Uwe Timm forgot our appointment. That’s why he arrives a little late in the lobby of his hotel in Hamburg and is genuinely dismayed by this oversight: he was “raised Prussian”! However, the calendar is probably pretty full at the moment. Timm’s new book “All My Ghosts” was published in September and the reading tour has just begun. The 83-year-old also has an appointment with his oldest friend that day; they have known each other since childhood. He still doesn’t cancel our planned walk: “That’s our story now!” Luckily, the friend still has time later. So we start walking towards Jungfernstieg.
Liberation in Braunschweig
Hamburg is Timm’s hometown. This can be seen in the fact that he suddenly hears the North, even though he hasn’t lived here for decades: “It’s very strange that this language, this tone of voice has become so memorable.” At the beginning of the 1960s, Timm was happy Leaving the city behind him: “That moment, going to Braunschweig and starting a really different life, was such a liberation.” And of course it sounds a bit strange that Hamburg, the big port city, is associated with a narrowness for him he wanted to escape in Braunschweig. But anyone who reads “All My Ghosts” will quickly understand what he means by that. Because this book, which if it weren’t autobiographical, would probably be called a bildungsroman, tells of the sometimes dusty, even pressured atmosphere of the post-war years in Hamburg. About Timm’s apprenticeship as a furrier, during which he dreamed of becoming something completely different – a writer, of course.
In terms of chronology, “All My Ghosts” is located between two of Timm’s other books. In “The Example of My Brother” he told the story of his older brother, who volunteered for the Waffen-SS and died in the war in 1943. Timm himself was three years old at the time. In “The Friend and the Stranger” he described his years at the Braunschweig College, where he earned his high school diploma and became friends with his classmate Benno Ohnesorg. In “All My Ghosts” Timm now devotes himself to his youth, his first reading experiences, his first loves. It is also a portrait of a time long gone and a melancholic declaration of love to a profession that is now almost extinct.
Timm gave it up voluntarily and shares the criticism that animal rights activists have about it. Nevertheless, he would like to preserve this craft, this art, the approach of which is almost reminiscent of Timm’s collage-like narrative technique, at least in language: “Because of its protection from the cold, the fur coat is a simple everyday item, only when the different colors and hair lengths are arranged in an orderly manner, i.e. harmonious If something is made or, on the contrary, counteracted, what has naturally grown becomes something artificial, something that has never been seen before.” A particularly talented fellow furrier draws his designs “as if it were about building cathedrals.” Tell us about everyday life in a furrier’s workshop, the various tasks involved – who else could do that? Timm captures both this sensual activity and the social structure that surrounds it.
#walk #Uwe #Timm