In a letter to his former student Hannah Arendt about the Nazi war crimes trials, written in October 1946, philosopher Karl Jaspers told her that he was uneasy with her view that the very boundaries of crime had been exploded by the Holocaust: that line of thinking might offer a streak of “satanic greatness” to the Nazis, a hint of “myth and legend”. “It seems to me that we have to see these things in their total banality, in their prosaic triviality, because that’s what truly characterises them,” he wrote. “Bacteria can cause epidemics that wipe out nations, but they remain merely bacteria.” His letter had an obvious influence on Arendt, and on the way terrible human actions have been considered ever since. Everyone knows her phrase “the banality of evil”. It is, in its way, a cliche.
It is also easily misunderstood. “Banal” could be interpreted as exculpatory – as if ordinary activities such as filling out forms, organising logistics and attending to bureaucracy might somehow imply a lesser degree of guilt, even when attached to industrial-scale murder. Lyndsey Stonebridge, in her new book on the philosopher We Are Free to Change the World, defends Arendt’s thinking on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief planners of the Holocaust. “Arendt did think that Eichmann was banal. She also believed it was important to understand that Nazism had corrupted everyone it touched.” That is, the crimes of the Holocaust were committed not just against individuals’ bodies, but against everybody’s morality; the mass murder of the 1940s could only have come about through a “disabling of moral choices”.
Stonebridge adds: “Not for a moment did she believe Eichmann was innocent. Because he was banal it did not follow that he was not evil.” Arendt was trying to show how “the crime had become for the criminals accepted, routinised, and implemented without moral revulsion and political indignation and resistance”, as Judith Butler once put it. The effect of Nazism, for Arendt, was to have removed the capacity of thought from those who fell under its shadow.
Arendt’s writing – despite its invoking of the quotidian human actions on which the murderous finality of the deaths depended – has not spared the Holocaust from being regarded, at times, as a kind of break with history. Indeed, as an event so uniquely terrible as to render all attempts at representation, artistic and otherwise, doomed.
That position was probably the one that I was implicitly brought up into. British culture of the late 20th century – through school, second world war movies on the TV, the general sense of what “being British” meant – tended towards the view that there had been something singularly and unrepeatably barbarous about Nazi Germany. Buried in all this was the notion that the Holocaust could not, under any historical circumstances, have been undertaken by a people such as the British, whose many virtues, including sense of humour, lack of commitment to efficiency, steady history of parliamentary democracy and innate disdain for authority, would render such a thing impossible.
Myths do hit the buffers of reality, from time to time. I recall a friend returning from Rwanda in the wake of the genocide there, in the mid-1990s. Idiotically, I said something to the effect of how remarkable it was that such a thing had happened. My friend – now appallingly exposed to the adamantine depths to which humans could drift and apprised of the thinness of the membrane that keeps people this side of violence – told me she was surprised it didn’t happen more often. Such cataclysmic events, I began to understand, were contingent, and it was facile to imagine that any one people might be immune to the danger of committing statewide crimes.
The British director Jonathan Glazer’s remarkable new film, The Zone of Interest is a riposte to the illusion of the exceptionalism of the Holocaust. It is a very loose adaptation of Martin Amis’s novel of the same title. An even more important influence on it might be the memoir of its main character, Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, which was written before his hanging in 1947: a grimly purposeful account of the mechanics of running the camp from a man who also claimed to be squeamish about watching people taking corporal punishment, who regarded the prospect of mass shooting of Jewish women and children as a potential “tremendous strain” on his SS officers, who struggled to open up emotionally to his wife, and who, as a child, adored his pony.
The Zone of Interest attempts something that the philosopher Gillian Rose had offered as a challenge in her 1990 essay The Future of Auschwitz, in which she noted that the visitor experience to the site of the horrors was focalised entirely through the “infinite pain of the victims”. Could it not also find a way, she asked, “to engage in intense self-questioning: ‘Could I have done this?’”
The film is set just outside the camp perimeter, in the house inhabited by Höss, his wife, Hedwig, their children and servants. Their garden abuts the camp wall. The family adore the pastoral lifestyle they enjoy in the glorious Polish countryside: swimming, picnics, riding. The garden teems with flowers and vegetables that are somehow frantically described by Glazer’s eye. The details of the house and garden were minutely researched by the film-makers. Höss goes to work and returns, but we never see over the perimeter wall, never see any of the violence and murder that is happening there. Much of the film consists of the entirely ordinary daily activities inside the house, captured on fixed cameras, Big Brother style.
In many ways, nothing happens in this film (which does not prevent watching it from being an almost unbearably tense experience). The family is simply oblivious to the sounds and sights that drift over the wall. But you, the audience are not. I’ve never known a film so powerfully built on its sound design. Johnnie Burn, who created the subtle but nightmarish layered soundscape, should certainly win his Oscar: the noise this film makes is almost a second movie.
In another essay, Rose decried what she called “Holocaust piety”. She feared that the fug of “ineffability” that lingered around the terrible events might serve to “mystify something we dare not understand, because we fear that it may be all too understandable, all too continuous with what we are – human, all too human”.
Glazer has said that this film is not about the 1940s. It is about now. Its challenge to its audience is to become attuned to the sounds that are not heard any more. To regain the capacity to detect when states drift towards immorality, and social institutions become violent and corrupted. Even as individuals remain, in other ways, perfectly normal: “human, all too human”.
Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer
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