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

In My Brother's Shadow: A Life and Death in the SS
by Uwe Timm; Translated from the German by Anthea Bell
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005, 150p

(Originally published in 2003 by Kiepenheuer & Witschas as Am Beispiel meines Bruders)

Copy from local community college library.

Uwe Timm leads us through a reading of his brother Karl-Heinz' wartime diary interspersed with Uwe's thoughts on the war and his brother's and his father's participation in it. The diary is not particularly unique or illuminating. The brief entries deal mostly with the everyday boredom of soldiering and shed no light on whether Karl-Heinz took part in the atrocities of the Russian front where he served in the Waffen SS. Only the final cryptic entry leaves a small clue.

This book is as much about Timm's relationship with his father as it is about his brother. That's where it's value lies.

          Writing about my brother means writing about my father too. My likeness to him can be 
          seen in my likeness to my brother. To get close to them in writing is an attempt to resolve
          what I had merely held on to in my memory, to find myself again.

Timm offers some insight to the attitude toward the war of children who came of age during the 1950s (Timm was born in March 1940). On the collective guilt of the Germans:

          They were deadly silent, and that was worse than the wordy speeches of those 
          who tried to exculpate themselves by protesting that they knew nothing. The latter
          repelled young people--as I remember very well--when they started to enumerate 
          the reasons why they couldn't have known, as if under a compulsion to justify
          themselves, often unasked



Timm's parents never recovered from the loss of their elder son. His father did little after the war. he was depressed, drank too much, and had little to do with the running of his failing business.

The tragedy of a nation trying to come to terms
with its past is reflected in this memoir of a man
trying to come to terms with the tragic consequences
the war had on his family. Definitely worth reading.