The Hösses’ Colonial Paradise

At the Academy Awards in March, the Oscar for Best International Feature went to The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s harrowing, hyper-realist film about the Nazi genocide. The achievement was somewhat predictable; few cinematic subjects, after all, have more consistently attracted honors than the Holocaust. But Glazer disrupted this familiar rite when he took the opportunity to draw a connection between his theme and the current moment. “All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present,” he said in his acceptance speech, standing beside his two producers. “Not to say, ‘look what they did then,’ but rather, ‘look what we do now.’” Then he made himself more explicit: “Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza.” Glazer, who trembled as he delivered his address, clearly understood the gravity of the link he was drawing, and the backlash it would inevitably provoke; indeed, within days, more than 1,000 Jewish film professionals had signed a statement decrying the comparison. At the very moment when The Zone of Interest cemented its status in the canon of Holocaust cinema, Glazer’s speech—by asserting that the lessons of the Shoah serve to indict us in the present—set it apart.

Even before Glazer appeared at the Oscars, many viewers were reading The Zone of Interest as an exploration of the complicity that pervades our modern lives. Filmmaker Josh Appignanesi, for example, argued that the movie—which loosely adapts Martin Amis’s 2014 novel of the same name—captures “the moral architecture of denial” by restricting its gaze to the quaint domestic existence of its protagonist, real-life Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, and his family, cordoning off the horrors unfolding on the other side of their garden wall. As the Hösses tend to their idyllic homestead, the genocide is omnipresent yet ambient, barely out of the family’s eyeshot and earshot, but banished from their conscious attention. Pillars of crematorium smoke sometimes rise up in the corner of the frame, while the soundscape of booming gunshots and prisoners’ screams barely shakes the couple’s placid middle-class existence. Glazer has explained that he was driven to “dismantle the idea” of Nazis as “almost supernatural,” showing them instead as ordinary people whose lives are shaped by the same social forces that govern ours. “The more fragments of information we uncovered,” Glazer has said about his research on the actual Hösses, “the more I realized that they were working-class people who were upwardly mobile. They aspired to become a bourgeois family in the way that many of us do today”—an aspiration that they satisfied by climbing the ranks of the Third Reich. “That was what was grotesque and striking about them,” Glazer explained: “how familiar they were to us.” This approach stands in stark contrast to the canon of Holocaust cinema, which has rarely depicted the everyday existence of its German villains, making their vitriolic hatred and unspeakable acts seem morally distant from our own lives. By inviting us into the bedrooms and gardens of Nazis, The Zone of Interest asks not only what kind of person could commit a genocide—or stand idly by during one—but whether we could be such people.

But The Zone of Interest’s intervention into Holocaust cinema goes beyond exploring the chillingly quotidian modes of thinking and aspiration that can enable genocide. It also pushes against the genre’s tendency to detach the Holocaust from its historical context, whether by treating it as a singular metaphysical breach or sentimentalizing it into total abstraction. Glazer’s film, by contrast, powerfully re-situates the Shoah in history. It subtly surfaces the specifically colonial character of the Nazis’ project: The Hösses see their life in Poland as an expression of Hitler’s call for the German nation to conquer new “lebensraum” (“living space”), expanding territorially to protect its survival and ensure, through plunder, the flourishing of people like them. In the process, the film presents the Holocaust not as an irruption of incomprehensible evil, but rather as an atrocity arising from a given historical moment—one whose contours are all too easy to grasp today.


For decades, films about the Holocaust have been a major site for its memorialization. In his 2021 book on the history of Holocaust cinema, Richard Brownstein writes that “feature films and television productions” have been “the earliest and most consistent American response to the Holocaust,” going so far as to claim that, even amid the proliferation of museums and educational initiatives, “American Holocaust cinema can be seen as the broader memorial.” While these productions started to appear immediately after the end of World War II, the subject matter broke into the mainstream with the 1978 miniseries Holocaust, which popularized the very term. Over the ensuing decades, the Holocaust became one of the most popular topics in Hollywood—such a reliable magnet for industry awards that films on the subject have often been derided as “Oscar bait.”

Indeed, films about the Holocaust increasingly adhered to the stylistic and narrative conventions of the movie industry. Perhaps the most paradigmatic entry in the genre is also the highest-grossing: Steven Spielberg’s 1993 Schindler’s List, which critic Harvey Greenberg described as “the Holocaust’s master narrative” in American consciousness. Spielberg’s film follows the moral U-turn of the eponymous German industrialist, who goes from profiteering off of Nazi policies to saving hundreds of Jews from annihilation. Like other films of its kind, it prioritizes pathos, catharsis, and blunt moral force over historical precision. Though the story is true, it’s an anomalous case seemingly chosen for being palatable and redemptive; as Jason Epstein argued in The New York Review of Books shortly after the film’s release, Spielberg emphasizes the “exotic exception” of Schindler without a sense of “historical perspective.” This focus renders the film in some sense anti-historical, as does Spielberg’s sentimental approach and mawkish cinematography: The movie was filmed on-site in Poland in a semi-archival cinéma verité style, yet the choice to render it in black and white seems to situate the story in an amorphous, mythologized past. Spielberg’s stated intention was to universalize the Holocaust; he has said that the film “represents racial hatred everywhere in the world.” But by interpreting the Holocaust as “a parable of universal suffering,” in the words of scholar Michael André Bernstein, the film both erases the atrocity’s specific reality and reinscribes its exceptionalization. Schindler’s List, Bernstein writes, “is so conventional and formulaic at its imaginative core that it actually engages no real historical catastrophe—and hence excludes none either.”

But for some viewers, Schindler’s List and films like it were flawed not because they fictionalized irresponsibly, but because they fictionalized at all. After seeing Spielberg’s film, French director Claude Lanzmann protested that when it comes to the Holocaust, “fiction is a transgression” because the event “is above all unique in that it erects a ring of fire around itself, a boundary that you cannot cross, because it is impossible to convey a certain absolute horror.” His condemnation is representative of a perspective that gained prominence in the wake of the success of the Holocaust miniseries; it’s perhaps best encapsulated by writer and survivor Elie Wiesel’s 1989 assertion that “just as no one could imagine Auschwitz before Auschwitz, no one can now retell Auschwitz after Auschwitz.” Perhaps the most accomplished example of Holocaust art within these bounds is Lanzmann’s own nine-and-half-hour documentary film Shoah (1985), which consists mainly of interviews with survivors and Nazi functionaries, as well as long shots and long silences that conjure the sense of a void that will never be filled again. The film and others of its kind bear witness but refrain from historical analysis. As Lanzmann told The New York Times in 2010: “To ask why the Jews have been killed is a question that shows immediately its own obscenity.” Thus, while many scholars take Schindler’s List and Shoah as the two defining poles of Holocaust cinema—representing opposing tendencies to sentimentalize and sacralize—both approaches function to remove the Nazi genocide from history. One expands the Holocaust into a hollow universalism that gestures at everything but touches nothing, whereas the other looks at it so closely and unflinchingly that it becomes incomprehensible; in either case, such films occlude specific links to the past and present, representing Nazism as something discontinuous with our own world.

From its first minutes, The Zone of Interest disrupts this paradigm by showing its subjects to be inescapably ordinary. A family picnics on the bank of an idyllic stream; the children wade into the glistening water and then go off to pick berries; they giggle in the car on the journey home. At bedtime, the lights of their bucolic house are put out one by one. It could be any family, in any pleasant part of Europe. Only the following day, when the father is led down the patio steps blindfolded to a canoe he has been gifted for his birthday, does a shot reveal the plumes of smoke from the chimneys of Auschwitz. The father, we soon learn, is Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), and he lives with his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) and five children in what they call their “paradise,” on the doorstep of the death camp. From the moment the black cloud rises, the viewers’ own blindfolds come off, while the Hösses’ remain firmly tied around their eyes.

The family’s narrow domestic concerns are the engine of the film’s drama, insofar as it can be called drama at all. Rudolf’s professional duties to the Third Reich pull his attention away from Hedwig and the children; Hedwig frets that he is overworked. His efforts fail to satisfy his superiors, and he learns that he will be transferred to Berlin, threatening the family’s pastoral idyll. Hedwig implores him to “go to Hitler,” as if he is just any senior manager. By forcing the viewer to confront the similarities between the Hösses’ lives and our own, Glazer de-exceptionalizes the Holocaust itself—not through a parable-like universalism like Spielberg’s, but through a disarming specificity about the ordinary motions of unthinkable cruelty, which pushes the viewer to consider their own mundane complicities. This disruption of the typical approach of Holocaust cinema is also carried out through the film’s stylized cinematography. In contrast to something like Spielberg’s sentimental greyscale, which distances the viewer from the events, Glazer uses high-resolution modern cameras to create a lurid and naturalistic immediacy, rendering the past in an unsettling present tense.

At the same time, Glazer’s choice of focus highlights the Holocaust’s relationship to the history that preceded it, in a way that likewise surfaces its afterlives in the present. By setting The Zone of Interest not in the gas chamber but in the fields of a Polish countryside occupied by German settlers, not in the dilapidated barracks of the camp but in the cozy bedrooms of a home stolen from unnamed former inhabitants—one where “the practice of domesticity,” as scholar Sari Edelstein has written, serves to fulfill “Hitler’s instructions to expand the reach and size of the Aryan population”—Glazer helps the viewer take note of Nazism’s colonial dimension. Though excluded from a mainstream narrative that has insisted on seeing the Holocaust as unique, understandings of the Shoah as part of the history of Western colonialism were put forward as early as the late 1940s by radical Black thinkers from W.E.B. Du Bois to Aimé Césaire to Frantz Fanon, who pointed out that the Nazis employed many of the same ideologies of racialization and technologies of dehumanization, subjugation, and killing honed by European nations in Africa and elsewhere. In the past few decades, scholars and writers such as Swedish author Sven Lindqvist, historians Jürgen Zimmerer and A. Dirk Moses, and, most recently, journalist Naomi Klein—whose 2023 book Doppelganger also discusses how Hitler’s project of eastern expansionism was inspired by America’s settler-colonial frontier myth—have worked to push such analyses into the public conversation.

While The Zone of Interest never names these connections directly, it illuminates them by presenting the family’s prosperity as inseparable from their move to the colonial frontier of eastern Europe. In a letter of recommendation from a regional Nazi leader, Rudolf is described as “a model settler farmer . . . and an exemplary German pioneer of the East.” Indeed, the protagonists understand themselves as embodiments of the benefits of lebensraum. It goes without saying that, to furnish Germans like them with bigger homes and gardens, the locals have been enslaved—like the trembling Polish servants who flow in and out of the household under Hedwig’s strict command—or killed, like the Jews on the other side of the wall. (In one scene, clothes confiscated from the death camp are quite literally brought into the Hösses’ home and spread on the kitchen table.) When Hedwig confronts Rudolf about his imminent relocation to Berlin, she makes clear how the family’s thriving is entangled with this settler project. “Our children are strong and healthy and happy,” she insists. “Everything the Führer said about how we should live is exactly how we do. Drive East. Lebensraum.”

The film’s visual language emphasizes this aspect of Nazism while linking the project to the colonialisms that inspired it. The Zone of Interest is composed almost entirely of wide shots. In the domestic scenes, the camera’s view bumps up against the overbearing wall, capturing the claustrophobia of the gated community, but in nature, it luxuriates in the expansive landscapes, replicating a capacious colonial gaze. Rudolf rides his horse through the fields with his son in a scene that, as critic Hazem Fahmy has noted, recalls classic Western films, while internees from the camp wade through nearby bullrushes, in an eerie echo of images of American plantations. These shots summon the twin prongs of American colonialism to evoke them as horrible antecedents. But the most vivid manifestation of lebensraum is the family garden, decked out with a pool where the Hösses and their guests can bask, and where Hedwig serves as horticulturist-in-chief of the vast vegetable patch. The children, Hedwig tells her mother—there on a visit from Germany to witness this new society blossoming beyond its borders—are especially fond of the kohlrabi. In the same scene, leading her mother through the fecund rows, she casually mentions that the site “was a field three years ago,” invoking the notion of terra nullius, a colonial mythos in which a land is empty and ownerless and can therefore be seized and cultivated. As Hedwig remarks that the vines will eventually grow to cover even more of the camp’s imposing border, we understand how the colony naturalizes itself.

But even as Hedwig’s cultivation further conceals the violence unfolding next door, it echoes the orderly work of genocide. To the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, the garden was the central metaphor for the modern nation-state and the evil that its bureaucratic logics can deliver. “Modern genocide, like modern culture in general, is a gardener’s job,” he writes in his 1989 book Modernity and the Holocaust. “If garden design defines its weeds, there are weeds wherever there is a garden. And weeds are to be exterminated.” The maintenance of the flower beds—where Hedwig takes pride in her phloxes, roses, and dahlias, and looks almost repulsed at the appearance of weeds—parallels the upkeep of an ethnically pure state. Occasionally, the connection is made explicit: for instance, in the indentured gardeners’ use of ashes to fertilize the soil. At the end of Linna’s tour, Glazer gives us a rare close-up shot of one of the family’s prized red dahlias; as the cries of prisoners mount in the background, the flower’s bloody hue overtakes the whole screen.

Throughout the film, the beneficiaries of colonial violence are for the most part unbothered by their proximity to it. But when Linna visits from the metropole, she is troubled by the brutality of the frontier, even as she shrinks from confronting her relationship to it. When she arrives at the Hösses’ home, she is initially proud of her daughter’s upward mobility from her working-class origins. “You really have landed on your feet,” she says, in awe of their vast plot of land. Yet there are signs that she is disquieted by the death machines on their doorstep. As she tours the premises—and witnesses the guard towers and chimneys overhead—she quips that a Jewish woman whose home she used to clean could plausibly be interned at Auschwitz; almost in the same breath, she complains that she tried to buy the woman’s curtains at a street auction but “got outbid.” At night, however, she is unable to look away from the howling flames of the crematorium visible through her bedroom window. The Zone of Interest generally refrains from close-up shots of the characters, perhaps to prevent identification from spilling into sympathy, but in a rare exception, the camera lingers on Linna’s reflection in the glass, overlaying the death that so disturbs her onto her introspective countenance. Faced with this image of her own complicity, she ultimately pulls the curtain shut. The object she uses to obscure her view—the same thing she tried to plunder from her former employer—emphasizes not only her refusal of understanding, but the material connection between the metropole and the colony. Linna declines to contend with this, either; she ends up absconding from the home in the middle of the night, retreating to the metropole, with its illusions of detachment from the overt violence of the frontier. Now as then, this episode suggests, the circle of culpability extends beyond the immediate perpetrators.

In the few sequences that disrupt the nightmarish realism of The Zone of Interest, the film seems to respond to the ways its paradigmatic predecessor separates the Holocaust from history. In Schindler’s List, the titular character notices a Jewish girl in a red coat, nearly the only source of color in the film, and later sees her body in a pile of the dead. This girl, like other passive Jewish characters, serves as a symbol to help the audience identify with Schindler’s own anagnorisis—one mythologized figure to bolster another. Her counterpart in The Zone of Interest is a local girl—based on the real-life Polish resistance member Alexandria Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk—who, in a series of interspersed scenes, steals around the borders of the camp with a bag of fruit, which she hides where the starving inmates might find it. Glazer shoots these moments with a thermal camera, the human heat flashing lurid against the night-black backdrop, to suggest a moral inversion of the Hösses’ blissful paradise, in which the world built by Nazi settlers reveals itself as a shadowy hell. But while Spielberg ruptures his film’s visual language to heighten the fable-like tenor of its narrative, Glazer’s stylistic departure serves to trouble this same framework. The scenes showing the Polish girl moving surreptitiously through the dark are overlaid by audio of Rudolf reading his children the story of Hansel and Gretel, slyly inviting the viewer to apply the familiar moral grammar of the parable. But later, after this dreamlike interlude ends, the film revisits Alexandria by the light of day. In a scene as naturalistic as any other, the girl takes a sheet of paper from a tin she has found half-buried in the cold earth. It turns out to contain the music for “Sunbeams,” a Yiddish song composed in Auschwitz by a man named Joseph Wulf, and she plinks out its haunting notes on the piano. While the girl’s courage and compassion offer a foil to the Nazis’ genocidal philosophy, the scene at the piano also serves as a rejoinder to Höss’s disconcerting voiceover and the fairy-tale logic that it would impose, in which a supernatural evil is met with an equally unearthly form of good. Instead, Glazer has given us a mundane act of solidarity that, like the Hösses’ banal cruelty, must be understood as taking place in history rather than myth.