I.
In the autumn of 1943, SS Obersturmbannführer and judge Konrad Morgen was sent to Auschwitz in order to investigate claims of corruption and self-enrichment among the SS officers and squads. As a result, Rudolf Höß, the commander of the concentration and extermination camp, was removed from his post and moved to Berlin, to the supervisory authority of the concentration camp, the SS Central Economic-Administrative Office. It was regarded as a promotion for appearance’s sake, but it was actually a disciplinary transfer. Höß’ family, with whom he lived in the immediate vicinity of the “main camp” Auschwitz I, remained in Auschwitz. On May 8th 1944, Höß returned to Auschwitz as the commander of the SS garrison because the murder of 400,000 Hungarian Jews was imminent and because Höß' successor Arthur Liebehenschel had been accused of incompetence and a “lack of toughness”.

II.
In January 2007, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum received a photo album found in 1946 that belonged to SS officer Karl-Friedrich Höcker. The album contained photographs of SS officers, guards, and female SS auxilliary troops of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp as they were relaxing in the rest home Solahütte close by. The happy murderers awakened new interest in the private lives of the Nazi guards of the camp. Along with Laurence Rees’ BBC Series “Auschwitz – The Nazis and the “Final Solution” ” and the accompanying eponymous book, these sources may have been the main sources that motivated author Martin Amis to write the novel “The Zone of Interest”. Reese collected many testimonies from survivors and witnesses, among them the testimonies of the members of the “Sonderkommando” who were forced to take the murdered men, women, and children to the gas chambers, lie about the purpose, loot the bodies, and send them to the crematorium.

III.

Hanser, a German publishing house, used the occasion of Amis’ novel “The Zone of Interest” to distance themselves from the writer. There was no other German publishing house that would take it, and so the book was published in Switzerland in “Kein & Aber.” The fussy German “remembrance culture” found it too frivolous, too cynical, too sarcastic, inappropriate – as if Auschwitz has been appropriate. The book was “Holocaust Pulp“, wrote Hans-Jost Weyandt in a humurous Spiegel review.
“The Zone of Interest” contains three perspectives: Golo Thomsen, a senior employee of the Buna-Werke (IG Farben) in the Auschwitz 3 concentration camp and Martin Bormann's favorite nephew, who in addition to various sex escapades, has serious amorous ambitions towards Hannah Doll, the wife of the concentration camp commander, and is trying by all means to slow down the production of the Buna-works in order to bring about the end of the war more quickly. Commander Paul Doll sits in operettas and ask himself how quickly he could gas the entire audience. Moreover, he struggles with the contempt his wife shows him. Jewish prisoner Szmul is in the “Sonderkommando” and is forced to lead fellow prisoners into the gas chambers and describes his desperation and his attempts to bear witness by secretly writing down his memories and burying them in a thermos flask. Amis’ novel looks at the banal, perversely frivolous everyday in Auschwitz as it was pictured in the Höcker album. This was too much for the Germany literary world. Jonathan Glazer’s film is more “decent.” There’s no sex and less boozing. But there is art, for better, for worse.


IV.
The “Zone of Interest” is how the SS referred to the approximately 60 square kilometer restricted area around the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp, in which the living quarters of the guards, SS officers and German employees of the agricultural and industrial companies attached to the camp were located, as well as the industrial facilities, especially the IG Farben factory “Buna”, which was supposed to produce artificial rubber and fuel for the Wehrmacht. The house of commander Rudolf Höß, where he lives with his wife Hedwig and their children, directly bordered the wall of the main camp Auschwitz I. THE ZONE OF INTEREST is most set in this house and its garden, primarily in the spring and summer of 1943, shortly before Höß’ transfer to Berlin.


With a color palette oriented on the cool German color scale of Agfa/Orwo – with deeper blue tones than US Kodak material – Glazer depicts the life of the family of the commander of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp, Rudolf Höß. The color palette is almost identical to the photographs of German family photos from the 50s, the early NS color films and the schmaltzy West German “Heimat” films. The first shock of THE ZONE OF INTEREST is one of recognition: the “paradise garden” which Mrs. Höß is especially proud of, with its tidy useful plant and ornamental flower beds, looks like all the gardens in the German settlement houses that have been built since the 1920s with gardens meant for partial self-sufficiency. The garden would be a petty bourgeous idyll if it wasn’t for the guard towers and the smoke from the chimney of the Birkenau camp in the background, filmed with maximum depth of field - and the swimming pool that the commander installed. The only evidence of the horror of the murder factory in the background is the soundtrack, on which the British composer Mica Levi added shots, whiplashes, screams and dog barks under the rumbling of the synthesizers.

Sandra Hüller gives Hedwig Höß a robust, peasant gait and an aggressive, patronizing arrogance. At the beginning of the film, she distributes looted property from the murdered to her servants and poses in front of the mirror in a dead woman's mink coat. When she’s angry, she scares the servants: “one snap of a finger and my husband kills you.“ The family goes to the rivers around Auchwitz to swim and paddle, Rudolf shows his children special bird species, Hedwig cares for her garden. THE ZONE OF INTEREST is less a film about the “banality of evil,“ a term that Hannah Arendt coined for the habitus of Adolf Eichmann. It’s about pleasure in the murderer’s world, which was only marginally different from the everyday of the rest of the Germans. Hedwig must, like all Germans of her time, block out the murder plots and the smell of corpses to be able to enjoy the benefits they receive or obtain for themselves thanks to the government's murder business. It’s not about the banality of evil, but rather about the satisfaction in enjoying evil, THE ZONE OF INTEREST is one of the chilliest but also angriest Holocaust feature films, precisely because it pushes the actual horror into the background. It doesn't ask how this happened, but states that it was quite simple, you just had to carry on as usual, and there were rewards to be gained. When Rudolf Höss discovers a human skull that was washed out of the mass graves while bathing, he panics.

The scenes are only rarely exaggerated, for example when Hedwig shows her baby a red dahlia and the camera zooms in on the flower until a fade into red finally fills the entire screen. The clear cinematic symbol – also known from Dario Argento’s giallo PROFONDO ROSSO or Nora Fingscheid’s social thriller SYSTEMSPRENGER – isn’t the strongest moment of the film. Short, dream-like sequences in inverted black and white, in which a (female?) figure buries something, break up the plot and the quasi-realistic style of the film again and again. Glazer explained in an interview that what was buried was hope. In fact, some prisoners secretly buried texts and letters testifying about Auschwitz in the hope that they would be found after liberation. Despite their alienation, these scenes in the film are like a sigh of relief: finally art again that interrupts the horrific everyday life.

Tom Dorow (INDIEKINO MAGAZIN)

Translation: Elinor Lewy