Bluesky

World War I novels tend not to grant their characters much time alone. In Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Paul Bäumer and his classmates are herded by their schoolmaster into enlistment. Joined by Frisian fishers, farmers, and workers, their cohort becomes a training platoon. “Comradeship,” Paul reminisces, was “the finest thing that arose out of the war.” From the first-person plural, Paul describes their daily habits, fighting under fire, and a shared sense of mortal dread: “We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go out.” One by one, these lives are extinguished, including, in the final paragraphs, that of Paul himself. Remarque saw the war as a mass betrayal.

Others, like the pacifist and socialist Henri Barbusse, found utopian presentiment on the battlefield—a crucible that the men of Europe had to pass through before they could transform society. In Under Fire: The Story of a Squad, Barbusse stages a dialogue between soldiers amid shellfire, storm clouds, mud, and ruin that swells into a choral revelation as they cry for an end to capitalist domination and all wars. Even Ernst Jünger, who placed an extraordinary emphasis on his own heroics in the field, begins Storm of Steel by employing a collective subjectivity: “We listened to the slow grinding pulse of the front…. We shuddered…. We had come from lecture halls, school desks and factory workbenches, and over the brief weeks of training, we had bonded together into one large and enthusiastic group.” Vibrating with the madness of August 1914, he writes, “we were enraptured by war.”

A defining feature of World War I novels might be their attempt to squeeze the contradictions of modern subjectivity into regiments of men—to illustrate how soldiers, both together and alone, modeled the societies that their authors either dreamed of or despised. The soldier can appear as a neoclassical warrior who embodies the revitalization of the national spirit (as in Storm of Steel), or as a patsy of merciless monarchical and industrial powers (as in All Quiet on the Western Front and Under Fire). 

Ginster: Written by Himself, Siegfried Kracauer’s semi-autobiographical novel published in 1928, defies both tropes. Stunned by the sudden fervor all around him, Kracauer’s protagonist, a young, listless graduate student and architectural draftsman in his 20s, is unmoved: “‘We’ was not about to cross his lips,” Kracauer writes in the opening pages. Days before his conscription, Ginster’s aunt drags him to a public lecture on the philosophical underpinnings of the war. The speaker delivers his points emphatically, which rest on the precept that the peoples of different nations have different “essential natures.” For the various nations of the West, war is a necessary evil, he proclaims, whereas Germans revere it as an art; whereas the West worships false idols like “political freedom,” Germans prize the inner spirit. The professor casts the culture of the former as soulless, rootless, hollow, and of the latter as springing from the genetic material of mankind. Outside the hall, Ginster’s friend asks him what he thinks of the professor. “He has an essential nature,” Ginster responds curmudgeonly.

This is Kracauer’s hero—a man who refuses to sanctify the collective endeavor of war but also refuses to give his reasons, beyond the occasional grunt. One gets the sense that this novel, carrying a whiff of the fin de siècle, thinks that even elaborating concedes too much. If the political realm is too focused on ends to hold Ginster’s attention, his quixotic aesthetic sensibility draws him to the realm of colors, lines, shapes, and objects. Decades later, as a film theorist, Kracauer would argue that cinema had the unique capacity to affect the “redemption of physical reality.” It was overlooked gestures, surface appearances, that held the greatest significance, Kracauer would suggest—and in capturing them, film could counteract ideology. Long before he worked this out, Kracauer invented Ginster, a protagonist with a wandering eye for cinematic detail and someone who, amid a society rife with propaganda, is able to find beauty.

Ginster, we learn early on, is in an enigma. (Indeed, “Ginster” is not our hero’s real name but a schoolyard nickname; it refers to a hardy, bright yellow shrub that grows along train tracks.) His only mission is to stave off the day when he has to become a man. To the extent that men have “set views and a profession…a wife and children besides,” they are “symmetrical ground plans”—baleful things to him, apparently. He exists in a state of superposition, every trait simultaneously itself and its opposite, which is why he shies from observation: Being perceived would force him into something definite.

Perhaps the most unaccountable thing about Ginster is what he makes of the war. Tears roll down his face as a crowd of people amass at the main square as the war begins. He dislikes the völkisch appeals to unity that have seized the national discourse overnight, but he delights in military music and parades. On the first day of the war, Ginster finds himself in the Altstadt contemplating the illumination of a church façade. Nobody is paying proper attention to the quality of the light, he complains. When his friend Otto enlists, Ginster volunteers to do railway logistics for the Army. His petition to evade hardcore military service, which is ignored, proves to be merely the invitation to an absurdist pas de deux with the bureaucracy, which alternately recalls and then exempts him over the course of the war’s four years. Throughout, he displays a disarming naïveté about political developments in his country. “Never had Ginster been introduced to a folk,” Kracauer writes, “merely to individuals, single human beings.” War calls to mind teachers of frightful proportions who once upon a time belabored the history of conflicts and treaties and dates. “I don’t understand a thing about wars, just let me go,” Ginster screams back. 

As it turns out, he will not have to live amid the constant shelling and trench rats, as Paul Bäumer did. Instead, Ginster spends his days shuttling between his family home and a small architectural firm, where he comes up with plans for leather and munitions factories. Caught between civilian and military society, Ginster perceives no division between the two. Everyday language takes on a belligerent character to “express the thing-character of human beings,” and his own gaze mutates accordingly. On the night before he reports for duty, Ginster—fussed over by his mother and his aunt—imagines himself as a “projectile shoved deep inside the barrel of a cannon and about to be fired off.” His aversion to joining up, juvenile and misanthropic, amounts to neither conscientious objection nor courageous resistance. His quiet riposte to the broad support for the war is that “a unity requiring wars defeated its own purpose.” Even more than disliking being told to kill other people, Ginster dislikes other people, or at least being lumped together with them against his will. He would perhaps have agreed with Robert Musil when the latter wrote that wars “do not appear like external epidemics, but through inner influences.” A society whose individuals are relentlessly pressured to prove their usefulness in peacetime has simply transferred that authority to commanding its youth to join up and, as Ginster’s uncle directs him to do, become “submerged in the collective.”

Not just figuratively, Ginster harbors a desire to vaporize into thin air. The daydream recurs regularly, functioning like a mantra or, paradoxically, an anchoring exercise: At the heart specialist’s office, he fancies himself “levitating, borne aloft on a faint odor of disinfectant”; at his boss’s presentation, he wishes to “flee into nonspace”; unlike men, he longs to “exist as a gas.” Once called up to serve, he ventures to shed as much bodily mass as he can, employing a stash of contraband cigars and Alsatian cigarettes to keep his hunger at bay.  Toward the end of his service, we find him contemplating a meringue at a bakery in town. He enters a reverie, admiring its “little air pockets,” imagining how eating it might buoy him into the sky. Vacillating in the face of the pastry, he finally decides to abstain from the dessert; seconds later, he snatches it “to counter his decisiveness, which threatened to violate him.” As he steps out of the shop, he notices with alarm that the pastry has stimulated his appetite, hurrying back to the barracks at the risk that he might “turn into froth himself.” Does he want to be decisive, or does he want to eat the meringue? In a rare earnest plea, he confesses to a female acquaintance at one point, “Everybody knows how to live, I see how they go on living without me, I can’t find my way in. Walls always shove themselves in front of me, it’s necessary to be polite and go in disguise. Still, there is something to me.”

In Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours, the archetypal Decadent hero Jean des Esseintes leaves Paris for the countryside, where he lives in isolation and replaces nature with artifice, preferring paintings, perfumes, and literature to landscapes and life outdoors. He idolizes Mallarmé, who seeks “pleasure far from society, in the caprices of the mind and the visions of the brain.” Ginster shares this predilection for withdrawal, favoring the constructions of his mind over the regulations of reality. But unlike des Esseintes, whose megalomania drives him to reorder physical reality, Ginster imbues the object world with a fantastical agency through language.