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Sometimes the backstory of an author adds to the legend of a great work of literature—Ulysses S. Grant wrote what many consider to be the greatest American autobiography after he learned he would die of cancer to provide for his family after he had lost all his money; Harper Lee wrote a seminal work of American fiction and decided to never write another book; J.D. Salinger wrote the book that is a rite of passage for virtually every American high school or college student only to live in cryptic isolation; John Kennedy Toole committed suicide before his novel was recognized as one of the great comic classics ever written. And even more rarely, it’s the lack of information about an author that intrigues, as is the case with Ernst Haffner.

Virtually nothing is known about Haffner; there are no existing records about how he lived or died. He was a social worker, all traces of him disappeared in 1938, when he was summoned to one of Joseph Goebbels�� departments which was responsible for the printed word in Nazi Germany. His only novel, Jugend auf der Landstraße Berlin (Youth on the streets of Berlin), was published in 1932 and was one of the books burned by the Nazis on May 10, 1933. Few of the 5,000 copies of the book that were printed survived World War II. Even fewer people remembered that it existed…until 2015, when Aufbau Verlag, the publishing house of former communist East Germany that has been resurrected into one of the most respected imprints in Germany today, published it with the title �����ܳٲ�����ü���� (Blood Brothers). And what a wonderful book it is.

The story revolves around a long forgotten episode of late Weimar, depression-era Berlin: the lives of young people with no homes or families, who lived on the fringes of society. Most of the story revolves around two young men, Ludwig and Willi, who despite their ages of 19 and 20, are still considered boys. At the time, boys who were not dependents lived in prison-like juvenile institutions. Ludwig is a member of a gang, the Blood Brothers, or in the parlance of that time, a clique, which acted as more of a social support network. He escaped a juvenile institution two years earlier. Willi escaped another one four months earlier, jumping on a freight train he thought would take him to Berlin but was instead bound for Cologne. His adventurous ride on the axle of passenger train from Cologne to the outskirts of Berlin reveals everything one needs to know about his character. Ludwig is duped into taking a rap for a crime with which he had nothing to do. Before he is saved by his “brothers,�� Haffner teaches us a great deal about Weimar criminal justice.

Their adventures touch on many aspects of the Berlin lower classes: gangs, prostitution, petty crimes, the constant nearness of violence, poverty, and coping to survive. There are characters who are reprehensible, cynical, conniving, and oddly friendly. But the true joy of the story is the inextinguishable optimism that keeps Ludwig and Willi going and eventually develops into the best of friendships. �����ܳٲ�����ü���� is one of those rare stories that burrows into your memory, hopefully for a very long time. It underscores the tragedy and mystery of what Ernst Haffner may still have offered the world. As I reflected on the characters. it occurred to me that Ludwig and Willi—and the other “blood brothers”—would likely have been fighting a war six years after the events of this story. How might have Haffner written their stories? My bet is that he would have humanized them. We can only speculate.