A Lesson to Unlearn: “The History of Interest”

Though I watched “The Zone of Interest” weeks after Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar speech and the ensuing drama, I was taken aback by its impact. Unlike films about human-made catastrophes designed to evoke tension or discomfort, moving one way or another towards mourning, remembrance, and trauma processing, this film evoked an overwhelming feeling of motionlessness and inability to reach closure. Glazer provides a full auditory narrative and a cutout visual narrative, placing them in opposition. The cinematic imagery may at first seem jarringly trivial, hardly worthy of attention, implicitly asking us, in a somewhat Orwellian manner, to disbelieve or brush aside our ears and our historical knowledge, and to embrace what we see as “the plot.” Incessant sounds of gunfire and screams elicit a state of mental urgency, while our eyes watch the mundane life of Rudolf Höß, the commandant of Auschwitz, and his wife, Hedwig, living in normalcy just outside the concentration camp – its external wall and crematoria’s fire are all we see. Rudolf and Hedwig parent their children, love their animals, garden, host guests, party, gossip for fun; basically they live “our” own normal lives,¹ unperturbed at the terrifying, recurring sounds. A few newcomers do react differently, or just “react” – validating our restlessness as viewers. Yet, nothing alleviates the eerie acclimatization to the horrors behind the wall. Waiting for a child to ask a parent something, anything, is useless and heart-shattering. How can a child not ask?

A pivotal moment for many viewers is the river scene where Rudolf discovers his children swimming amidst human remains. The subsequent frantic scrubbing of the children in the bathtub reveals dark ashes washing off their bodies. For us, the disturbance is immediate and palpable; remnants of lost lives demand respect and mourning, not casting off. But the Höß family has other axioms; these cremains contaminate their skin and hair, not their moral beings. As the ashes are treated as mere waste, I am reminded of another humanmade catastrophe film: the Japanese anime, “Grave of the Fireflies,” based on a semi-autobiographical story of the same name by Akiyuki Nosaka about orphaned siblings in post-atomic bomb Japan.² Memory’s workings are inexplicable, and in that “cleansing” moment, I found myself longing for Seita’s “Sakuma Drops container,” where he kept the cremains of his little sister, Setsuko, who died of starvation. So, for God’s sake, if I cannot peer into the camp, can I at least, before this shower ends, collect what remains of these human beings who crossed the wall? The answer was abundantly clear. Glazer’s Holocaust film is not about commemorating victims, certainly not in any familiar fashion; it is an intervention.

Double-Egded Anthropological Lens

There is an anthropological distance between us and the Höß residence. In this forum, Ghassan Hage refers to it as well, and recommends approaching the film as “an ethnography of necropolitical indifference.”³ An extra consideration is that not only are Rudolf and Hedwig placed under an anthropological lens, but so are we, the viewers. If we are to trust Glazer’s cinematic brilliance, I assume that we should stop resisting what emerges as the irrelevant “Nazi (non)human condition.” Rather, we could simply surrender and try to understand where these people in the early 1940s meet us today. Both Glazer’s Oscar speech and filming technique invite us to do so.

In the making of “The Zone of Interest,” static, hidden cameras rolled continuously. This technique enabled a more naturalistic capture of the actors, blurring the lines between performance and behaviour. Furthermore, the artifice usually associated with filmmaking is slimmed to the smallest possible measure. With such a shade of voyeuristic realism overlaid, viewers become distant observers. As the domestic banality of the Höß family unfolds in a brutally organic mode, viewers sink further into a malignant trap, seamlessly morphing into complicity, close enough to realize the harrowing truth behind the wall, too distant to intervene and do what is right.

In contrast to Adolf Eichmann in the glass booth during his predetermined trial, we meet the Höß couple when they still have dreams about the day after.⁴ Obviously, under one lens, they are a subject of scrutiny, but they are hardly the main ones targeted. To clarify, if this is an intervention through historical awareness, our protagonists are the reference group, namely, the non-treatment or the placebo group. On the other side of this reality show, the viewers stand as the participant group or the trial group. Many questions can stem from this experimental comparison. I focus on the historical interval, integrating two factors: time and the moral evolution anticipated throughout. Let us, in other words, attempt to grasp that temporal distance between the film’s two presents – the pastness of the Hößes’s present and the futurity of ours.⁵ A question emerges here: how far have we actually gone on the de-Nazification road?

To some, this may seem redundant or inconsequential to explore. Given the victory of the Allies and their international initiatives – launched immediately after the war – to prevent the recurrence of such large-scale political evils and to endorse peace and human dignity,⁶ we should be light-years away from Nazi creatures by now.⁷ However, since none of the institutions of postwar order have succeeded (so far) in communicating their alleged internationality with the world majority,⁸ it might be long overdue to question the celebrated “human rights revolution” and its de-Nazifying intents. To do so, this article relies on scholars who undertake efforts to see through the cloaks of politics, history, and cultures of memory.

The essay “The End of Politics” by Jacques Rancière demonstrates that political change, when worded by abstract ideals, often fails to synchronize with the rhythms of societies, rendering deep-seated issues untreated and the grievances of marginalized groups unaddressed.⁹ Thus, regardless of the Allies’ grandiose story, simply dismantling the Third Reich did not mean rooting out the political-societal paradigms that brought it into existence. Furthermore, the capacity for such great evil, as Hannah Arendt analyzes in Eichmann in Jerusalem, does not necessarily emanate from “monstrous, sadistic, perverted” individuals who, motivated by hate, intend to murder an entire group of Others.¹⁰ Rather, it is the potentiality of ordinary people to function as cogs in destructive political entities that must alert and frighten us. Otherwise put, prosecuting the few of the leading edge barely touches what stands behind a collective that has already reached the point of normalizing and institutionalizing genocidal operations.¹¹ When such a prospect is detected within society, purposeful corrective action in the present is imperative. Alas, Western leaders, as Rancière reveals, are predominantly inclined more toward avoidance than toward genuine investment and engagement that meet the urgent needs of the oppressed; instead, they commonly “pacify” demands for justice, thereby leveraging the concept of “promise” and deceiving the underclass that the past has passed and the future is here and “utopian.”¹²

With this in mind, defining our era as “postwar” or just as “post” is seemingly more about aspiration than actualization. Therefore, acknowledging “the fragile banalities of who we think we are and what we think we are doing,” as Bernard J. Bergen puts it,¹³ appears to hold much more reason than unequivocally denying the possibility of any common banality we might share with Rudolf and Hedwig Höß. After all, the vividly established resemblance between them and us deserves our curiosity and exploration. To offer some degree of solace, I would remind us that the potential for thoughtlessness, moral detachment, bureaucratic compliance, and rationalization of grievous atrocities can be the outcome of the vulnerabilities of many (if not most) human beings, Hößes or not, under certain political circumstances.

Once a Nazi family is re-humanized, the Holocaust is de-exceptionalized. Relevant to this point is A. Dirk Moses’s argument, in The Problems of Genocide, that Holocaust exceptionalism excludes it from the rest of human history. This isolation has cultivated problematic cultural remembering, imposed and massively mobilized in the Global North, crafting both Holocaust victims and perpetrators as exceptional, hence incomparable with other political murderous campaigns. Moses rejects this ahistorical framing of Holocaust – as a “capitalized noun” and “genocide’s archetype” – and shows that, historically, the Nazi policies are a radicalized continuation of imperialist and colonialist practices prevailing since 1500 CE. According to Moses, a consistent rationale appears to have been utilized by Christian Europeans, including the Nazis, to justify extreme measures of violence against those deemed Others, labelling them as existential security threats. Under the guise of “permanent security,” Moses argues, initiatives of exploitations, displacement, and extermination repeatedly occurred against marginalized groups inside Europe, such as Jews and Gypsies, as well as against Indigenous peoples on other continents.¹⁴

If the Nazi regime is not much of an outlier, then Rudolf becomes just another cog in the Christian-Western machine during Hitlerism. In “The Zone of Interest,” Glazer deliberately re-humanizes the Auschwitz commander within his private sphere, not to garner sympathy for the perpetrators but to shed light on human capabilities under permanent security regimes. Reviving Holocaust memory in such a courageous and original work, and reframing it as the historical moral lesson it is, forces us to pose the hardest questions – especially now amidst a genocidal initiative unfolding in the digital age where the same imperial colonial permanent security rhetoric is used to rationalize the political violence.¹⁵ How, when, or where do our ways of being intersect with a Nazi official? This is not an academic investigation afforded the luxury of choice. Since October 2023, humanity has been instantaneously witnessing, in the case of Palestine, “how genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the wanton infliction of collateral damage are driven by the permanent security imperatives of states,” as Moses describes.¹⁶ In his Oscar speech in March 2024, Glazer resolutely seized the relationship between past and present, between Auschwitz and that confined fraction capitalized and normalized under colonial fragmentation as “the Gaza Strip.” So, allow me to ask again, in which ways do we meet with Rudolf Höß? A conceivable answer materializes a bit before the end of the movie, in a special moment of Glazer’s Rudolf.

Rudolf’s Moment of Epiphany

In a late scene, Rudolf leaves a Nazi office gathering in a government building in Berlin. Nowhere near his family or the Auschwitz camp, he stands alone in an empty corridor, looking into nothingness – such heavy, stark nothingness. Then, he vomits. I take this visceral reaction to signify a momentary breach in the placebo effect, a crack in the façade of desensitized routine, a chance for him to look us in the eyes, to cross over to our time and see what we are like after eliminating the likes of him. Seconds later, Glazer does take us to the present. We watch another corridor in today’s Auschwitz Museum. Workers arrive early in the morning before the opening hours, and, in a somewhat Höß-like manner, they begin mindlessly cleaning and vacuuming, passing by piles of victims’ shoes without noticing them. Does Glazer reverse the roles between us and the Hößes? Are we the placebo group now? Is this what his Rudolf saw an instant ago? Us reduced to mere cogs in a machine? Yes, why not? Eventually, we are only humans. It is long past due we return to the Jewish Holocaust, the Shoah, as integral to human experience, evolution, trauma, memory, and history – not as propagated by the West, but rather as must be re-remembered.

The film ends. Rudolf remains stuck, motionless, standing somewhere in between the two corridors, looking into the emptiness of our post-Holocaust glories. On 27 January 1945, Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops. On 26 June 1945, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) was formed. About six weeks later, on 6 August 1945, the United States dropped an unfathomable bomb on Hiroshima, followed by another on Nagasaki, marking the start of “the Cold War” and igniting one catastrophe after another in the Global South. Amidst the systemic destruction of Palestine between 1947 and 1949, or what is known as the Nakba, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) saw the light on 10 December 1948. Shortly after the expulsion and exodus of nearly 85per cent of the indigenous Palestinian population,¹⁷ on 12 August 1949, the Geneva Conventions were signed. Are you still catching up with us, Rudolf? Can you locate the borders of the new world’s Zone of Interest?

The newcomers to power had their new interests to safeguard, leaving many Others behind old and new walls, all while promoting the post-Hitler world as one that belongs to all humanity as a single race. Can we state it clearly? The Allies lied on purpose. As discussed above, we have not, after Auschwitz, entered a new era of cold tensions and universal human rights. How can we comprehend these cuttings from the last century? Sharing critical perspectives on contemporary political landscapes, Rancière and Moses expose “depoliticization” as a mechanism of narrative control. Western politicians tend to deliberately depoliticize the most burning political issues to obscure their underlying political agendas, whether it be classism within society, as Rancière debates, or large-scale state violence, as Moses illuminates. In essence, Rancière puts it succinctly: “Politics is the art of suppressing the political.”¹⁸

If you are not an extraordinary bloodthirsty butcher, Rudolf, just a note in the protracted Western symphony of devastation and rhetoric, where do you fit into all this? And where do we? Is it possible to understand our past in a way that is explainable to our children when they ask us? Because they will, sooner than we imagine, and we must make sense. They deserve nothing less than a responsible and coherent answer. If they do not ask, we are definitely in much bigger trouble. So, for the children who will not finish as collateral damage due to some liberal bomb, for those who will grow up to hopefully be unstoppable askers, let us sound-mindedly return every Rudolf from the demonic land, re-politicize the Jewish Holocaust and every other “crime of crimes,” connect the dots that unveil this blurry historical continuum of Western Christian imperial political violence across time, and start over.

Which History to Learn?

After Auschwitz, the wilful, rapid process orchestrated by the Allies does not appear to have prioritized de-Nazification. It was mostly driven by the geopolitical need of the United States and Europe to counter the Soviet Union. Dieter Schenk critiques the post-Holocaust procedures thus:

The so-called denazification was a farce. During the 1950s the Allies were in favor of former SS and Gestapo members being integrated into justice and police forces, as with the Cold War escalating there was a need for, specialists’ fighting communism.¹⁹

Do you hear that, Rudolf? Some colleagues of yours, over whom you climbed in the hierarchy and hence unwittingly spared in the Nuremberg Trials, proved useful against those who freed the Auschwitz prisoners.²⁰

What sleight of hand steered us towards this conversion so swiftly? As Pankaj Mishra puts it, “[i]n the chameleon-like shifts of the early Cold War, the Soviet Union moved from being a stalwart ally against Nazi Germany to a totalitarian evil; Germany moved from being a totalitarian evil to a stalwart democratic ally against totalitarian evil.”²¹ It is, ostensibly, the false “consensus,” as Rancière explains, that politicians circulate.²² During their cold battles, both the West and the Soviet Union claimed to advocate for equal human rights, while regularly violating the newly established international order.²³ With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world superpower redirected its focus towards what has been dubbed the “war on terror” – another simulated consensus against the newly detected threat of Arabs and Muslims, another Empire’s security campaign whose latest chapters continue to be broadcast live from Palestine. Is this the chameleon fleetly shifting again, Rudolf? Changes at such a pace must leave us all astounded, with countless questions. Unless this War on Terror is, too, not change, only the same ruminated past, disguised as the present, once more.

The histories of antisemitism and Islamophobia, as Gil Anidjar conveys, stem from the root of Western Christian Orientalism. Though they are contemporarily defined as separate phenomena, Anti-Arab racism, interwoven with Islamophobia, and the centuries-old Judenhaß, culminating in institutionalized antisemitism, are in historical and conceptual continuity. Since Modernity, according to Anidjar, both Jews and Muslims were constructed as Europe’s enemies, or “the enemy’s two bodies.”²⁴ In his essay, “On the Political History of Destruction,” Anidjar investigates this enmity as representing one thread of destruction and “destructive power” which is not smoothly traceable from past to present. As he puts it, “Destruction, I would want to show, undoes the ‘chain of events,’ the very elements that partake of its unleashing;” it “implies (and implicates) a distinct understanding of politics, a mobilization and collective inclination, indeed a fall and a descent, toward a destruction of world along temporally uncertain markers.”²⁵

More intriguingly, Anidjar discusses the figure of the Muselmann to highlight the extreme manifestation of destructive power. Having been the ultimate state of dehumanization and despair, the Muselmann is a notion used in Nazi concentration camps to describe prisoners who had reached a state of complete physical and mental breakdown. As Anidjar illustrates, the Muslemann is not just a victim but a symbol of the annihilation of selfhood and humanity, epitomizing the destructive logic of the Nazi regime, where the “production of corpses” was perceived as a form of production. This reflects how destruction has been normalized and overlooked in historical narratives. The treatment of Muselmänner, when viewed through the lens of European Orientalism and racial superiority, elucidates the enduring mutuality of antisemitism and Islamophobia. Both forms of hatred dehumanize their targets, inflicting on them existential despair by extreme oppression. This destructiveness restores the oneness of human suffering and emphasizes the extent of destructive power wielded by totalitarian regimes, which remake themselves until this day.²⁶ If you are still there, Rudolf, we may not have gone as far as the propaganda historiography has been telling us.

Anidjar’s analysis yields satisfactory answers that stitch shreds of history back together. At this point, have we come closer to fathoming the bridge on which both Rudolf and we are standing? What occupies the temporal space between his corridor moment and ours? Is it, as Anidjar articulates, “an implausibly narrativized ‘chapter’ in the unwritten history of destruction, in a political philosophy of destruction”? How much moral progress have we accomplished since Auschwitz and Hiroshima, since the start of the Nakba and the end of the Nuremberg Trials, if any? Based on the history we have been taught, the answer is not only unclear but also absurd and nonsensical. How can we learn from such history? Should we even try? History that is systemically oversimplified, dismembered, and falsified is a lesson designed to never be learned. It is, more often than not, a “history of interest,” the flagship product of an industry that scrubs our ruling class clean, thrives on our complacency, potential for banality, or both, and confines us to the past.

A revised lens on history is essential. Anidjar suggests an alternative method to observe history not by measuring what we have accomplished or produced, but by examining and re-narrating the worlds we destroyed or what remains thereof. It should be possible, depending on how, where, or when we search for history. As we have learned, the long history of destroying Others (such as in the case of Muslims, Arabs, and Jews) was sometimes depicted as production and progress. So much history awaits rediscovering, re-membering, rewriting, mourning, and processing. Whether something remains of the Muselmänner or not, the Sakuma Drops container, filled or not, is worth keeping in our pockets. It symbolizes an indispensable compass guiding us towards a historiography of integrity. It could be our lesson to learn.

To conclude, Rancière, Moses, and Anidjar, each in his own methodology and perspective, sharpen our critical skills to question how historical processes have been and are being formulated, introduced, and reintroduced to us. Their observations, I think, can serve as an antidote to banality or as a reminder of other human potentials and potentialities deserving of acknowledgment and care. A major takeaway from Glazer’s Rudolf moment is the inherent, anti-banality potential for historical awareness, consciousness, or beingness. The historical beings that we are, or can be, have countless possibilities to work and rework pasts, presents, and futures, as well as countless susceptibilities to learn and unlearn, to see through, to know the squealing truth behind the wall, to detach and reconnect, to swallow a cutout narrative and throw it up; and start over.

Disclosure Statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Abeer Khshiboon

Abeer Khshiboon is a doctoral candidate in theology at the Humboldt University of Berlin, researching the historical trauma of internally displaced Palestinians. With backgrounds in political theology, Jewish studies, education, and psychology, her interests revolve around oral traditions of Indigenous peoples, decolonial theories and methods, memory studies, and the infrapolitics of the rightless.

Notes

1 The word “our” refers to us who live in relative security in the Global North.

2 Isao Takahata, Grave of the Fireflies (1998).

3 Ghassan Hage, “‘Zone of Interest’ as an Ethnography of Indifference,” Journal of Genocide Research (16 May 2024): 2, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2024.2350147.

4 At the peak of the film, the couple have a dialogue by the river, where Hedwig resists the reassignment of Rudolf away from Auschwitz and insists on staying with the children in the house there. Comforting him, she reminds him that after the war ends, they will farm as they had always dreamed.

5 “Pastness” is Gil Anidjar’s word in a talk at the event: “Safed: Jewish Exile in Falastin?” Berlin Center for Inellectual Diaspora, 1 May 2023, https://intellectualdiaspora.org/diasporic-knowledge_safed_jewish-exile-in-falastin/.

6 A. Dirk Moses, The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), Chapter 12, “Holocaust Memory, Exemplary Victims, and Permanent Security Today,” 477. To name but a few: the establishment of the United Nations on 24 October 1945; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) on 10 December 1948; the Geneva Conventions on 12 August 1949.

7 Again, “we” in the Global North.

8 Also known as the Global South.

9 Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 2007), 5–9.

10 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Group, 1963 [2006]), 276.

11 See Lydnsey Stonebridge, “Mythic Banality: Jonathan Glazer and Hannah Arendt,” Journal of Genocide Research (10 May 2024): https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2024.2351263.

12 Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, 10, 17.

13 Bernard J. Bergen, The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt and the "Final Solution" (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), xv.

14 Moses, The Problems of Genocide, 482, 477–511.

15 Francesca Albanese, Anatomy of a Genocide: Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied Since 1967 (Geneva: United Nations Human Rights Council, 2024); Nimer Sultany, “A Threshold Crossed: On Genocidal Intent and the Duty to Prevent Genocide in Palestine,” Journal of Genocide Research (9 May 2024): 1–26, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2024.2351261; Maryam Jamshidi, “Genocide and Resistance in Palestine under Law’s Shadow,” Journal of Genocide Research (6 May 2024): 1–35, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2024.2348377; and Martin Shaw, “Inescapably Genocidal,” Journal of Genocide Research, (3 January 2024): 1–5, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2023.2300555.

16 Moses, The Problems of Genocide, 477.

17 Hatim Kanaaneh, “Health and Politics: War by Other Means on the Palestinian Minority in Israel,” Medicine, Conflict and Survival 33, no. 3 (2017): 177–83.

18 Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, 11.

19 Dieter Schenk, “Strukturen Der Systematischen Nichtverfolgung von Nazitätern in Der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” Zeitschrift Des Verbandes Polnischer Germanisten 3, no. 1 (2014): 57–73.

20 Both post-Hitler German states, the Federal Republic of Germany (West) and Democratic Republic of Germany (East), leveraged the expertise of former Nazi officials for their Cold War agendas, albeit through different methods and with varying legal justifications and degrees of public acknowledgment. For detailed information, see ibid., 58–60, 62–3, 68–70.

21 Pankaj Mishra, “The Shoah after Gaza,” London Review of Books 46, no. 6 (21 March 2024), https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n06/pankaj-mishra/the-shoah-after-gaza.

22 Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, 7, 23.

23 Moses, The Problems of Genocide, 477–9.

24 Gil Anidjar, “On the Political History of Destruction,” ReOrient 4, no. 2 (2019): 154, https://doi.org/10.13169/reorient.4.2.0144; see also Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 33–9.

25 Anidjar, “On the Political History of Destruction,” 147, 149. Emphasis in original.

26 Ibid., 157.