When it comes to the movie The Zone of Interest everyone is suddenly talking about ‘the banality of evil’ again. As if Rudolf Höss, the commander of Auschwitz who leads an idyllic life next to the camp with his family in the film, was primarily a docile bureaucrat. If you like his autobiography Commander in Auschwitz read, which he wrote shortly before his execution in 1947, you would indeed think so. He knows no remorse. Even his matter-of-fact description of the gassing of Jews, Poles and Roma sounds like you hear a former minister during the parliamentary inquiry into natural gas extraction in Groningen. Equally down-to-earth, Höss reports on his time as a 15-year-old volunteer front-line soldier in the First World War, as a member of a Free Corps in the Baltic countries in 1919, as a young Nazi who commits murder in 1923, as an SS man in Dachau from 1934 onwards. and Sachsenhausen swings the bat and finally as boss of Auschwitz, which he develops into a model extermination camp and industrial complex.
With such a summary, the ‘banality of evil’ immediately evaporates and Höss turns into a fanatical murderer and sadist for whom violence is the only thing that matters. The origins of his behavior can be found in the Prussian authoritarian power relations, as Michael Haneke mercilessly depicted in his feature film Das Weisse Band.
The film The Zone of Interest is based on the novel of the same name by Martin Amis. And to be honest, from that book you get a much better picture of the human being Höss, who is called Paul Doll in the novel. Because where director Jonathan Glazer has stripped down the novel to make the Hössjes into callous, petty-bourgeois inhumans who live like kings in Auschwitz, Amis portrays them as gargantuan mourners. His novel therefore reads like a black, absurdist comedy, in which Doll’s servants remind you of the Lullos from Jiskefet. They drink, fuck and kill unscrupulously in their lawless world. At most they have difficulty when a large ‘load’ arrives in their camp that they cannot handle. Then the commander has to get involved, because he likes to tackle things. Just as he did when he had to ‘process’ half a million Hungarian Jews in 1944, a record.
At one point, Amis has the Jewish prisoner Szmul, one of his three narrators, say that Doll is crazy and the Nazis have murdered their souls. Doll doesn’t care about the latter. “National Socialism is logic,” he says. The Final solution It is not without reason that it is led by dozens of Herr Doktors.
Unlike in the film, Amis gives the camp commander humanity. This becomes apparent when Doll discovers that his wife is having an affair with officer Angelus Thomsen. It undermines his omnipotence. There is no love for his wife. In a chilling scene, Doll now orders Szmul to kill her.
In his afterword, Martin Amis quotes Primo Levi. In Is this a human? it says that there was no ‘why’ in Auschwitz. There was no rationality in the Nazis, but there was a hatred that was alien to ordinary people. Hence that dead soul. That is why Amis’s novel says more about the nature of evil than Glazer’s film.