When the Holocaust is just beyond the garden wall

A distant, dull roar accompanies a family as they go to sleep. It explodes, shakes, hisses and explodes: the sounds of a factory running day and night. But this factory doesn’t produce goods – it produces corpses. The family whose life these noises follow is that of Rudolf Höss, commander of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp complex.

The family home is right next to the camp walls. The idyllic garden is flanked by chimneys that expel thick smoke. Flames rise to the sky at night. While the children play in the garden, the sounds of dogs barking, guards shouting, tortured prisoners screaming, gunshots come from beyond the walls. It is the summer of 1943. The crematoriums at Auschwitz began operating a few weeks earlier and are now open 24 hours a day.

The horror remains beyond the wall

On the other side of the wall, Hedwig Höss – played by Oscar-nominated German actress Sandra Hüller – tends to her flourishing garden, showing the flowers to her baby.

During her mother’s visit, Hedwig says she wants to plant vines along the camp wall, to obscure it. It is one of the few scenes in which what lies beyond these walls is addressed or commented on.

The rest of the time, what happens there is simply ignored or dismissed.

Only once does horror invade the family: while swimming in the river, “Papa” Höss and his children are surprised by a flood of ash from the crematoriums. The children are then almost desperately cleaned and scrubbed in the bathtub.

This extermination camp idyll threatens to collapse when Höss is transferred to Berlin. Hedwig wants to stay with her children in the paradise she created for herself.

Ruthless efficiency

Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) is a quiet, dutiful man who keeps his feelings perfectly under control. He lovingly cares for his perfect family, carrying his sleepwalking daughter back to bed, reading fairy tales to the children, patting his horse, and going for walks with his eldest son.

He then assumes his duties in the camp, where he continues carrying out the extermination of the Jews: harsh, inhumane and mercilessly efficient.

This efficiency is one of the main themes of the memoirs Höss wrote before he was executed for war crimes in 1947.

He wrote that he learned from an early age not to show any emotion, and was proud of his icy gaze as he killed: “I had to appear cold and heartless during events that would have transformed the heart of anyone who still felt human (… ) I had to look on coldly as mothers entered the gas chambers with their children laughing or crying.”

An obedient mass murderer

He expressed that he always thought of his own family in these situations. Writing about his hidden emotional world, he said that as he watched corpses being burned, teeth being pulled out and deaths in the gas chambers – all among his duties – some things disturbed him so much that he could not return home to his family. Still, he added, he never felt any remorse.

For Höss, fulfilling his duty on behalf of his commanders came before all else. And so the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of people was an inevitable activity that could not be questioned.

The lipstick of a murdered Jew

The film “The Zone of Interest” does not raise questions about Höss’s character. Instead, it asks how it is possible for people to live as close neighbors to a death factory and block out any notion of what is happening behind those walls.

When asked about this very subject, lead actor Christian Friedel told the online magazine Filmstarts: “It’s a fact that people lived this way. I think these dimensions of repression that are possible in all of us – for whatever reason – are exactly the mirror which is shown to us in the film.”

Certain scenes clearly highlight this mechanism of repression: one of the children plays with gold teeth pulled from the prisoners’ mouths; a prisoner fertilizes the flowers in the Höss Family garden with the ashes of those cremated; Hedwig Höss tries on a fur coat that belonged to a Jewish woman who was killed. She finds a lipstick in her pocket and puts it on. She doesn’t care that the last person to apply it to her lips was one of her husband’s murder victims.

Alone with the cameras

This extraordinary film was made by unusual means. The house and garden sets (built not far from the original location of the real Höss family home) were equipped with remotely controlled cameras that the director and crew observed and operated from a trailer set up nearby.

The actors were alone on set and never knew which camera was recording or from which angle.

Furthermore, there are almost no close-ups of the actors, and this distance gives the film an almost documentary feel.

The dialogue often feels improvised; some conversations are difficult to understand, which is no great loss as they are mostly harmless conversations – except when Hedwig Höss comments that the murdered prisoners’ clothes, which the family naturally appropriates, need to be altered, as they they are all very tight.

The sound design conveys the horror

With this film, British director Jonathan Glazer managed to portray the Holocaust in a different way. He deliberately refrains from visually depicting the atrocities that take place beyond the walls. He leaves that task to sound design. The ever-present sounds of the death camp do not need accompanying images to convey the horror. The soundtrack consists of electronic music, used sparingly and to brutal effect.

The director also made the artistic choice not to use the standard, pleasant stereo sound. The stereo creates a feeling of proximity and he wanted to avoid that at all costs. The result is that both the horrible and the banal cover the audience like an undifferentiated carpet of sound.

A sort of chorus is heard at the end, as the screen fades to black: agonizingly loud, discordant, destructive, brutal – pure terror, and yet made by people.

“The Zone” has collected several awards, including the Grand Jury Prize at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, and now two Oscars: it won the Oscar for best international film and best sound on March 10.

“The Zone of Interest” is a film for today: As the male lead, Christian Friedel said, “When I look at the times we live in and how relevant the film is now, I’m glad we did this.”

This article was originally written in German.