Ernst Haffner
Blood Brothers
PRAISE FOR BLOOD BROTHERS
“Ernst Haffner’s Blood Brothers rips you apart, emotionally and intellectually. The tragic story of the Berlin street gang known as the Blood Brothers in the waning days of the Weimar Republic is devastating. Trapped in a cycle of poverty, violence and incarceration, these young men survive by any means necessary. Haffner doesn’t indict the brothers; his target is the outdated bureaucracy and societal inequality that allow six million people to be on the brink of starvation. The book’s power is only amplified when you consider what follows in Germany and the fate of the author and his book. ”
— MARTIN SCHMUTTERER, COMMON GOOD (MINNEAPOLIS, MN)
“In Blood Brothers, misery, company and Weegee-esque imagery form an unholy trinity of gritty perfection that sticks like skin to bone, and sheds flickering light on a vanished world: the merciless streets of 1930s Berlin and the kids who ran them. This is realism at its best — voyeurism with a conscience — and Haffner’s ability to lay bare the mechanisms of cyclical poverty and the state systems that, in spite of themselves, reinforce and recreate conditions of violence and criminality, is on par with Dickens: there are faces and names and stories behind each headline, each juvenile court docket. To paraphrase Dassin’s iconic closing words of that masterpiece of American neorealism, Naked City, there may be a million stories of destitution and despair on the eve of war, but this one is matchless. ”
— ALEX HOUSTON, SEMINARY CO-OP BOOKSTORES (CHICAGO, IL)
“Despite the little we know about Ernst Haffner, it’s clear to me from reading Blood Brothers that he was a brave and compassionate man, as well as a talented author. His novel is a stark, realist masterpiece of 1930s Berlin streetlife that also contains nightmarish elements of German Expressionism and features bureaucracies as strange and labyrinthine as anything Kafka ever conceived. Yet, what comes through the most is Haffner’s supreme empathy for these lost boys, his desire to point out their plight. Blood Brothers is literature of social importance.
It is a clarion call on par with
The Jungle—art meant to enact change for the greater good. Perhaps, in its time, it was too successful at this aim. Otherwise, why would the Nazis go to the trouble to burn it?”
— KEATON PATTERSON, BRAZOS BOOKSTORE (HOUSTON, TX)
INTRODUCTION BY HERBERT A. ARNOLD
THIS SHORT NOVEL about Berlin gang life is quite remarkable and slightly mysterious in several respects. Little is known about the author, Ernst Haffner, who seems to have disappeared during the turmoil of World War II. According to Peter Graf, the editor of the German edition on which this translation is based, he appears to have worked in Berlin as a journalist and possibly as a social worker between 1925 and 1933; the book was published in 1932 under the title Jugend auf der Landstrasse Berlin [Youth on the road to Berlin]. As the translator, Michael Hofmann, notes, “Landstrasse Berlin” conflates the idea of the city, Berlin, and the allegory of the road as the course of human life. It encompasses the road of good intentions and the road as the space of vagrants and tramps, the “home” of the homeless, those who fall by the wayside. The ultimate irony is, of course, that this makes Berlin not so much a destination as a constant condition of those condemned or allowed to flog its pavements. The Nazis banned the novel and included it in their public burning of unwanted books.
