Ernst Haffner

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ernst Haffner (* around 1900; † after 1938) was a Berlin writer .

Life

Little is known about Haffner so far. Between 1925 and 1933 he worked in Berlin as a social worker and journalist. After the NSDAP seized power in 1938 he was summoned to the Reichsschrifttumskammer again , after which his trace is lost.

plant

Only one book by Haffner is known, the novel Jugend auf der Landstrasse Berlin, published by Bruno Cassirer in 1932 in an edition of 5000 copies . The novel was praised by Siegfried Kracauer in particular in the Frankfurter Zeitung .

The novel authentically describes the life of homeless young people in Berlin who are struggling to survive, and thus offers an insight into a world that, with a few exceptions, was not the subject of literature at the time. The fear of or the escape from an educational institution, the “care”, which Haffner describes as a repressive place from his knowledge and perspective as a social worker, plays a bigger role in the book. What is striking is the absence of party-political street fights in Berlin after the Great Depression . According to the publisher Peter Graf, the homeless youth “just wanted to survive”. In describing the escape of one of the protagonists on the axis of an express train on the route from the Rhineland to Berlin, Haffner alludes to the vagabond movement, which had formed internationally as an anarchist movement of vagabonds and vagabonds after 1929. The nickname "Eternal Help" for a Berlin shelter for the homeless alludes to "mutual help" as an important principle of the vagabond movement.

The book fell victim to the book burning by the National Socialists in 1933 . It was reissued in 2013 by Metrolit Verlag and 2015 by Aufbau Verlag under the title Blutsbrüder . Similar novels from the first half of the 20th century are Hans Fallada's Everyone dies for himself and Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin .

expenditure

Theater version

literature

  • Almut Konsek: A Berlin clique novel . In: Metamorphosen , New Series 5, Issue 35, pp. 56–58.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The Guardian, accessed January 5, 2015 [1]
  2. ^ The Guardian, accessed January 5, 2015 [2]
  3. Ulrich Gutmair: Die Punks der Weimarer Republik , in: taz , August 19, 2013, accessed on September 10, 2013
  4. Zeit Literature No. 41, September 2013, p. 33.
  5. Blood Brothers. Retrieved May 9, 2017 .
  6. Against the taste of Kurfürstendamm . In: FAZ of August 31, 2013, p. 33.