Putting the Banality of Evil on Screen

Issue: 185

Henry Maitles

A review of The Zone of Interest (2023, Jonathan Glazer)

Steven Spielberg said that Jonathan Glazer’s film The Zone of Interest, based on Martin Amis’s book of the same name, was the best film about the Holocaust since his own Schindler’s List (1993).1 I would agree. It is a brilliant film. Most reviews are highly positive, praising the lighting and cinematography, as well as the subtlety of the content and the acting itself. The film has won several awards, including Bafta and Academy ones. Mainly set in the house of the commandant of Auschwitz, which adjoins the concentration camp, The Zone examines the life of Rudolf Höss, the commandant, Hedwig, his wife, and their five children—and how they pursue an idyllic lifestyle at the very entrance to hell. My immediate reaction while watching was that it is a powerful interpretation of the Holocaust, in this case exploring it using a “banality of evil” lens.

The film and the “Banality of Evil”

The phrase “banality of evil” originated with the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, who, in her book on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1962, highlighted how “ordinary”, banal even, Eichmann seemed.2 The idea has been used by artists prior to Glazer. As an example, here is a poem by singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen in his work Flowers for Hitler, titled “Everything you need to know about Adolf Eichmann”:

HAIR—Medium
WEIGHT—Medium
HEIGHT—Medium
DISTINGUISHING FEATURES—None
NUMBER OF FINGERS—Ten
NUMBER OF TOES—Ten
INTELLIGENCE—Medium 
What did you expect?
Talons?
Oversize incisors?
Green saliva?
Madness?
3

Glazer explains in the New York Times:

I wanted to dismantle the idea of them as anomalies, as almost supernatural; you know, the idea that they came from the skies and ran amok, but thank God that’s not us and it’s never going to happen again. I wanted to show that these were crimes committed by Mr and Mrs Smith at No 26.4

This banality is highlighted in several key scenes in the movie. I will highlight three of them. First, early in the film, two government functionaries arrive to discuss opening another gas chamber and crematorium. It is so downplayed, so matter of fact: a problem of numbers to be solved. They shake hands and part company after agreeing that the building will start.

In a second scene, clothes taken from murdered women are delivered to the house where Frau Höss, excellently played by Sandra Huller, keeps the fur coat for herself and tells her maids that they can take one item each from the rest. With her women friends, she jokes about “Kanada”, the name given to the Auschwitz warehouses full of expropriated clothes, money, jewellery, glasses, shoes, hair—anything that can be reused or sold, economically using as many of the possessions of the dead as possible.5 At no stage is there any suggestion that this is the loot of murdered Jews.

Third, after Höss (played by Christian Friedel) is promoted to overseeing the plan for the removal and murder of 400,000 Hungarian Jews, he is leading a committee in Berlin that recapitulates the original planning of the Holocaust at Wannsee in 1942. The people at the meeting see the decisions in front of them as a planning exercise, to be solved, to be examined as a matter of efficiency and bureaucracy, rather than mass murder. The violence in the film is all implicit. There is no overt antisemitism shown in the movie, other than that which we know is going on in the camp, demonstrated by sounds, the walls and the smoke from the crematoria.

This was mass murder using the most up-to-date industrial, capitalist methods; the historian Raul Hilberg called it murder by assembly line.6 The Polish-British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman similarly argues the Holocaust could not have happened without modernity, without industrial capitalism.7 It is this system of production that enabled Fordist managerialism to be applied to mass slaughter. Modern industrial capitalism linked with modern racism combined to produce Auschwitz.

In addition to these specific scenes, the film takes place almost entirely in the shadow of the camp. It is there; we know what is going on, but for Frau Höss and her five children it might as well not be there. For her, in particular, the life of plenty allied to a seemingly idyllic lifestyle of swimming, playing with and schooling her children and tending her garden at the wall of the camp is the epitome of what she sees as the good life. In one scene, she explains how she wants her life to go on like this forever. She decides not to go to Berlin with her husband but instead to continue as she is. “Every wish that my wife or children expressed was granted to them,” wrote Rudolf Höss in his autobiography. He continues: “My wife’s garden was a paradise of flowers”.8

It is as if the events in the camp—portrayed through sound, there is no visual portrayal of violence—do not figure in her life at all. Her mother is visiting and, in a particularly powerful scene, realises what is going on through the light of the flames flickering in her window. Even when her mother leaves abruptly, it does not make Frau Höss question anything.

Explaining the Holocaust?

Does the film help explain the Holocaust—or does it just show inhumanity per se? The Zone of Interest of course does not seek to address every issue, no film can. Indeed, the banality of evil is only one issue involved in understanding the Holocaust. The film, however, helps us to be a bit clearer about how the Holocaust evolved. One issue, unexplained in the film, is “irrationality” and its relation to the interests at the heart of capitalism. The events portrayed in the film span late 1943 to early 1944. One might have thought that Nazi high command would have priorities other than the “Jewish question”. Yet, the irrationality of the Holocaust is in some senses the other side of the coin to the banality. Think about 1944: the Allies planning to invade France; Germans pushed back in Italy; battles lost in North Africa; Russians advancing from the east; intense bombing of German cities; hunger in the Third Reich. Still, many orders coming from the High Command in Berlin related to diverting trains to transport Salonikan Jews and Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz.

The film Schindler’s List shows the irrationality by examining the complaints of factory owners at the constant extermination and replacement of their slave workforces. The Zone also addresses this but shows that not all industrialists held such views. The central point, however, is that the capitalist, industrial nature of the events and the genocide developed even as the Nazis realised that they needed workers. In The Zone, Colonel Gerhard Mauer is promoted for consistently hitting labour targets. A superior officer comments that he gets fan mail from business leaders for Mauer.

How to explain all this? Marxism can offer an explanation, although it is complex. The difficulty, as historian Enzo Traverso puts it, is that the policy of the Jewish (and Roma and Sinti) genocide “cannot be understood as a function of the class interests of big German capital”.9 I think that Traverso perhaps misses out the word “primarily”. The imperial war was in their interests.10 The genocide of the Jews might have appeared to them an unfortunate side-effect of the Nazis being in power. Yet, although Nazism was not the preferred choice of big business in 1933, it offered two things German capital needed: it smashed the left and neutralised the workers’ movement. Its antisemitism, before the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, focused on a brutal ethnic cleansing operation, primarily “encouraging” Jewish emigration. After the invasion, when millions of Jews were in its grasp, the exterminationism inherent in Nazism was given full vent. In the first week of the invasion of the Soviet Union, more Jews died than in the previous eight years of Nazi rule.

Perhaps the best explanation is to understand that German capitalism had thrown its lot in with the Nazis and the Nazi cadre “needed” the Holocaust. In the early phase of extermination, the avowed policy was that of a landgrab, although the language of the “Jew-Bolshevik” enemy and the desire to rid Europe of Jews was evident. Later, with the growing realisation that defeat was a likely outcome of the war, the drive to exterminate Europe’s Jews was an inducement to continue the slaughter right to the very end. It offered an ideological glue binding the Nazis together. The greater the pressure on the Nazis regime, the more extreme the genocidal impulses became.11

This relates to another issue raised by The Zone, albeit implicitly. In the film we see those on the “functionalist” side (planners, bureaucrats), never those on the ideological and “intentionalist” side. There is a debate among scholars of the Holocaust as to whether the Nazis had planned to physically destroy all Jews from the 1920s, seeing Mein Kampf (Hutchinson, 1974) as a manifesto for an exterminatory policy. Scholars who affirm this highlight the “intentionalist” drive. Those pointing to the functionalist dimension, on the other hand, argue that the invasion of Russia in 1941 was the trigger for a shift towards a genocidal approach. The Nazis found themselves with millions of Jews that they were both able to exterminate and for whom they could see no other “solution”.

There are elements of truth in both approaches. Nazi ideology had potential genocidal intent from its inception and desired a Europe free of Jews. The expansion of Hitler’s empire into the Soviet Union gave them the impetus and capacity to carry through on these ideas. The Nazi’s policy evolved through the 1930s from one of forced emigration to extermination. Indeed, although many writers are in one of the two camps, the key is to place the discussion within the context of the imperialist war. The Nazi plan was essentially a colonial one. At some stage, lebensraum (living space) would make land available in the east to German settlers. The indigenous population would be exterminated (Jews and Roma and Sinti) or would live as subjugated lower-class subjects, with little or no rights (Slavs). The Poles in the film are shown like this. The genocidal colonial settler mentality itself was not new to Naziism. Indigenous Americans and Aboriginal peoples of Australia and New Zealand were mercilessly killed by settler-colonial regimes.

It is also always worth recalling that there was nothing inevitable about the Nazis coming to power and hence being in a position to enact the Holocaust. The crises of the capitalist system, particularly the crisis of 1919-33 in Germany, opened up opportunities, not certainties, both for socialists and fascists. Abundance, linked to gross inequality under capitalism, can lead to a planned, better society, or along the railway tracks to Auschwitz.

Criticism of the film and its interpretation

While most critics welcomed The Zone, some have said that the film is too slow, that it meanders along. There are almost no moments of high tension. Davide Abbatescianni found it “monotonous”, saying it “lacked variety and remained stagnant for two hours”. Another critic, Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, argued: “Glazer has made a hollow, self-aggrandising art-film exercise set in Auschwitz during the Holocaust”, calling it “a vacuous movie”.12

I think this is to miss the point. Banality is not exciting, not “sexy”. It is banal, reflecting much of everyday life. It places the Holocaust in this context, as a warning from history. As Primo Levi put it: “it happened, therefore it can happen again…it can happen and it can happen everywhere”.13

The Zone also raises issues around complicity of Poland. As we watch the servants sullenly poring over some items from “Kanada”, there is also some animated moments showing a girl on a bicycle delivering apples to the camp, based on a true story of a member of the resistance. It raises complex issues, which have continued until this day, with, for example, controversy around the new Museum of Jewish History in Warsaw. Marek Edelman, for example, was certain that many people in Poland were supportive of Jews, or at least neutral; others argue that Polish antisemitism flourished and there were many collaborators.14

Further criticism has focused on the speech given by Glazer when he accepted the Oscars for best foreign language film and music. In his speech, he condemned the Israeli attacks on Gaza, and the world for standing by:

Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October 7th in Israel, or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanisation, how do we resist?15

This was a brave thing for a Jewish film director to do, and we should applaud it. Indeed, it is impossible to view the film without thinking of current events in Gaza. In Israel, viewers have also made the link to Gaza.16 However, the Times of Israel argues that the film and those who raise the links with Gaza ignore the existential threat posed to Israel. These critics further deny that Gaza is a genocide, and they argue that the film morphs into “another version of the contemporary antisemitic trope of oppressors and oppressed”.17 In reality, for the movie goers who go back to their TVs or social media, images of Israel Defence Forces riding kids’ bikes abandoned by fleeing Palestinians, sniggering as they blow up a house and justifying civilian bombing based on rumours of a Hamas leader in the area remind us of a suffering akin to what we see in the film. It raises an issue about the genocide of the Jews in Europe as both a specific and a general event. The words “Never Again!” were meant to mean no more genocides, not just no more genocide against the Jews.

I would unreservedly urge readers of International Socialism to watch The Zone of Interest for themselves. It is available on Amazon Prime—not that I want to endorse Amazon. So, better still, view it in an independent cinema if you can.


Henry Maitles is a long-standing member of the Soocialist Workers Party in Glasgow. He is Emeritus Professor of Education at University of the West of Scotland. His most recent book is Understanding and Teaching the Holocaust (SAGE).


Notes

1 A spoiler alert: I am going to use scenes from the film to highlight various points.

2 Arendt, 2006.

3 Cohen, 1973.

4 Abraham, 2024.

5 “Kanada” being an exemplification of a wealthy country of plenty.

6 Hilberg, 1985.

7 Bauman, 1989.

8 Hoss, 1956.

9 Traverso, 2019, p230.

10 Guerin, 1973.

11 Callinicos, 2001; Dawidowicz, 1986

12 Dargis, 2023.

13 Levi and Camon, 1989, p167.

14 Edelman, 1994.

15 Cited in BBC, 2024.

16 Mann, 2024.

17 Lerea, 2024.


References

Abraham, Rafael, 2024, “Interview with Jonathan Glazer”, Financial Times (February 23).

Arendt, Hannah, 2006 [1963], Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil(Penguin).

Bauman, Zygmunt, 1989, Modernity and the Holocaust (Oxford University Press).

BBC, 2024, “Zone of Interest Director Jonathan Glazer Makes Gaza Statement in Oscars Speech” (11 March), www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-68531229

Cohen, Leonard, 1973, Flowers for Hitler (Cape).

Callinicos, Alex, 2001, “Plumbing the depths: Marxism and the Holocaust”, The Yale Journal of Criticism, volume 14, number 2.

Dargis, Manohla, 2023, “‘The Zone of Interest’ Review: The Holocaust, Reduced to Background Noise”, New York Times (14 December).

Dawidowicz, Lucy, 1986, The War Against the Jews

Jews (Bantam).

Edelman, Marek, 1994 [1945], The Ghetto Fights (Bookmarks).

Guerin, Daniel, 1973, Fascism and Big Business (Pathfinder).

Hilberg, Raul, 1985, The Destruction of the European Jews (Lynne Rienner).

Hoss, Rudolf, 1956, Commandant of Auschwitz (Phoenix).

Lerea, Dov, 2024, “A Review of the Film The Zone of Interest”, The Times of Israel (20 March).

Levi, Primo, and Ferdinando Camon, 1989, Conversations with Primo Levi (Marlboro).

Mann, Itamar, 2024, “Everyday Evil and the Family: Watching The Zone of Interest in Israel 2024”, Journal of Genocide Research

Traverso, Enzo, 2019, Critique of Modern Barbarism: Essays on Fascism, Antisemitism and the Use of History (IIRE).