Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

This book is by far not about, as the title suggests life in his brothers shadow,as much as it is about life in his fathers shadow, or the shadow of a defeated Germany!
Herr Timm seems to be searching for his personal share of Germanys collective guilt. The writings of his brother might at most contribute 1 full page to this book! Herr Timm seems to be full of self-pity calling himself over and over again "the afterthought" where I would think his father instead planned him to be his brothers replacement. My father grew up in this same Germany and I have good insight into his thinking. I would suggest because of Herr Timms fathers position he knew a war would happen, and most likely consume his oldest son, that is what brought Uwe into being, not some accident or afterthought.Also his insistance that the 3rd. SS was an elite unit that the camp guards were drawn from is also a factual error. The 3rd SS began as the "Totenkopfverbande" they were the camp guards before the war! After the Polish and French campaigns they were re-organised into the Totenkopf division. The original members and leaders of the organisation Todt were all involved in the German camp system, not as Herr Timm suggests "elite soldiers from which guards were drawn" but rather camp guards that were formed into a front-line fighting unit!Herr Timm also wants to take small obscure entries in his brothers diaries and contort them into some evil or sinister act! A louse hunt is a louse hunt plain and simple, fodder for my MG is just an expression of the daily exposure to the horrors of front-line service. Herr Timm is searching so hard, it seems also hoping to find some act of brutality or inhumanity that he might link to his brother as to justify the feeling he has inside of himself! This book is a waste of time if you are seeking 1st hand accounts of the war, but if you want to read of the guilt placed on the German people and the effects of defeat on a family and country, it might be of some helpful insight.

Received in timely manner. Book in condition stated by seller. Absolutely fascinating read!