THE INTERTWINING OF FACTUALITY AND FICTIONALITY IN UWE TIMM’S AM BEISPIEL MEINES BRUDERS

Abstract

The literary works by Uwe Timm have a big relevance in the debates beginning in the 1990s about the relation between history, media and literature and about the responsibility of literature in the reconsideration of the events of the Holocaust; Timm’s narratives discuss and intertwine familiar memory and history.

This article embeds Uwe Timm’s book Am Beispiel meines Bruders (2003) in the contemporary context of the so called “Erinnerungsliteratur” and then concentrates on the narrativity of the text and particularly on the interplay between the strategies of fictionality and the claims for reality and truth that distinguish the text. The article first examines how Timm deals with fictional and factual and then focuses on some relevant fictionality strategies using the concepts of 'signpost of fictionality', 'biographem', 'narrem'.