Book Review:   Uwe Timm,   Am Beispiel Meines Bruders.

Reading this book is the literary equivalent of having someone explore your deep wound with a butchers knife; putting it deep into your bleeding flesh, turning and moving it around in all directions, not resting before everything is laid bare. This is one of the books one cannot forget. One cannot leave it and go back to normal life without keeping part of the pain alive and thinking about the slow, fateful, inescapable human catastrophe in the life of millions. Timm narrates the example of his 16 years older brother, Karl-Heinz, and his family in Hamburg as they went through, and were crushed by, the terrible times of the great war. One cannot accept such a story without wondering about the real causes of this misery: Can't we find better ways to govern ourselves than to elect leaders just because they are the more likable candidate? Or in reaction to evils that the media construe to sell their pages? Is our mind useless? Is it not possible to teach people to use it when they choose, rather than depend on their dear emotions? Are we sheep to follow the herd? These are some of the desperate thoughts when we read about the horrendous consequences of the last fateful democratic vote in Germany in 1933 that brought the Nazis to power and unleashed the unprecedented disaster - the endless what if . . . . ?

Compared with Guenther Grass' Im Krebsgang, with the theme of a hate that went through generations, Uwe Timm with somewhat less literary subtlety goes deeper in his penetration to the thought and the culture of perpetrators and victims. Over and over again in 159 pages he brings us to the question: how is it possible that common and sophisticated people alike can become so monstrously inhuman to do what they did.  How is it possible that valuable and meritorious traits in the German culture, discipline, duty, obedience, energy, valor, could become so distorted that they were used to commit these unspeakable acts on an unprecedented scale? Education and sensitivity were of no help or protection - in fact, many of the highest leaders, the generals and SS leaders were sensible persons and educated, but were still drawn into the disaster. Then it was too late and many became enemies of mankind. Encouraged by the culture, the good son Karl-Heinz, the fine youngster in the family, volunteered to join a Waffen-SS elite unit. His letters from the front show a total absence of human feelings when he reports about the enemy as he perceives him. Within one year, he is dead in Russia, only 19 years old.  Soon after that, the Timms lose their house in Hamburg, nearly everything they have as the result of an air raid . The total collapse of Germany in 1945 brings enemy occupation into the proud Reich and changes the culture. The people suffer silently, grudgingly. 

With deep insight in the mind of his people, Timm has created a true documentary; one has to read it to understand the forces that caused the German disaster. It makes it clear that as a species, man has not yet learned how to use his mind to defend against seductive emotions. No people are immune to the dark forces that an evil demon can unleash! Reading Timm's work is salutary, a bitter medicine to help in the prevention of problems.

Copyright © 2004  Gernot M. R. Winkler,     August 2, 2004;.  last correction 12/30/2008