Reading in The Zone of Interest
On the Nature of Evil
The opening scene of Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” presents a family’s riverside picnic idyll in tall grass beneath the trees on a tranquil, brilliantly sunny day. It appears as the living joy, in loving, natural peace, that is an end of all domestic hope and striving, and so the family mother will have cause later to claim she believed she’d found in her home compound abutting the Auschwitz extermination camp. It is an Edenic vision.
Soon enough, though, we will see that the dust of ash powders the petals of the home garden flowers, that ash mulches the domestic flower beds. The family father, the camp’s commandant, the historical Rudolph Höss, fishing and swimming in the river with his children, will discover on its bed human bones. The children are rushed home to be scoured in baths and disinfected.
During the day, though only a guard tower rises notably above the compound wall, the mechanical drone of the death camp, punctuated by occasional, barely distinguishable shots, screams, and barking, like a background sound of the universe, persists a low inhuman creaking roar. At night, the torch glow of the furnaces burnishes the near distant sky.
Meals are served, Jewish prisoner-servants scurry, family guests are received, the gardens and pool are enjoyed. Höss executes his terminal mission with bureaucratic and systematic expertise sufficient to earn promotion to govern all the death camps. What we see of the Nazi war machine appears only in the hushed business-like air of corridors and conference rooms of grand high command sattlicher Palasts. Concentration camp commandants, dressed in their official best and arrayed around a long conference table, their aides behind them against the wall, are directed to turn to page 12 of their meeting portfolios. There, the plans for liquidating Hungary’s Jews are to be reviewed.
Few reviews of Glazer’s fierce, cold depiction of Nazi evil failed to reference, when they did not actually endorse as the film’s depiction, Hannah Arendt’s sixty-year-old characterization, through the person of Adolf Eichmann, of the “banality of evil.” For six decades, this formulation, surely among the most mistaken ideas a prominent intellect has ever bequeathed to the culture, has misguided and distorted our thinking on the subject. The consequence for the non-theological general public has been that thinking about the nature of evil has essentially stopped. (For the theologically inclined, it became frozen longer ago.) To offer an odd, superficially inapposite, yet for that reason apt, analogy, it echoes the argument of Albert Brooks’s character in the film, Broadcast News, when his equally serious television journalist pal and secret object of his love, Holly Hunter’s Jane, against her better judgment, falls for the empty suit, handsome-anchor news-face of William Hurt’s Tom. Don’t you get it? Brooks’s distressed Aaron finally pleads to Hunter’s Jane. You keep looking for the additional layers – the depth behind the face. But that’s all there is! That’s all there is!
Arendt gave us permission to stop looking. See that banal face, that inoffensive, unthreatening personage of Eichmann. That’s it. That’s evil. That’s all there is.
Criticism and controversy over Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil was instantaneous. It divided the New York intellectual community bitterly, including the New York Intellectuals, of whom I have had cause to write a number of times the past week. One, Irving Howe, founder of Dissent, wrote years later about, “a civil war that broke out among New York intellectuals over Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book on the Eichmann trial.”
In 2007, Dissent published an extensive account of this discord in “The Eichmann Polemics: Hannah Arendt and Her Critics,” by Michael Ezra. Broadly, the criticism might be placed in three categories. The first concerned Arendt’s intellectual arrogance (some more specifically thought it German intellectual arrogance, overriding any sense of Jewishness), which condescended to the realities of Israeli culture and state justice. A second addressed, even in full books, Arendt’s voluminous factual errors. The third, my concern, is Arendt’s conception of evil’s banality. They do all relate to each other.
In a 1963 Commentary essay “Hannah Arendt on Eichmann: A Study in the Perversity of Brilliance,” Norman Podhoretz argued how Arendt’s intellectual arrogance had knowingly led her to distort brute reality to conform to her pre-existent theory of the totalitarian mind. Her conceptual ingenuity subverted recognition of the more manifestly true and real. Thus, she was conned into reading Eichmann, Ruth Wisse puts it in “The Enduring Outrage of Hannah Arendt’s ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem,’” as a “dullard who remembered ‘only moods and the catch phrases he made up to go with them’” rather than as one of the officers at the high-level Wannsee conference instrumental in deciding upon the complete and final extermination of the Jews, and who coordinated the transportation logistics. Arendt accepted Eichmann’s claims that he bore Jews no ill will and was just following orders. Yet under his supervision, in a plan dramatized in that conference room in The Zone of Interest and implemented by Höss at Auschwitz, by the end of 1944, some 600,000 people, almost 70% of Hungary’s Jewish population, had been slaughtered.
Recordings would later reveal Eichmann declaring, in defiance of every pretense that fooled the great intellect, “I will jump into my grave laughing, because the fact that I have the death of 5 million Jews on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction.” Said Richard Wolin, “Eichmann gave the performance of his life, and Hannah Arendt was entirely taken in.”
What’s the idea here, then — fooled by Eichmann or not — about evil?
“The idea being, that here is no great spirit of evil,” Sammler’s niece reports in Saul Bellow’s novel Mr. Sammler’s Planet.
Sammler thinks,
Politically, psychologically, the Germans had an idea of genius. The banality was only camouflage. What better way to get the curse out of murder than to make it look ordinary, boring, or trite? With horrible political insight they found a way to disguise the thing. Intellectuals do not understand.
What is it “intellectuals,” or at least Arendt herself understood or didn’t? Ten years after the trial, in 1971, Arendt wrote,
I was struck by the manifest shallowness in the doer [Eichmann] which made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer – at least the very effective one now on trial – was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. [Emphasis added]
Thinks Sammler, completing his thought above, “They get their notions about matters like this from literature. They expect a wicked hero like Richard III.”
Arendt apparently – she says it – looked for the “demonic,” the personification of the “monstrous,” not just the monstrous act, and failing to perceive it in Eichmann, decided evil is banal. If only the Nazi had worn a long mustache whose ends he twisted. If only he had rubbed his hands together under a long Roman (Jewish?) nose.
Humans – who knows how far back – saw what would come to be conceived in the world as evil. It was nothing other than the ways humans sometimes behaved, things they did, that were – awful. Destructive, greedy, wanton, cruel, torturous, the list goes on. They saw it in other humans. They gave it a name. Were humans, then, evil? An intolerable thought. Am I evil? Sometimes I feel these urges – greed, unkindness, revenge. What’s got into me? Something.
Cast it out. Cast it away.
Rather than reject their own natures, think themselves naturally evil, humans conceived themselves, instead, at times possessed by evil, some spirit, that split them asunder, from each other, from themselves. They gave it many names, many guises of the wicked, the devilish, the satanic, the demonic, the monstrous in humans that was not truly in humans but stole insidiously into humans, took possession of their beings. They depicted the spirit, in words, images, figures meant to personify what was not really a person, but if he were, would cackle, hiss, spin, rumble, leak, laugh, howl, shudder, burst into flame and devour.
That became part of the theology. For the non-believer, in modern times, we have developed terms of illness. No normal person would serially cheat, defraud, rape, murder. He’s sick, a psychopath, a sociopath, a narcissist. Wrote Podhoretz,
Now, if we are not to lose our own minds in the act of trying to penetrate into the psychology of the Nazi mind, we must be very careful to keep it clear that this item of the Nazi program—the ‘cleansing’ of Europe, and ultimately the whole world, of Jews—was literally insane. It is one thing to hate Jews, but it is quite another to contemplate the wholesale slaughter of Jews.
By such terminology, which holds psychiatric or legal meaning, we abandon the profound moral judgment of “evil” as indefinable and incalculable beyond whatever excess it is of “bad.” Among the secular, because of the word’s theological trappings and baggage, use of the word may even be mocked. Among certain political segments of the same secular population, it may conversely be used as the ultimate political condemnation of ideological effect or to express personal contempt.
Banal, however, means lacking in spirit and character, dull, bland, boring, insipid, and while these terms are significantly subjective in experience, for reviewers of The Zone of Interest, they seem to have been conflated with the quotidian, with daily life. But the manifest historical premise of Zone is that the Höss household carried on its quotidian existence in a compound adjoining the death camp. If quotidian life is banal, then we are very nearly all banal, and the characterization of evil as banal is rendered meaningless – or it is to make, somewhat blindly, a very different point.
Adolf Eichmann was a single Nazi functionary, and even were it true that he was a banal man, on what basis would all of Nazi personification, let alone evil as a human or moral category, in any way be meaningfully analyzed and understood through the character of a single man? How was Arendt able to get away with this slipshod, really fatuous philosophizing about evil? How has intellectual culture enabled it, however controversially, for decades? To act for good, she posits, is the product of minds that think critically. To act evilly is not to think for oneself at all. There are evil acts but no evil people. Evil disappears, or it is banal, which is the same.
The film is clearly intently undramatic, as is ordinary everyday life most of the time. A near climactic act of retching and a couple of low-level outbursts of temper by Rudolph’s wife Hedwig are what we have of drama. We observe ordinary domestic life, except for, of course, scattered interruptions and eruptions of the undramatically evil. Among these is Hedwig’s second display of temper. She is already disturbed by her visiting mother’s unannounced departure while she slept one morning. Irritated with a Jewish-prisoner maid, she warns that Hedwig could have her husband scatter the young woman’s ashes in the garden.
Hedwigs’s mother, Linna Hensel, visiting the Auschwitz camp for the first time, speculates on a tour of the family grounds, understanding the camp to be a concentration (rather than death) camp, that a Jew she once knew (who bargained well commercially) is probably in it. Shown to her upper-level guest bedroom, she remarks with pleasure on its charm. But the room has a view over the wall, and while not much is particularly visible, at night amid the inhuman mechanical background drone, the glow of the furnace draws her irresistible gaze from the window. Then, one too many times, she is gone that upsetting morning with a disturbing note to her daughter.
Glazer, commenting (too much) on how to understand his film, has insisted about Hensel’s departure that “there’s no pang of conscience, no redemption. There’s no salvation in this film, and there can’t be.” Hensel, he argues, was simply uncomfortable being that close to the death, as most carnivores would be repelled by the sight of the livestock’s slaughter. One needn’t argue any of these points to observe the significance Glazer himself fails to account for, similar to the film’s much discussed ending.
Leaving a nighttime SS party, descending a darkly shadowed stairway amid empty hallways, Höss twice stops to dry heave. Says actor Christian Friedel, who plays Höss, “I think it’s a fight: body against his soul. Because the body tells the truth and our mind, we can betray ourselves.” There is no reason to believe the real Höss had this experience, but the film makes it so, some almost primordial battle within human being itself over the nature of itself. Is this not what happens when Hensel leaves the house? No, she is not redeemed by her discomfort. But however not fully consciously, she knows, as the carnivore who keeps eating the meat of the slaughter he cannot witness knows. The carnivore keeps eating meat. Höss repeats an almost identical descent after heaving, of two more staircases but this time without upset.
Just before, at the party, he tells his wife on the phone, while looking down from a balcony high above a palace ballroom on those below, he mentally busied himself calculating the challenge it would be to gas them all. Wrote the real Höss after his capture, regretting he did not follow through on preparations, like those of the Goebbels family, to commit suicide, “We were bound and fettered to that other world, and we should have disappeared with it.”
Arendt argued for the automatic mind of the Eichmanns of the world, people she claimed did not think for themselves but only acted out the operations of a kind of mass virtual mind that is the bureaucratic machine of totalitarianism. But in The Zone of Interest, one way or another, everyone knows who they are and what they are doing, however much some may push away uncomfortable truths. (Read this account of a last interview with a Höss daughter in her Washington D.C. home a few years ago, just before she died.)
In part of that ending of the film, in the midst of Höss’s interrupted descent of the stairway, he pauses to stare down the hallway, almost as if he sees what the film cuts to – Auschwitz today, and its museum of glass enclosed artifacts of the dead. In the hours before opening, the staff clean floors and case windows in the same atmosphere of cool detachment in which the story of the murders has been told. It is stunning to experience. It is not irreverent, but without reverence. In the very space where once those lost lives languished and were extinguished. The facticity of the death, the slaughter, the inhumane – the evil – extermination of humans continues to hold its unemotional place in the world, right there (the emotions are in us) all these days, all these decades later, sun rising and setting, the going to work and coming home, waxing machines skimming with a motor’s hum over the floor, windows squeaking with their cleaning. It would be just as easy to forget. They are just floors, windows, old shoes.
At the moral center of the film, jarring at first, as so much is, we see without explanation a Polish girl at night, traveling by bike, who, we soon make out, leaves apples for the Jewish workers in the fields where they work. At one point of dispersal on the ground, she finds a note left for her. Then she bicycles back home. The scene is shot in night vision negative, and when she opens the door to her house, the interior is positive as she enters. Later, at the kitchen table, her mother literally gets wind of the Auschwitz ash in the air and hurriedly closes the window. She rushes outdoors to retrieve the hanging laundry. Through the window, outdoors, the mother is in black negativity while the interior is positive, the good and the evil of the film. The daughter plays a simple tune at the piano, the song left for her in the note, a real song written in the camps by a real survivor, “Sunbeams,” by Joseph Wulf, who committed suicide in 1974, sung by him in Yiddish. Through the window, the mother struggles in the wind to gather the clothing off the line. One can barely make out the outline of the clothes. It is as if she is wrestling with the darkness.
Evil is not banal. But it is, like goodness, in us, ready to emerge in the stuff of everyday life, the smaller actions and omissions that contribute, the greater ones that stand on their own. They don’t necessarily call themselves out dramatically to our attention. They may be hidden, ignored, rationalized, repressed, or like apples on the ground, gifted in grace. It’s always a struggle. It’s like wrestling with the wind. And sometimes it’s captured on film.
AJA
Writing that dares, thinking that delves deep, emotional explorations that range. Become a paid subscriber of Homo Vitruvius today. You’ll get access to the full archive, Recs & Revs posts, the Magellanic Diaries, Extraordinary Ordinary People, and A Reader’s Review. You’ll also have access to a free digital download of Waiting for Word and the opportunity to purchase signed hard copies of Waiting for Word and Footnote.
Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
“Not just words about the ideas but the words themselves.”
A very interesting piece. I need to see the film. Your article has also prompted me to revisit 'Eichmann in Jerusalem'; and I don't have the wherewithal to comment further until I do. Much food for thought.
Prof Adler, you never fail to impress with the depth and wit of your wordsmithing! by the way, youve, of course, heard Dissent merged with Commentary to form dissentery!