In modern popular culture, it’s springtime for Hitler all year round. Harmony, Barry Manilow’s musical about Jewish members of a Nazi-era barbershop ensemble, has just closed on Broadway. Meanwhile on the US west coast, The Zone of Interest, written and directed by Jonathan Glazer, is up for five Oscars, including best picture, at Sunday’s Academy Awards.
A week after its release in Germany, though, how is the British director’s Auschwitz drama going down in the land where the Holocaust originated?
After largely ecstatic reviews in the English-speaking world, German critics have been more ambivalent – as were audience members who spoke to The Irish Times after two screenings this week in Berlin.
The main bone of contention is whether The Zone of Interest is a ground-breaking meditation on the so-called banality of evil – or a cautionary tale on the evils of banality in filmmaking.
Glazer’s naturalistic approach means not everyone will catch key moments of exposition dialogue. Those reading along with Glazer’s script may emerge knowing more than those who watch the film without subtitles
Based loosely on a 2014 Martin Amis novel of the same name, the film about Auschwitz camp commander Rudolf Höss and his family retains its original English-language title in its German release rather than reverting to the original Nazi term, “Interessengebiet”, a euphemism for the restricted area around the death camps in Nazi-occupied Poland.
[ The Zone of Interest: Read Donald Clarke's five-star reviewOpens in new window ]
The decision about the title is a telling reminder. For all of Glazer’s remarkable technical efforts, the cool, dispassionate and observational outcome is still an Englishman’s subjective feature film.
Interestingly, in Germany two subtly different versions of the film are showing: one with English subtitles and one without. Glazer’s naturalistic approach means not everyone will catch key moments of exposition dialogue. Those reading along with Glazer’s script may emerge knowing more than those who watch the film without subtitles.
So what did the critics have to say? Die Zeit weekly was impressed with how Glazer fixes our gaze firmly on the Höss side of the camp wall, while sending over regular sounds of industrialised death: “This is a Holocaust film the likes of which you have never not seen.”
The Frankfurter Allgemeine daily praised Glazer’s stringent camerawork until, it suggested, a series of night-time scenes “reduce The Zone of Interest to one Holocaust film among many”.
Filmdienst, an industry review service, argued that the director was “as obsessed” as his lead character, Hedwig Höss, with the garden he had created for her. “For all its sophisticated design detail,” it added, “the film hardly goes beyond the scandal of normality that has already been established in the opening scenes.”
The biggest broadside came from the left-wing Tageszeitung. It accused Glazer of sleight-of-hand: using aesthetics – the “whimsical backdrop of a Wes Anderson picture and Wizard of Oz Technicolor – to distract from his cinematic statement of the obvious: Nazis were ordinary people capable of extraordinary violence.
Promoting the film, actor Sandra Hüller noted how English-language journalists asked her more technical questions about how the film was made while German journalists returned often to their unease about how – or whether – it humanised its main subjects
This is neither contested, it argued, nor is it the real scandal of the Nazi era.
“The scandal was that a majority of Germans thought this was right,” it added. “The Zone of Interest is not about those people. My suspicion is that this is why the film is so well-received.”
Promoting the film, actor Sandra Hüller noted how English-language journalists asked her more technical questions about how the film was made while German journalists returned often to their unease about how – or whether – it humanised its main subjects.
“This is much more sensitive, fragile and dangerous to talk about this here,” she told Vogue Germany. Hers is an observation echoed in The Irish Times’s unscientific survey of cinemagoers.
Dubliner Brian watched the film a second time in Berlin this week and called it a “far heavier” experience than his first watch back home. “People knew what they were coming to see,” he said. “Almost everyone stayed right to end of the credits, when the lights went up the house was still full.”
In interviews, Jonathan Glazer has described the film as “not about the past, but about now”. That was a point echoed by some local audience members.
Tom, an Irish-German designer raised in Dublin and based in Berlin, said he had no issue with how the film relegates the Holocaust, figuratively and literally, to the background. “Somehow he has turned it into a meditation on class and opportunity in wartime,” said Tom. “The film uses the Holocaust to tell us that Russian munition workers today can now afford a flat in Moscow. On those terms it worked for me.”
German audience members who spoke to The Irish Times appeared more confused – even critical – than moved by Glazer’s motives or his arthouse script and direction, observing rather than positioning himself.
“A clever author can pretend to be absent – and Glazer is trying to absent himself from the production he has created,” said Georg after a German-language screening. “But this is dishonest, because he is there in every moment yet has nothing to say.”
For Birgit the issue is less about what Glazer has – or hasn’t – to say, but to whom. Raised in the former East Germany, she likens the hype about the film to the The Lives of Others – the 2006 German picture that wowed international audiences and won the best foreign picture Oscar. At home, many laughed at the German-made film for its simplistic Stasi archetypes.
Nazi Germany’s mass murder was instigated by the few but enabled – and realised – by the many. This may seem obvious, but getting to this point has been a long and contested battle
In interviews, Glazer hoped audience members would associate with the perpetrators. But does the film make the Höss family relatable – or distant, alien Nazis from the planet Hitler?
In Germany, where Nazis are part of many family trees, this is not an abstract question, and recent decades of memory work have been about this very issue: moving the dial from viewing the National Socialists less as “them” and more as “us”.
Nazi Germany’s mass murder was instigated by the few but enabled – and realised – by the many. This may seem obvious, but getting to this point has been a long and contested battle.
And not all Berlin cinemagoers interviewed by The Irish Times thought the film made this point clearly enough.
“He is making it too easy for the audience to lean back and dissociate from the protagonists by finding them abhorrent,” said Benjamin, a Berlin-based Jewish American photographer, surrounded by three Germans who snacked their way through the evening.
“I think a bit more humanity – even humour – in the lead characters would have made those people feel more uncomfortable,” he said.
The Oscars take place on Sunday, March 10th, in Hollywood.
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