The Zone of Interest and Hope for Humanity

During World War II, the Nazis labeled the area surrounding Auschwitz the “zone of interest.” Similar to the term “concentration camp,” this banal, nondescript assignation was part of strategic normalizing of mass murder and systemic violence in support of fascism and its human hierarchies.
第二次世界大战期间，纳粹将奥斯维辛集中营周围的地区标记为“利益区”。与“集中营”一词类似，这种平庸、不伦不类的指派是大规模谋杀和系统性暴力战略正常化的一部分，以支持法西斯主义及其人类等级制度。

As I watched and listened to Jonathan Glazer’s vitally important film The Zone of Interest, all I wanted to do was reach into the cinematic space before me and strangle the characters on the screen. The characters in question are the Hoss family: Rudolph Hoss, the Nazi commandant in charge of Auschwitz, his wife, Hedwig Hoss, and their five small children (there are servants as well). I tamped down my rage and felt my blood pressure rising. I reminded myself to breathe. My mom was a Hungarian-Jewish child in hiding during the Holocaust and I grew up with the broken pieces of my family history embedded within. My grandfather Laszlo Tihanyi (Weisz) and my great-grandfather Sandor Vital (AKA Alexander) were both murdered in Auschwitz. I recently found their records from the camps and had an emotional discovery.
当我观看和聆听乔纳森·格雷泽（Jonathan Glazer）极其重要的电影《兴趣区》（The Zone of Interest）时，我想做的就是进入我面前的电影空间并扼杀屏幕上的角色。所涉及的人物是霍斯一家：负责奥斯威辛集中营的纳粹指挥官鲁道夫·霍斯、他的妻子海德薇·霍斯和他们的五个小孩（还有仆人）。我压下怒火，感觉血压在上升。我提醒自己要呼吸。我的母亲是一名在大屠杀期间躲藏起来的匈牙利裔犹太孩子，而我的成长过程中，我的家族历史的碎片就深深地烙印在其中。我的祖父拉斯洛·蒂哈尼（Laszlo Tihanyi）（魏斯）和我的曾祖父桑德尔·维塔尔（又名亚历山大）都在奥斯威辛集中营被谋杀。我最近在集中营找到了他们的记录，并有了一个激动人心的发现。

I learned that my grandfather, a trained engineer, had been transferred to Auschwitz and murdered there, after being used as forced labor in Muhdorf concentration camp, where Nazi weapons were built. That meant my grandfather and great-grandfather were possibly in Auschwitz together – maybe only for a day, a month or a moment? – before Sandor was killed. Laszlo was killed after four months there, according to the records. I can now imagine them offering each other some kind of comfort … My grandmother, mom and uncle would have been murdered there too if not for Raoul Wallenberg and for the tremendous luck and courage of my grandmother Isabelle Vital-Tihanyi (whose story is explored in depth in my podcast, How My Grandmother Won WWII). I wasn’t supposed to be here, according to the Nazi plan for the Hungarian Jews – or “Operation Hoss,” as the film reminds us it was called – named after Rudolph Hoss. But I am here, in this New York movie theater, experiencing an overwhelming, burning, seething, rage-filled desire to exact violent revenge. But I am not, and never will be, violent. I assume a fetal position in my seat and continue watching.
我了解到，我的祖父是一名训练有素的工程师，在纳粹武器制造地穆多夫集中营被用作强迫劳动后，被转移到奥斯威辛集中营并在那里被谋杀。这意味着我的祖父和曾祖父可能一起在奥斯维辛集中营——也许只待一天、一个月或一刻？ ——桑铎被杀之前。根据记录，拉斯洛在那里呆了四个月后被杀。我现在可以想象他们互相提供某种安慰……如果不是拉乌尔·瓦伦贝格和我的祖母伊莎贝尔·维塔尔-蒂哈尼（Isabelle Vital-Tihanyi）的巨大运气和勇气（她的故事在深度在我的播客中，我的祖母如何赢得了二战）。根据纳粹针对匈牙利犹太人的计划——或者“霍斯行动”，正如影片提醒我们的那样——以鲁道夫·霍斯命名，我不应该在这里。但我在这里，在纽约的这家电影院，经历着一种压倒性的、燃烧的、沸腾的、充满愤怒的暴力复仇欲望。但我不会，也永远不会暴力。我在座位上做出胎儿般的姿势，继续观看。

[Photos of death cards of my great grandfather and grandfather at Auschwitz alongside photos of Sandor and Laszlo]
[我的曾祖父和祖父在奥斯威辛集中营的死亡卡照片以及桑铎和拉斯洛的照片]

Glazer’s camera remains at a distance, yet doesn’t leave the Hoss family alone. We don’t sympathize with them ever; we are not being asked to – there are no close-ups, no tracking shots, the few impressionistic shots are used only for flowers grown with the ash of human remains. We do, however, follow this family relentlessly in their home, as they close their many doors, turn off and on their many lights. When Rudolph Hoss, so precisely played by Christian Friedel, goes inside Auschwitz, literally at the end of their driveway, we don’t see what he sees. Since Rudolph is not affected in his everyday life by what he does or sees within the concentration camp, Glazer would like us to imagine living in the same way as Rudolph. Because the Holocaust has been so fully written about and analyzed by historians, it makes for an ideal study of humankind’s ongoing capacity for violence, depravity and staggering lack of empathy, no matter what country or time period we consider.
格雷泽的相机保持在一定距离之外，但并没有让霍斯一家独自一人。我们从来不同情他们；我们从来不同情他们。我们没有被要求这样做——没有特写镜头，没有跟踪镜头，少数印象派镜头仅用于用人类遗骸的灰烬种植的花朵。然而，我们确实在他们的家中不懈地跟踪这个家庭，他们关上许多门，关闭并打开许多灯。当鲁道夫·霍斯（由克里斯蒂安·弗里德尔饰演）走进奥斯维辛集中营时，实际上是在车道的尽头，我们看不到他所看到的东西。由于鲁道夫的日常生活不会受到他在集中营内所做或所见的影响，格雷泽希望我们想象与鲁道夫一样的生活。由于历史学家对大屠杀进行了充分的记录和分析，因此无论我们考虑哪个国家或哪个时期，它都可以成为对人类持续暴力、堕落和极度缺乏同理心的能力的理想研究。

The Hoss family lives a dream upper-middle-class suburban life, with one slight inconvenience: they share a wall with Auschwitz, the largest of the Nazi concentration camps, where 1.1 million people were mass murdered. The family doesn’t see their proximity to genocide as even an inconvenience, though – they make the most of it. Hedwig Hoss receives furs, jewels and lipstick stolen from the people her husband murders. Only one of their older daughters seems to be increasingly bothered by the constant gun shots, screams and flames arising from the crematoria chimney next door. (This child wanders at night and hides in odd places, without explanation.) These disturbances are minor for the Hoss family. Indeed, I was hard pressed to imagine a better portrait of a family navigating work-life balance so seamlessly.
霍斯一家过着梦想中的中上层阶级郊区生活，但有一点不便：他们与最大的纳粹集中营奥斯威辛集中营共用一堵墙，那里有 110 万人被大规模屠杀。不过，这个家庭并不认为他们面临种族灭绝是一种不便，他们充分利用了这一点。海德薇·霍斯收到从她丈夫谋杀的人那里偷来的毛皮、珠宝和口红。只有他们的一个大女儿似乎越来越被隔壁火葬场烟囱里不断传来的枪声、尖叫声和火焰所困扰。 （这个孩子在夜间徘徊，躲在奇怪的地方，没有任何解释。）这些干扰对霍斯一家来说是小事。事实上，我很难想象有什么更好的方式来描绘一个家庭如此无缝地实现工作与生活的平衡。

As we train our eyes on what feels like every waking moment of this family, we are forced to ask how this level of indifference to mass murder becomes so everyday and natural. By the end of the film, despite our horror, or rage, if we are honest, we find a way to understand them – or this aspect of the human species – and this is exactly the larger point of The Zone of Interest.
当我们观察这个家庭每一个醒着的时刻的感受时，我们不得不问，这种对大规模谋杀的漠不关心是如何变得如此日常和自然的。在影片的结尾，尽管我们感到恐惧或愤怒，但如果我们诚实的话，我们会找到一种方法来理解他们——或者人类物种的这一方面——而这正是《兴趣区》的更大意义。

We have all become inured, to varying degrees, to the spectacular violence and cruelty humans continue to do unto each other – inequity and oppression have long been accepted as status quo. We have all been taught to compartmentalize, lest we be crippled by grief and despair and rendered unable to carry on. After all, nothing supports the argument that our cyclically violent nature is inevitable more than the fact that the world is and has always been full of suffering. But the facilitating, and even encouraging, of mankind toward genocide and war is the ultimate expression of ideologies such as patriarchy and fascism, and therefore something we can stop. The Zone of Interest highlights the fascist world order through the lens of domestic trappings we are programmed to seek out. Home is where the heart is. Home is also a place to enjoy our material wealth and reinforce human hierarchies. Maybe the latter statement is less catchy, but it’s equally true.
我们都在不同程度上已经习惯了人类继续对彼此实施的令人震惊的暴力和残忍行为——不平等和压迫早已被视为现状。我们都被教导要分清界限，以免我们因悲伤和绝望而瘫痪，无法继续前进。毕竟，没有什么比这个世界一直充满苦难这一事实更能证明我们的周期性暴力本质是不可避免的这一论点了。但助长甚至鼓励人类走向种族灭绝和战争是父权制和法西斯主义等意识形态的最终表现，因此我们可以阻止。兴趣区通过我们计划寻找的国内装饰的镜头突出了法西斯世界秩序。家是心之所在。家也是享受物质财富和强化人类等级制度的地方。也许后一种说法不太吸引人，但同样正确。

Materialism drives and inspires the characters’ greatest joy of The Zone of Interest, and it is this materialism that is so accessible to a modern audience. Hedwig receives the fur coat and lipstick from a recently gassed Jewish woman next door – and before even sterilizing the Jew-germs from it, can’t help but try on the expensive fur and dab on the red lipstick to admire herself in the mirror. It is a horrendous scene because it is a moment in this film where every single person confronts the primacy of human materialism. When Hedwig’s mother comes to visit and sees her daughter’s sprawling home, gardens and pool for the first time, she is so proud of her. She has really landed on her feet, the mother says. We humans are successful and worthy if we amass wealth. If we lack wealth, we lack worth. How we attain our wealth is less important. And every aspect of nearly every society supports this. The Zone of Interest illustrates this root cause of encouraging and nurturing our violent human tendency through our materialist systems better than any other film I have seen in recent memory.

In an “intimate” scene with Rudolph and Hedwig Hoss, the two facing each other in their separate twin beds and giggling one night, Hedwig demands to know when Rudolph will take her back to Italy for some fun. Part of our Great Dream of Material Wealth is to be a citizen of the world, to travel to all of the finest, most exotic places. This factors into the Hosses’ dream too. As Hedwig giggles and recalls a spa and some pigs, we are reminded of another Italy at that time: Vittorio de Sica’s The Garden of Finzi-Continis, Lina Wertmuller’s Seven Beauties, Primo Levi’s If This is a Man, Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon … and I was reminded of a photo I have of my great grandparents, Sandor and Boriska Vital, on their honeymoon in Venice, Italy, before WWII. I thought about traveling during the war in Ukraine, traveling during the war between Israel and Palestine, the war in Sudan, traveling so many places where I land in a walled-off zone of interest to enjoy life as a tourist. The performances in this bedroom scene conjure the memory of their past vacation so lucidly – even if we are terrified to be there with them – that off we go to Mussolini’s Italy.

The women in The Zone of Interest present a possible pathway to freedom from the cyclical violence that punctuates all of human history. To be clear, there are women who are fascists, women who willingly play a part in the patriarchal order, women who were good Nazi murderers – and there are men and others who work tirelessly to dismantle these systems. But the women in The Zone of Interest represent an alternative to the status quo, or in Hedwig’s case a severely cracked status quo, and therefore offer the possibility of a different way forward. The most prominent example of this is the girl, based on a real-life Polish resistance fighter named Alexandria, who clandestinely delivers apples every night around the perimeter of Auschwitz. She is a woman who resists, who is discounted as a threat and uses nourishment as her weapon. Another example is Hedwig Hoss’s mother. She leaves unceremoniously in the middle of the night, seemingly unable to tamp down her better emotions and her conscience. As proud as she is of her daughter’s estate, the constant sounds of murder next door diminish it for her, in some way. She is a woman who might feel empathy because this tendency was encouraged in her. She is unable to turn this feeling off completely and she represents a female liability/hope. Then there is the ceaselessly crying Hoss baby, who senses that everything is wrong. She is the wailing of all humankind. The scene with the exhausted nanny in the screaming baby’s room at night, pacing, fretting, rocking back and forth, captures the futility of life itself within this circle of hell which is the Hoss home. What are women to do? Keep creating more children to feed this unending cycle of death and suffering that they have less and less power to exert any influence upon? The baby girl here is a disrupter, since she has not become woman yet – she is pre-social order – and is all instinct.

This brings us to Hedwig Hoss, brilliantly and indelibly portrayed by Sandra Hüller. Her light, girlish laughter fills the Hoss house and potentially echoes throughout the gas chambers in Auschwitz. Her smile and her happy disposition cause her to flit from room to room, flower to flower. Her hair is tautly pulled back and twisted and sculpted atop her head into rows of tiny rosettes, her part as straight and loud as an exclamation mark. It is impenetrable and it demands happiness. But Hedwig’s performance of womanhood buckles and reveals defectiveness when she walks. She moves like a woman who has given birth violently and vaginally to five children. She moves like a woman who carries the weight of the world between her legs, who is constantly Kegeling in order to release any evidence of outward tension or misgivings on her face. Hedwig’s walk reminds us of the question we all have: how are these people on screen the same animal as me? So, while Hedwig aids and abets in the most damning ways imaginable, Hüller’s embodiment of her conveys a short-circuiting robotic doll delighting in the fake power she wields in her Nazi world. Hüller shows us the seams.

Women’s bodies have and always will be the currency and collateral in a patriarchal world order, fascist or otherwise. As the Hoss baby girl wails nonstop, as Hedwig clomps all over the film screen, unnamed enslaved women in Auschwitz are also regularly raped and brutalized. We first hear about this in a thinly veiled phone call from Hoss to his officers, telling them not to bloody or damage the lilacs around the camp: “They are for everyone and must not be damaged.” We then see Hoss in his underground office. A young starved woman enters and, we understand, habitually, takes off her shoes and undoes her hair to let it loose in the wild ragged mane it has become, and awaits rape. Afterward, we see Hoss wash his penis in a sink nearby, because of his fear of Jewish germs on his skin, or fear of the smell of her, or fear, generally.
在父权制世界秩序中，无论是法西斯主义还是其他秩序，女性的身体一直并将永远是货币和抵押品。当霍斯女婴不停地哭泣时，当海德薇在电影屏幕上踩来踩去时，奥斯维辛集中营的无名女奴也经常遭到强奸和虐待。我们第一次听到这一消息是在霍斯给他的军官的一次几乎不加掩饰的电话中，告诉他们不要流血或损坏营地周围的紫丁香：“它们适合所有人，不能被损坏。”然后我们在霍斯的地下办公室里看到了他。一名年轻的饥饿妇女走进来，据我们了解，她习惯性地脱掉鞋子，解开头发，让头发散落在野性的、参差不齐的鬃毛中，等待强奸。之后，我们看到霍斯在附近的水槽里清洗他的阴茎，因为他害怕皮肤上的犹太细菌，或者害怕她的气味，或者一般的恐惧。

The women and girls and performances of womanhood throughout The Zone of Interest point us back to the constructs at play in a fascist, patriarchal order. It’s not that fascism created this violent cycle in humankind. As Martinican poet and author Aimé Césaire reminds us, colonizers enacted similar depravity and violence, helping to predispose Europeans in this case, to the genocide of the Jews. And Ava DuVernay’s also vital film, Origin, based on Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste, reminds us Nazi models were largely inspired by systemic racism in the United States. These ideological systems celebrate and encourage the violent cycle, the worst tendencies within our species. Recognizing and rejecting these ideologies may be a start in helping humankind evolve. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued the necessity of reconceptualizing society in order to make power relations and injustices visible as constructs, rather than natural inevitabilities. He wrote that we need to escape what he called the “symbolic violence” within our own minds, which prevents us from thinking critically and can make the most intolerable conditions completely acceptable. Bourdieu believed we must free our minds in order to begin to free ourselves from the injustices and violence of the status quo.
《兴趣区》中的妇女和女孩以及女性气质的表现让我们回到了法西斯主义、父权制秩序中发挥作用的结构。并不是法西斯主义在人类中造成了这种暴力循环。正如马提尼加诗人兼作家艾梅·塞泽尔提醒我们的那样，殖民者犯下了类似的堕落和暴力，在这种情况下帮助欧洲人对犹太人进行种族灭绝。艾娃·杜威内 (Ava DuVernay) 的另一部重要电影《起源》(Origin) 改编自伊莎贝尔·威尔克森 (Isabel Wilkerson) 的著作《种姓》(Caste)，提醒我们纳粹模式在很大程度上受到美国系统性种族主义的启发。这些意识形态体系颂扬并鼓励暴力循环，这是我们物种中最糟糕的倾向。认识并拒绝这些意识形态可能是帮助人类进化的一个开始。法国社会学家皮埃尔·布迪厄认为，有必要重新概念化社会，以使权力关系和不公正现象成为可见的建构，而不是自然的必然性。他写道，我们需要逃离自己头脑中他所说的“象征性暴力”，这种暴力阻碍我们进行批判性思考，并且可以使最难以忍受的情况变得完全可以接受。布迪厄认为，我们必须解放思想，才能开始摆脱现状的不公正和暴力。

Glazer ends his film with working-class women cleaning the present-day state memorial of Auschwitz. We see these women vacuum the jails, sweep the gas chambers and dust the incinerators. This brilliant sequence sums up everything. We humans memorialize our atrocities. We have so many memorials. They help us to remember and maybe help us heal from individual and collective loss – but that is it. We don’t know what else to do in this current world. Encasing the shoes of millions of murdered people in brightly lit rooms, we beg each other to see, to feel something, and make meaningful changes. But who is doing any of the real work to break our cycles of destruction?

If we are the lucky ones – not experiencing firsthand violence – we doom-scroll the ubiquitous news, a cycle as well, and see current worldwide atrocities unfolding from the zone of interest which is our smart phone or computer, and then succumb to an ad targeting our need for a new bag or anti-aging cream … Modern life has conditioned us to live this way, whether or not we could do something to stop the horrors next door to us. In the words of author and Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel, “There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”

Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is then like a large mirror, centered on comfortable domestic life, forcing us to stare at our collective modern reflection.