All My Ghosts

Uwe Timm writes about his formative years as an apprentice furrier in post-war Hamburg – about odd experiences at work and in the world of fashion, about special friendships and the books that changed his life.

Hamburg, 1955. Uwe, just 14 years old, is apprenticed to a furrier by his father, who owns a fur store. To the beat of punch clocks, the young man learns the creative precision required for this now virtually extinct craft and trains his eye for the materials, customers, pitfalls and secrets of this art. He eavesdrops on his colleagues’ stories, makes friends, gets book recommendations, and discovers the city and jazz. The apprentice, who dreams of writing, reads Salinger and Camus on the sly in the sorting room and is initiated into politics by his master Kruse, which only makes his arguments with his father about the Nazi era all the more heated.

In the meantime, a price war has broken out on the fur market, the family’s furrier business is no longer thriving and, when his father suddenly dies of a heart attack, 18-year-old Uwe is left trying to rebuild the heavily indebted business. Yet hard work and serious worries cannot stop him from imagining a completely different life.