KIRST, Hans Hellmut. Gunner Asch Goes to War. Zero Eight Fifteen II. Trans. from the German by Robert Kee. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 1956. 8vo. First British edition. Publisher’s pale blue cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dust jacket designed by Stein. A very good copy. The cloth clean, but the backstrip faded, corners and tips gently bumped in places. The binding tight and square, the textblock edges a trifle spotted. Endpapers toned and spotted, else clean throughout. From the library of Bruce Marshall with his ink inscription to front endpaper. The dust jacket unclipped, slightly nicked and bumped to corners and tips, faint marks to white rear panel.
The author’s second novel in his acclaimed Gunner Asch series of five novels, each following the normal man in an abnormal world whose parameters and rules are stretched far beyond the mind and will of his own. Kirst joined the German Army in 1933 and was a member of the Nazi Party and, briefly, rejected the Nazi atrocities: “One did not really know one was in a club of murderers”, he later said. The series—an immediate best-seller in Germany and published in the UK and simultaneously in the US—comedically satirises the Nazi ideals of militarism, with flippant turncoats and blundering middle-managers aplenty.
KIRST, Hans Hellmut. Gunner Asch Goes to War. Zero Eight Fifteen II. Trans. from the German by Robert Kee. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 1956. 8vo. First British edition. Publisher’s pale blue cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dust jacket designed by Stein. A very good copy. The cloth clean, but the backstrip faded, corners and tips gently bumped in places. The binding tight and square, the textblock edges a trifle spotted. Endpapers toned and spotted, else clean throughout. From the library of Bruce Marshall with his ink inscription to front endpaper. The dust jacket unclipped, slightly nicked and bumped to corners and tips, faint marks to white rear panel.
The author’s second novel in his acclaimed Gunner Asch series of five novels, each following the normal man in an abnormal world whose parameters and rules are stretched far beyond the mind and will of his own. Kirst joined the German Army in 1933 and was a member of the Nazi Party and, briefly, rejected the Nazi atrocities: “One did not really know one was in a club of murderers”, he later said. The series—an immediate best-seller in Germany and published in the UK and simultaneously in the US—comedically satirises the Nazi ideals of militarism, with flippant turncoats and blundering middle-managers aplenty.
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