Uwe Timm Ikarien
[Icaria]

When, in July of 1943, allied bombs were falling on Hamburg and a firestorm was devouring entire city districts, Uwe Timm was three years old. Huge trees ablaze are among his earliest memories. The involvement of his older brother, who volunteered for the SS and died of his wounds in 1943, struck him with the force of an imperative. In many of his novels, without emotionalism, but with true narrative power, Uwe Timm dealt with National Socialism and the story of his own past. In doing so, the blind spots of German history came into view: the maudlin blather about what Germany suffered, the deafness of his parents' generation, and the history of thought that provided the preconditions for the Nazi era. In his new book Icaria, Timm searches for the origins of eugenics, the doctrine of the improvement of the human race through genetic selection.

Icaria is a longed-for destination. A commune where equality and brotherhood rule, where private property does not exist, where everyone works, studies, eats and celebrates together, where each person practices a craft and can be happy in his or her own way. At any rate that's how Karl Wagner and Alfred Ploetz imagine it on their way from Zurich to the USA in 1884 to visit the Icaria commune in Iowa for several months. Both young men, communistic students of medicine and economics, have read Étienne Cabet, the founder of the first Icarian commune, and are enthused by his ideas. A classless society, plenty of space, health, that would be just the thing! But the Icarians turn out to be pusillanimous, wizened members of the bourgeoisie, who pillory Karl for an innocent romance and accuse the visitors of having destroyed the commune. Nothing comes of the new commune. Ploetz, however, is only strengthened in his mission to improve humanity.

Uwe Timm has selected a historical subject to which he has a close connection: Ploetz, who dies in 1940 at the age of seventy, was the grandfather of Timm's wife, the translator Dagmar Ploetz. Ploetz, the physician as founder of eugenics; the concept of "racial hygiene" can be traced back to him. The historical and cultural background also permeates the novel, but Timm operates with a multiplicity of interruptions and mirrorings that make the whole bearable. On its own, accounts of racial theory with terms like "natural selection," "eradication" and "ballast life," could scarcely be endured for 500 pages. But Uwe Timm knows how to use narrative devices. So he doesn't allow the colorful character Ploetz to speak for himself, but invents an apostate travelling companion instead, the aforementioned Karl Wagner, and has him recount his friendship with the scientist. The elderly contemporary witness is interrogated by a man charged with investigating Nazi war crimes: an American occupation officer by the name of Michael Hansen, the third protagonist of the novel. This young man, a scholar of German literature, with Ernst Bloch and E.T.A. Hoffmann in his field kit, who emigrated with his family to America as a twelve year old, functions as site of value judgments. He combines analytic abilities, a cordial pragmatism and curiosity about the complexities of human life.

A rich and suspense-filled patchwork of narrative threads, settings, and types of text thus emerges. Sweeping descriptions of a devastated Germany alternate with the officer's brief and precise diary entries, with contrasting lyrical views of landscapes, bird-watching, and 14 protocols of interrogations. The original recording of the old man, whose tone turns conversational and loses itself on various paths, develops its own special power. There are constant undercurrents when the protagonists are involved in love affairs. Icaria's attraction arises from its oppositions: a USA sure of its future and a Germany fallen into barbarism, the revolutionaries of the Munich Republic of Councils and those breeding human beings under the Nazis, Ernst Bloch and Stefan George. In Icaria, Uwe Timm plumbs the depths of utopia.