2023-05-23 11:47:00
DThis garden is the pride and joy of Hedwig, the housewife. She planned and laid out everything, the vegetable patches and fruit trees and the greenhouse and the pool. Their realm is bordered on one long side by a high wall reinforced with barbed wire. Gravel paths lead to the family home, a two-storey building with clean lines and no architectural frills. Her husband praises her when he comes home after work, the three children – two to five years old – play carefree in the little “paradise”, as the mother calls her refuge.
The wall is the outer wall of the concentration camp Auschwitz, in the “paradise” lives the camp commandant Rudolf Höß with his family. The film that is playing there is called “The Zone of Interest” – after the German term “interest area”, which the Nazis euphemistically used to name a restricted zone around Auschwitz – and is the competition entry that, after the first half of the festival in Cannes, attracted many ratings.
The boldness of director Jonathan Glazer’s will to style takes your breath away. It is a British-Polish production in which only German is spoken. The real house of the Höss family was not directly against the wall, but some distance away, but from the upper floor, the Höss daughter Brigitte later recalled, she could see the prisoner quarters and the chimneys of the old crematorium. Glazer pushed the house right up against the wall for his experimental set-up, a trick that is entirely justifiable.
And so you can see the Hössens going about their daily lives: leading visitors through the little garden, splashing about in the pool, eating supper in the house, being served by their domestics – all dumb prisoners. They could hear and smell what was happening behind the wall. You should hear and smell it. You can see the red glow over the crematorium at night. You can hear the screams of the tortured and the shots of the guards. The Höß family hides all this.
Here’s the first question that The Zone of Interest doesn’t answer. Not even trying to answer: Is that ignorance? Of course not. Is that not wanting to know? Sure, but that’s not enough of an explanation. Is this knowing approval due to racist and nationalist infatuation? Definitely too. Is that the longing for an idyll in the midst of a situation that is perceived as threatening? Without doubt. Is that the pride of the ascended petty bourgeoisie in the status they have achieved, which they do not want to jeopardize by allowing millions of murders to get their hands on them?
Lots of attempts at explanation, but Jonathan Glazer doesn’t really care about them. In a very free film adaptation of Martin Amis’ novel of the same name, he provides a description of the situation that is possibly more oppressive than anything else we have seen in Holocaust films so far. In a garden, she concentrates the attitude of an entire nation that wanted nothing to do with it: from the civilians on the “home front” who one morning saw long lines of Jews from their town running to a meeting point, to the soldiers of the supposedly honorable Wehrmacht, to the employees of the Reichsbahn, who brought the trains to the extermination camps onto the tracks.
For half an hour, maybe three quarters of an hour, you watch this tremendous ignoring of reality and elimination of conscience with increasing perplexity. But at some point – when Glazer’s concept is crystal clear to you – you wonder if that can be enough. There is little development in the permanent horror.
Hedwig’s mother, who comes to visit, cannot stand the smell and the glow of hell and flees the first night. Hedwig herself once rebelled against the cadaveric obedience to the fatherland and the head of the family when her husband was threatened with a transfer – but it was not a rebellion of conscience, but one against the impertinence of having to give up her “paradise”.
Somehow Glazer must have felt that this one perspective is not enough, and so he shows – as if recorded with a night vision camera – a resistance girl hiding food for forced laborers under cover of darkness (but otherwise does not appear in the film).
Ash on the fields, that’s all you see
Glazer’s last feature film to date was called “Under the Skin”, in which a succubus alien – played by Scarlett Johannsen – seeks out men in Scotland and destroys them. Ultimately, it is a film about what constitutes human nature. This demon discovers something in itself that it didn’t know before: empathy.
“The Zone of Interest” can be read as the complete opposite: as the denial, the denial, the suppression of any human empathy. With every new genocide we have had to get used to the fact that people are capable of this, with renewed horror. Since then we have been looking for the psychological, historical and social factors that make this possible over and over again.
Glazer is only marginally interested in that, if at all. It presents a silently creeping image of the greatest horror possible, which is so effective because it doesn’t show the horror. Christian Friedel is a caring and loving father and Sandra Hüller is a dutiful and responsible keeper of the house. Father Höss is seen a few times in business meetings about better methods of murder, and once Mother Höss snaps at an employee that she can arrange for her husband to scatter her ashes in the fields. More horror does not get through the filter.
One gets the impression that Glazer is working on the image that has dominated the portrayal of Nazis in Anglo-American film and television for half a century – the roaring, heartless brute. He operates with 100% contrast. There have been cracks in this portrayal for some time, Christoph Waltz’ sophisticated (if still ruthless) officer in Inglourious Basterds or Philip Hochmair’s modern managerial Heydrich in Die Wannseekonferenz (now in French cinemas). ).
Above all, however, there was Theodor Kotulla’s 1977 film “From a German Life”, a year before “Holocaust” interrupted the sleep of West German oblivion forever. It was a film in which Götz played George Rudolf Höß, and it was no less terrifying than The Zone of Interest. At some point in Kotulla’s film, Höß’s wife sees through the full extent of the machinery of destruction and, frightened, confronts her husband, who refers to his sense of duty. Would he also kill their children if he was ordered to do so, she asks? Of course he would, Höß replies – as soon as he gets the order.
Kotulla isn’t content with a horror cabinet of petrified consciences and stunned humanity like Glazer. He describes “a German life”, he tries – largely conclusively – to answer the question of how the First World War soldier Höß could become the Auschwitz Höß. Glazer’s film, on the other hand, seems like an illustration of the worst monsters from Hannah Arendt’s thesis of the “banality of evil”. One has to warn against the rebirth of such monsters, especially nowadays. But in the end, “The Zone of Interest” falls far short.
PS: After the war, Rudolf Höß hid on a farm in Schleswig-Holstein and waited for the opportunity to flee to South America. A Nazi hunter tracked down his family and forced Höss’s wife to hand over her husband’s address, threatening to send their older boy to Russia. He was arrested, sentenced to death in Poland and hanged a few meters from his old villa in 1947. Brigitte Höß married an American engineer and lived in Washington for a long time; only her husband knew of the family history. Hedwig Höß died in 1989 while visiting her daughter’s guest room. Martin Amis died on the day of the film’s premiere in Cannes.
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