Uwe Timm

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 awareness of myself, my memory: I’m coming in from the garden, into 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 they’ll have 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, I remember that image very well, fair hair. Someone has been hiding behind the cupboard – and then he comes out, my brother, and lifts me up in the air. I can’t remember his face or what he was wearing, probably his uniform, but the situation is perfectly clear in my mind: all of them looking at me, the moment when I spot the fair hair behind the cupboard, and then the feeling of being raised in the air – I’m floating.

That is my only memory of my brother, sixteen years my senior, who was severely wounded in Ukraine at the end of September, a few months later.

30.9.1943 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 was amputated at the thigh I don’t have very bad pain any more please comfort Mutti it will all pass over I’ll be back in Germany in a few weeks’ time and then you can visit me I wasn’t being reckless. So much for now
Love to you and Mama, Uwe and everyone
from Kurdel

On 16 October 1943, at eight in the evening, he died in Field Hospital 623.

He accompanied me through my childhood, absent and yet present in my mother’s grief, my father’s doubts, the hints my parents dropped talking to each other. They told stories about him, little tales always of similar situations, showing how brave and decent he was. Even when he wasn’t the subject of discussion he was still present, more present than other dead people, in anecdotes, photographs, and the comparisons my father drew with me, the younger son, the afterthought.

I have tried to write about my brother several times, but I never got beyond trying. I read his letters home from the front, and the diary he kept while he was serving in Russia: a small exercise book with a pale brown cover bearing the word Notes. I meant to compare my brother’s entries with the wartime records of his unit, the SS Death’s Head division, to find out more details expanding on his brief references. But whenever I began looking at the diary or the letters I soon stopped reading again. It was an apprehensive reluctance of the kind I knew as a child from a fairy-tale, the story of Bluebeard. My mother used to read me the tales of the Brothers Grimm in the evenings, many of them several times over, including Bluebeard, but that was the only story where I never wanted to hear the end. The moment when Bluebeard’s wife decides to enter the locked room after he has gone away, in spite of the prohibition, was so sinister. When my mother reached that point I would ask her to stop reading. Only years later, when I was grown up, did I reach the end of the fairy-tale.
Then she turned the key in the lock. As the door opened, a torrent of blood flowed out to meet her, and she saw dead women hanging from the walls. Some of them were only skeletons. She was so frightened that she closed the door at once, but the key jumped out of the lock and fell in the blood. She quickly picked it up and tried to wash the blood away, but in vain, for when she had wiped it off one side of the key it appeared again on the other side.
Another reason was my mother herself. While she was alive it was impossible for me to write about my brother. I knew in advance what she would have said in answer to my questions. Let the dead rest in peace. Only when my sister, the last to have known him, had died too was I free to write about him, and by free I mean that I could ask any question and need not consider anyone or anything else.

But Karl-Heinz, the big boy, why did it have to be him? Then my father would fall silent, and you could feel the loss in him, you could see him wondering who could better have been spared.
My brother was the boy who told no lies, who was always upright, who shed no tears, who was brave and obedient. A fine example.
My brother and I.
Writing about my brother means writing about him too, my father. My likeness to him can be seen in my likeness to my brother. Approaching them in writing is an attempt to resolve what I had merely retained in my memory, to find myself again. They both go on journeys with me. When I come to borders and have to fill in immigration forms, I enter my father and brother too as part of my name, writing in block capitals in the appropriate box: Uwe Hans Heinz.
It was my brother’s fervent wish to be my godfather, to give me his name in addition to my own, and my father wanted me to bear his name of Hans as well. He wanted to live on in someone else, at least in name, for by 1940 it was already clear that the war was not going to end very soon, and death became more probable.

Asked why my brother had volunteered for the SS, my mother gave several obvious reasons. Out of idealism. He didn’t want to lag behind. He didn’t want to shirk his duty. She, like my father, drew a clear distinction between the SS and the Waffen SS. By now, after the end of the war, when those terrible pictures had been shown, films of the liberation of the concentration camps, people knew what had gone on. Bastards, they called the SS, criminals. But the boy was with the Waffen SS. The SS were a normal fighting unit. The criminals were the others, the Sicherheitsdienst, the intelligence and security service. The special actions groups. Especially the men at the top, the leaders. Abusing a boy’s idealism. First a “Pimpf” (a “little squirt”), then a member of the Hitler Youth. Marching to the sound of trumpets, battle games, singing, a uniform with metal tags. But unlike you, your brother never wanted to play with soldiers.
I was against it, she said, I was against Karl-Heinz volunteering for the SS.
And what about my father?