A renowned German novelist's memoir of his brother, who joined the SS and was killed at the Russian front.
Uwe Timm was only two years old when in 1942 his older brother, Karl Heinz, announced to his family he had volunteered for service with an elite squadron of the German army, the SS Totenkopf Division, also known as Death's Heads. Little more than a year later Karl Heinz was injured in battle at the Russian front, his legs amputated, and a few weeks after that he died in a military hospital. To their father, Karl Heinz's death only served to immortalize him as the courageous one, the obedient one, the one who upheld the family honor. His childhood was marked by the mythology of his brother's lost life; his absence-the hole he left in the family-just as palpable as if he were still alive. His mother's sadness and his father's rage over the loss of Karl Heinz ultimately defined Uwe's relationship with his parents. But while they eulogized the boy, Uwe wondered: who really had his brother been?
The life and death of his older brother has haunted Uwe Timm for more than sixty years. His parents' silence was one of the most painful aspects of his family history. Not even after the war ended, and details of unspeakable horrors emerged, did his parents ever acknowledge Germany's guilt and Karl Heinz's role in it. They simply said: We didn't know. After the deaths of his parents and older sister Timm set out in search of answers. Using military reports, letters, family photos and cryptic entries from a diary his brother kept during the war, he began to piece together the picture, discovering his brother's story is not just that of one man, but the tragedy of an entire generation. In the Shadow of My Brother is a meditation on German history and guilt, one that is both nuanced and measured.
The German novelist chronicles the short life and untimely death of his older brother Karl, who joined the SS and was killed on the Russian front, leaving his family to grapple with his absence.Uwe Timm was born 1940 in Hamburg. He studied German literature and philosophy in Munich and Paris. In 1972-1982 he was co-editor of the Authors Edition. He is the author of Midsummer Night and The Invention of Curried Sausage. He lives in Munich and Berlin.
German novelist Timm (The Invention of Curried Sausage) was a child when his big brother, Karl, joined the eastern front as a soldier in the fierce SS Death's Head Division (i.e., the Totenkopf). Although Karl did not return, his diary did, and Timm draws on brief entries to explore his brother's war experiences and, in turn, the average German's commitment to the Third Reich. Karl was not only programmed by the Nazi regime to die for Hitler, but he was also imbued with a strident form of militaristic nationalism that came from his father, a proud veteran of World War I. As a civilian, Timm's father was a furrier with a modest trade, but like millions of other German men he was a soldier at heart, willing to die for the fatherland. Timm seems to imply that his brother and father would have followed any national leader who enabled them to fight for Germany; in 1939, that leader happened to be Hitler. The real hero here is Timm's long-suffering but indomitable mother, who viewed the Nazi leaders as a pack of rogues who brought nothing but misery to Germany. Originally published in Germany, this memoir was not written until Timm's family had died. Essential for all World War II collections.-Jim Doyle, Sara Hightower Regional Lib., Rome, GA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
A memoir not of a brother but of his absence from the author's life and family, Timm's book revolves around memory-of how traces of his brother, an SS corporal killed in Russia in 1943, are tied up with aspects of WWII that still remain unspeakable for many Germans. Timm was two when his brother Karl-Heinz enlisted, at age 18. Using diary entries from a book Karl-Heinz kept at the front, family recollections and his own experience growing up without his brother, Timm works through, beautifully, his sense of an unknowable figure who, 60 years later, continues to loom large in his consciousness. At the same time, a good deal of the book goes toward unpacking the ways in which national identity informs personal identity; Timm digs into what it meant then (and means now) to have had a brother, or son, in the SS. Timm's novel The Invention of Curried Sausage was set during WWII, and this book is informed by a deep understanding of its horrors, anxieties and legacies. The translation is lyrical if occasionally awkward ("In the coffee break I went to the lavatory"); the whole compellingly scales a nation's failure down to the level of a nuclear family. Agent, Jennifer Lyons at Writer's House. (Apr.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
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