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

Uwe Timm (Author), Anthea Bell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 31, 2005

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Timm's reputation as a gifted literary portrait artist is by now well established outside of his native Germany, and his narratives of moral (and occasionally existential) ambiguity have likewise frequently transcended geographical and historical circumstance. His latest book, ostensibly a memoir of his older brother, an SS soldier killed on the Russian front, dares to be as anthropologically illuminating as it is intimate. Praised by their father for his bravery, Karl Heinz was the boy who told no lies, was always upright, shed no tears. His war diary, a quiet testament to the banality of evil that speaks matter-of-factly of combat but only alludes to "the cruel things that sometimes happen," only intensifies Timm's curiosity. A stubborn father and survivor mother, shadows in their own ways, are portrayed tenderly but without much sentiment; their presence rounds out this book's philosophical exploration of courage in its various manifestations. But, always aware of "the danger of smoothing it all out in the telling," Timm leaves powerfully open the question of whether it is more courageous to write or to be silent. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (March 31, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374103747
• ISBN-13: 978-0374103743
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #162,057 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars great book, October 27, 2005

By 

S. Vorstoffel (Leiden, Netherlands) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: In My Brother's Shadow: A Life and Death in the SS (Hardcover)

I was born and raised in Germany. Even though my parents were born after the war and both my grandfathers were dead by the time I started asking questions I can still relate very well to the unease when it comes to talking about WWII.

Where I grew up we had a neighbour whom I only knew as a mild mannered older guy, who loved us kids, would give us sweets and let us play in the big old trees in his garden. At one point I discovered that he was a member of the SS in WWII and had fought somewhere in Russia. He had no family. When he was in his eighties, he started opening up to a few people in the neighbourhood, among them my family. He would talk about the war, his comrades and generally the hard life they lived. He would always start crying. He would never mention fighting, killing civilians and all the other things he most likely saw and did. We all knew about those things, but we also felt sorry for the old guy and nobody pressed questions. He was a neighbour, not close family after all.

Timm's book perfectly captures the conflict of the - very normal - desire to love and admire a brother (father, uncle, grandfather, neighbour) while at the same time knowing that that person must have consciously participated in something unspeakably atrocious.

Obviously there is no easy solution and that conflict is one that generations of Germans had to deal with after the war. It is impossible to excuse what happened, but it is equally impossible to condemn all these people around you who all might have participated to various degrees, and be it just by keeping silent.

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars history, memory, guilt, January 9, 2006

By 

Yalensian - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: In My Brother's Shadow: A Life and Death in the SS (Hardcover)

This is less an account of Uwe Timm's brother's life and death in the SS -- though it is that -- than it is a reflection on memory and history, specifically on what they mean in postwar Germany. Timm's brother's diary, kept against regulations ("it ought not to exist," Timm writes), is brief and ambiguous. And in those ambiguities lie the greatest turmoil and conflict, with no real answers. What did the brother mean when he referred to a "big louse hunt"? Clearly, he was involved in criminal activities ("plenty of loot!"), and clearly, he was coarsened by the war ("fodder for my MG"). But was he involved in atrocities? Did he murder civilians? Those are the questions that Timm can't answer with any certainty. They point to the doubt and guilt of an entire people, a people who still struggle to come to terms with the war. Sixty years: still no answers, still no resolution.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Forbidden door, not opened, August 31, 2011

By 

H. Schneider "Hamlet" (Pandistan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: In My Brother's Shadow: A Life and Death in the SS (Hardcover)

Uwe Timm was born in Hamburg in 1940. When he was 3, his 19 y old brother died fighting in the Ukraine. The brother had been a soldier in a tank unit of the Waffen SS, in the infamous Totenkopf Division. Naturally, Timm has hardly any own recollections of his brother. What he has are his parents' tales about the brother, then the brother's letters and a small diary, covering half a year of the Russian campaign in 1943. The diary is partly included in the text. It gives only minimal information.

The subject is a difficult one for Timm. He dares to approach it openly only after his parents and elder sister have died. The book was first published in 2003. Timm compares his shying away from the subject to Blaubart's wife's hesitations in opening the forbidden door. He has the brother's diary and he has the official records of the division's campaign. He wants to compare. Does he dare? After the thrilling Blaubart picture in the early pages, I expected a serious exposure to the horror and analysis of its conditions. It never comes.

This non-fiction book, which is oddly called a novel in the Wikipedia entry on Timm, is more about the author himself and about his parents as it is about the brother. Father was a militarist, clearly. He had been in WW1 and then a `Freikorps' fighter in the Baltic states after WW1. He joined the Wehrmacht again for WW2. The family was deep into Nazi culture. The brother was father's apple of the eye. That is not the least important facet in Timm's memoirs. Mother was a loyal trooper, never second guessing father. Much of the book deals with the family business and its rise and failure after the war. Father's decay and death, mother's never-ending nostalgia for her son. Reconstruction and rearmament in West Germany. Collective guilt debates. The different approach in the East, where all explanations were pushed to the class struggle corner.

Why did the 18 y old brother join the SS, as a volunteer? Mother's explanation was: out of `idealism'. That is an essential category in understanding the attitude of many Nazis and sympathizers. It is a success story of brainwashing propaganda. Not all Nazis were primitives or cynics or fearful underlings who either knew or didn't care that their actions were criminal and immoral. Some, maybe many, had been duped into shedding normal human standards of morality. That is scary. It makes dictatorships more successful than could ever be achieved by pure violent state terror.

Who is Uwe Timm? A respected and successful German writer, with a tendency to the left. More a solid craftsman, not a lost genius (like Koeppen), nor an intellectual maverick (like Enzensberger), nor a great talent (like Erpenbeck). Also not a pompous old star of the literary circus, like Grass, nor an overrated taboo-buster like Schlink.

What has the solid craftsman given us? Timm had precious little material about his brother. Alas, he does not succeed in drawing much out of the little he had. His memories of family life are interesting, but not that unusual, and not particularly well told. The book title is an overstatement, it promises more than it can deliver. The original title is something like ` the example of my brother'. I find that as misleading as Anthea Bell's title version with the shadow. Which example, which shadow? The subtitle in the English version is dishonestly misleading: there is very little about 'a life and death in the SS' here.
The book is disappointing because Timm has promised more than he could deliver. There is a lack of focus on the book's promised subject. It is not a stupid book, but an incomplete one.