Remote Sympathy
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4.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
This polyphonic novel of an S.S. officer, his ailing wife, and a concentration camp survivor "marks a vital turn in Holocaust literature" (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
Being appointed administrator of the Buchenwald work camp is a major advancement for SS Sturmbannführer Dietrich Hahn. But as the prison population begins to rise, his job becomes ever more consuming. His wife, Frau Greta Hahn, finds their new home even lovelier than their apartment in Munich. She enjoys life among the other officer's wives, and the ease with which she can purchase nearly anything her heart desires.
When Frau Hahn is forced into an unlikely alliance with one of Buchenwald's prisoners, Dr. Lenard Weber, her naïve ignorance about what is going on so nearby is challenged. A decade earlier, Dr. Weber had invented a machine: the Sympathetic Vitaliser. At the time he believed that its subtle resonances might cure cancer. But does it really work? One way or another, it might yet save a life.
A tour de force about the evils of obliviousness, 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.
Shortlisted for the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Chidgey (The Wish Child) brilliantly explores the intersecting stories of a former German S.S. officer, his sheltered wife, and a survivor of Buchenwald. In 1954, Sturmbannführer Dietrich Hahn, imprisoned for war crimes as a commander at Buchenwald, continues to defend himself during taped interviews with an unknown interlocutor. His young wife, Greta, battled ovarian cancer during the war, the details of which she writes about in her diary. Dietrich tells of how he arranged for the arrest and imprisonment of Dr. Lenard Weber at Buchenwald, to get Weber to treat Greta. Chidgey weaves these threads together with short choruslike sections from the Weimar residents during Buchenwald's operation and after the war, ranging from complaints about how the camp disrupted business to denigrating the American liberators, all of it building symphonically toward a cascading sense of cultural loss and human devastation. In addition to treating Greta, Weber is assigned to the camp's photography lab to process film, and his descriptions of the photographs convey an eerie sense of mundane day-to-day life surrounding the death camp. ("Here is the cinema, here is the shooting range... this is an example of the inmates' accommodation, see how clean, how decently equipped... this is the oak tree beneath which Goethe may have written poetry," he imagines an officer saying on a tour.) Even more striking are Weber's elegiac letters to his daughter in 1946, which offer aching glimmers of what Germany lost in the war. With its multiple registers and complex view of humanity, this marks a vital turn in Holocaust literature.
