The Genocide Will (Not) Be Televised: The Zone of Interest and the Evil of Banality

Contains Spoilers

1. The New York Times Sucks

Most reviews of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023) inevitably lead to Hannah Arendt’s assessment of “the banality of evil.” Occasionally, an independent review might suggest Primo Levi’s split between “monsters” and the “common man,” the latter being far more dangerous and deadly to the social good by unquestioningly carrying out the gruesome demands of these horrifying others. Arendt’s concept, now well-established as a piece of pop-sociological critique, seems to be applied to Glazer’s film as a way to escape further analysis. In a strange way, the very idea of Arendt’s banality has become banal. 

The Zone of Interest, loosely adapted from the novel by Martin Amis, is about Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family’s picturesque domestic life situated directly next to the death camp. Their paradisiacal garden shares a wall with the camp, and the horrors of the Holocaust are relegated behind it. We never see the unimaginable process carried out just over the border, only the quotidian life of a family who both sustains and is sustained by its evil. Were it not for the looming guard towers in the background, the occasional steam rising from trains delivering prisoners, or the red glow of the crematorium’s flames, The Zone of Interest would simply be an aesthetically over-indulgent examination of bourgeois life, as one disgruntled reviewer in The New York Times suggests. The movie is not a Holocaust movie that happens to be about a family; it is a family drama that happens to be about the Holocaust. Once more playing a linguistic game—the movie is not about “the banality of evil” (I go so far as to suggest that misses the point entirely), but rather the evil of banality. 

The aforementioned New York Times review declares that Glazer’s “aesthetic bona fides, seriousness, sophistication and familiarity with a comparatively rarefied cinematic tradition…[seems] to be the biggest point of this vacuous movie,” a critique that may be better applied to Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things (2023). Describing the film as “vacuous” is an interesting choice, as its indication of “emptiness” implies that something is missing. What is missing from The Zone of Interest is the violence of the Holocaust—or at least, that seems to be what is visually missing. Auditorily, the specter of this genocide haunts the entire film. We can read this “vacuous” description of the movie as something profoundly sinister and unique to our current American culture: the bourgeois demand for violence. The Times review seems to imply that the emptiness of the movie could be filled by that spectacular violence of the Holocaust—as if demanding more screams, more beatings, and more ashes. It may come as no surprise that this accusation of emptiness is found in The New York Times, a newspaper whose use of the passive voice (the favorite grammatical construction of war criminals) has taken itself to the logical extreme of complicity in, and endorsement of, genocide. What is missing from The Zone of Interest is nothing short of our own lost humanity. 

The Times’ accusation of “vacuousness” unknowingly echoes Sandra Hüller, who plays Rudolf’s wife Hedwig, when she describes a similar emptiness demanded by the character’s subjectivity. Discussing her preparation for the role of “the Queen of Auschwitz,” Hüller states, “When I play someone I walk around inside my body and my imagination and I look where they sit, what they do, and there was just nothing. It was just empty.” That emptiness is undoubtedly felt throughout the movie, from its persistently fixed and distanced perspective, the general lack of a soundtrack, and the long periods of verbal silence. There is nothing in the film that speaks to cinematic empathy—no close-ups to show emotions, no voice-overs, no flashbacks, no scores. Instead we are left alone to dwell in the unoccupied space of the Höss family home, like “Big Brother in the Nazi House,” as Glazer himself describes it. There can be no subjectivity in the home, for even just a flash of consciousness would cause the house to come crashing down (as Trump recently suggested about his own actions and how he is able to put on his pants in the morning).

Again I come back to the “vacuousness” of the movie, and how sublimely stupid the critique is. Glazer’s film, like our own “First World”/post-industrial society, reveals through what it conceals. The Höss family demands unconsciousness and a refusal for introspection—how else could decent, law-abiding citizens live directly next door to a factory of unthinkable horror? While we may be reluctant to describe the family as “decent,” we must remember that they are indeed not just very decent Nazis, but the ideal family living the ideal Nazi life as professed by Hitler himself and affirmed by Hedwig directly in the film. She tells her husband, “Everything the Führer said about how to live is how we do.” In her words, they are the perfect domestic embodiment of Nazi ideology. And again, this ideology requires an erasure of one’s humanity. 

2. The Greenhouse and the Gas Chamber

The film is remarkable for its detachment from the spectacle of violence. In the gap left between what is seen and what is heard, we are invited to rediscover ourselves and what it means to be a caring human in a world dominated by a deadly and destructive ideology. When the screen fades to black, we may find ourselves staring blankly into our own moral defects. This cinematic “emptiness” is our own inability to authentically address the devastating global conditions that sustain our material comfort. We must not consider the evil that maintains our own banality. 

The film communicates this lack of self-reflection most blatantly by its intrusion of an outsider, providing perhaps the most critical scene that teaches us how to watch the movie. Hedwig’s mother, Linna Hensel, comes to visit, providing the first external gaze upon the domestic sphere of the Höss home. In many ways, Linna looks upon the property with the same fresh eyes as us. As with most scenes in the movie, there are two events happening simultaneously. Glazer reflected that there are effectively two films occurring at the same time in The Zone of Interest, the film that we see and the film that we hear. Near the midpoint of the movie, Hedwig guides her mother on a lengthy tour of the family’s garden. It begins with Hedwig pointing to the wall that separates the garden from the camp. However, instead of directly mentioning the wall, Hedwig calls her mother’s attention to the small patch of vine growing over it—“There’s the vine. Obviously it will grow.” Though deliberately planted to obscure the shocking division between the properties, the vine almost comically leaves much of the wall exposed. Like the Hösses’ refusal to examine their own consciousness, they patiently await the physical representation of this denial.

On a tour of the garden, Linna is initially awestruck by the level of bourgeois success her daughter has achieved. We hear the persistent buzzing of bees and bugs in the yard that intermingle with a loud humming sound coming from the daily activity of the camp. As they pass through the archway into the garden, Linna stops and states, “I’m speechless.” At the same time, we start to hear the sound of bells ringing, a train whistle, and an approaching steam engine faintly in the background. The family dog starts to bark, registering the auditory scene. Hedwig is quick to quiet the dog and smother this recognition of outside events, shouting “Nein!” The mother and daughter continue the visual tour that unfolds simultaneously with the auditory event of an arriving train transporting new prisoners to the camp. If the watcher/listener of the film registers both events, we too become speechless. 

The wall provides a physical barrier not just between the camp and the home, but also two spheres of labor: the professional and the domestic. Compartmentalize all that they may, the sounds that come from over the wall nonetheless communicate the latter’s reliance upon the former. Unveiling the garden, Hedwig proudly states, “It’s all my design. All the planting and everything. The greenhouse, the gazebo at the end.” But she also confesses, “I have gardeners. I couldn’t do it alone.”

On the other side of the wall is Rudolf’s garden, Auschwitz. Höss was intimately involved in the creation, design, development, and maintenance of the most notorious Nazi death camp. But he also could not do it alone. He too had his gardeners. One of whom, Karl Fritzsch, convinced Höss to begin using Zyklon B as a more efficient way to exterminate Jews in the gas chambers. Hedwig has her greenhouse and Rudolf has his gas chambers. The connection between the two is made explicit later in the film, where the eldest Höss boy, in uniform, teases his younger brother by forcibly dragging him into the greenhouse, barricading the door, and gleefully watching him from outside while making hissing sounds. Here the events of their father’s gas chambers are reduced to play. The banality of their boyhood is contingent upon the ongoing evil on the other side of the wall.

Continuing the tour of Hedwig’s garden, Linna suddenly stops to directly point out the wall, even though Hedwig has already done so at the beginning by indicating the vine. Linna asks, already knowing the answer, “And that’s the camp wall?” “Yes,” replies Hedwig, “that's the camp wall. We planted more vines at the back to grow and cover it.” Twice in quick succession we learn of Hedwig’s desire to cover the wall and further obscure from sight the horrors that allow her “paradise garden,” as Linna describes it, to grow. 

After the second acknowledgment of the wall and the growing vines, Linna deflects the horror by making a joke about her former Jewish employer, whom she worked for as a cleaner, being in the camp. This joke, used to mask the impossible evil of the Final Solution, is yet another vine employed to shield the family from the realities of Auschwitz. Surely we, the viewers, have never made jokes in a similar vein about the terrors of the world. 

Throughout Hedwig and Linna’s conversation, the sounds of the arriving train grow louder. While pointing out the vegetables and the sunflowers, there is a sudden scream from over the wall. Unaccustomed to the environment, Linna registers the sound and stops abruptly in her tracks, looking towards the barrier. Taking the cue from her daughter, who completely ignores the shriek, Linna quickly begins to follow Hedwig again towards the gazebo. Most of the scene is filmed from the side as the two continue their walk with the wall, its razor wires, and the looming barracks visible in the background. Just before sitting, Linna asks her daughter, “And Rudolf is okay?” Hedwig replies while pulling weeds, “Yes. He’s fine. Working non-stop, even when he’s home. Which he loves.” We, the viewers informed by history, are keenly aware of what Rudolf’s labor of love entails. 

Linna then stops again and pushes on Hedwig to pause her as well. She asks, “And you’re okay?” Using the German “aber,” the line may also be translated as “But, you’re good?” Having heard the scream, Linna attempts to impose a brief moment of reflection by halting her daughter’s walk. Hedwig shrugs her off and continues walking, turning to ask, “Do I look okay?” The two laugh. Everything looks lovely. Sitting down, Linna proudly tells her daughter, “To have all this. You really have landed on your feet, my child.”

Then there is the faint sound of more screaming, followed by a gunshot as prisoners begin to deboard the unseen train. Linna abruptly turns towards one of the garden walls, instinctually looking for the sound. Hedwig, unbothered, points up to the exposed pergola roof and remarks, “This will grow and cover everything. [Another gunshot, Linna turns.] You’ll see next time you visit.” Once again, Hedwig assures her mother that eventually everything will be covered by vegetation and the nightmares of the Holocaust will be seemingly hidden from their view. However, as we quickly learn again in the film, what is covered by sight cannot also shield the Höss home from the sounds of Nazi praxis. 

The dog continues responding to the elevating sounds of the disembarking prisoners, barking in reply to guard dogs yapping on the other side of the wall. Hedwig again attempts to silence the dog, calling out her familiar “Nein!” Only this time the command is drawn out with a rising inflection, sounding more like a question than a demand. When the dog ignores her request, she jumps up from her seat and approaches it, yelling “Stop it.” She instructs the dog to come with her to the seat. The dog follows and then quickly leaps away to continue loudly barking, harmonizing with the nearby (other) Nazi dogs. Filmed from a distance, we see Linna cover her ears before an abrupt jump cut to various stills of the beautiful garden flowers. While her mother may attempt to muffle the noise, the shots of the flowers are accompanied by some of the loudest Auschwitz sounds in the entire film. We hear coughing, women shrieking, more gunshots, all while the sound of the buzzing bees continues to rise to cover the drone of human suffering. The last shot is a red flower accompanied by the sound of a man repeatedly screaming. The flower fades into a red screen as the screaming continues. The sound cuts out, leaving us with a few seconds of silence, followed by a couple of seconds of Mica Levi’s score, and then another abrupt cut to a Höss family pool party in the garden.    

That night, Linna struggles to sleep in the room she shares with her granddaughter. Haunted by the red glow from the crematorium’s flames in her window, Linna stands in the dark, looking downward, horrified and silent. This gives us one of the closest approaches to a close-up in the entire film. In the background we hear the repetitive screams of the Höss family baby, who is attended to by a live-in local nanny who drinks throughout the night to cope with her occupational existence. Alone in her reflection, Linna’s solitude leads her to a moment of terrifying recognition. She stares blankly as the consequences of her son-in-law’s labor fully register. Perhaps even the utter inhumanity of her own joke about her former employer being in the camp crosses her mind again. The baby’s wails soon rhythmically resemble the previous shouts from the camp heard during the red screen. For Linna, the noise of the Holocaust is now coming from inside the house.  

The scene bears an eerie resemblance to Judi Dench’s performance as Lady Macbeth. Linna, like the Lady, cannot scrub her herself clean of the Nazi blood on her and her daughter’s hands. We might imagine her also shouting in her sleep, “Out, damned spot, out I say!” Oddly enough, one of the Höss daughters, like Lady Macbeth, sleepwalks. Even more remarkably, the scene cuts from Linna to the younger Höss boy in bed, playing with a flashlight. Just like Judi Dench with her candle, he runs his hands across the light, staring at the shadows they cast. Unable to cope with her guilt which has now fully materialized, Linna secretly leaves before morning. The close proximity to the realities of Nazi activity drives her away and safely back to her home where she can avoid the noise of her own government’s actions. The film itself also soon shifts away from the home to Rudolf’s administrative work back in Oranienburg, Germany, bureaucratically overseeing the operation of all concentration camps.

3. Little Nazi Flowers or: The Evil of Banality 

Returning to the frequent application of Arendt’s “banality of evil” by critics responding to The Zone of Interest, it is worth noting that the images of domesticity in the film far outweigh those of Rudolf’s bureaucratic labor. When we consider the “banality of evil,” we must consider the boring, detached work of Nazi technocrats, not the rest of the Höss family. Auschwitz is not contingent upon Hedwig’s garden, but Hedwig’s garden is entirely contingent upon Auschwitz. Her idealized world of leisure and aesthetic beauty, free from Jews, is materialized in her backyard. What sustains this bourgeois fantasy world is the evil of the Nazi party. As previously mentioned by Hedwig, the Höss family is the perfect image of Nazi domestic propaganda. It is entirely too fitting that this familial image obscures the vision and activity of the death camp. The perfect white nuclear family, living the perfect white nuclear family life: homeowners, groomed children, a dog, a yard with a garden, a pool with a slide, and a large fence to protect them from the outside world. Sound familiar?

Using the “banality of evil” to describe the film, in my opinion, completely obscures what the film communicates: the evil of banality. More directly, bourgeois banality. Evil is, in the film, unmistakably banal, as we witness the drab meetings of Nazi officials discussing the logistics of the Final Solution. Even Rudolf seems more motivated by class ascendency and a job-well-done than pure hatred. For him, Auschwitz is a scientific exercise executed with precision and Nazi ingenuity. His primary goal is to solve logistical problems and ramp up his quota of extermination. The need to do his job efficiently impacts his day-to-day existence, unable to enjoy a large party, recollecting to his wife how all he could imagine was the best way to gas everyone in the room. These professional ruminations are indeed the face of evil sustained by banal obligations. 

But the film is not a Holocaust movie. Its subject is undeniably the Höss family. As Glazer himself says, “If I was to explain the story, it’s about a man who has a lovely life with his family, he’s very good at his job, they live in the country, in a lovely house with a lovely garden. He also happens to be the commandant of Auschwitz. And the house they live in abuts the camp itself. Genocide becomes ambient to their life.” The primary difference between us and the Höss family is their proximity to the consequences of their country’s social, political, and economic activity. For them, “genocide becomes ambient.” What happens when that ambience is displaced, outsourced around the world and kept at a safe distance from decent, law-abiding citizens? Glazer again remarks, “I started trying to sort of look at this as a mirror of our lives now and the things we accept. The whole idea of this project was to try and present or reflect our similarities with the perpetrators. There’s nothing special about them. They are us and our neighbors.” If the Höss family cannot see the horror, at least they can hear it. On some strange level, this makes their refusal of self-reflection at least slightly more redeemable than ours.

Describing the characters, Glazer states, “Rudolf Höss sort of rang hollow, really. These people were not charismatic. I talked to Christian [Friedel, who plays Rudolf Höss] a lot about how they were occupied with doing rather than thinking. In fact, they were non-thinking.” In order to survive the material conditions of their existence, they had to be non-thinking. In many ways, we too must remain non-thinking. We must simply do, as others erect walls to obscure the realities of our own comfort. Whether it is ignoring the child slave labor that produces our chocolate, the migrant child labor in America that produces our Cheerios and Fruit of the Loom socks, the prison labor that produces Coca-Cola, countless American war crimes, the current and looming catastrophes of climate change we contribute to with our daily activity, or the genocide unfolding in Gaza bankrolled by tax dollars generated from our own labor. Under these conditions, even just a flash of consciousness would cause the house to come crashing down. The economic reality of most Americans now is a state of perpetual work to maintain stable living conditions. There is no time to think, only do. Like Linna’s own horrible realization: the genocide is coming from inside the house. 

Even more horrifying is the realization that, like ourselves, the genocide sustains the home. What The Zone of Interest so shockingly conveys is the evil of the Hösses’ banality. Their joy, sustenance, comfort, and pleasure are all products of the camp. Again, the camp exists without them—their banality has no effect on Auschwitz’s operation. Rather, the Höss family needs the camp. We see Hedwig try on a luxurious fur coat confiscated from a prisoner, the younger boy plays with extracted teeth, and most disturbingly, one of Hedwig’s gardeners (an Auschwitz prisoner) sprinkles human ashes in the garden as fertilizer for the Höss family paradise. Glazer’s film takes our own obscure material conditions and demystifies them, placing the concrete horrors of our comfort directly in our faces (incidentally by hiding them from the audience’s view). Glazer performs a sort of retrospective “cognitive mapping,” what Fredric Jameson describes as one’s ability to “map” or understand the realities of their social, political, and economic environment. In a profoundly fragmented post-industrial society like our own, the ability to perform our own mapping is obscured by all the barriers we have erected, rendering it nearly impossible. Glazer gathers these fragmented bits and reassembles them for us as neatly as possible. 

While we may not personally be Nazis (though there are plenty among us), we are nonetheless products of a genocidal regime that demands global domination, oppression, and conquest. We may not be Rudolf, or even Hedwig, but we are undoubtedly those beautiful little Nazi flowers that grow in their garden, nurtured by the labor and the ashes of those who are oppressed, whether directly (by Rudolf) or indirectly (by Linna). Our petty comforts rely upon these same conditions. We collectively blossom at the expense of others. In short, your happiness rests upon the suffering and death of incalculable innocents. Glazer’s film makes this so painfully unavoidable. It is no wonder The New York Times chief film critic rejects the film. Accepting it condemns the entire existence of the paper itself. Instead, the newspaper’s staff chooses, like Linna in the garden, to cover their ears.

4. Conclusion: The Striptease of Genocide 

Glazer masterfully executes a cinematic trick: he unveils the horrors of our own society by obscuring the horrors of perhaps the most well-known, concentrated human atrocity. Though we live with the consequences of our material comfort at a safe distance, we have, oddly enough, integrated images of global atrocities directly into our daily experience. 

Youtuber YUGOPNIK recently published a fascinating examination of “war crime influencers.” He starts by recalling the prominence of websites like LiveLeak early in the social media era. These shock sites hosted videos of cartel executions, terrorist beheadings, fatal workplace accidents, and more. As disturbing as this content is, it was at least contained in this limited anal fissure of the dark web that had surfaced on the internet. Many kids, like myself, were scared of LiveLeak and refused to look at it. I never wanted to witness death or murder, and in retrospect, I am reminiscent of a time when I had to opt-in to atrocity-porn. What the video demonstrates is the odd phenomenon of the disintegration of the border walls that surrounded sites like LiveLeak, and the integration of terror into our regular feeds and algorithms. I am not innocent of this exposure as well—scrolling in bed before sleep, I regularly pass by soccer highlights, a kid face-planting off a bike, a hot girl recommending short Russian fiction, dead Palestinian babies, more soccer highlights, more hot girls, more dead babies. The integration of this content into our daily consciousness has skewed the boundaries of what is both “normal” and “permissible.” 

YUGOPNIK’s video presents the most shocking manifestation of this internet phenomenon as “war crime influencers,” or IDF soldiers who post their illegal (under international law) activities to TikTok. These include, but are not limited to, tortures, shootings, the destruction of residential buildings, and sexy dancing as bombs level entire neighborhoods in the background. These IDF soldiers have removed the wall in the Hösses’ garden, because they know we are all becoming Hedwig—no longer capable of the self-disgust that Linna feels. Maybe you are protected from this content, or maybe you just cover your eyes and ears. If that is the case, congratulations. 

What The Zone of Interest forces us to confront is the brutal fact that the genocide is not just inside our homes, it is inside our bodies. The human ashes from the fertilizer have seeped into our produce, and we consume the dead daily. We are exposed to so many images of horror that they remain only that: images. Not real people. Not human lives. Images. What Glazer does is reintroduce modesty. Like a porn addict suddenly aroused by a softcore striptease, we have to relearn what it means to be disturbed. Or, as one scene in the Barbie (2023) movie explains, “She looks even better in more clothes…Because you can imagine more!”

The Zone of Interest denies us visual access to what we expect: the familiar images of the Final Solution. By obscuring them from our view, Glazer makes the horror all the more visible. In a paradoxical way, due to our over-exposure to human atrocity, we are more disturbed by what we do not see. Our imagination fills in the gap. And the use of our imagination returns us to a point of self-reflection that we have mostly removed from our daily existence—again, because to think about the conditions of our lives is to crumble. We have to view the spectacle of horror without viewing the spectacle of violence in order to remind ourselves of our own humanity. In other words, we have to hide the impossible evil in order to see ourselves again.

At the risk of exhaustion, I want to touch on two more aspects of Glazer’s film. The first is the director’s use of infrared cameras to film sequences involving a girl named Aleksandra who hides apples and pears among the worksites of starving prison laborers. This brazen act of kindness—of nourishing those who our superiors are trying to extinguish—is enough to inspire hope. Glazer admits as much, stating that the technique is employed to capture an essence of goodness, rather than an individual’s actions; even though the character was based on an actual 90-year-old Polish woman Glazer met while conducting research for the film. In a world so compromised by oppressive evil, the smallest act of care is sometimes all we can muster. But her distribution of fruits plants seeds of hope in us, and will perhaps inspire the viewer to imagine a kinder world. Whether or not praxis comes out of that hope is up to us.  

And finally, the film’s conclusion is just as startling as the rest of it. Rudolf phones his wife to tell her the good news: Heinrich Himmler is calling the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz “Operation Höss.” “That’s fantastic. I’m so happy for you,” Hedwig tells him over the phone. “Thank you, Mutzi [“kitten”]. It’s your name too,” Rudolf replies. After their conversation, Rudolf descends a dark staircase, coughing loudly and pausing occasionally to heave and spit onto the floor. At one point he stops and looks directly at the camera. The scene cuts to a dark screen with a small circle of light, which soon reveals itself to be a peephole in the door of the crematorium in modern day Auschwitz. Museum workers open the door and begin preparing for the day: sweeping, wiping down surfaces, cleaning windows, and vacuuming. We are provided with a montage of Auschwitz relics kept safely behind glass. In one interpretation, we can view this as “sanitizing” the atrocity, without implying that the museum does a disservice to the memory of the victims. Rather, one function of the museum (as in any museum) is to permanently fix a moment in time. Instead of the garden wall, we are now barricaded from these evil acts through glass windows that house shoes and prison uniforms. We can both contain the horror and displace it—remove it from our bodies. How could these monsters commit such inconceivable crimes against humanity?

As quickly as the movie cuts to the contemporary museum, it jumps right back to Rudolf who continues staring at the camera before cautiously taking a step back, as if he was just given this glimpse into the future. Not only are we watching Rudolf, but he is also watching us. It reminds the audience these monsters are not fictions, but rather, as Glazer said, “They are us and our neighbors.” There is a danger in neatly containing these atrocities. That is, by doing so we can more easily convince ourselves we could never be the perpetrators. 

Responding to a question about the film’s relevancy in relation to Israel’s current genocidal assault on Gaza, Glazer replied, “Yes, and it’s weighing on all of us. The sickening thing about this film is it’s timely and it’s always going to be timely until we can somehow evolve out of this cycle of violence that we perpetuate as human beings. And when will that happen? Not in our lifetime. Right now, it seems to be reversing and I’m mindful of that, too, in terms of the film and its complexity.” There is no easy way out from The Zone of Interest. We may no longer live next to the camps, but the sounds of genocidal oppression still occasionally find their way to us, even if only in heightened moments of the most extreme repression. Today, the camps are both everywhere and nowhere all at once—living out in the world and inside of our bodies. Both the worst and best parts of human history live within us at every moment. At once we are Rudolf, Hedwig, Linna, and Aleksandra. We are good. We are evil. We are complex. We can watch, we can listen, we can distribute apples, we can light ourselves on fire, or we can ignore it all—which do you choose? Because like Hedwig to Operation Höss, our names are also inscribed on the bombs falling on children in Gaza and all across the world.