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READING MARTIN AMIS’S RECREATION

OF THE PERPETRATOR’S GAZE

IN THE ZONE OF INTEREST

LA RECREACIÓN DE LA MIRADA

DEL PERPETRADOR EN THE ZONE OF INTEREST,

DE MARTIN AMIS

https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.202410052

AÍDA DÍAZ BILD

universidad La Laguna

adbild@ull.edu.es

<https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7543-5872>

Abstract

The Zone of Interest is a historical novel set in Auschwitz in the months from August

1942 to April 1943, and which belongs to the category of perpetrator fiction. This

article centres on the character of Paul Doll, the camp commandant, who represents

the banality of evil and, through whose voice Amis gives the readers a sharp picture

of the abominations committed by the Nazis, while he recounts the causes and

devastating consequences of the perpetrators’ actions. By transforming Doll into a

buffoon, Amis offers a different perspective on the Holocaust and makes the

reader realise that those responsible for the worst crimes were neither monsters nor

exceptional human beings, but normal, vulnerable people who had the fate of

millions of Jews in their hands.

Keywords: The Zone of Interest, Martin Amis, perpetrator, Holocaust, Auschwitz,

buffoon.

Resumen

The Zone of Interest es una novela histórica que transcurre en Auschwitz desde

agosto de 1942 hasta abril de 1943 y que se incluye dentro de la categoría de

“perpetrator fiction”. Este artículo se centra en el personaje de Paul Doll, el

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comandante del campo, que encarna la banalidad del mal y a través de cuya voz

Amis le ofrece al lector una visión nítida de las atrocidades cometidas por los Nazis

y recrea las causas y el efecto devastador de las acciones de los perpetradores. Amis

transforma a Doll en un bufón y ello le permite dar una visión diferente del

Holocausto y hacer que el lector sea consciente de que los responsables de los

peores crímenes no eran seres excepcionales ni monstruos, sino gente normal y

vulnerable que tenía en sus manos el destino de millones de judíos.

Palabras clave: The Zone of Interest, Martin Amis, perpetrador, Holocausto,

Auschwitz, bufón.

1. Introduction

In “The Jewish Tragedy and the Holocaust” Isaac Deutscher states that the great

obstacle to understanding the Holocaust is its uniqueness. He does not believe

that the passage of time will provide a better comprehension of what happened: “It

is rather the fact that we are confronted here by a huge and ominous mystery of

the degeneration of the human character that will forever baffle and terrify

mankind” (1968: 164). Saul Friedländer agrees with Deutscher that, although

knowledge of the Holocaust has increased, there is “no deeper comprehension

than immediately after the war” (1976: 36). In fact, he asserts that, in the case of

the Shoah, we have to abandon our natural tendency to look for some meaning or

interpretation, because “[i]n Walter Benjamin’s terms, we may possibly be facing

an unredeemable past” (Friedländer 1989: 73). In this sense, Friedländer arguably

belongs in the group of writers and scholars who believe that, on a global level,

there is no redemptive message in the Shoah (Langer 1975; Friedländer 1988;

Ozick 1988).

British author Martin Amis echoes these scholars’ words when he admits that,

despite his extensive reading on the Holocaust, “while [he] might have gained in

knowledge, [he] had gained nothing at all in penetration” (2015: 309). Amis

recognises that he has always been amazed and fascinated by the Holocaust’s

exceptionalism (Rosenbaum 2012; Seaman 2014). He is concerned not only with

the magnitude of the event, but also with the inexplicability of the crime and of the

figure of Hitler and the actions of the German people (Seaman 2014). In fact, he

admits that the problem of understanding Hitler bedevilled him until he read

Primo Levi’s statement on the Nazi fanatical hatred of the Jews: “But there is no

rationality in the Nazi hatred: it is a hate that is not in us; it is outside man, it is a

poison fruit sprung from the deadly trunk of Fascism, but it is outside and beyond

Fascism itself. We cannot understand it, but we can and must understand from

where it springs, and we must be on our guard” (Levi 2004: 395-396). Levi’s

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statement was like an epiphany for Amis since it relieved him of the pressure to

understand the Holocaust, and he felt free to write about it again (Rosenbaum

2012).1 As Ron Rosenbaum states, Amis seems to believe that he has a responsibility

as a writer and thinker to deal with the extermination of six million Jews in his

works (2012). This explains why, after the publication of Time’s Arrow (1991), in

2014 Amis returns to the subject of the Holocaust with The Zone of Interest, a

novel set in Auschwitz in the months spanning August 1942 to April 1943.

The Zone of Interest, as Tova Reich has asserted, may be considered as a novel of

written testimonies (2014). The story is told from the point of view of the three

central characters, who Reich interprets as representations of the collaborator,

perpetrator and victim. The collaborator is Angelus Thomsen, a womaniser who

happens to be a nephew of Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary; the

perpetrator is Paul Doll, the “Old Boozer”, the camp commandant and the source

of most of the comedy in the novel;2 and the victim is Szmul, the leader of the

Sonderkommando, the name given to Jewish prisoners forced to do the Nazis’

“dirty work”, that is, to help the Nazi officers deceive the prisoners on arriving at

the camp and dispose of the corpses.3 This article centres on Paul Doll, a ludicrous

figure who personifies Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil and,

through whose voice Amis gives “the reader a stomach-turning awareness of the

abominations the Nazis inflicted on their victims” (Kakutani 2014). By

transforming Doll into a buffoon, Amis achieves what he believes should be the

aim of a writer, which is to change the reader’s habits of perception, so that they

can look at the world with refreshed eyes (Stadlen 2013).

2. The Zone of Interest: A Perpetrator Fiction within a

Historical Novel

Whereas Time’s Arrow is an experimental novel,4 with The Zone of Interest Amis

wanted to deal with the Holocaust in a more realistic way, and this is why he chose

social realism as the genre for the novel (Seaman 2014). Some critics have indeed

described the book as a traditional, realistic, historical novel (Ozick 2014; Preston

2014; Wood 2014), and one which merits praise due to Amis’s thorough research

into the atrocities committed by the Nazis. In fact, in the acknowledgements

section and epilogue at the end of the novel, Amis includes the historical

documentation he used to write the novel and emphasises that he “adhere[d] to

that which happened, in all its horror, its desolation, and its bloody-minded

opacity” (2015: 310). Wynn Wheldon believes that Amis has achieved a great

accomplishment is performing a fundamental task by doing justice to his subject:

“If it only helps to explain to those who at present so promiscuously throw around

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the word ‘genocide’ what that awful word in reality denotes it will have earned the

attention it will certainly receive” (2014). Wheldon’s statement is very revealing,

because Amis eschews what James E. Young considers to be one of the main

problems with what he calls “documentary fiction”. According to Young, although

the writer of Holocaust fiction asserts the factual basis of his work, there is a

danger of trivialising the historical event that is recreated (1988: 201). In addition,

Young establishes an insightful distinction between non-fiction and fiction about

the Holocaust. For him, “[w]here the nonfiction account attempts to retrieve its

authentic connection to events in order to reinforce its documentary authority,

fiction necessarily fabricates its link to events in order to reinforce its documentary

authority” (1988: 211-212). In the case of the literature of atrocity, as Langer

points out, the writer has the “advantage” of dealing with a portion of reality the

audience already knows. Due to this reason, this kind of narrative can never be just

a fiction inasmuch as an author “can never totally conceal the relationship between

the naked body and the covering costume, the actual scars of the Holocaust and

the creative salves that often only intensify pain” (1975: 91).

More specifically, when it comes to Holocaust fiction, The Zone of Interest belongs

to the category of what Robert Eaglestone calls “perpetrator fiction” (2010, 2013,

2017). This literary critic explains that in the last two decades there has been a

boom across Europe and America of works dealing with perpetrators —a trend

that, according to Eaglestone, has a three-fold justification: the growth of historical

research into perpetrators, the ongoing popularity of the historical novel and the

fascination with the question of evil (2017: 48-49). Jenni Adams has also pointed

out that this renewed attention to the figure of the perpetrator in recent Holocaust

literature “forms another key strand of the lifting of prohibitions and taboos within

both literature and criticism” (2014: 251). Erin McGlothlin considers that this

taboo, which until recently shunned or regulated representations of perpetrators,

derives from most literary critics’ belief that Holocaust fiction should focus on the

victims’ suffering and pain (2010: 212) in order to avoid betraying the memory of

the victims (213).5 However, she strongly defends that critics should earnestly and

critically analyse the consciousness of the perpetrators: “If we leave the

representation of their thoughts and motives unexamined, we construct them as

abstract, mythical figures whose actions cannot be accounted for (even and

particularly if their thoughts and actions remain, in their extremity, essentially

incomprehensible to us)” (214).6

The aforementioned statement by McGlothlin is highly significant because those

scholars, who in recent years have argued in favour of the need to explore

perpetrator trauma, have argued that such research would contribute to destroying

the perception of “perpetrators as cartoonish monsters by exposing their

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ordinariness and humanity” (Mohamed 2015: 1157). Certainly, as Stef Craps and

his co-authors point out, some believe that by focusing on the emotional and

psychological response of perpetrators to events, there is a danger of identifying

the perpetrator with the victim and excusing his or her crimes (2015: 920).

Obviously, those interested in perpetrator trauma do not only reject this possibility,

but emphasise that the unease that readers experience when contemplating the

psychological scars of the perpetrators may derive from “the uncomfortable and

challenging nature of the self-scrutiny that this entails” (Vice 2013: 16), revealing

our potential for evil (Craps, Cheyette and Gibbs 2015: 920). Certainly, whereas

Time’s Arrow also belongs in the category of perpetrator trauma narrative,7 the

main aim of The Zone of Interest is to show how ordinary people are capable of the

worst atrocities.

3. Paul Doll: The Perpetrator’s Gaze through the Figure

of the Buffoon

In The Zone of Interest, Szmul, Thomsen and Doll conclude that the concentration

camp shows your soul, revealing who you really are. In Doll’s words, “it’s true

what they say, here in the KL: No one knows themselves. Who are you? You don’t

know. Then you come to the Zone of Interest, and it tells you who you are” (Amis

2014: 68). Amis is very much concerned with the fact that, as survivors have

constantly asserted, you discover who you really are when you find yourself in

extreme circumstances: “In normal, peaceful, civilized life you are aware of ten per

cent of your resources and your deeper personality, but in an atrocity producing

context you find out amazing things about yourself, both the perpetrators and the

victims” (Seaman 2014). In fact, in an insightful article Christopher R. Browning

makes a statement that reinforces Amis’s thesis: “The men who carried out these

massacres, like those who refused or evaded, were human beings. I must recognize

that in such a situation I could have been either a killer or an evader —both were

human— if I want to understand and explain the behaviour of both as best as I

can” (1992: 36).

Actually, according to Arendt, the case of Eichmann confronted the judges with

the question of how long it takes an average person to overcome their repugnance

toward crime and how they behave on reaching this point (2006: 93). Indeed, half

a dozen psychiatrists certified that Eichmann was “normal” (25) and, for Arendt,

this normality was more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, because it

showed that Eichmann and many others were neither monsters nor perverted or

sadistic (276).8 Moreover, what the trial showed was that Eichmann and those

who were like him represented the banality of evil since they were incapable of

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thinking or at least thinking from the standpoint of somebody else (49). It was

precisely this banality —this sheer thoughtlessness— that predisposed Eichmann

to become one of the worst criminals of the period (288). The terrible lesson that

was learnt in Jerusalem, where the trial took place, was that “such remoteness from

reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts

taken together” (288). In the same line, Amis argues that we must accept the fact

that those who implemented the Final Solution were not a gang of psychopaths

“getting together saying, let’s kill a lot of people, let’s have an orgy of violence”,

but a group of people who thought they were doing something good in the name

of Good (Wachtel 1996: 45).

Nearly every page of The Zone of Interest reports some horror, which is not the

figment of Amis’s imagination, but the reflection of a cruel reality, and it is in this

portrayal of the enormity of the Holocaust that Doll’s consciousness plays a major

role. According to most critics, Doll is an admirable creation. Michael Hofmann

has argued that Doll is “really the only reason for reading the book” (2014: 3) and

Alex Preston maintains that “the sections in his voice are the novel’s bravura

performances” (2014). For his part, Wheldon believes that the “best realized is

Doll, in whose company the novel is most enjoyable” (2014), and Reich has

asserted that the commandant is “a masterful comic performance” (2014). Doll

has also been described as “a wickedly funny Monty Python figure” (Oates 2014),

a buffoon (Oates 2014; Reich 2014), an oaf, a clown. Incidentally, “clown” is the

word that Arendt uses to describe Adolf Eichmann. She argues that the German

transcription of the taped police examination constitutes a gold mine for a

psychologist, “provided he is wise enough to understand that the horrible can be

not only ludicrous but outright funny” (2006: 48). She believes that during the

trial the judges became aware of his “worst clowneries” but decided to ignore

them, because it would have been hard to sustain that someone like him had

caused so much harm (2006: 54). This is the terrible reality that Amis portrays

through the ridiculous character of Doll.

It is no surprise that the conception of this Nazi perpetrator as a comic figure in

Amis’s work may be met with objection. Ozick, who has been very critical of the

character of Doll, has asserted that “[h]istory as comedy has a parallel effect: it

trivializes the unconscionable. The blood the clown spills is always ketchup”

(2014). She also claims that no genre is more liberated from the obligation to be

truthful to history than comedy. This viewpoint, however, is questionable because,

as some critics have proved in the last few years, comedy can deal with the

Holocaust respectfully while offering a different perspective that does not belittle

its enormity. Des Pres believes that comedy has become essential when coping

with such a horrifying event as the Holocaust, because “humour counts most in

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precisely those situations where most decisive remedies fail” (1991: 218). Mark

Cory endorses De Pres’s argument when he emphasises that, as a literary device,

humour has “functioned aesthetically to make the unfathomable accessible to the

minds and emotions of the reading public” (1995: 39). Casey Haskins reaches the

same conclusion in his analysis of Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful when he

argues that humour is often the only possible response to a reality before which

ordinary representational strategies fail (2001: 380). Life is Beautiful has certainly

attracted the attention of those scholars concerned with the Holocaust and its

representation through comedy. Most of them agree with Haskins that the film, far

from trivialising the Shoah, proves that comedy can provide a different perspective

without cheapening its subject. Thus, Daniel Kotzin claims that in the film “[l]

aughter is nearly irresistible but it is earned without minimizing the horror of the

camp” (1998: 4), while Maurizio Viano argues that comedy can be an effective

tool for the dissemination of the memory of the Holocaust (1999: 33).

In keeping with this, Amis himself has argued that humour should have no

limits, although he recognises that a subject such as the Holocaust carries with it

certain responsibilities, a kind of decorum that the writer must bear in mind (in

Mars 2015). As Preston has argued, humour in The Zone of Interest is more

restrained than in other works by Amis and is always directed towards the ethical

ends of the novel (2014). Paul Doll is the main source of comedy in the novel

and, by approaching the terrible events of the Holocaust from the point of view

of a buffoon, Amis succeeds in creating a terrifying picture of the cruelty and

violence of the “ordinary men” who committed mass murder. The first step in

the whole process of extermination was the confinement of Jews in ghettos,

where many of them died, either of starvation or disease (Gill 2018: 38).

However, in Amis’s novel Doll gives us his own view of life in the ghettos while

blaming the Jews themselves for living in such dramatic conditions, as a way to

dehumanise them:

(As a loving father, I found it particularly hard to stomach their vicious neglect of the

semi-naked children who howl, beg, sing, moan, and tremble, yellow-faced, like tiny

lepers.) In Warsaw there are a dozen new cases of typhus every week, and of the ½ a

million Jews 5-6,000 die every month, such is the apathy, the degeneracy, and, to be

quite frank about it, the want of even the rudiments of self-respect. (Amis 2015:

110)

This biased description of the ghettos offers readers a devastating picture of this

Nazi perpetrator, particularly his lack of empathy, his sense of racial superiority, his

fanaticism, as well as his blindness to the fact that it is the Nazi apparatus that has

led the Jews to this terrible predicament. Nonetheless, the implication that the

Jews are responsible for their subhuman living conditions, for their “degeneracy”,

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which can be extracted from Doll’s words, rather reveals the prejudices that Nazi

officials like Doll had about them.

The second step for many Jews after the harsh experience of the ghetto involved

being transported to a concentration camp by train. Here Amis makes the reader

acquainted with what he calls “the mercenary aspect” (in Rosenbaum 2012) when

he refers to these trips toward death: “how incredibly avaricious the whole

operation was. The way they made the Jews pay for their tickets in the railway cars

to the death camps. Yeah, and the rates for a third-class ticket, one way. And half

price for children” (in Rosenbaum 2012). Precisely, in the novel one of the Nazi

characters, Boris, expresses how bizarre the whole situation surrounding the train

tickets is: “‘You know they pay for their own tickets? They pay their own way here,

Golo. I don’t know how it went with those Parisians, but the norm is […]’. ‘…But

this —this is fucking ridiculous” (Amis 2015: 41-42). As a Nazi, Boris understands

the rationale behind many of the norms implemented by the Third Reich, but, like

Amis, he finds it absolutely ridiculous that the victims have to pay for their tickets

to Auschwitz. In fact, in the above conversation Boris refers to a train that has just

arrived from Paris with new prisoners. Doll and Professor Zulz, the head doctor,

do not hesitate to mock the French is spite of the ordeal they are about to go

through:

“Three classes? Well, you know the French. They do everything in style.”

“Too true, Professor,” I rejoined. “Even the way they hoist the white flag has a

certain —a certain je ne sais quoi. Not so?”

The good doctor chuckled heartily and said, ‘Damn you, Paul. Touché, my

Kommandant.’

Oh yes, we bantered and smiled in the collegial fashion […]. (Amis 2015: 22)

The fact that Doll and his colleagues can make these jokes when dealing with the

painful fate of the prisoners is quite revealing, because, as Andrea Reiter explains,

many reports by survivors testify to the sadistic “humour” of the SS despite the

eventual doom awaiting the butt of the joke (2005: 127). Actually, throughout

the novel Doll prides himself on his sense of humour, like when he jokes about the

tattoo on a prisoner’s arm: “And is that your phone number? Just joking” (Amis

2015: 127). He even considers himself blessed with “a sense of humour” (111)

when he makes fun of a Jewish family at a funeral service in the Jewish cemetery of

Warsaw. Doll shows again his cruel humour when he is confronted by a French

woman who has just arrived at Auschwitz:

“No service at all. Even in 1st class!”

“Even in 1st class? An outrage.”

“All we had were the cold cuts we’d brought with us. And we almost ran out of

mineral water!”

“Monstrous.”

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“…Why are you laughing? You laugh. Why are you laughing?”

“Step back, Madam, if you would,” I spluttered. “Senior Supervisor Grese!” (24)

The reference to Ilse Grese is highly relevant because she was Senior SS Superior

at Auschwitz and killed an average of thirty people a day —hence her nickname,

“the Hyena of Auschwitz”. She was in charge of selecting women for the gas

chamber, which explains why Doll calls her to deal with the French woman “in the

appropriate manner” (25), a euphemism for her use of the most sadistic methods,

such as sicking dogs on inmates. Of course, Doll “respects” her: “Grese is admirably

firm with recalcitrant females” (21). As Rees explains in his memoir, Rudolf Höss,

the SS officer and commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, records that

for mass murder to be successful it was vital to conduct the whole process in an

atmosphere of great calm, which is why it was important to keep an eye on those

individuals who could cause trouble for the Nazis on their way to the gas chamber

by warning the other prisoners of what was going to happen to them. Such people

were immediately removed from the scene and shot (Rees 2005: 146). Obviously,

in The Zone of Interest the French woman does not know what is awaiting her, but

the fact that she complains and therefore can disturb the whole process turns her

into a threat for Doll and the deathly project he is involved in.

Once the Jews arrived at the concentration camp, what Rees has described as “one

of the most infamous procedures associated with Auschwitz” started: the initial

selection which “would come to symbolize the cold-hearted terror of the place”

(2005: 141-142). Boris again describes it very well: “The most eerie bit’s the

selection” (Amis 2015: 4). The weak ones —women with children, elderly

people— were sent directly to the gas chamber, whereas those fit for work, the

healthy ones, were kept alive. In the novel, this process of selection is described by

Doll:

As for the Selektion: all but a few were under 10 or over 60; and even the young

adults among them were, so to speak, selected already.

Look. That 30-year-old male has a broad chest, true, but he also has a club foot.

That brawny maiden is in the pink of health, assuredly, and yet she is with child.

Elsewhere —spinal braces, white sticks. (23)

The fact that Doll becomes disappointed because the young woman is pregnant is

highly significant because both pregnant women and mothers with children were

sent directly to the gas chambers. As Rees has explained, although the selection

process separated men from women and husbands from wives, Nazi officials very

soon realised that it would be against their own interest to force mothers away

from their children. The reason would be that “the upset involved in such

separation would be so great as to rival the emotional disturbance caused to the

killing squads by shooting women and children at close range —the very trauma

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that the gas chambers had been designed to diminish” (Rees 2005: 168). Doll

himself refers to this reality in the novel:

And now, I see (the teletype lay before me), that that moron Gerhard Student at

EAHO is floating the bright idea that all able-bodied mothers should be worked till

they drop in the boot factory at Chelmek! Fine, I’ll tell him. And you can come to the

ramp and try separating them from their children. These people —they just don’t

think. (Amis 2015: 73, emphasis in original).

As his words evince, Doll is furious with the bureaucrats, but not because he

worries about the mothers dying in the factory from hard work and starvation,

since he is indifferent to their suffering. Yet, ironically, he presents himself as the

actual victim of those who try to make his life more difficult, which is highly

revealing, because in his final statement Eichmann argued that the court had not

understood him, since he was merely “the victim of a fallacy” and only the ruling

elite deserved to be punished (Arendt 2006: 247-248). Actually, Arendt argues

that Eichmann’s statements in the police examination are so funny because he told

everything in the tone of someone who thought that people would feel sympathy

for what he considered to be the hard-luck story of a man whose personal affairs

and work plans always went wrong (2006: 50). Like Eichmann, Doll presents

himself as a victim, not only because his colleagues and superior officers do not

appreciate his work, but because, as will be discussed later, he marries a woman

who overpowers him.

Once the selection was complete, it was necessary to make the Jews believe that

what was going to happen was just a formal procedure, which was done for

everyone’s benefit, as Doll’s welcoming of the prisoners reveals:

We apologise for the lack of sanitary facilities in the boxcars. All the more reason, though,

for a hot shower and a light disinfection —because there are no diseases here and we

don’t want any. Frightfully good, that, I had to admit. The stethoscope, the white

coat (the black boots)— awfully good. Oh, and would diabetics and those with special

dietary needs report to Dr Bodman after supper at the Visitors’ Lodge. Thank you.

Fearfully good, that, really 1st rate… (Amis 2015: 176, emphasis in original)

The aim of the Nazis’ reassuring words was not to make the Jews’ last minutes less

painful, but to solve some of the problems that the procedure might generate. As

Rees affirms, “[n]ot only did it prove easier to get people into the gas chamber by

deception rather than outright force, it was also less stressful for the killers themselves”

(2005: 121). This explains why, for Doll, the fact that the French have arrived quite

“comfortable” by train is a dream come true because everything has been done

peacefully without the need to use “the dogs, the truncheons, and the whips?”

(Amis 2015: 25). Yet, although Doll is very proud of the way in which he welcomes

the new inmates, his colleagues question his ability to deceive the prisoners:

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“What’s wrong with the business of the barrel?” The barrel: this was a wheeze I

dreamt up in October. Concluding my speech of welcome, I’d say, Leave your

valuables with your clothing and pick them up after the shower. But if there’s anything

you especially treasure and can’t afford to be without, then pop it in the barrel at the end

of the ramp. I asked, “What’s wrong with it?”

“It stirs unease,” said Entress. “Are their valuables safe or aren’t they?”

“Only the juvenile and the senescent fall for that 1, Kommandant,” said Zulz. “All

we ever find in the barrel’s a jar of blood-thinners or a teddy bear.” (173-174,

emphasis in original)

The irony and comedy that pervades the whole extract emphasises Doll’s

incompetence and his role as a buffoon, who becomes the source of laughter for

those who work for him. In this sense, it could be argued that one of the most

subversive aspects of the novel is that Amis has created a perpetrator who is

everything but strong and powerful. In fact, he is described by his wife, Hannah,

as “so coarse, and so…prissy, and so ugly, and so cowardly, and so stupid” (Amis

2015: 298). Interestingly enough, Hannah is the strong one in their relationship,

which is a clear reversal of the roles allocated to women married to camp

commandants. Doll admits that he is afraid of her (222) and that he cannot

discipline her (31). She even gives him black eyes, which, as Doll himself admits,

“seriously detract from [his] aura of infallible authority” (58) and makes him feel

“like a pirate or a clown in a pantomime” (59). What Doll is not aware of is that

he is really a clown whom nobody respects. Doll would like Hannah to be more

“tractable” (62) and more solicitous when he comes home burdened with

problems (29). Nonetheless, Hannah’s aim is “to hasten the psychological collapse

of the Commandant” (143), because she despises what her husband is doing in

Auschwitz. She knows that he sometimes uses music to muffle the horrible screams

of the inmates when they are confronted with a reality they cannot process because

of its terrifying nature. On such occasions, she is so numb with terror that she

cannot utter a word, and only smoking helps her cope with the situation (14-15).

Accordingly, the Nazis actually used music at the concentration camps, especially

to calm newly arrived prisoners (Fackler). In this case, Doll has given orders to his

musicians to start playing because the French inmates have just seen a heap of

corpses in a lorry and are terrified:

Now you don’t go far in the Protective Custody business if you can’t think on your

feet and show a bit of presence of mind. Many another Kommandant, I dare say,

would have let the situation at once degenerate into something decidedly unpleasant.

Paul Doll, however, happens to be of a rather different stamp. With 1 wordless

motion I gave the order. Not to my men-at-arms, no: to my musicians! (26)

As this excerpt from the novel shows, once again Doll is presented as a clown, an

oaf, who is convinced that he is a kind of genius for the way in which he has

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handled the whole situation. But for Hannah, who knows what he has done, this

is just another instance of his cruelty and inhumanity, which leaves her devastated.

In fact, at the end of the book she admits that she has been destroyed by what she

witnessed and experienced in Auschwitz (Amis 2015: 299).

Nevertheless, Amis does not only recreate the devastating effect of the perpetrators’

actions on their victims and even themselves; he also explains the rationale behind

some of them. Thus, gassing was not the Nazis’ first option. They started by

shooting the Jews, but then they decided to use Zyklon B to eliminate them, not

only because it was cheaper, but because it helped the executioners cope with their

task (Rees 2005: 89-90). One of the characters in the novel, Professor Konrad

Peters, describes the reasons for this change: “But the gas chambers and the

crematories are just epiphenomena. The idea was to speed things up, and economise

of course, and to spare the nerves of the killers. The killers…those slender reeds”

(Amis 2015: 246). According to Rees, when Heinrich Himmler visited Minsk in

August 1941 to see the work of the killing squads first-hand, he realised that many

of the officers were traumatised after the executions, since the shootings included

women and children (2005: 86). Eichmann himself was horrified when he went to

Minsk and Lwów and saw the shootings: “Our people will go mad or become

insane, our own people” (Arendt 2006: 89). In the novel, one of the characters

refers to the way in which some of the Nazis were mentally destroyed by the

denigrating tasks they were asked to fulfil: “I heard they were killing psychiatric

patients in Konigsberg. Why? To clear bedspace. Who for? For all the men who’d

cracked up killing women and children in Poland and Russia” (Amis 2015: 95).

Doll himself admits that not everybody is prepared to follow the execution orders:

“And mind you, disposing of the young and elderly requires other strengths and

virtues —fanaticism, radicalism, severity, implacability, hardness, iciness,

mercilessness, und so weiter” (123). Here the use of irony and more particularly

antiphrasis —what Doll considers virtues are obviously unacceptable vices—

enables Amis to emphasise once again the brutality and dehumanisation of the

Nazis.

One of the cruellest jokes that readers can find in the novel in relation to the

extermination of the Jews appears when a woman who has just arrived at the

camp smears lice on Doll’s face and he has to follow the same protocol as the

inmates to get disinfected: he is told to take off his clothes and fold them tidily

(Amis 2015: 181). The whole situation is ironic because Zyklon B was used

initially at Auschwitz as an insecticide and that the “epiphany” about the mass

killing potential of this gas occurred when Karl Fritzsch, Höss’s deputy, came to

the conclusion that “[if] Zyklon B could be used to kill lice, why could it not be

used to kill human pests?” (Rees 2005: 89). Once the prisoners had been gassed

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in the chambers, the Nazi officers had to get rid of the bodies. At first, they

decided to bury them in what Amis ironically calls in the novel the “Spring

Meadow” (Amis 2015: 37). The problem is that the bodies soon start to putrefy,

and the smell becomes unbearable, as readers can grasp from Doll’s words: “You

could smell it, of course; and you could hear it. Popping, splatting, hissing” (65).

A delegation of local worthies talks to Doll about the problem the population is

facing:

“…They said it’s undrinkable no matter how many times you boil it. The pieces have

started to ferment, Hauptsturmfuhrer. The water table’s breached. There’s no

alternative. The smell is going to be unbelievable.”

“The smell is going to be unbelievable, my Kommandant? You don’t think it’s

unbelievable already?” (61, emphasis in original)

In this extract Doll is addressing Wolfgang Prufer, his Lagerführer, who is

shocked by Doll’s inability to acknowledge a terrible reality. In fact, Doll does

not realise that Prufer is just being ironic and reprimands him for always

complaining. Because of the smell, they have to dig up the bodies and find a way

to get rid of them. The first idea they have in the novel is to blow them up,

which, of course, creates a surrealistic situation, because rather than disappear

completely, the corpses go everywhere and there are “bits hanging from the

trees” (65-66). When reading this scene in The Zone of Interest, one is tempted

to believe that this is just another instance of Amis’s sarcastic humour. Even

Doll, who is an incompetent officer, is perplexed when they tell him about the

experiment, because he realises how ludicrous the whole thing is. Unfortunately,

the whole episode is based on facts. Amis is merely reproducing the testimony of

Wilhelm Jaschke, a captain in Einsatzkommando 8 (Rees 2005: 87), who

explains that Albert Widmann, an SS Untersturmführer from the Technical

Institute of Criminal Police, in charge of devising a new method of killing the

prisoners, first thought that to blow them up would be a viable option. He put

several mentally ill patients in a bunker with a packet of explosives, and the result

was truly heinous.

Given the aforementioned unsuccessful experiment, Doll decides that the best

option is to burn the corpses, but he does not know how to make naked bodies

catch fire (Amis 2015: 74). Ironically enough, it is precisely Szmul, the leader

of the Sonderkommando —the Jewish prisoners in charge of throwing the bodies

into the fire— who gives him a series of suggestions “which, as it happened,

proved key” (74).9 Pressburger, who was a member of the Sonderkommando at

Auschwitz, testifies to this reality and emphasises that the stench was terrible

(Rees 2005: 144). Pressburger’s reference to the stench provoked by the

burning of bodies is of utmost importance, because, as Kakutani has pointed

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out, one of the most powerful aspects of the novel is Amis’s “insistent dwelling

on the stench that emanated from the camp (which would have been impossible

for nearby residents to ignore, however invested they might have been in

denial)” (2014). The stench became part of life in Auschwitz, and obviously

nobody could ignore it. In fact, one of the civilian contractors at the Buna-

Werke plant complains to Doll that in the town, which is 50 km away, it is

impossible to swallow a mouthful from six to 10 p.m. because the wind brings

the terrible smell. Even Doll is shocked when he goes outside and is confronted

with the disgusting smell:

During the drive back […] I kept pulling over and sticking my head out of the

window and taking a sniff. It was as bad as I’ve ever known it, and it just got worse

and worse and worse…

I felt as if I were in one of those cloacal dreams that all of us have from time to

time —you know, where you seem to turn into a frothing geyser of hot filth, like

a stupendous oil strike, and it just keeps on coming and coming and piling up

everywhere no matter what you try and do. (Amis 2015: 112, emphasis in

original)

The smell was really so unbearable that a British prisoner who survived after

working at the Buna-Werke, stated that he could never forget the “sweetish

gagging corruption that caught at the throat and nose and clung to clothes and

hair” (Jeffreys 2008: 234). Doll’s approach to this terrible reality shows to what

extent he is delusional, since he believes that everyone has from time to time what

he calls the “cloacal dream”, which he describes using words like “geyser” or

“stupendous”, as if he were describing something beautiful.

Moreover, Doll, who represents the quintessence of Nazism and is becoming

more paranoid and grotesque as the novel advances, imagines himself surrounded

by dead bodies recently exhumed for immolation on the pyre while he is attending

a concert. However, in juxtaposition to the corpses of Jews, he believes that dead

German bodies do not stink: “And how sweet the Aryans smelled! If I rendered

them into smoke and flame, the burning bones (I felt confident) would not

forsake that fresh aroma!” (Amis 2015: 191). Doll admits that this is not the first

time his mind plays tricks on him. During his previous experience as a concert

spectator, he “spent the whole 21/2 hours intently estimating how long it would

take (given the high ceiling as against the humid conditions) to gas the audience”

(70). Doll’s ludicrous daydreams show the extent to which he is obsessed with his

work and believes in the righteousness of the Nazi project. In another passage

from the novel, he goes so far as to state that the fact that prisoners are often

incapable of assimilating what they see at the camp is “a reminder of —and a

tribute to— the blinding radicalism of the KL” (27-28, emphasis in original). By

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characterising Doll as a buffoon who is constantly despised and ridiculed by his

wife and colleagues, who is not aware of his own shortcomings and who

wholeheartedly supports the Nazi vision, Amis is capable of dealing with some of

the most terrible atrocities committed by the perpetrators from a different

perspective.

4. Conclusion

There is a moment in the novel when Doll says to Szmul that he has never hated

the Jews, but something “had to be done about them” (Amis 2015: 139). Doll

goes so far as to ask himself why they do what they do (222). Doll’s moment of

doubt does not last long, but it is highly revealing because, as Eaglestone has

argued, both perpetrator testimony and perpetrator fiction seem to promise to

answer the question “why”, explaining why the protagonists committed such

atrocities, but in the end they fail to answer the question they posed for themselves.

They swerve, leaving “our speech broken, with nothing to say” (2017: 29). It is

obvious that, for Amis, there is no reason, and his aim with The Zone of Interest is

not to provide a definitive answer or interpretation. As Julia Klein has asserted, “It

may require a novelist’s skill to penetrate the psyche of a Holocaust perpetrator.

But even when the novelist is as accomplished as Martin Amis, the mystery of

radical evil is probably destined to remain elusive —possible to describe, but not

to understand” (2014).

In this novel, Amis makes no claim of offering the reader new insights into the

Holocaust, but to remind them of its enormity. He truly believes that it is important

to remember an episode of modern history whose brutality and horror still leave

us bewildered (Rosenbaum 2012), and in order to achieve his goal he uses comedy,

which, according to him, is the only form left that can take on the real ills (Wachtel

1996: 53). In a world where evil is not always punished and good is not necessarily

rewarded, “we can deal with iniquity only by sneering and laughing if off the

stage” (Wachtel 1996: 53). Since the machinery of punishment and conversion has

become obsolete, the writer can only use ridicule to achieve his aims. This is

precisely what Amis does in The Zone of Interest by creating Doll, a buffoon who

shows that intellectually and morally shallow people can become the incarnation of

evil. By approaching the atrocities committed at Auschwitz from the point of view

of a character who is defined by his stupidity, incompetence and fanaticism, Amis

offers the reader a different perspective and makes them realise that those

responsible for the worst crimes during the Holocaust were not monsters or

exceptional human beings, but normal, vulnerable people who had the fate of

millions of Jews in their hands.

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Notes

1. Ozick has criticised Amis for

what she considers to be a manipulation of

Levi’s words (2014).

2. Although Amis asserts that he

based the character of Doll on Rudolf Höss,

Alex Preston has argued that Doll exists

somewhere between Rudolf Höss and Kurt

Franz, an SS officer and commandant at the

Treblinka death camp, whose nickname was

Doll (2014).

3. On the figure of Szmul, see Aída

Díaz Bild (2018). In an interview Amis explains

that in Time’s Arrow he dealt with the victims

from a distance, but by the time he started

working on The Zone of Interest, he felt closer

to them, because now he was married to a

Jewish woman whose family were Holocaust

victims (in Mars). Already in 1993 Amis

defined himself as a philo-Semite and

emphasised how much he admired the Jews

for their heightened intelligence and their

tendency towards transcendentalism (Self

1993: 162).

4. Most of the articles on Time’s

Arrow focus on how the experimental

narrative strategies —double narrator, reverse

chronological order, defamiliarisation—

contribute to the novel’s ethical import. See

McCarthy (1999), Vice (2000), Martínez-Alfaro

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5. In his analysis of Jonathan

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expresses the same idea: “How can its

narrative deployment be dedicated to those

who perished at their hands” (2010: 50).

6. McGlothlin’s statement echoes

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7. See Martínez-Alfaro (2011) and

Roldán-Sevillano (2021).

8. It is highly revealing that

throughout the novel Doll emphasises again

and again that he is “a normal man with

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what nobody seems to understand” (Amis

2015: 32, emphasis in original).

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the war and would have to pay for their

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Received: 06/01/2024

Accepted: 09/07/2024

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