Genocide out of sight, out of mind
Defining ‘The Zone of Interest’
(This piece originally appeared on my Substack, Artless. Subscribe to that here.)
Across the Vistula river on the Józef Piłsudski Bridge are tenement buildings in pastel shades of lemon, orange and brown, leading to the terracotta-pink walls and teal spire of St Joseph’s Church. For a time it must’ve seemed less a church than a crenellated fortress, built as it was in the Gothic Revival style with studded roofs and serrated pinnacles, and looming as it did over the south-west corner of Kraków’s Jewish Ghetto. Through there it’s a short walk down tree-lined streets to the branch of the Historical Museum housed in Oskar Schindler’s enamelware factory.
It gets a lot of visitors — rarely are you out of earshot of guides with their speeches or tour-groups with their questions or that shifting, oppressive clamour of reenacted dialogues and archive footage played off speakers and screens. So it’s not untoward that the reception of the museum has over a door, or did when I went five years ago, an electronic counter of visitors currently inside and queue waiting time. But you can also see why people might be reminded of where else you get that sort of counter: tourist attractions, theme parks. Near the end of the museum walk-through the floor roughens and undulates to mimic the terrain you’d have faced running through the ghetto. (An interactive approach similar in intent if less abstract in execution than Berlin’s Liebskind Museum.) The final room is walled in Hebrew and Polish text and has a plinth with an open, fibreglass book, aglow from inside; adagio string music plays.
Back in reception you can get a bite at the Film Café under photos of Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley and Steven Spielberg. For the building, prior to a museum, was a film location, or its modernist grey exterior was anyway. After the war, through the production and success of Schindler’s List, and up until 2002, the site remained a factory, though making telecoms equipment. Following that it became property of the local government, who split the site between MOCAK, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the museum on the Nazi occupation of Kraków.
In his black comedy novel The Devil’s Workshop by Czech author Jáchym Topol a young man from Terezín see his hometown become a hit with tourists for having been the location of concentration camp Theresienstadt (a subsequent plan to turn a mass grave in Khatyn, Belarus into a tourist site doesn’t go so well). Recreating the concentration camp experience for an audience was something Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke decried in Schindler’s List, especially for its in/famous sequence in which a train-load of female Jews are funnelled into showers, where they intuit the same threat a modern audience does, but at the last moment are blasted only with water:
The idea of creating entertainment of this… The mere idea of trying to draw and create suspense out of the question whether out of the shower-head gas is going to come or water, to me is unspeakable.¹
For what it’s worth, I don’t think that the scene has to be read so literally. Being miraculously snatched from the jaws of hell was the experience in micro of the Schindler Jews. And the text of Thomas Keneally’s book Schindler’s Ark, on which the film is based, reads:
Feet sticking in the mud, they were marched to the delousing plant and stripped by order of hefty young SS women with truncheons in their hands. Mila Pfefferberg was troubled by rumours of the type most prisoners of the Reich had by now heard — that some shower nozzles gave out a killing gas. These, she was delighted to find, merely produced icy water.
But neither do I wanna go over all the critiques of the film (as I wrote in my piece on Spielberg: “to his detractors he’s either too populist, or, when he tries not to be, pretentious; one hard cineaste blog of the 2000s complained the kid hiding in the latrine in Schindler’s List was far too well lit”). Yet to concede that his film traffics in melodrama or the sensationalist feels wrong too: can you over-heighten the emotions of the Holocaust? (You can certainly traduce them: take the smug revenge-irony of aesthetic and moral disaster The Boy in the Striped P.J.s). One, not exaggeration, but emphasis that Spielberg made which strikes me as right is how he depicts the jouissance of the hearty, chuckling Nazis. Here’s Rebecca West, in her extraordinary report from Nuremberg, ‘Greenhouse with Cyclamens’, describing Hermann Göring:
Sometimes, particularly when his humour was good, he recalled the madam of a brothel… Even now his wide lips smacked together as if he were a well-fed man who had heard no news as yet that his meals were to stop.
There’s even that legendarily chilling moment in If This Is a Man, Primo Levi’s memoir of his abduction to Auschwitz:
I opened the window and broke off [an] icicle, but at once a large, heavy guard prowling outside brutally snatched it away. “Warum?” [Why?] I asked in my poor German. “Hier ist kein warum” [Here there is no why], he replied, shoving me back inside.
Here there is no why. One thing we hardly dare admit is that this line — haughty, cruel — is, in its own diabolical way, good. It has the zing of a clever bully, whom we’d prefer to assume was an automaton of dumb appetites who wouldn’t know wit if it barbed him in the face. We don’t want to admit the charisma of cruelty; then we’d have to admit our susceptibility to it. In the opening montage of Schindler’s List Liam Neeson at a fancy dinner parts his lips for his cig smoke but also in envious sighs at what he’s seeing in snapshots: the swag of those celebrity-like SS.
It’s perverse to rank, maybe even to face off Holocaust films against each other. And there’s scant collegiality between the contributors to that doleful subgenre. Claude Lanzmann, director of the documentary Shoah, wrote in ‘Why Spielberg Has Distorted the Truth’ that the Holocaust is “unique in that it erects a ring of fire around itself, a borderline that cannot be crossed because there is a certain ultimate degree of horror that cannot be transmitted. To claim it is possible to do so is to be guilty of the most serious transgression.” In turn Pauline Kael called Shoah “a form of self-punishment”, describing it in The New Yorker as “logy and exhausting right from the start,” a review for which she got hate mail, and which she didn’t collect in book form, but later defended as her conflicted right to give as someone who was Jewish herself.
Maybe we can only assess what a particular film adds, what it doesn’t seem to fudge. There’s Alain Resnais’s documentary Night and Fog, and its images that would be era-defining, and revelatory to everyone except the victims, perpetrators and camp liberators (and onlookers: the French government had the film censored for showing the telltale cap of a gendarme standing guard at a deportation camp. Meanwhile both West German and Israeli governments, for separate reasons, tried to suppress the film). Then there’s Marcel Ophuls’ documentary The Sorrow and the Pity, which understood that for each ‘Never forget’, however freighted, there’s an equal and opposite ‘It made sense at the time.’ As for dramatic treatments like The Pianist, directed by Roman Polanski, boyhood inmate of the Kraków ghetto, Clive James put it best:
[the film] is a work of genius on every level, except, alas, for the press-pack promotional slogan attributed to the director himself. ‘The Pianist is a testimony to the power of music, the will to live, and the courage to stand against evil.’ If he actually said it, he flew in the face of his own masterpiece, which is a testimony to none of those things. In the Warsaw ghetto, the power of music, the will to live and the courage to stand against evil added up to very little, and The Pianist has the wherewithal to respect that sad fact and make sense of it. In the Warsaw ghetto, what counted was luck, and the luck had to be very good.
More recently, in Conspiracy, a BBC/HBO TV-movie directed by Frank Pierson, the Wannsee Conference about the Final Solution is portrayed as a team meeting in hell: loudmouths vying for air-time, rival camps trying to save face and resources. It’s the closest ancestor to Jonathan Glazer’s new film The Zone of Interest, which has at its midpoint a huge team meeting, a sort of away-day for camp commandants. And both film’s share a total focus on the Nazis and their genocide’s bureaucracy — the jockeying for position, the difficult work/life balance, steam let off at the end of the day with a stiff shot of schnapps. But what else than Conspiracy does Glazer do to make another Holocaust film worth it?
First off, he’s adapted a novel but in name only, that name being the title it shares with Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest. Although the novel too is set in Auschwitz and tells the story of a camp commandant, he’s one of three POV characters, all fictionalised. Mostly though the tone is different; like Topol’s novel, Amis’s is a black comedy, or is so in the third that lampoons the cliché-minded Commandant Doll, a grotesque in Amis’s eye. Whereas Glazer’s steely eye is trained on Rudolf Höss: nice dad, workaholic and real-life commandant of Auschwitz.
It’s not a realist film however: its strict design is too prominent for that. Glazer’s sound designers have remarked that it’s actually two films. Film 1 is what we see: the home life of Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) and kids, plus whichever parts of his work next door at the camp intrude. Shot with 10 static cameras the film’s built out of coverage to catch the actors at their most naturalistic, the kind of gleaner set-up of reality TV or like a scaled-down version of the DAU project. The visuals of Film 1 aggregate, as in a Roy Andersson film: adjoining the Höss house is a wall. The wall has the crooked fingers of barbed-wire brackets. These are interspersed with watchtowers. At night the light from over the wall reddens the bedrooms. In the mornings along with dew on the grass there’s ash.
Film 2 is the audio we hear alongside Film 1: an unceasing mechanical thrum, shot through with the occasional scream or order of execution or actual gunshot. It’s the counterpoint between Films 1 and 2 that produces the horror, the juxtaposition of a garden party, with its beer and cake and swimming kids, and the death-machine chugging in the background, out-of-sight but not out of earshot.
For the most part the Höss family alternate between ignoring and wryly commenting on the charnel-house next door. Hedwig, self-described “Queen of Auschwitz” sorts through plundered dresses with her fellow ladies of leisure, complaining an ill-fitting one must’ve belonged to a “petite Jewess”. Hedwig’s visting mother wonders, not without satisfaction, whether her Bolshevik-bookclubbing employer from when she was a cleaner is “in there”. The member of the household most bothered appears to be the dog, skittish at hearing the bloodthirsty barks over the wall and needily following Hedwig from room to room. The dog and one other…
The associations we make between what we see on-screen and hear off it; the placing side-by-side of bourgeois comforts and historical horrors; the fretful Hösses trying to keep-up-with-the-Jonses while yards away people are fighting for one more day of life; dialogue that ranges from insinuative to clinically direct (in one scene Höss hears out two engineers on how to improve the efficiency of the ovens): it’s easy for all this to make you assume The Zone of Interest just reiterates, and keeps reiterating throughout the film, the banality of evil. But it’s more than that. Glazer cuts from the horror-adjacent splendour of the garden to extreme close-ups of its flowers. Later we see how the flowers get so splendid: a gardener is sewing the soil with ash — metempsychosis via horticulture. At times the evil is so unbanal it can only be shown abstractly, as when the film cuts to a full screen of red: The Shining’s wall of historical-atrocity blood become an admonishing slab. As for who is evil, the film title holds on screen for seconds longer than expected, till we might start to wonder how far, over whom, this zone of interest extends.
It’s wrong as well to say the film is purely a counterpoint of the seen and heard (and ignored). The material world over the great grey wall does manage to leak through: most of all as ash, once as bone. Höss on finding a jawbone yells at his kids paddling in a river to get out as it ominously clouds up. And back home he has to hock into a sink snot that’s stained black with the dead.
Does The Zone of Interest’s focus on Nazis come at the cost of the dead? This was the same complaint made of Schindler’s List by many Jewish intellectuals, including Maus author Art Spiegelman. Indeed the only sight of the Jewish prey in the film is their striped shirts we glimpse through tall grass.
If it’s natural to identify, imaginatively involve ourselves only with who and what we see on screen², then Holocaust films that focus on the victims might help the audience think, ‘That could be me, abused and wronged. I’d never be the one ratting on my neighbours or scavenging their belongings. Or turning a blind eye to what’s over the wall of my leisure and comfort.’ The Zone of Interest denies its audience that. All that’s left to identify with are the perpetrators.
In this, Schindler’s List was a forerunner of The Zone of Interest. It too is about Nazis more than Jews, though in its case it’s more a lead actor/supporting actor alternation than the spotlight on the Nazis that Glazer maintains. Beyond the obvious man-bites-dog appeal of a story about a Nazi breaking good in the older film, its focus on the Germans ought as well to raise a question: Why weren’t there more Schindlers among them?
And why not more like The Zone of Interest’s Polish maid? For it’s not accurate to say there are two films in one. There are three. The third is a short film about the Hösses’ young maid, who, with her own skin to save, as we see when she’s threatened by Hedwig for not mopping a puddle, leaves apples in the mud for prisoners to hopefully find.
Glazer shoots her secret heroism as if it’s a science fiction or horror film: in creepy grey-and-white heat vision, with Mica Levi’s score finally coming in to play, a minimalist, unsettling noisetrack of synth blarps. Throughout, on voiceover, we hear Höss telling the Hansel and Gretel fairytale to his kids in bed, or them recounting their dreams after a sleep-walk. The contrast with the rest of the naturalistic, unsoundtracked³ film couldn’t be more jarring. It’s as if the film finds the maid’s act so otherworldly, so strange as to be monstrous in the original meaning of the word: a divine admonishment.
But then the film does something even more jarring than these dream-like scenes. At the end it cuts from the war to the present day. (Again like Schindler’s List,which cut to the present-day survivors among the Schindler Jews.) In The Zone of Interest we go from the stairs outside a swanky Nazi ball, where the always-on Höss was calculating how much gas it’d take to kill the room, to inside the gas showers at Auschwitz in their current museum form.
So begins a montage of its other exhibits. A lesser director would’ve shown those images not as exhibits but as themselves, the pathetic piles of shoes and suitcases; would’ve have used them in the way the museum has and in the way those images are familiar to us — that is, seen beyond the glass.⁴ But Glazer shows them as museum exhibits, glass included, and what’s more, attended by everyday morning cleaners, who hoover and dust. Dust, that innocent trace of human bodies.
Then Glazer jars us one last time. He cuts from his ‘But this happened’ documentary coda back into the past, with Höss getting his breath on the dark stairs after a coughing spell. Those heaps of suitcases and shoes: that’s what he’s off to produce: to murder so many Hungarian Jews that the operation will be named for him, till he’s executed for it⁵, and his murders and those of his co-conspirators are turned into museum exhibits, into movies.
After leaving the history museum I went next door to the former factory halls, now the Museum of Contemporary Art. That day there was an exhibition by Wojciech Wilczyk called ‘Innocent Eye’. On a long wall hung photographs he’d taken of old synagogues around Poland, some derelict, some since repurposed. Underneath each photo was a caption recording conversations he’d had with locals who’d seen him at work. Some nudge-and-winked, “You know what happened to those people”. Others complained, “The Jewish community. They are keen on getting money — but to actually do anything, put some sealant on the roof — oh no, not them.” Some even made threats behind Wilczyk’s back: “If Józek saw that, he would run out and thump him.”
Oblique references, dark insinuations, not far off what you hear in The Zone of Interest. It’s like the onlookers wanted to prove Brecht’s point in the last line of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui: “Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.” A Spielberg can’t schmaltz up historical wounds, a Haneke can’t stifle the bad influence of entertainment with his better artistic example. What’s left is a Glazer and the window he’s made, through which we see others, can look down on them if we like. But we look through our reflection.
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[1] Haneke’s comment can be half-explained by the outsize role he gives to the propagandising power of art; his own finger-wagging filmography has yet to dampen much media-taught violence in the real world. (Plus him making his comment at a roundtable with Judd Apatow and John Krasinski reminds me of the way Tom McCarthy, scourge of the British literary establishment, kept getting nominated for the Booker Prize, as if their entirely unruffled and snickering revenge was to have him hang out with Howard Jacobson at a photo shoot.)
[2] Crass comparison but Spielberg and Lucas proved they could get away with making Indiana Jones sound reprehensible so long as the audience didn’t see it.
[3] There is music in the world of the film: Höss’s daughter plays a piano song with lyrics by German-Polish Jewish historian, Joseph Wulf.
[4] In the last pages of Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’ comic Crossed+100 the main character points out that every human skull we see — stacked in a catacomb, clasped in wax from the candle on its crown, eyelessly staring at you through plexiglass — was once a person as real as you, who breathed and felt and died.
[5] Höss, days before his execution, became a relapsed Catholic and repented in a statement to the court and a letter to his kids. My kneejerk urge to put scare quotes around repent… Primo Levi, who read the memoir Höss actually got to write while on death-row, stayed convinced the man was full of shit, “a coarse, stupid, arrogant, long-winded scoundrel.” But at the far edges of human possibility, what does sincerity mean any more? Höss or the Polish maid — who is the more extreme?
