ar didactic purpose. ‘This is not about the past’, he said back in December; ‘it’s about now’. We shouldn’t say ‘look what they did then’, he more recently declared in his infamous Oscars speech, but ‘look what we do now’. The point of The Zone of Interest is that the Holocaust could happen again – or, more disquietingly, that it could be happening right now. The omission of Höß’s personal capacity for physical violence is part of this refashioning of the Holocaust into an urgent modern warning: if such a thing could have been perpetrated by ‘ordinary’ bureaucrats, then we really ought to be on our guard.
Where does all this lead? Unsurprisingly, post-7 October, to Israel. The highest-rated review of The Zone of Interest on the website Letterboxd reads: ‘Truly horrifying how many people are going to watch this movie, rate it highly and bestow it awards and whatever, and then still be pro-Israel. This is literally about you.’ Glazer would seem to be open to this line of interpretation. Like so many artistic engagements with the Holocaust, The Zone of Interest exaggerates what is universal about the evils of Nazism at the cost of what was particular. This allows it to make a comment, perhaps even a ‘warning’, about contemporary politics – while sacrificing vital historical truth in the process. If Glazer’s Oscars speech is anything to go by, that might have been the point all along.
Not so much, then, the powerful film about the Holocaust that the critics claimed, more like another effort to remove its appalling specificity and present it as some kind of parable of human evil – performed by dull and shallow people who didn't really think about it, but were just doing a job. The banalisation of the Holocaust, in other words.
Here's a post of mine on Eichmann and Arendt from 2022, on the occasion of the release of “The Devil’s Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes”, where we hear Eichmann interviewed in Argentina, expressing pride in the part he played in the extermination of Europe's Jewish population:
“In conclusion, I must say to you… I regret nothing. I have no desire to say that we did something wrong,” Eichmann said in the recordings.
“If we had killed 10.3 million Jews I would say with satisfaction ‘Good, we destroyed an enemy.’ Then we would have fulfilled our mission. And thus, to my regret, it was not to be,'” Eichmann is heard saying in parts of the recordings that feature in the film and in which he was apparently referring to the entire Jewish population of Europe on the eve of the Holocaust.
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