Many-voiced and complex, rich in ideas and allusions, intelligent and moving, Uwe Timm’s novel enters a sphere in which history, chance and individual fate meet.
A young pilot, Marga von Etzdorf, shoots herself in Aleppo, Syria, in May 1933 after a crash landing. She is 25 years old. Her grave is situated on the Invalids’ Cemetery in Berlin. How does she belong here among the dead of the Prussian military history, important Nazi politicians and the civil casualties of the last days of the war? Is there an explanation for her violent death?
The guide who shows Uwe Timm’s narrator round the Invalids’ Cemetery points out some unsettling proximities. Not only is Scharnhorst buried here, the hero of the liberation wars, but also Heydrich, the organiser of the Holocaust, next to anonymous victims of May 1945. The dead begin to talk, to explain themselves, to justify. Among the voices which speak to the narrator is also that of Marga von Etzdorf.
After one of her spectacular long-distance flights, Marga von Etzdorf met the young diplomat and former fighter pilot Christian von Dahlem in Japan and spent a strange night with him – a night of narrating. Together in one room, but separated by a curtain, they are distant and yet close through private conversation. In this moment of inner revelation, they tell each other their lives.
This oratorio of fear and love, in the centre of which stand Marga and von Dahlem conjures the demons and angles of history and tells about attitudes and perspectives by which German history was shaped and marked.
