This was recommended to me by 2 good friends and had it not been I doubt I would have read it, I'm glad I did though.
It's a gripping, entertaining read, with engaging characters, some nice humour and a good (but not overwhelming) amount of historical detail.
Elton focuses on a small group of characters and does a good job of bringing them to life but still I couldn't help feel that the book lacked some of the emotional impact it could have had. The terrible events that happen to and around the characters too often felt somewhat distant and, while there were moving sequences, they weren't as frequent as they might have been.
Still, it's a solid novel, a page turner and a satisfying read with some clever twists and turns along the way. ( )

This book is a family saga set in Germany in the early twentieth century. The storyline follows two brothers raised in a Jewish family from birth to the rise of Hitler and the end of WW2. The setting is Berlin.

The years after Germany was defeated in WW1 are interesting and the descriptions of the Jazz clubs and the night club scene in Berlin effectively set up the rise of Nazism. This is a terrifying portrayal of what it was like to be a German citizen at this time. I have often wondered how the German people were able to be influenced by the Nazi movement. Elton writes the story of the little by little policy changes and the strategic planning of Hitler and his cohort to bring about enormous social change. This is not the usual Holocaust story. It is the telling of the coming of age of two brothers and how they attempted to beat the system.

At 520 pages the book is a bit tedious at times, repeating past events. It is a good read nevertheless. ( )

(8.5)The story opens with Stone, one of the brothers in the title. It is 1956 and he is living in London working for the Foreign Office. He is being interviewed by MI6 as he has received a letter from his sister-in-law Dagmar Stengel, who purportedly died in 1945. Stone is excited as he had loved her deeply when they were young. However, it is revealed that she is a spy working for the Stasi in east Germany. She wants him to travel to meet her.
The story then goes back to 1920 when his mother gives birth to twin boys, one of whom is stillborn. Freida and Wolfgang, German Jews, are offered another baby boy born the same day whose mother has died and is effectively an orphan. They agree and raise the boys, Paulus and Otto as if they are twins. It is at least two hundred pages before we find out which is their natural son and indeed which one is Stone. The story recounts the gradual rise of the Nazi party and the gradual, increasing degradations inflicted on German Jews. Eventually Freida and Wolfgang are forced to tell the boys that one of them is not Jewish so can be saved from persecution. However this entails turning his back on the family and friends he loves or can he help them.
This is a gripping tale, with twists and turns that kept me coming back to find out how the tale is revolved.

Really enjoyed this family saga, brilliant characters and experiences
I don't think I will be the only person who didn't like Dagmar ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3299324.html

I know Ben Elton mainly as a left-wing comedian from the 80s and 90s, though I did read his second novel Stark (and wasn't hugely impressed). I had not realised that his uncle was the historian Geoffrey Elton, or that the Elton family, originally Ehrenberg, had fled Nazi Germany to England. In Two Brothers, Elton takes a family situation very loosely based on that of his own father and uncle, and takes us through the brief but horrible history of Nazi Germany, looked at from the point of view of two brothers who it turns out are not biological twins after all, one of them being a non-Jewish kid adopted at birth by a Jewish couple. There is a framing narrative in the 1950s where one of the brothers, having escaped to England and joined the Foreign Office, goes back to East Berlin in search of the girl they both loved. But the core is the story of what life was like for those who were not as fortunate as Elton's own family. it's written from the heart, though I think also with an eye to educating Elton's core audience (young Anglophones) about how a normal society can swiftly degenerate to horror.

I was a bit annoyed by a couple of Elton's presentational quirks. There is a comedy MI6 sequence in the 1950s, which takes away from the seriousness of the theme. And the teenage German protagonists refer to each other by very British nicknames, which I suppose could be allowed as a translation convention, but it grated for me. Still, I give the book a lot of credit for effort and good intentions. ( )