Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, is happily bathing in the river with his children when he trips over a human jaw. His bone angers him. He has few moments of rest and does not tolerate work interfering with his rest. I come across this scene in The area of interest, the film by Jonathan Glazer that portrays the bucolic life of a Nazi family next to the wall of the Auschwitz camp. It seems to me like the gesture of a monster and, at the same time, a recognizable gesture. Like him, I don’t want to see the jaws of the children dying in Gaza these days: more than 14,000, according to Unicef. And some Sundays I do scroll on the front page of the newspaper to the topics of gastronomy and trends, so that deaths on the other side of “my wall” do not ruin our breakfast.
Now the commander wipes his nose in the sink and drops of ash fall. It is because of all the death that he breathes in the field. For Höss, like everyone, work sticks to his body. Despite the pressure, he is a dutiful and efficient family man, as well as a great professional. He is a businessman who strives to be productive and who, within his culture, is. In that I also feel identified, because like Höss, I also live in cultural coordinates where it is assumed with astonishing normality to attend the live broadcast of a genocide.
Jonathan Glazer has explained that his film, based on the novel of the same name by Martin Amis, does not aim to portray Nazism, but rather human nature. A “nature” capable of coexisting with the horror on the Smart TV of millions of European families at dinner time. Families of mothers and fathers who strive to maintain the comfort of our lives and who, along the way, accept everything. I’m talking about the kind of people who do what they have to do and don’t ask too many questions along the way. I know a lot of people like that. Sometimes it seems to me that Europe is full of citizens like that. Hedwig, the Nazi’s wife, is the most European in this sense.
Halfway through the film, Höss is moved to another camp, but Hedwig refuses to leave Auschwitz. “They would have to drag me out of here, you know that very well,” she says. “This place is our home, Rudolf, we live as we have always dreamed. (…) We have what we need at our doorstep, our children are healthy, strong and happy, (…) this is our living space.” Hedwig is the most terrifying character for me because she talks like any middle-class European. She represents a Nazi woman, but she speaks with the same words, the same expressions and the same images as us. Her obligatory question is: who are we if we say the same things and with the same music as her? I, like Hedwig, would have to be dragged out of Europe. On this side of the world we are happy, with our backs to Africa, Ukraine, Gaza…
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Is this what Hannah Arendt was referring to when she spoke of the banality of evil? There is nothing else? In the film, one of the Höss daughters dreams of bringing food to the prisoners. She doesn’t know where they are or who they are, but she looks for them every night. I wonder when we turned our duty into a dream. And why we accept it when we wake up.
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