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Loading... Blood Brothers (original 1932; edition 2015)by Ernst Haffner, Michael Hofmann (Translator)
Work InformationBlood Brothers by Ernst Haffner (1932)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Blood Brothers by Ernst Haffner is a novel that takes place during the interwar era in German. Haffner was a social worker and this was his only book. Published in 1932, it was banned by the Nazi's one month later. There is no record of Haffner after the war. Haffner's book details the lives of street gangs and the kids who make them up. The Versailles Treaty was tough on Germany and it was the average citizen who suffered the most. Gangs of kids from young teens to young adults group together in tight knit clubs. The clubs like street gangs today have a code of honor and a chain of command. There is a military like discipline among the members and a life of petty crime. Some fit into the lifestyle and others are leery of the criminal life. For some, it is their only choice if they want to survive on the streets. Blood Brothers took me back to the first time I read The Outsiders back in my preteen years. It is rough, gritty, and goes deeper than the The Outsiders. Life on the street is rough whether you depend on crime or a more honest means to survive. Blood Brothers shows the reader that it's not only the NYC underground where gritty lifelike street stories are born. A well written and excellent work of historical fiction. The gang subculture of homeless youth in Weimar-era Berlin, rendered in lean, muscular prose well-suited to the subject. The main narrative follows the converging paths of Willi and Ludwig, two adolescent escapees from the juvenile detention system who find protection and a sense of belonging within a gang of pickpockets on some seriously mean streets. As the scale of criminal activity ramps up, the stakes get progressively larger; sensing impending disaster and having no desire to become professional criminals, our heroes hit on a scheme to break free and - they hope - establish a basis for survival within society rather than on its underbelly. I was surprised by how invested I became in the fate of these characters. The novel does a good job of conveying the bonds of loyalty and subtle personality dynamics that form among this makeshift street family, eking out a tenuous niche among thieves, hustlers, snitches, prostitutes, beggars, rival gangs, and the police. Haffner's journalistic eye evokes the harshness of Berlin's "gray, proletarian streets", the crowded, smoke-filled claustrophobia of its basement dives, the institutional bleakness of the correctional facilities designed to warehouse kids until they reach the age of majority (until then, they are basically non-persons, unable to work legally and always subject to arrest). Haffner has an open heart that never shortchanges the dignity of these characters. There are lots of small, well-observed moments in which they get to be simply human, such as when Ludwig, recently fled from detention, hungrily takes in the tumult of a bustling Alexanderplatz after months of sensory-deprived incarceration. Moments like this throw into relief the more adrenaline depictions of life lived in extremis: unable to afford a ticket, Willi spends a harrowing night clinging to the underside of a passenger train speeding toward Berlin. Haffner gives us the racket, the wind-chill, the muscle cramps, the sheer terror, the rocks and pebbles thrown up from the tracks hitting him in the face. Hang on for dear life and let your guard down only at the risk of being ground up: it's an apt metaphor for how his characters subsist from day to day. Haffner was a social worker in Berlin at the time the novel takes place, and the self-perpetuating, structural brokenness of the various bureaucracies whose wheels his characters are caught in (or trying to avoid) always looms large. The Nazis didn't care for Blood Brothers and banned it when they came to power. Haffner himself ultimately disappeared in the chaos of the war years. Blood Brothers is his only known work. Blood Brothers: A Novel by Ernst Haffner, translated by Michael Hofmann (Other Press, $14.95). Originally published in Germany in 1932 as Jugend auf der Landstrasse Berlin (Berlin Street Youth), Ernst Haffner’s novel was never translated into English and was banned by the Nazi government in 1933. That alone makes this novel of historical interest; its popularity prior to being banned makes it interesting from a literary standpoint. Blood Brothers, in an English translation from the accomplished Michael Hofmann, is the story of a post-WWI street gang that called itself, fittingly, the Blood Brothers. This is the ugly underbelly of Weimar Berlin, with crime, soup kitchens, warming centers and unemployed, angry youth. Readers can’t help but wonder why the Nazi Party would have banned it, given that Haffner is describing in detail the very social conditions that made the rise of their regime possible. Haffner, a social worker and journalist, is a true realist, right down to stomach-turning descriptions of violence and the smell of unwashed bodies packed tightly in flophouses and public spaces. While it’s not overtly political, Blood Brothers provides insight into the social and economic conditions that made Hitler and Nazism seem like a way forward, at least to some people. The novel is also a reminder that youth gangs and violence do not arise out of nothingness and are, instead, the product of an economy and a culture that is already on the verge of collapse–a lesson that should not be lost of contemporary readers. Reviewed on Lit/Rant: www.litrant.tumblr.com no reviews | add a review
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Blood Brothers is the only known novel by German social worker and journalist Ernst Haffner, of whom nearly all traces were lost during the course of World War II. Told in stark, unsparing detail, Haffner's story delves into the illicit underworld of Berlin on the eve of Hitler's rise to power, describing how these blood brothers move from one petty crime to the next, spending their nights in underground bars and makeshift hostels, struggling together to survive the harsh realities of gang life, and finding in one another the legitimacy denied them by society. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)833.912Literature German literature and literatures of related languages German fiction Modern period (1900-) 1900-1990 1900-1945LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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Whether the translation was accurate I can't say, but this English version has very good flow and makes the material perhaps too easily borne. ( )