On the Boundary of Genocide: A Film and Its Controversies

Frann Michel

The Zone of Interest
Written and directed by Jonathan Glazer
Produced by Film4, Access & Polish Film Institute
Distributor A24; 2023)

The Höss family’s spacious garden, with the concentration camp in the background.

THE ZONE OF Interest shows us some months in the life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), who live with their family (five children, several servants) in a house with a spacious garden in the “Zone of Interest” next to the extermination camp, the interior of which is almost never seen, but always heard.

Through its style and substance, the film evokes questions about historical representation and about the boundaries of responsibility for fascist violence.

Historically, the “Zone of Interest” (Interessengebiet) was the area around the camp where Nazis expelled locals and took over housing for use of the SS officers, but the term more broadly evokes ideas of advantage and attention. In the present case, it points us to the interest of both characters and audience, questions of where we direct our attention and where we do not.

The fourth feature by writer-director Jonathan Glazer, nominally based on the 2014 Martin Amis novel of the same title, The Zone of Interest draws more on the archives of Auschwitz than on Amis’s satiric fiction of adulterous desire.

The film won this year’s Academy Awards for Best International Feature Film and Best Sound, but has been criticized as well as praised. In the interest of a popular front against fascism, I wish I could reconcile the divergent views of this film, but disjuncture is one of the things it is about.

While the film divides image (bourgeois domesticity) and sound (screams, gunshots, rumbling crematorium), and the visuals further distinguish complicity (desaturated color) and resistance (thermal imagery), the central characters compartmentalize: home and camp, us and them. Of course, these divisions also interface, coming together in material history or viewer experience.

Varying Responses

Some reviewers have praised The Zone of Interest as a “masterpiece” (Rolling Stone), “extraordinary” and “compelling” (Jacobin), a “colossal” achievement in filmmaking (Little White Lies), that “should be watched by as broad an audience as possible” (Socialist Party [Ireland]). Others have condemned it as “a hollow, self-aggrandizing art-film exercise” (NY Times), “Kitsch” (NYRB), or”Holokitsch” (The New Yorker).

Grove Art Online tells us that “Kitsch” is German for “pretentious trash” or “cheap sentiment.” The Marxist cultural critic Walter Benjamin, in his Arcades Project, described kitsch as “art with a 100 percent, absolute and instantaneous availability for consumption,” offering immediate emotional gratification without intellectual effort or difficulties of interpretation.

So, for instance, the red-coated child seen in an otherwise nearly black-and-white landscape of slaughter in Schindler’s List (1993) is kitsch. We can immediately feel the tragedy of the individual child, and we can congratulate ourselves on our appreciation of the beauty of the image and the horror of the Holocaust.

But in The Zone of Interest, the close-up shots of red flowers that bleed momentarily into an entirely red screen do something different and more complex.

Clearly, responses vary, and will be shaped by what one brings to the film, but the word “challenging” comes up a lot. Audience complaints that “nothing happens” would seem to emerge from expectations that it would be a conventional, mainstream film, with clear and stable points of identification, a dramatic plot, and clear exposition. Instead we have static camera, no exposition, and demands placed on our attention and emotions.

The Höss residence and garden have been carefully recreated, and multiple hidden cameras installed, with focus pullers offsite. Actions unfold in natural light, in often long takes, in which the characters seem unaware of what we hear: the meticulously recreated sounds of the death camp.

The film thus requires that viewers bring with them some knowledge of the events of the Holocaust, so as to be able to recognize the meaning of unexplained references, the sources of dissonant sounds, and the significance of characters’ lack of reactions.

Awareness of Horror

As they were working, the sound designers, led by Johnnie Burn, noticed that they themselves began to tune out the audio as they watched, and so the volume increases slightly, gradually, as the film goes on, countering the ease with which we can shut out our awareness of horror.

Shutting out the horror next door also entails active labor by the family: Hedwig orders vines planted to cover the wall that divides and connects the garden and the camp; Rudolf removes his bloody boots before entering the house, washes his genitals after raping a prisoner, closes windows as he checks the house at night.

Signs of horror punctuate the bland domesticity: we see the family servants invited to select for themselves fine clothing taken from prisoners, the gardener using crematorium ashes as fertilizer, one of the Höss children playing with a handful of teeth.

Rudolf takes the children boating, but when he unexpectedly encounters in the water some fragments of human bone, he rushes the children home for a good scrubbing, apparently distressed not by the mass death he has administered, but by the possibility that it may have contaminated his offspring.

Those critics who have objected that we don’t learn anything new from the film (we already know Nazis are bad, evil is banal) seem to assume not only that art must be educational but also that learning is purely about intellectual acquisition of information, rather than also involving emotional engagement, deep reflection, or recursive integration of experiences.

For at least some viewers, the film raises provocative questions and makes visceral the recognition of our own complicity in leading comfortable lives while atrocities occur.

That the film provokes us to consider our own complicities does not require equating every viewer to those actively perpetrating genocide or living next door to it. As Naomi Klein has suggested in her comments on The Zone of Interest in The Guardian, there are plenty of horrors to go around.

Klein mentions the climate emergency and related refugee crisis, though one might also note conflicts elsewhere (Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar), or the laissez-faire spreading of pandemic disease, or the ordinary social murders of capitalism.

We can all see atrocities on the internet; in the United States we know our own government is funding weapons — perhaps our own pension plan or university endowment is investing in them. If your reaction to an invitation to consider your complicity in atrocity is, “But I’m not a death camp commandant,” then you have set your ethical bar too low.

Speaking Up for Palestine

Reactions to Glazer’s acceptance speech at the Academy Awards suggest that whatever lessons the film offers, not all viewers are receptive students. After expressing the customary thanks, Glazer continued,

“All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present — not to say, ‘Look what they did then,’ rather, ‘Look what we do now.’ Our film shows where dehumanization leads, at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present. Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist? Aleksandra Bystro?-Ko?odziejczyk, the girl who glows in the film, as she did in life, chose to. I dedicate this to her memory and her resistance. Thank you.”

While some others at the Oscars wore pins or clothing that silently signaled their sympathy with Palestinians or their support for a ceasefire, only Glazer spoke onstage about the current violence in Gaza.

Glazer’s speech has sometimes been quoted in truncated and misleading ways, and even some of those aware of the full text have objected to its content. A number of groups have released statements denouncing Glazer’s comments, including an open letter signed by over 1000 “Jewish creatives, executives and Hollywood professionals” who objected to a “moral equivalence between a Nazi regime that sought to exterminate a race of people, and an Israeli nation that seeks to avert its own extermination.”

Other Jewish professionals in the film industry have signed letters in support of Glazer and his comments.

But a number of scholars have noted that many Germans of the Nazi era actually did see their mission as averting their own destruction. Peter Fritzsche points out in Life and Death in the Third Reich (2008), for instance, that the suffering that followed World War One in Germany left many people there susceptible to the Nazi fantasy that “repeatedly imagined the demise of Germany at the hands of Poles, Bolsheviks, Jews, and other enemies.” Perhaps genocide is not always rationalized as self-defense, but it would hardly be unprecedented.

Past and Present

Some critics have faulted the film for its attention to “what we do now.” They are not wrong that universalizing or transhistorical views can obscure shifting power relations and possibilities for agency. Nor are they wrong that an excessive presentism might leave us unable to see possibilities for change or lessons from the past.

Equally, however, antiquarian historicism that detaches the past from the present provides no useful insight. Finding and forging a usable past entails avoiding both of these extremes, a balance that many find The Zone of Interest achieves. What we do now can be shaped by how we understand what they did then.

As with the range of approaches to historical material, so, too, considerations of fascism might seek a balance: avoiding on the one hand the narrowness of studies that limit the phenomenon only to avowedly-fascist European regimes between the world wars, and on the other hand the expansiveness of accounts that flatten the category to encompass any vaguely authoritarian ideas or formations.

Those who object that The Zone of Interest lacks a material analysis of fascism or of the motivations of characters may have missed some details. Writers from at least Trotsky onward have noted that fascism emerges from capitalist crisis, and although it chiefly serves the interest of big business, its supporters and agents often come from the distressed petty bourgeoisie.

Some of the capitalist underpinnings of fascism emerge in the film when Höss family members or friends refer to the new Siemens factory and other industry moving to the area, as well as when Nazi bureaucrats comment on praise from CEOs, or when local businesses are offered their “pick” of newly arrived enslaved laborers.

A characteristic class position of fascists becomes evident in allusions to the family’s class resentments and desires. When Hedwig’s mother Linna (Imogen Kogge) comes to visit, she wonders about whether a woman she used to work for as housecleaner is now across the wall, and she regrets being outbid on the woman’s curtains when her goods were auctioned. Linna notes that Hedwig has “landed on [her] feet,” suggesting both their class insecurity and its material overcoming at the expense of other lives.

Once the daughter of a servant, Hedwig now commands servants, snapping irritably but matter-of-factly at one, “I could have my husband spread your ashes across the fields of Babice.” She revels in the furs and jewels she gains from murdered Jews, and longs for another spa vacation in Italy. If fascism doesn’t necessarily begin at home, it nonetheless includes it.

The film also supports the analysis presented by Aimé Césaire, that Nazism is the return to Europe of techniques developed in colonial regimes; that is, it is a mode of settler colonialism. As Hazem Fahmy notes in Middle East Eye, the Polish landscapes of The Zone of Interest evoke scenes from American Westerns like Shane (1953) and Johnny Guitar (1954). A letter we hear in the film describes Höss as “a model settler farmer and an exemplary German pioneer of the East.”

Having moved from Germany to Poland, Hedwig refuses, when Rudolf is transferred back to Germany, to leave the home and garden she has had the servants cultivate: “We’re living how we dreamed we would. . . . Everything the Führer said about how we should live is exactly how we do. Drive East. Lebensraum. Here it is.

Reflections on Resistance

If some criticisms of the film might emerge from refusal of the analysis it presents, others are apt enough, though not necessarily damning — no single artwork can do everything, after all.

Certainly we might learn different things from a film or book that offered fuller historical detail, or more focus on the resistance.

The “girl who glows in the film,” Aleksandra Bystron-Kolodziejczyk (Julia Polaczek), appears in nighttime scenes filmed with a thermal camera, the use of night vision making these the visual inverse of other scenes.

We see her bicycling through the town and fields, hiding fruit for prisoners to find when they return to work, and finding a container with a song written by Joseph Wulf, a prisoner who survived Auschwitz.

We do not learn from the film that members of the resistance also included Polish maids and a gardener employed by the Höss family, though the screenplay is based in part on their testimony about events in the household. As Amy Herzog notes in Film Quarterly, this may be a “missed opportunity” in an otherwise provocative and praiseworthy film.

In Herzog’s view, the voiceover of Rudolf reading “Hansel and Gretel” to his children while we see Bystron-Kolodziejczyk glowing on screen veers toward sentimentality about the resistance. But the Grimm fairy tale about starving children shoving an old woman into an oven seems to me more complex and ambiguous here.

The children, remember, have been abandoned to starvation by their parents; the protagonists of the tale are the ones who incinerate their enemy. (The Brothers Grimm collected their “Household Tales” in part to support a developing German national identity.)

Likewise, the all-red screen that appears during Linna’s visit may signal overwhelming emotion and horror; but how to respond to that horror is not so clear. Less accustomed than her daughter’s family to the sounds and smells of the neighboring camp, Linna covers her nose and mouth in reaction to the smoke, reacts to sounds they ignore, and departs in the middle of the night, leaving a note we never see.

She is, perhaps, like the title characters of Ursula Le Guin’s famous short story, among “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”: those who respond to a pleasant life based on the suffering of others by refusing to participate, distancing themselves. But can such distancing ever be enough?

November-December 2024, ATC 233