The Zone of Interest

The meticulous engineering of mass death in Adorno's Minima Moralia and Jonathan Glazer Oscar-nominated film.

Like the majority of German Jewish intellectuals, Theodor Adorno was expelled from the universities in the early 1930s. By 1934 he was living in exile from the Nazis. Educational spaces are usually early targets for fascists looking to cleanse public life. As the Holocaust escalated, the camp became the centre of all of his theory. To call Adorno’s experience “survivor’s guilt” would not just be reductive but morally and intellectually abhorrent. In crimes against humanity there are no survivors. It destroys us all – no matter where the genocide is committed. 

The question we ask now, “how do we move on from this?”, is something Adorno pondered while witnessing the mass death of his time. He answered conclusively in Autumn 1944 – “The idea that after this war life will continue ‘normally’ or even that culture might be ‘rebuilt’ -- as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation -- is idiotic.” 

We are fools. We are useless. We self-flagellate for a short while. And then we move on, relegating the horrors of the past to abominations committed by imaginary monsters who do not walk among us. Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023) refuses this false historiography. Firstly, by working with both British and Polish producers, the film offers a perspective seldom encountered in western retellings of the second world war: the centrality of the dream of eastward expansion for the National Socialist project. After all, it was in those lush green hills of Eastern Europe that they constructed their death camps. And it is among those trees that we first encounter the family of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss. 

How can such beauty coincide with such unnatural disaster? Adorno answers, “even the blossoming tree lies the moment its bloom is seen without the shadow of terror.” The sound of children playing drowned out by tortured screams. The banality of bidding on the curtains you always admired now that the Jewish owner has been deported. The sinister excitement of rifling through the treasures left over from the gas chamber. Family life, soundtracked by the rhythmic working of a human incinerator. The watchtower over the garden wall, a symbol of the judgement to come.

The film is less a meditation on the banality of evil, as it is the documentation of the meticulous engineering of mass death. What once took Höss careful planning, quickly became routine. The death machine he perfected no longer needed him to continue ticking. The human becomes secondary to the system of production. That system becomes its own means and ends, driving the tension between the competing goals of the Nazi project – fascism needs death, but it also needs workers, and it needs those workers to maintain its rate of death.  An exacting calculation of human life.

What Rudolf Höss does with the camp, Hedwig Höss achieves with her garden. She boasts of the destruction of the field that once was, now that it has been cleansed and turned into her ideal of Germanic domestic bliss. Adorno decries the garden as bourgeois hypocrisy and denial:

“The caring hand that even now tends the little garden as if it had not long since become a ‘lot’, but fearfully wards off the unknown intruder, is already that which denies the political refugee asylum.”

How easy it is to rid yourselves of pests, to cower behind vined walls, and conceal the smell of burning flesh with blossoms. The garden watered and fed with human remains is no more natural than the brick and mortar of the camp, or the promise of “making the desert bloom”. Such artifice requires a level of self-denial that so easily becomes our everyday. There are no survivors in crimes against humanity. 

In a rare moment of myopia, Adorno failed to see how the zionist project would unfold to become another genocidal endeavour – despite the ethnic cleansing necessary for its birth. But his warnings against fascism and its systems of death continue to ring true. Rarer still, are his moments of optimism:

“There is no longer beauty or consolation except in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, and in unalleviated consciousness of negativity holding fast to the possibility of what is better.”