The Sound of Atrocity

Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is an extraordinary film, not because of its message or its visual aesthetic, not for its placed timelessness or gut-punching metaphors. It is an extraordinary film because it upends the hegemony of sight, hitherto integral not just to cinema but to the very concept of atrocity.¹ From the outset, the film tells its audience that there will be nothing to see here: After the opening credits, the title fades out and leaves us with an all-black screen. A repetitive, gloomy, discordant score, whispering voices, and chirping birds, plunge us – ears first – into the opening frame where a mass murderer in swim trunks gazes out at the lake in silence, before carrying his wailing child back to the car that returns him and his family to the villa, the unnamed camp, and the ghastly duties from which he had just taken a short reprieve. Showing a seemingly innocuous family panorama set in nature, the film instructs the viewer to listen, priming us for the environmental traces of mass murder and the cacophony of violence.

With this essay, I offer an environmental reading of a film that shows us life before the end of the world. Examining the Zone of Interest against the backdrop of the unfolding climate apocalypse and current wars (Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Haiti, the list goes on …), I argue that Glazer’s camera successfully inverts the gaze that has accompanied atrocity ever since the advent of photography.² The Zone of Interest does not show what is happening inside the camps. Instead, the camera effectively mimics the very psyche of those who continue to live life as normal. The painful rest, the encroaching certainty of the end of the world (whether that world goes by the name of Nazi Lebensraum or carbon capitalism), is successfully left outside the frame, undisturbed by the occasional intrusion of the reality that unfolds in the passive voice on the other side of the wall as the stench of death and billowing smoke waft across and penetrate seemingly hapless lungs. Scentless, the film pits willful blindness against the constantly throbbing sound of atrocity.

The Hegemony of Sight

The Zone of Interest centres on the life of the family of Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) in the villa adjacent to the camp. Birthday celebrations, garden parties, conversations over coffee, and playing children are set to a soundtrack of arriving trains, distant gun shots, bellowing guards, barking dogs, blasting furnaces, industrial operations of an indeterminable sort hinting at grueling labour, grunts of exhaustion, and harrowing screams emitted by invisible, tortured bodies. The soundscape registers the physical and verbal objections of those tortured and murdered in the Nazi death camps to their erasure as humans and their transformation into visual evidence.

Glazer’s camera does not picture atrocity.³ It turns its gaze, showing instead the constant and laborious effort of the films’ protagonists to forge an alternate, inward-facing reality. The German word for this kind of labour – ausblenden – serves as a direct reference to the apparatus and mechanics of the camera, which in Glazer’s film focuses on the perpetrators, accomplices, onlookers, and away-lookers and their verbal acrobatics to rationalize and normalize the horror that surrounds them. Capturing the psychological labour of the Höss household, most successfully exemplified by Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller) the wife of the Auschwitz commandant, the film forces the viewer to observe the production of a deliberately constricted perspective, holding up a mirror to anyone daring to look.

In this fashion, Glazer breaks with important historical precedents. When the Western Allies liberated the camps inside Germany in April 1945 and apprehended the landscape of death they encountered, they declared language insufficient and called upon the camera to record the suffering which victims and survivors were forced to perform before it.⁴ Photographers took still and moving images of murdered and mangled bodies and of the not-yet-dead moving amidst the piles of decomposing corpses.⁵ The initial footage, staged and not, as well as the documentation of the forced visits to the former camps by German civilians was reassembled for re-education films, the most famous of which is the British-American co-production Death Mills (Wilder, 1945).⁶ In order to present the Allies as saviours of people stripped of humanity by Nazi monsters, Death Mills focused on the barely human or dehumanized body. “Years of imprisonment, starvation, torture, and forced labour had broken them. They had been beaten down to live like animals, far worse, for few animals had lived in the terror, hunger, and filth of these victims,” the narrator explains. “People who once had been human beings like you and me” were photographed while spooning garbage off the pavement.⁷ Officials and medical experts dragged survivors in front of the cameras, pointing at their bruises and zooming in on their scars, showcasing their emaciated bodies and hollowed-out faces.

Since the Nazi regime evacuated the camps in the East in horrendous death marches, most survivors were in fact liberated inside Germany by the Western Allies.⁸ However, Allied photographers lacked a general understanding of the camp complex, its geography, and its victims. Most importantly, they failed to understand the special plight of Jews.⁹ Filmmakers and photographers alike, informed by shock and horror, intended to show the destruction of humanity to whose rescue the Allies had arrived. In the process, they inadvertently reproduced an imperialist gaze.¹⁰ The (photographic) shooting of prisoners, now nominally liberated, was violent, nonetheless. As Susan Sontag reminds us “to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.”¹¹ In their capacity to “furnish evidence” the photographs (moving and still) taken during the liberation of the camps reduced the survivors to their scars and rendered the dead evidence of the crimes committed by the Germans.¹² In order to level the most devastating charge against the perpetrators, the images arrested the victims’ bodies in their most dismal state, for perpetuity.¹³

Since the Nazis had themselves notoriously recorded, with scientific precision, the nature of their own operations, in film, photography, charts, and statistics, scholars have long since drawn attention to the fact that images of atrocity, almost always reproduce the perpetrator perspective.¹⁴ In films such as “Das Ghetto,” shot by Nazi cameramen in the Warsaw ghetto shortly before its liquidation by the SS, the camera captured the horrendous conditions as “evidence” of the alleged racial inferiority and criminality of the ghetto dwellers.¹⁵ Post liberation of the camps, the wretched existences of the survivors and the mangled bodies of the dead, were no longer taken as evidence for some biosocial essence of the victims; instead they served as illustrations for the “nature” of the perpetrators. As Yael Hersonski so effectively exposes in A Film Unfinished (2010), such attempts inadvertently reproduced the very point of view of “that empire so infatuated with the camera.”

Refusing to yet again offer for visual consumption the tortured and violated bodies of victims and survivors that have characterized Holocaust education since the defeat of the Nazi regime, The Zone of Interest courageously breaks with a long-standing tradition.¹⁶ It echoes the demands of a younger generation of activists, who wear masks to ensure their own privacy, who refuse to share images of violated bodies, and who insist, instead, that we “say their names.”¹⁷

The Pollution Frontier

As photojournalist Paul Lowe notes, images that capture “the absence of visible violence can lead the viewer into an imaginative engagement with the nature of atrocity, and the nature of those who perpetrate it.”¹⁸ The Zone of Interest, invites precisely this kind of reflection. Instead of using the techniques of the documentary, Glazer turns to the feature film, inverting not only the gaze of the camera, but also the familiar tropes of nature, marriage, and childhood, perhaps most famously deployed in the film that inspired the riff for this essay’s title: The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965).¹⁹

Panoramas of natural landscapes often serve to invoke the sublime or an uncorrupted rural idyll.²⁰ In The Zone of Interest nature, which enters the narrative both visually and through its valorization by the protagonists, is unmasked as an archive of death. Rather than sweeping takes of breath-taking landscapes, our apprehension of the natural environment is afforded by a constricted perspective and eclipsed by the all-pervasive din. When Rudolf points out the song of a heron to his eldest son, as they ride on horseback through the countryside, shouting guards, who are moving a squadron of slave labourers to some indeterminate location, drown out any birdsong. In another scene, Rudolf dictates orders to protect the lilac bushes against vandalism by SS officers, threatening punishment for anyone interfering with the beautification of the Lager. Similarly, Hedwig shows Annegret the lady bugs in the garden and praises the fragrance of flowers and linden trees. She emphasizes to her visiting mother that they planted vines to cover the wall of the camp, “so it’s no longer that visible [damit man das nicht mehr so sieht].” The assimilative capacity of nature is already exhausted. The mother coughs – she hasn’t yet accustomed to the caustic air – but is clearly dazzled by the lavishness of the garden that symbolizes the social ascent of her daughter. Unlike Hedwig, the mother still flinches as gunshots puncture their conversation. The camera attempts to resist the power of sound, presenting close up of flowers in vibrant colours. Men shouting violently and women screaming in anguish overshadow the gentle buzzing of bees. Nature is at war. It is conquered by the sound of atrocity and transformed into an environment of death.²¹

Rudolf’s and Klaus’ excursion on horseback invoke the pioneer spirit of the frontier. Hedwig’s garden signifies nature turned into Lebensraum. The white bedsheets on the clothing line, fluttering in the fall breeze, encode rural domesticity. The camera betrays our eyes. The sheets could not have been white. The film’s narrative compresses the Höss family’s experience in the villa into a few weeks in the fall of 1943, (Annegrete was in fact born in September 1943 and Höss’s transfer to Oranienburg took place later that fall), at a time when the air around the camp was saturated with smoke from the constantly blasting crematoria.²² Conditions were so harrowing that the Central Building Office of the Waffen-SS and Police, which was in the process of planning the construction of a Fernheizkraftwerk (district heating plant) at KL-Auschwitz in the fall of 1943, ended up waving the required air quality survey the following spring, in light of the extreme concentration of fly ash, dust, and air pollution caused by the camp operations.²³

Nature is sick and everybody knows it, even if the film only as much as hints on the environmental effects of the Nazi genocide. The suggestions of smelling anything other than death illustrates the grotesque psychological distortions that shore up the Höss family’s sense of home.²⁴ Once Birkenau became operational as an extermination facility, the scent of linden trees and roses would have been thoroughly overshadowed by the thick and sweet stench of rotting corpses. The soil itself was unable to cope, belching up corpses swollen by the summer heat.²⁵ In September 1942, the SS initiated a so-called “system-switch” and moved to systematically burn bodies that had previously been buried. Over the course of the fall, Sonderkommandos were forced to unearth the dead and burn them. By then, mass murder had poisoned the ground water supply and attracted vermin in overwhelming numbers, threatening life and health beyond the camp walls.²⁶ By the summer of 1943, fly and vermin infestation in Auschwitz and the surrounding areas was so severe that Heinrich Himmler moved to institute regular garbage collection in the camp and appointed a special fly control officer to coordinate the response to fly infestation and vermin of all sorts.²⁷ Naturally, the Nazis lost the war against the flies. The stench of decomposing corpses was augmented by the stench of burnt flesh.

Hedwig plucks weeds in the garden, impervious to the deafening sounds from the Lager, and clearly unbothered by the smells we neither see nor hear. The reality of mass murder constantly intrudes on the lives of the protagonists and shapes their daily routines, nonetheless. When Rudolf returns from “work” to meet representatives from Topf & Söhne at the villa – they are to discuss the installation of a new crematorium with rotating burn compartments that manage “400–500 pieces” over the course of seven hours – Höss takes off his boots before entering the house. His guests ask him, perplexed, whether they too ought to take off their shoes. Höss just shakes his head and motions the men inside. While they explain the technical innovations that “allow for constant operation [Dauerbetrieb möglich]” to the sock-footed Höss, the camera cuts to a slave labourer who scrubs the blood and grime off Höss’ boots in the back of the villa. The traces of mass murder are not allowed to cross the threshold of home.

Höss has carefully developed routines to minimize pollution. His nightly locking of doors seals off the residence against the horrors he orchestrates during the day. While he leaves his death-stained boots to the care of a Häftling, Höss methodically washes his own penis after raping a young, female inmate. More aggressive scrubbing and rinsing of environmental traces follow when Rudolf returns with Inge and Hans from an outing to the river. Hedwig and Marta scrub the children, the Polish maid, Aniela, subsequently scrubs the tub. We see the freshly bathed Rudolf blowing his nose and rinsing the traces of ash from the washbasin. An idyllic outing in nature, of boating, fishing, and splashing in the river, amounted instead to a bath with death. Höss should not have been surprised when encountering human remains in the river; even his wife recognizes the environment as a repository for the remnants of genocide. Accusing Aniela of provocation, Hedwig hisses under her beath: “I could have my husband spread your ashes across the fields of Babice [wenn ich wollte würde mein Mann sofort deine Asche über den Feldern von Babice verstreuen].”

Glazer thus invokes the environment as an archive, whose sensory and material reality maintains a record of the crimes the camera does not show. The environment bears witness to murder and destruction, disgorging human ash and bone fragments at the most inopportune moments. The environment carries the sound of bellowing guards and tortured prisoners into the bedrooms of the Höss family. Sound and smell encroach on Hedwig’s Paradiesgarten, the villa, and their inhabitants, penetrating their bodies and their minds, without registering in their conscience. The Polish maids drink to numb the pain. Hedwig’s mother eventually flees from the smoke, the blasting furnaces, the harrowing screams, and incessant droning of industrialized destruction without goodbyes. But Rudolf and Hedwig chat and laugh or sleep as if nothing could disturb their slumber.

Marriage here is not the culmination of love and romance; it is an imperialist tool. The petit-bourgeois existence of Rudolf and Hedwig, nestled against the wall of the Third Reich’s largest extermination camp, is sweetened by the spoils of war and genocide that range from fur coats and Leckereien (delicacies) to domestic service and sexual gratification coerced from slave labourers. The Kameradschaftsehe of the settler-colonial pioneer at the out edges of the German frontier, unapologetically claims its Lebensraum even if that means to live apart. When Rudolf learns that he will be replaced by Arthur Liebehenschel and recalled to Oranienburg, Hedwig insists on staying behind to raise the children in precisely the spirit the Führer had imagined. Ignoring evidence to the contrary, Hedwig exclaims “our children are healthy, they are strong, they are happy [unsere Kinder, die sind gesund, die sind kräftig, die sind glücklich].” Rudolf acquiesces. The couple renews their marital contract by the very river that washes away human bones and human ash in the name of their children.

In The Zone of Interest childhood is not innocence. It serves as a canvas on which pathology manifests, showing the transformation of pain into cruelty with the passage of time. Annegret’s constant wailing – ignored by all – is likely the result of the caustic smoke burning in her throat. Her older siblings display pathologies that increase in intensity proportional to their age. Hans’ play, whether involving drums, dice, or tin soldiers never appears fully separate from the haunting sounds that enter through the open window. In one instance, after overhearing his father order a guard to drown a prisoner in the river for stealing an apple, Hans mumbles, as if addressing the prisoner directly “don’t do that again [mach das nicht nochmal].” At night Hans tries to catch invisible demons with his bare hands, chasing them with his flashlight. Inge and her older sister Heidetraud, already better able to maintain a psychological separation between the sounds of atrocity and the soundscape of home, instead display symptoms of insomnia and sleepwalking, subconsciously processing what they have already learned to block out (ausblenden). Most strikingly, the film shows the progression from detached scientificity with which Klaus, the oldest child, examines human dentures to the sadistic pleasure he displays when imprisoning his younger brother in the greenhouse. No level of paternal attention and household discipline can shield the children from the effects of living in the constant presence of death.

Nature and History

The Zone of Interest has prompted numerous references to Israel’s current war on Gaza and invites analogies to multiple other calamities that play out in front of our eyes, while we deliberately look away. Beyond the applicability of the film’s logic to specific historical or contemporary instances of apathy and indifference in the face of horrendous suffering, Glazer’s choice to use the Holocaust as a foil is an attempt to rescue the very universals that were written into international law in the aftermath of the defeat of Nazi Germany – universals that are currently being buried under heaps of rubble in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Yemen, in Haiti, in Myanmar, in Sudan.²⁸ Accordingly, I would venture, the film invites a universalist reading. It offers commentary on the planetary crisis. Escalating disasters, extreme weather events, species extinction, pollution, resource pressures, cascading poverty, mass displacement, famine, and death result from rapid, irreversible anthropogenic warming of the atmosphere. These dynamics are not separate from the horrors currently unfolding in the contexts of specific wars – they exacerbate them.²⁹

The film’s focus on the environment suggests that not only do we need to redirect our gaze but, in fact, refocus our attention. Sight can no longer function as a privileged source of knowledge and truth. For once, we are apparently immune to the pictures of atrocity that flood our social media feeds – for even when things can be and are pictured, they do not elicit a response beyond posts, likes, and shares, and habitual professions of horror. By contrast, global warming, carbon emissions, and many forms of pollution are by default invisible. Hence, their calamitous significance cannot be pictured nor can it be recognized by sight. The Zone of Interest instructs us to be sensitive to other forms of knowing; to pay heed to the archive of our collective destruction as it is carved into the mantel of the earth and encoded in the atmosphere, the biosphere, and the DNA of every living organism on this planet; and most immediately, to listen to the words, laments, and harrowing screams of those who are already suffering, because, unlike most of us, they are not silent. What if we were forced to hear? What if our existence would have to cope with the constant soundtrack of the daily proliferating agony that characterizes life on this planet? These are the questions The Zone of Interest raises and answers: The cacophony would be unbearable, or would it?

The film mobilizes history as both present and future. For even if Hedwig opened her eyes and ears and rediscovered her conscience, the worst has already happened. In this fashion, The Zone of Interest uses “a version of ‘history-as-fate’ trope” much like The Sound of Music, but unlike the latter, it offers a way out of this history-as-future trap.³⁰ Chronicling the Höss children’s pathological descent into emotional isolation, despair, and cruelty, the film demonstrates what happens when we extinguish the politics of refusal, here exemplified by Annegret’s constant screams. Throughout, her wailing falls on deaf ears. Inevitably, she, too, will grow up and stop screaming. The film points us toward the door, it even gives us the key.

In recent years, protests led by young, seemingly leaderless movements have reinvented the politics of refusal as a collective practice of care. Repeatedly, they have called in the prerogative of youth: History is history, but the future is ours to make. The uprisings of 2020 mobilizing against police and for Black lives, the occupation of land to block the construction of pipelines, the continuing climate protests, and the current encampments calling for university divestment from corporations profiting from war and genocide in Gaza are a younger generations’ refusal to become Klaus. We have already wagered their future; we should not extort the surrender of their moral compass and criminalize their politics of collective care. We should listen, instead, as their screams for peace and justice reverberate through our present, rather than stubbornly focusing on our respective zones of interest.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anne Berg

Anne Berg is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on waste and recycling, film and cities, racism, war, and genocide. She has authored two books, On Screen and Off: Cinema and the Making of Nazi Hamburg (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022) and Empire of Rags and Bones: Waste and War in Nazi Germany, (Oxford University Press, 2024). Currently, she is writing a global environmental history of garbage.

Notes

1 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2004), 83.

2 Ibid., 24.

3 Geoffrey Batchen et al., Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis (London: Reaktion Books, 2012).

4 Footage from the liberation of Bergen-Belsen was admitted as evidence Prosecution Exhibit #230 at the Nuremberg Trials. https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn616441

5 Anne Berg, Empire of Rags and Bones: Waste and War in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024), 226–7.

6 David Bathrick, “Billy Wilder’s Cold War Berlin,” New German Critique 110, no. 37 (2010): 31–47.

7 Death Mills (Wilder, 1945).

8 Daniel Blatman, The Death Marches: The Final Phase of the Nazi Genocide (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010).

9 Dan Stone, The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and Its Aftermath (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 18, 69.

10 For a critical discussions of photography, see Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 1973); Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others; Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980); Judith Butler, “Torture and the Ethics of Photography,” Environment and Planning 25, no. 6 (2007): 951–96; David Shneer, Grief: The Biography of a Holocaust Photograph (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

11 Sontag, On Photography, 4.

12 Ibid., 5.

13 Aoife Duffy, “Bearing Witness to Atrocity Crimes: Photography and International Law,” Human Rights Quarterly 40, no. 4 (November 2018): 776–814, 781. See also Toby Haggith, “The Filming of the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen and its Impact on the Understanding of the Holocaust” in Belsen 1945: New Historical Perspectives, ed. Suzanne Bardgett and David Cesarani (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006), 89–122, here 89. Also Paul Lowe, “Picturing the Perpetrator,” 189–90. For a careful discussion on the staging of scenes, see Ulrike Weckel, Beschämende Bilder: deutsche Reaktionen auf Allierte Dokumentarfilme über befreite Konzentrationslager (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2012).

14 See Janina Struk, Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence (London: Routledge, 2020); Zelizer, Remembering to Forget.

15 A Film Unfinished (Hersonski 2010).

16 Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, 172–86.

17 Curtis Bunn et al., Say Their Names: How Black Lives Came to Matter in America (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2021).

18 Lowe, “Picturing the Perpetrator,” 189.

19 Raymond Knapp, “History, ‘The Sound of Music,’ and Us,” American Music 22, no. 1 (2004): 133–44.

20 Johannes von Moltke, No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Christian Rapp, Höhenrausch: der deutsche Bergfilm (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1997); Kamaal Haque, “‘Damals gingen die Schnulzen eben gut’: Luis Trenker and the ‘Heimatfilm,’” Monatshefte 107, no. 4 (2015): 604–21.

21 I borrow the term “environment of death” from Dorothee Brantz’s article “Environments of Death: Trench Warfare on the Western Front, 1914–1918,” in War and the Environment: Military Destruction in the Modern Age ed. Charles E. Closmann (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2009), 68–91.

22 Martin Broszat, ed. Rudolf Höß: Kommandant in Auschwitz: Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen (Munich: DTV, 1963), 202–3; Volker, Rudolf Höss: Der Kommandant Von Auschwitz – Eine Biographie. (Cologne: Böhlau, 2014), 98.

23 BArch R154-48. Zentralbauleitung der Waffen-SS und Polizei an die Reichsanstalt für Wasser- und Luftgüte, 26 May 1944.

24 Berg, Empire of Rags and Bones, 183.

25 Andrej Angrick, Aktion 1005: Spurenbeseitigung von NS-Massenverbrechen (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2018), 205.

26 Kommandanturbefehl, No.10/42 Auschwitz, 6 June 1942; Komandanturbefehl. No. 1/40 Auschwitz, 6 June 1940, in Standort und Kommandanturbefehle des Konzentrationslagers Auschwitz, 141, 3. Himmler forbid the consumption of water from wells in the Lager, knowing it was contaminated.

27 Berg, Empire of Rags and Bones, 182, 195.

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

29 Nina Lakhani, “Revealed: Repairing Israel's Destruction of Gaza Will Come at a Huge Climate Cost,” The Guardian (6 June 2024). https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/06/rebuilding-gaza-climatecost

30 Knapp, “History, ‘The Sound of Music,’ and Us,” 136, 134.