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Remote Sympathy
Moving away from Munich isn’t nearly as wrenching an experience for Frau Greta Hahn as she had feared. Their new home is even lovelier than the one they left behind, and best of all – right on their doorstep – are some of the finest craftsmen from all over Europe, prepared to make for her and the other officers’ wives living in this small community anything they could possibly desire: new curtains from the finest silks, furniture designed to the most exacting specifications, execute a fresco or a mural even.
The looming presence of the nearby prison camp – lying just beyond a patch of forest – is the only blot to mar what is otherwise an idyllic life in Buchenwald.
Frau Hahn’s husband, SS Sturmbannführer Dietrich Hahn, has taken up a powerful new position as camp administrator. The job is all consuming as he wrestles with corruption that is rife at every level, inadequate supplies, and a sewerage system under ever-growing strain as the prison population continues to rise.
Frau Hahn’s obliviousness is challenged when she is forced into an unlikely alliance with one of Buchenwald’s prisoners, Dr Lenard Weber. A decade earlier he invented a machine – the Sympathetic Vitaliser – that at the time he believed could cure cancer. Does the machine work? Whether it does or not, it might yet save a life.
The looming presence of the nearby prison camp – lying just beyond a patch of forest – is the only blot to mar what is otherwise an idyllic life in Buchenwald.
Frau Hahn’s husband, SS Sturmbannführer Dietrich Hahn, has taken up a powerful new position as camp administrator. The job is all consuming as he wrestles with corruption that is rife at every level, inadequate supplies, and a sewerage system under ever-growing strain as the prison population continues to rise.
Frau Hahn’s obliviousness is challenged when she is forced into an unlikely alliance with one of Buchenwald’s prisoners, Dr Lenard Weber. A decade earlier he invented a machine – the Sympathetic Vitaliser – that at the time he believed could cure cancer. Does the machine work? Whether it does or not, it might yet save a life.
526 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 2020
273 people are currently reading
5316 people want to read
About the author
Catherine Chidgey
16 books606 followersCatherine Chidgey is a novelist and short story writer whose work has been published to international acclaim. In a Fishbone Church won Best First Book at the New Zealand Book Awards and at the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in her region. In the UK it won the Betty Trask Award and was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Golden Deeds was Time Out’s book of the year, a Notable Book of the Year in The New York Times and a Best Book in the LA Times. She has won the Prize in Modern Letters, the Katherine Mansfield Award, the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship, the Janet Frame Fiction Prize, and the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize for The Wish Child. Remote Sympathy was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. The Axeman's Carnival won the Acorn at the New Zealand Book Awards - the country's biggest literary prize.
Raised in Wellington, New Zealand, Chidgey was educated at Victoria University and in Berlin, where she held a DAAD scholarship for post-graduate study in German literature. She lives in Cambridge and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Waikato.
Raised in Wellington, New Zealand, Chidgey was educated at Victoria University and in Berlin, where she held a DAAD scholarship for post-graduate study in German literature. She lives in Cambridge and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Waikato.
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June 16, 2025
DORMONO SULLA COLLINA
Adolf Wildt: Autoritratto (detto anche La maschera del dolore).
A pagina trentuno compare per la prima volta la parola maledetta, la parola proibita, quella contaminante: ebreo.
Il primo io-narrante che incontriamo - in una lettera alla figlia scritta nel 1946 ha fin qui condotto il racconto iniziando dal 1930 e a questo punto è giunto al 1936 - la sente pronunciare dal direttore dell’ospedale dove lavora, apprende che il suo problema, quello che gli impedisce di proseguire la sperimentazione medica, è avere sposato una donna ebrea.
Chidgey aggiunge altre tre voci al suo racconto: oltre questa del medico che dopo la guerra scrive lettere alla figlia che non ha potuto vedere crescere a causa della “razza” di sua madre – ebrea, come già detto – c’è quella della giovane moglie del nuovo direttore amministrativo e responsabile della manutenzione del campo, che insieme al marito e al loro unico figlio di cinque anni si trasferisce in una villa che una foresta di faggi separa dal campo: Greta racconta attraverso un diario ‘immaginario’.
La terza è quella dello stesso ufficiale, marito e padre, che risponde a un intervista diversi anni dopo la fine del nazismo, al quale ha dedicato la vita. Sono registrazioni e qui e là il nastro è consumato, s’interrompe, si perde qualche parola.
E poi c’è una quarta voce, più sporadica, più breve delle altre, alla quale Chidgey assegna capitoli molto corti: questa volta a raccontare è una specie di coro, quello composto da mille cittadini della città di Weimar, che abituati all’eredità di Goethe e Schiller, hanno dovuto accettare la novità. Il campo lager.
Giunti più o meno a metà, la prima voce incrocia le altre due: vicine, perché il luogo è lo stesso, Buchenwald; ma distanti perché la coppia è ariana e il medico invece ha nella famiglia un lontano ramo ebreo.
Il coro rimane tale. Ed è la voce più agghiacciante… man mano che si trasformano in “volenterosi carnefici” di Hitler.
Bosco di faggi è la traduzione di Buchenwald, luogo più famoso per ben altro, eufemisticamente definito ‘campo di lavoro’ – e in effetti di lavoro ce n’era tanto, i prigionieri lavoravano eccome – ma funzionava bene anche come campo di sterminio: dalla sua fondazione nel 1937 alla chiusura, su una popolazione complessiva di circa 250mila prigionieri, almeno un quinto non è sopravvissuto.
Un’altra statistica invece trasforma Buchenwald in un luogo quasi virtuoso: di quel quinto di morti, “solo” un quinto era composto da ebrei.
Buchenwald sorgeva a un passo da Weimar, il luogo culla della cultura tedesca (la quercia di Goethe, tanto per limitarsi a un solo aspetto) e con Dachau e Bergen-Belsen fu il maggior lager su suolo tedesco (i nazisti amavano ‘esportare’ anche i campi di concentramento).
Il bosco di faggi prima del ’37 era molto più ampio: poi una bella fetta (150 ettari) fu eliminata per fare spazio al campo. Ma rimase la quercia di Goethe, in bella mostra all’interno del lager. Finché i bombardamenti non la ridussero in cenere.
La parte di bosco tagliata per lasciare spazio al campo era in collina, in cima a un’altura. Di conseguenza, lassù, su quella collina, o meglio, sotto quella collina, sono rimasti in tanti a dormire, sepolti in qualche modo, ridotti in cenere, o fumo attraverso il camino.
Man mano che la storia si srotola davanti agli occhi del lettore, Catherine Chidgey mantiene la promessa del titolo: ci conduce dentro l’orrore restando lontani. È il tran tran, la quotidianità, gli oggetti (ah, le tende della camera da letto!), a comporre la “banalità del male”. Tra le ville dei gerarchi nazisti e il campo c’è la casa del falconiere, e persino uno zoo con le scimmie, le mamme ci conducono i bambini: ma il fumo che esce dal comignolo è dolciastro, repellente, attira gli insetti, si attacca addosso.
Quell’orrore che abbiamo imparato a conoscere. Ma che resta sempre incomprensibile. Inimmaginabile.
Adolf Wildt: Autoritratto (detto anche La maschera del dolore).
A pagina trentuno compare per la prima volta la parola maledetta, la parola proibita, quella contaminante: ebreo.
Il primo io-narrante che incontriamo - in una lettera alla figlia scritta nel 1946 ha fin qui condotto il racconto iniziando dal 1930 e a questo punto è giunto al 1936 - la sente pronunciare dal direttore dell’ospedale dove lavora, apprende che il suo problema, quello che gli impedisce di proseguire la sperimentazione medica, è avere sposato una donna ebrea.
Chidgey aggiunge altre tre voci al suo racconto: oltre questa del medico che dopo la guerra scrive lettere alla figlia che non ha potuto vedere crescere a causa della “razza” di sua madre – ebrea, come già detto – c’è quella della giovane moglie del nuovo direttore amministrativo e responsabile della manutenzione del campo, che insieme al marito e al loro unico figlio di cinque anni si trasferisce in una villa che una foresta di faggi separa dal campo: Greta racconta attraverso un diario ‘immaginario’.
La terza è quella dello stesso ufficiale, marito e padre, che risponde a un intervista diversi anni dopo la fine del nazismo, al quale ha dedicato la vita. Sono registrazioni e qui e là il nastro è consumato, s’interrompe, si perde qualche parola.
E poi c’è una quarta voce, più sporadica, più breve delle altre, alla quale Chidgey assegna capitoli molto corti: questa volta a raccontare è una specie di coro, quello composto da mille cittadini della città di Weimar, che abituati all’eredità di Goethe e Schiller, hanno dovuto accettare la novità. Il campo lager.
Giunti più o meno a metà, la prima voce incrocia le altre due: vicine, perché il luogo è lo stesso, Buchenwald; ma distanti perché la coppia è ariana e il medico invece ha nella famiglia un lontano ramo ebreo.
Il coro rimane tale. Ed è la voce più agghiacciante… man mano che si trasformano in “volenterosi carnefici” di Hitler.
Bosco di faggi è la traduzione di Buchenwald, luogo più famoso per ben altro, eufemisticamente definito ‘campo di lavoro’ – e in effetti di lavoro ce n’era tanto, i prigionieri lavoravano eccome – ma funzionava bene anche come campo di sterminio: dalla sua fondazione nel 1937 alla chiusura, su una popolazione complessiva di circa 250mila prigionieri, almeno un quinto non è sopravvissuto.
Un’altra statistica invece trasforma Buchenwald in un luogo quasi virtuoso: di quel quinto di morti, “solo” un quinto era composto da ebrei.
Buchenwald sorgeva a un passo da Weimar, il luogo culla della cultura tedesca (la quercia di Goethe, tanto per limitarsi a un solo aspetto) e con Dachau e Bergen-Belsen fu il maggior lager su suolo tedesco (i nazisti amavano ‘esportare’ anche i campi di concentramento).
Il bosco di faggi prima del ’37 era molto più ampio: poi una bella fetta (150 ettari) fu eliminata per fare spazio al campo. Ma rimase la quercia di Goethe, in bella mostra all’interno del lager. Finché i bombardamenti non la ridussero in cenere.
La parte di bosco tagliata per lasciare spazio al campo era in collina, in cima a un’altura. Di conseguenza, lassù, su quella collina, o meglio, sotto quella collina, sono rimasti in tanti a dormire, sepolti in qualche modo, ridotti in cenere, o fumo attraverso il camino.
Man mano che la storia si srotola davanti agli occhi del lettore, Catherine Chidgey mantiene la promessa del titolo: ci conduce dentro l’orrore restando lontani. È il tran tran, la quotidianità, gli oggetti (ah, le tende della camera da letto!), a comporre la “banalità del male”. Tra le ville dei gerarchi nazisti e il campo c’è la casa del falconiere, e persino uno zoo con le scimmie, le mamme ci conducono i bambini: ma il fumo che esce dal comignolo è dolciastro, repellente, attira gli insetti, si attacca addosso.
Quell’orrore che abbiamo imparato a conoscere. Ma che resta sempre incomprensibile. Inimmaginabile.
April 30, 2022
Catherine Chidgey gets historical fiction right. Remote Sympathy is set in wartime Germany and follows several German characters as they navigate Buchenwald and its environs, exhibiting various outward manifestations of ignorance about the function of the camp. This is less a retelling of the Holocaust than a psychological examination of the distinction between knowledge and belief. How did the German people cope psychologically with the reality of what was happening - events that were very much their leader’s agenda from the beginning. The characters that deny, feign misunderstanding, or just plain ignore the function of the camps are not excused by their willful ignorance, but rather Chidgey illuminates the thought process employed by those in complicity. The book did drag in places and I didn’t need all the storylines, but readers with more patience than I have may enjoy the discursions.
March 11, 2025
I bought this book due to its longlisting for the 2022 Women’s Prize (an overdue example of UK literary fiction prizes recognising Antipodean authors), and it was, prior to my reading, also shortlisted for the 2022 Dublin Literary Award.
The book is effectively a heavily researched but fictionalised telling of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp - the largest concentration camp in the borders of Nazi Germany and which was situated close to the town of Weimar (previously home to Goethe and Schiller and the focal point of German Enlightenment) - the book makes much of this juxtaposition and the proximate indifference (note the contrast to the book’s title) if not deliberate self-deception of the town’s inhabitants to the horrific plight of those in the camp.
The novel is told in three main first person voices - all of which depart in different ways from the classical contrivance of a novel, albeit adding their own level of artificiality.
The first voice is of Dr Lenard Weber - a part Jewish research Doctor with a particular interest in human anatomy (he is particularly inspired by the famous Transparent Man exhibit in the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden) and in the therapeutic use of electricity to destroy cancer cells for which he draws on the remote sympathy theories of the 18th century Scottish surgeon John Hunter. He develops, with mixed success, a machine the Vitaliser. To protect his career and both he and his Jewish wife, they formally separate in 1939, his wife taking an arranged/sham marriage to another Jew which is not enough to stop she and her daughter Lotte with Weber, being taken to Theresienstadt. Dr Weber’s sections are told in letters addressed to his daughter in 1946.
The second voice is Frau Greta Hahn - whose SS husband Dietrich receives a promotion and posting to Buchenwald as camp administrator (moving together with their son Karl-Heinz), where she quickly strikes up a friendship with one of her neighbours in the luxury SS homes near (note again the concept of proximity) the camp. Greta though develops ovarian cancer. Her sections are told in the form of an imaginary diary - of what she imagines she would have recorded had she have kept one.
The third voice is Dietrich - desperate to save Greta he hears of Weber’s now mothballed machine, arranges for him to be arrested and transferred to Buchenwald, and then in Buchenwald orders him to reconstruct the machine in exchange for being spared the more fatal camp duties. An emboldened Weber extends the bargain to Dietrich finding out about Lotte and his wife and ensuring their safety. Dietrich’s sections are told in the form of recordings of interviews he gives to the Americans after his release in 1954 from his sentence for war crimes.
A fourth set and much shorter set of the alternating chapters is a chorus of the people of Weimar.
Despite these different voices (and given in the first three cases what seemed to me a certain level of contrivance) the book lacks any real innovation in style. However given that this author also wrote the vert innovative “Beat of the Pendulum” I think this is largely the author fitting the style to the weight of the subject matter. I would also say that the book is very competently executed - despite its length it is a fairly quick read but that it not because it lacks depth of impact or substance, but rather because the sections naturally flow across the different voices and forward over time.
I must admit I sometimes struggled with the subject matter of the book - as one that however terrible and pivotal to 20th Century history - is one that has been comprehensively covered in novels and on-fiction books and often by authors with a much closer (in many cases immediate) connection to the horrors of the Holocaust (I recall reading Corrie ten Boom’s amazing “Hiding Place” when I was quite young for example).
But where I think the book really excels is in the depth of its imagery. The book would I think make an ideal book to study for say an English A-Level or in a very in-depth book group. There are many images and ideas which recur through the book and which very cleverly and in what seems a non forced way (although I suspect it will read as artificial when I write it in a review) both draw from and highlight the themes of the book.
So Greta’s cancer can be seen as: the tumour of the camp set in this historically cultural town; the cancer of in German society or the poisonous growth in that society and in the town’s inhabitants that leads to their cognitive dissonance about the horrors occurring what it is effectively their sponsorship of the Nazi regime.
The transparent man image applies to both Weber and Dietrich - both concealing something of their Jewish links (for Dietrich both his Semitic sounding surname and his use of a part Jewish doctor to treat his pure Ayran family); both are keeping things secret from each other about the likely or actual fate of the other’s wife and their own agency to prevent it; and yet both in their sections are largely transparent to us, if not always to themselves. Both are in fact in self denial about what they ultimately know likely to be true (the likely efficacy of Webber’s machine, the realistic fate of his family) as is Greta (about her true diagnosis), as are the Weimar townspeople (about what is happening in the camp) and indeed the German leadership (about the war’s trajectory).
And as I have already implied the book is shot through with references both to proximity/distance and to (lack of) sympathy and concern.
Other important images to discuss are: Goethe’s oak - which links nicely to a family tree in a bible - a bible which itself is hidden in a hollowed out copy of Mein Kampf and which therefore functions as a clever and optimistic reversal of the cancerous growth metaphor; a recurring theme in Weber’s section of the three miracle healings associated with his otherwise rather (it not entirely) unreliable machine.
And those last two images come together in the book’s culmination which could I think have been manipulative but which I found profoundly moving.
A book that deserves to win prizes.
The book is effectively a heavily researched but fictionalised telling of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp - the largest concentration camp in the borders of Nazi Germany and which was situated close to the town of Weimar (previously home to Goethe and Schiller and the focal point of German Enlightenment) - the book makes much of this juxtaposition and the proximate indifference (note the contrast to the book’s title) if not deliberate self-deception of the town’s inhabitants to the horrific plight of those in the camp.
The novel is told in three main first person voices - all of which depart in different ways from the classical contrivance of a novel, albeit adding their own level of artificiality.
The first voice is of Dr Lenard Weber - a part Jewish research Doctor with a particular interest in human anatomy (he is particularly inspired by the famous Transparent Man exhibit in the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden) and in the therapeutic use of electricity to destroy cancer cells for which he draws on the remote sympathy theories of the 18th century Scottish surgeon John Hunter. He develops, with mixed success, a machine the Vitaliser. To protect his career and both he and his Jewish wife, they formally separate in 1939, his wife taking an arranged/sham marriage to another Jew which is not enough to stop she and her daughter Lotte with Weber, being taken to Theresienstadt. Dr Weber’s sections are told in letters addressed to his daughter in 1946.
The second voice is Frau Greta Hahn - whose SS husband Dietrich receives a promotion and posting to Buchenwald as camp administrator (moving together with their son Karl-Heinz), where she quickly strikes up a friendship with one of her neighbours in the luxury SS homes near (note again the concept of proximity) the camp. Greta though develops ovarian cancer. Her sections are told in the form of an imaginary diary - of what she imagines she would have recorded had she have kept one.
The third voice is Dietrich - desperate to save Greta he hears of Weber’s now mothballed machine, arranges for him to be arrested and transferred to Buchenwald, and then in Buchenwald orders him to reconstruct the machine in exchange for being spared the more fatal camp duties. An emboldened Weber extends the bargain to Dietrich finding out about Lotte and his wife and ensuring their safety. Dietrich’s sections are told in the form of recordings of interviews he gives to the Americans after his release in 1954 from his sentence for war crimes.
A fourth set and much shorter set of the alternating chapters is a chorus of the people of Weimar.
Despite these different voices (and given in the first three cases what seemed to me a certain level of contrivance) the book lacks any real innovation in style. However given that this author also wrote the vert innovative “Beat of the Pendulum” I think this is largely the author fitting the style to the weight of the subject matter. I would also say that the book is very competently executed - despite its length it is a fairly quick read but that it not because it lacks depth of impact or substance, but rather because the sections naturally flow across the different voices and forward over time.
I must admit I sometimes struggled with the subject matter of the book - as one that however terrible and pivotal to 20th Century history - is one that has been comprehensively covered in novels and on-fiction books and often by authors with a much closer (in many cases immediate) connection to the horrors of the Holocaust (I recall reading Corrie ten Boom’s amazing “Hiding Place” when I was quite young for example).
But where I think the book really excels is in the depth of its imagery. The book would I think make an ideal book to study for say an English A-Level or in a very in-depth book group. There are many images and ideas which recur through the book and which very cleverly and in what seems a non forced way (although I suspect it will read as artificial when I write it in a review) both draw from and highlight the themes of the book.
So Greta’s cancer can be seen as: the tumour of the camp set in this historically cultural town; the cancer of in German society or the poisonous growth in that society and in the town’s inhabitants that leads to their cognitive dissonance about the horrors occurring what it is effectively their sponsorship of the Nazi regime.
The transparent man image applies to both Weber and Dietrich - both concealing something of their Jewish links (for Dietrich both his Semitic sounding surname and his use of a part Jewish doctor to treat his pure Ayran family); both are keeping things secret from each other about the likely or actual fate of the other’s wife and their own agency to prevent it; and yet both in their sections are largely transparent to us, if not always to themselves. Both are in fact in self denial about what they ultimately know likely to be true (the likely efficacy of Webber’s machine, the realistic fate of his family) as is Greta (about her true diagnosis), as are the Weimar townspeople (about what is happening in the camp) and indeed the German leadership (about the war’s trajectory).
And as I have already implied the book is shot through with references both to proximity/distance and to (lack of) sympathy and concern.
Other important images to discuss are: Goethe’s oak - which links nicely to a family tree in a bible - a bible which itself is hidden in a hollowed out copy of Mein Kampf and which therefore functions as a clever and optimistic reversal of the cancerous growth metaphor; a recurring theme in Weber’s section of the three miracle healings associated with his otherwise rather (it not entirely) unreliable machine.
And those last two images come together in the book’s culmination which could I think have been manipulative but which I found profoundly moving.
A book that deserves to win prizes.
May 14, 2021
This is such a powerful novel. I didn’t realise how much it had affected me until I reached the last few pages and the ending had me in a flood of tears. The setting is Buchenwald concentration camp so obviously I was prepared for horrors and the author has done her research well.
The story begins in 1930 with Doktor Lenard Weber describing how he met his wife Anna at the exhibition of ‘The Transparent Man’ a see-through model of a man. Doktor Weber is the inventor of a machine that could be a cure for cancer using ‘remote sympathy’. His ‘Sympathetic Vitaliser’ uses electricity to create resonance through the body and therefore reduce tumours. They marry and have a daughter. The Doktor’s narrative is written as a letter to his daughter after the war. By 1936 Weber is coming under pressure to divorce, Anna is Jewish and even though Weber is very Aryan looking himself he also has a Jewish grandfather.
But Lenard is only one of the narrators. The other two are the Hahns, Greta and Dietrich. They have a five year old son and they move to Buchenwald where Dietrich takes up an administrative position. Greta’s narration reads like a diary. Dietrich’s is from a recording much later in 1954. Greta is young and naive, more worried about her son seeing through the fence into the camp than what her husband does there!
As the story brings the characters together their narratives are joined by the voices of citizens from the nearby town of Weimar.
This book is an impressive work. So beautifully written and constructed, I was immersed in the story from the beginning and while not an easy read I couldn’t look away.
The story begins in 1930 with Doktor Lenard Weber describing how he met his wife Anna at the exhibition of ‘The Transparent Man’ a see-through model of a man. Doktor Weber is the inventor of a machine that could be a cure for cancer using ‘remote sympathy’. His ‘Sympathetic Vitaliser’ uses electricity to create resonance through the body and therefore reduce tumours. They marry and have a daughter. The Doktor’s narrative is written as a letter to his daughter after the war. By 1936 Weber is coming under pressure to divorce, Anna is Jewish and even though Weber is very Aryan looking himself he also has a Jewish grandfather.
But Lenard is only one of the narrators. The other two are the Hahns, Greta and Dietrich. They have a five year old son and they move to Buchenwald where Dietrich takes up an administrative position. Greta’s narration reads like a diary. Dietrich’s is from a recording much later in 1954. Greta is young and naive, more worried about her son seeing through the fence into the camp than what her husband does there!
As the story brings the characters together their narratives are joined by the voices of citizens from the nearby town of Weimar.
This book is an impressive work. So beautifully written and constructed, I was immersed in the story from the beginning and while not an easy read I couldn’t look away.
October 17, 2022
Bearing witness to what I believe is the most depraved act of humankind has always been difficult for me to do. All too many hobbyist writers use the Holocaust as a plot point to add suspense or adventure to a novel when in reality, the evil perpetuated there was so heinous and unimaginable that it is hard for the human mind to fathom how anyone could ever have been privy to it. For this reason, I typically gravitate to books that reimagine the Holocaust and show how art triumphs over evil: I’m thinking books like The White Hotel, Blessing on the Moon, and Mischling.
So I began reading Remote Sympathy with some trepidation, anticipating that I would not like it. Reluctantly but fortunately, the book won me over. Catherine Chidgey eschews artificial sentimentality and trite plot twists and delivers a layered fictional world where sympathy is, indeed, remote.
There are three key narrators here. One is Lenard Weber, a Munich physician who identifies as Lutheran who may be on the verge of inventing a technological advance in the fight against cancer. Because he has a tiny smidgen of Jewish blood, he eventually finds himself at the Buchenwald concentration camp. His sections are written as letters to the young daughter he had with his Jewish wife.
Then there is SS officer Dietrich Hahn, based on a real-life Nazi officer, who gladly accepts a post at Buchenwald, complete with all the luxuries and perks his new position encompasses. His entries are written as post-war transcribed interviews and some of them were lifted verbatim from the real transcripts. Finally, there is his much younger wife Greta, who is ill with ovarian cancer and desperately needs treatment, even if the treatment is unproven. It is not a stretch to believe that metamorphically, she physically embodies the diseased Germany of the 1940s. Juxtaposed with these three narrators are short musings of the Weimar townspeople, written in third-person plural.
The yawning gap between the horrendous conditions of the prisoners and the utter lack of sympathy for them by the officers and townspeople, who have been conditioned to see them as less-than-human, is astounding. So is the denial of Dietrich Hahn, who works with vigor to ensure each prisoner receives precisely the amount of food required…no more, no less.
I write this review at a point in time when our own democracy is undergoing an enormous test and when we badly need an injection of sympathy for others. All of us must ask ourselves: in what direction lies our sympathy? How will we pay witness?
So I began reading Remote Sympathy with some trepidation, anticipating that I would not like it. Reluctantly but fortunately, the book won me over. Catherine Chidgey eschews artificial sentimentality and trite plot twists and delivers a layered fictional world where sympathy is, indeed, remote.
There are three key narrators here. One is Lenard Weber, a Munich physician who identifies as Lutheran who may be on the verge of inventing a technological advance in the fight against cancer. Because he has a tiny smidgen of Jewish blood, he eventually finds himself at the Buchenwald concentration camp. His sections are written as letters to the young daughter he had with his Jewish wife.
Then there is SS officer Dietrich Hahn, based on a real-life Nazi officer, who gladly accepts a post at Buchenwald, complete with all the luxuries and perks his new position encompasses. His entries are written as post-war transcribed interviews and some of them were lifted verbatim from the real transcripts. Finally, there is his much younger wife Greta, who is ill with ovarian cancer and desperately needs treatment, even if the treatment is unproven. It is not a stretch to believe that metamorphically, she physically embodies the diseased Germany of the 1940s. Juxtaposed with these three narrators are short musings of the Weimar townspeople, written in third-person plural.
The yawning gap between the horrendous conditions of the prisoners and the utter lack of sympathy for them by the officers and townspeople, who have been conditioned to see them as less-than-human, is astounding. So is the denial of Dietrich Hahn, who works with vigor to ensure each prisoner receives precisely the amount of food required…no more, no less.
I write this review at a point in time when our own democracy is undergoing an enormous test and when we badly need an injection of sympathy for others. All of us must ask ourselves: in what direction lies our sympathy? How will we pay witness?
March 8, 2022
This book takes a slightly different angle on the Holocaust novel but I sometimes felt that there's an odd juxtaposition of tones: the plot of the 'Remote Sympathy' machine feels a bit like a jaunty con-man trope... except for the fact that it's set against the background of Buchenwald and involves a woman dying of cancer. The motive for Dr Weber's deception is desperation but the crazy machine motif felt jarring to me as it has almost a sort of Jules Verne air which just doesn't fit the overall feel of the novel.
I greatly enjoyed Chidgey's The Wish Child but remember it as being tauter than this. It takes this story some time to get going with a little too much back-story. That said, there are some powerful symbolic images, especially the central one of how the taint and corruption of Buchenwald turns a wished for pregnancy into a cancerous tumour. There's also a slightly heavier-handed image of Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' hollowed out and containing a bible which looks forward to the compromised hope with which the book ends.
I'm never the greatest fan of the pass-the-baton narrative style: here there are three narrators plus a chorus of voices and some of the sections are only a few pages long. While reading, I was disappointed that the testament of the SS officer felt too contrived and simplistic, so it's fascinating to read in the afterword that quotations are taken from an authentic record at a war-crimes tribunal at Dachau.
Notable, too, are the grotesque scenes of Nazi wives discussing their beautiful new houses at Buchenwald as if they were gushing in Homes & Gardens magazine. Some are more naive than others about exactly what is going on in the camp (a labour camp, not an extermination camp) or exactly who is responsible for the beautiful workmanship of jewellery that they proudly show off or the tailoring and textiles which they love to admire.
So a slightly uneven book for me which had some pacing issues and which didn't always hang together as organically as I'd have wished - but potent and serious, all the same: 3.5 stars.
Thanks to the publisher for an ARC via NetGalley
I greatly enjoyed Chidgey's The Wish Child but remember it as being tauter than this. It takes this story some time to get going with a little too much back-story. That said, there are some powerful symbolic images, especially the central one of how the taint and corruption of Buchenwald turns a wished for pregnancy into a cancerous tumour. There's also a slightly heavier-handed image of Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' hollowed out and containing a bible which looks forward to the compromised hope with which the book ends.
I'm never the greatest fan of the pass-the-baton narrative style: here there are three narrators plus a chorus of voices and some of the sections are only a few pages long. While reading, I was disappointed that the testament of the SS officer felt too contrived and simplistic, so it's fascinating to read in the afterword that quotations are taken from an authentic record at a war-crimes tribunal at Dachau.
Notable, too, are the grotesque scenes of Nazi wives discussing their beautiful new houses at Buchenwald as if they were gushing in Homes & Gardens magazine. Some are more naive than others about exactly what is going on in the camp (a labour camp, not an extermination camp) or exactly who is responsible for the beautiful workmanship of jewellery that they proudly show off or the tailoring and textiles which they love to admire.
So a slightly uneven book for me which had some pacing issues and which didn't always hang together as organically as I'd have wished - but potent and serious, all the same: 3.5 stars.
Thanks to the publisher for an ARC via NetGalley
March 24, 2022
*** Shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award 2022***
***Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2022***
I absolutely loved Catherine Chidgey's novel The Transformation, more so even than her infamous debut In a Fishbone Church, so I was looking forward to her latest long-awaited novel.
I admit that I had been avoiding this tome on my shelf, at 522 pages and aware of the subject matter, it does require a commitment from the reader and I usually save my one chunkster of the year for summer, but last year I had other plans, so it sat there waiting.
After reading and enjoying Marzahn, mon amour which is also set in Germany, I decided I ought to remain in the same geographic location, even if Remote Sympathy asks us to go back in time.
It is an incredibly accomplished novel, with four narrative strands in different voices, backed up by but never bogged down by a foundation of significant and solid research.
The story relates to events that take place during the second war, that are variously recounted both during and after the war, around the lives of two German families, the citizens of the town of Weimar and the prisoners of Buchenwald, a camp located just up the hill from that town.
The novel demonstrates the responses of various people, under different circumstances, showing how they behave and manage their lives, what they choose to acknowledge and what they choose to ignore, the lies they tell themselves and others, faced with the extreme conditions of living under the Third Reich (Nazi Germany).
Four Entwined Narratives
Doctor Lenard Weber, the inventor
The novel begins with a first and second person epistolary narrative from letters written by Doktor Lenard Weber to his daughter Lotte in Frankfurt 1946. He is telling his daughter how he first first met her mother, his wife Anna at an exhibition of 'The Transparent Man', an installation that showed the inner circuitry of the human body.
The exhibit further inspired him with his own ideas on the therapeutic uses of electricity and the
invention of his Sympathetic Vitaliser, a machine that he hoped could heal the body of disease.
However, they are living in dangerous times and at the time of their marriage, neither of them knew that their family ancestry would drive them apart and that his invention would draw him into the lives of an SS officer and his wife.
Frau Greta Hahn, the wife
The second narrative voice comes from the imaginary diary of Frau Greta Hahn, the younger wife of the officer and begins in 1943 when she is packing up their lives in Munich, to move to a villa in Weimar, her husband having taken over an administrative position at the Buchenwald prison camp. He has told her and their young son Karl-Heinz how much they will love it there, being near a forest, a zoo, close to nature.
An invitation her mother is loathe to take up, even when Greta becomes very unwell.
Greta chooses to live in denial, unlike her friend and neighbour Emmi who delights in their newfound circumstances and privilege. Her discomfort turns inward and she finds herself in need of a radical medical intervention.
1000 citizens of Weimar
One of the narrative threads is the third person "we" voice coming from the reflections of one thousand citizens of the town of Weimar. These citizens are proud of their towns association with a number of past eminent citizens and love to show them Goethe's garden house in the park, with its bee-filled beds of flowers and to speak of others who had called their town home.
They hear strange noises, they smell the smoke, they see signs of maltreatment, but for every observation that doesn't fit with their idealised version of home, they have an excuse, an accusation, an alternative perspective, so loathe are they to admit even the thought of what might be going on up the hill.
Former SS Sturmbannführer Dietrich Hahn, the husband, the major
This first person narrative starts in October 1954 and is an oral taped account of an interview with the major who is under trial. He talks about the stress of his job, the insistence that it is a work camp, the pressure of budgets, his family and his desire to have a large family. It is the perspective of a man in charge of his responsibilities who refuses to acknowledge the human suffering (except his own).
The lives of this couple and the Doktor become entwined when the major hears of his medical invention and arranges to have him imprisoned in the hope that he may assist his wife. The presence of the Doktor and the young boy Josef who is their housekeeper challenge her ideas about the so-called "criminals" being held in the camp next door.
Although one man represents power and the other a prisoner, both men possess something that the other desires, they both believe that some kind of salvation might be able to be obtained from the other. Ultimately both will lie, in the hope of getting what they want.
Though 'remote sympathy' refers to the healing action of the machine, it is also a theme running through the novel, Greta's denial of what is occurring over the fence prevents her from confronting the truth, there can not be sympathy for something she refuses to see, but she feels it, it is literally eating away at her within. Likewise, her husband obsesses about budgets and cutbacks, without ever acknowledging the human impact, in the ultimate personal and institutionally narcissistic acts, depriving the inmates of basic necessities in order to meet financial pressures. Privately, he succumbs to certain behaviours that initially alleviate the stress, but will lead to his ruin.
It's a novel of great discomfort and incredulity, in that it imagines the lives and perspectives of an officer and father, his wife and son; their military neighbours, more so than it narrates the lives of the prisoners, as most of the story and gaze takes place outside the camp, among the privileged, including the Doktor himself, who has found himself in an enviable yet dangerous position.
A thought provoking, disturbing read that highlights the failings and frailties of humankind, the inclination to look away or make up stories to avoid confronting brutal harsh truths about our own inhumanity and the ease with which people lie to survive another day, refusing to see their own culpability.
And the small things that humans find to create meaning, to restore hope, to get through another day, the remains of an oak tree, a photo, pages from a book, a prayer card.
***Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2022***
I absolutely loved Catherine Chidgey's novel The Transformation, more so even than her infamous debut In a Fishbone Church, so I was looking forward to her latest long-awaited novel.
I admit that I had been avoiding this tome on my shelf, at 522 pages and aware of the subject matter, it does require a commitment from the reader and I usually save my one chunkster of the year for summer, but last year I had other plans, so it sat there waiting.
After reading and enjoying Marzahn, mon amour which is also set in Germany, I decided I ought to remain in the same geographic location, even if Remote Sympathy asks us to go back in time.
It is an incredibly accomplished novel, with four narrative strands in different voices, backed up by but never bogged down by a foundation of significant and solid research.
The story relates to events that take place during the second war, that are variously recounted both during and after the war, around the lives of two German families, the citizens of the town of Weimar and the prisoners of Buchenwald, a camp located just up the hill from that town.
The novel demonstrates the responses of various people, under different circumstances, showing how they behave and manage their lives, what they choose to acknowledge and what they choose to ignore, the lies they tell themselves and others, faced with the extreme conditions of living under the Third Reich (Nazi Germany).
Four Entwined Narratives
Doctor Lenard Weber, the inventor
The novel begins with a first and second person epistolary narrative from letters written by Doktor Lenard Weber to his daughter Lotte in Frankfurt 1946. He is telling his daughter how he first first met her mother, his wife Anna at an exhibition of 'The Transparent Man', an installation that showed the inner circuitry of the human body.
The exhibit further inspired him with his own ideas on the therapeutic uses of electricity and the
invention of his Sympathetic Vitaliser, a machine that he hoped could heal the body of disease.
But it was the eighteenth century writings of John Hunter, the great Scottish surgeon, that sparked the idea for my machine: his theory that the cure as well as the disease could pass through a person by means of remote sympathy; that the energetic power produced in one part of the body could influence another part some distance away.
However, they are living in dangerous times and at the time of their marriage, neither of them knew that their family ancestry would drive them apart and that his invention would draw him into the lives of an SS officer and his wife.
But I wanted to tell you about the miracles, Lotte. There are three in this story - I'll start with the first.
Frau Greta Hahn, the wife
The second narrative voice comes from the imaginary diary of Frau Greta Hahn, the younger wife of the officer and begins in 1943 when she is packing up their lives in Munich, to move to a villa in Weimar, her husband having taken over an administrative position at the Buchenwald prison camp. He has told her and their young son Karl-Heinz how much they will love it there, being near a forest, a zoo, close to nature.
'Taking a child to a place like that,' said my mother.
'It's quite safe,' I told her; 'We'll be living well outside the enclosure. We won't even be able to see it. Apparently the villa's beautiful - you can come and stay whenever you like.'
An invitation her mother is loathe to take up, even when Greta becomes very unwell.
Greta chooses to live in denial, unlike her friend and neighbour Emmi who delights in their newfound circumstances and privilege. Her discomfort turns inward and she finds herself in need of a radical medical intervention.
1000 citizens of Weimar
One of the narrative threads is the third person "we" voice coming from the reflections of one thousand citizens of the town of Weimar. These citizens are proud of their towns association with a number of past eminent citizens and love to show them Goethe's garden house in the park, with its bee-filled beds of flowers and to speak of others who had called their town home.
The Goethe oak still stands, though, not far from here - the tree beneath which the poet wrote some of his most celebrated verse, and rested with Charlotte von Stein. They say that if it falls, Germany will also perish...
They hear strange noises, they smell the smoke, they see signs of maltreatment, but for every observation that doesn't fit with their idealised version of home, they have an excuse, an accusation, an alternative perspective, so loathe are they to admit even the thought of what might be going on up the hill.
Former SS Sturmbannführer Dietrich Hahn, the husband, the major
This first person narrative starts in October 1954 and is an oral taped account of an interview with the major who is under trial. He talks about the stress of his job, the insistence that it is a work camp, the pressure of budgets, his family and his desire to have a large family. It is the perspective of a man in charge of his responsibilities who refuses to acknowledge the human suffering (except his own).
The lives of this couple and the Doktor become entwined when the major hears of his medical invention and arranges to have him imprisoned in the hope that he may assist his wife. The presence of the Doktor and the young boy Josef who is their housekeeper challenge her ideas about the so-called "criminals" being held in the camp next door.
Although one man represents power and the other a prisoner, both men possess something that the other desires, they both believe that some kind of salvation might be able to be obtained from the other. Ultimately both will lie, in the hope of getting what they want.
Though 'remote sympathy' refers to the healing action of the machine, it is also a theme running through the novel, Greta's denial of what is occurring over the fence prevents her from confronting the truth, there can not be sympathy for something she refuses to see, but she feels it, it is literally eating away at her within. Likewise, her husband obsesses about budgets and cutbacks, without ever acknowledging the human impact, in the ultimate personal and institutionally narcissistic acts, depriving the inmates of basic necessities in order to meet financial pressures. Privately, he succumbs to certain behaviours that initially alleviate the stress, but will lead to his ruin.
It's a novel of great discomfort and incredulity, in that it imagines the lives and perspectives of an officer and father, his wife and son; their military neighbours, more so than it narrates the lives of the prisoners, as most of the story and gaze takes place outside the camp, among the privileged, including the Doktor himself, who has found himself in an enviable yet dangerous position.
A thought provoking, disturbing read that highlights the failings and frailties of humankind, the inclination to look away or make up stories to avoid confronting brutal harsh truths about our own inhumanity and the ease with which people lie to survive another day, refusing to see their own culpability.
And the small things that humans find to create meaning, to restore hope, to get through another day, the remains of an oak tree, a photo, pages from a book, a prayer card.
April 10, 2021
When Doktor Lenard Weber meets his wife, Anna, in 1930, he is studying medicine and is engaged in inventing a machine to help cure cancer. His Sympathetic Vitaliser uses ‘remote sympathy,’ the idea that power produced in one part of the body can be used to influence another. However, with the rise of the Nazi Party, Herr Weber is asked to ‘resolve,’ his domestic situation, in order to continue his work, as Anna is Jewish. Both Lenard and Anna decide to divorce for show and Anna, with his little daughter, Lotte, move out.
The novel then shifts focus, as we learn of a young couple, Dietrich and Greta Hahn, moving with their young son, Karl-Heinz, to Buchenwald, where Dietrich is take-up a new position in the camp there. Greta is younger than her husband, exceptionally naïve and unable to grasp the new surroundings she finds herself in. When she becomes ill, Dietrich casts around for a cure and comes to hear of the Sympathetic Vitaliser, resulting in Weber’s swift removal to Buchenwald, where he is told to cure Greta. Although he uses this situation to try to discover where, and how, Anna and Lotte are, the power is obviously all in Dietrich’s hands.
This is an intensely moving and poignant novel, about denial, grief, love, loss, and hope. The author even uses the population of the local town, as an extra viewpoint, who are happy to turn a blind eye to what is going on so close to them; while Anna blithely accepts the help of domestic Josef, without wishing to question why, exactly, he is there. With the prison compound literally within walking distance of her door, she is more concerned with what her young son may see, than with what her husband is doing. It is testament to Chidgey’s writing, that she manages to create such sympathetic characters – from bored, Nazi housewives, flirting with danger and disgrace, to officers turning to drink and gambling to blot out the reality of their work; even as they try to excuse their actions to themselves and those around them.
I received a copy of this novel from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.
The novel then shifts focus, as we learn of a young couple, Dietrich and Greta Hahn, moving with their young son, Karl-Heinz, to Buchenwald, where Dietrich is take-up a new position in the camp there. Greta is younger than her husband, exceptionally naïve and unable to grasp the new surroundings she finds herself in. When she becomes ill, Dietrich casts around for a cure and comes to hear of the Sympathetic Vitaliser, resulting in Weber’s swift removal to Buchenwald, where he is told to cure Greta. Although he uses this situation to try to discover where, and how, Anna and Lotte are, the power is obviously all in Dietrich’s hands.
This is an intensely moving and poignant novel, about denial, grief, love, loss, and hope. The author even uses the population of the local town, as an extra viewpoint, who are happy to turn a blind eye to what is going on so close to them; while Anna blithely accepts the help of domestic Josef, without wishing to question why, exactly, he is there. With the prison compound literally within walking distance of her door, she is more concerned with what her young son may see, than with what her husband is doing. It is testament to Chidgey’s writing, that she manages to create such sympathetic characters – from bored, Nazi housewives, flirting with danger and disgrace, to officers turning to drink and gambling to blot out the reality of their work; even as they try to excuse their actions to themselves and those around them.
I received a copy of this novel from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.
June 7, 2022
Do we really need another Holocaust novel, by a New Zealand author, no less?
Well, yes. Because the genre doesn't really matter. This is superb writing. And structurally brilliant.
The novel is told from four rotating points of view: a doctor and inventor of a machine which might cure cancer (but he has a sliver of Jewish blood); a Sturmbannführer at Buchenwald; his wife, dying of cancer; and the Weimar voices. You see where this is going.
That machine: I saw the nurse casting a sceptical eye over the machine as I steered it to the edge of the bed and plugged it in. The other patients craned their necks: restaurant patrons regretting their choice when they see the dishes served to another table.
It would not matter to me how things ended. I know the story; you know the story. So the incidentals don't matter.
Brilliant, I say. . . . until the end, when the author introduced a familiar story-ending trope, which I won't plot-spoil by saying. And it was unnecessary.
Still, this is very, very good. And I'll read more of her. And soon.
Well, yes. Because the genre doesn't really matter. This is superb writing. And structurally brilliant.
The novel is told from four rotating points of view: a doctor and inventor of a machine which might cure cancer (but he has a sliver of Jewish blood); a Sturmbannführer at Buchenwald; his wife, dying of cancer; and the Weimar voices. You see where this is going.
That machine: I saw the nurse casting a sceptical eye over the machine as I steered it to the edge of the bed and plugged it in. The other patients craned their necks: restaurant patrons regretting their choice when they see the dishes served to another table.
It would not matter to me how things ended. I know the story; you know the story. So the incidentals don't matter.
Brilliant, I say. . . . until the end, when the author introduced a familiar story-ending trope, which I won't plot-spoil by saying. And it was unnecessary.
Still, this is very, very good. And I'll read more of her. And soon.
March 30, 2022
One of those books where I feel that I have read this all before, and more than once, and better (certainly in German literature, given the theme of this book).
July 20, 2021
4.5
For a book I wasn't even going to pick up, I was surprised how much I loved this ( thanks TimeOut Bookclub ).
This is certainly capable of rivalling Sprigs as my preferred Ockham winner for 2021. ( Hey, Ockham organisers if you are out there, how about a "People's Choice" award, I am happy to help organise this for you and I know a large group of very astute readers that could assist )
Anyway back to the review at hand :
A 500 -plus pager set in Weimar during the later stages of World War II and with a passing resemblance to books like Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and All the Light We Cannot See was not an enticing proposition for me. But this book slyly won me over, the pages slip by easily and as the Allies draw near you can't help but feel anxious for these characters. Chidgey has done a tremendous job of research on the history of the Buchenwald concentration camp and uses several real people as characters and sources much from eye-witness accounts. It adds a certain non-fictional / documentary quality which I might normally find out of place in a work of fiction but the tiny details of camp administration and logistics were some of the best moments in the novel.
This is an ambitious novel in many ways, not so much in the story-telling but in the challenge of trying to bring something new to the field of WWII historical novels. It is not perfect, it almost certainly needs whittling down from its hefty length and I wish there was a way to tell this multi-voiced narrative without the conceit of letters and a recorded interview.
As a reader often cynical when faced with authors trying to manipulate my heartstrings, I found the ending did cause me to shed a few tears there in the end.
Seems like I need to go back and check out The Wish Child now.
For a book I wasn't even going to pick up, I was surprised how much I loved this ( thanks TimeOut Bookclub ).
This is certainly capable of rivalling Sprigs as my preferred Ockham winner for 2021. ( Hey, Ockham organisers if you are out there, how about a "People's Choice" award, I am happy to help organise this for you and I know a large group of very astute readers that could assist )
Anyway back to the review at hand :
A 500 -plus pager set in Weimar during the later stages of World War II and with a passing resemblance to books like Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and All the Light We Cannot See was not an enticing proposition for me. But this book slyly won me over, the pages slip by easily and as the Allies draw near you can't help but feel anxious for these characters. Chidgey has done a tremendous job of research on the history of the Buchenwald concentration camp and uses several real people as characters and sources much from eye-witness accounts. It adds a certain non-fictional / documentary quality which I might normally find out of place in a work of fiction but the tiny details of camp administration and logistics were some of the best moments in the novel.
This is an ambitious novel in many ways, not so much in the story-telling but in the challenge of trying to bring something new to the field of WWII historical novels. It is not perfect, it almost certainly needs whittling down from its hefty length and I wish there was a way to tell this multi-voiced narrative without the conceit of letters and a recorded interview.
As a reader often cynical when faced with authors trying to manipulate my heartstrings, I found the ending did cause me to shed a few tears there in the end.
Seems like I need to go back and check out The Wish Child now.
April 11, 2022
Longlisted for the Women's Prize 2022
It is a brave choice for a writer in New Zealand to tackle a subject as familiar as the holocaust given the wealth of literature already out there by writers closer to the subject in both time and space, but this book largely succeeds on its own terms, partly through the thorough research and partly because Chidgey's perspective is an interesting one in today's "post-truth" society, and the book is also well written, and easy to follow despite its switching between three main narrators with different perspective, along with a fourth occasional one which gives a collective voice to the ordinary citizens of Weimar.
Most of the book is set during the latter years of the War at the Buchenwald "labour" camp near Weimar. The three main voices are Lenard Weber, a doctor who in his youth believed he could cure cancer by a machine that uses electrical therapy, Dietrich Hahn, an administrator at the camp who is heard via his ultra-defensive post-war testimony, and the "imaginary diary" of his wife Greta, whose impressions of the camp gradually darken, and whose cancer prompts her husband to use his connections to ensure that Hahn (who is mostly Aryan but has enough Jewish blood to bring him under suspicion and was divorced from a Jewish woman who he still loves) is brought to the camp as an inmate so that Greta can receive his experimental treatment. All of these viewpoints contradict each other frequently, but there is no doubting the brutality at the centre of the story
The central theme of lies and the lengths people go to maintain their belief in them is all too relevant now, and the book deserves its place on the women's prize list - I will be surprised if it misses the shortlist and it could win.
It is a brave choice for a writer in New Zealand to tackle a subject as familiar as the holocaust given the wealth of literature already out there by writers closer to the subject in both time and space, but this book largely succeeds on its own terms, partly through the thorough research and partly because Chidgey's perspective is an interesting one in today's "post-truth" society, and the book is also well written, and easy to follow despite its switching between three main narrators with different perspective, along with a fourth occasional one which gives a collective voice to the ordinary citizens of Weimar.
Most of the book is set during the latter years of the War at the Buchenwald "labour" camp near Weimar. The three main voices are Lenard Weber, a doctor who in his youth believed he could cure cancer by a machine that uses electrical therapy, Dietrich Hahn, an administrator at the camp who is heard via his ultra-defensive post-war testimony, and the "imaginary diary" of his wife Greta, whose impressions of the camp gradually darken, and whose cancer prompts her husband to use his connections to ensure that Hahn (who is mostly Aryan but has enough Jewish blood to bring him under suspicion and was divorced from a Jewish woman who he still loves) is brought to the camp as an inmate so that Greta can receive his experimental treatment. All of these viewpoints contradict each other frequently, but there is no doubting the brutality at the centre of the story
The central theme of lies and the lengths people go to maintain their belief in them is all too relevant now, and the book deserves its place on the women's prize list - I will be surprised if it misses the shortlist and it could win.
March 29, 2022
This is one the longlist for the 2022 Women's Prize. I'm about halfway through the list. This book is by far the best I've read so far.
WWII and the Holocaust have long been an interest of mine, with a focus on wondering what I would have done if I had been a German civilian during the war. The last sentence of the writing on the front flap of book jacket for this book puts this quest into perspective in terms of what this book does: Remote Sympathy compels us to question our continuing and willful ability to look the other way in a world that is once more in thrall to the idea that everything -- even facts, truth and morals -- is relative. Read it and weep.
This book has four separate sections that alternate. Section one is composed of letters that Dr. Lenard Weber writes to his daughter Lotte during and after his incarceration at Buchenwald. Section two is composed of portions from the "imaginary diary of Frau Greta Hahn." Section three is composed of excerpts from "an interview with former SS Strumbannfuhrer Dietrich Hahn, basically the CFO for operations at Buchenwald. The fourth section is composed of "the private reflections of one thousand citizens of Weimar," the German town closest to Buchenwald. The book is divided into ten parts of uneven length.
Each of the four sections provides backstory as well as what was happening in Buchenwald from 1943-1945. This is not just the story of the treatment of Jews, but also Russians, Poles, believers of Christian Science religion, and others. It is also the story of the spouses and children of the camp's high officials and the residents of Weimar.
Dr. Weber invented a machine he thought would cure cancer by sending low frequency electricity through the body. While there was some evidence that it might work, at least for a time, its use ceased when Dr. Weber was let go from the hospital because his maternal grandfather was Jewish. Sometime after his firing, Strumbannfuhrer Hahn, through a high up friend, arranged for Weber to be sent to Buchenwald, but as a political prisoner rather than a Jew, because Strumbannfuhrer Hahn wanted him to use the machine to help his wife Greta, who had ovarian cancer. Strumbannfuhrer Hahn had Dr. Weber assigned to the photo shop and provided Weber with everything necessary to build the machine.
Weber told the Strumbannfuhrer that he would help only if the Strumbannfuhrer would provide him with information about his wife and child (who had been sent to Theresienstadt) and help him exchange letters with his daughter Lotte. Strumbannfuhrer Hahn agreed. Shockingly, Greta Hahn did get better, for a while, extending Weber's life. Greta Hahn was much younger than her husband and rather naive at the book's beginning. But Greta Hahn she was perceptive and over time became aware of many truths being hidden from her.
The Hahn's had a young son -- Karl-Heinz. They tried to protect him from the horrors of the camp. Karl-Heinz, though, became friends with Fritz, son of neighbors who were did not hide anything from their children and who had little use for the prisoners and did not really think of them as human. Fritz's mother Emmi became a good friend of Greta Hahn. Fritz's father was another high-ranking officer but one who liked to drink and party at the Officers' Club. At about the 3/4 point in the book, the first American bombing of the armament factories near Buchenwald resulted in the destruction of their home, as well as buildings in the camp, death and injuries to many.
The book, I think, was well-researched and presents an accurate picture of what Buchenwald was like.
WWII and the Holocaust have long been an interest of mine, with a focus on wondering what I would have done if I had been a German civilian during the war. The last sentence of the writing on the front flap of book jacket for this book puts this quest into perspective in terms of what this book does: Remote Sympathy compels us to question our continuing and willful ability to look the other way in a world that is once more in thrall to the idea that everything -- even facts, truth and morals -- is relative. Read it and weep.
This book has four separate sections that alternate. Section one is composed of letters that Dr. Lenard Weber writes to his daughter Lotte during and after his incarceration at Buchenwald. Section two is composed of portions from the "imaginary diary of Frau Greta Hahn." Section three is composed of excerpts from "an interview with former SS Strumbannfuhrer Dietrich Hahn, basically the CFO for operations at Buchenwald. The fourth section is composed of "the private reflections of one thousand citizens of Weimar," the German town closest to Buchenwald. The book is divided into ten parts of uneven length.
Each of the four sections provides backstory as well as what was happening in Buchenwald from 1943-1945. This is not just the story of the treatment of Jews, but also Russians, Poles, believers of Christian Science religion, and others. It is also the story of the spouses and children of the camp's high officials and the residents of Weimar.
Dr. Weber invented a machine he thought would cure cancer by sending low frequency electricity through the body. While there was some evidence that it might work, at least for a time, its use ceased when Dr. Weber was let go from the hospital because his maternal grandfather was Jewish. Sometime after his firing, Strumbannfuhrer Hahn, through a high up friend, arranged for Weber to be sent to Buchenwald, but as a political prisoner rather than a Jew, because Strumbannfuhrer Hahn wanted him to use the machine to help his wife Greta, who had ovarian cancer. Strumbannfuhrer Hahn had Dr. Weber assigned to the photo shop and provided Weber with everything necessary to build the machine.
Weber told the Strumbannfuhrer that he would help only if the Strumbannfuhrer would provide him with information about his wife and child (who had been sent to Theresienstadt) and help him exchange letters with his daughter Lotte. Strumbannfuhrer Hahn agreed. Shockingly, Greta Hahn did get better, for a while, extending Weber's life. Greta Hahn was much younger than her husband and rather naive at the book's beginning. But Greta Hahn she was perceptive and over time became aware of many truths being hidden from her.
The Hahn's had a young son -- Karl-Heinz. They tried to protect him from the horrors of the camp. Karl-Heinz, though, became friends with Fritz, son of neighbors who were did not hide anything from their children and who had little use for the prisoners and did not really think of them as human. Fritz's mother Emmi became a good friend of Greta Hahn. Fritz's father was another high-ranking officer but one who liked to drink and party at the Officers' Club. At about the 3/4 point in the book, the first American bombing of the armament factories near Buchenwald resulted in the destruction of their home, as well as buildings in the camp, death and injuries to many.
The book, I think, was well-researched and presents an accurate picture of what Buchenwald was like.
February 19, 2024
Catherine Chidgey examines three ( or four, if one includes the collective voice of the citizens of Weimar) distinct and different perspectives of the Holocaust, specifically regarding the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. Buchenwald was the first concentration camp established at the start of World War II, located close to Weimar, Germany. It was a labor camp. Most of the prisoners’ deaths were attributed to hard labor combined with starvation. Although many were tragically and brutally hanged in the nearby forest. Buchenwald means beech forest.
The story is told in the form of letters written by a concentration camp prisoner (who also happens to be an Oncologist), imaginary diary entries by a Buchenwald Nazi Administrator’s wife, Greta, (dying from ovarian cancer), the Buchenwald Nazi Administrator, D. Hahn’s recorded accounts (after the war), and the German citizens of the town (speaking as one).
Although I have read many books about the Holocaust, this story explores how the events affected different sectors of society. The most interesting aspect of this book is how vastly different people viewed the same events. I think Chidgey was trying to understand how so many knew that millions of people were being brutally exterminated in the gas chambers, yet did nothing. “And some of us remained silent and did not speak at all.”
Once the camp was liberated, many Weimar residents were forced to tour the camps, to see first hand, the horror that occurred within its wire gates. Some were surprised or even appalled, but many who had ignored all of it, were disgusted and aggravated, that they were required to be there.
Her writing is so good, it’s difficult to put the book down.
The story is told in the form of letters written by a concentration camp prisoner (who also happens to be an Oncologist), imaginary diary entries by a Buchenwald Nazi Administrator’s wife, Greta, (dying from ovarian cancer), the Buchenwald Nazi Administrator, D. Hahn’s recorded accounts (after the war), and the German citizens of the town (speaking as one).
Although I have read many books about the Holocaust, this story explores how the events affected different sectors of society. The most interesting aspect of this book is how vastly different people viewed the same events. I think Chidgey was trying to understand how so many knew that millions of people were being brutally exterminated in the gas chambers, yet did nothing. “And some of us remained silent and did not speak at all.”
Once the camp was liberated, many Weimar residents were forced to tour the camps, to see first hand, the horror that occurred within its wire gates. Some were surprised or even appalled, but many who had ignored all of it, were disgusted and aggravated, that they were required to be there.
Her writing is so good, it’s difficult to put the book down.
November 9, 2020
Ms Chidgey once again has created an astonishing amazing story of love, loss, grief and hope set in the middle of world war 2. The horrors of the Nazi regime are not the focus of the story but the three (maybe four) main characters are. The way their lives intertwine as they each know a certain truth yet choose to cling to hope. Very, very moving.
October 6, 2021
This was almost 5 stars. 50-100 pages should’ve been cut because it got a bit repetitive and slow towards the end. It was mostly brilliant though. I don’t think I’ve ever read a Holocaust book quite like this one where cancer and a cancer curing machine plays such a central role, and as odd as it sounds, it works.
February 4, 2021
Catherine Chidgey is a versatile author: as you can see from this summary at Wikipedia she has written in a variety of styles and across wide-ranging topics. I discovered her work when
The Wish Child
became a bestseller in 2017, was captivated by the way she captured contemporary life in
The Beat of the Pendulum
in 2018 and then was lucky to find a copy of her debut novel
In a Fishbone Church.
She has won multiple awards both in New Zealand and internationally, and has just been longlisted for the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for her latest novel Remote Sympathy.
You might remember that I reported on the launch of this book via Zoom. This is how I summarised the story at the time:
[caption id="attachment_104064" align="alignleft" width="225"]
Source: Wikipedia[/caption]
The transparent man was on display in the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden which was bombed during the war, but there are replicas in many museums around the world. But in the novel, when Doktor Lenard Weber sees it, it is unique, and it is the catalyst for his invention: a cure for cancer called the Sympathetic Vitaliser. At the Holy Spirit Hospital in Frankfurt, he gets approval to run a trial, and remarkably, two patients with cancer go into remission. Weber is a good scientist, and he knows these are just cases of spontaneous remission, and he's disappointed but not surprised when these two cases eventually die.
All this is taking place amid the Nazi rise to power, and before long the restrictions that apply to Lenard's Jewish wife and child force them apart. Things get difficult for him at the hospital, but shortly after he is dismissed, he is summoned to the Buchenwald slave labour camp near Weimar, where to his dismay he is required to rebuild his Sympathetic Vitaliser in order to treat Greta Hahn, the terminally ill wife of the camp administrator, Dietrich Hahn.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/02/04/r...
You might remember that I reported on the launch of this book via Zoom. This is how I summarised the story at the time:
One of the guiding images of the novel is ‘The Transparent Man’, an installation in Vienna. This was a model of a male body which had been on display in the 1930s, which Catherine knew of from her research for The Wish Child. ‘The Transparent Man’ was a sensation because it was the first time people had been able to see a model of the human body wired to show how internal body parts work. In the novel, Lenard, a doctor who is hoping to find a treatment for cancer, goes to see this model and that’s where he meets Anna, his future wife, who is Jewish. He doesn’t find the cure he’s looking for, but he gets sent to the camp to cure the wife of a prominent Nazi so he has to pretend that he can.
[caption id="attachment_104064" align="alignleft" width="225"]
Source: Wikipedia[/caption]The transparent man was on display in the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden which was bombed during the war, but there are replicas in many museums around the world. But in the novel, when Doktor Lenard Weber sees it, it is unique, and it is the catalyst for his invention: a cure for cancer called the Sympathetic Vitaliser. At the Holy Spirit Hospital in Frankfurt, he gets approval to run a trial, and remarkably, two patients with cancer go into remission. Weber is a good scientist, and he knows these are just cases of spontaneous remission, and he's disappointed but not surprised when these two cases eventually die.
All this is taking place amid the Nazi rise to power, and before long the restrictions that apply to Lenard's Jewish wife and child force them apart. Things get difficult for him at the hospital, but shortly after he is dismissed, he is summoned to the Buchenwald slave labour camp near Weimar, where to his dismay he is required to rebuild his Sympathetic Vitaliser in order to treat Greta Hahn, the terminally ill wife of the camp administrator, Dietrich Hahn.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/02/04/r...
April 14, 2022
Longlisted for the Women’s Prize 2022 and shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Prize 2022, I had my eye on this book for a while. While it’s well-written and interesting, I have mixed feelings about it.
Set in Buchenwald concentration camp during the latter years of the Second World War, it offers several different perspectives on Buchenwald in a pass-the-baton style narrative: a prisoner, a Sturmbannführer, the Sturmbannführer’s wife and a chorus of voices made up of citizens of Weimar (the nearest city to Buchenwald, approx 10km from the site).
Some of the characters mentioned in the book were real people (Kommandant Koch and his wife, the infamous Ilse Koch, and Waldemar Hoven for example).
The book opens with Dr Lenard Weber, a German physician with some Jewish heritage from Frankfurt who some years earlier developed an electrotherapy machine that he hoped would cure cancer through the remote sympathy method - it’s where the title of the book derives its name and is an interesting play on words.
When Sturmbannführer Dietrich Hahn’s wife Greta becomes ill with cancer, he contrives for Weber to be transported to Buchenwald and thus begins an unhappy arrangement borne out of desperation on the part of both men.
I visited Buchenwald at Easter time twenty years ago, and visited Dachau a few years prior to that. My abiding memories of Buchenwald are the bleak drive out to it on a public bus along a country road with endless grey forest on either side of it and the tour guide speaking about the crematorium. He told us it was highly unlikely that the residents of the local villages and towns, or anyone living in close proximity to the camp (including the families of the SS officers running it) would have been unaware of the genocide occurring there - the smell of burning bodies was carried on the wind for miles.
It’s for this reason that I found a lot of the book hard to stomach. Whatever about the cognitive dissonance of the Weimar chorus of voices, the wilful ignorance of Greta Hahn is grating (intentionally so I imagine) - Greta’s supposed cluelessness of what is happening quite literally on her doorstep is too far-fetched.
Her husband’s state of total denial is fascinating and horrifying, especially as it’s revealed in the author’s notes that some of Hahn’s perspective is lifted straight from testimony given at a post-war trial. Remote sympathy is a stretch - there’s an almost complete absence of sympathy across the voices.
The symbolism in the book is noteworthy - some of it is pretty simplistic (eg, the motif of cancer as the rotting tumour of Nazism), but there are other subtleties - the Hahns’ servant, a prisoner from the camp, is named Josef Niemand. Hahn refers to him persistently throughout as Niemand, the German word for “nobody”, which I don’t think is explicitly mentioned in the book (I’m open to correction on that one).
I’ve read quite a few books set during this period - this book made me reflect on some of those. Remote Sympathy would make a good book club pick as there’s a lot to digest and discuss arising from the different perspectives offered in the book.
The dark heart of humanity is on full display in the book, but there’s a glimmer of hope at the end and I did find the ending quietly satisfying. However, my overwhelming feeling reading it was despair, especially given current world events. Are humans destined to continue committing the same atrocities time and again? 3.5-4/5 ⭐️
Set in Buchenwald concentration camp during the latter years of the Second World War, it offers several different perspectives on Buchenwald in a pass-the-baton style narrative: a prisoner, a Sturmbannführer, the Sturmbannführer’s wife and a chorus of voices made up of citizens of Weimar (the nearest city to Buchenwald, approx 10km from the site).
Some of the characters mentioned in the book were real people (Kommandant Koch and his wife, the infamous Ilse Koch, and Waldemar Hoven for example).
The book opens with Dr Lenard Weber, a German physician with some Jewish heritage from Frankfurt who some years earlier developed an electrotherapy machine that he hoped would cure cancer through the remote sympathy method - it’s where the title of the book derives its name and is an interesting play on words.
When Sturmbannführer Dietrich Hahn’s wife Greta becomes ill with cancer, he contrives for Weber to be transported to Buchenwald and thus begins an unhappy arrangement borne out of desperation on the part of both men.
I visited Buchenwald at Easter time twenty years ago, and visited Dachau a few years prior to that. My abiding memories of Buchenwald are the bleak drive out to it on a public bus along a country road with endless grey forest on either side of it and the tour guide speaking about the crematorium. He told us it was highly unlikely that the residents of the local villages and towns, or anyone living in close proximity to the camp (including the families of the SS officers running it) would have been unaware of the genocide occurring there - the smell of burning bodies was carried on the wind for miles.
It’s for this reason that I found a lot of the book hard to stomach. Whatever about the cognitive dissonance of the Weimar chorus of voices, the wilful ignorance of Greta Hahn is grating (intentionally so I imagine) - Greta’s supposed cluelessness of what is happening quite literally on her doorstep is too far-fetched.
Her husband’s state of total denial is fascinating and horrifying, especially as it’s revealed in the author’s notes that some of Hahn’s perspective is lifted straight from testimony given at a post-war trial. Remote sympathy is a stretch - there’s an almost complete absence of sympathy across the voices.
The symbolism in the book is noteworthy - some of it is pretty simplistic (eg, the motif of cancer as the rotting tumour of Nazism), but there are other subtleties - the Hahns’ servant, a prisoner from the camp, is named Josef Niemand. Hahn refers to him persistently throughout as Niemand, the German word for “nobody”, which I don’t think is explicitly mentioned in the book (I’m open to correction on that one).
I’ve read quite a few books set during this period - this book made me reflect on some of those. Remote Sympathy would make a good book club pick as there’s a lot to digest and discuss arising from the different perspectives offered in the book.
The dark heart of humanity is on full display in the book, but there’s a glimmer of hope at the end and I did find the ending quietly satisfying. However, my overwhelming feeling reading it was despair, especially given current world events. Are humans destined to continue committing the same atrocities time and again? 3.5-4/5 ⭐️
June 19, 2023
Remote Sympathy tells the story of Dr Lenard Weber who invents a machine he believes will rid the body of cancer.
Frau Hahn moves away from Munich to Buchenwald & is ignorant to what goes on in the camp beyond the forest surrounding her home. Frau Hahn’s husband is a stern & powerful administrator within the camp & feeds into his wife’s ignorance by never being honest about what goes on there.
When Frau Hahn’s & Dr Weber’s paths cross, will she finally begin to see the truth behind the lies?
This book is absolutely incredible. For some, it will be a difficult read. It contains descriptions of the Holocaust & some detail of what was done to those held in camps. Whilst it will devastate you and, at times, break your heart, ultimately it is a book of hope. And, in that sense, it is also beautiful. It is incredibly well researched, beautifully written and I won’t forget it for a very long time.
Frau Hahn moves away from Munich to Buchenwald & is ignorant to what goes on in the camp beyond the forest surrounding her home. Frau Hahn’s husband is a stern & powerful administrator within the camp & feeds into his wife’s ignorance by never being honest about what goes on there.
When Frau Hahn’s & Dr Weber’s paths cross, will she finally begin to see the truth behind the lies?
This book is absolutely incredible. For some, it will be a difficult read. It contains descriptions of the Holocaust & some detail of what was done to those held in camps. Whilst it will devastate you and, at times, break your heart, ultimately it is a book of hope. And, in that sense, it is also beautiful. It is incredibly well researched, beautifully written and I won’t forget it for a very long time.
June 12, 2021
After reading and loving The Wish Child a few years ago, I found this novel similar in theme and equally as good! Again set in Germany during WWII, this novel focuses on an SS officer at Buchenwald, his young wife and a part Jewish doctor. Although they are all individuals, there are similarities between them and I love the way the author can make us relate to them all at various points. As a counter point, there are also chapters narrated by 1000 citizens of the town of Weimar which gives a perspective of the 'ordinary' German people of the time. Very highly recommended - the content is harrowing but it is so well done.
March 16, 2022
Extraordinary how a book of layered family stories and perspectives, set in Buchenwald can be so captivating. Humanity is under the microscope and whilst the reader is spared nothing of the Final Solution it somehow quietly demonstrates insanity, delusion, cruelty, complicity in a reflective way.
Thanks to the creativity of the author's storytelling we ostensibly have two narratives. A newly promoted officer, Dietrich Hahn, is moved from Munich to Buchenwald with his family. An early oncologist, Lenard Weber, married to a Jewish woman is a prisoner.
These stories are enriched by Weber's letters to his daughter Lotte - an imaginary diary of Weber's cancer patient, Greta, Hahn's wife - interview transcripts/testimony with Hahn as he faces his war crimes and "the private reflections of one thousand citizens of Weimar". What could easily have been a loud cacophony of conflicted voices became, instead, an account of brutal history detailing the Holocaust by contemporaneous fictional eyewitnesses.
This is, in my opinion, deft mastery of melding fact and fiction into a read that is gut wrenching, page turning and wholly credible.
Thanks to the creativity of the author's storytelling we ostensibly have two narratives. A newly promoted officer, Dietrich Hahn, is moved from Munich to Buchenwald with his family. An early oncologist, Lenard Weber, married to a Jewish woman is a prisoner.
These stories are enriched by Weber's letters to his daughter Lotte - an imaginary diary of Weber's cancer patient, Greta, Hahn's wife - interview transcripts/testimony with Hahn as he faces his war crimes and "the private reflections of one thousand citizens of Weimar". What could easily have been a loud cacophony of conflicted voices became, instead, an account of brutal history detailing the Holocaust by contemporaneous fictional eyewitnesses.
This is, in my opinion, deft mastery of melding fact and fiction into a read that is gut wrenching, page turning and wholly credible.
January 22, 2021
"Remote Sympathy" is remarkable. I stayed up late to finish because I simply could not stop, and then tossed and turned for a few more hours wondering what might have become of some of the characters. The research is flawless, and the story will grab you immediately and pull at you every second you're not reading it.
There are four narrators. One is the oncologist who invents a device that uses "remote sympathy" to shrink tumors in cancer patients. He writes letters to his daughter in 1946. One is the imaginary diary of Greta Hahn, wife of the administrator at Buchenwald. Dieter Hahn, the administrator himself is another, writing in 1954. And finally, the people of Weimar and how they view what ultimately they cannot deny.
If you have been looking for a book that delivers the emotional wallop and unforgettable reading experience of "All the Light We Cannot See," this is it.
Thank you, thank you Edelweiss and Europa books for granting access to this remarkable novel.
There are four narrators. One is the oncologist who invents a device that uses "remote sympathy" to shrink tumors in cancer patients. He writes letters to his daughter in 1946. One is the imaginary diary of Greta Hahn, wife of the administrator at Buchenwald. Dieter Hahn, the administrator himself is another, writing in 1954. And finally, the people of Weimar and how they view what ultimately they cannot deny.
If you have been looking for a book that delivers the emotional wallop and unforgettable reading experience of "All the Light We Cannot See," this is it.
Thank you, thank you Edelweiss and Europa books for granting access to this remarkable novel.
July 20, 2022
"We did not believe them ... This was not real. The figure swinging from the gallows was a dummy filled with straw. Those were animal bones in the ovens. And there must have been an epidemic; something that had spread so quickly it couldn't be contained. Dreadful, of course, but nobody's fault."
Set in Buchenwald during the Second World War this superb novel was shortlisted for the Dublin literary award and longlisted for the Women’s prize. Told through three first person narratives each utilising a different, quasi archival method: the Doctor's letters to his Jewish wife and daughter, the recorded testimony of Sturmbahnfürhrer Dietrich Hahn who worked at the camp, and the imaginary diary of his wife Greta who is suffering from cancer. These three voices come together through the events of Greta's illness and are further juxtaposed with the "private reflections of one thousand citizens" from the nearby town of Weimar. The structure is both unusual and brilliant. The imagery is clever and thought provoking - the cancer and the camp, Goethe’s oak and the family trees in the banned bible hidden in a hollowed out copy of Mein Kampf, to name a few.
This is a brilliant book, well researched, well written, full of emotion. It is a book about how such atrocities occur and how we bear witness as perpetrators, as accessories to the fact, as victors, as victims, and as readers.
Set in Buchenwald during the Second World War this superb novel was shortlisted for the Dublin literary award and longlisted for the Women’s prize. Told through three first person narratives each utilising a different, quasi archival method: the Doctor's letters to his Jewish wife and daughter, the recorded testimony of Sturmbahnfürhrer Dietrich Hahn who worked at the camp, and the imaginary diary of his wife Greta who is suffering from cancer. These three voices come together through the events of Greta's illness and are further juxtaposed with the "private reflections of one thousand citizens" from the nearby town of Weimar. The structure is both unusual and brilliant. The imagery is clever and thought provoking - the cancer and the camp, Goethe’s oak and the family trees in the banned bible hidden in a hollowed out copy of Mein Kampf, to name a few.
This is a brilliant book, well researched, well written, full of emotion. It is a book about how such atrocities occur and how we bear witness as perpetrators, as accessories to the fact, as victors, as victims, and as readers.
March 14, 2022
What a great read!
I thought this was a very balanced exploration of the World War II experience as told from various perspectives: diary entries of a concentration camp officer's wife, letters of a prisoner, Weimar citizens' reports and audio recordings of the camp officer post the war's end. Initially, I was concerned the narrative would be disjointed but it flowed flawlessly. I was engrossed the whole way through and although this novel is pretty long at over 500 pages I thought it is extremely well edited. The content is heavy going at times, with some awful descriptions of suffering and depravity but this is such an important novel and highly appropriate to the times we are living in. 'Lest we forget.'
The writer has created complex characters that piece together an incredibly well-researched novel. There were times, especially in the opening few chapters, that this reminded me quite heavily of John Boyne's 'A Boy in tge Striped Pyjamas'. However, Where that is written for children, this novel is far superior in its depth and I would argue the quality of its writing.
There are some really interesting threads that run through the novel: lies and deception, innocence corrupted, inner conflict, nature and animals, justification of actions, the idea of home, the role of material possessions as a symbol of power, recording of history, unexpected human connection. I wanted to get my highlighters out for this novel. This is clearly a novelmof substance, layers and layers of meaning and so much to discuss. For the right book club this would make an excellent choice.
I highly recommend this novel and believe it deserves a place on the Women's Prize 2022 Shortlist and of the seven I have read from the longlist so far this has my number one spot.
I thought this was a very balanced exploration of the World War II experience as told from various perspectives: diary entries of a concentration camp officer's wife, letters of a prisoner, Weimar citizens' reports and audio recordings of the camp officer post the war's end. Initially, I was concerned the narrative would be disjointed but it flowed flawlessly. I was engrossed the whole way through and although this novel is pretty long at over 500 pages I thought it is extremely well edited. The content is heavy going at times, with some awful descriptions of suffering and depravity but this is such an important novel and highly appropriate to the times we are living in. 'Lest we forget.'
The writer has created complex characters that piece together an incredibly well-researched novel. There were times, especially in the opening few chapters, that this reminded me quite heavily of John Boyne's 'A Boy in tge Striped Pyjamas'. However, Where that is written for children, this novel is far superior in its depth and I would argue the quality of its writing.
There are some really interesting threads that run through the novel: lies and deception, innocence corrupted, inner conflict, nature and animals, justification of actions, the idea of home, the role of material possessions as a symbol of power, recording of history, unexpected human connection. I wanted to get my highlighters out for this novel. This is clearly a novelmof substance, layers and layers of meaning and so much to discuss. For the right book club this would make an excellent choice.
I highly recommend this novel and believe it deserves a place on the Women's Prize 2022 Shortlist and of the seven I have read from the longlist so far this has my number one spot.
March 20, 2022
This is a remarkable book, powerful and engrossing. It's an account of Buchenwald told from four points of view: an SS administrator, his wife, a doctor prisoner, and the citizens of Weimar.
July 25, 2022
I haven't read many books on holocaust and concentration camps. Probably just The Boy In The Stripped Pajamas. While that book was heart-wrenching, this one felt like a non-fiction. And to a certain extent, I believe it is.
Remote Sympathy is not a story. It's a saga, an era, a directory of the past. Through four different narratives, we get multiple perspectives and a bird's eye view of the atrocities of Weimer, Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp.
To be perfectly honest, it was a difficult read at times. Too much pain, too much distress, but the truth needs to be told. The vivid descriptions of the insides of the camp was extremely uncanny and nightmarish to picture. Can't imagine what the 'prisoners' had to go through and deal with. Such unimaginable agony, pain and trauma has been brought to life with words on paper and the author did not pull any punches.
I can't think of a way to ever say goodbye to this book because it's going to haunt my mind forever. It's a horror that has happened in reality and I guess that is the hardest part. Very well deserved to be longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction this year.
I don't think this book is for everyone. Definitely not for the faint heart, so make sure to check out all the triggers before picking this one up.
Trigger Warnings>>>> Cancer, Trauma, Torture, Death
Remote Sympathy is not a story. It's a saga, an era, a directory of the past. Through four different narratives, we get multiple perspectives and a bird's eye view of the atrocities of Weimer, Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp.
To be perfectly honest, it was a difficult read at times. Too much pain, too much distress, but the truth needs to be told. The vivid descriptions of the insides of the camp was extremely uncanny and nightmarish to picture. Can't imagine what the 'prisoners' had to go through and deal with. Such unimaginable agony, pain and trauma has been brought to life with words on paper and the author did not pull any punches.
I can't think of a way to ever say goodbye to this book because it's going to haunt my mind forever. It's a horror that has happened in reality and I guess that is the hardest part. Very well deserved to be longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction this year.
I don't think this book is for everyone. Definitely not for the faint heart, so make sure to check out all the triggers before picking this one up.
Trigger Warnings>>>> Cancer, Trauma, Torture, Death
June 5, 2023
Catherine Chidgey weaves four narratives of Buchenwald into one seamless story of love, loss, rationalization, and denial. It is told from the perspective of the head camp administrator, Sturmbannfuhrer Hahn, his wife Greta, a camp inmate, Doctor Lenard Weber, and the collective perceptions of the citizens of nearby Weimar. These four perspectives give a multi-layered portrayal that comes together in a bittersweet but satisfying conclusion.
Remote Sympathy is a masterpiece. I couldn't put it down and I didn't want it to end.
I will be gifting copies of it to at least two of my friends in the coming year.
Remote Sympathy is a masterpiece. I couldn't put it down and I didn't want it to end.
I will be gifting copies of it to at least two of my friends in the coming year.
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