Ernst Haffner: Blutsbrüder

Ernst Haffner's Blutsbrüder is a rediscovered novel first published in 1932, and has just come out to a flurry of excitement. It centres around a gang of young men on the margins of society, the Blood Brothers. They sleep in cheap dives or sheds or rent beds by the night and spend winter days in Berlin’s heated waiting rooms and bars around Alexanderplatz, mixing with pimps, prostitutes, thieves, buskers and beggars. The boys – petty criminals, runaways and kids down on their luck – do odd jobs for work, turn tricks or try their hands at occasional blackmail. 

We follow them through ordinary days and great adventures, an escape from a correction home and an excruciating trip on the underside of a train, nights of drinking and debauchery, an arrest and a fight, virginity lost and gonorrhoea gained, days of boredom and poverty. Haffner sketches out some great characters, including the charismatic leader Johnny (what else could a 1930s gang-leader be called?) and the more sensitive correction-home boys Ludwig and Willi. These two eventually break away from the gang and try to go back to the straight and narrow once they find out how the Blood Brothers' new-found wealth has been gained.

That's all I'll give away because the novel is very much plot-led. But what it also does is give us an authentic-feeling picture of life on the underbelly of Berlin society just before Hitler came to power. Little is known about him, but Haffner was a social worker and journalist and was presumably in contact with boys like his heroes. Although he makes no direct reference to politics, his novel was banned and burned by the Nazis. I assume it was the grimy portrayal of "degenerates" as human beings that rankled with them. 

Blutsbrüder will ring a few bells with readers. Döblin's more ambitious Berlin Alexanderplatz is set in the same streets and dive bars, and there's an excursion to Isherwood's gay haunts, portrayed here as decadent (ever the social worker, Haffner never quite ditches morality). The novel also has something in common with Fallada's Alone in Berlin, as the publishers have been quick to point out, in that it too has an almost documentary feel to it – but I found it a more exciting read. Lots of local detail, including poor Jewish life in the Scheunenviertel, lots of open questions – what on earth happened to these boys under the Nazis: did they join the SA, get send to concentration camps or merely end up as cannon fodder?

It's not great literature but the novel appears to capture a moment in time and draws the reader in to its stories and characters. The new edition is beautifully illustrated with photos of 1920s and 30s Berlin. Recommended.

On Writers' Writers and German Writers

There are writers' writers, as you'll no doubt be aware. The kind of writers namedropped by other writers. There are certain characteristics common to the writers' writer. Primarily, she will be no threat to the writers' own standing: unsuccessful in commercial terms, or if not precisely unsuccessful then at least dead. She will not suggest that writing is something that makes writers happy, thus making the writers look like emotional failures: she will have suffered for her art; suicide, madness, disease, loneliness or addiction will play a part. She will be sufficiently obscure to make the writers who drop her name look well-read. She will often be a he.

The obvious example right now is Ian McEwan's advocacy of John Williams. But see also Japanese-German writer Yoko Tawada's fascinating appreciation of Paul Celan in The White Review (trans. Susan Bernofsky) - suggesting the phenomenon might be universal - and any number of those recommended in this recent Observer list.

Of course, German-language writers are high up in the writers' writers charts among English speakers: Sebald, Kafka, Bernhard, Celan, Roth, Koeppen, Walser, Kraus, perhaps Brecht. Skilled, all of them, with a bit of a narrative to their own lives. And firmly dead.

Teju Cole was recently awarded the International Literature Award in Berlin, along with his translator Christine Richter-Nilsson. If you've read Open City and are anything like me, you'll have guessed at one of his major influences (I enjoyed it nonetheless). But what made me think was something he said at the award ceremony, along the lines of: Whenever you read a book by a living writer, you're supporting literature.

Now, I found his statement a little too pithy, but we all exaggerate on adrenaline. Yet, what I would like to happen is this: for British and American writers to start reading and championing living writers in translation. This is happening to some extent with Krasznahorkai right now – but you could take it further, writers. And Other Stories has the clever ploy of asking English-language writers for introductions to their books, so that each of their translated writers has an advocate on home territory. But really, think of the benefits! The few who get translated are outstanding writers but they present no threat because they're competing on different terms; they're magnificently obscure and will give you an early-adopter bonus; and although they may not yet be quite open about their tortured souls, a good few of them are fucked up in exotic ways. Plus you get writer karma points (is that a thing?) for supporting a real live underdog rather than a dead and buried one, who won't be grateful and won't big up your books in their own country.

I chickened out a little bit with Teju Cole, and asked his German editor to pass on one of my translations to him: Inka Parei's What Darkness Was - a single life and fifty-odd years of German history summed up in a single day. His German editor might not have given it to him, or he might have left it on a train or put it on that big pile of other books or started it and abandoned it. Or he might be dropping Inka Parei's name in conversation this very minute.

If you're an English-language writer and would like to namedrop some living German writers, I'd be happy to recommend someone you might like whose work is available in translation. I also have spare copies of all the books I've translated (see the profile section for details). Just let me know.