ira friedberg*
Making Fiction of the Holocaust: The Zone of Interest
Adapted from a paper delivered at the University of Sydney English Honours Conference 2024.
At the 96th Academy Awards, in Jonathan Glazer’s acceptance speech for best International Film (an appropriate yet jarring category for a German-language, Polish-shot film by a British filmmaker) he declared that his Auschwitz-set WWII drama The Zone of Interest (2023) was made ‘not to say look what we did then but rather, look what we do now,’ followed by a refuting of his ‘Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.’
This was five months into the assault on Gaza, and an outraged open letter was penned, accusing Glazer of blood libel. And how could a film about the Holocaust, about the mass annihilation of Jewish people, be about anything other than their singular plight? Is it not a disservice to the victims, and the horrible primacy of the Holocaust, to use it as a proxy for the suffering of others?
On the contrary, it would be an insult to the memory of the murdered Jews of Europe not to situate their suffering in a long, historical line of oppression which led to then, and leads to now. Glazer was asking that we allow the resonances of particular historical instances to be of use in understanding the mechanics of oppression and the rationalisations of oppressors.
The lessons of The Zone of Interest are not only fit for the cultural specificity of twentieth-century European antisemitism, but in ‘the solidarity of its polemics and passions, its forms, structures, experiences, and struggles with those of the present day,’ as Marxist literary critic Frederic Jameson would put it (18). Glazer’s vision is that of history as allegory, not rote recollection, with a single interpretative possibility. He insists upon a mode of viewing akin to what Jameson has asked us to do with literary and historical texts since the publishing of The Political Unconscious in 1981.
Glazer might as well have mimicked Jameson’s famous declaration that we ‘Always historicise!’ (9), and seek that ‘untranscendable horizon’ of Marxist interpretation; Jameson sees this critical framework as superceding all others, whilst allowing for other interpretative methods to be applied simultaneously (10). It is a way of doing history which retains ‘the original urgency of the event,’ but casts the importance of each historical moment into a larger narrative, by interpreting discrete stories within ‘the unity of a single great collective story;’ this story is that of the struggle between classes, between oppressed and oppressor (19).
Jameson will prove important to this essay’s point, but we’ll leave him for now, to focus on the ethical dilemma raised by Glazer’s film, which places every representation of the Holocaust under the microscope, and demands a more thoughtful approach. After some time spent discussing the Holocaust, a return to heavy Marxist theory might actually be able to lift the mood.
Postmemory
More extreme critics have argued for a wholly ascetic approach to writing about the Holocaust, deeming it ‘not a fit subject for fictional representation’ (Hawthorn 280). Such an immutable stance would surely be unacceptable to most, whose lives and worldviews have been enriched by historical fiction, whose perhaps only real exposure to the past is through fiction and the cinematic arts. The Holocaust demands representation, because its truths demand to be remembered, and as long as cinema remains one of the most popular mediums of historical communication, then the inherent moral complexities must be surpassed, so long as they are sensitively addressed. Depicting the past and passing it of as reality is irresponsible, but depiction itself is essential. How then, can that looking be made both preservational and pertinent?
A guiding concept for this project, which reveals The Zone of Interest as an outlier in a history of unproductive Holocaust representations, is to be found in the work of Marianne Hirsch. In Hirsch’s critique of ‘the ethics and the aesthetics of remembrance in the aftermath of catastrophe,’ she asks if our memory-making activities can inspire ‘action and resistance’, using the memory of this greatest of genocides to quell those ongoing and multiplying (104). Hirsch describes our collective recollection of the Holocaust, now several generations removed, as “postmemory”, an abstracted patchwork of ‘stories, images, and behaviors’, first transmitted by the original experiencers, now passed down through mediated fictional and documentative narratives (106). Hirsch uses this framework to understand the memory of the Holocaust, but it can speak to ‘traumatic transfer’ across cultural and historical lines (108).
Structures of memory are passed down through forms of aesthetic mediation, so goes Hirsch’s argument, often through the symbology and inhabiting potential of the individual or the family (110). The family served as the original site of transmission, what she terms familial postmemory, whereas the aesthetic representation passed down to subsequent generations is affiliative (114). Representations of the family have become a trope in literature and film, invoking the original familial transmission, and used for identification with the reader and viewer. Hirsch finds the use of these ‘familial idioms’ problematic, when they tend towards ‘occluding a public historical context and responsibility’ by relying upon symbols of innocence (115). In Jeremy Hawthorn’s analysis of Holocaust narratives, he asks if it is ‘morally defensible’ to assume such an ‘intimate relationship’ to the interior lives of trauma victims; the inherent risk being that we deprive them of their last freedom and possession, which is their ‘private, inner selves’ (281).
The Zone of Interest takes these abiding concerns seriously, both that of the overidentification with family, and the morally dubious claim of capturing personhood. We follow a family living under the Third Reich, but they are not victims of the regime, they are enablers. The key figures are Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, and his wife Hedwig. In unsaturated sharpness, we watch them potter around their magnificent garden, their many-windowed home, the lake where they take their children swimming. They argue over trivial matters and bureaucratic hurdles—and sure, they sleep on separate beds, occasionally Höss takes a lover, and Hedwig intimidates the help—but otherwise this is domestic, pastoral bliss. A small wall runs the length of their home; beyond, only the tall smokestacks are seen, and only heard are the sounds of train whistles, gunfire, shovels and furnaces, but there lies the concentration camp.
There are two important choices to note here. The first is the presentation of a ‘perpetrator postmemory’ (Hirsch 119) and second, the omission of images of victims’ suffering, as we have come to expect. Glazer presents to us a family, but does not ask us to inhabit them, only to observe how and why they enabled and perpetrated the crimes of the Nazis. Given cinema’s encouragement of identification, the risk here is that we are led to empathise with killers. But Glazer’s camera shoots from a distance, using multiple cameras in the corners of rooms, like CCTV. The camera resists empathising, it is observational enough that the viewer can remain detached, but intimate enough that one can identify familiar patterns of thought between themselves and the characters, particularly in the desire for comfort, and the means one will go to achieve it, as long as the consequences are kept from view.
Before the war, Hedwig’s family was rural, working-class. Hedwig’s mother worked for a wealthy Jewish woman, whose belongings were inevitably auctioned off once the Nazis came to power. Here told, the rise of Nazism was an opportunity for social mobility. The Höss family’s ability to ignore and justify the depravity they are causing is housed in their banal desire for material comfort, and their means of hiding from the suffering that is the foundation of their life is nothing but a thin, brick wall (the imagery is so on the nose and obscene that despite the historical realism, one must read it as allegory).
In watching the banal desires and justifications of the Höss family, a viewer is encouraged to ask how the maintenance of their own lifestyle might be supporting activities they choose to look away from. It is a burden we all share in late capitalism, what Jameson calls ‘the disaccumulative moment’ (11). As Jeremy Hawthorn writes, it is these ‘feelings, thoughts, motivations, and rationalizations of the perpetrators that we should try to comprehend’ (292).
Glazer omits a narrative of victims, as well as images of their suffering. In some sense, we have been trained to understand history through such images. But images, like narratives, are ethically ambiguous. They obfuscate the distinction between public and private, inviting us into familial worlds we were never meant to see, to shock and ostensibly to educate (Hirsch 112). A proliferation of images, rather than adding further credibility to an event, can erode its reality.
In Tadeusz Borowski’s short story “The Death of Schillinger”, a Jewish prisoner shoots dead a Nazi prison guard. Hawthorn points out that such acts of rebellion are unrepresentative, and so project a view of the Holocaust as a series of failed but heroic rebellions, rather than an impenetrable regime of oppression (292). Moreover, the story provides no insight into the motivations or feelings of guilt on the part of Schillinger; he is a character to be defeated, not understood. Painting Nazism as simply a mythological enemy, rather than an ideology which made of the average German murderer or accomplice, does little for our capacity to prevent a future fascistic turn.
In fictionalised accounts of both victims and perpetrators, the mediating effect of storytelling should be made transparent, encouraging an awareness of the communicating act. For victim narratives, we should follow, sympathise, believe, but always respect the victims’ original experience, and not get caught up in emotional manipulation, in pupeteering the memories of real people for narrative effect. For perpetrator narratives, a formal framing should differ from the thoughts and actions on-screen, creating an ironic distance and laying bare the self-deception and self-justification of the oppressors. The alternative to these approaches is simply an avoidance of reality; as Hirsch writes, “postmemory” is not limited to victims, but also ‘bystanders and perpetrators’, and many of the latter’s stories have been passed down, unmediated, unthinkingly, through their words and photographs (107). It is only fitting that fiction make sense of these perspectives, instead of letting them stand unanalysed.
Hirsch finds her argument succinctly put in a quote from W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz; ‘Our concern with history . . . is a concern with preformed images already imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere’ (120). If this is true of authenticated photography, what of written, set-dressed, artificially-lit, acted and filmed reproductions? How many of us walk through life with our understanding of the Holocaust limited to a series of film stills from Schindler’s List?
Conventions of Remembering
Glazer’s film emerges in in a proliferating sequence of Holocaust narratives; if these previous entries have had the moral, utilitarian goal of preventing further antisemitism, fascism, and genocide, then they have sadly failed. In this way, The Zone of Interest takes our “postmemory” as a given, assuming we have images of the camps pre-formed, through years of education and media consumption. It is a rejection of expectation; one might go to a drama of the Holocaust with the express desire of being reminded of these disturbing images, to not go too long without seeing them, in a self-flagellatory act of civic service, borne of a masochistic drive for a perverse pleasure.
Glazer does not fulfil this desire. He wants to frustrate it. There are only traces of violence; the sounds over the wall, Hedwig’s unstable outbursts, slow fades to a deep red in the transition between scenes, or the realisation that the river the Höss children are swimming in has the bodily refuse of the camp.
For Hirsch, the ‘innovative’ nature of Holocaust texts such as Austerlitz and Art Spiegelman’s Maus, are their bringing attention to the ‘testimonial structure of listener and witness’ (119). Where these texts represent memory being passed between characters in dialogue, in ways that are fractured and elusive, The Zone of Interest does so in its form, constructed with the gaping omission of victims and violence, that only draws attention to itself. As long as the crucial difference is pointed towards, between stories and their referent, then a reader or viewer will interpet the film allegorically, or as a gesture towards truth, rather than an expository form of it. In grasping at past experience, this can be more truthful. Conventional narrative representation ‘attempts a textual mimesis of trauma through tropes that . . . elicit in the reader . . . primal affects contiguous with the traumatic event’ (Kahane in Hirsch 124); this attempt at affectual representation or resurrection is part of the morally dubious practice I raised earlier–when the Holocaust is used as material for emotional narrative purposes. At risk of verging into psychoanalysis, is not a key symptom of trauma the forgetting of the event itself? Perhaps it is better to understand the effects of that trauma, to learn from it and avoid its repetition, rather than to reconstruct a false image.
We’ve diagnosed the ethical dilemma of representing the Holocaust as a narrative event. We’ve established that it is a fraught subject matter, that it risks disrespect to the victims, and does not help us to deduce and prevent authoritarianism and its consequences. To enhance that ability, and widen the scope of interpretation, we will return to the work of Frederic Jameson, as threatened earlier.
When Jameson exclaims that we should “historicize”, he is not directing us down what he terms the ‘objective’ route of doing so, which would involve assessing the historical context, the aesthetic and linguistic possibilities of a text’s production (9). And neither is Jameson’s focus of analysis here on texts in isolation, but on the act of interpretation itself. For Jameson, texts are ‘always-already-read’; we understand older texts through inherited interpretative formulations—one could even say a “postmemory” of its reading—while new texts are understood via reading habits developed by those same traditions. Here, Marxism is again that ‘absolute horizon’ (17). It is not a methodology per-se, but a position that allows for and transcends all other ways of reading; critical theory and textual analysis both. Interpretive methods will come in and out fashion, but for Jameson, a Marxist formulation will persist, able to compare competing allegories made of texts, and place them in dialectic relation (9). On a broader level, it casts individual texts as ‘ideologeme[s],’ or ‘the smallest intelligible unit[s]’ within historical class conflict and discourse (76). Without understanding this ‘master narrative’ (34), a text can only hope to be ‘synchronic’; merely a node in time, only representative of its instance of writing and reading, without recourse to a more universal historical struggle (28).
An Allegory for Our Times
I have covered how works of fiction mediate our relationship to the past and instil “postmemory”, particularly as historical narratives are often comprised of conventions that arose at the emergence of historical fiction, the novel, and the industrial revolution. Amitav Ghosh points out that the construction of these conventions served as a ‘rationalization’ for the forming middle class capitalist subject (19). These conventions further bourgeois and ruling interests, by condensing the revolutionary capacities of historical moments into moments alone, isolated incidents without a grander narrative. Revolution and class conflict thus become “synchronic” nodes rather than historical constants.
I include Ghosh in these closing remarks, because his writing on the failure of literary fiction to contend with the climate crisis ties a neat bow on Jameson’s “transcendent” theory, and the innumerable crises and conflicts which can be read into The Zone of Interest. There is no issue more indicative of narrative failures to counter the interests of the ruling classes, than the seeming incapacity of fiction to address the climate. Glazer’s film does so, but without taking the climate as its subject.
Narratives are built on ‘exceptional moments’ (23), Ghosh argues, but these are cleverly concealed by everyday details (17). The improbable nature of natural disasters, despite their increasing frequency, is a narrative imposition which most writers are unwilling to let sweep in and alter their text’s ‘likelihood’, to force a thematic shift, or worse, a generic shift into science-fiction (17). But this argument of Ghosh’s, and the expectation placed upon fiction theretold, is too narrow. Texts don’t need to threaten a natural disaster at any inopportune moment, or play news reports of temperature rises on background TV sets, just as we do not need to witness Jewish suffering to understand the oppression of Nazism, or indeed, to literally depict the plight of Palestinians to communicate the conditions and ideology that underpins their suffering.
The ‘basic logic’ of the “disaccumulative moment” is the atomising of mutually shared struggles into isolated battles (40). The ‘master narrative’ which a Marxist framework provides, is that of a ‘fundamental reality, one and indivisible’, entangling these struggles in one great knot. One need not subscribe to every tenet of Marxism to see the worthiness of this argument. There are many ways to read a text; ‘moral’, ‘allegorical’, ‘literal’, and ‘anagogical’, or political (31). All these methods are useful, but none can suffice without this ‘last analysis’ (20). This is especially true as concerns the morally tenuous question of adapting the past.
One might wonder if the appeal to a broader historical dimension damages the specificity of each historical instance. Does such a project mean oen is unable to distinguish the Holocaust from other genocides or instances of class conflict? Far from it, Jameson would rebut that it is only Marxism that can retain the ‘specificity and radical difference of the cultural past’ (18). In a sense, each episode of class conflict becomes meaningless, if it is not understood as part of a whole, if its unique situation is not put in relation with the uniqueness of others. Moreover, Jameson points out that attempts to isolate historical moments risk entangling us in an ‘ideological double-bind,’ in which rather than learning from the specificity of a moment and applying its lessons to other moments and to today, we end up contemporising the past, applying our own logic and cultural conditioning to a past event without understanding the difference of its instance (19).
An isolationist approach to history serves only to pin down history into unmoving paragraphs of dates and names and agreed-upon feelings. Only a historicist reading allows for an ‘adequate account of the essential mystery of the cultural past’ (19), by deferring to historical constants rather than trying to explain and justify the historically specific. That which defines the Holocaust against all other events, while readily apparent, should never be rationally laid out, or that interminable list will inevitably fabricate a sense of comprehensibility, to an event which defies it. A historicist approach thus defends against a brashly confident “postmemory” which masquerades as fact.
In Louis Althusser’s words, ‘History is a process without a telos or subject’ (in Jameson 29). And indeed, how could we claim to provide telos—narrative closure—to a gaping wound like the Holocaust? Glazer’s film knows we cannot, and so ends in a surreal, telling moment. Rudolf Höss, bored at a party of Nazi officials, calls his wife afterwards. He tells her, the only thing on his mind was how he might most effectively gas all the people in the room.
Soon after, he roams the cold halls, stares down the dark vanishing point of a corridor. Suddenly we glimpse the present day, as janitors dust the exhibits at Auschwitz-Birkenau museum, before cutting back. Somehow, Höss has seen it. He has seen himself on that great “diachronic” axis of history, in which he is not remembered as an efficient commandant, but as a perpetrator of unspeakable horror.
As we awe at this gaping divide between ideology and reality, we must ask if that gap exists for ourselves. It is the only way to ensure that that most important of slogans, Never Again, is adhered to. Otherwise, what are we doing, when we watch, read, look at photographs, or visit museums? We are speculating, voyeurs of past tragedies and the inner lives of victims; left without the capacity to recognise authoritarianism if it wears no red armband; blind to those responsible for climate breakdown if their armbands are painted green.
But I don’t wish to leave with the impression that narratives of hope are no longer possible, that we should only forever tell stories of perpetrators and never of resistance to them. I mentioned that The Zone of Interest does not tell a narrative of rebellion, but it hints at one. When the Höss’ drift to sleep, in quiet infrared sequences, a young Polish girl drops apples amid the worksites of the prisoners. It’s not enough to change the course of history, nor fuel an entire narrative. But Glazer nonetheless includes this small act of heroism, from a bystander, one who could otherwise allow herself to be subsumed by the reigning ideology and seek safety in the ignorant realm of the oppressor. Instead, she does what she can.
Works Cited
Ghosh, A. (2016) The Great Derangement : Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (The Randy L. And Melvin R. Berlin Family Lectures). 1-27. Available at: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=nlebk&AN=1334100&site=ehost-live (Accessed: 10 June 2024).
Hawthorn, J. (2019) ‘History, fiction, and the holocaust: Narrative perspective and ethical responsibility’, Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 17(2), pp. 279–298. doi:10.1353/pan.2019.0018.
Hirsch, M. (2008) ‘The generation of Postmemory’, Poetics Today, 29(1), pp. 103–128. doi:10.1215/03335372-2007-019.
Jameson, F. (1981), The Political Unconscious : Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Methuen, London.
Siegel, T. (2024) Over 1,000 Jewish creatives and professionals have now denounced Jonathan Glazer’s ‘zone of interest’ Oscars speech in Open letter (exclusive), Variety. Available at: https://variety.com/2024/film/news/jonathan-glazer-oscar-speech-zone-of-interest-open-letter-1235944880/ (Accessed: 10 May 2024).
The Zone of Interest. (2023) Directed by Jonathan Glazer. United Kingdom: Film4, Access, Polish Film Institute, JW Films, Extreme Emotions.