If the choking of the camp victims is muffled in the film, it is darkly recapitulated in the sputtering coughs that spread through the family, from Höss to Hedwig’s mother. The material historicity of the air, its capacity to carry the past within the present, gives immanent form to everything that the family tries to forget. Through the insinuating presence of the smoke-saturated air, the film stages a haunting resurgence of outsourced violence in the bodies and minds of the family it sustains.
* * *
It is well known that the Nazi Weltanschauung, Hitler’s political worldview, pivoted on the mutual flourishing of the human race and the environment. In The Zone of Interest, this warped ideological slippage between nature and nation permeates the world of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, and his family:
Inferior races make do with the space given them by nature, but from the very beginning the creative Nordic race has shaped its natural environment to suit its natural abilities, so that the German land today in all its parts bears the imprint of the Nordic man. (qtd. in Neumann, 2012)
The logic running through this document, Racial Policy (1943), is everywhere in The Zone of Interest. The family constructs a paradisical garden carefully sequestered from the hell they’ve built around it. It is impossible not to think of Der Giftpilz, the antisemitic image of the Jew as a poisonous mushroom, as Rudolf’s wife Hedwig frantically uproots weeds to the sounds of gunshots and screams echoing over the camp wall. We watch her stroll through the garden in a serene haze, musing on how the space will become gradually more isolated, more cocooned, more muffled from the outside world. Of course, she assures us, vines will unfurl to cover up the camp wall, and climbing plants will fan out across the expanse of the pergola. Encased in its own dense thicket, the garden will swallow itself up in one autophagic gulp. This self-devouring space emerges with nightmarish immediacy in the close-up shots of flowerheads that hypnotically flit across the screen, drenching it corner to corner in a blood-red curtain. This montage follows Höss’s euphemistic warning to SS officers against picking violets around the extermination camp in a “thoughtless and blatant manner.” If, in Hedwig’s garden, flowers are explicitly a vehicle of denial, the floral montage absorbs this repression into the film’s metaphorical language. Sexual violence is at once intimated and concealed in these images of disorientating proximity.
The green fetishism that suffuses the film reminds us of one important, if terrifying, way that the Holocaust was conceived: as an ecological project. As Boaz Neumann reminds us, the Nazis framed this genocide as the culling of a parasitic race for the sake of the larger equilibrium between organisms and the land. Within this terrestrial eco-logic, which planted personhood firmly in the soil, the rootless Jew became primed for exclusion from the human sphere. As such, the town of Auschwitz, in particular, served as an imaginative centre for a model future. The work of pioneering thinkers, botanists, architects, and gardeners converged with the labour of prisoners in the camp in pursuit of this monstrous dream.
The earth, in all its solidity, is ripe for human possession. Land is carved up into distinct territories in the film, zones of life and death held firmly apart by wire fencing and high walls. Eerie bird’s-eye perspectives abound, from the blueprint of the crematorium to the balcony view of party guests milling about in a large, ornate hall. These aerial views summarise space with diagrammatic poise whilst transmuting human lives into faint, dot-like coordinates. The map and the garden epitomise the film’s focus on these totalising viewpoints. In both instances, spatial unity is conditional on a highly curated schema shaped by the human imagination. This careful carving up of land embodies the emotional compartmentalisation that sustains the film’s characters. As the title suggests, The Zone of Interest is preoccupied with the limits of such schematisation, on the residual non-spaces that hover on the periphery of its characters’ psychological worlds.
The film’s spatial language is crucial to the disturbing atmosphere of indifference it imparts on the story. Łukasz Żal has discussed how this mood of cold objectivity involved forgetting everything he knew about cinematography, about injecting perspective, emotion, and gravity into a narrative. The scenes in the house were shot, reality-show style, on mounted hidden cameras with nobody else on set and no lighting equipment. The actors went through the scenes undisturbed by the film crew, who worked from the basement of the house. Rather than foregrounding traces of the genocide unfolding off-screen, the characters’ horrific actions become strangely incidental, part of the furniture. As a result, the film’s strategy of estrangement generates a world where evil has been naturalised to the point of invisibility:
We hope that the time will come one day when it will no longer be necessary to speak about National Socialism, but that it will be the very air that we breathe! – Joseph Goebbels, Reden
The Zone of Interest actualises the conditions that Goebbels alludes to, a world where Nazism has seeped into the environment so far as to displace it. If the horror of Auschwitz eluded direct articulation in the film, its ambient presence extends into the film’s environs, generating an atmosphere that permeates the entire ecosystem. It is here that the film performs a thematic movement from the earth to the air. But where Nazi ideology runs parallel with land-based logics of ownership, the air becomes a fluid medium that resists fixed geographic divisions. Mutable and uncontainable, the atmosphere remains ungraspable by the film’s characters even as it surrounds them, promulgates through them, and suspends them in the same medium as those they wish to separate themselves from. As we shall see, the dispersed, outward-tending atmosphere flouts the domestic seclusion carefully constructed by the family. The Nazis can build walls around their prisoners, but they must breathe the same air.
In the shared sonic atmosphere, the uneasy co-presence of entities belies the strict partitioning of zones that dominates the film’s visual aesthetic. Air is the medium through which sound travels, transmitting a mobile force that disrupts the static segregation between the house and the camp. Pulsating noises ache and throb against the neat borders around the house and seep through its idyllic surface. The camp, separated by barriers and walls, lies beyond our field of vision but takes on a phantasmal presence throughout the film. The sonic traces in the air resist all forms of territorialization, pulling disparate places into disruptive contiguity.
The film opens with a blank screen accompanied by a deep, churning drone. The soundscape conjures the inner workings of a machine, wedging us between the interlocking teeth of rotating gears. The sound is suspended in weary revolutions curling around its dismal axis. It is this mechanised throbbing that lingers before giving way to bright, shrill birdsong. The film’s opening soundscape evokes the nightmarish rhythms of the camp, the regime within which humans are reduced to flat calculable quantities. This logic reaches its natural conclusion in the streamlined efficiency of the ring crematorium: “burn, cool, unload, reload.” With rhythmic certainty it charts how humanity is lost in a network of inputs and outputs. But it is prescient that this sonic evocation of the Final Solution is pierced through by its antithesis, with the sound of warbling birds travelling through expansive, open skies. The air, the medium through which sound travels, becomes an arena of disturbing intermingling. It is this uneasy blurring of the industrial and the pastoral that gradually encroaches upon Höss’s family throughout the film.
The atmosphere is a zone of co-presence, where bodies separated by space or time are pulled into a shared circuit. Against the backdrop of the crematorium, the atmosphere is the medium where fragments of the dead are inhaled by the living. Moving through and between bodies in diffuse trajectories, the air cuts through subject–object divides and gives form to the shared affective contours that bind people together. Pervasive yet nebulous, the atmosphere unites a nexus of ideas around sound, affect, and the climate, a vapour trail of associations that The Zone of Interest follows. We watch as Höss meanders around his garden at dusk; he smokes a pipe that strikes a strange symmetry with the billowing cloud from the crematorium chimney looming over the skyline in the background. The image captures the tension between separation and contagion that shapes the narrative. The camp leaves a residue inside Höss, becoming lodged in corporeal recesses and abruptly resurfacing in strange fits of retching. As ash falls onto the compost of Hedwig’s crops, the bodies of the dead are reabsorbed through a deathly chain of consumption. If the choking of the camp victims is muffled in the film, it is darkly recapitulated in the sputtering coughs that spread through the family, from Höss to Hedwig’s mother. The material historicity of the air, its capacity to carry the past within the present, gives immanent form to everything that the family tries to forget. Through the insinuating presence of the smoke-saturated air, the film stages a haunting resurgence of outsourced violence in the bodies and minds of the family it sustains.
The presence of the camp’s crematorium lingers behind the film’s mundane instances of coughing, smoking, and retching. The atmosphere becomes an insistent non-presence, saturated with invisible horrors occurring just out of frame. It is this demand to attend to the world beyond our field of vision that structures the night vision scenes in the film, which follow a girl hiding food for the people held captive in Auschwitz. Filmed in the dead of night with an infrared camera, these scenes rely on the invisible heat emanating from the environment. This stylistic choice resonates with the song composed by a Polish-Jewish prisoner of Auschwitz, Joseph Wulf, which we hear played later in the film:
Sunbeams, radiant and warm,
Human bodies, young and old;
And we who are imprisoned here,
Our hearts are not yet cold.
Souls afire, like the blazing sun,
Tearing, breaking through their pain,
For soon we’ll see that waving flag,
The flag of freedom yet to come.
Sequestered from the narrative proper with their monochrome surface and narrated by Grimms’ bedtime stories, these scenes attain a fairy-tale quality. In leaning toward fantasy, they generate a space for resistance protected from the daytime reality of the camp. But the fairy tale eventually slumps into disenchantment when we hear about prisoners being killed for fighting over the supplies provided by the girl. Ultimately, the infrared shots pull in two directions, at once toward Wulf’s fiery resistance and to the ultimate fates of the crematorium-bound prisoners.
The film’s conclusion offers a reflexive meditation on the aura of detached remembrance that envelops the Holocaust today. Whether through chain-smoking or through constantly breathing in the smoke billowing from Auschwitz, Höss becomes afflicted by an ambiguous respiratory condition. At the end of the film, his violent coughing fit transports us into a keyhole view of the future of Auschwitz as a museum space. Here, we see shoes, clothes, and bags lying in nondescript piles behind glass. Visitors are gone and the staff are cleaning the exhibits, eerily recalling the housework of the silent prisoners at the beginning of the film. The narrative is bookended by scenes of Auschwitz caught in the monotonous routines of unnamed labourers.
This concluding scene is fraught with ambiguity. On one hand, this repetitive cleaning evokes the ongoing work of historical recollection. The work of hoovering, dusting, and polishing blurs into a repetitive rhythm, a series of reparative gestures that become a strange tribute to lost lives. Caught in the paradox of tending for the dead, these compulsive gestures of care persist through their own inadequacy. But whilst the scene evokes the vexed process of mourning, it also recapitulates something of the clinical detachment that permeates the preceding narrative, recalling the logic of decontamination that underpinned the Holocaust. Images of cleaning inevitably carry echoes of Zyklon B, the disinfectant gas initially used for pest control and fumigation. The substance was used to murder over a million people during the Holocaust, particularly in Auschwitz, where victims were led to believe that the gas chambers were for bathing and “disinfection.” The silent museum, with visitors gone home and its objects safely stowed behind glass, offers a strangely sanitised shell of the horrors of Auschwitz. By echoing this tendency toward detached memorialisation with the original acts of violence it reflects on, The Zone of Interest recentres the Holocaust as a vital subject of contemporary reflection.
Works Consulted
Böhme, Gernot, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres, ed. by Jean-Paul Thibaud (Routledge, 2016).
Boyson, Rowan Rose, “Air and Atmosphere Studies: Enlightenment, Phenomenology and Ecocriticism.” Literature Compass, 19(1–2) (2022).
Der Reichsführer SS, SS-Hauptamt, Rassenpolitik, (Berlin: 1943), quoted by Boaz Neumann, “National Socialism, Holocaust and Ecology” in The Holocaust and Historical Methodology, ed. by Dan Stone (Berghahn Books, 2012), pp. 101-124.
“The Extermination Procedure in the Gas Chamber,” Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. https://www.auschwitz.org/en/history/auschwitz-and-shoah/the-extermination-procedure-in-the-gas-chambers/
Goebbels, Joseph, Goebbels Reden, vol. I (Munich: Wilhelm Heyne, 1971), quoted by Boaz Neumann, “The National Socialist Politics of Life.” New German Critique, 85 (2002), 107–130
Neumann, Boaz, “National Socialism, Holocaust and Ecology” in The Holocaust and Historical Methodology, ed. by Dan Stone (Berghahn Books, 2012), pp. 101-124
Roxborough, Scott, “Camerimage: ‘Zone of Interest’ Cinematographer Łukasz Żal on ‘Forgetting Everything I Learned’ to Make Harrowing Holocaust Drama.” Hollywood Reporter. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/zone-of-interest-cinematographer-lukasz-zal-1235645356/
Wulf, Joseph, “Sunbeams” (1943), quoted by Nancy C. Lee, Lyrics of Lament: From Tragedy to Transformation (Fortress Press, 2010), p. 4.
