Location, location, location. In Jonathan Glazer’s new film The Zone of Interest, Hedwig Höss has found a heavenly home – lush garden, swimming pool - in which to raise her family. Over her garden wall is the neighbour from hell, Auschwitz, a death camp operating at full stretch under the command of her husband Rudolf. She’s unbothered.
Zone is loosely based on Martin Amis’s inevitably, sometimes jarringly, more satiric novel. There are no laughs in the movie. It portrays perpetrators as people who could, in their domestic setting, pass for an ordinary family of the time. The message, for many commentators: any of us could be Hedwig and Rudy. We’re all capable of … anything.
I’ve had arguments about that view over the years. I don’t buy it. Hedwig happily sorts through the spoils that come her way: clothes of murdered babies for her youngest; a fur coat she tries on, careful to check for jewels sewn into the hem in another woman’s doomed, desperate bid for survival. Hedwig is not in denial, not just looking away. Brazen, gleeful, she views with approval the destruction of those responsible for “Bolshevik things” and “Jewish things”.
![Johann Karthaus and Luis Noah Witte in The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer's film based on the 2014 novel by Martin Amis.](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/resizer/v2/FC4CUL6EB5DKNLVZ2I5IXAV764.jpg?auth=ec6fed3dfd9dabc338f523cc2fdaa21d103aa833bb0bbed472b1e7f1ac276123&width=16&height=9&quality=70&smart=true)
In Rudolf’s discussion with the engineer of an efficient new crematorium, the engineer boasts about how many “pieces” it can process, eager and proud. It’s too easy to say this population has been brainwashed to think of their victims as subhuman. If that were the case the endless, creative cruelties and public humiliations the Nazis and their often-enthusiastic helpers meted out to their victims would have been pointless.