Uwe Timm

At first, one is a little taken aback by stereotypes, which one is not used to seeing in Uwe Timm’s work. Two men who first met in 1965 when they were students in Munich and then lost touch with one another meet again in the Western Pomeranian town of Anklam. One, the narrator, was a German and history teacher and after the political transformation following the fall of the Berlin Wall, he settled “voluntarily” with his family in the eastern province, where he has been running an antiques shop since his retirement. (…) The other moved on from German and mathematics to waste logistics early on and has now arrived from Berlin as an investor to bless the impoverished town of Anklam with a hazardous waste site that will create a large number of jobs. (…) The author, who was born in 1940, reports of an unspectacular but latently simmering era between the fifties, when literary themes were rehashed a hundred times, and the fateful year of 1968. Thus, this text by Timm, too, is another a piece of the history of the Federal Republic of Germany’s mindset, livened up with anecdotes and turning to focus on individuals, this time reflected in the veneration conserved over decades for an anarchical, pessimistic brilliant poet of the post-war era. Allusions to Arno Schmidt and quotations from his works pervade the narrative, which jumps effortlessly between the past and the present, giving a very relaxed, absent-minded impression.

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© Die ZEIT, 17 March 2011