Word: kirst
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...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...
...REVOLT OF GUNNER ASCH (311 pp.) - Hans Hellmut Kirst - LH-fle, Brown...
German Author Hans Hellmut Kirst spent a decade in Hitler's army, and though he does not play his experiences for the routine laughs of No Time for Sergeants, he is able to marry his resentments to a sense of the ridiculous. Perhaps that is why his book has sold 1,200,000 copies in German and various translations...
...Author Kirst's picture of barracks life is only mildly caricature: he knows that the everyday facts are so close to comedy that there is no need to 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...