Berliners - Hardcover

Stamper, Vesper

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593428366 ISBN 13: 9780593428368

Verlag: Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

A riveting story about the rivalry between two brothers living on opposite sides of the Berlin wall during its construction in the 1960s, and how their complicated legacy and dreams of greatness will determine their ultimate fate.

A city divided. A family fractured. Two brothers caught between past and present.

Berlin, 1961. Rudi Möser-Fleischmann is an aspiring photographer with dreams of greatness, but he can't hold a candle to his talented, charismatic twin brother Peter, an ambitious actor. With the sudden divorce of their parents, the brothers find themselves living in different sectors of a divided Berlin; the postwar partition strangely mirroring their broken family. But one night, as the city sleeps, the Berlin Wall is hurriedly built, dividing society further, and Rudi and Peter are forced to choose between playing by the rules and taking their dreams underground. That is, until the truth about their family history and the growing cracks in their relationship threaten to split them apart for good.
 
From National Book Award-nominated, critically acclaimed author-illustrator Vesper Stamper comes a stark look at how resentment and denial can strain the bonds of brotherhood to the breaking point.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Born in Germany and raised in New York City, Vesper Stamper writes and illustrates novels which tell, through words and pictures, stories of history's rhymes. Her debut illustrated YA novel, What the Night Sings, about two teens emerging from the Holocaust, was a National Book Award Nominee, National Jewish Book Award Finalist, and Sydney Taylor Book Award Winner. Vesper lives with her husband, filmmaker Ben Stamper, and her two teenagers, in the Northeast.

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April 1945


Stunde Null


When he thought about it years later, it was the book in the piano bench that had tipped him off.

Herr Richter was in the kitchen making a cup of tea while Rudolf waited in the parlor for his viola lesson, bored out of his skull. In the low golden light, the room so flowery, so pink, with its armchairs bedecked in cabbage roses, the ticking clock sent him into an afternoon drowse. Rudolf hated the viola. It had none of the panache of the violin, none of the glitter of the piano, which was his first instrument. He had only convinced his parents to let him take these lessons so he could get closer to Gerta.

Today she wasn’t even home, out with Frau Buchner on some errand. So Rudolf, after chewing his nails to nubs, picking at the callus on his left index finger and rosining his bow a third time, lifted the hinged lid of the piano bench and rifled through to see if there was anything interesting.

And there it was. Under the Christmas carols and Volkslieder, a book written in those funny letters he knew only Jews could read, and underneath the title, the translation: Yiddish Ballads.

Rudolf chalked it up to the collection of an eccentric musical couple; people had already begun accumulating artifacts for the time when those people would be extinct. Even though he was given his Hitler Jugend uniform and told to be on the lookout for hidden Jews, it still did not click in Rudolf’s mind.

But when, on another afternoon several weeks later, Herr Richter opened the cabinet to put more cigarettes into his brass pocket case, Rudolf spotted a small silver cup not much bigger than a schnapps glass and thought he made out the distinctive shape of a six-pointed star incised on its side. Then he knew.

It had to be true: Gerta Richter was Jewish. All this time, he had been fantasizing not about a girl, but about a Jew. It wouldn’t have mattered before, in the days prior to the Nuremberg Laws. But it did now. The thought simultaneously repulsed him--mainly because he had been told it should repulse him--and excited him. He had something to report at the next HJ meeting. It pained him, too, because he knew he would have to renounce Gerta. Purge himself of her. He would have to harden his heart and train himself to hate her.

Because he knew he would have to turn Gerta in. It was the Right Thing to do.

That is how Rudolf found himself standing in the midnight dark, watching from the edge of the crowd, emotionless, as the girl he had been in love with since her first day in the children’s choir was herded by guns and dogs onto a train with the rest of the filthy Jews of Wurzburg.

That is how, the next day, he was able to march mechanically up the stairs of Gerta’s flat with the throng of newly vested HJ and march Maria Buchner back down into the glaring sun of Residenz Square, to make her kneel on the cobblestones, and to personally shove the sign--which he had himself scrawled with the words Jew Lover--over the tangled bottle-blond hair of the famous operatic diva who had sheltered Gerta and her father.

That is how now, during the Battle of Berlin, he was able to grab a smoking Luger from the hands of a dying child soldier, younger than himself, just grab the gun from the bleeding-out boy who reached for Rudolf crying, “Mutti . . . Ich will zu meiner Mama. . . .”

Grab. Go. Do. Never feel.

Rudolf walked like an automaton through the crumbling city, ducking behind walls that stuck out of the dust like scraggly teeth. He shot anything that moved. Since his first decision to betray Gerta, his heart had become fossilized by thousands of minuscule choices. Years of convincing himself that down was up, east was west, wrong was right. Compassion was weakness. There was now no belief, no theory, no thought at all--only the animal will to survive.

So it was out of character for Rudolf Möser to save a girl’s life that day.

He didn’t know why he stopped for her. He’d passed dozens of dead compatriots and blubbering toddlers and old women with rubble falling around their shoulders. Buildings bulged and toppled in the non-light of war, dust obscuring all color and notion of time. Every landmark was blasted, the city formless, like a melted honeycomb.

But when Rudolf saw the girl hiding in that doorway, pointing a shaky pistol at whatever bastard would dare to mess with her, he knew he was going to help her. Not just help, but protect her. Not just protect, but marry her.

He saw it in her wild eyes. Standing out from the white war dust encrusting her face, her lips were deep red with lipstick precisely applied. There was something about that beautiful audacity that drew Rudolf to her like a supercharged magnet. For a moment, there was something else besides this war, besides buildings and bodies deconstructing themselves into hell and hate and noise. Those red lips drawn tight across her chalky face were more real than the shrapnel whizzing past his head.

He ducked into the doorway. She swiveled and pointed the pistol in his face. He put the rifle strap on his shoulder and lit a smoke. She didn’t back down.

He could see that she was trembling, not from fear, but from muscle failure. She must have been holding that gun for hours. She could’ve shot him, and felt no regret, either. He analyzed her face as he smoked. For a second, a fleeting moment, he was aware of their youth. That as cockily as he stood staring down the barrel of a 9-millimeter Volkspistole while smoking a cigarette, as littered as his past was with atrocity, as sure as her aim was likely to be, they were only children. That red lipstick lay between two cheeks still round with baby fat, the dust not broken by one wrinkle. Rudolf stared at her.

He thought of Gerta. He wondered if she was still alive.

“How old are you?” he asked the girl.

“Fifteen,” she said blankly.

“Next time, say eighteen,” he said. “Come with me.”

She blinked. She didn’t move.

“Come with me,” he repeated.

“I can’t,” she said.

“Why not?”

“I can’t move my arms,” she replied.

Rudolf advanced, took her pistol by its barrel, flipped on the safety and pried her numb fingers from the trigger. Instead of taking it away, he slipped the gun gently into the pocket of her trousers, took the girl by her khaki-clad shoulders and squeezed until the blood returned to her cold muscles. He puffed the cigarette as he massaged her arms, and the girl began to thaw, a tear carving through the concrete dust on her cheek. She put her head on the chest of this stranger and heaved a sigh of relief. And Rudolf held her as she broke down and sobbed.

Only then did they feel the first pangs of hunger in their bellies.


Ilse Fleischmann was dreaming about a faraway voice. Her father was calling her across a vast field, trying to tell her something important. She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted, “Louder, Papa, I can’t hear you!” But he would not come closer, would not step his foot on the sea of golden flowers between them. Instead, he picked up a bullhorn, and at his shout, the flowers all wilted into a sea of brown, decaying back into the ocean of rubble that was Berlin.

“We are your liberators,” proclaimed the truck-mounted loudspeakers, in broken, Russian-accented German. “People of Berlin, the army of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics has arrived. We are here to bring you freedom and peace. Freiheit und Frieden.”

Ilse shook Rudolf awake. They were lying on a mattress in a corner...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Books for Young Readers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593428366
• ISBN 13: 9780593428368
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 448
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland