Archival Spaces

340: Zone of Interest

Archival Spaces 340

The Zone of Interest

Uploaded 9 February 2024

**The infamous selection ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau today**

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.

**Aerial view of Auschwitz Birkenau with Höß Villa top left**

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.

*Zone of Interest* (2023, Jonathan Glazer)

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.

**Sandra Hüller as Hedwig Höß** in *Zone of Interest*

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.

**Christian Friedel as Höß with Topf & Sons, builders of the crematoria**

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.

**The real Höß** (**right) with SS Buddies**

*Aus einem deutschen Leben* (1977) with Elisabeth Schwarz, **Götz** **Georg**

*Aus einen deutschen Leben* (1977, Theodor Kotulla)

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.

*Zone of Interest* (2023) pool party in the shadow of industrialized death

339: Kinemathek Update

Archival Spaces 339

Deutsche Kinemathek Update

Uploaded 26 January 2024

The news took a little longer to arrive than initially indicated in my Archival Spaces 319 blog (https://archivalspaces.com/2023/04/14/319-deutsche-kinemathek/)), but it is good, indeed. As reported in April 2023, the Deutsche Kinemathek and Museum für Film und Fernsehen on Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz had lost its lease and was seemingly going to become homeless since ground had yet to be broken next to Berlin’s Martin Gropius Building, the envisioned (and still planned) new permanent home of the German film archive. While the Arsenal Cinema and the German Film and TV Academy, the Kinemathek’s co-tenants in the building, had found new spaces, the Kinemathek as of April had not. Now, the Deutsche Kinemathek has sent out a press release, stating they will be moving to a new temporary facility in January 2025, after the Film Museum is shuttered at the end of October 2024.

For the foreseeable future, the Deutsche Kinemathek will move to the E-Werk building, located less than a mile from Potsdamer Platz, close to the former Checkpoint Charlie and the border between what was East and West Berlin for 45years after World War II. A former electric power substation, Abspannwerk Buchhändlerhof, originally built in 1885, the electrical works were subsequently enlarged and rebuilt over the years, the existing building designed by the architect Hans Heinrich Müller between 1925 and 1928 in a Neue Sachlichkeit aesthetic. In the 1980s, the electric substation was closed, only to reopen after German reunification in 1993 as a techno music night club, whose DJs made it world famous. The techno-club closed in 1997 and the building was renovated as a temporary event space in 2006.

When the Kinemathek moves in a year from now, it will have 4000 square meters (ca. 43,000 feet³) for office, archive, and exhibition space. The Kinemathek’s material culture archive, housing the collections of Marlene Dietrich, Paul Kohner, Werner Herzog, Ken Adam, and Gerhard Lamprecht, among countless others, will become available again to researchers after a brief period of closure for the transfer, as will the institution’s TV-Mediathek, which presently includes more than 12,000 broadcasts, spanning seven decades from broadcasters licensed the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic. The Kinemathek’s photo archives, including around 500,000 still and production photos, 100,000 personal photos, and 50,000 photos relevant to cinematic and festival history, will also be housed on-site.

***Marlene Dietrich Collection on display at Museum for Film & Television, Berlin***

While the Museum for Film and Television with its strikingly beautiful permanent exhibitions, will close its doors permanently in October, at least until the move to the Gropius site, – if you are in Berlin before then, it is well worth a visit -, the Kinemathek’s Ewerk site, with its vast main hall on the ground floor, and adjacent service counter hall, will present temporary “pop-up” exhibitions, as well as “experimental forms,” for traveling exhibitions and those developed with outside partners. Finally, the new space will include a small cinema, which will allow for film screenings for the first time in the Kinemathek’s own space (rather than at the Arsenal), although it is as yet unclear, whether the theatre will only be utilized for internal screenings and those of partners, or eventually include a public program.

This development is quite an accomplishment for Director Rainer Rother, who will retire in 2025 after the move to the new facility is completed, and who for more than a decade had sought a new space for the Deutsche Kinemathek, given budgetary restrictions placed on the institution by the Minister of Culture of the Federal Republic, which controls the purse strings.

It should also be noted that the Deutsche Kinemathek’s film archive and film restoration work has continued unabated during this period of instability. The film archive is housed on the outskirts of Berlin, as are its digital restoration facilities. Recent high-profile restorations have included Werner Schroeter’s Palermo oder Wolfsburg (1980), Werner Hochbaum’s Brüder (1929), G.W. Pabst’s The Mistress of Atlantis (1932), and Helke Sander’s Der subjektive Faktor (1981).

Finally, the Deutsche Kinemathek is continuing its longstanding cooperation with the Berlinale, International Film Festival, programming often ground-breaking retrospectives. This year’s retrospective begins in February, “An Alternate Cinema – From the Deutsche Kinemathek Archives,” and will feature “unconventional and idiosyncratic” film productions made in Germany between 1960 and 1980

**Werner Hochbaum’s proletarian classic,** **Brüder** **(1929)**

338: The Kawakita Diaries

Archival Spaces 338

The Kawakita Diaries 1932

Uploaded 15 January 2024

**Nagamasa and Kashiko Kawakita** **Passport Photos**, **1932 Kawakita Memorial Film Institute**

In April 1993, I was invited by my colleague (and now long-time friend), Hisashi Okajima of the Film Center at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, to give the opening lecture for their three-month film program, “American Films – The Little Known.” I had brought with me from the George Eastman Museum a group of silent films by Thomas Ince and Cecil B. DeMille, starring the Japanese actor, Sessue Hayakawa, including The Wrath of the Gods (1914), The Typhoon (1914), The Cheat (1915), and, most importantly, Hayakawa’s own production, The Dragon Painter (1919), none of which had been seen in Japan since their original release. While in Tokyo, we also began negotiating an exchange of these films, which, though made in America, constituted an important element of Japanese national patrimony. I already knew what I hoped to get in trade: unique German silent films, only to be found in the Film Collection, including Lupu Pick’s masterpiece, Sylvester / New Year’s Eve (1924), a film Lotte Eisner discusses extensively in her The Haunted Screen. Unfortunately, I was told the deposit terms to the Museum were that these films could never again leave Japan. I also heard about another large collection of German and European films in Tokyo’s National Film Archive, the Kawakita Memorial Film Collection., and had vague memories of Madame Kawakita attending a FIAF conference.

*Sylvester / New Year’s Eve* (1924, Lupu Pick)

I had no idea how German films had gotten to Japan or anything more specific about Kawakita. I did come across the name again when I curated a Dr. Arnold Fanck exhibit at the Munich Film Museum since Fanck had directed The Daughter of the Samurai (1937). Now, the Danish film journal, Kosmorama, has published in English an essay by Wayne E. Arnold and Adrian Wood on a unique diary by Kashiko Kawakita of her and her husband’s honeymoon to Germany in 1932, which reveals the extensive relationship the Kawakitas had to the German film industry: https://www.kosmorama.org/artikler/kashiko-kawakita?fbclid=IwAR07esRMb9LZimnnShMO0UtoBVbcQxEhOdau_8O5EpzRw0i7z9NLAmyJq6w

*Daughter of the Samurai* (1937, Dr. Arnold Fanck) with Setsuko Hara

In October 1928, Kawakita Nagamasa (1903–1981) established the Towa Shoji Goshi Kaisha (Towa Trading Partnership Company) to export German films to Japan, since he, like many in the Japanese film industry was worried about the growing dominance of American films and wanted to create a counterbalance by introducing more European films. In 1932, Kawakita, after marrying his secretary, Kawakita Kashiko (1908-1993), traveled to Berlin, in the hopes of negotiating a trade agreement with UFA. It was not Kawakita’s first trip to Germany. Speaking nearly perfect German, which he had learned while studying in Germany in 1923-24, Kawakita returned in 1927, to negotiate distribution deals for German films, while working for other companies. During their 1932 trip to Berlin, the Kawakitas were mostly interested in German sound films and German sound film technology, since until 1935, the great majority of films produced without sound in Japan. Indeed, in 1933, 81% of Japanese films were still silent, even though Heinosuke Gosho had directed the first talkie, The Neighbor’s Wife and Mine (1931).

Towa Release *Girls in Uniform* **(1931, Leontine Sagen)** **Kawakita Memorial Film Institute**

*The Congress Dances* (1931, Erik Charell)

Having previously visited Italy and Switzerland, the couple was made aware of considerable anti-Japanese sentiment in Berlin, given Japanese imperialist activity in Manchuria and Shanghai. Nevertheless, with the help of Japanese intermediaries and Hans Fitzke, the German representative of Towa in Berlin, they were able initially to meet the UFA’s head of foreign distribution, Wilhelm Meydam, and tour the Afifa film laboratories, one of the largest in Europe. One of the first films they screened was Leontine Sagan’s Girls in Uniform (1932), which would become a huge hit for Towa in Japan, although Nagamasa was initially unenthusiastic about the film’s prospects in Japan, and had to be convinced by Kashiko to purchase the Japanese rights. The annual UFA convention was taking place in Berlin at the time, allowing the Kawakitas to meet numerous UFA luminaries, including Erich Pommer, Conrad Veidt, Renate Müller, and Will Fritsch, while also attending screenings of UFA’s famous film operettas, Her Grace Commands (1931, Hanns Schwarz) and The Congress Dances (1931, Erik Charell). In total, the Kawakitas viewed an amazing 65 films during their stay in Berlin from 19 July to 23 August, of which 21 were eventually imported to Japan, including the previously mentioned films, as well as Bombs Over Monte Carlo (1931, Hanns Schwarz), Emil and the Detectives (1931, Gerhardt Lamprecht), Niemandsland (1931, Viktor Trivas), L’Atlantide (1932, G.W. Pabst), and Vampyr (1932, Carl Dreyer). That more films were not imported to Japan had to do with the weakness of the Japanese Yen.

As Arnold and Wood also note, Kashiko and Nagamasa were also intensely interested in sound film technology and new dubbing technology, in particular. To that end, they set up a dubbing session into Japanese for Dreyer’s Vampyr, utilizing the Tobis-Polyphon-Film at the Afifa labs. They also met and became friends with Dr. Guido Bagier, a German sound film pioneer at the Tobis Company, responsible for the first German sound films in 1930, but who by 1932 was experimenting with color. Finally, the Kawakitas developed a close personal and professional relationship with the couple, Karl Koch and Lotte Reininger (Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed, 1926); Koch would direct the German version of the first Japanese talkie to be exported to Europe by Towa, Nippon (1932).

**Karl Koch and Lotte Reininger in Paris in exile, 1930s**

“Kashiko Kawakita and the 1932 Shoji Film Diary,” goes into much more detail than can be related here and makes a fascinating read for anyone interested in the mostly still little-known relationship between the German and Japanese film industries before World War II.

**Kashiko and Nagamasa Kawakita on board ship to Europe.** **Kawakita Memorial Film Institute**

337: Bratři/Brothers (2023)

Archival Spaces 337

Bratři / Brothers (2023, Tomáš Mašín)

Uploaded 15 December 2023

Ambassador Jaroslav Olša and the Czech Consulate in Los Angeles recently invited guests to a special screening of the Czech entry to the Academy Awards, Bratři / Brothers (2023, Tomáš Mašín), at the Crescent Theater in Beverly Hills with the director in attendance. The film opened in Prague in October. Like several recent films coming out of the Czech Republic, including In the Shadow (2012), Milada (2017), and The Golden Sting (2018), Brothers addresses the dark days in the 1950s of Czechoslovakia’s Stalinist dictatorship under Klement Gottwald, when the Státní bezpečnost, the secret police, ruthlessly suppressed all opposition. The film was of interest to me, not only because my father, Jarome V. Horak, was sentenced to 20 years hard labor in absentia, for his role in the „abduction“ of Dr. Petr Zenkl (https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/blogs/ archival-spaces/2018/08/31/abduction-petr-zenkl), but also because my aunt and a cousin were imprisoned for years by the Communists. My aunt‘s husband, Gen. Josef Kohoutek, was executed on 19 August 1942 at Plötzensee (Berlin) by the Nazis (https://wordpress.com/post/archivalspaces.com/1945), in direct reprisal for Reinhard Heydrich’s assassination, just as Josef Mašín, leader of the Three Kings anti-Nazi resistance group was executed on 30 June 1942 in Pankrác Prison (Prague) weeks after Heydrich’s death.

Mašín’s film begins with the execution of Josef Mašín after intense interrogation, then relates the story of his two sons, Ctirad (called Radek) and Josef Mašín, who in 1953 became resistance fighters against the Communist dictatorship; they were perceived as blood-thirsty terrorists by others. Their legacy is even today, seventy years later, hotly contested in the Czech Republic, which is why the director, “a distant relative” spent ten years trying to get the film made

The brothers, who were still students, aged 21 and 23, initially planned to form a resistance cell, after reading that they could join the American army to overthrow the Communist government. With school friends they make plans to escape to West Berlin, first agreeing to steal weapons from a local police station. But being amateurs, their plans go completely wrong, and in September 1951 they kill a local policeman without getting any weapons. In a second raid on another village police station, they do get a cache of weapons, but they kill a second policeman in cold blood after being handcuffed and drugged. Later, in robbing a payroll car to finance their escape, they murder a civilian. Their plan to flee the country is upended when the secret police capture one of the conspirators, and the older brother is sentenced to two years hard labor in a uranium mine (possibly the same mine in which my cousin, Pepic was incarcerated), the police not connecting the police station raids to the group. Meanwhile, their mother, who has stomach cancer is forced out of her home and eventually imprisoned.

*Brothers* (2023) with Oskar Hes (center)

After Radek’s release, thanks to an amnesty following Stalin’s death in 1953, the group fled across the border into East Germany, where they were involved in a shoot-out at a train station, killing several Volkspolizisten. Despite a massive manhunt involving thousands of East German police and the Soviet Red Army, the two brothers and a friend eventually make it to West Berlin, while the remainder of the group is sent back to Czechoslovakia, where they are executed, while almost everyone who knew the group is mercilessly harassed, the mother dying in prison without treatment.

The film makes clear that the brothers have taken the words of their father to heart to fight tyranny because to live without freedom is to not live at all. But beyond that, the audience learns little about their inner motivation, only seeing their actions. The film does a good job of visualizing the absolute oppressiveness of the Stalinist era and the ruthlessness of the secret police. In a time when few Czechs attempted any kind of resistance, the Mašín group is portrayed as heroes. The latter half of the film actually morphs into a thriller, as the group escape after being surrounded by hundreds of German police. But there is also a moral ambiguity here, in particular when Josef Mašín slits the throat of an unarmed, handcuffed country policeman. The killing is not actually shown, just as their killing of the innocent civilian during a car-jacking remains off camera, so the director is staking the deck to an extent.

*Brothers* (2023) with Hes, Nedbal and Vaclav Neuzil

Until I started doing some research, I was unaware of the degree to which the Mašín Brothers are still controversial in the Czech Republic. After their successful escape, the Communists branded them as terrorists and murderers, and for many in the country that label has stuck. Even after the Velvet Revolution in 1989, when many victims of the Communist regime were rehabilitated, President Václav Havel and other government officials kept their distance, because 55% of the Czech public (according to a survey in 2003) still considered them murderers. Their criminal case was in fact not removed from the books until 2001.

It is unclear from Czech film reviews, whether this film will in fact change anyone’s mind about the brother’s legacy since opinions are still divided on their actions. However, Tomáš Mašín has made a gripping film that does illuminate the terrible crimes committed by the Gottwald regime, and the, at times, wrong-headed attempts to fight that tyranny.