Remote sympathy

Catherine Chidgey, 1970-

Book - 2021

"Moving away from their lovely apartment in 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. Frau Hahn and the other officers' wives living in this small community can order anything they desire, whether new curtains made from the finest French silks, or furniture designed to the most exacting specifications. Life here in Buchenwald would appear to be idyllic. Lying just beyond the forest that surrounds them--so close and yet so remote--is the looming presence of a work camp. Frau Hahn's husband, SS Sturmbannführer Dietrich Ha...hn, is to take up a powerful new position as the camp's administrator. As the prison population begins to rise, the job becomes ever more consuming. Corruption is rife at every level, the supplies are inadequate, and the sewerage system is under increasing strain. When Frau Hahn is forced into an unlikely and poignant 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." --Publisher's website.

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Subjects
Genres
Historical fiction
Published
New York, NY : Europa Editions 2021.
Language
English
Main Author
Catherine Chidgey, 1970- (author)
Physical Description
526 pages ; 22 cm
ISBN
9781609456276
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

Chidgey (The Wish Child, 2016) returns to Nazi Germany to examine the inner worlds of three individuals living inside and outside the walls of Buchenwald concentration camp. Camp administrator Dietrich Hahn, speaking in interviews a decade after the war, cuts corners and hoards gold teeth from dead prisoners. In her diary, Dietrich's wife, Greta, squeezes her eyes shut about anything happening outside the grounds of their villa. Dr. Lenard Weber, writing to his daughter a year after the war, divorced his Jewish wife but still ended up in the camp because he has a Jewish grandmother. When Greta falls ill, Dietrich secretly enlists the aid of Lenard, who once experimented with a machine to use electrical impulses to cure cancer. The lengthy novel is crammed with historical detail about Buchenwald, mostly furnished during lengthy speeches by Dietrich, in the stock role of Nazi villain. Greta and Lenard are more nuanced and sympathetic, far from innocent but also increasingly aware of their own shortcomings. A bleak meditation on the consequences of selfishness and willful ignorance.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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. (May)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

The perspectives of perpetrators, victim, and bystanders evoke the horrors of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Noted New Zealand author Chidgey's latest is a lengthy, well-researched addition to the already sizable shelf of Holocaust fiction. Dr. Lenard Weber is a Mischling, only part Jewish, but he ends up at Buchenwald, having been summoned there by Sturmbannführer Dietrich Hahn. Hahn's role at the camp is administrative officer--overseeing budgets, plumbing, etc. The inmates are less than human to him but not so his wife, Greta, with whom he lives in a luxury villa. When Greta develops ovarian cancer, Dietrich will try any medical resource, which leads him to Weber, inventor of the Sympathetic Vitaliser, a machine designed to destroy cancerous tumors. Weber narrates his story in 1946, via letters written to his daughter, who's in the Theresienstadt ghetto; Dietrich's account dates from the 1950s; Greta's "imaginary diary" takes her from 1943 to 1945; and a fourth narrative voice emanates from 1,000 citizens of Weimar, whose awareness of the vast camp nearby is filtered through propaganda, self-interest, and delusion. Packed with precise details about the camp, German culture, the Nazi machine, and much more, the novel offers a sober reflection on a country seized by dehumanizing insanity, corrupted by lies and cruelty. Yet the characterization is predictable, especially when it comes to Dietrich, a familiar blend of Aryan orderliness, contempt, and deception. Greta senses the abyss on her doorstep but averts her eyes. Weber is a sympathetic lens through which the worst of the suffering may be glimpsed. And the Weimar citizens embody denial, disgust, and disbelief. As the war wraps up, deliverance for one survivor contrasts with guiltless acceptance by the German community. This serious effort to evoke the crucible of German fascism proves less effective at conveying emotional resonance. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.