Lyndsey Stonebridge, a professor of humanities and human rights at the University of Birmingham, is the author of “We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience.”
The British director thinks so. Glazer has said that while working on the film he was “constantly thinking” of Arendt’s description of how it was not evil but a catastrophic thoughtlessness that transformed the Nazis’s mad antisemitic ideology into industrialized genocide. Even before the attack on Oct. 7 in Israel and the brutal assault on Gaza that followed revived questions of moral responsibility in politics, Glazer was clear that “Zone of Interest” was about today as much as the past, “about us and our similarity to the perpetrators, not our similarity to the victims.”
For many, it is this uneasy similarity that makes “Zone of Interest” so forceful. The film allows viewers to ask uncomfortable moral questions in the upholstered comfort of the movie theater. How is it that ordinary people, at best, consent to and, at worst, execute crimes against humanity? Would I — could I — have done the same?
These are good questions, but not ones that “Zone of Interest” really challenges. No one could watch this film and seriously imagine themselves planting dahlias as the smoke poured from the chimneys of Auschwitz. If we indulge in the thought experiment the movie presents, we do so with full knowledge of what the Holocaust was. This distance makes any passing familiarity with the perpetrators relatively easy to shake off. Rudolf and Hedwig Höss, the commander of Auschwitz and his cat-got-the-cream frau are clearly monstrous.
The monstrosity of banality was only partly Arendt’s point. To this extent, Glazer’s film delivers a master class in the aesthetics of Nazi banality. The horror of the ordinary is deftly communicated by the small things — a bloodied boot, a manic dog, a creaking wheelbarrow — as the cameras track through the ugly house and its cartoonlike garden to the acclaimed soundtrack of horror. Stinknormal is the German word for an unexceptional normality, and “Zone of Interest” certainly succeeds in making the normal stink.
But even if Arendt’s famous concept subsidizes Glazer’s ethical claims, I’m less sure the film delivers the moral and political lesson we need right now. For all its ambient artistry, it stops short of resonating with Arendt’s wider concern, which is: How did we get here, and what can we do about it?
Arendt did not think Eichmann — a logistician who delivered Europe’s Jews to the death camps, boasted about it and then in his trial played the part of an appalled cog in the machine — was just like you or me. She argued that the thoughtlessness with which he and others executed their crimes had catastrophically undone the categories in which good and evil could be understood. This is why she always put quotation marks around the word “normal” in her Eichmann reports (and why she never used the word “mediocre”).
She did not think the banality of evil was timeless or somehow intrinsic to the human condition, as if we’re destined to brush the crumbs off our tables as fellow human beings are incinerated — although she did think that the Nazi genocide may well have turned the unprecedented into a precedent. She was describing a post-Holocaust world in which the capacity to make moral and political judgments had gone fatally awry. And she was asking us to do something about it.
The bigger question Eichmann’s trial posed for Arendt was eloquently put in survivor József Debreczeni’s soaring account of his time in Auschwitz, “Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz”: “Why does it occur to so few of them that they are committing a crime?”
This was a historical question with profound legal, political and moral implications. Eichmann represented a new kind of criminal who had committed a new kind of crime — against humanity itself. The genocide of Europe’s Jews was not only the latest and most horrific antisemitic massacre; for Arendt, it was an attack against human plurality — the fact of our existence together — committed on the body of the Jewish people and executed through a terrifying new technology. Modern genocide, in short, was everyone’s problem.
Eichmann’s judges ruled that in cases of atrocity the law says we should listen to our hearts as much as to orders from above. If a “black flag” — named after a prosecution of Israeli soldiers following a 1956 massacre of Palestinian villagers in Kafr Qasim — should wave, we should disobey. Eichmann refused to follow orders just once when, toward the end of the war, Heinrich Himmler, knowing the Nazis were losing, ordered the death trains to be slowed down. Eichmann’s black heart told him that the only law that mattered was the one that said the Jews should die. The “normal” rules would not apply.
Arendt would have recognized the high-pitched moral anguish that characterizes our political culture today — the accusations of absolute collective guilt, the claiming of righteous innocence, the good people taking responsibility for crimes that are not their own (“Could I, too, be Hedwig Höss”?) and the bad ones breezily uninterested in damage they have done. These are as much symptoms as expressions of moral confusion. We have gone wrong, Arendt teaches, and it remains unclear whether we have the courage to learn to go right.
The law still struggles to catch up. The black flags ripple loudly in the wind, but from Gaza to Ukraine, Sudan to Iran, too many interpret the flags as calls for even more violence, not warnings that crimes against humanity are being committed.
Movies allow us to ask ourselves what we might have done in the past. Reality — complex, hard and resistant to easy answers — demands that we ask ourselves what we are doing in the present. Since the movie’s release in December, the critical praise for it has grown in proportion to the increase in political violence, especially but not only in Gaza. It’s no surprise that a film about complicity with atrocity resonates now.
But complicity is only half the story. Worse would be to resign ourselves to confused thoughtlessness. It takes courage to understand when we are committing crimes, and to call out others when they do. Read “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil” carefully, and it’s clear that it was those who resisted, who went against the grain in appalling circumstances, who most interested Arendt. In her words: “Best of all will be those who know only one thing for certain: that whatever else happens, as long as we live we shall have to live together with ourselves.”
