A MAN IN a tie and suspenders smokes a cigar thoughtfully, its ash end hot orange in an otherwise cool blue shot. Its fiery pock is the most lurid thing we see in Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest,” even though there’s a crematorium next door.
“The Zone of Interest,” winner of the 2024 Academy Award for best international feature, imagines the domestic life of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife (Sandra Hüller), who for a time lived mere yards from the ovens built to burn the bodies of hundreds of Jews a day. The screenplay might have been ghostwritten by Hannah Arendt, so banal is its portrait of evil. Höss fishes with his children, worries about a promotion, enjoys his garden, conducts an affair. We see no victims, nor, other than that cigar, any flame: just a pretty, smoky glow from the furnaces at night.
It’s not as if the movie’s intentions could be misread. Without depicting horror itself, Glazer, who is Jewish, wants to show how easily middle-class values like diligence and ambition were adapted by Nazis to horrible ends. But in avoiding what the cartoonist Art Spiegelman, in response to Roberto Benigni’s 1997 movie “Life Is Beautiful,” called Holokitsch — the sentimental exploitation of victims’ suffering to dredge up drama — “The Zone of Interest” approaches it anyway, only now from the other direction, drawing its aesthetic power from detachment instead of engagement.
Is that better?
Tear-jerking as they may have been, works like “Life Is Beautiful,” the 1979 mini-series “Holocaust” and Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” (1993) had no trouble plainly acknowledging the murder of six million, which “The Zone of Interest” does only obliquely. If, as the German philosopher Theodor Adorno asserted in 1951, it became “barbaric” to write poetry after Auschwitz, it also, for many, became barbaric not to. What else can artists do with atrocity but make art from it?
At the same time, and especially in our time, they are faced with a paradox. The appalling resurgence of antisemitism has made it more important than ever to remind the world of the great crime against the Jews. Yet the names and symbols of Adolf Hitler’s regime — and of Hitler himself, the big rhetorical nesting doll that contains the rest — have been emptied of real meaning by years of overuse as sitcom punch lines (the Soup Nazi from “Seinfeld” nearly three decades ago) and zingers for politicians (Donald Trump called out Joe Biden’s “Gestapo administration” in May). To try to reinvest these ideas with awfulness is to risk aesthetic failure. Not to try is to risk the moral kind.
Still, the “Sieg Heil” salutes, SS lightning bolts and swastikas keep coming, even if in most contexts their omnipresence has rendered them not just objectionable but trite. In political discourse, Nazi name-calling almost always diminishes the unique evil of the originals. The words themselves, like amulets, may even burnish the twisted self-respect of those who trade in them. JD Vance, who in 2016 wrote that Trump might be “America’s Hitler,” has had a convenient change of heart, but it’s not clear that Trump minded anyway. That he might just as easily have been called America’s Idi Amin or Joseph Stalin emphasizes the emptiness of the insult.
The problem is even more complex in pop culture. Whether the stories and signs of Nazism are appropriated by ambitious film and theater artists as a shorthand for seriousness or played for yes-I’ll-go-there laughs by comics hoping to be seen as audacious, the scale always seems to be off. When the ordinary collides with the atrocious, a sense of proportion is the first thing demolished.
YOU COULD ARGUE that “The Zone of Interest” sidesteps the problem by burying the drama completely. But handsomely shot Nazis didn’t do it for me; I spent a lot of the movie’s 105 minutes admiring the beautiful compositions and wondering where the Jews were.
The film is hardly the only recent work to weigh such trade-offs. Daniela Völker’s “The Commandant’s Shadow,” released a few months later, implicitly counters Glazer’s artfulness with its rough documentary treatment of the same story. There is no aesthetic distancing here, as Höss’s son Hans Jürgen, now 87, who spent part of his childhood in the house depicted by Glazer, goes to London to meet Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, now 99, who for about a year in her youth was imprisoned nearby. Art barely enters into the story’s considerations, except that Lasker-Wallfisch survived because she played cello in the women’s orchestra.
Documentaries, not needing to write a story that history has already written, generally avoid the expediency problem. (Certainly, Claude Lanzmann’s nine-and-a-half-hour 1985 epic “Shoah” does.) In the context of nonnarrative nonfiction, swastikas and the rest aren’t tropes but evidence. Some forms of visual art are likewise capable of reviving debased imagery, often by personalizing it in works that seem to be X-rays of the artist’s own misgivings. In Anselm Kiefer’s “Heroic Symbols” series from the late 1960s and early ’70s, the German painter absorbs Nazi iconography into his emotional autobiography, conveying guilt even though he was an infant when the Third Reich fell. In these staged photographs and paintings, he wears costumes and poses in ways that mimic Hitler and his followers. By doing so, he demonstrates that he — like anyone else born since 1945 — is literally one of them.
That subjectivity, that ability to see through one thing to another, is not so easily achieved in narrative formats. It is especially difficult in theater, with its tendency to make even ugliness beautiful, or at least compelling, by embodying it in live, shared space. (Stage Nazis are so often glamorous.) Too many plays I’ve seen recently — including Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt” (2022) and Joshua Harmon’s “Prayer for the French Republic” (2024) — fall into that trap, using the horror of the Holocaust or the shock of the swastika as dramaturgical accelerants. Rebecca Frecknall’s revival of the musical “Cabaret,” now on Broadway, goes even further, making the markers of Nazism into fetishes. During the song “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” which needs no help to evoke a sense of threat, Frecknall has a parade of Aryan proto-Nazi dolls circle the stage on a turntable, reducing the menace to a merry-go-round.
To portray Nazis as toys — and then to suggest that we, by watching, are somehow complicit in their politics — is to chip away at the singularity of the word and the movement. But just as such references are dog whistles among white supremacists and the Trumpian alt-right, they’re coded signals in progressive art, meant to suggest urgency but often, as it happens, hijacking it instead. “Prayer for the French Republic,” set primarily in the Paris apartment of a Jewish family in 2016, repeatedly flashes back to the Nazi occupation as if to justify the family’s extreme reactions to the rise of antisemitism. This backfires by making the contemporary characters seem merely neurotic by comparison to their stoic forebears. Likewise, in Stoppard’s semi-autobiographical “Leopoldstadt,” the anguish of a young man in 1955, belatedly learning what happened to his Viennese relatives, seems puny and ignoble in comparison to theirs.
The middle ground is hard to find. “Here There Are Blueberries,” one of the best-crafted of recent plays addressing Nazism, is also one of the driest. It concerns the so-called Höcker album, a collection of 116 photographs taken by an SS officer that, like Glazer’s movie, depict daily life among Auschwitz personnel in the shadow of the smokestacks. Höss himself appears frequently, grinning; in another album that’s part of the play, so does young Hans Jürgen, playing in a wading pool behind the Hösses’ house.
But “Blueberries,” a narrative-documentary hybrid conceived and directed by Moisés Kaufman and written by Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, situates itself at an even further remove than “The Zone of Interest.” Set mostly in the archival research department at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., it depicts Nazis only in projected images; their victims, because they are absent from Höcker’s album, are absent from most of the play, as well. Perhaps uniquely in dramatic literature, that leaves archivists as the heroes, if imperfect ones. For them, compartmentalization is a professional necessity, lest they never sleep.
“Blueberries” itself is thus sleepy, at least until the appearance, near the end, of Lili Jacob, a Jewish Czech woman with an album of her own. Hers, depicting hundreds of transportees, including members of her family and even herself, fully awakens the play — not because it is aesthetically apt but because it is morally so, undermining the archivists’ sang-froid in the face of the horror they study. This is why Kiefer’s recognition of his post facto complicity is terrifying: It is not processed but rather animated by his art. Likewise in “Blueberries,” Jacob alone bears the story that needs to be told. The rest is memorabilia.
“Blueberries,” which will begin an international tour next year, is an admirable, excruciatingly noble work. But nobility, an aestheticized form of morality, is exactly what makes me queasy. It reverses the gaze from the thing being seen to the act of seeing, in much the same way that politicians do when they reach for references to Hitler to describe mere opponents or supersize their dudgeon. They obliterate the original by metaphor.
PERHAPS THAT’S WHY low-minded works that trade frankly if grossly in Nazi imagery have been more successful than high-minded ones that do so genteelly.
Take “Crap Chancellery,” Daniel Spoerri’s contribution to Luna Luna, an artistic amusement park originally built at a Hamburg fairgrounds in 1987. (A partial re-creation that debuted in Los Angeles in 2023 will open at the Shed in New York City next month.) Spoerri’s work lampoons fascist grandiosity by covering the facade of the park’s bathroom building with an image of Albert Speer’s Reich Chancellery, the Berlin headquarters of the Nazi Party. Beyond its gleefully nose-thumbing name, “Crap Chancellery” drives its point home visually, reducing Speer’s four monumental entrance columns to two wee ones, each uplifting (as the show’s website describes it) a pile of “steaming sculpted feces.”
It seems you could do that in 1987 — or Spoerri could; born Daniel Isaac Feinstein in Romania in 1930, the artist escaped to Switzerland after his father was killed in a 1941 pogrom. That doesn’t mean that the right to address specific evils should be limited to those who suffered from them; ideally, all evil would be open to comment by everyone, especially those, including Kiefer, who speak for the perpetrators. But people like Spoerri do not need to establish their bona fides or bemoan their belatedness or demonstrate humility. Their survival is sufficient and an excellent workaround for the problem of excess virtuousness.
In the first 25 years following World War II, perhaps because its terror was so broadly shared, everyone had that dispensation. Strange as it now seems, many lighthearted or even endearing treatments of Nazis were created and enjoyed by Jews themselves. In my Jewish home in suburban Philadelphia, where buying German appliances and cars was forbidden, we happily watched “Hogan’s Heroes,” a sitcom that ran from 1965 to ’71 despite its bizarre and seemingly radioactive premise: Under the nose of an oblivious Nazi commandant and his lovably roly-poly sergeant, Allied prisoners of war carry out spy and sabotage missions to undermine the Reich.
Not only were the show’s creators Jews, so were the actors who played the main Nazis — even though three of them had fled the real ones some decades earlier. Perhaps their participation felt like revenge on their former tormentors, a chance to scrawl over once-fearful faces with the rude graffiti of mockery. Starting in 1968, the comedian Arte Johnson became famous for doing much the same thing on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” playing a dim Nazi storm trooper with an absurd German accent who hides in a jungle thinking that the war is still in progress. The Reich, defeated, was now being buried in ridicule.
But the silly-Nazi jokes reached their pinnacle in “The Producers,” the 1968 Mel Brooks movie about a Broadway charlatan and his nebbishy accountant. After a string of failures, they devise a scheme to oversell investments in a musical so awful it is sure to close instantly, leaving them to embezzle the excess capital. The show they discover is a jaw-droppingly bad love letter to the Führer called “Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp With Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgarten,” highlighted by a title song performed by a chorus of jackbooted soldiers (“We’re marching to a faster pace / Look out, here comes the master race”) and capped by leggy chorines dancing in swastika formation.
That the mortifying camp of “Springtime for Hitler” is misunderstood by its audiences as satire — the show becomes a sensation, foiling the producers’ scam — is emblematic of the unstable valence of Nazi references. So, I think, is “The Producers” itself. Though the movie’s stage adaptation, which opened on Broadway in 2001, was a hit, it has not been revived, and I’m not sure it could be. (The 2005 movie version bombed.) The certainty of safety that many American Jews felt in the first decades after the war has since collapsed. What was once reparative is now repugnant; with actual neo-Nazis marching through city streets, fake ones goose-stepping onstage seem less sardonic than tin eared. Who dares play with danger when the danger is nigh?
THERE IS ANOTHER danger, too. Over time, stories that flash swastikas to raise the pulse — or name-check the Holocaust to uplift an unremarkable story — can produce a fatiguing high-mindedness about Jewish victimhood. This will be familiar to members of any despised or marginalized group, no matter how far they have advanced. As a gay man gutted by the AIDS epidemic, I sometimes found myself further desolated by the many fine plays and movies about it. Some Black critics like John Blake, writing for CNN in 2022, likewise seek a more “trauma-free Blackness” in artistic works about Black life. He is not arguing that we stop teaching and writing about slavery any more than I am arguing that we do the same about the Holocaust. We are both arguing that artistic overdependence on epochal nightmares deadens a meaningful response to it.
But if moral exhaustion is not a great goal, what’s an artist to do? In our immodest day, filled with minor disappointments magnified into thundering grievances, dramatists need big antagonists sowing big conflict to make an impression. And antagonists don’t come much bigger than Hitler, who seems to have been created by a graphic designer as a compact synecdoche for evil. (The mustache alone is sufficient.) There’s a safety in Nazism as a subject, too: Who but hooligans would knock an anti-Nazi angle?
In any case, time is running out to get this story right. As the infant survivors of the Holocaust enter their 80s, with the adult ones mostly gone, the world’s connection to their suffering is becoming second- and even thirdhand. Urgency is thus understandable, creating, along with the rattling drumbeat of antisemitism, an expectation, especially among Jewish artists, that they make a statement — and perhaps, among enlightened audiences, a feeling of responsibility to take it in. When I saw “The Zone of Interest” and “Leopoldstadt” and “Prayer for the French Republic” and the others, I, too, often felt as if I were checking off required items on a list of religious and cultural observance.
Obligation does our moment no favors. Even Adorno later revised his warning about the barbarism of writing poetry after Auschwitz, explaining in 1966 that “perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream.” The scream is not, however, art.
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