Film Review: 'The Zone of Interest'

Watching ‘The Zone of Interest’, directed by Jonathan Glazer, my mind kept going back to the sub-title of Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book, ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil’.

Rudolf Hoss was the commandant of Auschwitz. He and his wife, Hedwig, lived in a comfortable and spacious house built literally next to Auschwitz.

Large parts of the film show Hedwig involved in the day-to-day running of the house, assisted by her Polish maid, who works for the Hoss’s on the understanding that at any moment, for any real or perceived transgression, her employment would be terminated and she would be sent to the gas-chambers.

In one particularly chilling scene, Hedwig - annoyed at the girl for not completing an assigned task to her satisfaction - tells the girl that she could instruct her husband to ‘have her ashes spread'.

Nazi functionaries visit the house, plans are laid out in the dining room revealing the expansion of the camp with the aim of maximizing the efficiency with which the gassing and burning of victims will be carried out. The methods are discussed calmly, they listen intently, as if they were debating the expansion of a chain of retail supermarkets.

The Hoss children are shown doing all the things that children at that time would do: playing in the forest, picking flowers, helping their mother, being read to at night by their father before falling asleep.

Hedwig’s mother comes to visit: she admires the house, the large bedrooms, clearly proud of how well her daughter has done for herself. At night, she is shown looking out of the bedroom window, and the glass reflects the camps’s chimneys glowing red and orange, smoke and ash billowing from them and filling the night sky.

Much of he film’s power derives from the horrific reality, unfolding day-to-day, sometimes muted, but omnipresent, right behind the other side of the wall screening the Hoss family from the crimes for which they are responsible: the gunshots; the shouts and screams; the glowing chimneys; the ash that falls like snow; the smoke emitted by the constantly-arriving trains, visible only from above the top of the walls of the camp as each transport arrives, bearing its cargo of human misery.

Hoss takes his children swimming in the river near the camp. He reaches out and his hand touches what turns out to be a fragment of human bone, perhaps a piece of spinal chord. Immediately, he pulls them out of the river.

It is as though despite his best efforts to ignore the enormity of his crimes, he is confronted with them, each day, and by extension, his family is, too. The children are complicit, one of the brothers opens a bag, out of which spill a number of gold teeth; he boy holds up one of the teeth for examination, as if he were examining a block of lego.

Early in the film, Hedwig and some friends rummage through some clothing deposited at the house by one of the inmates. Hedwig takes a fancy to a mink coat. She tries it on, and decides she will keep it. One of her friends laughs as she discovers a diamond hid in tube of toothpaste. They speculate whether the diamond belonged to a Jewish neighbor now incarcerated behind the wall, all spoken in a casual, flippant manner.

In order to be successful, to be acclaimed and recognized, and to gain advancement within the National Socialist social order, it is essential not to question, but to adapt and accept that this is simply ‘how things are’; the most abnormal, most horrific of events, must be normalized, to the extent that they become banal.

Acts of wickedness, of cruelty, if conducted both randomly and frequently, come to be seen by the perpetrators as perfectly normal.

And yet, in the midst of such depravity and evil, small acts kindness - of resistance, really - are still possible: a young Polish girl, under the cover of darkness, sets out on her bicycle and leaves apples for the prisoners in the work crews to find.

In ‘Schindlers List’, the audience may draw some comfort from the figure of Oskar Schindler, the ‘good Nazi’, who saved lives by giving Jews jobs in his armaments factory.

No such solace can be taken from ‘Zone of Interest’. The ‘machinery of murder’, built by men like Rudolf Hoss - and Adolf Eichmann - depended for its efficiency on the acceptance and normalization of murder on a scale never before witnessed in a supposedly ‘civilized’ country such as Germany once had been.

As Hannah Arendt stared across the courtroom at Adolf Eichmann, she saw the embodiment of a mundane-looking bureaucrat, a family man who, at first glance, would appear incapable of the monstrous crimes for which he was executed.

Which is all the more reason why she chose as her subtitle, ‘The banality of evil’.