ZONE OF INTEREST: The Real Problem With Jonathan Glazer.
The protagonist of The Zone of Interest, Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höß, is presented as the epitome of the ‘banality of evil’. He is a twitchy, conscientious civil servant. He commits his crimes at a distance, filling in forms and phoning suppliers. He concludes his conversations with a lacklustre ‘Heil Hitler, et cetera’. All he seems to want is a conventional family life with his wife Hedwig. He frolics in the water with his children, he weeps while saying goodbye to his horse: and all the while, the din of Auschwitz can be heard in the background, behind the garden wall (the film undoubtedly deserved its Best Sound win at the Oscars). Glazer’s Höß, in short, is the consummate competent bureaucrat, his mind fixed on the job.
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.
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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.
Lionel Chetwynd, who co-hosted the excellent Poliwood series on PJTV with Roger Simon, directed the 2004 History Channel movie Ike: Countdown to D-Day, starring Tom Selleck in the titular role. He has attempted for years to get a movie made about the Allies’ 1942 raid on the French port of Dieppe as a disastrous but necessary precursor to the D-Day invasion two years later. Chetwynd once told the late Cathy Seipp about the response from Hollywood executives when he pitched them a movie about Dieppe:
Many years later, when Chetwynd was a successful Hollywood writer specializing in historical dramas, he told the Dieppe story during a Malibu dinner party–as a sort of tribute to the men who died there so people could sit around debating politics at Malibu dinner parties. One of the guests was a network head who asked Chetwynd to come in and pitch the story.
“So I went in,” Chetwynd told me, “and someone there said, ‘So these bloodthirsty generals sent these men to a certain death?’
“And I said, ‘Well, they weren’t bloodthirsty; they wept. But how else were we to know how Hitler could be toppled from Europe?’ And she said, ‘Well, who’s the enemy?’ I said, ‘Hitler. The Nazis.’ And she said, ‘Oh, no, no, no. I mean, who’s the real enemy?’”
“It was the first time I realized,” Chetwynd continued, “that for many people evil such as Nazism can only be understood as a cipher for evil within ourselves. They’ve become so persuaded of the essential ugliness of our society and its military, that to tell a war story is to tell the story of evil people.”
Two weeks ago, with his Oscar speech, Glazer took that leftist mindset to its sadly “logical” conclusion.
Related: How US Jewish liberalism metastasized into hatred of Israel.
