{"id":1167,"date":"2020-12-12T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-12-29T22:48:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/?p=1167"},"modified":"2025-05-03T13:49:00","modified_gmt":"2025-05-03T01:49:00","slug":"remote-sympathy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/2020\/12\/12\/remote-sympathy\/","title":{"rendered":"Remote Sympathy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Catherine Chidgey<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Victoria University Press<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Otago Daily Times, December 12th 2020<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Set in the final years of WWII, Remote Sympathy<\/em> 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 \u201cmuch the same way a glass can break if a soprano hits the right note\u201d<\/em>), whom Hahn believes will cure Greta\u2019s cancer. The novel takes the form of a series of interleaved accounts drawn from different sources and times: excerpts from Greta\u2019s imaginary diary, letters from Weber to his daughter and post-war interviews with Hahn and extracts from \u201cThe Private Reflections of One Thousand Citizens of Weimar.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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:  \u201cI was only an administrator. What happened behind the fence was not my domain\u201d, \u201cIf we gave the prisoners leather shoes [from the hundreds in storage], what would they wear when they were released?\u201d <\/em>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\u2019s life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2018othering\u2019 to migrants and refugees who seek shelter on our shores.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Greta also fails to acknowledge Burchenwald\u2019s 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\u2019s orders so that he can treat Greta, the glimpses the doctor offers of the prison add emotional substance to Hahn\u2019s 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: \u201c[N]aturally the only way to check the disease hadn\u2019t spread to her bones as X-rays, but I wasn\u2019t about to risk something that might prove my treatment a failure \u2013 you can understand that, can\u2019t you?\u201d<\/em>. As bleak as this description makes it sound, the novel acknowledges humanity\u2019s moral frailty in all its complexity, and Chidgey allows us to retain a belief in humanity\u2019s potential for good; Greta\u2019s 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<\/em> is a powerful and timely reminder of the damage our capacity for self-justification can inflict. As Weber tells himself, \u201cI wasn\u2019t harming her \u2013 not <\/em>harming her as such; not neglecting my duty. My treatment wouldn\u2019t make her condition worse…I was simply offering her a little hope \u2013 a little comfort. We find them where we can.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[326,347,370,421,500,18],"class_list":["post-1167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-326","tag-catherine-chidgey","tag-fiction","tag-historical","tag-nz-author","tag-odt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1167"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1978,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1167\/revisions\/1978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}