Word: asch
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
FORWARD, GUNNER ASCH! (368 pp.)-Hans Hellmut Kirs-Little, Brown...
...number (0-8-15) of the Wehrmacht service pistol-which in Germany is a term roughly equivalent to G.I. The book snickered behind the officers' ramrod backs, put in a plea for the dignity of the individual in uniform, and demonstrated hilariously how a canny conscript like Gunner Asch could win at the old army game simply by hiding behind regulations. Old army pros denounced it, and the publisher's office was ransacked by hoodlums. But Gunner Asch became the talk of the land and Null-Acht-Funfzehn the bestselling novel of postwar West Germany...
...friend Asch suffers from no such fears of the military. A bright, thoughtful type with a gyroscopic sense of self-preservation, he hates the whole military setup but manages to land all the cozy details while creating the impression that he is a first-rate soldier. While Vierbein works himself to death without reward, Asch's brilliantly planned loafing brings him a recommendation for corporal...
...very unwieldiness, he sets out to make fools of the men who run his life. Through devices that any old soldier can only admire, he gets his noncoms and even his captain into so much regulation trouble that they earn the contempt of the battery commander. Gunner Asch wins his corporal's stripes and shows up the simple-mindedness of the goose-steppers. But by a superb irony, he is the final loser; through the simple expedient of throwing all the Asch-inspired reports into the waste basket, the commander restores discipline, and the battery reverts to glacierlike army...
...invent the ludi crous. Above all-almost for the first time since Hitler's rise, when the shadow of horror fell on all writing by and about Germans-this book makes at least one group of Germans seem truly human and amusing. For whatever else they were, Gunner Asch suggests the Wehrmacht soldiers were also members in the brother hood of the gripe, card-carriers in the great privates' international...