Patrice Nganang's historical novel Mount Pleasant (2011) is a beautiful interplay between imagination, archival sources, time, and memory. More than a simple product of the author's imagination ...utilizing colonial archives, this novel is a celebration of an unprecedented cultural memory, initiated by a Cameroonian king, Sultan Njoya, whose prodigious cultural creativity and intellectual life is unique in African history. This study aims at delineating the aesthetic entwinement between archive, memory, and emotion. Attention given to the argument that despite the novel's critics of racialized relations embedded in the ruling strategies of the three consecutive European imperial powers (German, English, and French) in Cameroon, Mount Pleasant can be regarded as an archaeological site, a powerful exploration of human nature as well as a convincing ethics of storytelling on human understanding in this age of mind. The stories created by Nganang ultimately lead to the conclusion that there are coalescent aesthetic influences between historical features of this literary text, which in turn translates these historical sources into new epistemologies of emotional memories and as a result constitutes a call to acknowledge the place and merits of this original cultural memory in the history of African cultural production within the current context of a global paradigm.
The novel Ikarien (2017) by Uwe Timm is set in Germany after WW II, where Wagner tells the story of the German eugenicist Alfred Ploetz to a young American soldier. Although Timm refers to historical ...facts about Ploetz and the Icarian movement, the novel deals with philosophical themes relevant to the 21st century reader, while asking basic questions about the ideas, thought patterns and fallacies that lead to racism, violent behavior, and genocide. Since Timm writes about these themes for decades, the article suggests a reading of the novel in the context of his early work and the history of utopian concepts.
This essay explores the contribution of two works of German literature to a decolonial narrative ethics. It analyzes the structures of colonialism, taking narratives as a medium of and for ethical ...reflection, and reinterprets the ethical concepts of recognition and responsibility. This essay examines two stories. Franz Kafka’s Report to an Academy (1917) addresses the biological racism of the German scientists around 1900, unmasking the racism that renders apes (or particular people) the pre-life of human beings (or particular human beings). It also demonstrates that the politics of recognition, based on conditional (mis-)recognition, must be replaced by an ethics of mutual recognition. Uwe Timm’s Morenga (1978) uses the cross-reference of history and fiction as an aesthetic principle, narrating the history of the German genocide of the Nama and Herero people at the beginning of the 20th century. Intercultural understanding, the novel shows, is impossible when it is based on the conditional, colonial (mis-)recognition that echoes Kafka’s unmasking; furthermore, the novel illuminates the interrelation of recognition and responsibility that requires not only an aesthetic ethics of reading based on attentiveness and response but also a political ethics that confronts the (German) readers as historically situated agents who must take responsibility for their past.
The first-person narrator of Uwe Timm's In My Brother's Shadow and Samantha Hughes, the main character in Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country, encounter life-changing peripeteias long before they reach ...adulthood. They both focus on young men whom they never knew through direct experience. These men are fallen soldiers and at the age of 19 their deaths are not only violent, but premature and tragic. Upon reaching a resolve to know more about their own lives Timm's narrator and Samantha Hughes explore the lives of these figures who would have otherwise played a significant role in their lives. The protagonists of these novels investigate Karl-Heinz Timm and Dwayne Hughes through time from the panoptic view of the present. Uwe Timm examines the familial memories and the relics of his significantly older brother killed on the eastern front in October of 1943. Mason depicts an adolescent, born in October 1966 now almost majority age who never knew her father because he was killed in Vietnam one month before her birth. Both protagonists refer to themselves as an "afterthought" (Timm 4; Mason 184). In their own eyes they are low in the family hierarchy. The latency of their willingness to face the past and ask questions leads to processing their familial losses indirectly through the memories and stories of others. We encounter a paradox in an expression such as the presence of loss, or the presence of an absence, but this paradox affords both narratives the tenor of eulogies situated in everyday living. This essay examines the junctures of daily living and loss in order to reveal the uneasy resonance that manifests itself between the permanence of loss and the durability of practices of everyday life. Timm and Mason make loss visible in the preparation of food, in distractions of reading and watching TV, having parties, in innocuous self-destructive moments of rebellion, earning money, going shopping, and ultimately recognizing the geography of loss whether it is located in the Ukraine or entails visiting the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C.
Instead of taking an erudite look at art in his Romische Aufzeichnungen (1989, Roman Notebooks), Uwe Timm registers broken objects, imitations of classic sculptures, and the deterioration of ...buildings. He critically approaches the instability of signs, the difficult forms of life, and the muddle of interpersonal communication. He neither praises Rome as a place of sacralized antiquity, nor builds around its chaos a myth of spontaneity and plentiful life. In contrast to Rolf Dieter Brinkmann (Rom, Blicke, 1979) who is not interested in experimenting with the Other, Timm designs a patchwork of perceptions, memories, and multimedia fragments of knowledge by using literary and ethnological techniques and codes. He thus creates an 'aesthetics of precariousness,' of sensuality and labor which enables him to come to terms not only with various Rome clichAs, but also with his own, German history. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
During the Second World War, the German officer Wilm Hosenfeld, on duty in Poland, wrote about the war atrocities committed by his country, 'We shall be punished for it. And so will our innocent ...children, for we are colluding when we allow these crimes to be committed.' Taking this diary entry as its starting point, this essay assesses Rachel Seiffert's 2001 novel The Dark Room and Uwe Timm's 2005 autobiographical novella In My Brother's Shadow in the light of contemporary German victim and collective guilt discourses, transposing Marianne Hirsch's term 'postmemory' on to the children of the perpetrators.
My dissertation examines the development of Uwe Timm's mode of narration from the early 1970s to his most recent novels. Using one of his earliest theoretical texts (Zwischen Unterhaltung and ...Aufklärung, 1972) as a point of departure, the dissertation shows that principles presented in that essay—though constantly re-evaluated and re-worked—shaped all of his works. In the essay he claims two major functions for a literary text: on the one hand it should offer insights into historical and political contexts, yet it should also appeal to the reader's senses, emotions, and fantasies. In detailed analyses of the early novels Heißer Sommer (1974), Morenga (1978), Kerbels Flucht (1980), Mann auf dem Hochrad (1984), and the autobiographical narrative Vogel, friss die Feige nicht (1989), the dissertation examines how Timm developed a unique fusion of essayistic and fictional elements, combining the two aspects mentioned above that he considered essential for literary texts. While all of his texts are based on historical events and persons, he also implements writing techniques typical for fiction, drawing from the author's imagination. Thus, he does not claim to present events as they happened, but as they could have happened. In a later collection of poetological essays (Erzählen and kein Ende, 1993) he termed this narrative approach "Poetik des Alltags." His montage technique allows him to re-present events and historical actors that are barely remembered due to fragmented or distorted documentation, to question historical research, and to complement the accounts using his imagination. In the final chapter, the dissertation investigates how Timm utilizes this writing style to write about his older brother, who died as an SS-soldier during WWII (Am Beispiel meines Bruders, 2003). The fact that the author was only three years old when his brother died made it almost impossible for him to access his brother's conflicted past. His parents conveyed a presence of absence through their narrations, yet they refrained from talking about his brother's involvement in the SS. The chapter discusses how Timm's writing techniques offer a means of connecting to conflicted or distorted memory without suspending either historical research or the author's imagination.
This article discusses the extended figurative inventory to be detected in Heine's prose and addresses its narrative function both through a close reading and through a delineation of the frameworks ...in which it can be situated. Extensive usage of tropes like metaphor and metonymy tends to be seen as either a strong signal of interpretative authority or as an inherent aspect of the reader's activity of reception. The figurative network can also be seen, however, as an indicator of a certain hermeneutic openness, prefiguring and requiring the reader to reflect the process of metadiscursive denomination. In Heine's Ideen. Das Buch Le Grand, the prominent narrator takes up a number of common tropes denoting polemic communicative procedures ('stigmatising', 'executing', 'digesting', 'slaughtering' one's opponent). Those alienating appellations are filtered through a sequence of metonymic operations that relates their seemingly inherently persuasive effect to situations of reciprocity and cooperation. The analysis tests the assumption that Heine's prose is digressive, amorphous, eclectic, and witty at best. This widespread impression is refuted by pointing out the overt rhetoricity of the text, which constitutes a peculiar form of comment on the performance of the narration.
Since the end of the nineteenth century, a wide variety of readers, whether "implied," "ideal," "postcolonial," or "other," have read and reread Joseph Conrad's texts, helping both to shape and to ...critique our twentieth and now twenty-first century culture. Here, Levy examines Uwe Timm's De Schlangenbaum (The Snake Tree) and Aleksandar Hemon's The Question of Bruno, and finds that for both authors-one a German who shows how Western capitalism exploits neo-colonial cultures, the other a Bosnian Serb who situates Conrad in Sarajevo, the dark heart of the Bosnian War-Conrad problematizes the nature history and identity and represents a particular way of reading society, other, and self.
The slim volume is a memoir about growing up following the death of his much older brother Karl-Heinz, a sapper in the Death's Head Division. The Death's Head Division was a part of the Waffen SS, ...the only part of the SS not declared criminal during the Nuremberg trials. Karl-Heinz was 16 years Uwe Timm's senior, and died at the age of 18 as a result of wounds sustained in battle. Timm was only three at the time, and had very few tangible memories of his brother. However, life from that point on became lived in the shadow of this sibling whose shadow became larger than life and loomed over Timm, who often refers to himself in the book as "the afterthought" and in the third person during anecdotes as "the boy." Timm attempts to piece together his brother's time in the SS through brief letters home and a diary that Karl-Heinz managed to keep despite the fact that keeping a diary was forbidden. The entries are brief and vague, the final entry closing with an obtuse reference to "cruel things." It is this which Timm tries to put a name to, fearing his brother's unit may have taken part in the Babi Yar massacre in Russia, when 34,000 Jews were killed.
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