In My Brother's Shadow: A Life and Death in the SS - Hardcover

Uwe Timm; Anthea Bell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374103747 ISBN 13: 9780374103743

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2005

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Review

"With piercing intelligence, . . . history and private life [are] interfused utterly by a master writer in a way at once authentic, unpretentious, moving, and of extraordinary significance." --Kirkus Reviews

"This masterful book is autobiographical. It delves into the lives of the author's family, father, mother and sister, during the Nazi years and the Second World War. But essentially it is about his older brother who joined the SS, the Storm Troopers with the skull and bones on their black uniforms. It does not take long, however, before the young man is sent to war and killed on the eastern front.

Up to this point the story is among thousands. What makes it unique and a bestseller in its original German version is the narrator's painstaking reconstruction of this life on the basis of a few letters, a few diary entries, a few photographs and his own desperate memories. On such scanty evidence he probes into the family dynamics, the movitves for his brother's involvements with the most aggressive of Nazi organizations and the signs of his early disenchantment. Deeply affecting are the narrator's speculations about his own vulnerabilities and his hypothetical attitudes towards the regime, had he been old enough to be confronted with any decisions, questions all Germans, nay, all persons living in a country with an army should ask themselves." --Egon Schwarz, Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, Washington University

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0374103747
• ISBN 13: 9780374103743
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 150