Elie Wiesel wrote of two great misfortunes of the past century. One was to be born into a family of survivors of the Nazi Holocaust; the other one was being born into a family of perpetrators. "In My Brother's Shadow," a deeply moving portrait by Uwe Timm of his family's collaboration with the Nazis, belongs to the latter category. To get a fuller picture of that terrible time; to get at the root of how so-called normal people can collaborate with evil and to use the insight gained to help prevent future nightmares, we need to read about those who abetted the Nazis as well as those who suffered at their hands. We are fortunate that Timm wrote this book; it is essential reading.
Timm aimed for something big with this little book, and I believe he mostly succeeded. On one level it is a portrait, stripped to essentials, of his problematic family. On another level, the family is meant to be symbolic of so many other German families of the time, many members of which descended into evil without even being aware of it.
It is the story of a rather unhappy, dysfunctionally functional family. The father, an intelligent and ambitious man, was never able to realize his gifts. He could have been a lawyer, Timm tells us, but did not study at a university, presumably from lack of means. He is seething with anger for which he has no outlet. He considers himself a failure. He winds up being a furrier, a mediocre one at that--an occupation which he hates. As with many frustrated fathers, he expects his elder son, eighteen years older than Uwe, to succeed where he has failed. The father desperately wanted to consider himself and his son elite; perhaps that is why his son voluntarily joins, while still in his teens, the so-called elite SS Death Head Division.
The book contains excerpts from the elder brother's laconic diary which he maintained while fighting in Russia. It is highly probable that he was involved in, or at least witnessed, atrocities committed against civilians. The diary ends with his stating that it makes no sense to keep a diary when such horrible things occur. Just what those horrible things were he never mentions.
The father, who never joined the Nazi Party, and the son, quiet, respectful, never utters anything in the diary against the Jews, although he must have been indoctrinated frequently, nevertheless fight without any scruples for the Nazi cause.
(The father fought in the air force.)
This is the horror of the book: if it hadn't been for Hitler, Timm's family would have led "normal" lives--they would have been "upright" citizens, no doubt about it. Their unhappiness and difficulties would not have been that different from those of an unhappy family living in, say, New Jersey. Their elder son, who died on the Russian front in 1943 at the age of twenty-one, might have indeed have been able to distinguish himself in life.
This is a very moral book, but an aesthetically successful one, too: the author never preaches. Timm's purpose is not only to objectively portray the past but to analyze the reasons of his family's moral failure in order to understand and prevent others from sliding into evil. His witnessing is an important complement to the witnessing of the victims.
From Timm's portrait it is fairly clear how this "normal" family failed, and, by extension, how many Germans failed. I think the main failures can be summarized as follows:
1. Lack of Self-Awareness. Thoreau's dictum that the unexamined life is not worth living applies here perfectly. The seething anger behind the father's reticence and authoritarian behavior is never diffused by self-reflection. His thwarted and unexpressed sense of failure sets the stage for his son's fateful decision to join the Nazis.
2. Lack of Genuine Transcendence. The father's life, as he sees it, is meaningless. His chief response to the disorder of his inner life is to make a fetish out of order. The highest example of this is, for him, national order; it is never questioned. The mother never questions the father's authority, even though she might have come up with better solutions. Thus, this lack of genuine transcendence links directly to self-absorption and lack of moral and political engagement. Timm, an expert in saying much with little, recounts how the father emphasized the first syllable of "The German Empire"--as if it were God! To follow orders blindly was for Timm's father an ideal; it later became a poor excuse for him and so many others.
These and other reasons for the German failure to confront fascism have been portrayed elsewhere; Timm gives them faces--And the faces just might not be very different from ours. To show us why the descent into evil is not inevitable is the purpose of this wonderful, horrible, cautionary memoir.
This book is, I believe, a postmodern classic. The ambiguity of evil; ordinary people doing monstrous things. Hating these Germans is not possible; they are too much like ourselves. Uwe Timm has risen about his past by a process of examination of his family and of his country. He is a politically engaged, successful author, who, presumably, is not plagued with a sense of failure. He gives us hope. But how many of us have the time, talent and inclination to examine ourselves? One can always begin by reading this book.
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