Remote Sympathy

Starred review from March 29, 2021
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.

March 1, 2021
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 Sturmbannf�hrer 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.

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March 31, 2021
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.

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