"The Zone of Interest" by Martin Amis

Spoiler: Paul Doll is not completely normal.

Huge thanks to everyone who’s subscribed. It’s kind of amazing having actual subscribers other than my weird housemate who hits on me dearly-beloved spouse.¹

On to a more serious subject: Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest. (The book, not the movie, but comments welcome on both.)

The novel’s loosely based on Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, who lived next to the camp with his family. It was published in 2014, but articles about the movie—and Martin Amis’s passing—only inspired me to pick it up last year.

Also, burned in my brain—last year and now—was my visit to the site of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in Alsace in the summer of 2022.² As we left, the guide pointed out the villa where the commandant had lived. It had a pool, the guide explained, where the SS guards used to swim—meters from where they’d starved, tortured, and murdered people.

Nazis living it up next to their victims’ hell is a familiar part of Holocaust literature and film. A commandant’s child narrates John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.³ In Schindler’s List, Amon Göth (played by Ralph Fiennes) uses his villa’s balcony for target practice. It’s part of the horror of the Holocaust: that the Nazis seemed so capable of compartmentalizing genocide that they could live happily next door to it.⁴

But The Zone of Interest digs deeper to make a bigger point—that there is no zoning off genocide, whether in mind or in the world around us. It can be euphemized, but it can’t be compartmentalized.

Let’s get into it.

Background

The novel has three narrators:

1. Paul Doll, the Höss-inspired character, who insists that he’s “completely normal,” and wonders why his wife, Hannah, won’t sleep with him;

2. Golo Thomsen, who works for a German industrial conglomerate and fantasizes about Hannah while spouting anti-Semitism to help his employer justify enslaving Jewish people; and

3. Szmul, a Jewish Sonderkommando in the camp.

Plotwise, Paul deteriorates mentally and physically as he scrambles to cover up his war crimes and forces Szmul to help. Golo has a will-they-or-won’t-they romantic drama with Hannah—until he learns the Germans might be losing the war. From there, Golo’s arc is best described as:

Three Questions

(1) Does the novel have diverse perspectives?

Yes, Szmul in a novel that’s mostly narrated by Nazis is so important. His chapters are briefer, but add some much-needed emotional depth and acknowledgment of what happened at Auschwitz.

(2) Which character felt the realest?

At the outset of this project, I figured I wouldn’t write about a book if none of the characters felt real. Leave it to Martin Amis, RIP, to school me in my wrongness. I finished the book in a day—and not because its characters felt real, but because their voices drew me in anyway.

First, there’s Doll. Amis unsettles with how smoothly Doll rationalized his way into fascism and mass murder. That much feels real, as does the prospect that a government would empower someone that self-delusional. But Doll sometimes veers into being such a buffoon that I could keep his character at a distance.

Then there’s Szmul, who gives the book something approaching a conscience. But his chapters are shorter and more distant. We know less about him than we do about Doll or Thomsen, so as important as he is to the book, he feels more ethereal as a character.

That only leaves Golo, who was the most frustrating of all three. I never cared about his love triangle with Doll and Hannah, but I wanted to feel invested in his confronting the evils he’s participated in—and was frustrated that I didn’t. It doesn’t feel earned; it just feels like Golo’s realized he’s on the losing side. 

That said, Golo’s entertaining to read. His voice belongs to a posh reprobate I’m pretty sure only an English author could make work for that many pages. It’s like Lord Flashheart from Blackadder had a love child with Bertie Wooster and that baby became a Nazi. My points are:

• More Americans should watch Blackadder.

• I didn’t care about Golo’s destination—but I was along for the ride.⁵ I stand by what I wrote: WWII fiction needs more characters who feel like flesh-and-blood people. But no novel works unless it keeps the reader reading. Even if the characters in The Zone of Interest didn’t feel real, their voices kept me hooked.

(3) Did it teach me something I didn’t know about WWII?: No, but it took a well-known fact–Nazis living next-door to the camps–and gave it a deeper perspective. Which brings me to:

Craft Highlight

Doll visits the euphemistically-named “Spring Meadow” with other Nazis and Szmul. Edited somewhat for length, but in just a few paragraphs Amis reveals both what it is—a mass grave—and how Doll reacts both internally and with his colleagues.

Now I had not been to Sector 4IIIb(i) since July, when I accompanied the Reichsfurer-SS on his day-long ‘look-see.’ As I climbed from the truck (and as Szmul jumped down from the flatbed) I uneasily realised that I could actually hear the Spring Meadow. Said meadow began perhaps 10 metres beyond the mound where Prufer, Stroop, and Erkel stood with their hands pressed to their faces—but you could hear it. You could smell it, of course, and you could hear it. Popping, splatting, hissing. I joined my colleagues and gazed out at the great field.

I gazed out at the great field without the slightest trace of sentimentality. It bears repeating that I am a normal man with normal feelings. When I’m tempted by human weakness, however, I simply think of Germany, and of the trust reposed in me by her Deliverer—whose vision, whose ideals and aspirations, I unshakably share. To be kind to the Jew is to be cruel to the German. ‘Right’ and ‘wrong,’ ‘good’ and ‘bad’: these concepts have had their time; they are gone. Under the new order, some deeds have positive outcomes and some deeds have negative outcomes. And that is all.

‘Kommandant, in Culendorf,’ said Prufer, with 1 of his responsible frowns, ‘Blobel tried blowing them up.’

I turned and looked at him, and said through my handkerchief (we all had handkerchiefs), ‘Tried blowing them up to achieve what?’

‘You know, get rid of them that way. It didn’t work, Kommadant’ . . .

I looked out on a vast surface that undulated like a lagoon at the turn of the tide, a surface dotted with geysers that burped and squirted; every now and then divots of turf jumped and somersaulted in the air. I yelled for Szmul.

It’s a horrifying visual. It’s also—permit me some reverence—fucking Biblical. God tells Cain in Genesis, Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. Doll is Cain, denying he’s his brother’s keeper. But the earth itself suffers and bears witness to the murder he’s committed.⁶

The Zone of Interest is imperfect, but the writing has stayed with me. I hope you’ll read it if you haven’t, and comment if you have thoughts on the book (or the movie—otherwise I’m just yelling into the void about both).

1.  Love you, babe. You’re still making dinner tonight, right?

2. If you visit Alsace, which is a province in northeastern France (and you should visit it), I'd recommend visiting the site (there’s also a memorial), and this museum dedicated to the history of Alsace and its role in the world wars. Before going, I read Boris Pahor's Necropolis, a memoir by a Slovenian writer and Resistance fighter who survived Natzweiler. It's a harrowing (but short) read, and it at least sort-of helped me prepare for what we were going to see and learn.

3. I know this one was a bestseller, but confession: I haven’t read it. I loved Boyne's A Ladder to the Sky, and enjoyed The Heart's Invisible Furies. If someone wants to recommend The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, I'll consider reading it for this project—but tbh, some takes gave me some pretty serious “yikes” vibes. The Zone of Interest wasn’t an unqualified rave when it was published, either, but the same criticisms haven’t been leveled at it.

4. A less well-known examples that deserves more recognition: Affinity Konar’s Mischling, a novel about twins selected for Mengele’s experiments, depicts the SS guards’ families picnicking near the camps. Not sure yet if I'll cover it in a post.

5. To my relief, Golo wasn’t in the movie. It was definitely the right move for a post-2016 audience that presumably cares more about why and how people buy into a fascist regime in the first place than about a Nazi corporate hack’s lust for the Auschwitz’s commandant’s wife and Schindler’s-List-esque-but-less-convincing transformation to Good German.

6. It’s also exactly the kind of horrific scene that makes me understand why Jonathan Glazer would make this into a horror movie (but question why he wouldn’t put this scene in the movie, and gave us some weird nightvision/fairytale shit instead…but I told myself I wasn’t going to make this about the movie).