Lie, memory: James Gibbons on Uwe Timm.

IN MY BROTHER'S SHADOW: A LIFE AND DEATH IN THE SS BY UWE TIMM, TRANSLATED BY ANTHEA BELL. NEW YORK: FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX. 160 PAGES. $21.

The Onion Cellar, the trendy nightspot in Gunter Grass's Tin Drum, lures its clientele with a shrewd gimmick: Its customers, drawn from the elite of postwar West Germany, pay handsomely for the opportunity to chop onions. It's the only way they can weep. With defeat and occupation, the conquered population has grown rigid, inwardly stifled; yearning for release, the Onion Cellar's patrons let their bodily reflexes stand in for their deadlocked emotions. Grass makes the point that in the wake of total war and the full revelation of Nazi atrocities, Germans became numb--to their guilt and their losses alike. Later, as examining the fascist past became a preoccupation among those young enough not to be implicated in Nazi crimes, West Germans confronting the Hitler era were careful to exhibit an appropriate depth of emotion, as if to rebuke their parents' generation not only for their actions but also for their psychic paralysis, their inability to feel.

The outraged theatrics of the student movement in 1968 thus denounced the protective silence of older Germans. And emerging as a literary '68er of the first order was Uwe Timm, whose debut novel, HeiBer Sommer (Hot Summer), chronicled those heady days of revolt. Like most in his cohort--the erstwhile radical Joschka Fischer, of course, is now Germany's foreign minister--Timm has mellowed politically, though without abandoning his leftist roots, garnering critical plaudits and prizes along the way. In his memoir, In My Brother's Shadow, he affirms the soixante-huitard antiauthoritarian ideals of nonconformity and skepticism toward officialdom, even if his own eventual break with the German Communist Party suggested that politics are less pure a realm than temperament. And yet, as Timm's memoir shows, there is a growing tendency, even among '68ers, to consider Germans of the war years as victims as well as aggressors. Great pains, of course, are taken to avoid even a hint of exculpatory apologetics for the Nazis. But something else is at stake here, too. The '68ers' stance of accusation toward their parents seemed absolute. If softened for a more revisionist assessment, aren't the adversarial passions of that later generation also in some sense repudiated? Such fraught speculations require careful monitoring.

Timm was a small child in 1943, when his brother, Karl-Heinz, serving with the Waffen SS in Ukraine, died in a military hospital from wounds suffered in combat. Given Timm's dearth of memories about his brother, his memoir also charts his difficult relationship with his father, as well as more sympathetic attachments to his mother and sister. Arranged as a series of notebooklike fragments, In My Brother's Shadow includes more general reflections on the war years and their aftermath. Timm presents himself as a suffering saint in the church of German anguish over the Hitlerzeit, displaying a rawness of response that extends even to his body. His research, he explains, has caused the tearing of one of his corneas; he is seared by pain that "makes not only the injured eye weep but the other eye too, and I, one of a generation to whom tears were forbidden--boys don't cry--I weep as if I had to shed all my mother's, my father's, my brother's suppressed tears, the tears of those who didn't know, who didn't want to know what they could have known, should have known." Though doubtless genuine, Timm's suffering seems burdened by religious overtones. A more literal translation of the memoir's title in German, Am Beispiel meines Bruders, would be My Brother's Example: Timm presents himself as a humane counterexample to Karl-Heinz's dutiful service to the Nazis, and as proof of German progress in managing the past. Instead of the emotionally stunted crowds in Grass's Onion Cellar, here is the thoughtful, responsible man alone in his study, his painful tears set flowing by a sincere engagement with the war and the Holocaust.

As a result, In My Brother's Shadow assumes at times the air of a citizenship seminar for Germans anxious about their national character. Timm cites the familiar insight that European high culture was irrelevant in the face of fascist barbarity (the SS elite "listened to Mozart, read Holderlin--one could wish they had not"), and laments the Nazis' irreversible corruption of German (the phrase final solution is "proof of the fact that even the German langauge has lost its innocence"). But, rather curiously, given his suspicions about silence on the past and his own efforts to understand Nazism, Timm also writes, echoing Primo Levi, that regarding the death camps, "There can be no attempt at explanation. Nothing written with a view to tracing the causes of those events, classifying or understanding them is any help; it can only act as self-defence." Timm's observations are in line with what is now a broad consensus about the Third Reich, affirming orthodoxies that have emerged from the voluminous literature addressing the Hitler years.

Timm is more bracing when he brings his novelist's tools to bear on the personalities in his family. Fortunately, such explorations make up the bulk of In My Brother's Shadow, as Timm sifts through anecdotes, family lore, snatches of dreams, and an array of documentary evidence. At the center of In My Brother's Shadow is a diary Timm's brother secretly kept while serving in the SS, which offers the allure and dread of unexpected revelations. Timm's gravest fear--that his brother may have delighted in murdering Jews and other civilians--is not borne out. The entry that receives the most angst is a description of a lone Russian soldier, observed smoking a cigarette, followed by the comment "Fodder for my MG [machine gun]." The remark's casual brutality ratties Timm, who never considers the entry's ambigulty--Did Karl-Heinz shoot the Russian soldier, or is he simply regarding him as a contemptible enemy? Might there possibly be some irony in the remark, even?--because he is more interested in establishing the terms by which his brother is to be judged. For Timm, Karl-Heinz was an ordinary man unable to imagine his enemy as a fellow human being; his failing was primarily an abdication of feeling.

In Timm's moral calculus, feeling is opposed to and obliterated by obedience, Karl-Heinz's defining trait. He suggests that because his brother was just a teenager when he volunteered for the SS, his sense of obedience made him a victim as well as an instrument of the Nazis: "Cheated of his own story, of a chance to experience his own feelings, he was reduced to putting a brave face on things." Such an evaluation is as questionable as it is abstract, because Karl-Heinz's terse soldier's diary offers insufficient evidence about whether his "own story," never realized, might actually be found outside the ambit of Nazism. Timm wants both to judge and to empathize with his phantom brother; to accuse him of a "terrifying ... partial blindness" but also to entertain the desire that he may, ultimately, have questioned his own obedience. These warring urges are never resolved in his memoir, but dissolve in an ambience of artful sobriety, a respectful reverence toward the enormity of the past. In confronting that past, Timm strives also to mend its wounds, and although the sentiments expressed in In My Brother's Shadow are for the most part unimpeachable, there's something too fastidious about its unvaried mournfulness. In Timm's arena of healing, the emotional climate is strictly maintained. The Onion Cellar, too, was a controlled environment. But there, at least, its desperate weepers were able "to cry properly, without restraint, to cry like mad." Timm's sense of propriety is too responsible to admit such unruly, wild energy.

James Gibbons is associate editor at the Library of America.