Jonathan Glazer’s Holocaust drama is a powerful snapshot of when the unthinkable was ordinary.
Jonathan Glazer’s Holocaust drama is a powerful snapshot of when the unthinkable was ordinary.
‘I don’t think we really need another film about the Holocaust, do we?” says Kate Winslet, appearing as a fictional version of herself in Ricky Gervais’s 2005 comedy series, Extras. The fictional Winslet adds crassly that she’s only performing a role in a Holocaust movie because it’s “guaranteed an Oscar.” There’s obviously something to that. Think Sophie’s Choice (1982), Schindler’s List (1993), Life is Beautiful (1997), The Pianist (2002), The Reader (2008) — for which, amusingly, Kate Winslet won best actress — Jojo Rabbit (2019). And now The Zone of Interest (2023), which has received five Oscar nominations.
Jonathan Glazer’s movie, for which he wrote the screenplay and directed, is inspired by a Martin Amis novel by the same name. It’s a portrait of the personal lives of Auschwitz-Birkenau commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his family, who enjoyed a wealthy, suburban life in the idyllic Polish countryside, with the most notorious Nazi concentration camp in their backyard.
If you’d come from another planet and had no knowledge of the Holocaust, the film would seem obscure and difficult to follow. The atrocities all happen off-screen and are referred to mostly indirectly. The ideological motivation of Nazi antisemitism is alluded to, but not discussed. The victims are not so much de-personalized as not personalized at all. The Polish servants are minor characters, but we don’t see any prisoners — they’re there, but invisible, functioning more like a soundtrack.
Our familiarity with the subject may be taken for granted. But it’s a risk that pays off. One memorable line, easy to miss, comes when Höss’s mother-in-law comes to visit. She complains about her train journey into Krakow; it was crowded, too hot, and someone fainted. It’s a throwaway comment, one anyone might say. And yet it’s grotesque in its context, considering the hundreds of thousands of Jews making the same journey: crammed into carriages, dehydrated, standing for days, some already dead on arrival, others sent to the gas chambers as soon as they disembarked.
In part thanks to the legacy of Holocaust movies that came before, Glazer is safe to assume that his audience already grasps the scale and depths of human suffering at Auschwitz where over 1 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered in fewer than five years. What is more difficult to grasp is what kind of person can perpetrate such misery. Glazer’s answer, disturbingly, is a very ordinary one.
Höss is a family man. He reads bedtime stories to his five children; he shares laughs with his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller); he works too hard, even when at home. He enjoys his work, and it’s not difficult to see why — he’s good at it. Initially, mass execution of Jews by firing squad was shown to be damaging to Nazi morale. It involved too much direct participation, and the executioners were suffering deteriorating mental health and drinking to cope. Höss was among those to envision a more efficient, executioner-friendly alternative: the use of the pesticide Zyklon B through gas chambers.
In The Zone of Interest, he and his colleagues discuss this technological innovation, a contraption that involved straightforward steps: “Burn, cool, unload, reload.” Simple. In real life, Höss would sometimes look through the peephole as his victims struggled for air. But in The Zone of Interest, the dirty work is less explicit: We see Höss washing blood from his boots as he comes home, smoking a cigar in his back garden as the chimney in the backdrop flames red with human flesh. We see his face against a cloud off white, with screams and gunshots in the background.
Sandra Hüller’s outstanding performance as Mrs. Höss captures both her veneer of pleasantness and underlying cruelty. Rudolf nicknames her the “Queen of Auschwitz.” In one scene, she puts on a fur coat and discovers lipstick in its pocket, confiscated (we assume) from one of Auschwitz’s female victims. Over coffee, she and other Nazi wives discuss other goodies they’ve come into: a diamond hidden in toothpaste, for instance.
Theirs is a world of cinnamon rolls, strudels, and salads; of “happy and healthy” children raised with help from indentured servants; of enjoying a “paradise” of homegrown flowers and eating freshly picked strawberries fertilized with ash from human remains. “We’re living how we dreamed we would,” she tells Rudolf. “They’ll have to drag me out of here.”
The Höss’s marriage is also superficially contented. There is distance between them; they sleep in separate beds. Later, Rudolf temporarily moves away for re-assignment, and Hedwig insists she and the children stay behind at Auschwitz. But relations are mostly amicable between them. Hedwig is more attached to Auschwitz than to Rudolf, and Rudolf is more committed to his work than to her.
In real life, Rudolf reportedly had a sexual relationship with Eleonore Hodys, an Austrian prisoner who briefly worked in the Höss household; he impregnated her, then arranged for an abortion by a camp doctor. But in the movie, Rudolf’s affair with a servant is more subtly implied.
At points, you wonder where the movie is going. But the key to understanding this is to realize that this is not a classic narrative in as much as a psychological snapshot. Even the cinematography lends itself to that perception. Scenes are captured from across the room, at a distance in the garden, from the ceiling; we hear only snippets of conversation as opposed to sustained dialogue.
We do not see Rudolf Höss’s downfall, his infamous testimony at the Nuremberg trials, nor any self-reflection from his nauseating autobiography. We don’t see any exploration of his post-war interior life; his Catholicism, to which he reverted shortly before death, seeking out a priest to make a last confession and communion, and expressing remorse for his actions. We don’t see his capture by the British after the war, nor his death sentence being carried out at the request of his surviving victims — hanged at Auschwitz.
But then, we don’t really expect to. In a sense, the movie isn’t really about the Höss family. This jarring realization comes at the end, with yet more quiet, understated scenes from Auschwitz as it is today.
Cleaners at the camp — which is now a memorial and a museum — are shown sweeping the gas chambers’ floors, dusting the furnaces and ovens, cleaning the glass that covers piles of victims’ shoes and suitcases. The same monotonous ordinariness that affected those who worked there in the 1940s must tempt those who work there today. In that way, The Zone of Interest is as much about us as it is about Nazis. At any time, the unthinkable can become ordinary.