The Zone of Interest is a brutally effective film, and it doesn’t show any image or event that is shocking. Its PG-13 rating is hardly stretched. The vast majority of the movie takes place in entirely banal settings: a family home, a backyard, an office, a boardroom. Probably 80% of what happens onscreen is conversation, and most of that is conversation of the most homespun kind. Siblings play and quarrel. A woman shows her mother what she’s done with the place. Infants cry, adults mutter, people sing “Happy birthday.”
And right above people’s heads, almost the entire time, the audience sees the peaks of Auschwitz. Because the home in question is the estate of Rudolph Hoess, the longtime commandant of the Holocaust’s most efficient tool, and the family is his. They eat, play, argue, and recreate a few yards away from the barbed-wire camp. They (and we) hear the camp incessantly. Trains arrive and are opened. People scream and dogs bark. Shots are fired. At night, the air turns thick red with crematorium flame. Only one character who visits the Hoess home seems to care.
This contrast between the audible hell of the camp and the mundane lives of the people on the Hoess estate drives home the sense that the Holocaust happened at least in part because people got used to it. There is no way, of course, for a human being to be unaffected by the systematic slaughter of women, children, and the disabled happening right in their backyard. But every effect has a shelf life. Compartmentalize long enough, and eventually one’s eyes will settle again on household arguments and pool parties.
Hoess and his wife, children, and housekeepers are all normal people. This is important for us moderns to understand, lest the magnitude of injustice and the alienating length of time convince us that camp commandants and SS officers were a different species. No, they were human beings with marriages, mortgages, missed birthdays, work-life imbalance, hidden sins, regrets, and hopes. There’s an important sequence in The Zone of Interest where Hoess’s wife becomes outraged that new orders mean they may have to leave their dream home. The dialogue between them could be taken from any marriage, in any place. It’s key for the audience to be able to conceive of the Nazis as more than just consumed by the logistics of genocide (though, as a late scene reveals, Hoess probably was consumed by them). These are people like us.
When people come to the realization that the ones they abhor the most in the world share some kind of humanity that was heretofore invisible, there are generally two possible reactions. One is to understate the difference between them and us. This is less common, but it does happen. Usually it takes the form of economic determinism, the idea that all of us are Hoess or Hitler if we had grown up in the same kind of conditions as they, or if we had experienced the suffering they did. This kind of thinking turns human moral agency into mere chance, and underestimates the degree to which evil people, though certainly shaped by their suffering and context, expand their wickedness through an active surrender to it. This is the point of Romans 1 and “suppressing the truth in unrighteousness.”
It’s a mistake to assume that shared humanity between us and the monsters of history means that we can be sure we would have been just as monstrous in their conditions. This lets the Nazi, the slave ship captain, and the sex trafficker off far too easy. No, there are vestiges of common grace available to all, and ignoring or rejecting them is the difference between people who suffer well and people who inflict their suffering upon others.
But there’s another possible reaction, one that is more likely among my generation. We tend to overstate the differences between us and them. We talk about Nazism or the killing fields or Emmett Till’s lynching as if they are utterly strange and inexplicable. We survey the bloodstains of history with an air of superiority, confident that, had we been the colonist or the German, we would have been “on the right side of history.” What’s behind this attitude is not just self-righteousness, but a subhuman mental picture of the characters who commit these crimes. We think of them as beasts and cannot imagine ourselves or anyone we love that way.
I have often heard it argued that institutions should remove any portraits or tributes to men who owned slaves. Honoring them, it’s suggested, honors the injustice they perpetrated, and reconciles with it. I don’t think that’s true. While there are certainly men and women who are undeserving of public respect, it seems more often the case that men and women are complex people who are capable of creating legacies worthy of reverence and condemnation. Where these lines are drawn will vary, of course. But the rush to dispose of monuments, public landmarks, community and street names, and other artifacts of those who were wrong about the humanity of slaves or anyone else, tells a lie about what kind of people we are. We are not liberated from our blind spots. We are not enlightened beyond compromise. We are the people in the painting, the person on the marble statue. We are them, because they are us.
All variables being equal, you and I would likely have been dutiful members of the Nazi Party, had we been ambitious young adults in 1930s Germany. The question is not “why,” but, “Why not?” The overwhelming majority of people who considered themselves reasonable, compassionate, and thoughtful simply accepted their regime as a fact. You and I would have as well. We balk at this thought experiment only because we imagine ourselves knowing and feeling the way about those times the way we feel about them now. But that’s not how life works. Even the moments where we might contemplate the depravity of what’s around us tend to be interrupted by the banal demands of the day, and our tendency is to shrug, say “What can you do” and then try to as best we can to navigate our lives. It’s what we do, and it’s what they did.
Again, this is not to say that there is no difference between you and Rudolf Hoess. The human race will appear before Christ to give an account for all our actions, not the actions we hypothetically may or may not have carried out. The point is that history is populated by humans, not characters. When Scripture says that there is no temptation other than what is “common to man,” that is not a grounds for boasting. It is a sober look in the mirror of the soul.
While Hoess was in prison awaiting his execution for war crimes, he wrote his autobiography. Commandant of Auschwitz begins with a narrative of his childhood, which Hoess described as deeply religious. His father hoped that Rudolf would become a Catholic priest.
Early in the book, Hoess writes about something that which caused “the first shattering of the religious belief to which I adhered so firmly.” Hoess “unintentionally” injures a boy at school and gets in trouble for it. Hoss goes to confession and tells all, but decides not to tell his parents. However, his father does find out, and Hoess concludes that his confessor must have divulged.
And now this priest, in whom I had placed such implicit trust, to whom I regularly went for confession, and who knew by heart all the ins and outs of my petty sins, had broken the seal of the confessional over a matter as trifling as this…My faith in the sacred priesthood had been destroyed and doubts began to arise in my mind for the first time.
How much of Hoess’s autobiography can be taken at face value is, of course, unknown. But it’s unsettling to consider that as the commander of Auschwitz awaited his death, his mind returned to childhood hurt over the church, and the disappearance of religious faith later that he connected to it. It’s the unremarkable nature of it that is remarkable.
I can probably relate. You can probably relate. And if learning from history means anything at all, it means realizing we are, all of us, still very much in it.
Excellent post. I want my teen kids to read this. Thank you.
This is so very true, reminds me the saying of " I have seen the enemy and it is us" Truth of the matter we are the villains in our story and lives and do not even realize it at times.
None of us are above this no matter how Christian we think we are. Until our natures are changed and we are no longer in a fallen world or in a fallen state, we are all villains to some extent in this life, it is only in the matter of degrees that we commit evil or turn a blind eye to evil, but we are guilty of it to some degree.
I don't think their will ever be time that we will not be complicit with evil to SOME degree as long as we live in a fallen world. Introspection and thinking for ourselves might help, but unfortunately the pressures of living in this world will cause many to cave in or turn a blind eye to just be able to survive.
Living in this fallen world is hard because it is full of fallen sinful human beings.