The Zone of Complicity

Jonathan Glazer’s 2024 film Zone of Interest opens with a serene pastoral scene: amid birdsong, a German family relaxes and chats on a lush meadow by a lakeside before the men go down to the water to take a dip. The camera follows this everyday, leisurely scene and briefly turns back to the man who remains standing at the edge of the water, basking in the sunlight, the natural beauty, and the cheerful cries of his sons. It is only after the fact that we learn that this tranquil man, standing by the lakeside in his floppy swimsuit, is none other than a notorious historical figure: Rudolf Höss, the “commander” of Auschwitz, located only a short drive away from this beautiful lake. The opening scene signals the major historical, theoretical, and aesthetic claim of the film: understanding the world of Auschwitz is not about dredging up fantasies of muscular, Aryan muscular SS uniforms, barking German shepherds, and the crack of whips inside the barracks, but rather about understanding the family, colleagues, friends, and even the bright sunlight that enabled this atrocity.

Zone of Interest is a film about a non-event and a non-crime. The event is not shown and the crimes are only insinuated. Mass killing, torture, and starvation take place outside our view and are alluded to by the insignia at the edge of the camp’s universe: the wall at the edge of the commander’s garden, the sound of shots in the distance, bones floating in the river, and the personal belongings and toys handed out to women and children. The camera does not follow the criminal, nor his deeds, but the various markers of active and passive complicity that surround him.

In his cinematic interpretation of Martin Amis’s novel The Zone of Interest (2014), Jonathan Glazer makes two surprising decisions, which allow him to stress complicity as a focal point, and reject the perpetrator-victim dichotomy that has shaped much of the Holocaust historiography. One decision is to focus the narrative not on the commander, who is the protagonist of Amis’s novel, but on his wife, Hedwig. The other is to turn the view from Amis’s stress on the German obsession with chauvinistic manhood to their environment. The film alludes to major history works of the past generation, written by Saul Friedlaender, Leni Yahil, Christopher Browning, Ian Kershaw, Andreas Hillgruber, Hans Mommsen, and Martin Broszat – to name just a few of a now-canonical group of historians, who participated in or commented on the historiographical debates about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust in the 1980s. While choosing either to write the history of perpetrators or history of victims, acclaimed scholars debated whether an “intentionalist” or “functionalist” approach best described the Nazi regime and its genocidal ideology. For the most part, they chose either a model that emphasized the top-down ideology of Hitler and the Nazi elite, a bottom-up “functionalist” approach to bureaucrats and functionaries, or the victim’s limited understanding of the situation.¹ During the late 1990s, the gap between the two historiographic schools narrowed and most historians moved to synthesize the two perspectives. The change took place in the context of a new historiographic trend that focused on matters of representation and “collective memory.” Amis’s novel, like the works of Jonathan Littell and other novels of the early 2000s, demonstrates a deep understanding of these debates and the wealth of historical material they helped to expose.² Amis’s book focuses on the character of the Auschwitz commander, his SS deputies, and the Jewish Sonderkommando he kills. The commander’s wife exists to shed light on the perversion of the men who surround her, but is not a key protagonist, unlike in the film.

Both the novel and the film allude to Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved (1986). In this slender collection of essays, one of them entitled “The Grey Zone,” Levi analyses how, in the camps, human language was replaced by the language of violence, and humanity by dehumanization. Once the Lager was instated and shut off from the world, Levi shows, the dichotomy between the perpetrator and the victim was eroded: “the frustrated sought power as well, as this too is a feature in which the microcosm of the Lager reproduced the macrocosm of totalitarian society.”³ Both the novel and the film follow this logic in different ways. The Nazi system was monstrous precisely because it made the Jewish victims into accomplices in their own demise, but while Amis explores this issue from the perspective of toxic masculinity (following the arguments of Klaus Theweleit’s seminal study, Male Fantasies, Glazer depicts complacency as a general human condition.⁴

How can one define complicity, and how does the film focus on it? The concept appears, for the first time, in Thomas Blount’s Glossographia (1656): “Complices: from complex, icis: companions, or partners in evil.”⁵ The etymology of the term stretches back even further, though. Blount borrowed the word from Greek “entwinement” (πλέκω, plékō: weave, tangle) and adapted it to the seventeenth-century language of social unity, cultural symbols, and political legitimacy. A close reader of Thomas Hobbes, Blount realized how a new understanding of sovereignty and the social contract could shape our understanding of the complicit “multitude.” The British historian Ian Kershaw, who analysed the Historikerstreit as a historical phenomenon in its own right, depicted the Nazi stress on the complicity of the multitude as “working towards the Führer,” a translation of the common German term, “entgegen arbeiten,” that communicates anticipating one’s superior’s expectations.⁶

Glazer’s film will frustrate those who try to understand it based on the perpetrator-victim opposition because it forgoes any classic depiction of victimhood. Its coherence and consistency become apparent when the film is understood as addressing complicity in genocide. Much like the opening scene, key events in the story follow the logic of entanglement or entwinement with power, as complicit parties avoid, suppress, or disregard the crimes committed outside their windows, or beyond their walls. Consider the forced labourers at the house who get to choose items from a shipment of clothes. It is clear that the clothes, including a fancy fur coat and the lipstick that Hedwig, the commander’s wife, tries on in front of the mirror, belong to those murdered in the camps. When Hedwig’s mother comes to visit, Hedwig points out to the new additions to the house and the garden, which have been carried out by enslaved workers from the camp and oppressed Poles. The mother, who obviously comes from a lower class, expresses great pleasure with her daughter’s ability to create such a “paradise” and climb up the social ladder. She also admits that she tried and failed to obtain the costly curtains of a Jewish employer who was deported to Auschwitz, and then wonders whether this employer is perhaps there, on the other side of the wall. The daughter ignores the question or indeed any allusion to individual Jews. Jews are an abstract entity she does not consider worthy of attention. The mother, obviously antisemitic herself, attempts to ignore the context but finds it impossible. She cannot stand the smell of burning bodies; she coughs and leaves the garden, and, later that night, watches the flames from the crematorium with a handkerchief to her mouth. The next morning, we surmise that she abruptly leaves the house without a word – no scene depicts her departure – except for a short note that we, the viewers, are not privy to. Instead, we watch as Hedwig silently burns the note and lets off steam by threatening to ask the commander to kill a frightened young servant. Mother and daughter represent two forms of complicity in genocide: the older, working-class mother has no qualms about antisemitism but recognizes the individuality of the Jewish person she worked for, and whose death she may have witnessed in the crematorium [yes]. The daughter, one rung higher on the social ladder and more detached, cannot even consider the Jew as an individual, or admit that the smell of corpses fills her paradise. The mother escapes, while the daughter refuses to leave her own private Lebensraum.

Other scenes follow a similar logic: consider, for example, two engineers who come to advise the commander about an improved crematorium. Not a single word is uttered concerning its intended purpose, or the barbarity of the civilized, technical solutions proposed over coffee.

By refusing to give us clear perpetrators and victims, Zone of Interest builds on recent, critical literature: Mahmood Mamdani’s analysis of the genocide in Rwanda shows how civilian, rather than governmental or military authorities, can turn into complicit or active agents of violence. Mamdani writes, “By portraying opponents as potential perpetrators and ourselves as potential victims, war tends to demonize opponents and sanctify aggression as protective and defensive.”⁷ War and ideology serve to justify mass violence from afar. The historian Jan Gross, who has explored Polish complicity in the Nazi genocide, explains that though war provided a context for genocide, “desire and unexpected opportunity to rob the Jews once and for all – rather than, or alongside with, atavistic anti-Semitism – was the real motivating force that drove … the killing.”⁸

The Zone of Interest, following these histories, unpacks complicity as a variety of positions, a spectrum within the perpetrator-victim dichotomy. One end of the complicit scale falls very close to the perpetrator side, while its other end modifies the victim’s. If the local Polish population stands between the two opposite poles – some enjoy the benefits granted to them by the Germans, and others suffer their wrath or scorn – the Jewish victims are left with no choice but cooperation. The majority must comply, and die, but a few win favours, and a little time. Complacent opportunism, the historian Omer Bartov explains, shows not only how Nazis and local antisemites were integral to the killing machine, but also how – as Primo Levi argued – Jewish victims became complicit, which “reveal[s] something about how decent men in dark times can become useful instruments in the realization of genocide.”⁹

Recent theorists, such as Michael Rothberg and John Hamilton have paid closer attention to complicity, complacency, and implication. Both theorists unpack the repercussions of a post-1945 discourse that stresses intention as the core proof for the liberal and judicial language that formed around such static positions, and status quo, since 1945. Alluding to Primo Levi’s “grey zone,” Rothberg reminds us about the political instrumentalizations of the perpetrator-victim opposition and advises us to avoid binary oppositions by sticking to such in-between concepts such as implication, lest we misrepresent “the victims, who are no longer around to speak for themselves.”¹⁰

As Dirk Moses notes in a recent book, what made the category of genocide achieve such theoretical traction in our era is its “‘special intent’ (dolus specialis) requirement that effectively incorporates the antique notice of ‘malice aforethought.’”¹¹ Intent is a legal category that stood at the heart of post-1945 liberal democracy. Prosecutors in the Nuremberg Trials and successive Holocaust trials had to prove the intent to kill and participate in crimes against humanity and genocide, legal innovations that brought about a new era in international law. Complicity is mentioned, briefly, in Article III of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) but is not defined or discussed. In contrast to the perpetrators of crimes, or their collaborators, one cannot demonstrate intent for complicit parties, who may be anything from bystanders to unintentional collaborators.

They are complicit because they watch without intervening (bystanders) or help the perpetrators without taking any part in the prosecutable actions themselves (collaborators). When confronted with this issue. judges explained they cannot prove complicity, implication, or complacency, because the intent is weak or even non-existent, and that they therefore cannot sentence or sanction those accused of complicity. Indeed, complicity – even more than implication and complacency – exists as a spectrum, rather than a single position, action, or event. Those entangled with power “often could, and did, live in denial of their complicity during and long after the event, and they were rarely mentioned either by the perpetrators or by the victims.”¹² Glazer’s choice to focus the story on Hedwig, rather than the commander, disputes a heuristic discussion of intent, and with it the legal and historical agency that was the hallmark of post-World War II international law and human rights.

Zone of Interest is a timely intervention in a necessary historiographic transformation: it refuses the metaphysical opposition between event and non-event, perpetrator and victim, active and passive positions. Instead, the film depicts a spectrum of complicit positions, some more active (the engineers), some less (Hedwig). It does not focus on killings or the killer, the tortured or the victim. Rather, it shifts its perspective to the threshold of the camp, to the wife and the mother, and to everyday language. Here, the director and his film help us engage with the major political issue of the latter half of the twentieth century: complicity in crimes against humanity, complicity in genocide. This is a perspective that widens the scope of our understanding of “Auschwitz” and forces us to look at similar cases of complicity, as Glazer did in his Oscar speech. In that speech, Glazer stressed the two turns I mention above: he calls the viewers “to reflect and confront … the present, not to say look what they did then, but rather look what we do now.” The objective of the film is not to affirm the perpetrator or victim’s perspective, but, more provocatively, to follow the tangled web of complicity that enables atrocities. In reference to the current war in Gaza, Glazer said,

Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It’s shaped all of our past and present. Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.¹³

With the issue of complicity in mind, we must thus turn back from the affirmative oppositions that support our sense of collective identity and collective memory, and instead ask directly, as Glazer does: “How can we resist?” The answer, The Zone of Interest argues, is by thinking and working against complicity.

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Nitzan Lebovic

Nitzan Lebovic grew up in a Tel-Aviv suburb and considered himself a musician until he was eighteen. He studied in Tel-Aviv and in Munich, Germany, before continuing his studies for a PhD in intellectual history at UCLA. Nitzan won a series of prestigious post-doctoral fellowships before accepting an offer from Lehigh University. He considers himself a political activist, next to his academic work, and is among the founders of a number of political forums, among them Academy4Equality, the largest academic organization for Progressive academics in Israel-Palestine.

Notes

1 These debates are analysed in Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation. 4th ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2000).

2 Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Ones (New York: Harper Collins, 2006).

3 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), 36.

4 Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, trans. Chris Turner and others (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

5 Thomas Blount, Glossographia: Or a Dictionary Interpreting the Hard Words of Whatsoever Language, now used in our refined English Tongue (London, tho. Newcomb, 1681 [1656]), 148.

6 See the chapter under this title in Ian Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 29–48.

7 Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 217

8 Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), 69.

9 Omer Bartov, Anatomy of Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 174.

10 Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021), 84; John T. Hamilton, Complacency: Classics and Its Displacement in Higher Education (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2022).

11 A. Dirk Moses, The Problem of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 24.

12 Bartov, Anatomy of Genocide, 213.

13 Jonathan Glazer, acceptance Speech after Winniing Best International Feature at the 2024 Oscars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHkTZ-yeb44 Last access 12 April 2024.