Review of REMOTE SYMPATHY by Catherine Chidgey

 4 Stars

I picked up this book because it appeared on the 2022 Dublin Literary Award shortlist and the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist.  Set primarily in or near the Buchenwald concentration camp, the novel alternates among four narrators:  Dietrich Hahn, Greta Hahn, Dr. Lenard Weber, and Weimar citizens.    

SS Sturmbannführer Dietrich Hahn is the Chief Administrator of the camp; his story takes the form of taped interviews with an unknown person in 1954.  His wife Greta has ovarian cancer; her story takes the form of an imaginary diary kept during her husband's time at Buchenwald.  Dr. Lenard Weber is a part-Jewish doctor, the inventor of the Sympathetic Vitaliser for the treatment of cancer, who comes to treat Greta; his story takes the form of letters written in Frankfurt to his daughter Lotte in 1946.  Finally, there are chorus-like sections “From the Private Reflections of One Thousand Citizens of Weimar” which show the thoughts and reactions of the people living in the town around Buchenwald.

The book examines the human inclination to ignore evidence and lie to ourselves and others to avoid accepting the unacceptable.  Dietrich says, “People want to make us into monsters, but it’s easy to accuse someone else of atrocities to deflect attention from our own involvement – to salve your own conscience.”  Oh the irony:  he refuses to acknowledge his role in the suffering of camp inmates; he focuses on the stress of his job and his difficulties because of budget constraints.  He sees his depriving people of basic necessities as a sign of his doing a good job.  Because he is “the man responsible for those savings . . . I deserved a small percentage.  That was only fair” so he steals gold teeth fillings.  He further justifies his actions and casts aspersions on others:  “every single officer at Buchenwald skimmed off his share. . . . You see the corruption I was up against.  How impossible it was to run a decent sort of place.  My goodness, I wasn’t taking food out of anyone’s mouth.”  When atrocities are brought to his attention, he says, “Before my time, and not my area – I was merely in supplies” and “I was merely in administration.”  He avoids looking at things that might make him uncomfortable:  “like all the other officers, I preferred not to have to visit the compound unnecessarily; you risked seeing something.”  Everyone but he is to blame:  “As far as I was aware, for instance, every prisoner had his own bed and his own bedding; if Wolff shoved two or three inmates in together, that was out of my control.”  Even the victims are to blame:  “most inmate deaths weren’t due to mistreatment on the part of our men but the result of disputes amongst themselves, or the diseases they brought with them into camp, or indeed the scheming by the illegal communist underground to do away with undesirables.”

Greta also ignores what is going on around her.  She doesn’t ask questions about Josef, a prisoner who serves as her domestic.  She accepts that she can have whatever she wants made by skilled workers at the camp and takes pride in having “the finest craftsmen in Europe” available to her.  It is obvious that she may have some idea of what her husband does because she avoids walking near the camp.  She visits the Buchenwald zoo where she sees bears:  “I could see shreds of raw meat, bits of bone – the remains of their dinner, I supposed, but I decided not to look too closely.”  She initially accepts the explanation that the shrieks she hears are made by peacocks.  Only later does she start asking questions:  “are the cries of peacocks always the cries of peacocks?”   

Dr. Weber tries to convince himself and others that his machine does cure cancer though there is no scientific evidence that it does.  Of course, admitting that his machine is inefficacious could mean that Dietrich would have no reason to protect him.  Just as Dietrich refuses to believe that Greta is getting worse, Dr. Weber keeps trying to convince the Hahns and himself that she is improving.  Despite what the doctor sees in the camp, he refuses to think that his wife and daughter, who were deported to another camp, could be dead. 

The citizens of Weimar hear strange noises, smell smoke, and see signs of camp inmates being mistreated, yet refuse to admit what is happening at Buchenwald.  When one man is seen with a gash in need of stitches, they see this as “proof they were unruly criminals, Bolshevik sub-humans who couldn’t resist violent dust-ups amongst themselves.  It was proof they were in the right place.”  When they hear rumours of beatings, torture, starvation, and executions, they are dismissed because there have been no newspaper reports.  When Buchenwald is liberated by Americans and the townspeople are shown evidence of what happened in the camp, the citizens do not believe:  “This was not real.  The figure swinging from the gallows was a dummy filled with straw.  Those were animal bones in the oven.  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.”  The townspeople do what Dr. Weber describes:  “’Maybe you stop noticing after a while.  Like a  . . . like a cracked windowpane that you always mean to fix but never do, until you just don’t see it interfering with the view any more.’” 

This book should inspire us all to ask some questions of ourselves:  To what am I turning a blind eye?  What lies am I telling myself?  What we walk past is what we tolerate.  Self-deception may make us feel better, but it doesn't make us innocent.