If somehow you were to wander into a screening of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest without knowing what you were getting into, it might take you about ten minutes to figure things out. The film opens on a bucolic scene, a group of mostly children sitting in high grass while another group bathes in a river below. It’s a breathtaking view: the meadow-like grasses, the broad water glittering in the sun, the wooded bank on the river’s far side. A man in ill-fitting swim trunks, pasty and pudgy, walks down to the river with two boys, who start splashing each other; a woman stays with the other children, a crying baby (it will cry through the whole film) in her arms. There’s no narrative, just lovely glimpses: the children swimming, picking berries, squabbling in the car on the way home while their parents urge them to sleep.
It’s night when they arrive at an ample, graciously appointed, unremarkable house. The children are sent to bed; outside, their source unclear, the bucolic sounds of the opening (purling water, a woodpecker’s tattoo) have been replaced by troubling noises: something metallic, industrial. We see the parents in their bedroom, in separate narrow beds but turned toward one another, affectionate, intimate, untroubled by the sounds that grow increasingly unnerving, punctuated by shouts and screams. A cut to the next morning, another gorgeous, painterly shot, framing the narrow hallway by the stairs. We gaze from the dim interior to the entryway flooded with early light—a Dutch interior, almost. It’s the father’s birthday; he’s led out of the house blindfolded, presented with his gift, a canoe; the baby cries when he sets her in it. And then, as he kisses his wife, we see a guard tower behind him, the huge, barbed walls of a concentration camp.
Very attentive viewers might catch on more quickly: on my second viewing I noticed a quick flash of Nazi SS insignia on the license plate of one of the cars driving the party home from the river. But the whole conceit of Glazer’s film is to reverse foreground and background, to place the horrors of Auschwitz at the edge of our perception while inhabiting, with the kind of density and patience typical of art meant to reveal the luminous in unremarkable moments, the privileged banal domesticity of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz. The film has provoked strong reactions: it has won a slew of awards and is up for five Oscars, including Best Picture, Best International Feature, and Best Director. But there has been notable, virulent critical dissent, maybe most particularly, in the United States, from Richard Brody at the New Yorker and Manohla Dargis at the New York Times.
I wasn’t sure what I thought after seeing the film for the first time. All I knew was that something had happened to me: the film wouldn’t let me go, it was like a dark stain spreading in my interior. The film disquieted me in a way that felt more important than whether it was “good” or “bad,” certainly more important than any argument I might make justifying my response. I talked about it with friends. I bought the Martin Amis novel on which the film is putatively based (it’s also up for the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, though it’s hardly an adaptation at all) and read it in a day. I went to the film again, this time not in a little art cinema but in the huge AMC in Times Square, my first time in that bizarre labyrinth of a space, where I felt a little like a lost figure in an Escher engraving, riding endless escalators up and up. Ten minutes into the movie—maybe it didn’t even take that long—I felt sure I was seeing something great.
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Reading the Amis was clarifying. I enjoyed it—as I say, I sped through it in a day—and there are marvelous technical things. But in the days that followed I felt my enjoyment of it curdle. Like Glazer’s film, the novel centers on Auschwitz, and the commandant (fictionalized in the novel) is a central character. But Amis draws on a broader cast. The book toggles—a little formulaically, I came to feel—between three voices: Paul Doll, its fictionalized Höss; Angelus Thomsen, a Nazi officer and secret saboteur—and also the nephew of Hitler’s powerful private secretary, Martin Bormann; and Szmul, leader of the Sonderkommandos, the unit of Jewish prisoners given special privileges for their services in loading the gas chambers and cleaning out the crematoria. The drama of the book centers on Angelus’s desire and then love for Doll’s miserably disaffected wife, Hannah.
The book is full of horrors. Doll’s great preoccupation is the disposal of bodies (“Stucke,” or “pieces,” in Nazi parlance, which the film also adopts), and there is much description of the stench of the air, the putrid taste of decomposition-contaminated water in the town, the specter of a field flatulent with fermenting corpses. We see the terrible “selections,” where newly arrived prisoners are divided into the many murdered quickly and the few murdered slowly, their starved bodies forced to labor at double and then triple speed until they collapse. As Doll’s doubts intrude upon his ideology (a little absurdly, I think: “If what we’re doing is good, why does it smell so lancingly bad,” he wonders), he grows ever more unhinged, his violence increasingly stripped of any palliative veneer, even outside the camp walls. He brutally terrorizes his wife, whose resistance of his coercion, sexual and otherwise, becomes more assertive. When, in a heroic assertion of his own dignity, Szmul refuses to murder Hannah, as Doll had demanded, Doll shoots him in the face.
Szmul’s short, spare sections create a kind of core of gravitas to the book, a magnet keyed to pathos: “We are in fact the saddest men in the history of the world,” he declares in his first section. Elsewhere the novel can veer toward manic black comedy, sometimes of a bitterly distasteful kind. It is a little stomach-churning to hear the rhythms of an urbane Noël Coward comedy in dialogue like this:
[Angelus:] “I’m thinking, what don’t we do to them? I suppose we don’t rape them.”
[His friend Boris:] “Much.”
But the book also has a moral center, or at least a stable ground of sanity, in Angelus, who begins the book skeptical of Nazi enthusiasm but willing enough to accept the perks (“I had derived much sexual advantage from my proximity to power,” he says), and then is transformed into a heroic saboteur by his love for Hannah. He gives Amis a chance to wax philosophical. “Under National Socialism you looked in the mirror and saw your soul. You found yourself out,” Angelus muses; or elsewhere, making sure we don’t miss the point: “Who somebody really was. That was the zone of interest.” This gets quite rich, especially in Angelus’s confession of his love, in which he narrates the moral conversion he undergoes while watching Hannah sleep:
In that gazebo or half-made pavilion, as I watched you sleep: during those sixty or seventy minutes I felt something happen to the sources of my being. Everything I had waived and ceded made itself known to me. And I saw, with self-detestation, how soiled and shrunken I had let my heart become.
Well. As I say, the book’s momentum, its madcap comedy horror, carried me through a first read, but all this curdled as I sat with it. The book, self-consciously posturing as a work of moral witness, came to seem to me a moral cartoon, radically inadequate to its subject. The macabre corpse comedy, the fact that Angelus (the name!) serves as a Vergil through the inferno, the fact that the narrative drama of the book centers on adulterous passion, the bourgeois novelistic conceit par excellence, the fact that its moral drama centers on a Nazi’s redemption through love—there’s a word for all of this, and that word is kitsch. Not least among my reservations was precisely the book’s success, by one measure, as I encountered it for the first time: the fact of my enjoyment. Even in the grip of it, Amis’s novel gave me a qualm I’ve felt before in novels set among Nazis, maybe especially in Jonathan Littel’s in many ways amazing, Goncourt-winning Les bienveillantes (published in English as The Kindly Ones), and in almost every Holocaust movie I’ve seen. Should I really be so entertained by a book about the Holocaust, I wondered as I read Amis. Should a novel set in Auschwitz really be this much fun?
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That question didn’t occur me as I watched Glazer’s film, because I never felt—in a way that strikes me now as part of the film’s remarkable and moral discipline—entertained. Glazer does away with all of Amis’s characters and drama. There are no Sonderkommandos, no morally conflicted Nazis, no love affairs. There is little of Amis’s grotesquerie. Glazer takes Amis’s setting and focus—Auschwitz and its commandant—but reinstates the historical Höss and family, and subtracts any hint of Nazi moral melodrama. The film’s links to the book come in small moments and gestures: in Hedwig Höss’s furtive cigarette smoking, in a scene of vomiting late in the film, in a moment when Höss, gazing at an roomful of Nazis, can only think about the logistics of gassing them.
There’s really very little drama at all, in the foreground of the film: the closest we come to a plot involves Höss’s transfer from Auschwitz and Hedwig’s insistence that she and her children will stay in the home they have made there. This climaxes in one remarkable scene (about which more later), but not in anything I would really consider narrative tension; after a few months in Oranienburg, Höss is transferred back to Auschwitz, rejoining his family there. There’s very little obvious pathos to be found; certainly none adheres to Rudolf or Hedwig. Much of the film seems determined to avoid interiority or psychological depth altogether: there are almost no close-ups of faces, and long scenes are interrupted by glances elsewhere—other rooms of the house, say—a counterpoint that I found fascinating on a second viewing. The film gives a sense of a world in which no one looks anybody else in the eyes. (This is a motif in the Amis.) I came away from my second viewing feeling that the film works very hard to avoid opportunities for identification, for easy sympathy; Glazer’s Hösses are not Amis’s moral caricatures, but neither are they vessels for our emotional investment.
This means that Glazer refuses us many of the pleasures we expect from cinema. Watching the film the first time there were stretches where I felt bored, where I wondered whether we really needed all these long shots, whether the film wallowed a little too much in its own longueurs. I felt this boredom was justified even on my first viewing, part of a considered aesthetic effect, part of what guards against entertainment. But on my second viewing I wasn’t bored at all; every moment was riveting. In part I think this is because—and maybe this is a bit counter-intuitive—the first time around I was waiting for some drama to erupt, and especially for some violence to be unleashed; knowing what to expect, or what not to expect, let me relish what the film offers: not so much a narrative as an experience of a world, scenes of extraordinary and revelatory density.
Density is something I’ve talked about before in this newsletter, as one of my most important aesthetic values, and also one of the most mysterious. What I mean by the word (sorry for repeating myself) is the weird alchemy by which great art, with the few bits of data that will fit on a page (or on a screen), conveys the pressure of an entire world—of all the infinite data that makes up reality, which it would be impossible to include, however long the novel or the film. This density is what makes an invented world feel lived-in, and to the extent I can understand how it works I think it has to do with saturating details with information, so that each detail we see ramifies, suggesting all we don’t see.
As every discussion of the film has emphasized, Glazer’s film is adamant about all we don’t get to see. The camp’s brutality is omnipresent, not least in architecture: the walls that abut Hedwig’s beloved “paradise garden”; the guard towers and lines of buildings whose gables poke above those walls; the crematorium’s smokestack. But we never witness violence; in the one scene that (so far as I can tell) takes place within the camp’s walls, the camera is positioned so that all we see is Höss’s face, seen from below in a weird, monumentalizing, socialist realist framing. He remains impassive as the sound of grunts and screams becomes overwhelming; eventually his image is lost in drifting smoke.
The reality of the camp is conveyed almost entirely through sound, the film’s use of which is remarkable—I can’t imagine that the Oscar for sound design will go to anyone else. Inside the Hösses home, we’re constantly assaulted by sounds from outside, human and non-human: trucks, sirens, the shouts of guards, the cries of prisoners. This gives the domestic scenes—Richard Brody at the New Yorker refers to the film dismissively, I think wrongly, as “scenes from a marriage”—a surreal and devastating overcast, so that we’re constantly aware, hyper-aware, of everything the family leaves unacknowledged, the barbarity that undergirds and enables their seeming contentment. (In a line of Höss’s autobiography quoted by Dargis, “my family had it good in Auschwitz, every wish that my wife or my children had was fulfilled.”) It also makes us weirdly complicit in that barbarity, not passively observing but actively imagining violence, filling in the world beyond the edges of the screen.
This is how Glazer sidesteps what Ruth Franklin, in a review of Amis’s novel that I think is pretty much right, calls the “documentation glut” that challenges any attempt to create narrative about the Holocaust—the fact that we have access to so much information about the Holocaust, including images of the death camps. That information can often seem inert: it can be numbing, or too quickly assimilated to pre-packaged narratives of evil or heroism, narratives that engage pre-programmed emotional responses, that fail to strike us to the quick. One thing Glazer’s film is doing, I think, is seeking out strategies to make us feel the Holocaust’s world-shattering barbarism, to register not just the horror (though the film does register that) but the strangeness, the weirdness and alienness of that barbarism. It does so, and this is what seems to me nearly miraculous in the film, not by isolating or walling off that alienness, suggesting the Nazis were some different species, monsters that have nothing to do with us—but instead by forcing us to recognize barbarism as part of the human equipment, a possibility that all of us carry.
More about that in a bit. But I haven’t shown yet what I mean by density. One of Brody’s complaints about the film is that “There’s also no room for the victims: prisoners, serving as forced laborers, appear around the house throughout the film, but silently. They’re given neither any voice nor any point of view.” As with many of Brody’s observations about the film—and to be clear, I think Brody is a really good critic, one of my critics of reference for film (Dargis is another)—I think this is factually imprecise, and certainly inattentive. Hedwig’s huge garden seems to be worked by prisoners. But the domestic servants at least do not live within the walls of the camp. The nanny seems to be German; the other women working in the house are Polish—target of a slower (though no less absolute) genocidal project than that facing Jews. When Hedwig’s mother, on a visit, whispers in shock “Jews in the house,” Hedwig laughs: the Jews are all on the other side of the wall, she says; the women working in the house are “local girls.” Their status wasn’t entirely clear to me. Clearly they are not in any normal sense simple workers, but they don’t seem to be prisoners. At least some of them live in the house with the Hösses; in one of two moments when Hedwig loses her composure, she screams at one servant something like, “Don’t you live well in my house?” When a bag of clothes from newly arrived, murdered prisoners arrives, Hedwig allows each of the servants to choose an item.
To be clear, these workers’ lives can be, at any moment, forfeit, and it’s evident they’re living under a regime of terror. What seems really wrong to me about Brody’s observation is his assertion that “they’re given neither any voice nor any point of view.” Point of view, as I’ve already suggested, is complex in the film—I think Glazer resists letting us occupy any character’s perspective—but to the extent that it’s granted to anyone it is granted to one of the Polish servants, Aniela, played by Zuzanna Kobiela in one of the film’s great performances. (The historical figure’s full name was Aniela Bednarska, and much of what is known about the Höss family household at Auschwitz comes from a diary she kept, apparently, and from interviews she gave after the war. From information I can find online, she does not seem to have been a prisoner, at least officially. Please correct this, and anything else I get wrong, in the comments.) She does have one line, actually: “Nein, Frau Höss,” which she speaks before one of the film’s most chilling moments, when Hedwig, eating breakfast, calmly and quietly tells her, “I could have my husband spread your ashes across the fields of Babice.”
But point of view doesn’t depend on speech, and Aniela’s experience is conveyed eloquently, plangently by Kobiela in every movement. In the one scene where Rudolf and Hedwig argue—Hedwig is chasing after Rudolf, yelling for him to stop and talk to her—Aniela presses herself against the wall, her head down, her broom clutched to her body: her posture speaks of absolute, animal fear, a survival strategy of invisibility. In an extraordinary sequence, as Rudolf arrives at the house with a group of German industrialists in tow (the presence of civilian businessmen at the camp, seeking slave labor and profit, is another fact of the world that is quietly omnipresent in the film), he takes off his boots before entering the house. Immediately a man (who does seem to be a prisoner) snatches them and takes them to a spigot beside the house, thoroughly washing them before setting them back at the door. This is interspliced with the image of Aniela placing a single small liqueur glass on a tray, carefully centering it before filling it to the brim with liquid, then carrying it out of the room, every movement calibrated to prevent it from spilling. This apparently negligible action takes on extraordinary drama—everything in how Aniela moves conveys the stakes for her, her fear; I was terrified, too. This was one of the few moments in the film where I did feel that I had access to a character’s interiority, and where it became available to me for sympathetic investment. A moment later we see Aniela take the boots from the door and set them outside Rudolf’s office.
This is what I mean by density. Every detail—every gesture, every object—is packed with information about the world and the situation in which the characters live. The mechanized efficiency of domestic labor is a kind of shadow of the mechanized efficiency of slaughter the film hides from our view. I became hyper aware of Rudolf’s boots throughout the film on my second viewing, seeing how they are processed, cared for, how they are a mark of the line between domestic life and work—a line that never holds. In that first scene, the industrialists seem a little taken aback when Rudolf removes his boots, and ask if they should remove their shoes as well. No no, he says, there’s no need. One of the haunting questions the moment leaves unanswered is what contamination Rudolf is protecting his house from, what has soiled his boots. It suggests unimaginable horrors; the film forces us to imagine them.
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All of the performances in the film are extremely good; the best is probably Sandra Hüller’s as Hedwig. It was a banner year for Hüller, who is up for Best Actress for her extraordinary performance in Anatomy of a Fall, a film that I thought was very good but also weirdly flawed and confused—confused about itself, I mean, about what its central question was. But that’s a subject for a different Substack. Hüller’s performance in Zone of Interest is less flashy, maybe, but no less extraordinary; like the rest of the film, it’s so lived-in that it makes exposition—the mere relaying of information—superfluous. The whole world is conveyed in every movement.
What do I mean? After receiving the bag of clothing she distributes among the servants, Hedwig goes up to her room with her own prize, a glamorous fur coat. As she tries it on, pulling it tight to her body, modeling it over her drab household clothes, it’s clear what a foreign object it is for her. She has no idea how to wear it; though it fits her fine, her body can’t inhabit it. There’s a tube of lipstick in the coat’s pocket, and this is foreign to her, too: she sniffs it, she puts it on her hand to test the color, she uses her finger to rub it into her lips, finally she daubs it clumsily against her mouth. Then she takes a corner of her apron to wipe it all off.
I find this scene so eloquent, compressing a whole national narrative about Jews, who in Nazi ideology were at once vermin and privileged, hyper-cultured, the object of both disgust and envious class resentment. On my second viewing, I was amazed at how Hüller moves, giving Hedwig an ungainly, lumbering gait; or the way, in the scene where she speaks that chilling line to Aniela, she shoves her food into her mouth. Details about the historical Hedwig’s upbringing are weirdly hard to find—I couldn’t even find clear information about where she was born—but everything in Hüller’s performance suggests that the luxury in which she lives in Auschwitz was foreign to her experience, an elaborate costume. (You’ve certainly landed on your feet, her mother says to her on her visit.)
Hüller’s most extended speech comes in the scene of her argument with Rudolf, and it’s revelatory for what I take to be Glazer’s aims. The argument comes in the middle of a pool party, when Rudolf suddenly announces to Hedwig that he’s being transferred—something he has known for a week—and that the family will have to leave their home. He flees her questions, walking through the house and then out the front door, and Hedwig follows him. (This is one of the only times we see the road outside the home, and the only time we see military vehicles; it’s also one of the film’s only tracking shots.) She finds him standing by the river, gazing out over the water. We have to go, he tells her, and she responds, “No, you have to go,” demanding that he request that the family stay in the house in Auschwitz while he goes to Oranienburg. His shock at this proposal is one of the signs in the film that—unlike in Amis’s novel—his bond with Hedwig is a sincere one. (That said, we do see him summon a woman, perhaps a prisoner, for sex, and the film strongly suggests that Hedwig also has sex with a man I take to be a Polish laborer. The historical Rudolf was investigated for sexual relations with a political prisoner, who became pregnant, an episode that may have led to his removal from Auschwitz and that is dramatized in Amis’s novel; the film only makes one, oblique reference to an “investigation.”)
Hedwig justifies her demand with an impassioned speech about their ideals. The film’s Hedwig is a true believer—she and Rudolf met on a farm, both enthusiasts of a Nazi back-to-the-land movement—and she makes an appeal to the beliefs she and Rudolf share. They would have to drag me out of here, she tells him. That is our house, she says. We’re living how the Führer told us to—the Führer said Go east, we have come east. The Führer says we need Lebensraum—that (she points in the direction of their house) is our Lebensraum. (All of this is reconstructed from notes I scribbled in the dark theater, they aren’t exact quotes.) I don’t think this is just a domestic squabble, as Brody suggests when he calls the film “scenes from a marriage.” (To be fair to Brody, I’ve just double checked this, and it’s from the header of the article, not the text of the review—which means it’s entirely possible it’s not from Brody himself. But it does express the spirit of his objections to the film.) I think Glazer is making a serious and profound argument about the way fascist ideology suffuses domestic life, so that Lebensraum becomes not just a national program but an individual ideal. He is also, not incidentally, casually dismissing, as he does throughout the film, what has been a kind of ludicrous debate about how much Hedwig knew about her husband’s activities. In the memoir Rudolf wrote in prison, he claimed Hedwig never knew about the gas chambers, which is a claim some historians have apparently taken seriously. The film tacitly reveals how absurd an idea it is. Of course she knew, as everyone in the camp’s vicinity knew. There’s no way to keep death on that scale a secret, especially while reaping its rewards. Bring back any chocolates or other goodies, Hedwig tells Rudolf one night in bed, meaning from the prisoners’ stolen goods; ashes from the crematorium are sprinkled over her flowerbeds.
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Another meaning of density: every frame of the film is considered, every image is deliberate, every sound. This isn’t to say that there weren’t choices I questioned, though finally, even if I wasn’t sure I agreed with them, they earned my respect. I’ve said that the film doesn’t give us any vessels for sympathetic identification, but we do in fact see one heroic figure: a Polish girl who, at great personal risk, leaves food for the prisoners at their work sites, hiding pears among their tools and (in a wildly poetic image) burying apples in what seems to be a ditch they are digging. These sequences (there are two of them), are hugely disruptive in the film, they erupt from its texture in a wild formal extravagance: they were filmed in black and white with a military thermal imaging camera, registering heat instead of light; they look like animated photographic negatives. In both sequences, as we watch this girl we hear Rudolf’s voice reading fairy tales to his daughters.
My friend Mark Armijo McKnight, a brilliant photographer, loved these moments, and was hugely excited by the formal conceit. He’s mostly convinced me, but I wasn’t quite sure of my response either time I watched the film. In part this was because I respect so much what otherwise seems the film’s refusal of sanity, the way it denies us any point of sane value in the world of the film. There is no Angelus figure to serve as a moral reference point against which to measure the moral aberration of the Nazis. I think that’s important to the film’s moral aims, and especially to the way it implicates us. (More about this in a bit.) Maybe the formal device of the thermal imaging camera protects against this—it’s the girl who is the exception, not the actually aberrant Nazis; she exists in a different realm. I don’t understand all of the ensuing formal shenanigans—in the second sequence we see her arrive at her home, carrying her bicycle up the stairs to her apartment, and in flashes the film switches from the thermal image to regular values before switching back. Why? I don’t know. But it’s interesting, and Mark loved it, and he’s smarter than I am.
In the second sequence, while the girl is placing pears among the workers’ shovels, she finds a small metal canister left there by one of the prisoners, presumably for her to find; unscrewing it, she sees a folded up sheeted of paper inside. We learn what this is a little later, in a scene that is also unique in the film. After the second thermal imaging sequence, we see a girl sitting at a piano in what looks to be middle class home. I’m confused about who and where she is; this doesn’t seem to be the impoverished household of the apartment we saw the girl return to. Is the girl at the piano the girl who hid the food? I think she must be, but I don’t feel sure (if you have a surer sense of this, again, please put it in the comments); I do feel sure, because of the way the page has been folded, that the sheet of music on the piano’s stand is the page hidden in the canister the girl found.
The discovery of the music is fictional, so far as I can tell, but not the music itself: the song is “Sunbeams,” by Joseph Wulf, a Jewish prisoner of Auschwitz, and it was written in the camp. The story of Wulf, who survived the camp only to commit suicide in 1974, in despair over German indifference to his historical research into the Holocaust, is told in this article about the song and its use in the film. As the girl plays the melody, subtitles provide the text, the only Jewish words we hear in the entire film. They’re written in Yiddish. “We who are imprisoned here, are wakeful as the stars at night,” the text begins. “Souls afire, like the blazing sun, tearing, breaking through their pain, for soon we’ll see that waving flag, the flag of freedom yet to come.”
Intellectually, I can’t justify this scene; it’s the one moment in the film that seems like it should be kitsch, an appeal to pathos unlike anything else the movie allows itself. (It’s also another moment that counters Brody’s claim that victims have no voice in the film.) But it feels right to me. Maybe it’s that the scene is treated so quietly, without melodrama: just the figure of the girl, the clumsily, eloquently played melody. At the end of it she stops playing, and for a moment we see her looking at the page, her expression unreadable. Maybe it’s that no one sings, that the only human voice is the one we provide, reading the subtitles. (This was something else my friend Mark thought was brilliant.) The whole thing can’t last more than a minute, if that. It should seem like a violation of what I take to be the film’s contract, the rules it sets for itself; I feel like I should object to it. But maybe that violation is part of what makes it so moving.
Even harder for me to swallow—though kitsch isn’t the word for it, it’s too strange for that—is a moment almost at the very end of the movie. The film ends with Rudolf, alone in what I take to be Oranienburg, descending a staircase in an empty, darkened office building. There’s something surreal about the sequence from the start: the floor has a geometric pattern, rectangles within rectangles, that echoes the seemingly endless flights of stairs. (Escher, again.) Rudolf, whom we have seen being examined by a doctor shortly before this scene, though we don’t know why, stops and bends over, retching. He doesn’t vomit, which makes the moment even stranger; he remains bent over, as if trying to expel some rot he can’t rid himself of. He straightens, descends another flight, and repeats the gesture. Then, still bent over, he looks to his left, down a darkened hall, at the end of which is a pinprick of light. This pinprick expands, becoming a window, and then a door opens and we are in Auschwitz, in modern day, as a group of women enter to clean the museum.
What are we meant to make of this? On one hand, it seems a more grievous violation of the film’s contract, as though here, at the very end, it loses its nerve, offering an escape hatch from the nightmare we’ve been locked in. A domesticating, placating gesture, as if it were saying, Yes, you’ve spent two hours among horrors, but remember that the good guys win. Even worse, are we meant to think that Höss has a vision of this future, that he sees the judgment of history? It’s not implausible: I think (based on the timing of Höss’s recall to Auschwitz, news he has just shared with his wife), that we’re in 1944, by which point the writing was more than on the wall; anyone with any grip on reality could see that Germany would lose the war.
By either of those readings, I think this weird flash forward is a wrong step, a failed gesture. But I don’t really trust my readings. It’s such a weird gesture, for one thing; the very strangeness of it resists the kind of domesticating force these readings would suggest. It’s important that we see the museum not filled with tourists but instead undergoing routine maintenance, a place of work. We see some of the iconic images: the displays of suitcases and shoes, prisoners’ uniforms hung up for viewing. But we see them only as the women wipe down the vitrines. The women aren’t trying to make meaning or memories; they’re just doing their jobs. Maybe the sequence raises a question about what we should do with history, where we put the stuff of it, how we preserve it. If so, I don’t think it offers any answers.
This lasts a couple of minutes, a significant interruption, before we return to the view of Höss, still bent over, still staring down the hall. And then he straightens, and continues his journey down.
[Edit: My friend the novelist Nellie Hermann (you should read her beautiful novel about Van Gogh, if you haven’t) texted me after reading this essay and suggested a different reading of the museum scene: that it is “a way of indicating the longevity of systems of numbness,” showing how the women need “to treat the reality of where they are as a non-entity.” I think that’s smart, and probably right. And it may be that the museum stands in for the more typical ways of representing atrocity, the idea that an adequate representation means putting everything on view. Maybe it’s a a little moment of polemic: here’s the numbness that has resulted from our typical approaches to registering horror; let’s try something else. I don’t think that convinces me, quite, but it makes the gesture richer, more complex.] [Edit #2: Please read Maura Finkelstein’s thoughts in the comments below.]
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The Hösses had five children. They’re a constant presence in the film, key to the ways Glazer makes clear that the household, for all its apparent bourgeois normalcy, is radically unquiet and—like Rudolf, maybe, with his retching—diseased. One of the daughters wanders at night, startling Rudolf when he comes upon her huddled in a corner. The boys play like any boys, but their games are horrors: the older brother lies in his top bunk with a flashlight, examining teeth. In one of the film’s most devastating moments, we see the younger boy alone in his room, playing with dice. We hear noises of a disturbance, shouts from the camp, and then Rudolf’s voice demanding an explanation. A man has been fighting over an apple, he’s told—one of the apples the girl has left, I think we’re meant to understand; and this moment helps press against a sentimental response to those thermal imaging sequences. The boy wanders toward the window, looking through it for a moment; then he moves away.
“Bring him here,” his father’s voice says; then: “Drown him in the river.” It’s recognizably Rudolf’s voice, but a radically different voice from the one he uses in the house, high and piercing, a voice imitating Hitler: fascism is also a style. (Hitler famously had starkly different public and private voices.) The boy is looking down, his back to the window, and he shows no obvious response. But I find the moment devastating, overwhelmingly moving: the father’s familiar authority of correction is transformed into an authority of annihilation. “Don’t do that again,” the boy whispers, I think to himself; as I experienced the scene, he has identified not with paternal authority but with the punished offender. This is the only moment I sympathized with any of the Hösses. That sympathy is reinforced in a later, equally chilling scene, when the older brother locks the younger boy in their mother’s greenhouse. He sits outside, laughing, while the younger brother shouts to be released; the older boy leans forward, still smiling, and starts hissing: sssssssss, ssssssssss. It’s the sound of the gas chambers; he’s playing at extermination. (Apparently the historical elder son really was something of a sadist, flinging stones at prisoners with his slingshot.)
I became a little obsessed with the children and their fates. There’s a Washington Post article about the middle child, Inge-Brigitt, who was 80 and living outside of DC when the article was published in 2013. It’s an amazing piece of writing. Inge-Brigitt, who goes by Brigitte, agrees to be interviewed on the condition that her married name not be revealed. She describes the day in her childhood when British agents accosted her mother and older brother, looking for their father (the family, minus Rudolf, had taken refuge above a sugar factory); she got a headache from their screaming, she said, a headache that returned when she received the journalist’s letter.
Brigitte left Germany in the 1950s, moving to Spain, where—this detail blows my mind—she spent three years working as a model for Balenciaga. What in the world. She lived in various countries with her husband, an engineer, before finally settling in DC in 1972. For thirty years, she worked for a Jewish-owned fashion salon. Early in her time there, drunk with a manager, she told them who her father was. The manager told the owner of the salon, who said that Brigitte could stay: she had been a child at Auschwitz, she hadn’t committed any crimes herself—an astonishing act of moral generosity, it seems to me. In another mind-blowing detail, the owner and her husband were refugees, having fled Germany after Kristallnacht. They and Brigitte became close friends; the owner’s son, contacted by the journalist, says “My family holds Brigitte as close as we always have.” Put that in a novel, see if anybody would buy it.
Brigitte does not come off well in the piece. She has hidden her past from her grandchildren, but sleeps beneath a portrait of her father, whom she calls “the nicest man in the world.” “There must have been two sides to him,” she says when asked about his crimes. She has never gone to the Holocaust Museum, because “they always make things worse than it is.” She acknowledges the Holocaust itself, but insists the numbers of those killed must be inflated, because “How can there be so many survivors if so many had been killed?” Auschwitz, the construction of which Höss oversaw, was the largest of the extermination camps, capable of killing two thousand people an hour. 1.1 million people died there. It’s true that Brigitte was a child, and it would be obscene to hold her accountable for her father’s crimes. But can we hold her accountable for failing to recognize them fully? I find it a moving question: How could one process such facts about one’s father?
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But should it be a moving question? Should it be a question we care about? Manohla Dargis’s review of the film in the NYT fascinates me, because I agree with her about so much. She sees the same things I see: the film’s discipline in how it has chosen to tell the story, its guarding against sympathetic investment. But she comes away with a radically different response: she hates it, calling it a “hollow, self-aggrandizing art-film exercise.” She’s offended by its aesthetics, by the fact that it cares so much about aesthetics. Is it morally depraved to care about aesthetics when making a film about the Holocaust? (Would it be morally depraved not to?) Dargis seems to think that Glazer’s primary concern is impressing us with his technical bravura, what she calls the film’s “wow factor.” (She’s referring specifically to the thermal imaging sequences, but she indicts the film as a whole.) I don’t understand this response, especially since to me the aesthetics are so bound up with the film’s moral project. Much of Dargis’s negative response, and much of the negative response directed at the film in general, seems predicated on outrage over what I began this essay by calling the film’s conceit, its flipping of foreground and background. It’s as though our attention is a privilege of some kind, something it’s obscene to bestow upon the Hösses. How dare we tell the story of the Holocaust from any perspective other than that of the victims, this outrage seems to presume. How dare we dramatize that story as it was experienced by the perpetrators?
But doesn’t the impossible task of narrating humanness, all that we’re capable of, demand it? It seems to me we don’t know what to do with art that asks this question. I think of Philip Guston’s great paintings from the late 1960s, in which he shows cartoonish figures in KKK hoods doing everyday things: smoking, riding around town, looking generally hapless and lost. In one of his greatest paintings, one of the greatest paintings I know, 1969’s “The Studio,” one of these figures, with a cigarette in one hand and a paintbrush in the other, paints a self-portrait. The painting itself is a self-portrait, of course, an exercise in a kind of nightmare identification. Could this be me, Guston’s paintings ask, am I capable of this; and there’s nothing glamorous in the question, no self-flattering innocence or self-lacerating monstrosity. (Abjection can be glamorous, too.) The paintings refuse to quarantine the evil of American racism as something over there, something of which the self—any American self, certainly any white American self—can be pure. It’s one of the twentieth century’s great works of conscience. One of the finest things I’ve read about Guston is an essay by Steve Locke from ArtForum, in which he describes, after being shocked and angered by his first glimpse of these paintings in art school, how he immersed himself in Guston’s life and work, and came to a different understanding. “I learn that I am not seeing what I think I am seeing,” Locke writes. “Instead of evidence of an artist’s racism, I learn that, for the first time in my life, I am seeing a white artist—one of the giants of American art—grapple with his own complicity in white supremacy.”
What if we all tried to grapple with our complicity in evil, even if that complicity remains, thanks to nothing more than the luck of our circumstances, potential? I’ve written elsewhere about what seems to me a genuinely repugnant aspect of our moral moment, a kind of Indiana Jones moralizing triumphalism. This has flourished on the left in the era of Trump, with memes urging us all to go out and punch Nazis, memes that assume, against every scrap of evidence history can offer, that we would all of us, under the Nazi regime—assuming we were lucky enough not to be targeted by that regime—risk our lives with the resistance. This seems to me an unwarranted confidence. Of course we wouldn’t all be resistance fighters; only the tiniest fraction of us would risk our only lives for the lives of others. And what’s most important for our moral health is to acknowledge that should the shit ever really hit the fan—it looks likelier all the time—none of us can know what we would do. The posture of righteousness seems to me not only morally bankrupt but dangerous. None of us has any idea what we would do in extremis, whether we would pass a test we haven’t faced.
Or have we? I’ve always taken comfort from the fact that in anything like a Nazi regime I would be an early casualty, a degenerate cosmopolitan Weimar queer quickly cleansed. But if I weren’t? I feel fairly sure I would collapse before committing any overt act of violence: I can’t bear killing bugs that make their way into my apartment, I can’t imagine killing another human being. But that was true of a lot of Germans, too, and the Nazis expended a lot of effort figuring out how to make non-psychopaths, which is most of us, kill unarmed civilians without losing their minds. And even so a lot of them did lose their minds. (One of the piquant moments in Amis’s novel is a detail about asylum inmates being murdered to make beds available for Nazi soldiers suffering breakdowns after murdering civilians.) But let’s set that aside. What if violence wasn’t demanded? What if we could keep our heads down, occupy ourselves with our families, our pets, what if we could go to work and grab a beer with our friends afterward and read a book as we fell asleep, what if we could turn our faces away from the sufferings of others? What if it was a matter of degrees, of accepting a little more and a little more, until suddenly one was lost in some moral hinterland, disfigured, unrecognizable to oneself?
Isn’t that a fair description of many of our lives? I don’t think the Holocaust should be a metaphor, and I don’t think Glazer makes it one. I think the film, like most great art, sharpens distinctions, it doesn’t flatten them. But it also allows for unexpected points of contact. That feeling I had after my first viewing of the film, that sense that something had happened to me, was a feeling of having been indicted. Glazer treads a very fine line; I think it’s an exemplary one. He doesn’t make his Nazis caricatures, he doesn’t make them monsters we could easily cordon off from humanity, from ourselves, or—since this is our response to monsters, too—that we could glamorize and sympathize with. (He’s like Guston in this, I think.) It’s a film that attacks all our conventional narratives, all our pieties. It makes us see the Höss family as humans like us, and so it makes us recognize the potential in ourselves, if not for overt barbaric acts (though that’s there, too) then for a willful blindness to, a tolerance of barbarism. Identification, at least potential identification, without sympathy—maybe that’s a way of putting what Glazer achieves. “I have the germs of every human infirmity in me,” Hardy’s Jude the Obscure says; Glazer’s film made me feel it. This isn’t a typical Holocaust film, with heroes and villains; it’s villains all the way down. Nobody, including the viewer, gets to feel good about themselves. That’s an index of its achievement.
I can’t end this essay without at least saying quickly how remarkable Mica Levi’s music for the film is; it’s one of the most powerful soundtracks I’ve ever experienced. There are sounds I’ve never heard before: radically processed and estranged voices and plucked strings and synthesizers, and low buzzes so subtle I thought at first they might be trains passing underneath the theater. Stay for the final credits: the music, with a simple five note (occasionally extended to a sixth) motif that is layered and relayered until it becomes unrecognizable, unbearably complex, is a kind of encapsulation of the whole film. It’s also the film’s most faithful adaptation of Amis, whose Angelus offers this description of the sounds of Auschwitz: “we heard something, something borne on the wind … It was a helpless, quavering chord, a fugal harmony of human horror and dismay. We stood quite still with our eyes swelling in our heads. I could feel my body clench itself for more and greater alarums. But then came a shrill silence.”
As always, thank you for reading—
G.