“Bodies lie in the bright grass and some are murdered and some are picnicking”: The Zone of Interest

When Martin Amis’ fourteenth novel, The Zone of Interest, came out in 2014, many people still believed we lived in a very different world than the one of Nazi Germany. For Americans, after all, it was still before the 2016 election, the 2021 insurgency, the reemergence of Trump yet again in the 2024 election. People outside of the U.S., however, have always been less naive. Especially Europeans. For the lingering pall of World War II remains cast over everything throughout the continent: monuments, statues, plaques, walls. Constant reminders that to forget history is to slip back into the same dangerous patterns in the present. 

With Jonathan Glazer’s brutal adaptation of Amis’ novel, a different aspect is highlighted than in the source material. An aspect that more directly asks the question: how does evil not only so effortlessly rationalize itself, but continue to live with itself each day? In the book, Amis does a better job of concealing his main character’s true identity by, if nothing else, naming him Paul Doll instead of Rudolf…as in Rudolf Höss, the longest-serving commandant at Auschwitz. Glazer doesn’t much bother with that, likely figuring one of history’s biggest monsters doesn’t deserve such a cloak. Being Jewish himself (unlike Amis), Glazer’s take on the material is undoubtedly more personal. And certainly comes across that way. His merciless contrast between how someone so despicable lives right next to the very thing that serves as the crux of their despicability is what keeps viewers on the edge of their seat throughout the film despite never actually seeing any onscreen torture of camp prisoners. 

Instead, Glazer relies on the horror of the sounds coming from the camps. Screams, burnings, gunshots. All contrasted against “idyllic” scenes like the flowers growing in Rudolf’s (played by Christian Friedel) backyard. Or, more accurately, his wife’s backyard. Hedwig (Sandra Hüller, clearly on her game this year with film choices, for Anatomy of a Fall is also Oscar-nominated), indeed, “runs the roost,” as it were. Perhaps being more Nazi-like in her rigidity than her husband. In point of fact, Rudolf is sure to tell her she’s the “Queen of Auschwitz.” This being something she relays proudly to her visiting mother, Linna (Imogen Kogge). Initially, Linna seems pleased with her daughter’s way of life. “Living off the land” and all that, but, after enough days spent seeing and hearing the goings-on at the camp (complete with watching the flames burst into the sky as the crematorium roars on next to them), she departs without any warning. The note she does leave behind with an explanation is never shown to the audience, only the image of Hedwig reading it and then promptly burning it in her own “mini crematorium” of a cast iron fireplace. Because it’s clear that Hedwig can’t “receive” any information that might infect her delusions about what this place really is. What it actually represents. And that is, of course, how the unspeakable suffering of others is always at the core of those on top’s pleasure. Glazer elucidates this in so many ways throughout The Zone of Interest, but among the most memorable is when Hedwig is given the latest batch of personal effects from those transferred to the camp. Among these items is a lavish fur coat and a pink-hued lipstick. 

Greedy Hedwig is quick to retire to her room and try these things on, even the used lipstick. Because, apparently, Jews aren’t that “dirty” to Nazis when they want to use something they’ve stolen from them. Plucked and pilfered from their very body. It is such a disgusting sight that it makes graverobbers look almost positively benign by comparison. Glazer eases his audience into this more overt form of reprehensibility, opening the film with a black screen filled with ominous noises and Mica Levi’s jarring music. That blackness leads into the contrasting image of Rudolf on an idyllic picnic with his family, taking a swim in the river as he surveys and appreciates the natural beauty around him. Natural beauty that is a stark contrast to the visions he views at “work” on a day-to-day basis. Where “just following orders” meant the mass extermination of millions of human beings. This done in just less than five years. All that life snuffed out thanks to methodical German “efficiency,” carried out by men with the same effortless compartmentalizing ability as Höss. And yes, walls like the one between Höss’ “home” and the concentration camp do make it so much easier to compartmentalize. Something that not only Germany knows about, but also Israel. With its West Bank Barrier designed to keep Palestinians (therefore, Palestinian “militants”) out as they’re summarily abused in their occupied territory.

The seed for building this barrier was heavily planted by former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, who said in 1994, “We have to decide on separation as a philosophy. There has to be a clear border. Without demarcating the lines, whoever wants to swallow 1.8 million Arabs will just bring greater support for Hamas.” The clinical, “pragmatic” tone with which Rabin stated this is a mirror of Nazi “logic” during WWII. And, as so many have pointed out, it seems more than a touch ironic that the very race—Jews—subjected to such cruelty has decided to unleash similar acts of violence and oppression on another race. This being yet another reason why The Zone of Interest’s release comes at such a timely moment. Glazer couldn’t have anticipated just how timely. Not only in relation to Israel with Palestine, but also that “other” increasingly forgotten war between Russia and Ukraine. 

This is why, when accepting the LA Film Critics Award for Best Director, Glazer remarked, “Obviously the events in the film predate the abominations of these current conflicts by years. But the questions it poses are the same: to ask ourselves to have a genuine human response, to ask ourselves why one life can be considered more valuable than another. Human pain is pain and loss is loss and at their most basic or fundamental, the needs and desires of any of us are the same. Violence and oppression of any kind produces more violence and oppression, not less.” But it seems history will never teach governments and regimes anything, that it will forever be doomed to repeat itself. Especially since, as The Zone of Interest suggests, it isn’t necessarily “pure evil” that causes violence and subjugation and genocide, but rather, a willingness to simply go along with pure evil’s will. “Just following orders.” 

It was the Milgram Shock Experiment, conducted by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram in 1961, that accented an unsettling point about that Nazi-spouted excuse: any ordinary person is capable of what is reductively branded as “evil.” When coerced by those in positions of authority, Milgram found that the large majority were willing to go against their own personal beliefs in order to “follow orders.” To obey. Milgram eventually summarized these unnerving findings as follows: “​​The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation. Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”

Despite ringing true in relation to how the events leading up to the Holocaust could go unchecked, Milgram’s experiment was viewed unfavorably as an analogy for what Nazi officials like Höss and Adolf Eichmann were capable of doing. And even what Höss’ wife was more than capable of turning a blind eye to for the sake of her “comforts” and “needs.” Something most are also willing to do every day while others suffer on an unfathomable scale. As Jenny Holzer once said in her Survival series, “Bodies lie in the bright grass and some are murdered and some are picnicking.” This is at the heart of what The Zone of Interest quietly, yet ruthlessly illuminates. The tragic part being that we all still need to be illuminated about our own complicity in the goings-on of the present.