‘You cheapen a story if you put horror centre stage’

The novelist from New Zealand on her books set in Nazi Germany, the isolation of the Antipodean author, and writing stories that sing to her the loudest

- Saurabh Sharma

Remote Sympathy had its seeds last century, when I was studying German in Berlin in the early to mid 1990s. Our university professor took a group of foreign students on a trip to the Buchenwald concentration camp, which is part of the beautiful town of Weimar, which is seen as the cradle of German culture. We stayed in the former SS barracks. I realised that the citizens of Weimar, who form a chorus in the book, could not possibly say they didn’t know what was happening on the hill above their town. Yet they maintained this.

The town was cheek-by-jowl with these horrors. The officers overseeing the camp lived in a little collection of about 10 beautiful villas and raised their families there.