The Zone of Interest: How Auschwitz Became an Oscar-Winning Crack against the Jews
by Lisa Wegenstein and Justus Wertmüller
The following essay originally appeared in German in Bahamas 94 (Spring 2024). Translated by Xuxu Song.
For decades now, everything has been known about Rudolf Höss and his ostensible double life as both an enforcer of the Holocaust and a loving family man. Robert Merle’s 1953 roman à clef Death Is My Trade was based in part on publicly accessible notes that Höss had composed while in prison for war crimes. Pictures of the affable Mr. Höss with his wife and colleagues appeared in Alain Resnais’s 1956 film Night and Fog. The testimony of prison psychologist Gustav M. Gilbert, who had spoken with Höss at length in Nuremberg, came up in 1961 during the Eichmann trial. Höss’s autobiographical notes were published by DTV in 1963 under the title Commandant of Auschwitz. Things got especially German in 1977 when the film Death Is My Trade—the German title translates as Excerpts from a German Life—by Theodor Kotulla, based on Robert Merle’s novel and starring the prominent actor Götz George, the son of two celebrated German thespians, was released in German cinemas. A review from the Catholic magazine Filmdienst in December 1977, and quoted on Wikipedia, revealingly states:
The interchangeability of collective thinking and The Enemy becomes frighteningly clear in Kotulla’s emotionless psychohistorical analysis….In Kotulla’s film, political and moral superficiality and the volatile idea of “peace, order and above all cleanliness,” irrationally propagated as the highest value in itself—under this pretext, up to 9,000 people were sent into the “shower room” every day in Auschwitz—rightly appears as the main cause of the totalitarian abuse of power, which is why it can continue to function openly or covertly worldwide in various forms and ideological guises. In this respect, this fact-oriented fiction is a lesson that every teacher, especially every history teacher, should discuss with young people.
Even back then, the pedagogical lesson lay in the notion that Auschwitz merely provided the backdrop for vague musings about man’s responsibility for his actions in times of unfreedom.
A few months before the German New Wave band Ideal hit the charts in 1982 with “Keine Heimat, wer schützt mich vor Amerika?” (“No Homeland, Who Will Protect Me from America?”), German politician Oskar Lafontaine articulated the analytic function of the Höss case that is still in use today. Referring to the debate about the NATO Double-Track Decision, he declared: “Helmut Schmidt continues to speak of a sense of duty, predictability, feasibility, steadfastness….These are secondary virtues. To put it very precisely: one can also run a concentration camp with them.” There would have been much to criticize about a German chancellor (Schmidt) who served as a first lieutenant in the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front and who, in Saudi Arabia in 1981, “spoke in relation to Auschwitz about ‘all the moral and historical baggage’ that characterizes German foreign policy in Europe, whereas the Arab peoples are pretty much the only ones who have not had any negative experiences with the Germans” (Jüdische Allgemeine, July 9, 2013). But Lafontaine, the left-winger of the SPD and an avowed anti-Zionist to this day, had taken no offense. After all, concentration camps, as we have learned, are facilities run by the Americans, like Abu Ghraib, or by their proxies—one of whom, Israel, has been running the world’s largest concentration camp for decades. “Let’s look at the conditions in the Gaza Strip: It increasingly resembles a large concentration camp,” stated Cardinal Renato Martino, member of the College of Cardinals, in an interview fifteen years ago (Spiegel, January 9, 2009). We have learned that we all become accomplices if we do not ask ourselves the question: “How can we offer resistance?”
And so, when Auschwitz becomes the subject of postmodern art, it is all about warning against “totalitarian abuse of power,” which “can continue to function openly or covertly worldwide in various forms and ideological guises.” Whoabuses power is clear from the outset, and the probing question of whether we have not all long since become accomplices in crimes comparable to Auschwitz and whether, in the end, there is even a little Rudolf Höss in us, must be ever present.
The Oscar as an Appeal for Shoah Relativization
On March 11, 2024, Jonathan Glazer was awarded an Oscar for best international film for The Zone of Interest—a film that does not want to be a film about the Holocaust, but instead transposes the Holocaust into the present and makes the violent deaths of millions of Jews interchangeable with all kinds of major and minor crimes. In The Zone of Interest, “crime” is indeed no longer bound to any objective criteria but is rather given over to the audience’s free association. The Oscar is not a recognition of an artistic achievement but is instead a recommendation to equate the nearly achieved extermination of European Jews with supposedly equal crimes committed by Jews against the Palestinians.
In his acceptance speech, director Glazer began by saying for himself and his team what needs to be said when artists talk about Auschwitz today: “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.”
Dehumanization is the key word and, tellingly, it seems used more as a rebuke of the perpetrators than those who were first stripped of their existence as citizens, then of their pitifully few remnants of human dignity, and finally, after the shaving, tattooing, grotesque uniforms, and starvation, of their last semblance of humanity before being driven into the gas chambers. This meticulous, European-wide process of capturing, stigmatizing, selecting, “concentrating,” and murdering six million people was carried out according to criteria that the perpetrators devised specifically not to murder all communists, intellectuals, or gays, but rather to exterminate the Jews, regardless of their relation to Judaism. This makes the Holocaust unique and distinguishes it above all from the murder of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915–1916 by the Ottoman Turks and also from the genocide of 800,000 Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda in 1994, because there was no escape in the Holocaust.
But Glazer had even more to say. To thunderous applause, he warned, as a Jew, against a Jewish Auschwitz: “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?” (Der Standard, March 13, 2024).
The Zone of Interest—Not a Film about the Shoah
People with a Jewish problem always imploringly warn not to lump a work together with the potentially “problematic” ideological statements of its creator. Yet Glazer’s statements correspond precisely to the conception and execution of the work itself. The Zone of Interest is an antisemitic propaganda film for the educated classes.
The freely adapted plot is based on the book of the same name by British author Martin Amis, whose title is intended as a risqué double entendre. Published in 2014, this provocative and often obscenely erotic novel, which is obviously set in Auschwitz but does not mention it, describes a fictional love story between an SS soldier and the camp commandant’s wife. In the English original, Amis often uses (sometimes misspelled) German words to describe their zones of interest, so it is hardly surprising that German publishers were not very enthusiastic. A central character in the book is the Jewish prisoner Szmul, who is described as the “saddest man in the camp.” Amis is no longer able to give an opinion on the adaptation of his book for a film in which no Jews appear; he died on the day of the film’s world premiere.
The film tells the story of the Höss family, whose head, Rudolf, was the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp from 1940 to 1943, in the conventional style of realist narrative cinema. The leading roles are played by the well-known German actors Christian Friedel, as Rudolf Höss, and Sandra Hüller, as his wife Hedwig. The international co-production between the United Kingdom, Poland, and the United States premiered at the Cannes International Film Festival in May 2023. At the 2024 Academy Awards, the film won an Oscar for best international film and for best sound, which was created by sound designer Johnnie Burn and mixer Tarn Willers. Sound indeed plays a leading role in the film, alongside the actors, as it replaces the visual absence of the victims of the Auschwitz killing machine with background sound effects. Gunshots, dogs barking, the roar of the guards, and the screams of pain from the concentration camp inmates can be heard day and night.
The soundtrack by musician and composer Mica Levi is only heard in exceptional cases. It is based on Hanns Eisler’s grand score for the documentary Night and Fog about Nazi concentration and extermination camps, though it does not come close to matching it. It is only in the closing credits that Levi is allowed an angelic song with a techno beat for six nerve-deadening minutes—which, like the occasional fade-ins of short sequences during the film (in bright red, later in black, or at the very beginning in impenetrable gray), are meant to contribute significantly to the film’s supposed emotionality, praised by critics and audiences alike.
Scenes are shown from the life of the Höss couple and their five children, who live in a villa with a garden directly behind the camp wall. The wall is never absent from the fabric of the film itself (which reaches feature length courtesy only of its protracted, tacked-on credits). It separates the world of the perpetrators or profiteers of injustice from the walled-in district of the unspeakable and also of the unnamed—onto which everyone is supposed to project whatever is currently on their mind. The only curious part is that almost everyone makes exactly the same spontaneous association.
The house and the garden are large and well-kept; there is a greenhouse, a garden pavilion, and a swimming pool. The “paradise garden,” which Hedwig Höss lovingly tends, is repeatedly blown with ashes from the concentration camp’s crematoria. Yet life remains peaceful. The message is that the residents manage to ignore the suffering next door, and for which Rudolf Höss is largely responsible, although evidence of the horror keeps intruding on the bourgeois idyll. During a Sunday boat trip in the nearby river, Papa Höss finds a not completely burnt human jawbone in the water. He immediately runs home, where the children are thoroughly washed. Hedwig delights in the contents of the suitcases of dispossessed Jewish women, turns in front of the mirror in a plundered fur coat, and uses the lipstick of women who are gassed on the other side of her garden. Höss loves his horse and his children and discovers that Zyklon B is the perfect means of cleanly exterminating human beings. A happy family in Nazi-era Auschwitz, seemingly able to successfully suppress everything.
The question of whether they may not have suppressed anything at all, but instead agreed to the extermination of the Jews behind the wall out of conviction, and simply did not want to be bothered with “details,” is cast aside. The film repeats what has already been said or laid out in the well-known Höss saga since the 1950s—but it is not true. The three oldest Höss children were ten, eight, and seven years old when they moved into the villa in Auschwitz; they lived there for three years. Children observe and ask questions. The wives of the SS soldiers from the settlement knew about it because the stench from the crematoria must have been a nuisance and so a topic of conversation. They could have quickly applied to get away—that was possible—but they stayed. They were all held together by a consensus that can be easily deduced from Höss’s statements and notes. Of his subordinates, he writes in Commandant of Auschwitz:
Most of those involved often approached me during the inspection rounds through the extermination sites to vent their depression and impressions, just to seek reassurance from me. From their confidential conversations I heard the question again and again: Is what we have to do there necessary? Is it necessary that hundreds of thousands of women and children have to be exterminated? And I, who had asked myself this question countless times deep down, had to fob them off with the Führer’s order, to put them off with it. I had to tell them that this annihilation of Jewry was necessary to free Germany, to free our descendants for all time from the most tenacious adversaries.
What went for the subordinates also must have been true for the women and older children. The reference to the Führer’s order is secondary and only played a role afterward: in the self-defense of the perpetrators and in the pathetic retrospective babble about necessity to obey orders, right of resistance, corruptibility, and so on, which began with the trial of Adolf Eichmann. What remains central is that the Führer’s order was not questioned by the historical personnel because the message that Jewry had to be annihilated to free Germany from its most tenacious adversary was shared by everyone. Hard, dirty work, but vital for the survival of all Germans, and it was not easy to remain personally decent, as Höss and Himmler emphasized. This conviction was widely shared, not simply by the residents of the SS settlement—yet it is not mentioned for the entirety of a film about Auschwitz.
Glazer was born in London in 1965 and is of Jewish descent. The former director of commercials made his feature-length film directorial debut in 2000 with Sexy Beast, a thriller, followed by two more feature films, Birth in 2004, a mystery drama, and Under the Skin in 2013—a science fiction thriller, which prior to The Zone of Interest was Glazer’s most successful, most talked about, and first work dedicated to a decidedly political subject.
A few days after the theatrical release of The Zone of Interest, voices on social media called for Glazer’s film to be sent to Gaza. The Swiss newspaper Blick (February 29, 2024) likewise reported on how Gaza comparisons caused a stir at the Berlinale: “It is extremely interesting to observe how Glazer’s film is being received in Germany in the wake of the antisemitism discussion at the Berlinale. There, an Instagram account of the festival posted a picture of the destroyed Gaza—and captioned it The Zone of Interest.” Glazer did not comment on these directly, but at the Oscars he made positive reference to such comparisons, which perfectly serve antisemitic thinking. At the Berlinale, as at the Oscars, there was cheap, convenient applause for such statements.
The cynicism with which Glazer emphasized in his acceptance speech that his film should stimulate thought about the present is obvious. After all, he made as little mention of the uniqueness of the victims of the Shoah in his speech as he did in his film. In an interview with the Guardian, Glazer also admitted that he wanted to connect the past with the present: “For me, it is not a film about the past. It is trying to talk about the present, about us and our resemblance with the perpetrators, rather than our resemblance to the victims.” Was that the reason why there is no violence and no victims to be seen in The Zone of Interest? Glazer obviously hid the victims of the Shoah behind the wall to make them fungible—interchangeable.
A “zone of interest,” in German “Interessensgebiet,” was the name given to the remote area in occupied Poland between the Sola and Vistula rivers near the town of Auschwitz, where the largest extermination camp was built. From 1941 until the end of the war, around 1.3 million people were murdered there in an area of around 40 square kilometers. One million Jews, that is one-sixth of the victims of the Shoah, as well as a large number of Roma, Sinti, prisoners of war, and others whose lives were deemed unworthy by Hitler and his henchmen, lost their lives here in the cruelest manner between 1941 and 1945.
Ideological and Primitive Universalization
Since then, historical awareness and a confrontation with the German past have been demanded in a variety of ways. Films, contemporary witness accounts, books, documentation, museums, and school textbooks attempt to describe this period and call on people to “never forget.” Over the years, the call for a different, less narrow, even global approach to the German past has become louder in German-speaking countries, not only from the AfD (Alternative for Germany) end of the political spectrum, but also from the milieu of the far more influential postcolonial left. New groups of perpetrators and other previously neglected genocides have been discovered, and people no longer want to be permanently tied down to the extermination of the European Jews.
National Socialism, like the Holocaust, is history, and history is something old. People should look to the future and finally take adequate account of the many mass crimes committed since the colonial era—so say voices from very different walks of life. Germany views itself as a superior country that has learned from the atrocities of the past and is therefore all the more determined to uphold moral principles. The narratives of Auschwitz serve as a reminder from the past, but no one wants anything to do with the idea of collective guilt. The claim that Germans have been stigmatized with collective guilt is part of the rhetoric of the right, which has always resisted the claim that the Germans are a nation of perpetrators. Martin Hohmann, a former CDU politician who later switched to the AfD, even went so far as to project the term “perpetrator people” onto Jews in a speech on German Unity Day in 2003, thus becoming a trendsetter for a completely different, left-wing scene.
With his universalization of the Holocaust, Glazer follows the Hohmann thesis in a postcolonial fashion. It seems that every resident of a Western country is a perpetrator. But now that the Germans have been spared this collective accusation, there remains but one perpetrator nation.
The possibilities of making the Shoah the subject of a traditional feature film have been exhausted, for the very reason that series such as the 1978 American miniseries Holocaust: The Story of the Family Weiss or films like Schindler’s List were unable to grasp the dimension of the crime and seemed to trivialize it against their own intentions. Glazer sensed his opportunity and pretended to create a completely unique work of art of his own out of Auschwitz, the Nazis’ zone of interest. He was well aware that he would have to approach the concentration camp story differently in order to be successful. The idea was not to make a “normal” film about the greatest crime in the history of mankind, but a different, newly conceived, and skillfully executed Holocaust film.
Such a plan requires a successful recipe based on the “less is more” principle. Be gone, Schindler kitsch and Spielberg melodrama, but also away with the facts, away with the presentation of victims, and above all: away with the Jews. Bring on the now, into which everything can be projected and which gives audiences room for their own interpretations based on current events. Of course, Glazer doesn’t want to be associated with right-wing fulminations against collective guilt, as the selection and staging of his actors shows. With skillful makeup and costume design, they correspond perfectly to the traditional images of Aryan women, men, and children. He accords rather with the milieu of the postcolonial left, because Glazer discovers evil in a German bourgeoisie that is believed to be capable of anything, submissive to its masters while simultaneously orchestrating its own, naturally tasteless happiness in the corner. The further away the specific victims are removed, the less talk there is of Jews and antisemitism in general, the clearer it becomes that behind the guilt-ridden bit players, the merciless but impersonal essence of capitalism is at work, which will not shrink from anything.
The soundscape of the film noted above can be applied to many places where people are tortured and murdered. To ensure that this interchangeability is maintained, those in front of the wall do not name who the victims behind the wall are. Only one scene in the film doesn’t quite follow this pattern. It is one in which Hedwig Höss laughingly tells her mother, who has come to visit, that her Rudolf calls her the “queen of Auschwitz,” and her mother ponders whether the Jewish woman whose house she cleaned before the war is “perhaps now on the other side of the wall.” At the same time, she is annoyed that she did not manage to acquire this woman’s beautiful curtains after her deportation. The distribution of the loot from the “Jewish apartments,” uncovered especially by historian Götz Aly, as well as the allocation of these apartments to the increasing number of “bombed-out” people among neighbors and other profiteers, here serves the sole purpose of shedding light on the shabbiness of the petite bourgeoisie and accomplices. In doing so, it conceals the fact that the Third Reich, its days of military triumph numbered, had long since been warning of Jewish vengeance and retribution as a further necessity for the Final Solution. It actively turned as many people as possible into accomplices, for instance by appropriating the household goods of deportees, so that there could be no turning back.
Research shows that Hedwig Höss came from a very wealthy family. Why does Glazer turn Rudolf Höss’s mother-in-law into a former cleaning lady in a Jewish household? Perhaps because the longer this cleaning lady is there, the more agitated she becomes by what happens in the concentration camp, so that one day she leaves the house secretly without saying goodbye. In his film, Glazer deals with only one Jewish victim, whom he describes as a rich woman whose former subordinate is a German accomplice but who has sufficient heart to at least flee the scene of extermination. Using a rich Jewish woman and an exploited German worker as stereotypes for the victims and perpetrators not only feeds into antisemitic prejudices. Recognizing human potential in someone because they were underprivileged in a precarious employment relationship echoes the bleak attempts to save the German working class by the KPD (Communist Party of Germany) and SED (East German Communist Party), who insisted that Jews should not be granted any “special” victim status. It is hard to imagine a more ideological and primitive universalization of the difference between “rich and poor” than in this key scene in the film.
And What Does All This Have to Do with Hannah Arendt?
The Zone of Interest is often praised in the German-language press with reference to Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil.” Arendt had belittled Eichmann and many other so-called desk murderers (Schreibtischtäter) as willing followers of orders, who in their ordinariness would not have been capable of evil at all—as if this required diabolical personality traits. Eichmann seems to her a mere functionary whose sole interest was the organization of the Holocaust, the purpose of which was of no concern to him.
Yet Adolf Eichmann was such a fanatical antisemite that even when it was important to remain inconspicuous, he inculcated his children with such blatant hatred of Jews that the “knowledge about the Jews” and the necessity of their extermination spread among their friends and classmates, arousing the suspicion of attentive mothers and fathers in the German colony of Buenos Aires, including Jews, and he was eventually exposed. What is already laid out in Arendt’s work is taken to extremes by Glazer and the German press in the case of Höss. Can the evil that is often located in the Auschwitz system, with its functionaries and, moreover, in a German population that at least willingly goes along with it, or at any rate that is completely indifferent, exist at all? Can an atrocity that is impossible without the suspension of any inhibition to kill and without that of the repression of the obvious, which manifested itself, among other things, in the fact that people shrugged at the fact that small children, the disabled, and the elderly were allegedly sent to work in the East, be called anything else other than a manifestation of evil?
Glazer, who depicts Rudolf Höss—who proverbially had his hand on the gas tap—as a lovable family man who was simply doing his duty, deliberately fails to recognize that he and his wife were perpetrators who acted out of conviction. As it happens, Höss was also an extremely brutal killer. In 1923, along with two colleagues, he got Walter Kadow, who had been expelled from the Roßbach unit of the paramilitary Freikorps as a traitor and thief, drunk in a pub in Parchim. They then dragged him into a wooded area at night, where they cut the young man’s throat as he lay on the ground before shooting him in the head. Höss had been a member of the Nazi Party since 1923 and was closely associated with Martin Bormann. In 1928 he and his wife joined the National Socialist, environmentalist, and, of course, antisemitic Artaman League, which probably awakened his and his wife’s preference for German settlement in the “East.” Someone who had been an avowed antisemite since at the latest 1922 by no means became an exterminator of Jews simply for career reasons.
It may be true that Höss himself did not mistreat or mock any Jews, but this is immaterial in relation to his will to exterminate the European Jews. Himmler did not quarter just any squeamish Germans or desk murderers from next door in a villa next to the camp, but hard-boiled Nazis from the very start, fanatical Jew-haters and sadists. The Polish inhabitants of the area where the camp was built were forced by the Nazis to leave their homes and villages because no one who was not involved in the genocide was supposed to live there. They wanted to avoid witnesses to the horror. Glazer does not look beyond the camp wall either, but instead turns it into one of the many walls of contemporary history behind which people are imprisoned.
“Inevitably” One Felt Reminded of Gaza
In The Zone of Interest, the suffering and murder of millions of people is reduced to a sound installation, which is celebrated as an artifice just as much as the use of surveillance cameras, which turn the Höss villa into a kind of Big Brother house in which the audience is supposed to feel just as caught as the actors in the film. The background sound functions as a substitute for what happens and sounds just as monotonous and threatening as it does in hundreds of films when it comes to making fear and horror “tangible.”
Canadian political activist and critic of globalization Naomi Klein believes that, given the emotional impact of the film’s images, it is impossible to avoid an updated reading of the historical material. “Everyone I know who has seen the film,” she wrote in the Guardian, “felt inevitably reminded of Gaza” (Berliner Zeitung, March 18, 2024). There is no declared one-to-one equation in the film, but the almost complete concealment of the identity of the victims is the trick to creating an interchangeability between the victims being Jewish, or, according to racial definitions of the murderers, having to be Jewish. When the extermination of the Jews is discussed, but they are not allowed to appear at all, whether in the picture or in the conversations of the perpetrators, the rumor about the Jews inevitably persists. This is the second trick that makes it possible for millions of moviegoers to be “inevitably” reminded of Gaza. Glazer, who comes from the same postcolonial milieu as Klein, knew very well what people who remember everything except the Holocaust jump at. He knew that that the unremarked depiction of Auschwitz’s camp wall alone was sufficient to come to the same realization as a Catholic cardinal in 2009: “Let’s look at the conditions in Gaza: It looks more and more like a large concentration camp.”
The Zone of Interest is intended to offer a unique and provocative perspective on the events in the concentration camps, and the audience is challenged to think about good and evil, where the lines can become blurred. Where does this lead? The key scene in this film that does not want to be a film about the Shoah is the one in which Hedwig Höss, who is drawn like a caricature of the German Woman of 1940—blond, healthy, fertile, and hardworking—shows her mother the lovingly tended garden of her new home and says something to the effect of: “Three years ago there was nothing here when we came here, and I planted it all so beautifully.”
This statement clearly alludes to Israel and to the Jewish immigrants who have been reclaiming the desert there since the beginning of the twentieth century, and even more so after the Second World War, following the words of the prophet Isaiah:
For waters break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water; in the haunt of jackals, where they lie down, the grass shall become reeds and rushes….And the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.
(Isaiah 35:3–10, quoted in German from the 2017 Luther translation of the Bible; English translation from the English Standard Version)
This pragmatic and biblical promise for the survivors has been the target of scorn and hatred from the anti-Zionist left since the 1960s. The fact that Jonathan Glazer himself is Jewish lends additional relevance and credibility to such “criticism” of the age-old Jewish dream of returning to the Promised Land, where they would be so free to live as Jews without persecution. After all, it never hurts to protect your own resentment against possible objections with references such as “I know a Jew who also thinks that…”
The tedium of the film, which, committed to narrative cinema, has nothing to tell, is intended to reveal the murderers’ and accomplices’ boring evening after work—which, somehow, intensifies the horror. The visual language and the technically elaborate color scheme, which is reminiscent of faded, colorized black-and-white pictures from family albums, turns out instead to be a vain, elaborate, and nonsensical artifice that seems like an homage to the old days. The color scheme of The Zone of Interest’s footage ironically calls to mind the symbolism of the red dress in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, which became a strong visual symbol for injustice, cruelty, and for the life and dignity of every single human being. Glazer never achieves such symbolism at any point in his film. The exploited victims who work in the Höss villa, the nameless non-Jewish servants, who were filmed by the Big Brother cameras in such a way that their identities are unrecognizable, are likely meant to be the sort of typical staff of any capitalist society based on the exploitation of subordinates. Even the female rebel roaming around at night, filmed with a thermal imaging camera while she hides apples and leftover bread for the concentration camp inmates in the bushes, remains faceless and nameless.
The Holocaust Shrinks to a Backdrop
With little dialogue and no plot, the film wants to hit the mark yet instead falls into an abyss of triviality, as demonstrated by the sequence in which Höss acts out his sexual lust. We know that Rudolf Höss raped a political prisoner in the camp several times; the woman became pregnant and had to pay for it with harsh punishment and an abortion. Glazer stages this story by constructing a scene that is intended to look like a completely “normal” visit by a prostitute to a completely “normal” German man. A young woman takes a seat in Höss’s study, undoes her thick braid of auburn hair, which is over a meter long, and takes off her shoes to submit to Höss. We learn that there was a sexual encounter after the next cut, when we see the Sturmbannführer cleaning his genital area extensively from behind.
Glazer tells the story of a mass murderer who lives in a beautiful catalogue home, sexually exploited the women in his captivity, and loves his own children. So far so bad. This leads away from the reality of Auschwitz, which was not a prison camp in an authoritarian state where the Kapos also helped themselves sexually. Sexual relations with Jews were taboo for the German camp occupants. In Glazer’s film, the simple-minded Höss family does not stand in contrast to the extermination process, but simply exists alongside it. In the case of The Zone of Interest, the correct insight that evil cannot simply be shown by depicting extreme cruelty has led instead to the depiction of the banal everyday life of brutes, who appear as interchangeable—in a way that the Holocaust, which has been shrunk to a backdrop, is not.
One wonders for which audience this film was made and what its message is. The Zone of Interest is not a film about the Holocaust; you have to already know history to understand the film. But it is not a film about the perpetrators and their perspective either; the bland character study of a single family is too shallow for that. Does it even provide a view of the Shoah that has never been seen before in cinematic form?
The Zone of Interest is the work of an ambitious filmmaker who wants to stand out with his supposedly extraordinary way of telling the events of World War II; for this purpose, he appropriates the genocide of the Jews and assumes the audience’s knowledge of the subject. But even for this, the much-praised sound of the horror is too quiet and the smoking chimney in the background too hackneyed. The work is obviously meant to be translated into today. Glazer uses Hitler’s planned and almost completely realized extermination of the Jews as a synonym for the capitalist West, which sits as a generalized evil perpetrator in blooming allotments in front of walls, behind which the Global South is exploited and starving. Israel, before and after October 7, lies of course at the forefront. Glazer uses the Holocaust as a mere prop, distorting the true tragedy and inflaming what is most dangerous for Jewish life today. Glazer’s “today” are the Europeans and Americans who live in prosperity and ignore the fate of their neighbors. The “de-Judaization” that Glazer undertakes in his film thereby delights the so-called “anti-Zionists” and the passionate antisemites from the Arab world to America.
Glazer Is Celebrated for His Perpetrator-Victim Reversal
The filmmaker stretches this far-fetched parallel to infinity. Yet when it comes to Jews and the genocide against them, the infinity of comparisons ends in Israel, because the world, since year one, but especially since October 7, has sensed there the opportunity to turn history on its head. They want to move the Jews into the gardens in front of the walls and fences behind which the new zone of interest they themselves have built is located: Gaza. This is Glazer’s perfidious idea of coming to terms with the past. He does not want to talk about the past and show what happened in Auschwitz, but to dock into the present. This is clear enough in the film, but especially in his speech accepting the film industry’s biggest award: “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?” This is surely what moves postcolonially trained intellectuals so much about the film, and what it so expertly underpins for the anti-Zionist movement. And it’s exactly what Glazer wanted—as the Friday Times, published in Pakistan, enthusiastically suspects, writing on February 27, 2023, under the title “Watching Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest as Israel Massacres People in Gaza”:
The film's contemporary nature is revealed in at least one more aspect: it appeared on screens less than a week after the current conflict between Israel and the Palestinians flared up, and this is also worth noting. Although this allusion is unintentional, what is immediately striking is the situation of the peaceful, carefree life of Zionist settlers and the suffering and dying Palestinians on the other side of the wall. The narrative around Operation Al-Aqsa Flood promoted by liberal media and commentators around the world revolved around Hamas’s attack on the music festival on October 7. The festival, where young people had carefree fun, took place just two kilometers from the walls of Gaza. On the one hand, the settlers’ carefree fun, and on the other, the tragedy of the Palestinians.
Social media is likewise overflowing with joy at Glazer’s Holocaust relativization. A Syrian Facebook user happily notes what the message is: “Not to say, ‘look what they did then,’ but ‘look what we do today,’ Glazer said, quickly dispelling the notion that comparing today’s horrors to the Nazis’ crimes is inherently trivializing or relativizing. He left no doubt that it was his expressed intention to show continuities between the monstrous past and our monstrous present.” Quite apart from the numerous expressions of gratitude to Glazer, which often end with the tag “#FreePalestine” on social media, it is easy to find countless anti-Israel statements sparked by Glazer’s film on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. The only difference between the cineastes’ praise and the usual antisemitic hate comments that can be found beneath almost all social media posts by Jewish institutions or even by Jewish private individuals since October 7 is that the relevant community first thanks Glazer for The Zone of Interest and only then writes antisemitic comments.
Glazer used the Jews as witnesses against themselves in a film about Auschwitz, instigating a rhetorical perpetrator-victim reversal, thereby contributing to the incitement of antisemitic mobs, such as those at American universities. The Oscar-winning film equates the Nazi Shoah with Israel in Gaza, and it does so with such ingenuity that a notion of colonialism in which Jews are perpetrators can be explained to schoolchildren on the basis of European Jewish history—which simultaneously gives every old, right-wing, dusty Nazi and every young, woke, left-wing antisemite great pleasure.
With his Rudolf Höss, Glazer puts himself on a par with Arendt and her Adolf Eichmann. He makes evil so small and trivial that even the worst relativizer of history can go along with it. We have long known what humans are capable of. Jonathan Glazer does not have to explain this to us, especially not on the back of the Jews and their fate.
Topics: Israel Initiative • TPPI Translations