{"id":1591228,"date":"2024-04-05T05:36:43","date_gmt":"2024-04-05T05:36:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/?p=318015"},"modified":"2024-04-05T05:36:43","modified_gmt":"2024-04-05T05:36:43","slug":"death-camp-the-holocaust-hangmans-humor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2024\/04\/05\/death-camp-the-holocaust-hangmans-humor\/","title":{"rendered":"Death Camp: The Holocaust Hangman\u2019s Humor"},"content":{"rendered":"\"\"<\/a>\n
\"\"

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair<\/p><\/div>\n

So, there we are a little bulb of life and light all lit up in the Christmas night, engulfed by darkness all around us, full of manufactured hope and questing for the gift-wrapped meaning that comes with faith and long suffering, singing\u00a0O Tannenbaum<\/em>\u00a0once per year, all helio- and ego-centric.\u00a0\u00a0Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy<\/a>\u00a0streaming from Spotify. Then the morning kicks you in the head, as Rod Stewart would say, and at the door stoop is a science magazine that tells you there may be a billion other Earths (other Tannenbaums) \u201cin our galaxy alone.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0There may be a billion galaxies in our universe, one of many universes we\u2019re told by the eggheads.\u00a0\u00a0Life is rife, they crow, but we volk vant purpose, teleology, a sign that Kant was not just categorically crazy.\u00a0\u00a0Voltaire.\u00a0Candide<\/em>. If God did not exist, then it would be necessary to create one. For monsters are everywhere.<\/p>\n

In the West, our own Origin story, shared by the Abrahamic religions, has us believing zat God was a miserable prick we won\u2019t miss now that Nietzsche popped two in the back of his skull.\u00a0\u00a0The proud and the loud Satan was His favorite angel. but he\u00a0was cast out of Heaven because he refused to bow before the newly created\u00a0Adam<\/a>\u00a0and incites humans to sin by infecting their minds with\u00a0wasw\u0101s<\/em>\u00a0(\u2018evil suggestions\u2019), which sounds an awful lot like Bill\u00a0Clinton\u2019s\u00a0<\/a>is-is<\/em><\/a>, when you think about it.\u00a0\u00a0Satan’s suggestions to Eve led to her eating from the sexual knowledge tree, getting herself preggers by Satan, cuckolding the sleeping Adam, and producing the first human born, Cain. If you are keeping score of such things, recall that Cain was a murderer. That\u2019s what we trace back to. In the Vest. Lest we forget.<\/p>\n

We really are quite mad. Ve komm up mit the craziest theories of why we are here und vie we are \u201csmarter than the average bear,\u201d to quote the former manager of the Yankees, who had an epic meltdown in 2004, losing to the BoSox, stupidly taunting Pedro Martinez with \u201cWho\u2019s your Daddy?\u201d und having A Rod swat, like a sissy, at the ball.\u00a0\u00a0Ze Nazis hat der \u2018cosmic ice theory\u2019. Was ist das? Hier:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cThe cosmic-ice theory\u2026holds that the earth was created when a frozen comet the size of Jupiter collided with the sun. During the trillennia of winter that followed, the first Aryans were cautiously moulded and formed. Thus, Onkel, only the inferior races are descended from the great apes. The Nordic peoples were cryogenically preserved from the dawn of terrestrial time \u2013 on the lost continent of Atlantis.\u00a0\u00a0[Amis,\u00a0The Zone of Interest<\/em>, p. 224]\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

We really are quite mad.<\/p>\n

And then it gets tricky when we consider this appeal to racial superiority.\u00a0\u00a0Zese Nazis.\u00a0\u00a0Trickier still when we are forced to consider that the Jews make a similar claim ven they anoint themselves the Chosen People. Then we begin to get a West Side Story vibe (vich was vitten by a Jew, Bernstein, who should have won the Oscar this year).\u00a0\u00a0Supposedly, God said to the Israelites that the covenant of chosenness was dependent on their accepting the Mosaic Decalogue, which begin, \u201cThou shalt not kill.\u201d Oy veh.\u00a0\u00a0How do today\u2019s Israelites get around this failing as they raise Cain in Gaza?\u00a0\u00a0Or raze Gaze mit Cain.<\/p>\n

Dunno. It\u2019s a toughy. I love Jews, especially American Jews, and Saul Bellow most of all, so let\u2019s go with the Israelites\u00a0introjected\u00a0<\/em>(Freud\u2019s term, and he was a Jew) the Nazi cosmic- ice theory and see themselves now as the Golem Heights.\u00a0\u00a0This introjection raises another question that only Jewish prophets could answer: If dey hate Die Nazis zo much, dann how komm circumcision makes the peenie look like a teeny German helmet, nicht? Is this all some kind of Hegelian Master-Slave dialectic — thesis and antithesis working its way toward synthesis, while the rest of us watch helplessly? Oy. Und\u00a0Ja vohl!<\/em><\/p>\n

Crazy comes at me as I consider how to respond to the 2024 Oscar-winning film (Best International Feature Film),\u00a0The Zone of Interest<\/em>, written and directed by Jonathan Glazer. The credits allude to Martin Amis as co-writer, but his presence in the film is more of an inspiration than a meaningful interpretation of his novel by the same name. IMDB succinctly sums up the storyline: \u201cAuschwitz commandant Rudolf H\u00f6ss and his wife Hedwig strive to build a dream life for their family in a house and garden beside the camp.\u201d Glazer derives from Amis, who, in turn, acknowledges dozens of sources for his account of the \u2018true\u2019 story. Glazer\u2019s film is listed on IMDB as drama, history, and war. But you could not get away with calling Amis\u2019s novel any of those, without adding black comedy, provided by the sadistic tormentors.<\/p>\n

The Zone of Interest<\/em>\u00a0begins and ends with black screens with eerie music playing. Glazer opted to not indulge in camp.\u00a0\u00a0Instead, the film comes across as cinema verite. He wants the viewer to experience the clear dissociation of the humans (sick) living with edenic disregard next to Auschwitz, from which occasional muffled screams, shouts and gunshots are heard. The film could be from a home camera.\u00a0\u00a0But there is immediately something bizarre about the environment.\u00a0Even before the viewer sees the barbed wire walls and towers. The long narrow yard has the feel of an artificial environment. There is a pool where children quietly swim and around which adults silently lounge, perhaps reading\u00a0Die Sturmer<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(\u201can artist\u2019s impression of (as it might be) Albert Einstein rutting against a somnolent Shirley Temple\u2026\u201d -Amis, TZOI, p. 235)<\/p>\n

And much of the yard is a flower garden. Then, suddenly, at one point, the camera follows a prisoner gardener who comes across a patch of ash presumably fallen from the chimneys next door, which he then incorporates into the flower beds. The flowers from then appear sinister, as when you start noticing\u00a0the faces erupting from the orchids<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0The Little Shop Horrors\u00a0<\/em>(1960). A disturbed mind has me imagining a floral garden with five million faces — I mean, six. Who are these fuckers?\u00a0\u00a0Why, they must be Hannah Arendt\u2019s banality-of-evil fuckers. And the constant gardener must be making happy lemonade out of the bitter lemons that fell from the sky.<\/p>\n

This \u201czone of interest\u201d is, of course, the main actor.\u00a0\u00a0Auschwitz, the death camp, is the co-star. The film lists the following as stars: Christian Friedel as Rudolf H\u00f6ss, Sandra H\u00fcller as Hedwig H\u00f6ss, and Johann Karthaus as Claus H\u00f6ss.\u00a0\u00a0But they are mere props, it seems, for the uncanny space possessed by Death itself. Everything is haunted or possessed by the devil’s work.\u00a0\u00a0Daily banality goes on: In an opening scene, Hedwig calls all the prisoner help into the dining room and lays open a bag of silken undies taken from Auschwitz women and has them rummage for their size, \u201cone each, please.\u201d Hedwig is herself gifted a fur coat. There is lavish excitement over jewels, a diamond found in the toothpaste! (\u201cHow clever do you have to be?\u201d exclaims a friend of Hedwig.) Meanwhile, the menfolk, often consisting of SS officers, sit around the dining room discussing future plans for the camp:<\/p>\n

\n

SANDER:<\/strong>\u00a0The 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.<\/p>\n

RUDOLF :<\/strong>\u00a0In how long?<\/p>\n

SANDER:<\/strong>\u00a0Seven hours. Four to five hundred at once.<\/p>\n

PRUFER:<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0Closer to five hundred.<\/p>\n

SANDER:<\/strong>\u00a0(points)\u00a0\u00a0So, once that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Easy peasy.\u00a0\u00a0No one queasy.\u00a0\u00a0The commandant celebrates his birthday, mirth is had all around. The commandant reads \u201cHansel and Gretel\u201d to his sleepy children. And so it goes. The only dramatic tension comes when Rudolf is informed that he may be transferred and is upset by this news, not wanting to leave his beloved home and garden and family, not having finished his work at Auschwitz. Banality up the yin-yang. Director Glazer clearly feels such envisioning of what the master race gets up to on any given work day is sufficient to horrify.<\/p>\n

This is in sharp contrast to how Martin Amis handles events in his novel,\u00a0The Zone of Interest<\/em>. Black humor written by a master stylist who has come under the influence of such writers as Kurt Vonnegut, Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabakov, and John Updike. Absurdity, Alienation, Comic Derision, and Carnality.\u00a0\u00a0Updike probably seems strange to include here until you remember his\u00a0Rabbit<\/em>\u00a0books and the carnal perceptions of \u201cA&P<\/a>.\u201d Indeed, Amis\u2019s novel is, at time, fiendishly funny, outrageously visceral. Amis chooses to tell the same tale from the points of view of three narrators: Angelus Thomsen, the officer; Paul Doll, the commandant; and Szmul Zacharias, a Jewish Sonderkommando. Thomsen\u2019s Zone of Interest is carnal, is the commandant\u2019s wife, Hannah Doll (Hedwig), is often full of erotic erudition that reminds one of the best lines from\u00a0Lolita<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cShe opened the half-glass door and, not quite entering, leaned over and rummaged in a flowerpot on a low shelf . . . To tell the truth, in my amatory transactions I hadn\u2019t had a decent thought in my head for seven or eight years (earlier, I was something of a romantic. But I let that go). And as I watched Hannah curve her body forward, with her tensed rump and one mighty leg thrown up and out behind her for balance, I said to myself: This would be a\u00a0big<\/em>\u00a0fuck. A\u00a0big<\/em>\u00a0fuck: that was what I said to myself.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Thomsen\u2019s zone of interest is erogenous, and he hates the commandant who he refers to as The Old Boozer.\u00a0\u00a0Thomsen has similar eyes for all the women, really, and his imagination and expression are generous in exposition. You either laugh or deal with a shameful erection — you know, like when you were in college and used to read\u00a0Penthouse<\/em>\u2019s Letters to the Editor.<\/p>\n

Similarly, Szmul Zacharias, the Jewish Sonderkommando, is troubled — with himself, with the price of endurance and survival. Amis has him thinking:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cOnce upon a time there was a king, and the king commissioned his favorite wizard to create a magic mirror. This mirror didn\u2019t show you your reflection. It showed you your soul \u2013 it showed you who you really were. The wizard couldn\u2019t look at it without turning away. The king couldn\u2019t look at it. The courtiers couldn\u2019t look at it. A chestful of treasure was offered to any citizen in this peaceful land who could look at it for sixty seconds without turning away. And no one could. I find that the KZ is that mirror. The KZ is that mirror, but with one difference. You can\u2019t turn away.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Ja wohl. We are all crazy as Joseph Heller seems to propose in\u00a0Catch-22<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Arguably, Amis goes waaaaay over the top, deeply moved and troubled by human nature and the human project itself.\u00a0\u00a0He sees the evidence of our \u2018sinning\u2019 piling up:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cBeetling heaps of rucksacks, kitbags, holdalls, cases and trunks (these last adorned with enticing labels of travel \u2013 redolent of frontier posts, misty cities), like a vast bonfire awaiting the torch. A stack of blankets as high as a three-storey building: no princess, be she never so delicate, would feel a pea beneath twenty, thirty thousand thicknesses. And all around fat hillocks of pots and pans, of hairbrushes, shirts, coats, dresses, handkerchiefs \u2013 also watches, spectacles, and all kinds of prostheses, wigs, dentures, deaf-aids, surgical boots, spinal supports. The eye came last to the mound of children\u2019s shoes, and the sprawling mountain of prams, some of them just wooden troughs on wheels, some of them all curve and contour, carriages for little dukes, little duchesses.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Sweet Jesus! How will we ever find our way back to the Garden with this burden of conscience?<\/p>\n

And, in the end, the Zone of Interest for Amis is the Question of why the Nazis — nay, the Germans — did it?\u00a0\u00a0Why?\u00a0Thomsen thinks, soberly in the end:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cYes, I was thinking, how did \u2018a sleepy country of poets and dreamers\u2019, and the most highly educated nation the earth had ever seen, how did it yield to such wild, such fantastic disgrace? What made its people, men and women, consent to having their souls raped \u2013 and raped by a eunuch (Grofaz: the virgin Priapus, the teetotal Dionysus, the vegetarian Tyrannosaurus rex)? Where did it come from, the need for such a methodical, such a pedantic, and such a literal exploration of the bestial? I of course didn\u2019t know, and neither did\u2026anyone in my sight, families, limping veterans, courting couples, groups of very young and very drunken GIs (all that strong, cheap, and delicious Lowenbrau), tin-rattlers collecting for causes, black-clad widows, a moving, threading line of boy scouts, and sellers of vegetables, sellers of fruit . . .\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Somewhere the answer seems to include what you already knew and have failed to include in the calculus of Mankind\u2019s endeavor: Cain, the first born, was a murderer. Amis is given a writing credit for the film, but the film has no sign of Amis\u2019s outrage and sardonic \u2018critique\u2019 of the Project. For Glazer to have truly honored Amis\u2019s take would have required a considerably expanded and far more controversial film, maybe ala\u00a0Catch-22<\/em>, which some might argue is actually a postmodern tragedy, But it might have been a more effective movie had it been over-the-top.<\/p>\n

A few days ago,\u00a0The Guardian<\/em>\u00a0ran an interview with one of Rudolph H\u00f6ss\u2019s daughters, Brigitte (played by Nele Ahrensmeier in the film). She talks of how wonderful Mom and Dad were, with no real sign of acknowledging the contribution of Papa\u2019s eager assault on humanity. Thomas Harding, the interviewer, tells us:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cNext to me stood a scraggy Christmas tree. From its branches hung homemade ornaments that decades before Brigitte had brought from Germany. \u201cMutti made many of those,\u201d she told me with a fond smile.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And of her father she tells Harding,<\/p>\n

\n

\u2018\u201cHe was a wonderful dad,\u201d she said. \u201cOn Sundays he smoked a cigar through the whole house. We had breakfast, lunch or dinner, like a nice family.\u201d She then added: \u201cWe didn\u2019t even know what his work was really.\u201d\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Never Forget and Never Remember. The key word is Never.<\/p>\n

The Zone of Interest<\/em>\u00a0won an Oscar for Best International Feature Film. Jonathan Glazer accepted the trophy and made a speech.\u00a0\u00a0He said, in part,<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cOur film shows where dehumanization leads, at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present. 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This statement became controversial, in that it equates Holocaust dehumanization with the atrocities taking place in Gaza. Glazer suggests that Netanyahu\u2019s decision to raze Gaza and puts its people on the brink of mass starvation — in retaliation for the horrific events of October 7 — has marked Jews worldwide as monsters and made the remembrance of the events of the Holocaust seem hypocritical.\u00a0\u00a0(Full speech transcript and analysis here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

This is a strong view, but many American Jews, for instance, all of whom are Israeli citizens in principle (Israel is seen as the guaranteed historical homeland of Jews), don\u2019t see Israel\u2019s eye-for-an-eye action as necessary, let alone justifiable.\u00a0\u00a0In some ways, it reminds one of the controversy that erupted after the censoring of the Israeli documentary\u00a0The Gatekeepers\u00a0<\/em>(2012), which had cut a section of the film where former Shin Bet officers discussed how Zionist zealots had planned on\u00a0blowing up the Dome of the Rock<\/a>\u00a0for the express purpose of initiating Armageddon (and ending the world).\u00a0\u00a0Reichstag?<\/p>\n

While perhaps a lesser event, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has recently alluded to the Israeli government\u2019s failure to heed American warning about Hamas activities just prior to the October 7 massacre and hostage-taking.\u00a0\u00a0In\u00a0his Substack<\/a>\u00a0post of April 3, \u201cWhat Did We Know and When Did We Know It?\u201d, Hersh notes,<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cIsrael\u2019s failure to anticipate the October 7 Hamas assault is the most dramatic example of neglecting to listen to and take account of a series of Duty to Warn messages from the American intelligence community, whose satellites watched and listened as Hamas instructors trained cadres how to breach the Israeli border in six places and trained others to fly over the border fence in crude paragliders. These activities grew more intense early last fall.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A cynic might see such intentional ignorance as a Dome of the Rock event. As, surely, endless needs for retaliation will now follow; you can already hear the ululations already beginning — if you lean your head out far enough from Desolation Row.<\/p>\n

The Zone of Interest<\/em>\u00a0is a good movie, but the Martin Amis book is a better engagement. I recommend both. Or one could eschew both and look at Amis\u2019s sources for his drawing.\u00a0\u00a0He lists dozens of reads, including: Yehuda Bauer, Raul Hilberg, Norman Cohn, Alan Bullock, H. R. Trevor Roper, Hannah Arendt, Lucy S. Dawidowicz, Martin Gilbert, Ian Kershaw, Joachim C. Fest, Saul Friedl\u00e4nder, Richard J. Evans, Richard Overy, Gitta Sereny, Christopher R. Browning, Michael Burleigh, Mark Mazower, and Timothy Snyder, among many others. [For his full exhaustive list see pages 266-267 of the novel.]<\/p>\n

The post Death Camp: The Holocaust Hangman\u2019s Humor<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, there we are a little bulb of life and light all lit up in the Christmas night, engulfed by darkness all around us, full of manufactured hope and questing for the gift-wrapped meaning that comes with faith and long suffering, singing\u00a0O Tannenbaum\u00a0once per year, all helio- and ego-centric.\u00a0\u00a0Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy\u00a0streaming from More<\/a><\/p>\n

The post Death Camp: The Holocaust Hangman\u2019s Humor<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":80,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1591228"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/80"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1591228"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1591228\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1591229,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1591228\/revisions\/1591229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1591228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1591228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1591228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}