Blood Brothers: A Berlin clique novel

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Blood brothers. A Berlin clique novel is a work by Ernst Haffner , originally published in 1932 under the title Jugend auf der Landstrasse Berlin in an edition of 5000 copies by Bruno Cassirer , banned by the National Socialists in 1933 and reissued in 2013.

action

The work, which is divided into 20 short chapters, describes how a group of young homeless people in Berlin in the early 1930s managed to survive. Some of the eight boys and young men are orphans or run away from home or welfare institutions. They are looking for work as a day laborer or errand boy, are active as petty criminals or prostituting themselves. The peer group is an important point of contact, as the boys have little trust in adults or institutions due to bad experiences. Despite abject poverty, the young people show solidarity with one another and often share their last groschen or food with one another. Haffner describes her everyday life as follows: “Going on the line, occasionally earning a thaler, and otherwise starving and starving that the rind cracks. Homeless, homeless for so long that a mattress in a mass hostel is paradise. Or join another clique. Working under a guide again, pickpockets, minor break-ins, car robberies, ... Which is the specialty of the clique right now. ”(Page 228)

The action takes place in the streets and squares of eastern Berlin center near Alexanderplatz , where the boys spend a lot of time on the streets and in pubs. They eat in branches of the cheap restaurant chain Aschinger , which was popular at the time , stay in heated rooms , libraries and cinemas and sleep temporarily with the so-called "slumber mother" Olga, who illegally rents the boys sleeping places in her apartment. The Berlin Tiergarten also plays a role in the novel, because there the boys meet their suitors, some of whom they try to rob and blackmail. Only a few chapters take place in a welfare facility in another part of the country and describe the escape of a boy from there via Cologne to Berlin.

As the oldest and most courageous of the boys, Johnny is the "clique bull", the leader of the blood brothers. In order to be accepted into the group, the boys must pass an initiation ritual, namely have sex with a woman, usually a prostitute, four times within an hour in the presence of the other.

The real protagonists of the novel are Willi and Ludwig. Willi fled the violence in the youth welfare facility and traveled to Berlin hanging under a train. There he gets by with minor thefts and occasional prostitution. Through Ludwig he made contact with the blood brothers. Ludwig broke out of the same home two years earlier and has been living on the streets for a long time and is a permanent member of the blood brother clique. He is arrested in the course of the plot for attempting to redeem a stolen baggage ticket, which he was hijacked. During a prisoner transfer by tram, he manages to escape and he returns to the clique. From now on, however, he lives as an illegal man until a landlady helps him out with the papers of a former tenant.

Documents are a central problem for the clique, because officially the underage boys are not allowed to rent an apartment or work without the consent of a parent or guardian. In order to raise money, the boys often have no choice but to commit crimes. When the clique begins to pickpockets from customers in department stores in addition to the occasional car theft, Willi and Ludwig have a remorse. They are aware that the clique does not shy away from stealing from other poor people, which the two boys find very unfair. They break away from the clique, but from then on live in fear of being considered traitors and being beaten up, as the youth cliques have a strong code of loyalty. A third boy, Heinz, who ran away from home, also leaves the clique. He turns himself in to the police as he is exhausted from the struggle for survival on the street and hopes to be better off in a welfare facility.

To avoid the blood brothers, Willi and Ludwig avoid the center and go to Neukölln , where a helpful landlady gives them a room. The boys try their hand at honest work and go from house to house to buy cheap used shoes. At home, they mend and polish the shoes and then sell them to junk dealers. Despite the economic crisis, the small business is doing surprisingly well and the youngsters enjoy a carefree time for a few weeks with a roof over their heads, enough food and legal work. However, they are denounced because they move under a false name in Berlin and end up in prison only for assault on an educator in the youth welfare institution (Willi) or theft (Ludwig) and then again in a home for young people. Willi is released from welfare on his 21st birthday as an adult and Ludwig, who is not yet of legal age, piles up again. Back in Berlin, they sublet a shoemaker at the Görlitz train station and resume their business with the old shoes. The novel ends with the following words: “The time up to Ludwig's twenty-first birthday will cost you many a restless minute. Willi and Ludwig, two of the wretched army of urban vagabonds who, already in the process of going under, did not go under. Two out of thousands on Landstrasse Berlin. - "(page 260)

style

Haffner's style is a relentless realism, with which that time in Berlin's city history is portrayed intensely, namely "more lively, more comprehensible than a non-fiction book ever could," says Patrick Schirmer. The novel is written in the present tense and has an authorial narrator . The language is simple and contains many expressions from the jargon of the lower class, in the literal speech a lot of Berlin dialect is spoken.

reception

The work of twenty chapters was assigned to various literary genres and described as follows: as "fable" ( Siegfried Kracauer , 1932), as "novel report" and "historical asphalt literature " ( Andreas Kilb in the FAZ , 2013), as "milieu report" (anonymous at perlentaucher.de for the NZZ review, 2013) or what it actually says: “Mileu-Roman”, “Zeitportrait”, “vivid material collection” ( Nico Bleutge in the NZZ , 2013), as “episodic novel in the style of the new Objectivity ”( Ina Hartwig in Die Zeit , 2013) or as a“ Berlin novel ”( Jens Bisky in the SZ , 2013).

1932

In 1932, Siegfried Kracauer enthusiastically reviewed the book (or: I wrote a very benevolent, laudatory review, or: an "anthemic criticism".) Kracauer mentions that Haffner "spent a long time as a journalist between Alexanderplatz and Schlesisches Bahnhof". Kracauer praised the novel for its portrayals of the environment. In the form of a fable about which Kracauer admits that Haffner is “not satisfied with incoherent excerpts of reality”, we would be “led casually through the subterranean city labyrinth” (Kracauer).

Since then, only a few of the studies on the literature of the Weimar Republic have mentioned this work, Jens Bisky noted in his 2013 review for the Süddeutsche Zeitung .

2013

For Ina Hartwig , lacony is in the air in Blood Brothers , a sound that is familiar from Bertolt Brecht , Alfred Döblin or Irmgard Keun . Here the story is told with great speed, wit and empathy. Patrick Schirmer Sastre found blood brothers breathtaking. In his review in the Berliner Zeitung he mentions the simultaneous works Straßen ohne Ende (1931, by Justus Erhard ), Schluckebier (1932, by Georg K. Glaser ) and Betrogene Jugend (1932, by Albert Lamm ) and notes that these too deal in literary form with tortures in welfare institutions and with the neglect of unemployed (male) young people. In contrast to Glaser, Haffner tells of apolitical young people. Nico Bleutge read the novel as a contrast to Walter Benjamin's upper-class Berlin childhood around nineteen hundred , written around the same time. The “real shortcoming” is that the novel takes a we / them perspective from “below” to “above”. Haffner describes the situation using the example of individual young people, which may be interesting from the point of view of the material, but is disappointing from an aesthetic point of view: "Haffner tries to develop a style that television will later cultivate as social reporting". However, he counteracts their objectivity in a mixture of closeness and distance by instead using judgmental, empathetic sentences “in an almost permanent present”. Bleutge reads genre scenes with stereotypes and he thinks that Haffner subverted them, i.e. used them inadvertently: One should not confuse the book with a good novel, because it is more of a clear collection of material. Also Andreas Kilb in the FAZ has a problem with the area occupied by Haffner perspective, the "look of a law Haber. Because Haffner's book has a clear enemy image. Not the police, not the state, not even the Weimar parties, which are never mentioned - but the bourgeois 'amusement mob' with its 'Kurfürstendamm taste' ", which expresses Haffner's" black and white picture of Berlin class society "," the gaze of the compassionate, compassionate witnesses ”. The problem is that there is something “mixed up” in tone and perspective: reportage and morality. Kilb generalizes his sense of reading and says that one reads the book “with that pleasant shudder with which one watches a newly discovered silent film, for example. It screams, but in black and white ”, and sums it up, also generalizing:“ It doesn't hurt. ” Jens Bisky notes, similar to Bleutge, that Haffner, in his description of barracks in West Berlin, pays his tribute to the cliché“ - the reader Christopher Isherwood suspects in a corner - “and it remains vague, whereas Haffner usually sketches the picture of the city precisely. By describing a birthday orgy as "almost chaste", Haffner in no way prepares the plight of the boys and the misery for the "amusement mob". Bisky thinks that the sentences are not to be ascribed to observation but to reading.

expenditure

  • Youth on the Landstrasse Berlin. Bruno Cassirer Publishing House, Berlin 1932.
  • Blood brothers. With a foreword by Peter Graf. Walde + Graf bei Metrolit, Berlin, 4th edition 2013, ISBN 978-3-8493-0068-5 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Patrick Schirmer Sastre: "Blood Brothers" by Ernst Haffner: Damn no self-chosen fate. Berliner Zeitung , August 15, 2013.
  2. ↑ a b Ulrich Gutmair: The punks of the Weimar Republic. Ernst Haffner's re-published novel “Blutsbrüder” is for the radau-communist Berlin youth culture of 1932 what “Christiane F.” was for the subculture of West Berlin: a drastic look at the life of the marginalized. taz , August 19, 2013
  3. ↑ a b c d e Jens Bisky: Willi and the lost boys. A rediscovery: Ernst Haffner's Berlin novel “Blutsbrüder” from 1932. First in: Süddeutsche Zeitung , August 21, 2013.
  4. ↑ a b Andreas Kilb: Against the taste of the Kurfürstendamm. Ernst Haffner's novel report "Blutsbrüder" from 1932 tells of the lost youth of Berlin and guides the reader casually through the underground labyrinth of the big city. FAZ , August 30, 2013.
  5. ↑ a b Ina Hartwig: "Don't go back!" "Blood brothers" - the cool sound of the Weimar Republic. In: Die Zeit , October 2, 2013, book fair supplement, p. 33.
  6. ^ Nico Bleutge: In the eternal night of Berlin. A new edition of Ernst Haffner's forbidden and burned milieu novel "Blood Brothers" from 1932. In NZZ , December 24, 2013, p. 43.