Originally published in 1932, Blood Brothers was banned by the Nazis one year later. It’s not hard to see why: for a party founded on German supremacy, this portrait of Berlin’s seething young underclass must have felt like the filthiest propaganda. Worse still, Haffner’s only novel, translated into English for the first time by Michael Hofmann, is packed with thrilling set pieces and believable characters, while the hubbub of the city is brilliantly captured.
Its Blood Brothers are a gang of young men, cut adrift from the adult world, who sleep in warehouses and fleapit cinemas and spend whatever money they can hustle as soon as they get it. Much of the book’s energy comes from the good times, when the boys pack into disreputable beer joints, downing schnapps and roaring with camaraderie, or climb over borstal walls or hide under train carriages. But this is an angry book, too, one that’s furious not so much with individual adults – some of whom are decent and kind – but with institutions that treat the troubled youth like a plague. Haffner disappeared during the second world war but his novel thoroughly deserves its second life.
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