I decided to read Two
Brothers. Partly because, having decided to read Ben Elton, I felt his
fourteenth novel was as good a novel as any of his previous thirteen, but also
because Elton said that it was his most personal novel, based on his family’s
history. It might not have been a literary novel (Elton couldn’t give tuppence
about it) but it was a novel with a serious theme, with Holocaust as its
background.
Two Brothers, as the title implies is the story of two
brothers. Two Jewish brothers, except that one of them is not Jewish, as he is
adopted. The novel is however not just about the two brothers, Paulus and Otto;
it is also about their parents Wolfgang and Frieda Stengel; Dagmar Fischer the
rich Jewish girl both the brothers are in love with, and Silke Krause, their
Aryan friend and a budding Communist,
the daughter of the Stengels’ friend who is secretly in love with Otto.
The story unfolds against the backdrop to the novel is the Germany in the 1920s
and 1930s, from the days of the Weimer republic to the rise of Hitler and the
Nazis. The novel traces the early happy years in the lives of the Stengel
family—Wolfgang is a jazz musician while Frieda is training to be a doctor. The
family survives the post First World War chaos in the 1920s before the family’s
fortunes brighten a bit, only to sink again in the Great Depression and the
rising anti-Semitism in Germany. The time of the novel is set in two time
periods: the 1920s’ and 1930s’ Germany and the Britain in the 1950s where one
of the brothers has been living following the Second World War. I shall not
reveal which of the two brothers was adopted and which survived the war and the
Holocaust, although I do not think Elton means it to be the secret; the
identities are revealed long before the novel reaches its end. The surviving
brother has been working in the British Foreign Office and, a decade after the
war ended, has received a letter from East Germany from Dagmar, who—the reader
is informed in the initial chapters—married the other brother before the
outbreak of the war, expressing a wish to meet him. The brother who has
anglicized his name to Michael is eager to meet Dagmar except that he is quite
sure that the writer of the letter is not Dagmar—who, he is convinced, perished
in the Holocaust— but a Stasi agent who has a very good knowledge of the
Stengel family history. This is a trap to lure him. MI5 are of the same view
and meet with Michael prior to his proposed travel to East Berlin. Michael has
a shrewd guess as to who has written the letter, but he still is determined to
travel to the city of his birth and meet the writer of the letter. This is not
the only twist in the novel. Elton packs in more twists in the novel than on a
winding country road in the South of France.
At almost 600 pages Two
Brothers is a huge sprawling novel. Elton does know how to spin a yarn.
The prose style is pacy, and at times gripping. A quick and easy read, which,
despite the unpleasantness of the subject matter, amusing at times (without
being irreverent). Elton paints his characters with a broad brush; he is not
one for subtlety. Paulus is the calm and calculating one; he has a plan for
everything, the sort of boy whom you can easily visualise sitting in Dragon’s
Den asking searching questions to the would be entrepreneurs, calculating
potential profits. Otto is the headstrong one, whose response to any conflict
is an invitation to the other party to step aside and have a fight. Frieda,
their mother, is nobleness personified. Most of the characters drawn are of
only two shades. The character of Dagmar, who comes to play a pivotal role in
the lives of the two brothers, on the other hand, has no depth. The heavy style
of exposition becomes a tad clunky at times. The atmosphere of terror (for the
Jews) unleashed by Hitler and the Nazis is described in a manner that has the
force of tornado, with language that is at times florid. Perhaps Elton was of
the view that the the nature of the atrocity perpetrated by the Nazis could
only be conveyed adequately by prose that pulled no punches. The result, at
times, is reiterating the obvious. Thus, in a chapter on the Night of Broken
Glasses, after describing at some considerable length, using stark images, the violence
unleashed against the Jews, Elton informs the readers that it was apocalyptic.
Elton has done historical research for the novel, and is driven by the need to
demonstrate it. The novel, at times, reads like a history lesson, as the
invisible, omnipotent narrator feels the need to stop the flow of the fictional
narrative and educate and remind the reader that Hitler was an evil man. It
gets a tad jarring after a while. The dialogues are a curious mixture of
clichés (“Only Jews could produce an Einstein”) and slang which is more British
than German. The characters refer to each other as “mates” and use words like
“wankers” to express contempt. Even allowing for the fact that this is an
English version of what the fictional characters say in German, seeing as the
period of the novel is Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, it seems a bit ersatz.
Two Brothers is a novel that is, for all its weaknesses,
remarkable for the author’s sincerity. In the Afterword, Elton tells the reader
the inspiration behind the novel. The reader learns that Elton is Jewish from
his father’s side, and the family’s original, German Jewish name was Ehrenberg.
Elton’s uncle, Gottfried Ehrenberg, after enlisting in the British army in
1943, changed the name to Geoffrey Elton; and Elton’s father, Ludwig, followed
suit, and anglicized the name to Lewis Elton. Elton then goes on to inform that
a cousin of his father and uncle, Heinz Ehrenberg, was an Aryan child who was
adopted by his Jewish parents and went on to serve in the Wehrmacht. It turns
out that some of fantastic sounding “set-pieces” in the novel have been taken
from real life stories from Elton’s family. Thus, the end of the noble
Frieda—she volunteers to accompany Jewish children being sent east when she is
not required to go, and is gassed on arrival—theatrical as it may sound, is how
Elton’s great aunt (grandmother’s sister) died.
Perhaps Elton could
have written a family memoir instead of novel with unnecessary and unconvincing
twists.
