Zone of Interest

  So in what zone do we focus our interest? Are we entirely self-absorbed or do we engage our views and responsibility beyond us? And how far will we range our commitment?

Hard to image a more dramatic example than this film, purporting to record the daily experience of the historic Rudolph Hoss family. They enjoy their plush garden and manor smack next-door to the Auschwitz concentration camp where Herr Hoss is the excellent Director.

Opulence, power, self-satisfaction, right smack dab against arguably mankind’s most horrible exhibition of inhumanity. The Holocaust. You know, the unprecedented 20th Century German atrocity that the Gaza government tried modestly to emulate on October 7 in Israel.

Herr Hoss may be slightly troubled by this disjunction in his humanity. Perhaps that’s why he rides a horse to work, so that “next door” might seem “distanced.” His weird haircut can be read as his trimming of his hair (=self) to match his officer’s cap (=role). Ironically, it could pass for the Jew’s skullcap -- a quiet reminder of their shared humanity. It’s also another reduction of his self in wrong-headed discipline.

No such qualms for his Frau. She’s a deft mistress of the house, sufficiently broad-minded to employ Jewish slaves. “You have Jews in the house,”  her mother marvels. Frau Hoss even lets her maids choose some underwear from the loot delivered from the prison. For herself she saves the fancy fur coat, showing off secretly in her mirror. 

Less happy, her mother still resents having been outbid on the curtains, when the rich Jewish woman for whom she cleaned had her possessions auctioned off. Somewhat consolingly, that woman is now in the camp.

But the matron is mercurial. Infuriated by news of her hubby’s transfer away from that idyllic appointment, Frau Hoss turns sharply on one maid servant: “I could have your ashes spread on the garden if I wanted.” The good woman knows what’s going on next door, on what others’ suffering her lavish comfort is based. It only enhances her delusion of power, her pleasure. 

The film’s brave premise assumes we too know what’s going on next door and will be appalled by these characters’ indifference, indeed exploitation. The agents or instruments of that inhumanity carry on nonplussed. We hear some of the telltale sounds they hear but we pause to read them — and are appalled they don’t. 

The film’s basic conceit is that we find cheap comfort in remoteness. Dramatizing this, the film characteristically shows us something that it allows to fade away, leaving us haunted by the lingering score.

That begins with the opening title. We read it, it fades away and we hear the music over a black screen for a spell — a spell well cast — before the plot opens on the Hoss family enjoying a sunny lakeside picnic. The framing music moves from sombre chords into a culminating scream. 

So, too, an action is implied but not shown. A helpless young girl enters Hoss’s office and routinely prepares for his use. Like the Auschwitz enormities, we don’t see the sex. Cut to Hoss going into some deep downstairs for his shameful post-coital cleanse. 

For her part, Frau Hoss invitingly gives a manly worker a fag and they stand eying each other. Her dog enters, knows what’s happening so turns tail and leaves. So does the camera. But we’re left knowing even in their marital intimacy these characters live on the edge of a reality they are determined to ignore. The Hosses sleep in small twin beds with no exchange of physical affection. Their marital ardour is as false as their affected honour.

Does it work? 

It does insofar as the Hoss couple’s comfort and career ambitions go. But we catch strains of failure. One of their sons has picked up the Cruel Guard role and tortures his kid brother in the greenhouse. 

The oldest daughter lives another compulsive retreat from comfort in her sleepwalking. She hides in closets, as her family hides from the reality they serve in the day. Hoss’s nightmare evokes the Hansel and Gretel story, the witch’s oven an echo of the death factory and the Hoss family life just another Grimm tale.

The adults’ self-deception may also be wavering. The visiting Frau Hoss’s mother waxes exuberant over the luxurious house and garden. But when she can’t sleep at might she peers into the darkness and perhaps sees and hears the deeper darkness. Impulsively she leaves. Her explanatory note is read by her daughter, then flung into the fire. As if that solves it.

That internal gnawing may also explain Herr Hoss’s vomiting when he learns his transfer has been rescinded and he will stay in his happy home to supervise the Hungary operation. A medical operation found him hale. But now alone he vomits in the hallway, as if finally unable to contain the vile basis of his life and fortune. 

In that scene the marble floor is a sequence of boxes within boxes, like prisons within prisons, or contexts within contexts. This elaborates upon the film’s central theme — ignoring the tragedy outside your box.

As it happens this film is made poignantly pertinent by the current Jewish situation, with Israel’s existential threat ramifying into  a global resurgence of antisemitism. As the Hosses’ moral condition is defined by their detachment from their context, so we can be read by our response to the Gaza attack on Israel and her response. For many responders to the current war, history begins on October 9.  

As usual Keats springs to mind. Heard melodies are sweet; those unheard are sweeter. Holocaust imagery is harrowing, yet what we know is happening but refuse to witness or acknowledge is even worse.