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Remote Sympathy: LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2022: Catherine Chidgey

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The tension mounts, building on the failure of Weber's machine, the progression of Greta's illness (her death would end Weber's protected status and presumably that of his wife and child) and the ever approaching forces of the Allies and the Red Army. Remote Sympathy is a uniquely told WWII historical fiction novel, mainly set in Buchenwold concentration camp. I don't want to say too much about it, because there is so much (in fact, too much) to say, but the contradictions and the dilemmas and the acts of cruelty are evident in this passage:

Chidgey alternates between three main characters. Leonard Weber is a doctor of Jewish ancestry, inventor of the "Sympathetic Vitaliser", an electrotherapeutic device he believes could cure metastatic carcinoma. SS Sturmbannfuhrer Dietrich Hahn, the new camp administrator at Buchenwald, reads of his work and hopes for a cure for his wife, Greta, our third narrator. She is desperately hoping for a second child but can't conceive because of ovarian cancer. The story largely unfolds through Weber's letters, Greta's diary and the transcribed recordings of Dietrich's post-war trial at Dachau. The looming presence of the nearby prison camp – lying just beyond a patch of forest – is the only blot to mar what is otherwise an idyllic life in Buchenwald. 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 Hahn, 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.

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Il bosco di faggi prima del ’37 era molto più ampio: poi una bella fetta (150 ettari) fu eliminata per fare spazio al campo. Ma rimase la quercia di Goethe, in bella mostra all’interno del lager. Finché i bombardamenti non la ridussero in cenere. 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. I absolutely loved Catherine Chidgey's novel The Transformation, more so even than her infamous debut In a Fishbone Church, so I was looking forward to her latest long-awaited novel.

In her latest novel Remote Sympathy– the title itself can be read on a number of layers – Chidgey tests the truth of these words once more. This time, she takes us into the camps themselves, to the Buchenwald labour camp, perched on the Ettersberg hill above the picturesque Weimar village. We are introduced to Doktor Lenard Weber from a letter written to his daughter Lotte in 1946. He describes meeting his wife, and inventing a machine called a Sympathetic Vitaliser, which he hopes will prove a cure for cancer. Buchenwald sorgeva a un passo da Weimar, il luogo culla della cultura tedesca (la quercia di Goethe, tanto per limitarsi a un solo aspetto) e con Dachau e Bergen-Belsen fu il maggior lager su suolo tedesco (i nazisti amavano ‘esportare’ anche i campi di concentramento).Un’altra statistica invece trasforma Buchenwald in un luogo quasi virtuoso: di quel quinto di morti, “solo” un quinto era composto da ebrei. Do you know,’ says Greta’s new friend Emmi, ‘they released some of the Polish child prisoners because they found out they had Aryan blood?’

The fourth point-of-view “character” is a kind of Greek chorus of Weimar citizenry, and it is here that I found something terribly recognisable. These are the people who are neither bad enough to run the camps nor good enough to stop them. These are the citizens on whose behalf and for whose good the state says it is doing all of this. These are the people whose inaction, as a schoolchild, I could not understand – and to whose ranks I am now awfully afraid I would belong. Dr Lenard Weber, inventor of the “Sympathetic Vitaliser”, is the most reliable among Chidgey’s grouping of different narrators. He is violently arrested one afternoon; Dietrich Hahn wants him to treat his wife, whose illness appears terminal. Weber reconstructs the machine and, under the watchful eye of her husband, begins to treat Greta, all the time knowing the machine is probably a failure. Fired by real historical knowledge, Catherine Chidgey is an acute observer of human strengths and weaknesses and a very accomplished story-teller. This is a great novel.' —Nicholas Reid, Reid's Reader A pagina trentuno compare per la prima volta la parola maledetta, la parola proibita, quella contaminante: ebreo.So Greta’s cancer can be seen as: the tumour of the camp set in this historically cultural town; the cancer of in German society or the poisonous growth in that society and in the town’s inhabitants that leads to their cognitive dissonance about the horrors occurring what it is effectively their sponsorship of the Nazi regime. Chidgey is a gifted writer, and in this, her confident, commanding prose and vivid atmospherics hold the attention.”— The Guardian (on The Transformation) But Lenard is only one of the narrators. The other two are the Hahns, Greta and Dietrich. They have a five year old son and they move to Buchenwald where Dietrich takes up an administrative position. Greta’s narration reads like a diary. Dietrich’s is from a recording much later in 1954. Greta is young and naive, more worried about her son seeing through the fence into the camp than what her husband does there!

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