Uwe Timms Berliner Trilogie Bilanzen von Teilung und Wende in Johannisnacht, Rot und Halbschatten

Abstract

In his Berlin Trilogy, Uwe Timm broaches the division of Germany and the Reunification with the novels Johannisnacht (1996), Rot (2001) and Halbschatten (2008). In the first two novels, the memories and experiences told by the characters offer a heterogeneous panorama of the post-World War II period in both the East and the West of the country: Johannisnacht shows the chaos across Berlin in 1995 and the difficulties to integrate Eastern and Western Germans. In Rot, the failure of socialism accounts for the disappointment by members of the German student movement. In Halbschatten, the author focuses on German history before 1945, searching in Prussia’s militarist past the causes of the scenery we find in both other novels. The Invalidenfriedhof Cemetery, the oldest in Berlin, appears as a stage of historical events and a place where memory becomes concretely visible: besides uniting the military Prussian elite and important members of the Nazi army with resistance fighters, it was divided in half by the Berlin Wall.