In the memories of some survivors of the Nazi camps there remains the feeling of never having seen a bird flying over the camp.
This belief motivated one of my artistic works,
Je vous offre les oiseaux / I offer you the birds,
which was inaugurated in 2017. The entire installation, from the title to the content, indicates the mismatch between the lived experience and the transmitted experience, to At the same time, he wants to achieve something that can only be achieved through art: offer the songs of birds to those who have never heard them.
In the course of my research I came across the name of Günter Niethammer, a German ornithologist who held a prestigious position in Berlin after the war.
In 1940 he joined the Waffen-SS and asked to be assigned to Auschwitz, where he remained until 1942;
that is, when the concentration camp was already functioning as an extermination camp.
Thanks to Rudolf Höss, camp commander, Niethammer was able to devote himself to bird watching in the so-called zone of interest, a sinister name corresponding to an area of about 40 square kilometers made up of concentration camps and industries that, like IG Farben, or Siemens, used deportees as slave labor.
The corroborated existence of birds in Auschwitz does not detract from the survivors' feeling of their absence.
On the contrary, the distorted sensory memory has great value as a subjective experience: while Niethammer could dedicate himself to studying the hundreds of birds in the area, the deportees were unable to see them.
The film
The Zone of Interest,
by Jonathan Glazer, Grand Jury Prize at Cannes and recently nominated for five Oscars, begins with a long black and silent sequence interrupted by an exuberant song of birds that gives way to a banal scene of a family enjoying a picnic.
These visual and sound elements constitute the tension that will be the conceptual axis of the entire film: we see and hear according to our position, of power or exclusion.
Politics and perception converge.
And, after this scene, we discover that the family in question lives not far from the place, in a house adjacent to the concentration camp.
The family consists of Rudolf and Edwig Höss and their five children.
Niethammer is not a character in the film, but we know that he stayed in the same place, along with other professionals who work in the area's industrial complex.
Rudolf Höss had arrived at Auschwitz in 1940, a little before Niethammer, with the mandate to organize the annihilation of the Jews of Europe;
that is, to convert the concentration camp where there were Polish, Jewish, German and Gypsy prisoners into an extermination camp for Jews.
Of the 1,100,000 people who perished at Auschwitz, one million were Jews.
We are facing a new aesthetic applied to representations of the Holocaust that avoids the voyeuristic act towards the victim to emphasize the complacent ignorance of the perpetrators.
Primo Levi, in the prologue to the English edition of Rudolf Höss's memoirs, describes the character as a cretin placed at the service of his superiors.
On the other hand, the character that Glazer constructs reveals the stubborn desire for power and a cold anti-Semitic stubbornness facilitated by his adherence to Nazi values, all of which, incidentally, is more in line with the memoirs written by Höss than with the character. fictionalized from the book
The Zone of Interest,
by Martin Amis, which supposedly served as inspiration for the director.
Levi also recognizes Höss's fanaticism, which serves to indicate the danger of being seduced by ideologies based on the notions of “homeland” and “duty.”
This adhesion must undoubtedly be attributed to someone's ability to live feeling in paradise 30 meters from an extermination camp.
In Glazer's film we also do not see what is behind the wall crowned by barbed wire, but we know it, just as Höss and his family knew it, because above the wall you can see the smoke from the chimneys, because you can hear the noise sinister of the crematoriums operating night and day, and because the screams of pain of the victims can be heard.
A risky bet, that of Glazer, who had the will, as he has assured, to show that we are closer “emotionally and politically to the culture of the perpetrator” than we think.
Glazer confronts us, ultimately, with our blindness to history.
Faced with behavior that can also be projected into the present: obscuring atrocious events at the very moment they happen.
We are, I believe, facing a new aesthetic applied to representations of the Holocaust that avoids the voyeuristic act towards the victim to emphasize the voluntary and complacent ignorance of the perpetrators.
A cinema that puts itself at the service of a memorial representation that incites us to explore the possibility of evil not only in the mechanical fulfillment of orders, as has been said and repeated, but in the stubborn will not to see.
Marta Marín-Dòmine
is a writer and director of documentaries and installations, specialized in exile and memory.
She directed the Born Center of Culture and Memory of Barcelona until 2023.
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