Uwe Timm's Am Beispiel meines Bruders is a searing memoir about his family published in 2003 - after the deaths of his mother and sister. Timm only has flashes of memory about his brother Karl-Heinz, who joined the Waffen-SS when Timm was just a toddler. Karl-Heinz was severely wounded in battle somewhere in the eastern Ukraine in 1943 and died just a few days later. But his ghost would caste a wide shadow on Timm for most of his childhood and into adulthood (The English translation is titled "In My Brother's Shadow"). For Karl-Heinz was the favorite son - "ein richtiger Junge" , as Timm's father used to say: courageous, obedient, destined to take over the family business. He died a hero for the Vaterland. The much younger Timm, on the other hand, was deemed too dreamy, too much his mother's boy, lacking in masculine virtues.
Timm was left with a handful of letters from his brother, and a diary that Karl-Heinz kept while serving in the SS. Somehow these fragments survived the firebombing of Hamburg which destroyed the Timm's house, and the Uwe Timm pores over each sentence trying to understand what motivated his brother to join the Waffen-SS - the same division that stood guard over Auschwitz and the other death camps. In the memoir, Karl-Heinz - and his father - represent the entire culture, the authoritarian mindset, that drove the German nation to disaster. Timm's father fought in the First World War, and then joined the Freikorps - a forerunner to the Nazi storm troopers - in the early Weimar Republic. He served in the Luftwaffe during the war, never questioning Hitler and the goals of the Third Reich - the madness which ultimately took the life of his favorite son.
The front diary of Karl-Heinz doesn't provide Timm with much to hold onto with respect to insight: mostly laconic reports about daily activity - long periods of boredom interspersed with intense moments of combat. One fragment of a sentence sticks in Timm's mind:
75 m raucht Iwan Zigaretten, ein Fressen für mein MG.
Did Karl-Heinz have any sympathy for his Russian counterpart? Why is there no mention of Russian POWs in the diary? His Waffen-SS division was operating in the vicinity of Babi Yar, where 35,000 Jews were slaughtered in 1941 - the largest massacre carried out by German forces up that point in time. Was Karl-Heinz aware of this? Did he think about the fate of the civilians as his division systematically destroyed villages on its eastward march? One enigmatic sentence - the very last one in the diary - gives Uwe Timm a glimmer of hope:
Hiermit schließe ich mein Tagebuch, da ich für unsinnig halte,
über so grausame Dinge, wie sie manchmal geschehen, Buch zu führen.
We'll never know what "gruesome things" Karl-Heinz witnessed that finally drove him to silence, but for Timm this is at least a sign that his brother possessed a vestige of humanity.
The rest of the memoir deals with the fate of the Timm family after the war. Timm's father experiences a brief period of prosperity in the immediate postwar period. With a sewing machine salvaged from the bombed-out ruins he starts a furrier business; he thrived in the chaos and black market era where one was forced to use one's wits to survive. But with the Wirtschaftswunder and gradual normalization of commercial practices in Germany his business fails and he descends into alcoholism. After his sudden death from a heart attack Timm's mother takes over what remained of the business and stoically runs it until her death. His older sister futilely seeks the love she never got from her father in a series of disastrous relationships, until finally finding happiness late in life.
One interesting note: Uwe Timm's father was evidently a very talented taxidermist as a young man, and was offered a position at a museum in Chicago which he turned down. In Timm's recent novel Ikarien (see my review) the father of the American protagonist, Michael Hanson, was a German taxidermist who accepted a position in the US. So Michael Hanson is the American alter ego of Uwe Timm's brother Karl-Heinz.
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