There is something unsettling about sitting in a German theatre laughing at Nazis. How unsettling depends on the type of humour that prompts the laughter. Is it meant to set the audience apart from the stage action, or does the laughter stem from the discomfort of proximity? When I saw the satire Nachtland staged recently at Berlin’s prestigious Schaubühne (a production also runs in an English translation at the Young Vic in London until 20 April), I perceived the ripples of laughter filling the room as a sort of embarrassed self-awareness. Like a tense moment of getting caught – a feeling that every storyteller ultimately longs to evoke.
In the play, which has a present-day setting, two siblings find a painting signed by “A. Hitler” in their dead father’s house. Once they realise that the kitschy artwork is worth more than €100,000 if they can credibly authenticate the artist as Hitler, the siblings start recasting their entire family history in a different light. While the previous narrative had insisted that “our family had nothing to do with the Nazis” (the dominant account in most German households), now suddenly the late grandmother is not only found to be a committed follower of Nazi ideology, but to have had a love affair with Hitler’s secretary. As the new family history pragmatically, and profitably, unfolds, it becomes much more realistic, ironically, than the hitherto official version.
Surveys have found that most Germans claim their family members did not actively support the Nazis. Ten percent say they don’t know for sure, which could simply mean they never asked. Almost 30% even believe their ancestors were part of the resistance and helped potential victims of Nazi crimes survive or hid them in their own houses. Mathematically, the numbers don’t add up – if they were accurate, millions of lives could have been saved. But psychologically, this self-perception gives deep insight into how collective remembrance of the Holocaust works for many Germans: There is guilt, but it is externalised. Nazis were always the others, the evil monsters from the History Channel; certainly not Grandpa Hans, who left a remarkable fortune he came into possession of during the early 1940s. “We didn’t know” is a common phrase you would hear from contemporary witnesses asked about the systematic annihilation of Jews, before this generation started to die.
This is the context in which to understand why Jonathan Glazer’s film The Zone of Interest has received mixed reviews from German critics. The film has won international acclaim, honoured by two Oscars, one of them for best international feature film, as well as the Grand Prix in Cannes. But in Germany the film has not drawn universal approval. Glazer’s focus on the idyllic family life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife, Hedwig, in their home next to the concentration and extermination camp has been praised by some as the first feature movie to appropriately speak of the unspeakable horror of Auschwitz. Others, however, have said it represents a “trivialisation of the evil”. The visual absence of camp inmates is especially controversial (we only hear them in the movie and watch the Höss family ignoring the horrible sounds coming from the other side of the wall). It is either praised as a stringent examination of German repression, or slated as an “annihilation of antisemitic violence”.
Leaving aside that provocative wording, it is true that Glazer’s film shows antisemitic violence in just a few scenes, but that does not minimise it – rather, it underlines it even more effectively. The Nazi family knows what’s going on next door; they approve of it; they are not even conflicted about it. Of course, this is a story about a privileged Nazi commandant who oversaw mass murder, and not your average German family living through the second world war. But in the naturalistic way the characters talk about daily banalities or care for their kids, their garden, their pets and their beautiful house – the way they don’t have to care about anything outside – they could be seen to also represent the idealised, self-interested, bourgeois, even aspirational family today. Interestingly, the film doesn’t bother to make the viewer identify with the Nazi family; the camera always observes them from a safe distance. The characters appear schematic, but not in the same way as the perpetrators from other Holocaust films. They resemble, rather, a normal, white, heteronormative German family.
Might it be triggering to German audiences to watch such familiar domesticity intertwined so closely with the unimaginable crimes next door? Or that there is nothing to laugh or cry about in The Zone of Interest: no catharsis, no relief, just the constant unease of the diffuse horror in the background? The sounds from the camp and the technical conversations about the efficiency of the ovens instantly bring to mind images of Auschwitz. The film presupposes the audience knows about Auschwitz. At least in Germany, of all places, this is an assumption that can be made because of the country’s “remembrance culture”.
This Erinnerungskultur, or commitment to face up to the nation’s crimes under nazism, is, according to the social scientist Samuel Salzborn, mainly characterised by official commemoration and private denial, a deep gap between the domestic and the public sphere. The Jewish-German writer Max Czollek describes German memory culture as an effort “to reconcile the Germans with themselves”.
But there is no room for reconciliation in The Zone of Interest. While German film productions on the Third Reich made in recent decades tend to stress the potential for acts of resistance even among higher ranking circles of the Wehrmacht, Glazer’s film allows resistance only in the shape of a lonely Polish girl hiding apples in bushes for Auschwitz inmates. It concentrates on looking at the perpetrator. Not with disgust, not with compassion: it just looks. This film is a depiction of guilt. And that, perhaps, is, above all, why it sits uneasily with German audiences. The guilt we see can’t be externalised or historicised: it is ubiquitous and ageless. Its germ cell lies in the aspirations and wealth of the nuclear family; in the pragmatism and self-righteousness that give rise to their complicity in genocide. That the film has divided opinion in Germany only proves how powerful this approach really is.
Fatma Aydemir is a Berlin-based Guardian Europe columnist
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