In My Brother's Shadow - Softcover

'There is something of a nightmarish quality in Timm's powerful memoir of the elder brother he lost in the war ... The tone throughout is tender but unsentimental. And in the hands of Timm, now a distinguished writer, this domestic drama serves as a microcosm of the German catastrophe' Sunday Telegraph 'This remarkable short book combines a poignant memoir of Timm's upstanding, resourceful father and his loyal, peaceable mother with a perceptive analysis of the traditional values that helped to lead a nation to obey inhuman orders' Sunday Times 'This book is informed by a deep understanding of its horrors, anxieties and legacies' Publishers Weekly 'Uwe Timm, a well-known novelist in Germany, is determined "not to smooth it all out in the telling", not to make it easy for us to understand and thereby to excuse' Daily Telegraph

Uwe Timm was born in Germany in 1940. Just three years later his brother, Karl-Heinz, who was sixteen years his senior and a sapper in the elite SS Death's Head Division, was killed. His notebook was returned to the family, and the last entry read: 'I close my diary here because I don't see any point in recording the cruel things that sometimes happen.' When Timm decided to write this astonishing memoir, he feared the possibility that his brother's unit had taken part in the shooting of civilians and Jews. Yet he wanted to piece together his brother's experience, and also that of his nation, which once considered the qualities of an SS man so exemplary. As Timm unleashes his memories of this devastating time, he also pinpoints the questions that his parents' generation seemed unable to face, and offers new insights into the impact of the war on ordinary Germans.