Discover Top Posts Tagged with #ernst haffner

Fratelli di sangue di Ernst Haffner, per Fazi Editore, su “Avvenire” del 5 marzo.

Folge 12: Jugend auf der Landstraße

#jugend auf der landstraße #ernst haffner #blutsbrüder #literatur #Literaturempfehlung #Buch #Bücher #gangs #Straßengangs

Ernst Haffner - HERMANOS DE SANGRE

"¿Un destino elegido voluntariamente? No siempre. ¡No siempre! Los años de juventud sometidos a la educación de un centro tutelar, punto menos que años de aprendizaje del futuro transgresor de la ley, no son, maldita sea, ningún destino elegido a voluntad. Y por añadidura, ¡con antecedentes penales! El muro infranqueable, duro como el vidrio, de los prejuicios y la sed de castigo burgueses condena a muchos al fracaso. A un sin número de personas que de buena gana habrían emprendido una vida ordenada".

- Ernst Haffner. HERMANOS DE SANGRE vía Anonyma Veneciana (anonimaveneciana.blogspot.com)

#ernst haffner #anonyma veneciana #habitantes-oazj #letras

Blood Brothers: A Novel by Ernst Haffner, translated by Michael Hofmann (Other Press, $14.95).

Originally published in Germany in 1932 as Jugend auf der Landstrasse Berlin (Berlin Street Youth), Ernst Haffner’s novel was never translated into English and was banned by the Nazi government in 1933. That alone makes this novel of historical interest; its popularity prior to being banned makes it interesting from a literary standpoint.

Blood Brothers, in an English translation from the accomplished Michael Hofmann, is the story of a post-WWI street gang that called itself, fittingly, the Blood Brothers. This is the ugly underbelly of Weimar Berlin, with crime, soup kitchens, warming centers and unemployed, angry youth. Readers can’t help but wonder why the Nazi Party would have banned it, given that Haffner is describing in detail the very social conditions that made the rise of their regime possible. Haffner, a social worker and journalist, is a true realist, right down to stomach-turning descriptions of violence and the smell of unwashed bodies packed tightly in flophouses and public spaces. While it’s not overtly political, Blood Brothers provides insight into the social and economic conditions that made Hitler and Nazism seem like a way forward, at least to some people. The novel is also a reminder that youth gangs and violence do not arise out of nothingness and are, instead, the product of an economy and a culture that is already on the verge of collapse--a lesson that should not be lost of contemporary readers.

#fiction #Germany #translation #Ernst Haffner #Michael Hofmann #Other Press

SECCIÓN DE PRÉSTAMO: Hermanos de sangre (Ernst Haffner, 2015)

#hermanos de sangre #ernst haffner #sección de préstamo

Head over to our website to read an excerpt of Ernst Haffner's Blood Brothers Eight Blood Brothers — tiny individual links of an exhausted human chain stretching across the factory yard and winding up two flights of stairs — stand and wait among hundreds of others to be admitted from the awful damp cold into the warm waiting rooms. Just three or four minutes to go now. Then, on the dot of eight, the heavy iron door on the second floor will be unlocked. The local welfare bureaucracy for Berlin-Mitte on Chausseestrasse jerks into life; the coiled line jerks into life. Limbs advance, feet shuffle, hands clutch the innumerable necessary papers. (In the furtherance of good order, the office has put out printed instructions that list them in endless sequence, and which twenty-four offices are responsible for issuing them.) The queue has already reached the cash-office waiting room. There, with military precision, it splits into two smaller queues. One waits patiently to surrender its stamped cards to the hoarse-voiced office boy Paule, prior to receipt of payment. The second queue winds in front of the information counter in order to answer questions of who and where and where from, and then, with luck, to be issued with cardboard numbers. Thereafter, the individual parts will go into two other rooms to stand outside the doors of officialdom and wait with the patience of saints for their number to be called. The saints will have to be patient for five or six hours or more. The eight gang members join neither of the two queues but make straight for United Artists. Maybe they’ll be in time for a bench. Read more

#Ernst Haffner #Blood Brothers #excerpt

When Nazi students burned proscribed books all over Germany in 1933, a compact work of fiction by a writer named Ernst Haffner went up in smoke along with the writings of Thomas Mann, Robert Musil andSigmund Freud.“Jugend auf der Landstrasse Berlin” (“Youth on the Road to Berlin”) had been published the previous year to considerable acclaim for its unsparing look at a gang of down-and-out teenagers in Berlin.“I have rarely read a description of this milieu that is so grippingly written,” journalist and cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer wrote in the Frankfurter Zeitung. “If a film should ever be made of it, the public will get an object lesson that goes far beyond the usual gangland movie.”

#Ernst HAffner #Blood Brothers #Weimar Republic #Berlin