The Zone of Interest
In its depiction of Commandant Höss and his family, The Zone of Interest confronts us with the everyday desires that can fuel genocide.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F60a0ac31-7f01-4673-bc5f-1361d6d0a167_3800x2280.jpeg)
Please support my work by becoming a free or a paid subscriber to the newsletter. A paid subscription is, at time of writing, available at a standard rate of just £3.50 per month, or £35 for a full year. Paid subscribers receive additional posts in regular series, and are vital to me being able to continue producing and expanding this newsletter.
This post is part of the ‘One Take’ weekly series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.
Content warnings: Antisemitism; The Holocaust.
Note: Given that, at time of writing, The Zone of Interest is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.
Loosely adapted by writer-director Jonathan Glazer from Martin Amis’s book of the same name, The Zone of Interest is set in 1943 and focuses on the family of Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), commandant of the Auschwitz extermination camp in occupied Poland. He lives in a luxurious home right next to the camp with wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their five children, waited on by local servants. Höss takes his elder children on regular outdoor activities, while Hedwig looks after their youngest child and tends lovingly to her garden. At the same time, the commandant works hard maintaining the unseen brutal efficiency of the death camp next door, looming ever large in the background, the brutalisation of its inmates distinctly audible.
The Höss family barely seem to register this, however, and Hedwig shares in the spoils expropriated from the inmates. Her mother Linna (Imogen Kogge) arrives to stay with them, and seems impressed by the life her daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren enjoy there. Yet unbeknownst to Hedwig, her husband is facing a dilemma. Unwillingly promoted to the position of deputy inspector of all concentration camps, Höss must relocate west to Oranienburg, jeopardising the luxurious country lifestyle his wife so cherishes.
Settler colonialism and rural idyll
The Zone of Interest captures not just the banality of evil, but the familiarity of that which drives it. What ostensibly motivates Rudolf and Hedwig Höss, more the anything, is the pursuit of a certain version of the good life. He relishes the opportunities for outdoor activities such as swimming and fishing, in the company of his children, to whom he is visibly dedicated. She luxuriates in particular in her perfectly curated, vast garden.
All of this is possible through a logic of dispossession and exploitation. The Höss family are colonial settlers, making their home and lives on conquered Polish land, their household maintained through locally sourced labour, paid for by Rudolf’s ascent through the Nazi exterminatory machine. Hedwig explicitly references Nazi ideology in conversation with Rudolf and others, as bargaining and justifying rhetoric: talking about the life they have built in terms of ‘lebensraum’ and ‘the East’; urging her husband to appeal up the chain of command, even to Hitler himself, in order to maintain it; evoking the idea of separate spheres in demanding that she and the children remain in Auschwitz even after her husband has gone to Oranienburg. This is a language in which common dreams can be articulated.
We also get a sense of the status insecurities that partly drive her: this is a standard of living she has become accustomed to, not one she inherited. Her relationship to her servants is one of indifference: they work silently around her as she gossips with friends and her mother, sometimes talking condescendingly about them. Yet Hedwig also turns viciously upon individual servants at points where her position is threatened, and the privileges she enjoys are challenged or questioned. She imagines disregard or insubordination on their part, as an opportunity to reassert her superiority.
Absence, presence, and the Holocaust
In The Zone of Interest, the Holocaust is both ubiquitous and elusive. The name ‘Auschwitz’, with its unbearable connotations, is all the more unsettling for being talked about as residential address, even a desirable one. The camp looms physically over the Höss family garden, its ominousness heightened by occasional shots of trains passing or flumes of smoke billowing into the night sky. We see ashes scattered and blood washed from boots. We hear snatches of muffled dialogue and orders being barked from behind the fence, intermingling with a soundtrack dominated by dissonant, rumbling, voluminous noise.
The Holocaust’s victims are not seen; instead we view their appropriated possessions being almost nonchalantly distributed and consumed: gentility accrued through state-sanctioned looting. Again, this is in keeping with the politics of envy and resentment that partly fuels Hedwig, the intersection of material want with racial hatred. Yet that hatred is only perceivable as callousness, as the Jews and their fate are only absentmindedly and amusedly referenced in everyday conversation. We also encounter the Holocaust in its most bureaucratic and professionalised forms: acquisitions of furnaces; institutional restructuring; staff meetings; abstracted numbers and quotas; mass murder as logistical challenge.
A mood of unease and dread thus lingers throughout the film, as we encounter the Holocaust only in fragments, and struggle to mentally assemble its totality. Traces of its violence are everywhere. Rudolf both criss-crosses and broodingly polices the boundary between these spaces, arcadian bliss and death camp. His wife and children seem almost oblivious to the horror of the juxtaposition. Only Linna, as partial outsider to this world, is unable to ignore it.
Screening war memory
There have been a number of films made of late, across different countries, engaging with the Second World War and its legacy: Oppenheimer in the US; One Life in Britain; Godzilla Minus One and The Boy and the Heron in Japan. These films have wrestled with questions of where the conflict’s worst horrors fit within particular national histories, often seeking some form of exoneration or redemption.
The Zone of Interest, by contrast, is unflinching in its depiction of German culpability for the Holocaust. It is though a British-Polish production, co-funded by the Polish Film Institute. It is set mainly in Poland, but Poles are present only as downtrodden servants, or in one case – based on a real-life figure – covertly providing comfort and sanctuary to Jews. These elements are in keeping with a dominant Polish national narrative about its war experience; accounts of Polish culpability in the persecution of their Jewish compatriots are decidedly not. I remark upon this not as a criticism of the film. Rather, I note its existence within a broader structure of mainstream Holocaust representation, which restricts the drawing of analogies and frequently involves outsourcing guilt for historical and contemporary antisemitism.
The Zone of Interest resists those tendencies in other ways. The most viscerally disturbing moments and elements of the film centre on the particular paraphernalia of industrialised genocide. Yet these sit upon a far more recognisable phenomenon: building a better way of life for oneself through dispossessing and displacing others, by assembling and maintaining an intrinsically fragile hierarchy. It is a set of relations we can recognise in other, similar circumstances, including the British Empire and the American West.
More frighteningly still, what drives Rudolf and Hedwig Höss – the desire for more living space, a higher standard of living, a healthier place to raise their children, career advancement – are continuing staples of middle-class aspiration. The audience is implicated in wanting what they want from our own lives, even as we react with disgust as to how they get it.
Please support my work by becoming a free or a paid subscriber to the newsletter. A paid subscription is, at time of writing, available at a standard rate of just £3.50 per month, or £35 for a full year. Paid subscribers receive additional posts in regular series, and are vital to me being able to continue producing and expanding this newsletter.
If you’ve enjoyed this post, you can also show your appreciation by sharing it more widely, recommending the newsletter to a friend, and if you’d like, by buying me a coffee.
I am available for freelance writing jobs, and other academic and media work; if you would be interested in commissioning me, you can find out more here.