Word: kirst
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...RETURN OF GUNNER ASCH (310 pp.) _ Hans Hellmuf Kirst - Little, Brown...
...Blankets. Author Kirst. tries doggedly to depict the mentality, talk and folkways of Americans, but except for an occasional phrase like "in the bag," the Americans sound totally Teutonic. But readers will find grim, retroactive amusement in Author Kirst's account of the hasty changes made in a German town as U.S. tanks approach: an old Nazi triumphantly reveals that his housekeeper is half Jewish; panicky Gauleiter and Kreis-leiter are sheltered in hospitals; a satisfactory "antifascist" working man is thrust into jail ("Wouldn't you like another blanket, Herr Freitag? Two more perhaps?") in the hope that...
...Germany, it has seldom occurred to novelists that life in uniform is a laughing matter. But in 1954 a Prussian-born veteran of the Wehrmacht named Hans Hellmut Kirst wrote a book called Null-Acht-Fiinfzehn-the model 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...
...Kirst's wry chronicle of the peacetime Wehrmacht was published in the U.S. as The Revolt of Gunner Asch (TIME, March 5). Forward, Gunner Asch! is sketched in the frame of the Russian front. But Author Kirst, who fought there, knows that a sense of the ridiculous is valid up to and including the front lines...
...pimp "), and a melodramatic love affair which features a class-C movie Russian Mata Hari who loves her German officer sincerely even as she betrays him. But its freewheeling candor is as engaging as it is un-Prussian. Even its most improbable episodes are edged with Soldier Kirst's knowledgeability, which consistently saves Novelist Kirst's neck...