The Novel of a Melancholy Outcast. On Ginster

Abstract

Generically unclassifiable, Ginster is not only a “war novel” that does not focus on war events, but on an everyday life that is the continuation of the war by other means, but also a work with a philosophical and sociological dimension, in which Kracauer thought to have solved the problems that he wanted to discuss in his book, finally not written, on Marx. The protagonist was not only an innovation in terms of the aesthetics of novel, but also Kracauer’s response to the sociological and political debates about the crisis of the individual (and of individualism), the expansion of mass society and the emergence of a new subject in line with the changes experienced by late capitalism.

Translation from the Spanish by María Inés Castagnino.