly. The sewers through which his words flowed were often clogged. So sluggish. […] Ginster was afraid of being washed away. […] Silence; the main valve was off again. Ginster struggled mightily to open it, and finally something came dribbling out. (217)
In Kafka, we regularly meet poor fellows whose entire personality is their occupation, and whatever laughter they induce is often mixed with some pity. Here, Ginster’s entire perception of Wenzel is colored by the latter’s job as the overseer of the municipal system, leading to a prolonged metaphorics that become amusing through its insistence. Wenzel is not a chubby man carelessly sitting on a chair, but a puddle, and magically, he can reflect images on his oversized belly. The fact that he doesn’t talk much leads to the deduction that his word-sewers are clogged. And when the silence sets, Ginster’s task is to force-open the main valve, at least enough for a couple words to drop. This is perhaps funny in the images it conjures, like a Mickey Mouse skit or Surrealist flick, but before that, its force comes from how Ginster lets a concept or a word and the associations around it infect him. And if militarized language emphasizes the thingness of human beings and thus reifies them, the metaphor’s capacity to upset the literal/figural boundary — Wenzel is not literally a puddle, or is he? Isn’t he merely a literary being at the grace of this so-called comparison? Is he anything more than that? Is he not a puddle? — and Ginster’s open-hearted — idiotic? — givenness to it suggest a model of resistance in language: in a reality where every man has to be a thing to be made use of, metaphor lets one loose by allowing them to oscillate between two things — this and that, this like that — thus making them a not reliable, stable thing, i.e., a nothing. “I must starve myself to nothing, to nothing” (183), says Ginster, stating a strategy to duck the draft, and this becoming-nothing proves as much a linguistic as a physical project.
Kracauer, Siegfried. Ginster. Translated by Carl Skoggard, NYRB, 2024.
Artun Ak is a third-year Ph.D. student in German Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is interested in post-Kittlerian media studies with a focus on the early 20th century. Current projects address protective and projective screens in Franz Kafka’s “The Judgment” and Béla Balázs’s literary criticism in Weimar newspapers.
Works Cited
Balázs, Bela. Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The Spirit of Film. Translated by Rodney Livingstone, edited by Erica Carter, Berghahn Books, 2010.
Kaube, Jürgen. “Ginster und Chaplin.” Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung, April 4, 2013.
“Director’s Statement: Markus Nechleba and Julian Radlmaier talking about Self-criticism of a bourgeois dog,” Faktura Film.
[1] Re: Chaplin’s development, I am relying on the David Letterman writer Stephen Winer in “A Smile and a Tear,” Current (The Criterion Channel), December 30, 2013: “As Chaplin gained greater creative control over his work, he began to add unexpected levels to his character. Beginning with shorts like The Tramp, The Bank (both 1914), and The Vagabond (1915), he dared to temper the slapstick with moments of sadness, asking audiences to feel for the Tramp, who might lose the girl, the job, or even the future. These emotional grace notes were something wholly original in silent comedy, and they were noticed and admired by both audiences and critics. Chaplin was no longer simply being referred to as a great comic; he was being called a great artist.”