Remote Sympathy

Catherine Chidgey

Victoria University Press

Otago Daily Times, December 12th 2020

Set in the final years of WWII, Remote Sympathy traces the contours of the relationship between the administrator of Buchenwald, Dietrich Hahn, his wife Greta, and Dr Lenard Weber,  a prison camp inmate and inventor of the Sympathetic Vitalisor (a machine that uses electrical frequencies to destroy tumours “much the same way a glass can break if a soprano hits the right note”), whom Hahn believes will cure Greta’s cancer. The novel takes the form of a series of interleaved accounts drawn from different sources and times: excerpts from Greta’s imaginary diary, letters from Weber to his daughter and post-war interviews with Hahn and extracts from “The Private Reflections of One Thousand Citizens of Weimar.” Independent and interdependent, these disparate voices form a dialogue between the living and the dead and tell tales of faith and denial, self-justification and willing disbelief whose resonance with contemporary events should give us all pause for thought.

For Hahn, Buchenwald exists at a remove, an enterprise to be managed according to rules handed down by his superiors. Prefaced by a warning that sections of the tape are corrupted, both literally and figuratively, his testimony is littered with attempts at post-hoc censorship and denials of responsibility:  “I was only an administrator. What happened behind the fence was not my domain”, “If we gave the prisoners leather shoes [from the hundreds in storage], what would they wear when they were released?” Despite this, it is hard not to feel a degree of empathy for him as he struggles with the frustrations of maintaining a sewage system strained beyond capacity, carves wooden animals for his son or bargains with the universe for Greta’s life. 

So, too, the citizens of Weimar, who accept official descriptions of the prisoners as thieves and criminals, interpreting their raddled appearance as proof of their guilt rather than a consequence of their deprivation. The cruelty of their selective disregard is clearly evident, yet we apply the same selective ‘othering’ to migrants and refugees who seek shelter on our shores.

Greta also fails to acknowledge Burchenwald’s existence, at first deliberately and later unable to register anything beyond her all-consumed illness. The only person for whom it is a lived reality is Weber. Arrested on Hahn’s orders so that he can treat Greta, the glimpses the doctor offers of the prison add emotional substance to Hahn’s clinical descriptions of the deteriorating situation behind its walls. He genuinely cares for Greta and his actions are driven by the desire to keep himself and his family alive, yet even he feels the need to seek absolution for provide treatment he knows to be futile: “[N]aturally the only way to check the disease hadn’t spread to her bones as X-rays, but I wasn’t about to risk something that might prove my treatment a failure – you can understand that, can’t you?”. As bleak as this description makes it sound, the novel acknowledges humanity’s moral frailty in all its complexity, and Chidgey allows us to retain a belief in humanity’s potential for good; Greta’s dying vision bears witness to the suffering she turned away from in life, and her posthumous gift to Weber acknowledges the genuine bond that existed between them. Above all, Remote Sympathy is a powerful and timely reminder of the damage our capacity for self-justification can inflict. As Weber tells himself, “I wasn’t harming her – not harming her as such; not neglecting my duty. My treatment wouldn’t make her condition worse…I was simply offering her a little hope – a little comfort. We find them where we can.”