Blood Brothers Read Free

Empire this meant not only a reduction in size and importance, not to mention being saddled with war guilt and reparations; it also meant a complete upheaval of the social order. Nobility ceased to matter, parliament replaced monarchy, fortunes were lost and made without anyone quite understanding how. Everyone was looking for a new identity, sanctioned by society, with some stability and escape from what must have appeared as a never-ending loop of dispiriting and unsettling catastrophies. This book and the others of the time seem a metaphor for this search.

1
    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 officialdomand 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.
    The “United Artists’ ” waiting room, where applications for urgent assistance are filled in. The initials “UA” have been repurposed by cynical Berlin humor as “United Artists.” Half an hour after opening time, the large hall is already jam-packed. The few benches are fully occupied. Individuals who couldn’t find a seat fill the aisles or lean against the two long walls, which have acquired a nasty black stain at shoulder height from so many thousands of slumped human backs. The indescribably dreary light of the day outside mingles with the glow of the weak electric bulbs to form a chiaroscuro, in which these poor souls look even more wretched, even more starved. On the other side of the walls are bright clean offices. Though these offices are fitted with doors, in the conventional manner, beside each door there is also a four-sided hole large enough for the head of an official on a lower pay scale. To spare their vocal cords and to avoid excessive contact with the needy public, the officials don’t themselves call out the numbers through the doors. No, a flap is thrust open, a human head appears nicely framed and yells out the number. And with that the flap clacks shut. The number — in the office, it is translated back into “Meyer, Gustav” or “Abrameit, Frieda” — trots into the office through the door beside the hole. Each time a number is called, all the waiting heads jerk up. It can happen that two numbers are called from opposite walls simultaneously. Then all the heads jerk up and back in time.
    The eight boys were able to capture a whole bench and, serenely oblivious to the numbers, they drop off to sleep. They’ve spent the whole endless winter’s night on the street. As so many times before: homeless. Always trudging on, always on the go. No chance of any shut-eye in this weather. Day-old remnants of snow,