Timm, Uwe

The German author Uwe Timm was born in Hamburg as the third and youngest child of the family. His father fought in the Second World War, as did his much older brother, who served in the Waffen SS and was killed in 1943. Timm's father, whose military career ended with the war, later opened a furrier's shop in Hamburg; the family’s bourgeois way of life was informed by a sense of duty. Timm trained as a furrier and took over the debt-burdened shop when his father died. He attended Braunschweig-Kolleg until 1963 and went on to read philosophy and Germanistics at the universities of Munich and Paris. He presented his doctoral thesis on Albert Camus in 1972. From then on, he dedicated his time to writing.