Reading in The Zone of Interest

On the Nature of Evil

The term Zone of Interest (German: Interessengebiet) was used by the occupying Nazi forces to describe the area around the Auschwitz concentration camp complex reserved for the Schutzstaffel (SS), subject to the administration of the main camp. The zone was created on the land confiscated around the camp, as a 40-square-kilometer (4,000 ha; 15 sq mi; 9,900-acre) zone patrolled by the SS, Gestapo, and local police. Public domain, via Wikipedia.

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.