The Brooklyn Rail

Anni Albers’s Six Prayers (1965–66) is a series of six narrow vertical tapestries, each a varying shade of gray or beige, beckoning the viewer with their variegated textures. Their surfaces, shimmering with tightly coiled neutral and luster fibers layered into oblivion, are a thorny sea of sloping Escher-esque Penrose staircases. Each tapestry’s linework is delicate yet disorienting and, though crammed within nearly identical ribbed borders, somehow endless.

Albers, a Jewish textile designer forced to flee Germany with her husband Josef in 1933, devised Six Prayers as a Holocaust memorial, deviating from more literal depictions of the Holocaust by survivors like Esther Nisenthal Krinitz, Leo Haas, or Nelly Toll. Albers’s tapestries are cohesive art objects composed of innumerable individual threads, commemorating the Holocaust’s six million Jewish victims (and untold millions of their friends, family members, and descendents) by simultaneously evoking the form of Torah scrolls and the labyrinthine structure of death camps.

One such death camp complex, Auschwitz, is also the primary location of writer-director Jonathan Glazer’s own cinematic Holocaust memorial The Zone of Interest (2023), a loose adaptation of Martin Amis’s 2014 novel. The film centers around Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) as they determinedly raise their five young children adjacent to Auschwitz.

Albers derived her approach to abstraction from art historians Alois Riegl and Wilhelm Worringer’s concept of Kunstwollen, or “artistic volition,” referring to nineteenth-century viewers’ rapidly evolving valuation of the artist’s conceptual framework in addition to their technical mastery.¹ As wider audiences continued to base their engagement with abstract art in Kunstwollen, they further plumbed their capacity for emotionally connecting with it, discovering that they were able to form affinities for art that strayed further and further from naturalistic representation. Albers memorializes Holocaust victims using what historian Maurice Berger refers to as “synecdoche,” eschewing literal tributes (like faces or possessions) for abstracted “parts of the larger, missing whole.”² Thus, Albers’s deliberate omission of the Holocaust’s victims in Six Prayers, through Riegl and Worringer’s lenses, still elicits empathy from viewers—their absence calls attention to their real-life murders: painful, gaping absences felt to this day.

Similarly, by withholding from overtly depicting the barbarity within Auschwitz’s gates, The Zone of Interest is a quietly momentous memorial to the Holocaust’s victims, encompassing Riegl and Worringer’s Kunstwollen framework and Albers’s aesthetic, “synecdochical” visual approach to the Holocaust. Glazer, like Albers, commemorates the Holocaust’s victims by embodying its destructive machinations, serving as a powerful meditation on evil and memory while aiming his work squarely at the Holocaust’s perpetrators in condemnation.

Like Albers’s tapestries, The Zone of Interest’s aesthetics are appropriately austere, replete with grayed color grading, a small (and strong) ensemble cast, and minimal setpieces. Most of the film’s light sources, from the harsh beams of fluorescent bulbs to rays of sunlight peeking through overcast skies, telegraph light yet emanate none of it. Łukasz Żal’s dispirited lighting and dour digital cinematography and Mica Levi’s (effective) minimally utilized elegiac score epitomize the Holocaust’s disturbing, profoundly unprecedented horrors, committed and upheld by heads of household who, with no fanfare, elected to live in what Elie Wiesel termed “the kingdom of night.”

In addition to aesthetics, Glazer depicts the Höss’s crimes against humanity with antiseptic restraint. Undercurrents of violence permeate the film, but they are neither overt nor sanguinary. Rather, they are intermittently, intentionally juxtaposed, and hence muted, by unstructured scenes of domesticity, like Hedwig chatting with her friends over garments stolen from Jewish prisoners and Rudolf casually riding horses with his son amid an execution field. The film’s most memorable example features Rudolf slowly, methodically dimming a series of lights in his family’s home. Minutes go by as the atmosphere mounts, palpable dread clinging to each frame.

As Rudolf swiftly flips the final light switch, a spacious window with an open curtain, at first pitch black, erupts into ear splitting flames. Like Albers’s tapestries, the scene is wordless and we do not see anything in detail. We do not need to. All of the contextual seeds Glazer plants throughout the film (Rudolf’s identity, the roof of Auschwitz clearly visible from the Höss’s garden, strident screams brilliantly interwoven throughout the film) indicate that the inferno is the cremation of murdered Jewish prisoners, whose ashes the characters breathe in and the film’s audience chokes on. Rudolf, startled by this sensory dissonance, snaps the light back on, temporarily relieving the viewer from the scene’s hazy nightmare and faintly acknowledging himself as its architect.

The only Jewish people portrayed in The Zone of Interest are the Auschwitz prisoners and kapos the Höss family exploits as household servants, forcing the prisoners to sow the garden with their community’s cinders and scrub the debris of Jewish corpses from the Höss’s children. Glazer’s conspicuous reduction of Jewish perspectives goes right in hand with his inferred references to the Höss’s atrocities—both creative decisions belie the ways in which the Höss’s deny their own evildoings. Later editions of Rudolf Höss’s autobiography, penned shortly before his execution in 1947, bear an introduction written by chemist, philosopher, and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, who describes Höss as an example of “how readily evil can replace good, besieging it and finally submerging it—yet allowing it to persist in tiny grotesque islets: an orderly family life, love of nature, Victorian morality,” implying that Höss’s gestures at contrition were wholly disingenuous.³ Levi later argues that Höss's testimony is “complete and explicit” in such a way that negates any suggestion of merely following orders.⁴

It is worth noting that Levi’s interpretation of Nazi evil departs from Hannah Arendt’s conceit of “the banality of evil,” which she defines in her coverage of Rudolf Höss’s commanding officer Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem and is based in the same notion of “following orders.” Here, Arendt posits that Eichmann’s crimes against humanity are more of an ideological byproduct than Höss’s, a misconstrued adherence to Kantian categorical imperative, or Eichmann’s innate drive to abide by what he considered moral law, regardless of what he claimed were his duties or beliefs. Both Levi and Arendt render their subjects as unintelligent, dispassionate, spineless bureaucrats, but their conjectures deviate. Levi’s essay surmises that Höss’s character is defined by his distinct choices, whereas Arendt concludes that every person’s shared passivity and susceptibility to underlying brutality makes Eichmann’s character unremarkable.

Levi and Arendt’s analyses are directly tied to The Zone of Interest’s aesthetics and position. For instance, Żal always situates the camera at a calculated distance, rarely capturing actors closer than from the torso up, both referencing an inherent ideological disconnect between most audiences and the Hösses. However, Żal’s framing also calls attention to the audience’s presence within the film, and by extension, complicity. When Rudolf dictates a letter requesting permission for his family to remain at their Auschwitz estate upon his mandatory transfer to Oranienburg, he signs off with “Heil Hitler, et cetera,” reducing an official Nazi greeting to a deadpan (banal) obligation while also postscripting a direct choice to reside at the exploitation and cost of lives.

The film’s conclusion makes the strongest argument for Glazer's incorporation of Levi and Arendt’s perspectives, recreating tracking shots of Rudolf and Hedwig Höss walking past Auschwitz with identical shots of maintenance crew members at the present-day Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum cleaning gas chambers and display cases. The scene has two functions—it triumphantly demonstrates how the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum preserves the very monstrosities the Höss’s constructed and upheld, while also offering a rare glimmer of hope, of survival, for the audience. Rudolf, in an eerily lit empty hallway, retches at this premonition, potentially an admission of guilt, or presumably, like the entirety of his autobiography, as a hollow performance of remorse, brought on only by knells of his impending demise.

1. Wilhelm Worringer, "Abstraction and Empathy." In Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style. Chicago, IL: Elephant Paperbacks, 1908 (ed. 1997), 9.
2. Maurice Berger, et al, Masterworks of the Jewish Museum. New York: The Jewish Museum, 2004, 64-65.
3. Primo Levi, "Introduction.” In Commandant at Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf Höss, Rudolf Höss, translated by Joachim Neugroschel. New Haven, CT: Phoenix Press, 1985. 19.
4. Ibid, 25.