Discovery of Senses in the Literary Output of Uwe Timm

Abstract

The article is an attempt to portray the important role of so-called lower senses (smell, taste and touch) in the works of Timm. Despite the writer’s claims that it is the picture that is the starting point for writing a story, the perceptions of lower senses are the essential part of the narrative flow. By referring to his own experiences as well as to the collective memory Timm constructs a multi-sensory image of the world. The haptic sense is represented in its different instantiations as a sense of touching (in the erotic and economic sense), a sense of balance or a sense of cold (German soldiers’ recollections of imprisonment in Soviet camps). The senses of smell and taste, despite their transient nature, are the reservoirs of both individual and collective memory. Introducing lower-level senses to Timm’s literary works serves, thus, the purpose of reconstructing the past and the present within the culture-related paradigm.