Title: history, memory, guilt
Product review: This is less an account of Uwe Timm's brother's life and death in the SS -- though it is that -- than it is a reflection on memory and history, specifically on what they mean in postwar Germany. Timm's brother's diary, kept against regulations ("it ought not to exist," Timm writes), is brief and ambiguous. And in those ambiguities lie the greatest turmoil and conflict, with no real answers. What did the brother mean when he referred to a "big louse hunt"? Clearly, he was involved in criminal activities ("plenty of loot!"), and clearly, he was coarsened by the war ("fodder for my MG"). But was he involved in atrocities? Did he murder civilians? Those are the questions that Timm can't answer with any certainty. They point to the doubt and guilt of an entire people, a people who still struggle to come to terms with the war. Sixty years: still no answers, still no resolution.
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