#holocaust 4242323

[holdoncallfailed]

can you expand on what you meant by the actual context for the zone of interest? just curious, i only recently heard about the movie so i don’t know much

well, the movie is about the director of operations (? idk the proper title lol) for auschwitz and his family who live in a beautiful home right next to the camp. as far as i can tell the whole point of the film is to illustrate hannah arendt's phrase "the banality of evil" in that it's just the daily lives of this family and how accustomed to and unbothered they are by the unimaginable human misery that they're contributing to. there are scenes where the characters talk very casually about the violence taking place next door; there are scenes where the main guy, hoss, is talking with other military officials about how to operate the camps (i.e. kill more people) more efficiently. all of these conversations are really boring, perfunctory, the way anyone would talk about their job or mention a current event, and of course that invites the comparison to how we currently talk about terrible things in the news when we're personally unaffected by them, as just a passing thought and then back to our own lives...

what i took away from it was how well-integrated the misery of the camps is into their regular lives (obviously, cos it's the guy's job) and yet how distant the reality of it is, how little they care about the actual jewish people they're killing, because they don't think of them as human. there's never a point where we see the characters reflecting or feeling "guilty" because it's obvious that they don't think there's anything to feel guilty about.

basically i grew up learning about the holocaust in immense detail but of course it was always focused on the suffering of the jews and other victims. so it has always been difficult (impossible?) for me to imagine how german society could have just gone on as usual when all of that was happening, how they could have been so unbothered by it on such a large scale, and the film gave me a much better sense of how easy it might have been to just ignore it as an issue, especially if you specifically were profiting from it in any capacity. and that was extremely unnerving for me!