User:Keenan188

Life

Ernst Haffner was a German social worker, journalist, and novelist whose only novel, Blood Brothers (originally titled Young People on the Berlin High Road), was published in 1932 to critical acclaim by Bruno Cassirer and banned by the Nazis one year later. Sometime over the course of WWII, all traces of Haffner were lost, including any professional and personal records that may have helped to indicate what led to his disappearance. There is just a single entry for him in the Berlin registry, where Haffner lived between 1925 and 1933. At the end of the 1930s, it is documented that he was summoned to appear at the Nazi Reichsschrifttumskammer (a writer’s union affiliated with the Third Reich), after which the details of his life remain unknown.

Work

Published in the last year before Hitler’s rise to power, Blood Brothers received a notable review by famed sociologist and philosopher Siegfried Kracauer in Frankertur Zeitung upon publication.

Told in striking, matter-of-fact detail, Haffner's novel chronicles the dark underworld of Berlin's working class districts in the 1930s, following a gang of young male runaways and delinquents, known as the Blood Brothers, as they eke out a troubled existence along the margins of a society in which gang warfare, petty theft, and prostitution are rampant, but almost entirely unseen by the greater population.

The book was subject to the 1933 Nazi book burnings.

Blood Brothers was reissued in 2013 by the German publishing house Metrolit, and the first ever English edition, translated by Michael Hofmann and published by Other Press, is due to appear in 2015.