How Do You Make a Movie About the Holocaust?

Poetry makes nothing happen, W.H. Auden said in 1939, when words must have seemed especially impotent; but cinema is another matter. For several decades after the end of the Second World War, what’s come to be seen as its central catastrophe — the near-total destruction of the European Jews — was consigned to the status of a footnote. The neglect was rooted in guilt: Many nations eagerly collaborated in the killing, while others did nothing to prevent it. Consumed by their own suffering, most people simply didn’t want to know, and a conspiracy of silence was established.

What definitively broke it, in the late 1970s, was — of all things — an NBC miniseries starring Meryl Streep. Crude, contrived and overblown, “Holocaust” is not a work of art; by today’s standards, it is barely even a work of television. Nonetheless, the show’s graphic depiction of the death camps, unprecedented at the time, shocked a vast global audience into belated recognition. Fifteen years later, the process of mnemonic restitution was completed by “Schindler’s List.” Released to stratospheric acclaim in 1993 and seen by hundreds of millions of people around the world, Steven Spielberg’s movie triggered a commemorative boom. For members of the newly united, post-Cold War Europe, Holocaust remembrance became an unofficial civic creed, or in the words of the historian Tony Judt, “the very definition and guarantee of the continent’s restored humanity.”

Not everyone took this moral U-turn at face value. The British philosopher Gillian Rose, who advised the Polish government on how to redesign the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum after the fall of Communism, believed that the new regime of memory was mired in bad faith. By framing the Holocaust as an unfathomable evil — “the ultimate event, the ultimate mystery, never to be comprehended or transmitted,” as the writer Elie Wiesel once put it — we were protecting ourselves, Rose argued, from knowledge of our own capacity for barbarism. “Schindler’s List” was a case in point. For her, Spielberg’s black-and-white epic, which sentimentalizes the Jewish victims and keeps the Nazi perpetrators at arm’s length, was really just a piece of misty-eyed evasion.

A richer work, she suggested, would present the Holocaust as something legibly human and goad the viewer into asking an uncomfortable question: Could I have participated in this? In a startling passage from her final book, “Mourning Becomes the Law” (1996), Rose called for a film that would center on “the life story of a member of the SS in all its pathos, so that we empathize with him, identify with his hopes and fears, disappointments and rage, so that when it comes to killing, we put our hands on the trigger with him.” Instead of eliciting “sentimental tears,” like Spielberg’s production, such a film would leave us “with the dry eyes of a deep grief.”

“The Zone of Interest,” the astonishing new film from Jonathan Glazer, one of England’s most talented and unpredictable directors, can feel at times as if it were made to fulfill Rose’s desideratum. The action, such as it is, charts the daily round of what appears to be a normal German family. The paterfamilias, a baby-faced bureaucrat with a high-and-tight hairdo, goes off punctually to work each morning, while his blond and fertile wife — a mother of five — stays home to raise the kids. On weekends, there are parties in their walled garden, with its wading pool and beds of dahlias and roses, or excursions to their nearby lake house. From a distance, they seem to be living a version of the good life, and as the hausfrau insists during a rare moment of disharmony (the prospect of a move has just been raised), “We’re living how we dreamed we would. … Beyond how we dreamed.” There’s just one catch: Her husband is none other than Rudolf Höss, the long-serving commandant of Auschwitz, and their attractive villa looks out over the camp.

Such a premise may strike some viewers as unsalvageably grotesque, and Glazer himself spent a good part of the nine years it took to make the film wondering if he was doing something he ought not to. His doubts were assuaged only during postproduction, when he discovered Rose’s essay, with its appeal for a cinematic treatment of the Nazi mind. She seemed to be describing the film he’d just shot — or, as he put it, the one he was currently “rewriting” in the edit suite.

“It was incredibly reassuring,” he told me. “It gave me the confidence to believe in my own instincts, the confidence to complete the film.” Glazer, a gangly man in his late 50s with hazel eyes and a mop of graying hair, had met me at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, where he was spending time between appearances at film festivals in Telluride and Toronto in early September. So far, it seems, his instincts have been validated. “The Zone of Interest” won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, where it received a six-minute standing ovation, and the early reviews have been rapturous.

Audaciously, the German-language film invites us to regard its central couple not as calculating monsters, the way we’re used to seeing Nazis depicted onscreen, but as ordinary people acting on recognizable motives. For the most part, the Hösses want the things we want: comfort, security, the occasional treat. In an early scene, we see them chatting in their twin beds. Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) asks Rudolf (Christian Friedel) if he will take her back to the spa they once visited in Italy. “All that pampering,” she says, her head propped up on her hand, beginning to reminisce. “And the walks. And that nice couple we met.” Suddenly she succumbs to laughter as a further, Chekhovian detail bubbles up: “And that man who played the accordion to the cows.” Rudolf replies, “They loved it.” The conversation is so mundane and universal — this could be any wife addressing any husband — that it’s possible to forget, if only for a moment, just whose pillow talk we are listening in on.

“I wanted to humanize them,” Glazer, who is Jewish, said — in the sense, he quickly clarified, of showing the Hösses as only human, all too human. “I wanted to dismantle the idea of them as anomalies, as almost supernatural. You know, the idea that they came from the skies and ran amok, but thank God that’s not us and it’s never going to happen again. I wanted to show that these were crimes committed by Mr. and Mrs. Smith at No. 26.”

In doing so, he is pushing back against an edifice of conventional wisdom. Thinkers as varied as Jewish theologians and postmodern theorists have conceived of the Holocaust as a singular, almost transcendent disaster — Wiesel’s “ultimate mystery.” This impulse to sequester the Nazi Judeocide from the rest of human experience is understandable, but in the words of the historian Robert Jan van Pelt, it inadvertently consigns the death camps “to the realm of myth, distancing us from an all too concrete historical reality.” It is this concrete historical reality that “The Zone of Interest” seeks to recover.

Bracing for a backlash that had yet to transpire, Glazer was surprised at the film’s positive reception. “I suppose to some extent it must be due to the state of the world,” he mused, referring to the fit of racist populism seizing the West. “When I first started on this, I genuinely couldn’t get my head around how a society could have gone along with these hideous ideas. During the time of making the film, it’s become blindingly obvious.”

Whether or not you believe the Holocaust was an exceptional event — different in kind, not just degree, from all genocides before or since — will naturally determine how you think it ought to be portrayed, or whether you think it ought to be portrayed at all. “We see long, endless processions of Jews marching toward Babi-Yar,” Wiesel wrote of NBC’s “Holocaust” in a coruscating piece for The New York Times. “We see the naked bodies covered with ‘blood’ — and it is all make-believe.” Such techniques may be appropriate for other historical films, but when it came to the subject at hand (which was “not just another event”), they amounted to a kind of sacrilege. “Auschwitz cannot be explained,” he insisted, “nor can it be visualized.”

Of course, you don’t have to be an exceptionalist to sense there may be something morally dubious about making entertainment out of mass death, or in the complacent assumption that the means of cinema are commensurable with that task. Claude Lanzmann’s magisterial documentary “Shoah” (1985), which famously abjures archival footage of the camps in favor of oral testimony from survivors, perpetrators and bystanders, can be understood in part as a rebuttal to the guileless verisimilitude of “Holocaust.” At nine and a half hours, it was never going to reach as wide an audience as the American TV show, but the way it foregrounds the limits of its representational powers set a standard of artistic integrity against which all subsequent Holocaust films would be measured.

Most of those films, it must be said, have taken their cues more from the NBC series than from Lanzmann’s documentary. “Schindler’s List,” “Life Is Beautiful” (1997) and “The Pianist” (2002), to name just a few, are unalike in many ways, but they all take for granted that the horrors they portray are accessible to cinema. These films have, to their credit, contributed to the de-erasure of the Holocaust, but they have also produced a distorted and simplistic understanding of history. To center the victims, as most films do, makes both moral and commercial sense, but it leaves us in the dark about the perpetrators. In general, the Nazis are drawn as stock villains: They do evil because they are evil.

Some may say that there is wisdom, and decorum, in leaving it at that. In an addendum to his Auschwitz memoir “The Truce” (1963), the writer Primo Levi tries to answer the question “How can the Nazis’ fanatical hatred of the Jews be explained?” but ends up drawing an eloquent blank. “Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand is almost to justify,” he wrote. To understand someone means, in some sense, to identify with him, but for a normal person to identify with Hitler and the Nazi top brass, Levi continues, is impossible. “This dismays us, and at the same time gives us a sense of relief, because perhaps it is desirable that their words (and also, unfortunately, their deeds) cannot be comprehensible to us. They are nonhuman words and deeds, really counterhuman.”

This timeless-sounding passage, it’s worth remembering, was written at a specific historical moment, some 30 years before the belated boom in Holocaust memory got going. To grant understanding to the perpetrators in the 60s, before their victims had been widely recognized as such, may have struck Levi as improper. It’s instructive to compare his proscription with the words of another great chronicler of Auschwitz, the Hungarian novelist Imre Kertesz, who admired him deeply. “I regard as kitsch any representation of the Holocaust that is incapable of understanding or unwilling to understand the organic connection between our own deformed mode of life … and the very possibility of the Holocaust,” Kertesz wrote in an essay from 1998, which condemns “Schindler’s List,” among other works, in terms that echo Rose’s critique. He was thinking, he continued, of “those representations that seek to establish the Holocaust once and for all as something foreign to human nature; that seek to drive the Holocaust out of the realm of human experience.”

Glazer, who steeped himself in Holocaust cinema and history, told me that he is not an exceptionalist. “I don’t like getting involved in a genocide-off,” he said. A few days before we met in Los Angeles, he was in Telluride, where the traces of Native American culture reminded him that Hitler had drawn inspiration from Manifest Destiny, an ideology whose death toll, by conservative estimates, numbers in the tens of millions. When I asked why he decided to tackle the Holocaust, he said it was probably rooted in his family history. Glazer’s grandparents were Eastern European Jews who fled the Russian Empire in the early 20th century. Although his parents weren’t religious, they sent him to a Jewish state school in their North London neighborhood. Bricks were sometimes tossed into the playground by local children bleating slurs.

His first knowledge of the Holocaust arrived early, at age 10 or 11, when he came across pictures of Kristallnacht, the Nazi-led pogroms of November 1938, in an old issue of National Geographic. Without understanding what he was looking at, he noticed his physical resemblance to the people in the photos — the ones on their knees, that is, scrubbing sidewalks and sweeping up debris. The expressions on the faces of the bystanders, some of whom seemed exhilarated by what they were seeing, others merely indifferent, left him in a state of bewildered alarm.

Glazer’s work often yields a similar response. His signature dread is present in its rawest form in some of the music videos he made at the start of his career. In the video for Radiohead’s “Karma Police,” a car pursues a fleeing man down a country road at dusk. The camera, which looks out from the driver’s seat over the car’s sharklike hood, seems to take a lingering delight in the man’s flailing limbs and heaving torso — and to tempt us into doing the same. The unnerving suggestion of collusion recurs throughout Glazer’s acclaimed, and utterly dissimilar, feature films: “Sexy Beast” (2000), a gangster movie-cum-surrealist nightmare; “Birth” (2004), a supernatural melodrama; and “Under the Skin” (2013), a work of sci-fi mumblecore with visionary intent. In the latter, Scarlett Johansson, disguised in a black wig, plays a dead-eyed alien who drives the streets of Glasgow in search of eligible men to take home with her. Once she gets them there, things turn deadly, and aggressively surreal. Glazer used hidden cameras and nonprofessional actors, most of whom had no idea they were participating in a film. (Chris Oddy, Glazer’s longtime production designer, described his freewheeling M.O. as one of “jazz filmmaking.”) It sounds like a Situationist prank and, in lesser hands, may well have become one. Instead, Glazer spun his materials into a kind of extraterrestrial docufiction, which bristles with the random poetry of street life.

Shortly after finishing that film, Glazer came across a newspaper preview of a forthcoming Martin Amis novel, “The Zone of Interest.” Another story about an enigmatic predator, the book is narrated in part by a fictional commandant of Auschwitz. The perspective intrigued him, and after reading the novel in galleys he optioned it. To call the film an adaptation would be putting it too strongly, however. Much of the novel, which centers on a love triangle involving the commandant, Paul Doll; his wife, Hannah; and one of Doll’s subordinates, struck Glazer as superfluous, including the love triangle itself. He seems to have been more interested in Amis’s source material than in what Amis did with it. The Dolls were based, loosely, on the Hösses, and Glazer’s first big call was to revert to the originals. Before starting work on the script, he spent two years researching them, during which he came across a staggering data point: The garden of their villa shared a wall with the camp. What feats of denial, he wondered, would it have taken to live in such proximity to the damned?

Glazer found a clue to the answer in the archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, which he’d hired a pair of researchers to scour for information on the Hösses, the more quotidian the better. According to the testimony of the family gardener, the couple had a blowout argument one day in the summer of 1943 after Rudolf learned he was about to be transferred to an SS office near Berlin. Hedwig, the gardener recalled, was apoplectic at the idea of leaving their rural hideaway. For the Hösses, who in their youth were members of an idealistic back-to-the-land movement, life in Auschwitz was something of an idyll, Glazer came to grasp. This stunning reality comes through in his imaginative reconstruction of their quarrel. “They’d have to drag me out of here,” Hedwig says after hearing the news. “Everything the führer said about how to live is how we do. Go east. Living space. This is our living space.”

In his book “Black Earth” (2015), the historian Timothy Snyder argues that the concept of living space, or lebensraum, carried two distinct but related meanings: on the one hand, “a living room, the dream of household comfort”; on the other, a “habitat, the realm that must be controlled for physical survival, inhabited perhaps temporarily by people characterized as not quite fully human.” Glazer read the book while working on his script, and his depiction of the Hösses as both creatures of household comfort and pioneers on a grand historical mission clearly chimes with Snyder’s thesis. It’s indicative of just how thoroughly he inhabits their moral universe that neither husband nor wife at any point betray the slightest hint of bad conscience. The idea that they lost sleep over what they were doing, Glazer said, is without foundation, as is the assumption that we are ethically superior to the Germans of the Nazi era. “If states were destroyed, local institutions corrupted and economic incentives directed toward murder,” Snyder writes, “few of us would behave well.”

Lanzmann’s “Shoah” has spawned a slender but vital countertradition in Holocaust cinema, one founded on the principle that formal rigor is inseparable from moral truth. You can see the principle at work in a recent film like “Son of Saul” (2015), by the Hungarian director Laszlo Nemes, which follows a day in the life of an Auschwitz sonderkommando, a member of the group of inmates who were forced to remove the corpses from the gas chambers. The film consists of smothering close-ups of the lead actor, Geza Rohrig. The horrors of the camp remain either out of focus or outside the frame: We read them off Rohrig’s reactions, or more often, his lack of reaction.

The influence of “Shoah” is also palpable in “The Zone of Interest,” which makes a similar formal choice: to keep the camera on the civilian side of the wall. “I don’t think they should be represented,” Glazer said of the film’s unpictured atrocities. “I don’t think they can be represented.” The idea of simulating violence (“extras in striped pajamas being beaten”) struck him not only as distasteful (“and then the extra is there later in the catering tent, eating his apple and custard”) but also as redundant. Forty-five years after NBC’s “Holocaust,” images of the camps have become a cheapened visual currency. The stifling sound design, by Johnnie Burn — an aural froth of gunshots, dog barks and human shouts and screams — is all we need to visualize the horror for ourselves.

Glazer shot most of the film in summer 2021. Drawing on extensive research, Oddy spent the previous few months meticulously converting a derelict home just beyond the camp’s perimeter wall into a replica of the Höss house. (The actual house, a few doors down, which would have been Glazer’s first choice, has been a private residence almost since the end of the war.) Oddy began planting the garden, previously a stretch of wasteland, in early April, so that everything flowered in time for the shoot. When Friedel, Hüller and the rest of the cast and crew arrived, they were taken aback. “It was like walking into 1943,” one of them told me.

The goal was an immersive naturalism, and Glazer went to great lengths pursuing it. By using multiple stationary cameras running simultaneously throughout the house, he gave his actors an extraordinary freedom to improvise; they were often unaware if the cameras were even rolling. Glazer remained outside, holed up in a shipping container decked out with monitors. “Cinema is at odds with atrocity,” he said, explaining his approach. “As soon as you put a camera on someone, as soon as you light them, or make a decision about what lens to use, you’re glamorizing them.” Lukasz Zal, his cinematographer, arrived early to the shoot and made some initial studies of the house. Glazer told him they were “too beautiful.” He wanted the images to seem “authorless.”

Friedel’s first major role came in 2009, when he appeared in “The White Ribbon,” Michael Haneke’s haunting film about a German village on the eve of World War I. He told me that the two directors could not be less alike. “Haneke knows everything from the beginning,” he said. “When I read the script of ‘The White Ribbon,’ I thought, This is perfect. The shooting process was to shoot the script, and there were no surprises.” Glazer, by contrast, is more open to chance. “He wasn’t thinking, OK, this is a great script, let’s do it,” Friedel went on. “He was searching every moment. He was always asking, Is there something I don’t know?”

Often there was. The moment when Rudolf breaks the news to Hedwig that he is being transferred away from Auschwitz comes during a casual get-together in the Höss garden. Glazer’s open-ended instruction to the supporting cast of friends and family was simply, “Have a party.” For the next three hours, they mingled on the lawn and splashed in the pool as Friedel and Hüller moved among them, trying out their lines. Occasionally Glazer stepped in to offer notes, but mostly he allowed them to improvise and experiment. “It’s like children playing,” Friedel said of the director’s hands-off approach. “You forget where you are and just be in the moment.”

So, too, does the audience. Little happens in the film, dramatically speaking. Instead of exposition, conflict and rising action, its rhythms are those of lived domesticity. In a succession of medium-wide shots, which resemble surveillance footage and encourage us to view the Hösses less as characters than as human case studies, we see the family go about its daily business. Here they are gathered around the dinner table. Here they are lounging in the garden. At moments — or rather, for extended stretches — these vignettes sail close to the wind of sheer tedium, but there is method in the drabness. Rather than taking you out of yourself, as most movies do, “The Zone of Interest” provokes a disquieting self-awareness. As the minutes ticked by and little of note occurred, I found myself asking the unwholesome question: When are we going to see behind the wall?

By staging acts of obscene cruelty — a pair of sociopaths breaking a man’s leg with a golf club as his son looks on, a married couple murdering their own daughter before themselves committing suicide — Haneke’s films seek to shock us into an awareness of our conditioned appetite for such spectacles. In “The Zone of Interest,” which Friedel described as a kind of spiritual sequel to “The White Ribbon,” Glazer uses different means to pursue a similar end: It’s by withholding violence that he shocks us into recognizing just how much it fascinates us. The effect, at least on me, was a shaming apprehension of complicity. As you watch the film, you slowly come to realize what Glazer is suggesting: that in its ways, the Höss house, where ordinary life goes unconscionably on, is as much a scene of horror as the camp itself. Unlike the abjection unfolding “over there,” this kind of contented obliviousness has rarely been portrayed onscreen. The average viewer is unlikely to see himself in the figure of a death-camp C.E.O., but a family that sleepwalks through their own lives, heedless of the suffering that surrounds them, may feel closer to home. To a greater or lesser extent, we all ignore and deny the pain of others, including — perhaps especially — when that pain is inflicted by our own governments on designated enemies.

As “The Zone of Interest” receives its theatrical release, the mass murder of Jews is back in the headlines, and many seem indifferent, if not outright thrilled. Glazer was revulsed by Hamas’s killing spree in southern Israel on Oct. 7, which left a body count of roughly 1,200, according to Israeli authorities, including at least one Holocaust survivor; some 240 hostages were also taken. “It makes everything else seem so frivolous by comparison,” he said of the attack a few days later, from his home in central London. “I’ve lost interest in the film and everything surrounding it.”

At the time, he was reluctant to say more, but when we corresponded in late November, he expressed his growing anger at the way that Israel was invoking the specter of the Holocaust to explain what happened and to justify its response. Now in its third month, Israel’s retaliatory assault on Gaza — “a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness,” in the words of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — has so far killed over 18,000 people, most of them civilians, according to local health officials. That assault, accompanied by exterminationist rhetoric — “We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly,” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said, while advocating for electricity, food, water and fuel to be cut off from Gaza — has itself drawn comparisons to earlier campaigns of mass violence.

To identify as victims, in Rose’s words, “turns us into strangers to ourselves as moral agents and social actors.” A vacuum of self-knowledge is soon filled by the desire for violent revenge, especially if you’re convinced your enemies are “counterhuman,” in Levi’s term. By inviting us to consider our resemblance to the culprits, “The Zone of Interest” is an attempt to short-circuit these ingrained responses and to open up space for self-criticism and doubt. Though it’s unlikely to have the same effect on history as “Holocaust” and “Schindler’s List,” it might chip away at the crude binary thinking — the children of light versus the children of darkness, and so on — that those movies have instilled in our culture. “It isn’t a partisan film,” Glazer told me. “It’s about all of us.”

Unlike “Schindler’s List,” which leaves us, Rose says, “piously joining the survivors putting stones on Schindler’s grave in Israel,” “The Zone of Interest” is short on consolation. Though Höss was convicted of war crimes in 1947 and hanged at Auschwitz later the same year, the film ends in early 1944, as he learns he’s being transferred back to the camp and reunited with his family, who had remained there. It is a moment of personal vindication. “I’m pleased as punch,” he tells Hedwig on a long-distance call. In his final months in charge, the deadliest in the camp’s existence, he oversaw the murder of nearly 400,000 Hungarian Jews. The action was named Operation Höss in his honor.

Before the film ends, though, we are finally shown behind the wall. In a disorienting sequence, Glazer cuts to present-day Auschwitz, where we see cleaning ladies at work in the former gas chambers and crematories. Here, at last, are the victims, or what remains of them: piles of shoes and suitcases displayed behind glass panels, a corridor hung with black-and-white mug shots. Is this a bravura instance of jazz filmmaking, an unexpected formal flourish designed to catch the audience off guard? Or is it something humbler than that, an admission of artistic defeat? Glazer has taken great pains to construct an airtight historical realism, but in the end he’s reduced to shooting photos of the dead, to showing us an image of an image. Perhaps, above all, this interpolated footage should be read as a warning. Be vigilant, it seems to say: The door of history can swing open any moment.

During Glazer’s childhood, the Holocaust was rarely discussed. A few years ago, when he first mentioned to his father that he was making a film about Auschwitz, he was met with a blunt response.

“What are you doing that for?” his father asked. “Let it rot.”

“It’s not rotting,” Glazer replied. “It’s not even dead. Read the paper. It’s in the world.”

Giles Harvey is a contributing writer for the magazine. His most recent article was a profile of the Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov. Cristiana Couceiro is an illustrator and a designer in Portugal. She is known for her retro-style collages.