Mick Hartley

Samuel Rubinstein has an interesting article at the Spectator on Jonathan Glazer and his Zone of Interest film. Glazer, of course, made the headlines with his Oscar acceptance speech about "refuting" his Jewishness. Rubinstein argues that "Glazer’s comments flow naturally from the film itself, and from the very problem of focusing a Holocaust film on the ‘banality of evil’."

But what’s the historical reality? On 31 May 1923, in a forest in Mecklenburg, a 63-year-old schoolteacher named Walther Kadow was beaten to death by a band of thugs. One of Kadow’s former pupils, Martin Bormann, suspected him of having betrayed an ally to the French, and thus encouraged his underlings, including Rudolf Höß, to kill him. For this crime, Bormann was sentenced to one year in prison: he joined the Nazi Party a few years later, and was to serve as Hitler’s private secretary. Höß, already a card-carrying Nazi, was sentenced to ten, but then released after only five as part of a general amnesty. Perhaps this convicted murderer wasn’t quite the dull bureaucrat that The Zone of Interest would have us believe. One could watch Glazer’s film a thousand times and remain none the wiser that its protagonist once killed a man with his bare hands.

At its essence, the problem with The Zone of Interest is the problem with the ‘banality of evil’. Hannah Arendt dreamt up that snappy phrase while viewing the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, and it has retained a hold over the popular imagination of the Holocaust ever since.

The point about Arendt's portrayal of Eichmannn was that, in effect, she believed him. She was fooled by him into accepting his defence that he was a bureaucrat, a dull and not very clever fellow, just following orders. In fact, as we now know, Eichmann was a fanatical Nazi who maintained his beliefs throughout his post-WW2 life in Argentina. Fortunately the Israelis were not as gullible as Arendt, and Eichmann was found guilty and hung. Alas, the "banality of evil" phrase now lingers as the misleading legacy of that whole episode.

The point of the film, according to Glazer, is to bring forth the unsettling fact that the Nazis were human beings. It serves nobody, least of all their victims, to present the Nazis simply as ‘monsters’. But Glazer runs the risk of overcorrection. The Nazis were people, but, as the French historian Johann Chapoutot has masterfully demonstrated, they were not people like us. They possessed an idiosyncratic, historically-contingent worldview: they had their own cosmology, their own anthropology, and, crucially, their own moral law.

Höß did not do what he did as a cog in the machine, but because he was motivated by a specific set of beliefs. In his post-war memoir, Meine Psyche, he explained that, since the Jews had declared war on Germany, exterminating them at Auschwitz was as justifiable as bombing Allied cities. There is no ‘banality of evil’ here to be found: beneath his evasions and excuses, Höß revealed himself as a fervent ideologue. ‘I remain a National Socialist’, he wrote before he was hanged in 1947, ‘in the sense that I still believe in this idea of life. It isn’t easy to give up an idea, a worldview you believed in for twenty-five years’.

Although it is vastly better, by any measure, as a work of art, the message of The Zone of Interest reminds me of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, a novel (and film) which ranks among the least proficient portrayals of the Holocaust. The book ends with the sardonic and nauseating line: ‘Of course, all this happened a long time ago, and nothing like that could ever happen again. Not in this day and age.’ Glazer wants his film to fulfil a similar didactic purpose. ‘This is not about the past’, he said back in December; ‘it’s about now’. We shouldn’t say ‘look what they did then’, he more recently declared in his infamous Oscars speech, but ‘look what we do now’. The point of The Zone of Interest is that the Holocaust could happen again – or, more disquietingly, that it could be happening right now. The omission of Höß’s personal capacity for physical violence is part of this refashioning of the Holocaust into an urgent modern warning: if such a thing could have been perpetrated by ‘ordinary’ bureaucrats, then we really ought to be on our guard.

Where does all this lead? Unsurprisingly, post-7 October, to Israel. The highest-rated review of The Zone of Interest on the website Letterboxd reads: ‘Truly horrifying how many people are going to watch this movie, rate it highly and bestow it awards and whatever, and then still be pro-Israel. This is literally about you.’ Glazer would seem to be open to this line of interpretation. Like so many artistic engagements with the Holocaust, The Zone of Interest exaggerates what is universal about the evils of Nazism at the cost of what was particular. This allows it to make a comment, perhaps even a ‘warning’, about contemporary politics – while sacrificing vital historical truth in the process. If Glazer’s Oscars speech is anything to go by, that might have been the point all along.

Not so much, then, the powerful film about the Holocaust that the critics claimed, more like another effort to remove its appalling specificity and present it as some kind of parable of human evil – performed by dull and shallow people who didn't really think about it, but were just doing a job. The banalisation of the Holocaust, in other words.

Here's a post of mine on Eichmann and Arendt from 2022, on the occasion of the release of “The Devil’s Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes”, where we hear Eichmann interviewed in Argentina, expressing pride in the part he played in the extermination of Europe's Jewish population:

“In conclusion, I must say to you… I regret nothing. I have no desire to say that we did something wrong,” Eichmann said in the recordings.

“If we had killed 10.3 million Jews I would say with satisfaction ‘Good, we destroyed an enemy.’ Then we would have fulfilled our mission. And thus, to my regret, it was not to be,'” Eichmann is heard saying in parts of the recordings that feature in the film and in which he was apparently referring to the entire Jewish population of Europe on the eve of the Holocaust.