Catherine Chidgey

Tanya Hart interviews Catherine Chidgey, author of Remote Sympathy

by Tanya Hart

Tanya Hart interviewed Catherine Chidgey to discuss her latest novel, Remote Sympathy.

I first heard Catherine Chidgey speak at a Sunday session as part of our Jewish Auckland Festival of Learning - Limmud 2021.

To say I was impressed by the way she masterfully shared and articulated the background to and research for her most recent novel, Remote Sympathy, is to completely understate the lasting effect this session had on me. The reality is that it will sit with me for some time yet.

I was compelled to read the novel and, in quick succession, request a personal interview with Catherine.

Catherine Chidgey is one of New Zealand’s foremost novelists. Her first novel, In a Fishbone Church, was a multi award winner and her fourth novel The Wish Child was shortlisted for the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize in 2017. It was about two children from different families in Germany during WW2, and about the horrors of war as experienced by ‘ordinary’ people and the normalisation of ‘state sanctioned brutality’.

Similar themes are explored in Remote Sympathy, which is, once again, set in Nazi Germany, in Buchenwald, and the nearby town of Weimar. Catherine completed Remote Sympathy in September 2019 and the book was first published in October 2020. The book has now been published in the UK, USA and Australia.

To follow are the main excerpts of my interview with Catherine.  

T: I recall you spent time studying in Berlin in the 1990s. Is that when and where the inspiration for this novel came from?

C: It came from a couple of different sources really, but mostly from the time I spent living and studying in Berlin in the mid-1990s. 

I was studying at university there and remember thinking how ‘geographically present’ the war still was.  It was four years after the Berlin Wall had come down but it was still very much a divided city and the east of the city was still scarred by shrapnel damage, bomb damage, bullet damage, and a lot of the buildings in East Berlin had just been left as they were after the war. There was no grand restoration as there had been in West Berlin. That was very fascinating to me - as a Kiwi from a place where we don’t have that evidence of our history so very visible on our landscape. 

That really got under my skin. 

One of the university courses I signed up for was a paper for foreign students on German history. One of the reasons I signed up for the paper was because it seemed to offer all these seemingly gorgeous little ‘junket’ trips and visits around Germany.  We went to lots of lovely pretty and romantic German villages but we also went on a campus tour of the Freie Universität and visited the rooms in the buildings which had been used as the sites of medical experimentation during WW2. That was a jolt to realise I was studying right in the heart of where that kind of thing transpired. 

We also went to Buchenwald – a place which had occupied this ‘mythological’ place in East German history. The story which had grown up around it was that the Communist prisoners had liberated the camp, stormed the watchtowers and overthrown the Nazis; supposedly they also had this huge cache of weapons they had amassed over the years. This wasn’t entirely true – there was a Communist underground in the Camp but they certainly didn’t liberate it in that ‘heroic’ fashion. After the war, the East German regime had an educational programme in place which meant that every East German school student visited Buchenwald and learned about the East German version of history. An educational programme continued after the Wall came down and it was set up so students could sleep overnight at the camp. Our university group slept overnight in the former SS Barracks, which was a weird feeling. 

As is the case with most concentration camps, there are not a lot of original buildings to see. There are a few of the original buildings, such as the crematorium, and the SS Barracks were very much as they once were. That was a strange feeling which stayed with me.

The other thing which stayed with me from that trip was again the geography of the place, realising that this was a Camp in the heart of Germany; it wasn’t tucked away ‘in the East’. It was in Weimar –the cradle of German enlightenment, the home of German democracy and civilisation and home to Goethe, Liszt and to all these great men, philosophers and musicians. Weimar is always held up as the home of ‘the flowering’ of German culture. 

On the hill above Weimar, just a few minutes’ bus ride away, is the site of horror. I hadn’t quite appreciated, before I went there in person, just how close it was. And just how close the SS officers’ enclave to the camp was either - a little neighbourhood, a mini village, of ten beautiful villas, which looked like ski lodges, built on the outskirts of the Camp for the most high ranking officers and their families. They don’t exist anymore but I have seen plenty of photographs of them and looked at floor plans of them and they were beautiful. Just a few minutes’ walk, through a little patch of trees, to the Camp.

The other major ‘seed’ for the book was the Goethe Oak which our professor talked to us about and showed us (the stump remains). This was an ancient, gigantic oak tree which was within the grove of beech trees (Buchenwald means ‘beech forest’ or ‘grove of beeches’).  The tree was spared when the prisoners cleared the hillside for the camp because of its association with Goethe. The story went that Goethe would sit under this oak tree to rest and write poetry when he went on his hill rambles. It was a sacred spot and the SS ordered the tree be saved when the camp was being built; they erected a little fence around it and the prisoners therefore referred to it as Buchenwald’s ‘First Prisoner’. It was a sacred tree and a sacred symbol to the SS – a symbol of noble German brotherhood and of Goethe and that ‘flowering’ of German culture but it was also interestingly sacred to the prisoners as a reminder of what had been lost in Germany.

The legend went that if the tree fell, so too would Germany. The tree and the camp were ‘safe’ until quite late in the war when there was an American precision bombing raid on the camp. Up until August 1944, the SS believed that Buchenwald could not be bombed because the prisoners were the ‘security’. That is, the SS believed the Allies would not bomb the camp because doing so would kill thousands of prisoners.

But by this stage of the war the Americans had developed the ability to precision bomb and their target was the armaments factory in the camp, which they succeeded in destroying. The rest of the camp was relatively untouched, but some sparks flew into the branches of the Goethe Oak and it caught fire, burned overnight and had to be felled. This marked a real turning point in the direction of the war for Germany and the direction of the way things unfolded at Buchenwald. A lot of the prisoners took little chips of the tree as souvenirs; I found that so touching and I knew I had to weave that in to the book somehow.

So by 1996 I knew the Goethe Oak and the geography of Weimar and Buchenwald were going to be important to my writing but I didn’t yet quite know how so just carried that with me for years and years and years.

Then, when I was researching my novel The Wish Child, I was reading about medical treatment in Nazi Germany.  I read a little about cancer research under Hitler and the use of electrotherapy which was all the rage, not just in Nazi Germany but all of Europe. And that’s when the plot of the book came rushing in to my head - picking up the geographical site of Buchenwald, and the Oak Tree and linking it to a part Jewish doctor character who has invented an electrotherapy machine early in his career and thinks he’s going to save the world with it. With the rise of Hitler, his job becomes increasingly difficult and he shelves the machine and decides it doesn’t work, but later on is called upon to rebuild it and to convince the SS Officer, Dietrich Hahn, that he can save his wife’s life with it.

The impossible agreement he comes to with the SS Officer, Hahn, is that if he saves Hahn’s wife he will also be able to save his family, who have been deported to Theresienstadt.

T: You mentioned studying in Berlin. How did that come to be?

C: I’d done an Honours Degree in German Language and Literature at Victoria University and then gained a scholarship from a body called the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). The scholarship was originally to study for a year in Germany but I extended it for another six months. I was supposed to be putting together the topic for my Master’s Thesis, which I would then come back to Victoria University and do, but whilst I was over there I joined a bilingual creative writing group and it was the first time I showed people my writing work and started to take my writing seriously. 

I was on the other side of the world and it felt far less exposing and risky to be doing that over there. My focus shifted from writing about other people’s books to writing my own books. I was also fully immersed in speaking and thinking in German day in, day out and that fed in to my creativity - just thinking about language and about meaning and about communication to that degree.

So I changed the direction of my career whilst over there and that was definitely the right move for me.

T: The title of the book, Remote Sympathy, is extraordinary in that it resonates throughout the book in multiple ways. Tell us where the phrase originated from?

The 18th-century writings of John Hunter, the great Scottish surgeon, sparked the idea for the electrotherapy machine, which my character Lenard Weber developed in line with historical approaches to cancer treatment.

Hunter’s theory was that when you treat one part of the body, which may be quite distant from the site of the disease, the body’s systems will transport the treatment or the cure to the site of the disease. 

I was fascinated by that idea and with the phrase itself and the ‘freight’ that those two words ‘Remote Sympathy’ seemed to carry. This idea is echoed and contrasted in ‘closeness’ – how close the town of Weimar was to the camp; how close the SS families’ houses were to the camp and yet still people looked the other way. 

In fact, all throughout the book there are words relating to closeness, proximity, nearness. I deliberately inserted these subliminally right though.

T: The book is long but doesn’t feel it. Each character is exposed and the lens through which they look is consummately portrayed. The multi-dimensional perspectives you offer and probe in relation to ‘ordinary’ Germans as well as the Nazi officers and their wives is quite extraordinary. Tell us about the ‘ordinary’ people of Weimar.

I knew it was going to be a fairly long book from the get go. In The Wish Child, too, I was interested in getting beneath the surface of the lives of ‘ordinary’ Germans. The people who did just go with flow either because they really believed in it, or because it was easier to or because it felt safer. They didn’t want to stick their heads above the parapet or draw attention to themselves.

And this is why I definitely wanted the book to have the fourth perspective of the 1000 citizens of Weimar – a town which prospered from having the Camp so near. The officers supported the shops and the restaurants of Weimar, and used their taxis. On days when the wind was blowing in a certain direction, the people of Weimar said their washing became covered in ashes from smoke from the crematorium or that they couldn’t pick their apples off their fruit trees in their gardens, because of the taste of ash. So the people knew about the Camp and I wanted to expose that and question how complicit, or not, they were.

T: For me, one of the most powerful parts of the book was when Buchenwald is being liberated and General Patton, from the US Military,  orders the ‘bystanders’ (the ordinary citizens of Weimar) to immerse themselves in the horrors of the Camp. Tell us about these citizens as characters within the book.

C: The citizens came in to being as characters and were a gift of research when I read about General Patton arriving at Buchenwald and witnessing the conditions in the camp. He was so appalled by what he found that he ordered the 1000 citizens of Weimar to be marched up the hill the next day and forced to tour the camp.

It was an interesting challenge to write from the perspective of 1000 people but to also make it individual in parts by focussing the camera in on various faces within the crowd.

And with Dietrich Hahn’s sections and perspectives as well – I definitely wanted to include that perspective because I didn’t want him to exist in the book as yet another ‘cardboard cut-out’ Nazi.

It’s more chilling if we understand an SS officer’s ‘humanness’ and we can see him acting lovingly with his son and desperately grieving over the potential loss of his wife to cancer - if we can understand that side of him, it’s all the more horrifying that someone with that capacity to love can, at the same time turn, around and act as an instrument of evil. 

I did spend hours, days and months reading 6000 pages of trial testimony and transcripts. The trial at Dachau, run along the same lines as the Nuremburg trials, was where the perpetrators of Buchenwald and Dachau were tried by the American military. What was available is smeary and faint  - photocopies of photocopies of photocopies – but I wanted to lift some of the language that the perpetrators used at the trials and put that language, verbatim, in the mouth of the character of SS officer Dietrich Hahn.

All of the characters in the book are guilty of wilful blindness in one way or another but Hahn definitely sees himself as a victim and refuses to acknowledge his own crimes.

T: How and when did you research the book and when did those ‘seeds’ of ideas from the 1990s come to life?

C:  I went back to Buchenwald and Berlin in 2018 when I was researching the book, having corresponded with an amazing man named Harry Stein who is the chief archivist at the memorial site. We corresponded for about two years and when I visited he made available all the historical photographs of the Camp for me, as well as the floor plans of the Nazi occupied villas nearby, greeting cards that prisoner calligraphers had made for the SS and all the fascinating ephemera which one can’t find online. This really gave me a feel for the place.

I had done endless reading to obtain information on the camp, including any prisoner memoir or diary I could get my hands on, as well as official texts. Some memoirs were written clandestinely in the camp and some were written decades later. I relied on first-hand accounts to bring the place to life. 

With Harry Stein’s help, I saw lots of SS family photographs, including many of children playing ‘soldiers’ with their wooden machine guns and little helmets on in their lovely gardens - and that was really chilling to see. 

I also learned about the presence of the falconry right opposite the villas, which later in the war was turned in to prisoner accommodation for VIP prisoners. The citizens of Weimar could catch a bus saying ‘Buchenwald’ up to six times a day to come up the hill and visit the birds of prey as a leisure activity. It’s completely mental and so obscene!

The zoo was just a few metres from the fence of Buchenwald and was open for children to enjoy too – but only the families of the SS officers. From the zoo, you could see through the fence of the compound….see the prisoners….see what was going on. And this placement was deliberate. The SS believed that if their children could see what was going on they would learn to recognise who the enemy was, who these ‘sub humans’ were and what they looked like, and would make the connection that ‘here are the animals in the zoo’ and ‘here are the animals who are not humans’.

I think it’s important, when writing, to have a ‘lightness of touch’ with research. I have a file about three times as long as the book itself, filled with material I didn’t use. 

I believe it’s important not to drown stories with facts and figures but rather weave them in lightly and organically.

T: I want to revisit the name of the camp – Buchenwald. You mentioned a ‘historic nugget’ attached to the name?

Buchenwald was originally going to be called Camp Ettersberg after the hill on which it stands, but the German Cultural Committee of Weimar wrote a letter expressing their outrage that the camp was going to be named after the sacred hill on which Goethe had walked, written and composed. He was also known to have staged a lot of his plays there. They weren’t objecting at all to the presence of the camp or what they must have known would transpire in the camp – they just wanted it to be called something different. 

Himmler came up with Buchenwald in 1937/1938 when the camp was being built – a name to appease the people of Weimar.

T: What was General Patton’s impressions of the Camp when he arrived there in 1945? Of the camp infrastructure’s inability to cope with sheer numbers of prisoners?

C: General Patton came the day after the liberation and saw the piles of corpses as well as evidence they had even run out of coal for the crematorium in the last weeks preceding the liberation. There also just wasn’t enough room in the mass graves they had dug not far from the camp, and so the bodies were just piling up. 

By this stage, the SS were so concerned with saving their own skins that they didn’t care - they were busy burning files, disguising themselves to get out and thinking about escape.

There was horrific evidence of medical experiments and wards of patients who had suffered terrible phosphorous burns, for instance, when they were experimenting with how best to treat burns from phosphorus bombs.

In the prisoner barracks themselves, there were men who were clearly starving and were at death’s door.

But it was the ‘Little Camp’ which was perhaps the most horrifying discovery for General Patton.

This was separate to the ‘main camp’ and was where any Jewish prisoners were put, as well as a site of transit for prisoners who were earmarked to be sent on to certain death elsewhere. So any prisoner who ended up in the ‘Little Camp’ was not expected to work or be productive. They were expected to die.

Buchenwald’s numbers swelled to the point it was bursting at the seams by the time of the liberation. There just wasn’t enough food, even of the scanty rations. There were reports of cannibalism – it was just a hell hole.

The infrastructure was unable to cope. As the Reich’s borders shrank towards the end of the war, the prisoners were all shoved on to camps within Germany.

T: There are many different threads and voices throughout the book….the Sympathetic Vitaliser (electrotherapy machine); Dr Weber’s three miracles; the 1000 citizens of Weimar; the Transparent Man; the workmanship of the prisoners. Do you want to touch on any of these?

C: I loved the symbolic possibilities that the Sympathetic Vitaliser machine allowed me; it sits at the heart of the story and sends its waves throughout the book. I loved the use of language – pulsing, jolts of power, thrumming, currents – these words describe how the Vitaliser works but also how human emotions work. The machine is a symbol of power, but also of hope, of recovery, of life. 

The doctor and his patients desperately want to believe the machine could work and would save them. 

The Transparent Man was another gift of research. I saw a photo of him when I was researching The Wish Child - I knew he didn’t belong in that book, as much as I would have liked to ‘shoe horn’ him in….so he was another thing I tucked away until I discovered he definitely belonged in this book.

He was a scientific, international sensation exhibited at the Hygiene Museum in Dresden in 1930. Another one was made for the American market in 1935. I loved the idea that people were so taken by him because they could see inside the human body in a three dimensional way, to see their innermost recesses. 

I also just loved the symbolic possibilities of the phrase – The Transparent Man - because the two main characters in this book are not necessarily transparent men – they keep secrets. And yet, they each reveal themselves in their setting down of their own stories.

He is an idealised figure – a symbol which feeds in to the Nazi notion of Aryan perfection whilst also being a figure of hope.

T: Was the book as life changing for you, the author, as it was for me, the reader?

I feel a deep sense of connection to all my books. It’s weird to say that the story moves me but there are certain scenes in this book and The Wish Child in which I was moved to tears as I was writing them. I believer that, as a writer, you need to feel that deeply about a project, in order for the reader to feel that way.

T: What’s next for you? 

C: I have finished my next novel which is due to be published September or October next year. I’ve taken a completely different direction - I finally got WWII out of my system. Having lived with that dark material for so long, I had to do something totally different.

My next story is set on a Central Otago sheep station and it is the story of a husband and wife who are locked within a violent marriage and are trying to keep afloat a financially failing farm. One day, Marnie (the wife) rescues a magpie chick and brings it home and decides to keep it.  The magpie develops an amazing ability to mimic speech and becomes an internet sensation, earning them serious money. It might be the thing which can save the farm, except that Rob, the husband, cannot stand the bird. The whole story is narrated by the magpie, in the magpie’s voice.

T: Do you sleep?

C: I do have a busy life. I also have a six year old daughter, Alice. My life is Alice, full-time writing and full-time teaching and I don’t have a life beyond that.  My schedule is insane.      

T: Future aspirations for Remote Sympathy?

C: If a Hollywood producer wants to buy the film rights - that would be nice!