Uwe Timm.(Review)

Uwe Timm. Ed. by David Basker. (Contemporary German Writers) Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 1999. xi + 148 pp. 7.95 [pounds sterling].

Given Uwe Timm's position as one of the most important of contemporary German writers, given too the lack of secondary literature in German and particularly in English on Timm's prose writing, this volume is timely and valuable indeed. It follows the usual Contemporary German Writers Series pattern, comprising a hitherto unpublished piece by Timm himself, an interview with the author, a biographical overview, and a series of articles on Timm's works, in this case by Rhys Williams, David Basker, Keith Bullivant, and Colin Riordan. The volume concludes with an up-to-date bibliography. Timm's work can roughly be divided into novels exploring the aspirations and disappointments of the 1970s German student movement (Heisser Sommer and Kerbels Flucht), novels examining the impact past and present of Western thinking and values on far-away places (thus Morenga is set in German South-West Africa, Der Schlangenbaum in South America, and Kopfjager in Easter Island), and novels which, while they take an apparently ordinary object as their theme, approach it from a perspective which reveals its extraordinary aspects and embed it in an historical context (Der Mann auf dem Hochrad, Die Entdeckung der Currywurst, and Johannisnacht). The value of the new volume, however, is that several of the contributions point out that dividing up Timm's work in this way may be misleading, indeed fundamentally so. Both in his short essay 'Das Nahe, das Ferne', and in his interview with Riordan, Timm outlines the links between his own biography, notably his active involvement in the 1970s German student movement, and his interest in more exotic climes. As Basker makes clear in his biographical overview, politics, and disillusionment with politics, play as much of a part in Kerbels Flucht as in Morenga and Der Schlangenbaum. Moreover, the theme of exploitation is connected not just with past German ventures in Africa, or with contemporary European intervention in the Third World, but also with the power of capital in post-1945 West Germany. Keith Bullivant, in his energetic essay on aspects of the postmodern and anthropological in Timm's work, argues that the perspective and literary techniques used in Der Schlangenbaum, Morenga, Kerbels Flucht and Der Mann auf dem Hochrad are similar, as Timm seeks to explore aspects of 'the other' not just in faraway cultures, but in his own.

The volume is well balanced in its focus. Rhys Williams's essay on Heiber Sommer and Kerbels Flucht examines the use of literary allusion and quotation in both these works, an unusual perspective. David Basker, in his piece on Der Mann auf dem Hochrad, Johannisnacht and Die Entdeckung der Currywurst argues that, while in these works Timm's narrators base their tales on what they have heard or read, they also tend to 'invent' or at least 'fill out' certain gaps in these tales with their own imagined recreations of what 'might' have happened. Throughout the volume, the relationship between the documentary and fictional in Timm's work is a central theme. Both Bullivant and Riordan focus more on Der Schlangenbaum and Morenga, particularly Riordan, whose contribution is, of all in the book, the most stimulating.

I say this in full awareness that Riordan's view of Der Schlangenbaum is in some respects very different to my own; indeed he takes issue with my interpretation. I am grateful to him for drawing ...