Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/02/26/review-zone-of-interest-is-the-banality-of-evil-film-adaptation-weve-all-been-waiting-for.html
…
7 Likes
Seems like an interesting film.
However. Most modern histories of the holocaust are pretty clear on that Eichmann was a burning antisemite and devoted nazi. The whole boring bureaucrat following orders was just a defense move that Arendt fell for.
2 Likes
This morning my feed included a TikTok from a WWII researcher at a university, saying she had watched the film and the details seemed very accurate. Not sure if I can watch or not, but maybe interesting to see it come to life. Will keep a look out.
2 Likes
She didn’t fall for it, so much as she understood what he was projecting to justify himself.
The banality of evil IS a thing. We are seeing it right now - people who are pretending to be “normal, average Americans” are pushing conspiracy theories to justify mass slaughter of people they believe are a threat to them and “their way of life.” They are passing laws to eliminate an entire group of people from public life. They are talking about shutting down the border and rounding people up and putting them in camps in order to deport them, possibly to their deaths. The people pushing this shit are just normal people. They are not devils or cartoon nazis. They are the people next door.
29 Likes
I was just thinking that Eichmann now seems to be a poor vehicle for Arendt’s book, and that if she had lived longer she might gave written a better one about Speer.
5 Likes
Yes. This film obviously was aware of that and had Höß as a raging and enthusiastic Nazi all in on the management engineering speak and career ladder. The murder of the entire Jewish population of Hungary was named after him and is framed in this film as a huge honour.
If you are worried that this film buys the blame avoidance, don’t.
He is filthy, slimy, evil. Yes he’s glib and superficially normal and obsessed with the beautiful garden and the blonde children and wife but you hear him at work in the background sometimes, or he tells his wife things when he’s feeling excited about his work. And lots of other things that are spoilers.
He is banal, and evil.
11 Likes
I’d argue her larger point still stands, though, that monstrous acts aren’t just carried out by those who are some embodiment of evil (which is, I think, a, but by people who see themselves as normal, ordinary people. Lots of people have made this argument, in fact… we do ourselves a real disservice when we assume that only people who are “evil” (in the sort of cartoonish kind of way of thinking of what constitutes “evil”).
That. Exactly that. Browning made that argument.
9 Likes
yep. saw it a few days ago. felt like a meditation about the horrors and the absurdism of mankinds normality in the face of evil, if that makes any sense.
1 Like
I saw some interesting/horrifying stuff on the life of “Angel of Death” Dr. Josef Mengele—who was personally responsible for some of the most evil and depraved acts ever committed against human beings—that made a convincing case that he wasn’t especially sadistic in the way he carried out his crimes against humanity. That is, he didn’t seem to derive personal gratification from human suffering. Everything he did was for a reason, usually carrying out human experimentation to help a colleague gather data for some study or another.
So he didn’t do all those monstrous things just to make people suffer, he just didn’t give a fuck.
In another timeline he would have probably remained a respected physician without the world ever learning what kind of monstrous acts he was capable of.
None of that diminishes the evil that Mengele and his Nazi accomplices carried out, but it demonstrates what kind of people we should be on the lookout for if we want to prevent that kind of evil from triumphing again.
11 Likes
That.
We really need to look at how we define terms like “evil” and how we understand people’s actions. I think the larger point we should attend to is that the people who carried out events like the Holocaust (or other atrocities, in fact) were not some evil, sadistic people, most often. Just that they had justified their actions to themselves, and that their society helped facilitate that. Again, WE CAN SEE THIS IN ACTION RIGHT NOW, in our own society. The language being aimed at trans people, at immigrants, and to a lesser extent at ALL of us who are not part of the MAGA/white Christian nationalist movement is meant to justify whatever happens to those groups. They, in fact, see all those groups as “evil” in the sense of malevolent and destructive to what they define as “good”. It is in fact, dehumanizing to the rest of us, but they see it as an existential threat to their own survival - just like people who bought into the Nazi worldview saw it…
We risk losing that larger context when we put events like this into terms of “good” and “evil” because of the… ontological baggage maybe? That comes with those terms… they are loaded with almost supernatural meaning, that objectifies individuals, the actions they take, and the context that they take them in.
Events like the holocaust merely become events in the past that are out of the proper stream of historical events (an abberation what is “real” history) that we’ve all “learned” from and that it “can’t happen here”… well, it’s very close to happening here. The more we treat the holocaust like an ahistorical thing carried out by cartoonish monsters that we already vanquished, that means we’re letting our guards down. We seem to be doing that right now, in fact.
11 Likes
I see that I was a bit categorical about Arendts work. The banality of evil is useful as a concept, absolutely. But in the post about the film you can see the problem with the term when it comes to Eichmann himself. The post pushes the idea that he was just a bureaucrat. He was that, and a careerist, but he was a commited nazi and antisemite. The holocaust was founded on ideology, and that is true both if you have an intentionalist or a functionalist view of it. The problem is that in the case of Eichmann this is somewhat shrouded by Arendts concept.
Being a nazi and an antisemite does not make a cartoon monster however, and I agree with you about all your other points. And that comes back to you pointing out on the horrifying political developments of the current day.
1 Like
Who is not in the film from what I understand… seems weird to bring it up, when the concept is what’s at play, not Eichmann himself.
it was also carried out by PEOPLE who had differing motivations. It seems weird to only focus on one person here.
3 Likes
@jorny the film is focused almost entirely on the immediate family of a real historical person: the commandant of Auschwitz Rudolph Hoss (or Höß) see here Rudolf Höss - Wikipedia
The novel that this is taken from apparently uses a fictional version but here they use the real people’s names. This, and the focus on his banality, makes the choice not to mention Eichmann in any way an obvious building on Arendt. Not a repudiation, but a further meditation on the banality of evil. I could be wrong and one of the actual Nazis in the film actually was chosen to represent Eichmann but I don’t really know the individuals that well. I’m not a historian of the period (from teh wikis he took orders from Eichmann but I don’t remember him in the movie).
He is presented as an excellent and driven manager, very much an engineer manager in a tech corporate model, not obsessed with killing people (his employers assure colleagues that private sector clients and partners are very satisfied with the proportion of people not murdered but converted to slaves before they die). He is merely efficient. He kills the “right” number of people and his obsession with it is only in how to do it more efficiently and to deliver great quarterly numbers to stakeholders in both the public and private sectors.
Their (his and his wife’s) vision of themselves is of pioneer farmers in the new lands. Humble, hard working, honest labourers creating something beautiful where only savagery existed before. Quite an echo of American foundation myths about itself
When, for example, Zuck and his family get around to watch this in their underground bunker with their organic farming after the Jackpot, I imagine his kids will look to him and feel something like we feel the small children of Hoss appeared to feel. Or indeed what is implied that Hedwig’s mother felt. Maybe he’ll look at himself for a tiny second, and then look out at the hellscape outside that he constructed from paradise and feel a quiet self satisfaction.
Ain’t nobody big fighting the Nazis right now.
8 Likes
2 Likes
The foundation myth of every settler-colonial society.
8 Likes
Yeah. It was just jolting for me to see it in the context of Germans moving to Poland. In reality it’s no more fantasy than all of them.
6 Likes
I can’t remember who said it, but someone noted that the rise of the fascist regimes in the 20s and 30s, and especially of the nazis, was colonialism turned in on Europeans themselves… Of course, that ignores the centuries long colonization of Ireland by the British, but I think the point makes some sense. The nazis certainly used similar logic to justify their wars across the continent that the British and French (among others) used to justify colonizing the global south.
10 Likes
That’s even worse, IMO.
4 Likes
And this is why this concept of the banality of evil matters. As long as we assume “evil” intent on the part of people doing awful things, then we miss the larger picture of how mass society makes these kinds of actions possible. When we’re so atomized from our fellow humans, and see them as competition or some kind of “other”, then we’re all at risk of falling into this kind of thinking of not caring…
11 Likes
It is the logical conclusion. It’s visible in Brexit where central and Eastern Europeans are the big bad others that the English Conservative Party wanted rid of. Obviously now it’s “small boats” like they lionise in Dunkerque, but back then it was Polish people.
5 Likes
