I want to make some observations about the Jonathan Glazer film The Zone of Interest. Which superlative to apply to it. Chilling? Impressive? Harrowing? Grotesque? The plot is minimal, and I assume hews close to the historical facts. In 1939, after Germany invaded Poland, a prison camp was set up in Oświęcim (in German, “Auschwitz”). The film is based on the experience of the camp’s commandant Rudolf Höß and his wife Hedwig, who live in a roomy new house, with extensive gardens, just on the other side of the wall enclosing the death camp.
Before continuing, it’s probably a good idea to review a few facts about the camp, given that these days you can’t expect much knowledge of history. Here’s a sufficiently accurate summary from Wikipedia:
“The initial transport of political detainees to Auschwitz consisted almost solely of Poles (for whom the camp was initially established). For the first two years, the majority of inmates were Polish. In May 1940, German criminals brought to the camp as functionaries established the camp's reputation for sadism. Prisoners were beaten, tortured, and executed for the most trivial of reasons. The first gassings—of Soviet and Polish prisoners—took place in block 11 of Auschwitz I around August 1941.
Construction of Auschwitz II began the following month, and from 1942 until late 1944 freight trains delivered Jews from all over German-occupied Europe to its gas chambers. Of the 1.3 million people sent to Auschwitz, 1.1 million were murdered. The number of victims includes 960,000 Jews (865,000 of whom were gassed on arrival), 74,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Romani, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and up to 15,000 others. Those not gassed were murdered via starvation, exhaustion, disease, individual executions, or beatings. Others were killed during medical experiments.”
The subject of Jonathan Glazer’s film is the split in consciousness in people who have no trouble going about the daily business of middle-class life while others, a few meters away, are being starved, tortured and killed. None of the carnage is shown in the film, though faint cries of agony do sometimes drift over the wall. Also, at various moments we see in the background squat brick chimneys belching smoke. But life at home trundles on with all the indifference imaginable—nothing extraordinary is occurring, the characters seem to feel. They’re just nice family types, doing their job, upholding the Führer, with no special rancor or sadism. In short, ‘the banality of evil,” in Arendt’s notorious phrase. I didn’t find this at all incredible and would have felt the same even without the evidence offered by the Eichmann trial in Nürnberg in 1961. People can’t be counted on to behave ethically if doing so requires them to put their settled lives at risk. Clearly observable and unfortunately very widespread is the human ability to wall off any consideration of suffering and injustice from thought and feeling if that’s what’s required to preserve one’s own comfort and secure position. It’s a psychological feature that has become glaringly obvious since October of 2023.
Mr. Glazer has come under heavy fire in the wake of his acceptance speech at the Academy Awards ceremony. The attack is at best foolish. If artists have no ethical commitments at all, how valuable can their work be? There were early signs that the Shoah was coming, but nothing, or too little, was done to block it. Given that it did occur, shouldn’t we at the least try to find some perspectives and conclusions to draw from it that will apply to eventualities coming later? Should not any series of events having even a passing resemblance to it be brought to a halt? Canons of justice are meaningless if applied selectively, nor does make right. International law governs everyone and can’t be flicked aside merely because you can. Whenever collective punishment is wreaked on an entire people, Hitler and his fiendish ideology is thrust back into active existence. I will, though, confess to a certain cynicism about the present day, unavoidable in view of events from the last few months. Most people are like Commandant Rudolf Höß. They know what’s happening, but they have a wedding or a week-end trip or promotional engagements or a soccer game to attend: they’re not going to let anything interfere with that. Every man for himself.