Timm was two years old when his brother joined up in 1942 and three when the volunteer died of his wounds in a military hospital in the Ukraine. What he knows of Karl-Heinz he knows only through what he heard tell about him by his parents, snippets from his sister, and through the few letters the young soldier sent home while in service. Timm also possessed obscure entries in a diary Karl-Heinz kept—albeit illegally—while serving on the Russian Front. As he begins to write In My Brother's Shadow (German title: Am Beispiel meines Bruders), he soon realizes that to write about his brother also meant to write about his father, Hans, about his mother and his much neglected sister. Hanne Lore, born in 1922, was ignored by the father, who wanted a son as his first-born. She was also shown little affection by an otherwise affectionate mother.

Timm, while reading his brother's letters, soon noticed that the older boy often asked for him in these missives, but hardly ever made mention of his sister. This is then the family in which he grew up. A family, where the parents idolized the eldest son, and always held him up as model to their youngest child, the afterthought, born in 1940 when his mother was 38 years old. His mother felt embarrassment to be pregnant at that age, "[b]ut there was never any doubt in her mind that she would bear the child. Or in my father's mind, she said." Timm also tells us that his father "wanted sons, sons to make up for what had gone wrong in his own life."

It is important to get a picture of the father to understand the family. Hans Timm served in the German army in the First World War, and afterwards joined one of the units of the right-wing Freikorps (Free Corps), who after the war fought the Russian communists and opposed Germans who tried to form socialist local governments. Many of these Freikorps members, after they were forced to disband in 1921, joined the National Socialist party.

Timm senior did not join the Nazis, as mentioned earlier. But he remained wholly nationalistic, highly autocratic, and most likely regaled his oldest son, a dreamy child by all descriptions, with stories about duty and loyalty to the Fatherland. This is, however, something I surmise only because of the characters of father and son. In 1929 the elder Timm opened a taxidermy business and became so successful that he was offered a job at Chicago's National History Museum. He turned it down. While ostensibly he did so for the sake of the family, "[a]nother more profound reason was that he didn't like America, he wanted to stay in Germany. Germany was not just a country, it was the country, full of a history which was his own, which permeated him, and he was proud of it." In the father's eyes people like Thomas Mann and Marlene Dietrich were traitors.

Timm writes his family's story with clear, unsentimental language. You can feel his sadness, and at times the chill that overcomes him when he reads his brother's brief diary notations. What, he wonders, was in his brother's mind when he wrote in his diary on February 28, 1943: "1 day's rest, big louse hunt, on to Oneida." After reading this passage, the author wonders, "Couldn't louse hunt mean not just delousing a uniform, but something different?"

On March 21 Karl-Heinz wrote in his diary: "Bridgehead on the Donez. 75m away Ivan smoking cigarettes, fodder for my MG." Timm contemplates this entry in a thoughtful, searching passage that looks at both his brother and the most likely equally youthful Russian, whom Karl-Heinz probably killed.

There is really no answer in the book as to why this youth, sickly as a child, who loved to read, and was a failure in the HJ (Hitler Youth), volunteered to join not just the SS, but the most elite group of all, the SS Totenkopf Division (the Death's Head Division). This group originally had been recruited in 1939 from the guards of Dachau concentration camp. As a special distinction its members wore the death's head badge not just on their caps, as other SS units did, but on their lapels as well.

As one reads this book, so clearly and thoughtfully written, one begins to see that perhaps Timm had a blind spot and could not see why his brother might have chosen to join up. Since he was too young to remember, perhaps the authoritarian father, who felt a failure, harped at his eldest son with his own heroic deeds in WWI and made him feel bad for insufficient performance in the HJ. It is not inconceivable. Timm senior, having joined the Luftwaffe (German Air Force) during WWII, no doubt made the youth feel he had to do something special to live up to the father's expectations, and enlisting in the SS may have seemed the perfect answer. After all, he fit the ideal. He was six feet tall, blond and blue eyed, and his ancestry proved him wholly Aryan. Timm does not draw this conclusion, but a reader can easily do so.

Uwe Timm wonders how his brother could have fallen under the spell of the Nazis to do so. Perhaps, once again he has a blind spot. Did he not, himself, fall under the spell of another totalitarian system, communism, during the turbulent 1960s in Europe, especially West Germany, where being an ultra left winger was the mark of distinction for a university student? Of course, he later became disenchanted with the communists and left the DKP (German Communist Pary), but does not explain why in In My Brother's Shadow.

He does, however give some explanation in an interview with one Ingo Stoehr, where he mentions that he disliked the infighting of various communist splinter groups, and the abstract solidarity with the GDR (East Germany), which he considered wrong. What further disenchanted him with the left all together came in 1973, when the German government, headed by the SPD (Social Democratic Party) — the same party which currently heads the German government — passed legislation "to blacklist members of political groups that were deemed radical and prevent their employment with the state." They would not be allowed to hold any minor or major government jobs.

According to Timm, about 200,000 people were exposed and spied upon by the West German government, then headed by Chancellor Willy Brandt. In today"s Germany the communist party and all neo-Nazi parties are outlawed, although the socialist party in the former East Germany clearly has strong communist leanings. In addition, members of the Church of Scientology are prohibited from holding jobs with any government agency. No matter what one may think of any of the three, to learn of this as a Canadian makes one wonder how such draconian laws can be conceivable in a supposedly democratic state.

Uwe Timm, exposed to his father's constant talk about the "good son" as he grew up into a teenager, and by having to listen to his father's claims that the Luftwaffe had nothing to do with the killing of Jews, found himself embroiled in countless arguments between father and son by the time he was 16. He obviously rebelled by turning to the left, although his father died before he entered university, having first been apprenticed to become a furrier, just like his late, elder brother. Timm admits he tired of hearing about "[t]he upright Navy. The upright Wehrmacht. The upright Waffen SS," as opposed to the SS units that served as guards at concentration camps and oversaw occupied lands, and even dictated to the regular army. The son knew his father was wrong about all that uprightness.

Karl-Heinz closed his field diary with an undated entry sometime between August 7 and September 19, the day he was wounded. "I close my diary here, because I don't see any point in recording the cruel things that sometimes happen."

Had the young soldier, who had seen nothing wrong with killing Russian civilians — they were, after all, part of the sub-race — yet complained of the bombing of his hometown Hamburg by the British, suddenly realized that he was part of an inhuman killing machine? We will never know, nor has Timm solved this passage in his brother's diary.

Despite all of the unresolved questions, this is one of the finest books written by a German about the German condition just before, during and after WWII. It is eminently worth reading. One cannot recommend it too highly.