340: Zone of Interest

Archival Spaces 340

The Zone of Interest

Uploaded 9 February 2024

In June 1990, I flew to Katowice, Poland to work on a traveling exhibit of American film, developed by the now-defunct U.S. Information Agency. While there I took a day trip to Oświęcim, better known by its German name, Auschwitz. In  Auschwitz I, the work camp, visitors first viewed a short film, made by the Russians in 1945 that barely mentioned the word Jews, shockingly, and included only a Catholic funeral; the signage in the onsite exhibits mentioned the number of Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, etc. killed, but failed to identify them as Jews. I then asked my driver to take me to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the death camp, but there were no signs to direct us, so we had trouble finding it. Once there, I noticed that there were ordinary Poles living in what had been the villa of Camp Commandant Rudolf Höß – again no signage anywhere – and apartment buildings and wash hanging on clotheslines within a hundred feet of the gas chambers. This was literally months after the Communist government of Poland had fallen, so it was not surprising that anti-Semitism still informed the presentation; on the other hand, today it is a crime in Poland to say the Poles participated in the Holocaust.

I remembered that trip watching Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023) recently, an extremely disturbing film, possibly because it eschews any visual depiction of violence. The film begins with the title appearing in grey on white on screen, switching to white on black, then slowly fading to black, the darkness continuing over atonal music for seemingly minutes, both an elegy and an overture. Halfway through the film, Glazer fades from a close-up of a rose to a completely red screen and holds the shot, one of Glazer’s experimental techniques. He later uses a thermal imaging camera to film two black and white scenes of a young Polish girl hiding food in places where inmates will find it, while the film ends with cinema verité shots of Polish charwomen today cleaning the gas chamber, the crematoria, the exhibits of hair and shoes in Auschwitz I, which heightens the everyday banality of what we have witnessed.  

The action begins with a long shot of a German family in bathing suits, swimming, picking berries, then returning home, where Rudolf Höß and his family celebrate the Commandant’s birthday. While he is in SS uniform, there is little indication here or anywhere else in the film that we are in Auschwitz. For the family, it is a privileged, happy life with a large house, numerous servants, and free food and clothing. Only the soundtrack with its non-stop din of dogs barking, gunshots, screams beyond the high wall, and the chimneys constantly belching smoke and fire reveals where we actually are, while the stench of burning bodies is inscribed in the faces of newcomers, like Höß’s mother-in-law.

It takes a focused eye to see the horror of genocide, e.g. when Hedwig Höß tries on a full-length fur coat brought to her by an inmate, when dad chases the kids out of a creek after finding something, presumably human remains, when the oldest boy in his Hitler Youth uniform inspects a pouch of gold teeth, later locking his brother in the greenhouse and making a hissing sound, or when an inmate spreads ashes in the garden for fertilizer. Yet, when Frau Höß tends her garden or hosts pool parties for friends, the family steadfastly looks away, just like the majority of good German citizens looked away when their Jewish neighbors were deported. Hedwig quickly burns her mother’s note, after she flees without a word. The first family crisis occurs only when Höß is transferred to KZ Oranienburg, the wife insists on staying in her paradise, because country life is good for the children. She is apparently ok with her husband being almost pathologically detached, getting sex from inmates in his office, or showing more tenderness to his horse than to her.

Other than the title, there is virtually no connection to the Martin Amis novel, on which the film is ostensibly based. The novel concerns the Commandant’s jealousy, when he thinks his wife is having an affair with another SS Officer. The never consummated affair is barely hinted at in a greenhouse scene in The Zone of Interest, where Frau Höß gives a cigarette to an SS officer and quietly smokes with him.

Not mentioned in any contemporary reviews of The Zone of Interest is that Glazer was probably conceptually inspired by another source: Theodor Kottula’s 1977 German feature, Aus einem deutschen Leben (translated: A German Life, but released as Death is My Trade), based on Rudolf Höß’s published autobiography. While Kotulla’s film covers Höß’s career from World War I to Auschwitz, we see no violence, no selection ramp, no killings, although we and two inmates hear them. Both films treat the happy bourgeois family similarly, ignoring the horror, Höß consciously shielding them from the specifics of his job. Kotulla and Glazer keep their actors at a distance, their performances cold, unemotional, with rare exceptions zombie-like. In both films the Commandant reviews architectural drawings for new more efficient crematoria, but, as was with all Nazi terminology, language obfuscates, speaking of units processed rather than human beings.

It was that level of dehumanization that allowed ordinary Germans after the war to turn themselves from a nation of perpetrators into a nation of victims, steadfastly repressing their crimes for more than a generation.

Coda: After discussions with my colleague Raye Farr (formerly of the Holocaust Museum, Washington, D.C.), it seems clear, the film’s geography is ambiguous. Höß’s villa was outside Auschwitz I, the work camp, not Birkenau, as I have assumed all these years, but the proximity of the large crematoria, seen belching smoke and fire from the villa, suggest Auschwitz II, which would have been behind and west of the villa. The infamous ramp at Birkenau only became operational in 1944 with the arrival of the Hungarian Jews, the old ramp lying between Auschwitz I and II.