“We are frequently told that we must sympathize with Israel because of the suffering of the Jews in Europe at the hands of the Nazis. I see in this suggestion no reason to perpetuate any suffering. What Israel is doing today cannot be condoned, and to invoke the horrors of the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy.”
— Bertrand Russell
“Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might. Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”
— Ephesians 6:10-12
I am not big fan of World War II films. Especially not action war films (they have been largely done to death, become saturated, unoriginal). For me to be interested it must be something more grounded, focused, limited in its scope, bottom-up rather than top-down, more about the emotionality and morality than the spectacle (which is more often than not all that it is — superficial, hollow, skin-deep, unimaginative, lazy, without any interest in the nuance that characterises any human being and therefore any human historical event).
The Zone of Interest represents such an exception to the rule of World War II films, in my view. I would describe it as surreal horror. Surreal in its banal treatment (by design) of one of if not the most inhuman events in human history; horror in that not a single one of the characters (of whom are all staff or family members of staff working at Auschwitz) is repulsed, horrified, or remotely disturbed by the events taking place just over a wall from them (the goings on being audible at all times throughout the film, but never visible); the entire event — the extermination (or attempted extermination) of an entire people — is treated as a benign backdrop to their happy family lives and promising career prospects; as a matter of fact rather than something to investigate morally in any way (there seems to have been a definite cascading psychological effect on Germans from first using Zyklon-B to bug bomb factories before it was used on humans). And this to me is a more accurate portrayal of what life was like for the average German at the time (dispelling the myth that the average person knew nothing of the camps): not anxious, unsettled, disquieted, or merely tolerating the goings on around them — for fear of the tyranny that might come their way instead — but gradually having come to accept it, to adapt to it, to pay it no mind, to blend it into the otherwise monotonous scenery of everyday life, it eventually becoming as banal as everything that envelopes it (in fact the thing that first attracted me to the film was that it reminded me of the weird photo albums and footage of life for staff at the camps; smiles, picnics, bike rides, pretty dresses, crisp uniforms — only a few hundred yards from a death factory, mass graves).
All this is to say that I would recommend the film. Highly recommend it. It is a slow burn. A very monotonous one at that. But that is where the true horror lies. As Hannah Arendt put it in Eichmann in Jerusalem, “Conscience as such had apparently got lost in Germany, and lost to a point where people hardly remembered it and had ceased to realize that the surprising ‘new set of German values’ was not shared by the outside world... In the Third Reich evil lost its distinctive characteristic by which most people had until then recognized it. The Nazis redefined it as a civil norm.”