Amis and Auschwitz
The last rendezvous I had with Martin Amis was in the summer of 2014. We had met several times over the years and he was always stimulating company. I once asked him what he might do should he give up writing novels. “I could do your job, I suppose,” he said, which was undoubtedly true. On another occasion my wife and I had supper with him in an Edinburgh restaurant. He arrived late and rather well-lubricated from a book signing and proceeded to entertain us and other diners with his eerily accurate and hilarious impressions of Melvyn Bragg, Philip Larkin and Clive James.
In 2014, the ostensible reason for our conversation at the Edinburgh International Book Festival was his latest novel, The Zone of Interest. Its immediate predecessors, Lionel Asbo and The Pregnant Widow, were not ones that I felt did him justice. The Zone of Interest, however, showed Amis at his peerless best.
Too few novelist strive to be novel; that is not something that could ever be said of Amis. Even when he misfired, his aim was to be original, to break new ground, to expand the form. The Zone of Interest is a love story but in no way is it a conventional one. For a start it is set in a Nazi concentration camp - an unnamed Auschwitz. Then there are the lovers: the Camp Commandant, Paul Doll, and his wife Hannah.
Their home is outwith the walls of a hell where unspeakable things happen every day, where Jews are murdered in their tens of thousands. Among those who survive, at least in the short term, are the Sonderkommando. Their job is to dispose of the bodies of the victims of the gas chambers. For Paul Doll, the camp is merely a workplace where targets must be met and discipline maintained; for his wife and children, living in a big house with a walled garden, it is their Eden, albeit one that is regularly engulfed in clouds of human ash.
Richard Ford described The Zone of Interest as “celestially upsetting”. Few readers would disagree. When I learned that it had been the basis of a movie I was ambivalent. I find it hard to read about the Holocaust and harder still to watch re-creations of it on screen. The Zone of Interest likewise makes painful viewing. But its director, Jonathan Glazer, is a model of restraint and at no point, for instance, does he take us into Auschwitz to witness its horrors. Instead it forms the movie’s backdrop. We hear gun fire, screams, the cranking of machinery, the issuing of orders, and we see its walls and the smoke rising from its chimneys.
Glazer’s movie is “loosely based” on Amis’s novel, so loosely, in fact, that in much media coverage there was no mention of the novel. This is unacceptable but all too common. The most obvious difference between the movie and book is the name of the two principal characters. Thus Paul and Hannah Doll are given the names of their real counterparts: Rudolf and Hedwig Höss.
The former ran Auschwitz from May 1940 to November 1943 and again from May 1944 to January 1945. Few of Hitler’s henchmen were more complicit in the killing of Jews. He joined the Nazis in 1922 and a year later was one of the thugs who, on the say-so of Martin Boorman, beat to death a schoolteacher. As a result Höss spent ten years in jail.
After the war, instead of opting for suicide, like the Görings, the Hösses went on the run. They were tracked down by a captain in the British army, Hans Alexander, a German Jew, who found Hedwig first. She told him where to look for her husband and he was arrested, tried and hanged.
In 2013, Thomas Harding, Alexander’s great-nephew, persuaded Brigitte, the Hösses’ daughter, to talk about what life was like living in the lea of the camp. They met again in 2021 when she was 88 years old. An account of these interviews was published in the Guardian on 24 March. Harding is also the author of Hanns and Rudolf (Windmill), which tells of how his great-uncle captured Auschwitz’s former commandant and which I look forward to reading.
Brigitte Hoss told Harding that her first memory was of Auschwitz and described her formative years there in idyllic terms. At the weekend, she said, her father did not need to “work” and could spend time with his family. She said she knew that people who worked in the house and garden came from the camp. “They were always very happy. They called my mother, the Angel of Auschwitz. My mom was just a nice person. Period.”
Was this what Hannah Arendt meant by “the banality of evil”?