A Hall of Mirrors Leading Nowhere

On Zone of Interest

Every year when the Berlinale takes place, I take the time to visit the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. I always found its imposing blocks of concrete—some two thousand of varying size and height—an evocative commemoration of an atrocity that can’t be adequately put into words or images. The abstraction, towards the unknowable, the impassable, the insurmountable, feels a worthwhile gesture.

This year, I couldn’t go to Berlin. In a way, I’m glad I didn’t. Since Israel began its full-scale genocide of Palestinians, the German cultural and political elites have funnelled much of their energy into supporting Israel. Even mild criticism of Israel is derided as anti-Semitic; any cultural organisations in receipt of federal or state funding in Germany have been at risk of losing their funds if they make even the smallest gesture towards the suffering of Palestinians.

The Berlinale film festival, which prides itself on being an explicitly political and humanist festival, well and truly shat the bed at such a moment. The festival took an approach of cautious silence, its only visible gesture being the much-derided “Tiny House” project until the day after the awards ceremony. As a succession of filmmakers took the stage and called for peace and a ceasefire—including the Israeli/Palestinian directorial duo of Yuval Abraham and Basel Adra, whose No Other Land about life under occupation in the West Bank won two awards—the festival released a follow-up statement distancing itself from their calls for peace, whilst senior figures in Germany politics and cultural institutions accused the filmmakers of anti-Semitism and sowing division.

Leaving aside the arrogance and hypocrisy of accusing people (even actual Jews) of anti-Semitism by a people whose grandparents actively took part in the murder of six million Jews, this instrumentalisation of history is driven by a complete and fervent belief in the historiographic accuracy of the present German state, which suggests that the country emerged in the years after WWII as a functioning democracy, a success story possible in part because of its commitment to remembrance and its own guilt. It’s clear now that these impulses are empty.

Away from Berlin, I take myself in my mind’s eye to the memorial and imagine the spots where I usually sit—a bench to the side, or one of the smaller blocks. The Berlin February weather in my memory is always chilly but crisp and dry, quite a beautiful thing in the sun. But the memorial now does not feel like an evocation of the unknowable. It feels like an empty, meaningless gesture. It feels like a succession of concrete blocks in the middle of the city. An abstraction of nothingness—in worship to the material that houses state institutions and helps build them, the material that also defends these institutions as worthwhile and inherently just. The concrete blocks are contextualised by the same political continuum and infrastructure that supplants the modern German state’s obsessive weaponisation of anti-Semitism. The blocks are a blank slate on which to impose meaning.

The Zone of Interest, directed by Jonathan Glazer, has the same issue. It is an empty vessel of a film, built out of one basic observation that has become de rigueur when talking about the Holocaust: that evil is banal. The original observation was coined by Hannah Arendt to describe how the crimes of an entire state had been rationalised and normalised by the population. And yes, it is banal when we watch the film’s protagonists, the Höss family of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf (Christian Friedel) and matriarch Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), go about their daily business with their back garden adjoining the death camps walls. It is banal when we watch them bathe in the river nearby, discuss gardening plans, and purloin dresses stolen from dead Jews next door.

The film is a series of (mostly) coherent, carefully considered aesthetic choices, decided upon with the best of intentions—and I do believe the film was made with honest, sincere, artistic intentions. When Glazer and his team picked up the Oscar for Best International Film, he was the only one that night to explicitly mention the genocide in Gaza. With visible shaking hands, one could sense he did so with some fear, not entirely unwarranted given how stringently aggressive parts of Hollywood’s institutions have been towards any mention of the Palestinian plight. His fear was justified: a heinous open letter denouncing his statement came in the week after, arguing that Israeli attacks are targeted at Hamas instead of the Palestinian population, which now numbers over 30,000 dead. Just as Glazer called against the instrumentalisation of the Holocaust to justify dehumanisation today, so too did the open letter actively instrumentalise the ethnicity of the Israeli people to justify the targeting and dehumanisation of the Palestinian people today.

It might sound paradoxical, but the humanism of Glazer’s words, the emotional distance of Zone of Interest, and the genocidal intent of the Israeli army (and the genocidal intent of many such crimes that have taken place since 1945) are all part of the same intellectual continuum. Zone of Interest falls into that same trap of European memory politics that has played out since 1945, one which is instinctively tied to nation-statehood, and one which is doomed to repeat the same mistakes, doomed to exclaim “Never again!” whilst the same things happen again and again.   

Aesthetics Without Meaning

The shooting style—labelled “Big Brother in the Nazi house” by Glazer and his production team—involved setting up a series of cameras in a recreation of the real-life Höss house with the cast unaware of when they’re being filmed. Meaning Friedel, Hüller and co. needed to stay in character at all times, playing the role of dutiful Nazis regardless of whether the camera’s eye was on them. We’re given Auschwitz as a “slice of life”—normality and murder standing side by side. The surveillance-style footage creates a sense of objective and emotional distance, detailing how the sheer barbarity of Auschwitz sits next to Hedwig tending to her garden, toasts of schnapps, or bucolic walks along the river.

The strategy is intended for us to see how the violence and dehumanisation of the Nazi regime was entirely normalised and accepted by its adherents. But the film opens as this process has already been completed: we are already at the end-point, with architects visiting Höss with designs on how the efficiency of the gas chambers could be improved. By starting from this point, the film’s central thesis is already cast into amber and stasis. We are then not looking at a process, but an iconographic symbol: Auschwitz as the end-point of all human evil.

Auschwitz in The Zone of Interest (or the idea of it) becomes not a living entity, upheld by human beings and functional organisational principles, but an institution. And there is something dead and still about an institution, even one populated by human beings. It is a concept looking always to the past, slow-moving ships incapable of turning. The emotional distance of this aesthetic choice is pointed in the wrong direction. It is obscured and abstracted into something immovable and unknowable. There is a paradox here: there is something inherently unknowable about the Holocaust, a distance that only increases as we move further away from it.¹ But that does not mean giving up. Rather it means striving harder.

Within these aesthetics of distance are visual motifs—more like breakages—gesturing towards the avant-garde. A freeze-frame on a red rose in Hedwig’s garden that bleeds into a wash of red as we hear the ambient horror of the camp in the background. Night-vision sections appear to depict a lone Samaritan sneaking into the camp’s outskirts and leaving fresh apples on the ground. And then the epilogue, which fasts forwards towards the modern-day Auschwitz, now a museum kept meticulously clean by Polish service workers, much like the Polish service workers who kept the Höss house clean.

Each breakage further clarifies the distance between depiction and reality. Each one only serves to pin Auschwitz further into the amber. Glazer in his Oscars acceptance speech stated that; “All our choices we made to reflect and confront us in the present, not to say ‘look what they did then.’ Rather, ‘look what we do now.’” But the sum totality of the film’s emotionally distant approach is to present Auschwitz as an institution whose existence is inevitable, an inevitability exemplified by the presence of the wall that separates the Höss residence from the camp itself, and which is ever-present in the film’s spatial geography—solid, immovable, implacable.

The wall stands as a symbol for itself and for the real, hard material reality of the state. The wall and the blocks of the Memorial in Berlin are the opposite ends of the same continuum—the former creates the latter, whilst the underpinning philosophy of the latter will only bring us to the former eventually.

The Inevitability of the Holocaust?

In a sense, the Holocaust was inevitable, in the sense that it represents the natural end-goal not just of Nazism and fascism more broadly, but any ideology based on national statehood tied to ethnicity or race. Nationalism (the underpinning belief of a nation-state being what ties a constituent people together as something “natural”) is in itself a wholly modern belief not more than a few centuries old. The idea of a German people unified under one state, or that of the French, British, Turks, Chinese, Indians—this is a modern construct. German speakers existed beforehand, as did French speakers, Chinese speakers (themselves split into Mandarin, Cantonese and numerous other variations, many of them not mutually intelligible) and so on. But moulding German speakers into a German nation is a relatively new historical event.²

And nations are inherently given to in-group/out-group politics—a nation is defined by as much as who is not part of the nation as who is. As the late 20th century and early 21st in the West gave rise to a new type of multiculturalism (which has historically always existed), the still-lingering resentments of nationalist essentialism absorbed new migrant groups but only on the basis of assimilation: “You can become one of us as long as you adopt these customs and thought processes.” Those unwilling to assimilate, or wary of the new customs, risk rejection.

I’m outlining these unwieldy concepts only in the most general of ways, but I do believe that as long as it provides the underpinning of the international world order, Auschwitz is doomed to repeat itself forever. The constant Israeli attacks on the Palestinian population is always couched in terms of the ethnically conceptualised nation-state: those a part of Israel and those outside.

Which brings us back to Zone of Interest. By placing the film already at the endpoint of the Holocaust, it avoids entirely the question of the state institutions which built Auschwitz—state institutions which themselves are replicated in many seemingly modern nation-states. If the film intends to explore “the banality of evil”. then these state institutions are the very fuel of it. This lack of questioning is precisely where the film’s thesis falls apart, because it implies that the concept of the state is not worth questioning: rather it is the individuals and their gleeful evil. Individualising the Holocaust means reducing its crimes to crimes of the individual rather than of an entire people complicit in the same cruelty. Individual crimes are easier to judge and condemn: group crimes enter into difficult territory that requires litigating concepts that seem impossible to depict onscreen.

This question even enters in the opening credits: tucked away in the logo-run at the start of the film is the imprint of The Polish Film Institute, one of the production partners of the film. In 2018, the far-right Polish Law & Justice party, in power at the time, enacted legislative reform that essentially illegalised any implication that Poles were complicit in the Holocaust. It’s an obfuscation of history through legal means, which seeks to erase the fact that many Poles (and Europeans more widely) were quite happy to be rid of their Jewish neighbours, and turned them in as active collaborators, whilst others were coerced or forced into collaboration. In Zone of Interest itself, the local population are invisible, present only as indentured servants or, in the case of the night-vision sections, as lone Good Samaritans. These “types” did exist (the person in the night-vision sections is inspired by Aleksandra Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk, who did the same as a 12-year-old member of the Polish resistance). But equally I wonder if the picture of Nazism as a purely German construction obscures its rather more heinous and intra-ethnic capacities on the ground. Was this ever a question for Glazer in getting the film made? Did he have to compromise on the Polish relationship to Auschwitz and the Holocaust?³

It all leads Zone of Interest into a conundrum. How do you truthfully depict ideology, or the concept of nationhood, or government institutions? How do you connect these to genocides and crimes against humanity? Ideology, nationhood, governments, crimes against humanity: these aren’t material objects which can have a camera pointed at them and filmed.

The answer lies not in the historical depiction of Auschwitz as Zone of Interest suggests, which turns it into a historical memory to be studied rather than to be understood (as impossible as the latter is). The answer lies in directly connecting modern-day and historical nation-state politics to that of genocide and genocidal apologia.

As a counterpoint, Radu Jude’s I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018) provides an instructive on how these connections can be formed. The film details the story of a young theatre director who is putting on an ambitious open-air re-enactment of Romania’s complicity in the Holocaust in Bucharest’s central square. The young non-professional actors volunteering for her production seem worryingly keen to cosplay as Nazis, whilst a local apparatchik from the Cultural Ministry, who has greenlit and funded the project, expresses concern about the director’s vision, which wishes to openly implicate Romanians in the Holocaust.

As the director and the apparatchik turn to long philosophical arguments on the nature of artistic freedom and historical truth, the director eventually agrees (or is forced by threat of having the funding pulled) to make changes to the play. In a strange roundabout way, one of the apparatchik’s central arguments—that the Romanian public simply isn’t prepared to accept the truth of the nation’s complicity—turns out to be reality, as the public gleefully cheer on the re-enactment’s scenes of violence and murder against Romanian Jewry.

Jude’s central idea is that historical guilt and complicity, and its subsequent memorialisation, is not a static process which has already been completed, but one which is violently, dreadfully alive, and not to be taken lightly. It is a process which requires understanding some fundamentally ugly truths about people today (mainly that the average person would quite willingly partake in another genocide if the cards were dealt that way). But his grappling with the process also understands that this war isn’t finished and it can still be won, and it requires imagination and pragmatism. Despite Glazer’s position that every decision was made with an eye to the future, the depiction is still that of Auschwitz as a static historical event that took place in the past, rather than a living, breathing, modern entity that can still exist.

I’m not sure Zone of Interest understands where we are in this process right now. It says that what happened then can happen again now. But it fundamentally doesn’t seek to question the underpinning ideological construct of the nation-state that gave birth to Nazism, nor the machinery of state production that helped create it.

1. In Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, he largely respects this unknowability, except for one grave misstep - the infamous showers scene, where he pushes the audience through the dehumanising of Jewish women - unclothing, shaving, and reduction to mere bodies - until he puts them in one of the gas chambers only for a final-second reveal that they were showers all along. In doing so, he takes us past the final circle of hell and purports to come back. An exquisite director he may be, but a poor thinker is he too.

2. Eugen Weber’s Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities are two great texts about how the ‘idea’ of a nation forms.

3. The Law & Justice Party lost in the October 2023 elections, which were won by a coalition of centrist and centre-left parties led by former President of the European Council Donal Tusk. I’m not as of yet aware of any plans to repeal or change these laws.

Fedor Tot is a Yugoslav-born, Wales-based film critic and curator specialising in Eastern European cinema.