Blood Brothers

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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.

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