Blutsbrüder: Ein Berliner Cliquenroman (1932)
Ernst Haffner (1900-?)
260 pages
A novel published to critical acclaim in 1932, only to be pulled from the shelves a year later and burned. An author about whom little is known, the last trace a summons to a Nazi government ministry on the eve of WWII. The sudden rediscovery of his novel many decades later, and the recognition of the book as a significant contribution to a little understood aspect of German history.
What sounds like the basis for a dramatic work of fiction actually outlines the real-life history of the novel Blutsbrüder (Blood Brothers and its author Ernst Haffner. Published in 1932 as Jugend auf der Landstrasse Berlin (Youth on the Road to Berlin), the book was banned a year later, after Hitler and the National Socialist party took power in January 1933. Included soon after in the bonfires of the Nazi book burnings, the novel disappeared from public visibility and consciousness all together.According to a 2015 review in the New York Times on the publication of an English translation of the book, a cultural sociologist studying Germany of the 1920’s and 30’s rediscovered the novel in the late 1970’s, but it drifted again into obscurity for several decades, until coming to the attention of a German publisher who, upon reading it, “was fascinated by its immediacy and its lack of melodrama … as an historical document, it is exceptional.” That publisher subsequently released a German edition of the book in 2013.
Of the author himself little is apparently known. According to a preface that accompanies the German re-issue of the book, Haffner worked as a journalist, and possibly a social worker, and lived in Berlin from 1925 to 1933. The last trace of him in the public record is a summons to the Nazi Ministry of Culture in the late 1930’s.
Haffner sets his novel in the Berlin he witnessed in the late 1920’s, a city where the wealthy and middle class lived surrounded by many who struggled in crushing poverty, particularly among the young. The slaughterhouse of the First World War and the hyperinflation Germany experienced in the early 1920’s had destroyed many families, leaving a generation of young people with little or no support. From broken homes and prison-like orphanages, teenagers escaped to the big cities to make their own way. Haffner’s story tells of one such group of boys in their late teens who banded together as a way to survive, calling themselves the Blood Brothers.
Though escaping to the streets of a big city gave the boys a certain kind of freedom, they quickly found themselves constrained on all sides by their illegal status, a lack of education or training, and the high unemployment of the depression era. These teens were in fact but the youngest members of a roiling mass of homeless and unemployed who wandered the streets of Germany’s big cities in search of food and shelter.
In the novel, Haffner exposes this underbelly of society through the boys’ struggles. He builds the story as a series of chapters that are essentially vignettes: short scenes or sequences of scenes, each demonstrating some aspect of the boys’ lives. We experience life in an orphanage, and the dramatic attempts to escape; the never-ending search for a bit of money to be able to afford a place to sleep and some food, beer and cigarettes; the unending risk of being picked up by the police, and the helpless drift through the legal system when they did find themselves caught up in it. The limited supply of opportunities to earn a few coins as a day laborer being quickly exhausted by the masses of unemployed, many resort to thievery or prostitution to keep themselves alive. Even those who attempt some honest labor live in constant risk, since they are underage and have no papers.
Though a rough plot drives the story forward, Haffner mostly uses it as a means to describe what he has seen on the streets of Berlin among the generally invisible masses of the poor. Largely telling the story through the actions and dialogue of the boys themselves, he does occasionally turn directly to the reader, reinforcing for us the almost insurmountable challenges these homeless youth faced. At these points in the story, a reader can almost hear him thinking: “In case you are not fully recognizing the true depth of the shameful existence these children lead …"
Such asides could easily distract from and derail the plot, but they never do. Haffner keeps them short and pointed, and so, instead of undermining the story, they help broaden our understanding. His telling is aided too by his approach to presenting the story. Though the ugliness that surrounds and engulfs these boys (as well as the millions of other boys and girls, men and women, they represent) rings clear in every paragraph, Haffner presents his characters with an empathy and sympathy that avoids making them seem pathetic, or their lives completely hopeless.
Neither are the boys presented as, say, noble savages, having some sort of innate, uneducated goodness. Rather, in a manner that ultimately makes the novel grippingly effective, the young boys appear as real people; they have been dealt a bad hand by circumstance and fate, and in response make choices any of us might make --- sometimes good, sometimes bad --- in an attempt to survive another day. Haffner’s engaging novel thus provides not only a look back at a particular time in history, but, beyond that, an examination of the human ability to survive soul-crushing circumstances.
Other reviews / information:
Fritz Stern has written several fascinating essays that in part describe the interwar period in Germany, in his collections Dreams and Delusions: The Drama of German History, and Das feine Schweigen(The Polite Silence). Follow the links to my reviews of those works.
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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