In memory of an unknown brother

MemoirMemory, its regrets, its ambivalence and its multiple confusions, is beautifully evoked in this haunting memoir by German writer Uwe Timm, who, in telling the story of his family, has also looked to that of his country.

Inspired by a diary kept by his elder brother, who went to war and never returned, Timm began to remember the brother, who was 16 years older than he and of whom he had only one personal - if all-defining - memory.

"Lifted up into the air - laughter, jubilation, boisterous delight - that sensation accompanies my recollection of an experience, an image, the first to make a lasting impression on me, and with it begins my self-awareness, my memory. I'm coming in from the garden, entering the kitchen where the grown-ups are gathered, my mother, my father, my sister. There they stand, looking at me. They must have said something that I don't remember, perhaps: Do you see anything? And then they glanced at the white cupboard, which I was told later was a broom cupboard. I can see hair showing above the top of the cupboard, that image impressed itself on me very distinctly, fair hair.

"Someone has been hiding behind the cupboard - and then he comes out, my brother, and lifts me up in the air . . . and then the feeling of being raised in the air - I'm floating."

It is a wonderful reconstruction of a moment suspended in time, made even more special because it is a three-year-old child's recollection recalled by its adult self. Timm then confirms, "That is my only memory of my brother . . . who was severely wounded in the Ukraine", and died a few weeks later. This brother he never knew - other than as the glamorous stranger who once lifted him into the air and then lived forever in the family home as the much mourned son of his father and mother - left an important legacy to the young Uwe, who would grow up and wait more than 60 years, and until all his family was dead, before he began to write about it.

While the narrator was always aware of being an afterthought, the surprise late child born to parents who already had an 18-year-old daughter as well as the beloved son, Karl-Heinz, he was always sure of his mother's love. Uwe was a little boy, but his brother, the stranger, was a man who wrote graphic letters from Russia to his father, a fellow soldier, and sent softer, more guarded ones to his mother.

In a letter dated September 30th, 1943, Karl-Heinz wrote: "Dear Papa, I'm sorry to say I was badly wounded on the 19th. I got a rifle shot through both legs and now they have been amputated. They took the right leg off below the knee and the left leg at the thigh. I'm not in such bad pain any more, please comfort Mutti . . . " Throughout the narrative, Timm sustains a miraculous balance between the public and the personal. He recalls his father, a handsome dreamer whose hopes faltered into despair, and also that of the German people, and the national habit of remaining unaware of what was happening, of the way in which no one seemed to notice when their Jewish neighbours disappeared. All the while, though, there was his brother. "He accompanied me through my childhood, absent and yet present in my mother's grief, my father's doubts, the hints my parents dropped when they were talking to each other . . . Even when he wasn't the subject of discussion he was still present, more present than other dead people."

SINCE THE PUBLICATION in 1999 of WG Sebald's essay, Air, War and Literature, several German writers, including Günter Grass in Crabwalk, have looked to the wartime suffering of the German people, a suffering long denied because the emphasis was placed on guilt. This shift in national attitude caused a forgotten writer, Gert Ledig, who had written three novels in the mid-1950s about the German civilian war experience, to be deservedly revived.

But Timm's memoir is different. There is neither lamentation nor defiance.

Instead he is attempting to confront the reality of what his brother, as a soldier in the elite SS Death's Head Division, would have done in the course of his daily duties. What civilians did he kill? And how would he have explained these actions? "How did my brother see himself? What were his feelings? Did he acknowledge anything like personal responsibility, guilt, injustice?" He sees his father as having "suffered more from the loss of his son than my mother. She had said goodbye to him in her grieving", and she blamed the Nazis and those who made the military decisions. But Timm snr felt anger.

Using the diary entries - and diaries were actually forbidden - as well as his letters, Timm pieces together a sense of the war as experienced by this brother he never knew. He also most powerfully and profoundly commemorates his parents: his father the doomed romantic, who once, as a boy, tamed an injured raven - "This picture: the raven . . . on the shoulder of the boy who was to be my father" - and most lovingly of all, his engaging, ever-optimistic mother, the girl who never regretted marrying a man who must have disappointed her although she never admitted it.

Thoughtful, gentle, often laconic and always candid, Uwe Timm has brought the skills of a novelist and the feelings of a son, a brother and a German to an eloquent memoir that says far more about being alive than many such accounts four times its length.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

In My Brother's Shadow By Uwe Timm, translated by Anthea Bell Bloomsbury, 143pp. £7.99