Nazi Self-Perceived Victimhood in 'The Zone of Interest'

A short reflection having read Sam Kriss's remarkable 'Against the brave'

Sam Kriss is a brilliant writer who regularly gets under my skin as a reader. This time he has done so productively. I seriously recommend reading his recent article ‘Against the brave’ and then sitting with it.

His moral argument is expressed most succinctly in this passage:

“Do not, under any circumstances, get too attached to your identity as a victim. Do not assume that everything you do is brave. Whatever happens, the victim you should be thinking about is not you; the victim is the person you victimise.”

He describes this as the most important mitzvah in the Torah.

The line of dialogue that impacted me most in Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2024) is not one I have seen mentioned elsewhere. Rudolf Höss, whose beautiful house and garden borders Auschwitz – where he is commandant – is addressing his wife and family. “The life we enjoy”, he tells his family, “is very much worth the sacrifice”.

Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller) in The Zone of Interest

The dramatic irony here is obvious – what are the inconvenient, bourgeois sacrifices of the Höss family compared to the sacrificed lives of over a million victims at Auschwitz? However, I would argue that the moral horror of the line that is that to the Höss family, their bourgeois inconveniences are more important because they are their sacrifices.

It is not just that the Nazis didn’t see themselves as the bad guys (as per the famous Mitchell and Webb sketch) – they saw themselves as history’s self-righteous victims.

Laurie Penny made this observation about male nerds a decade back in an article called ‘On Nerd Entitlement’. Will Lloyd made this point a week ago about the British in ‘The prime minister for victims’.

i.e. No wonder male nerds sexually harass and objectify women in real-life and in media from The Revenge of The Nerds (1984) to The Big Bang Theory (2007–)…

No wonder the British voted for Brexit and love Princess Diana…

We/They identify as victims!

This is the same critique those on the alt-right and the dirtbag left make of woke politics and victimhood culture and they almost always end up in the same place. Actually it’s the white men who are victimised by victimhood culture! It turns out after all that it was the cancelled who were the true victims of cancel culture! etc.

The chessboard is flipped but the terms of engagement remain the same.

One might argue that the empathetic thing to do is to recognise that the male nerd and the attractive girl he objectifies are both victims (of patriarchy/ gendered expectations/ media norms etc.)

This can be helpful… when you learn that a white nationalist was beaten by their father, it does help you understand where their hateful ideology might have come from.

The radical moral intervention Sam Kriss makes is arguing that healing (on a national level, though the same might be argued individually) cannot be found in recognising shared victimhood, but through a shared recognition of having victimised others.

I think this is close to what Sufjan Stevens was getting at when he sang about serial killer John Wayne Gacy Jr. “And in my best behavior/ I am really just like him/ Look beneath the floor boards/ For the secrets I have hid”. Stevens – as a Christian – makes a mistake in these lines by characterising shame (and the resulting repression) as not just that which unites his self with Gacy’s, but something that should be overcome (hugely understandable from someone who had to hide his homosexuality due to his religious upbringing).

By contrast, Kriss writes, “Shame is not a punishment. It might not be what you deserve, but it’s what you need”. This is another difficult sentiment to get one’s head around because we are so used to thinking of shame through the lens of deservingness i.e. Rudolf and Hedwig Höss deserved to feel shame i.e. They were monsters because they were shameless.

The Zone of Interest challenges us not to dismiss Rudolf and Hedwig Höss as comfortable monsters, but to look at ourselves with a greater degree of self-awareness, recognising that we might not be the innocent victims that we self-righteously see ourselves as being. When faced with what is being done in Gaza, shame is appropriate, necessary and needed. However, we must not wallow in that shame lest we start to feel sorry for ourselves. The challenge is to look our shame in the eyes, bow our heads, while still not looking away.