In My Brother's Shadow

Uwe Timm was born in Hamburg in 1940. He trained to be a furrier and went to college in Braunschweig. He graduated from high school in 1963, and went on to study Philosophy and German Literature in Munich and Paris. He was awarded his doctorate in philosophy in 1971. One of Germany's greatest contemporary writers and novelists, he now works in Munich and Berlin.

'There is something of a nightmarish quality in Timm's powerful memoir of the elder brother he lost in the war ... The tone throughout is tender but unsentimental. And in the hands of Timm, now a distinguished writer, this domestic drama serves as a microcosm of the German catastrophe' Sunday Telegraph 'This remarkable short book combines a poignant memoir of Timm's upstanding, resourceful father and his loyal, peaceable mother with a perceptive analysis of the traditional values that helped to lead a nation to obey inhuman orders' Sunday Times 'This book is informed by a deep understanding of its horrors, anxieties and legacies' Publishers Weekly 'Uwe Timm, a well-known novelist in Germany, is determined "not to smooth it all out in the telling", not to make it easy for us to understand and thereby to excuse' Daily Telegraph