#The Banal Dreams

[xtruss]

“The Zone of Interest: The Banal Dreams of Nazi Settler Colonialism”

In Jonathan Glazer's Oscar-Winning Movie, You Do Not See Auschwitz the Camp; You See Auschwitz the Colony. Neither Exists Without the Other

— Hazem Fahmy | 11 March 2024 | Middle East Eye

English Director Jonathan Glazer Poses with the Oscar for Best International Feature Film for "The Zone of Interest" during the 96th Annual Academy Awards on 10 March, 2024 (AFP)

In the 1965 Soviet Film Ordinary Fascism, Also Known as Triumph Over Violence, director Mikhail Romm’s voiceover implores the viewer to pay attention to the petit-bourgeois quality of fascism in general, and Nazism in particular.

Over archival footage of German small-business owners leaving their stores in uniform and hopping onto bicycles, he remarks, almost comically: "Here is a butcher, and there goes a baker." This brief scene succinctly captures Hannah Arendt’s (by now highly cliched) notion of the "banality of evil", a phrase she coined while covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann, known as the "architect of the Holocaust".

But Arendt’s own refusal to interrogate the inherently colonial nature of European fascism, a refusal inseparable from her own racism and western chauvinism, has blunted the sharpness of that term’s capacity for critical insight. Yes, the Holocaust was engineered by middle managers, but to what end? What did they get out of the horrific affair, besides satiating their sadism?

A simple answer is Jonathan Glazer’s Academy Award-winning film,The Zone of Interest: land - more specifically, enough land to replicate the expansionism of American manifest destiny, to recreate the German Aryan into the fascist ideal of the Ubermensch.

Over the weekend, the film won the Oscar's best international film award. In his acceptance speech, Glazer told the audience: "Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of October 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack in Gaza."

The story follows the mundane domestic lives of Rudolf Hoss (Christian Friedel), the longest-serving commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, and his wife and children, as they go about their days in their idyllic house adjoining the camp grounds.

As the primary subject is the Holocaust, the film has been widely noted for its refusal to visually depict any of the atrocities that occurred within the camp, though the audience frequently hears gunshots and screams from over the wall. This bold narrative and political choice has been consistently misread in mainstream film criticism as a simple affirmation of Arendt’s limited perspective on the "banality of evil".

It is far too simplistic to describe the film as a truncated biopic of its subject, nor is it accurate to reduce it to a formal experiment; a film about the Holocaust in which you do not see the Holocaust. In other words, The Zone of Interest is not simply a film about the Nazi official as a middle manager, but is much more importantly a film about the Nazi official as a settler.

Cartoon Villains

Since 1939, mainstream western education, media, and discourse about World War II and the Holocaust have strived to depict Nazism as a catatonic movement of unbridled hate, rather than a settler-colonial one in continuum with those of other western powers.

Nazis tend to be portrayed as larger-than-life cartoon villains, rather than quite ordinary monsters, easily comparable to their colonial brethren in the Belgian Congo, French Algeria or British India, among countless other places around the world that have had the misfortune of experiencing western occupation and colonialism.

Writers and scholars from across the Third World have, of course, long questioned this narrative. One of the most notable and succinct critiques was levied by Aime Cesaire in his Discourse on Colonialism.

But such perspectives have been uncommon within the US. With the exception of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, which has frequently been criticised for oversimplifying the primary terms of its investigation, writing on the intimate connections between western, and very specifically American, colonialism and Nazism is often marginalised. Scholars such as Carroll P Kakel and Edward B Westermann are few and far between.

The beauty of these scenes begs the (rhetorical) question: what is the difference between Hoss's family and that of any other frontiersman?

This connection is laid bare in The Zone of Interest, both visually and politically.

The amount of screen time dedicated to the lush vistas of the Nazi-occupied Polish countryside, in which Hoss and his family hike, swim and play, evokes the frontier romanticism of classic western films such as The Naked Spur, Shane and Johnny Guitar.

Being Hollywood productions, these stories, of course, implore the viewer to identify with the settlers’ yearning for the vast landscapes they seek to conquer and rid of their indigenous inhabitants.

In The Zone of Interest, the gaze is identical, but it is now one of a Nazi as opposed to that of a noble American pioneer. The beauty of these scenes begs the (rhetorical) question: what is the difference between Hoss’s family and that of any other frontiersman?

Pivotal Scene

Glazer’s identification of Poland as a frontier for Nazi German expansion is one shared unambiguously by his characters. In a pivotal scene, Hoss and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Huller) argue as to whether they should leave Auschwitz. He has been reassigned elsewhere by his higher-ups and his instinct, as that of any family man, is to take his wife and children with him.

But Hedwig refuses: “Your work is in Oranienburg now. Mine is raising our children.” When he insists, she delivers the final blow: “This is our home. We’re living how we dreamed we would since we were 17 - beyond how we dreamed. Out of the city finally. Everything we want, on our doorstep. And our children strong and healthy and happy. Everything the Fuhrer said about how we should live is exactly how we do. Drive east, Lebensraum. Here it is.”

Hedwig’s impassioned plea emphasises what the vast majority of western media narratives seek to suppress: that genocidal fascist projects are always about reproduction as much as they are about destruction. This is why Lebensraum, German for "living space", is so seldomly discussed in mainstream depictions of the Holocaust.

The Nazis’ ideology of eastward settler expansion did not simply echo American manifest destiny, but considered it a blueprint. This is why the robotically repeated line that the film is about not depicting, or “looking away” from Auschwitz is patently false. You do not see Auschwitz the camp. You see Auschwitz the colony. Neither exists without the other.

Ironically, and despite being the only filmmaker at the 96th Academy Awards to explicitly acknowledge the situation, Glazer himself apparently failed to see the resonance of his own work to the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza. In multiple interviews, he has responded meekly when asked about Israel’s mass slaughter and starvation of Palestinians since 7 October, with a shallow lamentation for “both sides”. He repeated this liberal sentiment during his acceptance speech for Best Foreign Language Film, ignoring how the Hoss family has been reborn time and time again in Sderot and Ashkelon and all the other settlements of the so-called Gaza envelope.

Anyone uncomfortable with such comparisons needs only to listen to the words of Israeli leaders speaking of Auschwitz as their end goal for Gaza. I wish Glazer had done so, rather than fall into the tired old trap his own work so brilliantly escapes.

When it comes to colonialism, what most urgently demands our attention is not the banality of evil, but the evil of banality.

[strawberry-halla]

where i am going is terrible.

it won't be terrible if you're with me.

we make this journey together, always. ♥︎

[awakenedsalamander]

saw your post about marauders, opinions on CtD?

I don’t know a whole lot about Dreaming, compared to the other WoD games, I’m afraid— I mention that only to say if my answer is a little uninformed, I apologize!

I think Changeling: The Dreaming is probably the most tragic of the WoD lines, and very disquieting in the reality of its horror.

It digs into the appeal of fantasy, and the kinda heartbreaking way fantasy tears us from reality but only because reality is so lacking in the joys of magic and mischief and dreams after midnight.

It’s tempting to hold to our fantasies, but if we do, we lose sight of the real things— but those same real things threaten to tear apart the things that make life worthwhile.

Dreaming portrays that dance between mad imagination and dull actuality, and what I think strikes my most is that it says it is a doomed endeavor. Winter will arrive, and with it, the dreams die. It is a mundane horror, because the horror is, itself, mundanity.

I don’t know if that’s the answer you were hoping for, but that’s what comes to mind.

[1eos]

i grabbed my last letter of reccomendation from my grandmas house and when she asked what its for and i told her she launched into this whole thing as to why i cant move and i can't go to school bc i have to work and i just asked her if she thinks im an idiot. like the hostility..........................................................it be your own family that wants you to die at a dead end job in a declining city..................

[sisterdivinium]

I woke up after a dream today with the words "de sleutel van Warrior Nun" in my mind...

[thepursuitofunderstanding]

My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which might confer meaning upon the banality of life.

Carl Jung

[eric-the-bmo]

Love how Wilders can just straight up kill people as long as it's for a quest. Alice my darling you're gonna be Violent /hj

[n--n]

You know the Neil Gaiman situation reminds me of when the new Linkin Park singer was announced and it was later revealed that she is not only a part of scientology but her parents are similarly powerful to Gaiman's. Also she evidently testified for that sitcom rapist guy's trial *at the request of the church*. I hate how powerful that stupid cult is.

[buttercuparry]

I know I sound like a broken record by now: repeating the same things others have said before but I think banality of it all is the point of my post. The fact that I have nothing new to say– not about the genocide in Gaza, not about the dwindling attention of allies, is HORRIFYING. 

It has been 11 months of a genocide that the UN calls “war on children”. Malnutrition, diseases, lack of suitable medical care have caused Gazan children to lose their childhood; to lose their lives entirely!  

There is no hope left for a future unmarked of pain and my friend Siraj Abudayeh ( @siraj2024 ) , who is father to three sons describes it as a “feeling of oppression”.  He laments that his children have been forced away from their schools, hopes and dreams  by colonizers and where before there were ambitions to excel in either studies or sports, all they know now is helplessness, fear and anger. 

Siraj has told me how his children- Abed, Muhammad and Amir have confessed to their father about how they have begun to  feel guilty for surviving at all now ; after having lost so many of their friends to the genocide they are experiencing survivor's guilt and it breaks my heart to hear that. Abed, the eldest son, is ONLY ELEVEN!!  Can you imagine an eleven year old feeling guilty because he has managed to survive while his friends haven't ? And what kind of survival it is– Half starving, drinking unclean water, forced into tents where sand mites pester him throughout the day?

I am not sure what happened or why the engagement with fundraisers has dropped so drastically lately but there is nothing more atrocious, more horrible than apathy when children are suffering.  It is so strange that we can quote James Baldwin so easily and yet have failed to understand what he meant when he said,

"The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; ...whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality. ”

We have the power that is not afforded to Gazans and therefore it is on us to be attentive no matter how repetitive these posts feel. It is ridiculous and dehumanizing that during a genocide one has to worry about making a post original enough to maintain attention. And yes I know that we won't be able to stop the horrifying banality of Israel’s evil in a day but WE CAN help provide FIVE families that are dependent on this fundraiser with a lifeline during times such as these.  

Please we have managed to get this far after struggling for so long, it cannot be that we will fail Siraj when he is so close to the end goal of 82k !!

So DONATE AND BOOST. Find it in yourself to not just reblog but circulate the fundraiser among your colleagues, friends and family. Share it in your whatsapp chats and discord servers. Share it on every other platform that you may have a reach on.

Currently at $72,987 CAD of the short term goal of 75k. We have 2k left to raise by tomorrow. 

Vetting at 219

[yappacadaver]

I hope maria got outta milford and got into a more satisfying marriage if that's what she wanted honestly

[elfbotanist]

Solas' love language is protecting Lavellan (from his fate)

"It'd be kinder in a long run"

"I- can't!"

"i cannot do that to you vhenan"

"ar ghilas vir banal"

while he yearns to be with her, haunted her very dreams cuz every second without her was agony, now he pleads with his eyes for her to join him

"you shouldn't, i am ashamed, a sinner, a betrayer and undeserving of your love but i am also a selfish man"

"In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you"

[sodawithmoss]

♔♛

due to the fact that in the second series we were confirmed that the participants of the show still have some kind of sleep and dreams - my theory that Kinger suffers from insomnia was confirmed. and this means that these small "hangups" of the Kinger may actually be a banal attempt to sleep at least with his eyes open. or he is just autistic.

[icterid-rubus]

Last night I dreamt I started my period way early and spent the entire dream looking for my pads and woke up so exhausted.

[perfectlyoongi]

HUSBAND!JUNGKOOK who proposed to you on vacation on the outskirts of florence. four days of beautiful scenery and incredible memories were just a cover for Jungkook's true plan: in a green field dressed in brightly colored flowers, the two of you were having a small picnic while laughter and tender words danced with the gentle breeze of the day; and when Jungkook's question flowed as naturally as any other sentence he could have said, your heart immediately accelerated, sending waves of happiness and fulfillment throughout your body. “will you marry me? make a whole life by my side? only you and me?”

HUSBAND!JUNGKOOK who insisted on throwing floating lanterns at your wedding. but Jungkook didn't want any lanterns, no; Jungkook wanted your dreams and desires for your life to be written and decorated on the light fabric of the lantern, believing that, when they reached the vast starry sky, they would be able to cling to the various stars and guard your future forever. “the celestial magic of the stars will make all our dreams come true, you’ll see.”

HUSBAND!JUNGKOOK who kisses you under the rain on bad days. it was a simple gesture, something small and quite banal, but it was something precious, an action that warmed you inside and made you feel good, made you feel alive; it was between raindrops that Jungkook declared his love for you in the form of a kiss, the lips that sang so many promises to you and shared so many dreams reminding you that in all the darkness of the world, among all the rain and grey, there was always something warm, there was always his love for you. “just to remind you that after so long, i still love you. and i will love you forever.”

HUSBAND!JUNGKOOK who wears his wedding ring like a badge of honor. Jungkook was proud to be your husband; for him, you were the only person to exist, you were the only one who really mattered because you, quite simply, were incredible in every way; so, having a token of your love, something physical that people could see, only made Jungkook's eyes shine even brighter — after all, he was eternally united to the best person that could exist. “yes, i’m married to the love of my life. isn't it incredible? i’m the luckiest man alive.”

HUSBAND!JUNGKOOK who hugs you from the back in the morning and gently kisses your neck. still infected by sleep, Jungkook walked slowly through the kitchen, his feet leaving traces of need, his small yawns looking for you lazily; Jungkook's arms would wrap around you without any difficulty, squeezing you with all the love he felt for you, letting his natural scent mix with that of breakfast; Jungkook's lips kissed your neck innocently, an invisible mark of wishes for a good day beginning another opportunity to live life. “good morning. you weren’t in bed, i thought i wouldn’t have time to say goodbye.”

HUSBAND!JUNGKOOK who takes you on long car rides at night just to decompress. with the windows open to let the night breeze flood his car, Jungkook took you to different neighborhoods and streets without any destination in mind, just the desire to bring you a little peace controlling his steering wheel; soft music was gently played in the car, while the stars of the night guided you to moments of tranquility and serenity that made you realize that it was with Jungkook that life was worth living. “the night is beautiful today. do you wanna go out? we can eat ice cream later.”

HUSBAND!JUNGKOOK who will love you forever and ever. Jungkook deeply believed that it was the universe that brought you together; it was impossible for two such deep and similar souls to meet by chance — it had to be destiny. because, for Jungkook, your souls had already been formed in ancient times, wandering through worlds and constellations in search of a way of loving deeper than the spiritual — and here you two were, extending every fragment of your passion beyond the soul. “what are the chances of feeling like we’ve loved each other forever? believe me, we are made of the same celestial dust.”

[centrally-unplanned]

Ever have one of those days where you just want to end it all in an orgasmic display of pure public violence, an act of audacity, power, and finality such that it erases from the Akashic Record of your life every tepid banality and suffocated dream that composed your grim normality, a Fire of Alexandria targeted with gnostic precision at every other probabilistic worldline of your potential fate, collapsing your sketchy multiplicities into single, crystallized moment in time, for all time?

But you have, like, an inbox full of emails to reply to-

[vaguely-concerned]

I think there is no better illustration of the more intimate, internal angle veilguard chooses to approach its characters and themes with than the fact that like... listen in this game we get to follow so much pain back to its source, and we find it really does permeate everything in thedas today on a level that evokes a kind of cosmic horror. the bones of the earth itself are broken open and drenched in trauma; the world is mired in suffering down to the core and the marrow. as above, so below. as outside, so inside. on the big scale, and the small. all of creation is a throat gone to bloody shreds from screaming in agony, when you allow yourself to listen. (maybe that's why we usually don't, or can't, bring ourselves to listen.)

...and yet the thing that makes me personally so desperately gnaw-my-own-arm-off sad that it feels like I could die from it is that in a run where you save minrathous, lucanis never gets out from the ossuary in his mind. what's worse, no one even knows he's in there. he's still in there. and there is no rescue on the way, because he's locked down so deep inside himself this time that there's no way for anyone to even understand there's a need for it. would he be able to welcome one, if someone did realize it and tried to reach him? You know him -- you can open the door, but he won't walk through. He won't move. There's nowhere to go. the way he says 'it doesn't matter what I want' with such utter, leaden, final resignation in the wrecked treviso cutscene is going to haunt me forever. it makes perfect sense to me you can't romance him after that, I'm not sure he's ever really here completely in that version of events, at least within the timeline the game takes place. he's just standing in the shitty awful ossuary torture room all alone, and no one's coming to find him.

and what is that, next to the millennia of suffering screaming through all of history and creation? well. nothing, of course, not really. a single plucked string in an endless deafening symphony of despair. one singular trapped and broken soul among the untold millions that have gone before and the untold more that will surely come after, that are being made as we speak in the conflicts and tragedies unfolding through the game. but more importantly it's also everything. to me. and to the game too. the game says this also matters. just as much as anything else, this pain matters and deserves to be loved and comforted. even in the face of all the suffering in the world, beneath the systems perpetuating all the banalities of evil, for good or for ill sometimes, we matter to each other. and what would be the point of anything, if we didn't? that's where hope lives. as long as you're alive, the right key might still arrive to gently open the locks of your mind, the right hand might reach out one day and you will bring yourself to take it. you don't know what tomorrow's going to be. if in the meantime the only thing we have to gain in staying is each other -- isn't that enough? isn't that everything? why does this one guy saved mean the world saved to me, a little bit? hello. hello. hello. there's stuff going on in the deep here.

when I say that the deep thematic spine of this game is so good and solid that the occasional clumsiness and false tones of the writing on top of it simply cannot hurt me... I think this is part of what I mean. works for every single one of the characters of course! lucanis' is the predicament that speaks to me most viscerally. for. uh. personal reasons there simply is no time to get into at this juncture lol. but just as much the idea that davrin can die before he could see the world freed from the blight and the need for wardens, or that harding can get cut down right at the beginning of a great revelation that could change everything and heal things no one had even dreamed could be healed. all of them are like this. each and every one of us has a world and so many stories inside that matter, and it's not to dismiss the larger systemic forces and evils that create so much of the suffering in the world to focus in on that for one installment of the series -- only to view it from a different angle that brings other things to light than what we're looking for normally in this series. it's worth looking at what's actually here.

(have you ever heard the poem 'good light' by andrea gibson? it's very good. you should check it out if you haven't, you can find it on youtube. it has these lines:

Come make it count Our finding each other like we found God Come root for the salt Come believing we can heal it all, even everything Even everything that has ever been done I know how much the pain of this world weighs But I can still tip the scales in light's direction Whenever I have your name on my tongue

and yeah. I think that's basically what I'm trying to say here.)