The Movies

There is a long, thoughtful review and intellectual reprise of the film “Zone of Interest” posted on today’s New York Times (Dec. 19, 2023).

Written by Giles Harvey about the film conceived and directed by Jonathan Glazer, it should be read, the film should be seen and will be by me soon enough.

It is as you know another albeit different film about the Holocaust. It does not show any of the things that happened or any of the people, real or imagined to whom it happened.

It shows the domestic life,, reasonable tranquility, and settled marriage of Rudolph Hoss, twice commandant of Auschwitz. It is a view of the plain satisfying life of this work-a-day German burgher and his wife and five children as they lived in the commandant’s house literally outside the wall of the camp.

Inside, almost everyone dies. Outside they don’t. The film does not show the camp inside, you what that is. It is a factory where they make dead people and dispose of their bodies, where the means of production is murder and in which the product is death. This is a movie about the factory manager.

Part of this was/is from my comment to The Times (adapted for more exact references). It is a bad habit, responding to Times stories with comments (reporters call everything in the newspaper a story, they write and read stories, not articles), but I persist. It may be a bad habit but it occupies the mind.

This response purposefully refrains from any reference to current events and their troubling circumstances – tempting, so tempting as that is. It is there nonetheless.

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I have read extensively, too much perhaps a friend once said, about these events, their history, and the totality of what at best we can call their politics in Germany and internationally before, during and immediately after the cataclysm.

I think always about this sentence from the charge to the International Tribunal by Justice Robert Jackson, who took leave from the U.S. Supreme Court at the behest of President Truman to serve as chief prosector at the tribunal in Nuremberg at the end of 1945.

In that remarkable, detailed document Justice Jackson told the court in clearest terms, “The real complaining party at your bar is civilization.”

Ever since we have continued civilization’s complaint. Harvey’s essay is a good one, another reminder of what happened, including of that aftermath at Nuremberg and it is a good one about a very important film.

Yet of itself, Harvey’s writing gets to no better explanation. It contains no more, no new revealed truth about the factories where the Germans and their friends all over Europe, but principally their Eastern European friends, made death.

In the certainty of praise, it does not explain the inescapable fact that this happened; that nothing – nothing explains it though we keep trying to understand it as this film does, as Justice Jackson so plainly set out in the jury’s charge.

That we cannot is the reason we keep writing about it, referring to it, making and watching films about it, building museums to remember it that exhibit its remnants, depict its deadly advance through Europe, preserve and retain its artifacts.

Still, the most important, cogent, revealing film I have ever seen about this is “Wansee”, the version directed by Kenneth Branaugh. (There is a later German version for television in German, which I do not speak.) Perhaps it its way “Zone of Interest” equals it. Perhaps.

The Branaugh film is about a business meeting, albeit in a lavish setting, a very real one.

It is a representation of the event but it is not fiction.

The film was peformed mostly in the very same Wansee Villa in Wansee, an exclusive, wealthy enclave in Berlin where it took place efficiently during two hours on Jan. 20, 1942. Eerie isn’t it? You don’t have to imagine the actual setting. It is shown to you.

The meeting involved the same 15 people it identifies and depicts the woman who recorded the details in what came to be known as the Wansee Protocol. Each participant received a copy. Only one was found in German files after the war. It was enough to reveal all.

All 15 of those in attendance were government or Nazi Party officials of the
Third Reich and its colonies (Poland under the Reich was not a country but a German colony divided into a section incorporated into Germany, while Germans ruled a large rump portion in an enslaved so-called “General Government.” The six death camps, Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno, Maydanak, Belzec and Auschwitz were inside the territory of the General Government. The choice made sense, was busines- like after all – given that 2.9 million million of the 6 million were Polish Jews.)

The film is based on the lone surviving summary. To a significant extent what is said is what they discussed that day.

No one dies. No victim is shown. Mention is made of already accomplished mass shootings. A break is taken for refreshments. – brandy, delicacies and cigars, which were indeed served at the session.

It is an ordinary meeting of the board you might say, among the participants were eight Ph.Ds and several who held law degrees from venerable German Universities. Among them were Adolph Eichman, we all know who he was, his boss who had convened the session, Reynhard Heydrich, second in the SS to Heinrich Himmler, and Herman Muller, the chief of the Gestapo who also worked for Heydrich.

There is a hierarchy to the Holocaust. It was Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich.
The first one ordered it. The second one commanded it and the third, Heydrich, was its architect . Also the Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia (the Czech Republic today), Heydrich died in May 1942, assasinated by Czech partisans. Slovakia under the Fascist Priest Father Tiso, had broken away from the Czechs and was a rump German puppet (the facts get in the way of the narrative but they matter).

As they did that day, the “Wansee”attendees discuss, plan, define, and move ahead with genocide – it is their routine business. It is why they have convened – to be apprised of the next phase of that business, its expansion, and its new means of production, and to learn what will be done by and expected of their departments, agencies, and party offices.

Eventually, the execution of the industrial plan will be handed off to plant managers like Hoss. No one dies in the film. But you know millions of people already have and millions more will. The film tells you about the new means of achieving product.

No film, no writing ever gets to the whole of it, the center of it, the deep interior of it, the why, why, why of it. Because it cannot be done. Because unreasonable, unyielding hate does not have a findable center. It is a vortex spinning endlessly into eternity.

Even still, we continue to look for it, for the bottom of the vortex. We should and the creative among us, like Glazer, should never stop searching even though they will never get to it. It spins endlessly.

It cannot be gotten to but, as they say, never forget. Never forget.

We could though learn from it, we should learn from it, especially just now.

That is another why. Why don’t we?