Fear and Hunger in The Zone of Interest
Since the October 7 attacks on Israel and the subsequent slaughter inflicted upon the Palestinians, a disturbingly familiar feeling has started to creep back up in our culture, and pundits are flailing while trying to name it. The 20th century is back! Afghanistan has reverted to tribal Islamic law, and women are back out of school! The Islamic State West African Province (ISWAP) is executing Boko Haram-style attacks in Nigeria and Chad! CIA-linked Neo-Nazis are running military campaigns in Eastern Europe (and now looking to strike within Russia itself)! And of course, the American media apparatus is back in full swing, pushing the same party line they’ve held since at least the 1970’s to defend Israeli expansionism and terror! As the saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Where the discomfort is arising for many today, though, is not just that the same actors from the past are still in play. Rather, it is the way in which the whole ordeal — the bloodbath that erupts from the ever-hungry push of global capital — seems to have almost become post-ideological for people. The discussion focuses not on first principles or moral arguments lines, but rather on logic and rationality, with major players jockeying to be seen as the rational ones out of the belief that this status itself will win them their wars. Only the most insane people are actually writing ideological defenses of the massive acts of violence we see today. Eyes glaze over when participants fall back into a “we’re making sense,” “no, we’re making sense” sparring match. Russia and Ukraine push back on one another to determine who has the most rational military — each accusing the other of being chock-full of irrational far-right militants and fighting an inherently contradictory battle. At the same time, Israel brags about the strong management skills they are displaying in the way they murder, pointing to technologies and tactics that are nothing if not sophisticated in how effectively they kill. And, of course, this is all done alongside the opinion offensive meant to make it appear as if the violence inflicted on October 7 was a beastly horde swarming civilization rather than an act of extreme political violence with a particular aim. Why do we think they have tried so hard to find 40 beheaded babies or hundreds of rapists to trot out? The arguments here are not about whose actions are just, but whose actions are logical, and the goal is always to decide which side is making the least sense — and, by extension, is least worthy of existing.
This focus on the logical application of violence has echoes of the 20th century within it, but the fetish people are displaying for any military action that makes sense smells to me of something much older. It is as if we yearn for a violence that we understand – something less like the stochastic violence of the 1960s or 2010s and more like the ordered violence of the 1940s or, more honestly, the ancient logic of slavery and true imperial activities. The West is finding itself again in a position to litigate violence, and the failures of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and so many others seem to have broken our dedication to supposedly ideals-driven battles. Violence is back at the forefront of our conversations, and that old specter — of war as for war’s sake, as something bigger than itself — is floating back into view. But why are we so willing to let it in?
“’That man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry . . . will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.’” – Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest provides an incredible, arresting depiction of the Holocaust and anti-semitism, despite the post-hoc arguments that the film was somehow problematic because it didn’t actually show the execution of Jews. The film centers on a brief period in the life of SS officer Rudolf Höss — the first person to oversee the day-to-day work at Auschwitz and whose name was later applied to the operation deporting 700,000 Hungarian Jews for execution — leading up to his transfer from the camp. Its depiction of the blissful life of a family of Nazi true believers experiencing the pleasures and privileges of Lebensraum got deeper to the core of the evil that pervaded a world that birthed the Holocaust than maybe any other film that I’ve ever seen. Central to this evil and the horrors it bore was not only the actions themselves, but the underlying logic applied to the whole project — and how that logic transcends the immediate goals of the Holocaust.
Early in the film we see Höss meeting with representatives from JA Topf and Sons Engineers, walking through the logistics of a potential new addition to the camp. The discussion happens fairly quickly and is not referenced again, but I think it is worth reviewing exactly what is shared during it:
“. . . the other side of it is the next chamber. In here is the next load ready to burn, once the pieces in here.. (points) Have been completely incinerated . . . So, once that’s happened, you close this chimney. Then simultaneously open the next. The fire will follow the air, through this baffle of course, into this chamber and burn this load.
In each case, the chamber directly opposite the fire zone, which is burning at around a thousand degrees, has by now cooled to around forty degrees. Cool enough to unload the ash then reload pieces . . . The process moves one chamber over, counterclockwise. Burn, cool, unload, reload. Continuously.”
What’s most frightening about this scene is that, had you not seen the diagrams shown on screen and had the conversation not taken place directly next to an extermination camp, one would be forgiven for mistaking the conversation for a sales pitch of a municipal trash incinerator. They focus on the efficiency of disposal of loads, the lack of downtime between destruction of pieces, and the leanness of the operation like true Nazi logicians. The pleasure for these men seems to come not even from the extermination itself, but with just how well the extermination has been optimized. This is the murder perfected.
The Zone of Interest is full of vignettes like this. It is a masterclass in showing the ambient psychological and spiritual terrors that existed at the time. Höss and his wife, Hedwig, are true blue (or brown) Nazis, with full conviction for the larger project of racial purification and German expansionism. What viewers take away most from them, though, is that they are not fanatics — Nazism and the Nazi project for them is one based in pure logic, and which the simple calculus of modernity has led to quite easily. Hedwig views Jews as vermin and yearns for a dejudified, dechristianized, Germano-pagan pastoral promised to those who moved East, because she honestly believes that the goal of the age is for the flourishing of civilized cultures and civilized families. Of course, for her, those cultures and families are the ones best able rationally order themselves, and her husband is nothing if not orderly. Höss himself has similarly bought fully into the larger Nazi project, but he does so seemingly due to a paired fetish for logical management and belief in humans as simply another resource to be managed. He believes the Jews ought to be killed, but they ought to be killed sensibly.
I left my screening of this movie disgusted, and the disgust only grew over time. Something about the way Höss and his comrades took so quickly to their roles as managers — of a household, or a vacation, or a slaughter — stuck with me. I knew that there was something deeper to their love of planning and their dedication to logic, and I felt a sense of familiarity in the gleeful discussions of rationalizing death. This language was not out of date — I have seen these kinds of conversations in the media today. It did finally land with me, though: The Zone of Interest is about the ability to enact an expected ultraviolence understandably. But this then brings the question, what causes the violence to be expected? Was there something in the German mind or political experience that led to it making immediate sense in a way that non-Germans can’t comprehend? This is a comforting thought, and one that you will find to various degrees in lay understandings of the genocide. But if that is the case, why did the Japanese, the Italians, the Polish, and others take up similar acts so easily (and why did Americans and Soviets take up their own forms of ultraviolence)? If the managers of today are simply continuing on the logic of Höss and his colleagues, who was Höss following after? What was it in him — and in us — that made it all make sense?
“’The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down.’” – Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
Fear and Hunger: Termina is a Finnish RPG-maker video game focused around exploration and combat in a fictionalized 20th century Europe. While not my cup of tea from a gameplay perspective, I tried it out recently and was struck by how seriously the game seemed to grapple with the way spirituality and the unspoken agreements within cultures shift as material, “logical” understandings of the world take hold, and what forces may actually be driving these shifts.
Termina posits a world in which gods literally exist, but where their impact and power can change. In this world there are old gods (think of the classical deities, unhuman and responsible for things like nature and sacrifice and lust), ascended gods (who serve as an intermediary step between the old and new, beginning as human but attaining a state of true godhood), and new gods (humans who attempted to step into true godhood but failed). The game understands the gods’ positions and power to be flexible and to shift over time, with devotion and worship of their followers playing a direct role in the influence they have. In Termina’s version of the 1930’s, the influence of the old gods is ostensibly wiped away, as secularism has moved people away from religion into a desire for a world of logic and science and reason. And it is in this space, where the old gods are gone and the new are grappling with a world that doesn’t want them, that an interesting character emerges.
As the new gods begin to experience the same fate as the old, losing the support of humans and being relegated to the realm of myth (even if they were literally real), one of the new gods — a Hitlerian figure named The Yellow King — aims to manufacture a god whose worship and influence would be inescapable by humans. He does this by using the body of a young girl, fused with machinery, to create the Machine God, also known simply as Logic. This being will serve as “The conscience of consensus . . . an avatar for the stream of thought.” The Yellow King’s ultimate aim, which leads to this game’s Holocaust, is the creation of a god connecting the entire world through rational engagement and shared understanding, embracing the believed godlessness of the world under the direction of a god not recognized as such. Ultimately, Logic is taken live, and a new age is founded in a slavery to it — albeit a slavery understood as progress.
Now, the Machine God ending is only one conclusion to the story. Another ending leads to the player confronting Rher, an old god whose followers enact subterfuge, trickery, and violence as a way to expose the world to his understanding of “truth.” It turns out that Rher had been behind the titular Termina festival taking place in the game — a cosmic festival of violence that happens across the world at different times with both willing and unwilling participants. Rher is the one, it turns out, who was influencing those enacting the ultraviolence experienced in this game, up to and potentially including the Yellow King himself. At the conclusion of this confrontation, though, it is discovered that Rher has already left this world. What we faced, and what has been ostensibly overseeing the atrocities we’ve experienced, is simply a trace of the old god. A memory. Rher’s connection to humanity has been severed, yet his devotees continue their work, and the “truth” that this old god had been trying to expose since time immemorial continues to search out new audiences, even in his absence.
Termina’s story becomes most interesting when we take these two endings together. This game’s Hitler was doing atrocities because he wanted to institute pure logic and shared truth, and mechanized slaughter was the most direct path to that end. Yet his work was only made possible through the direct influence of at least one of the old gods who have apparently abandoned us. The old gods may be “dead” insofar as people do not worship them, but it is through their ancient “truths” of violence and domination that a logical society is being formed. War and murder continue to inspire, even when we claim we oppose them. The brutish old gods are not really dead, because we can’t stop reviving them.
Now I admit, this game is not subtle, and these ideas themselves are not entirely new. What has made it stick with me, though, was its underlying premise — that what was born out of the second world war, and what we are living in now, is not a godless age, and not even something entirely new. Instead, a new age has been built on a deification of the same understandable brutality that birthed modernity. And this new age — of reason and peace and rationality — fiercely defends its old gods. Everyone’s an atheist now, but how quickly they return to worship and sacrifice.
“’War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.'” – Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
The Zone of Interest and Fear and Hunger: Termina are obviously quite different, but they share a through line with what we see in history and art and any discussion of humans at a mass scale. There is a fascination with violence out of a desire to perfect something apparently intrinsic to us. Humans are driven towards order, and humans are driven towards violence, and these truths lead to the unfortunate reality of our cultures constantly trying to find new and improved ways to order the violence that comes so naturally to us. We don’t want to do war, but we are sure to be ready to serve it.
Which brings me back to the wars of today and the apparent return of the 20th century battlefield. Did we learn nothing from the Holocaust, Vietnam, and the ethnic wars of central Africa? What did all these bodies teach us?
I would argue that what we are seeing today is the lesson of the incredible violence wrought by war in the 1900’s. Some 80 million people were killed in World War II, with 11 million of those being killed directly through the Holocaust. Millions died in Liberia, Rwanda, the Congo, Nigeria, Eretria, and others. 1.5 million died in Indonesia, 3 million in Vietnam, and almost as many in Korea. And out of all of this murder was born what modern philosophers and dignitaries will remind us is an incredibly safe world – the safest we’ve ever known, in fact. Yes, over 3% of the world’s population may have perished in the blood-letting of the 1930’s and 1940’s — but at least the Nazi scientists and American engineers and Japanese doctors helped usher us into the second half of the 20th century with a new vigor for technological and societal progress. Millions may be on the brink of war-induced starvation in African and the Middle East, but we now have entire countries that work like startups and aim to solve the real problems we face. We are truly living in a blessed time.
And it is through these blessings that we are finally able to truly master what we have been trying to tame for so long. The 20th century taught us how efficient war could be, and showed us the wonders that could come out of it if done in a properly understandable way. This is no longer the old war of religion or ethnicity – only the primitive nations and armies still do that. No, this is the war that we have always been striving for. The mass human sacrifice that was World War II has shown us that we don’t need religion to give up offerings. Free from the illogic of religion and pre-liberal ideas of the soul and duty and responsibility to man, we can finally offer up service to the god we’ve always returned to. We’ve been practicing this for millennia, and it seems we are finally ready.
Jitter 