Every year the Oscars unleashes some kind of political controversy, and this year’s revolves around Jonathan Glazer’s speech denouncing Israel. Glazer, the director of the acclaimed Holocaust film The Zone of Interest, used his moment in the spotlight to rail against ‘the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people’. An open letter has sprung up to rebuke him, and even the film’s executive producer has distanced himself from Glazer’s remarks. Some argued that Glazer unwittingly betrayed his own film’s core message. In fact, Glazer’s comments flow naturally from the film itself, and from the very problem of focusing a Holocaust film on the ‘banality of evil’.

The protagonist of The Zone of Interest, Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höß, is presented as the epitome of the ‘banality of evil’. He is a twitchy, conscientious civil servant. He commits his crimes at a distance, filling in forms and phoning suppliers. He concludes his conversations with a lacklustre ‘Heil Hitler, et cetera’. All he seems to want is a conventional family life with his wife Hedwig. He frolics in the water with his children, he weeps while saying goodbye to his horse: and all the while, the din of Auschwitz can be heard in the background, behind the garden wall (the film undoubtedly deserved its Best Sound win at the Oscars). Glazer’s Höß, in short, is the consummate competent bureaucrat, his mind fixed on the job.

But what’s the historical reality? On 31 May 1923, in a forest in Mecklenburg, a 63-year-old schoolteacher named Walther Kadow was beaten to death by a band of thugs. One of Kadow’s former pupils, Martin Bormann, suspected him of having betrayed an ally to the French, and thus encouraged his underlings, including Rudolf Höß, to kill him. For this crime, Bormann was sentenced to one year in prison: he joined the Nazi Party a few years later, and was to serve as Hitler’s private secretary. Höß, already a card-carrying Nazi, was sentenced to ten, but then released after only five as part of a general amnesty. Perhaps this convicted murderer wasn’t quite the dull bureaucrat that The Zone of Interest would have us believe. One could watch Glazer’s film a thousand times and remain none the wiser that its protagonist once killed a man with his bare hands.

At its essence, the problem with The Zone of Interest is the problem with the ‘banality of evil’. Hannah Arendt dreamt up that snappy phrase while viewing the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, and it has retained a hold over the popular imagination of the Holocaust ever since.

The Zone of Interest exaggerates what is universal about the evils of Nazism at the cost of what was particular

Arendt has been criticised by generations of historians for, in effect, taking Eichmann at his word: for believing that he was merely a weak-willed middle-manager who only did what he was told. Her analysis of Eichmann may well apply to ordinary Germans who lived under the Third Reich; it may even be appropriate for the lower rungs of the Nazi civil service. But it is wholly inadequate as an explanation for the behaviour of the Nazi top brass, which The Zone of Interest tries to represent. The architects of the Holocaust, men like Eichmann and Höß, were not banal mandarins living banal lives: they were zealots, radicals, brutes, and gangsters, committed to an ideology that would strike most of us today as profoundly weird. They gloried in violence and were often prepared, as Höß was, to kill, even when that came at a substantial personal cost.

The point of the film, according to Glazer, is to bring forth the unsettling fact that the Nazis were human beings. It serves nobody, least of all their victims, to present the Nazis simply as ‘monsters’. But Glazer runs the risk of overcorrection. The Nazis were people, but, as the French historian Johann Chapoutot has masterfully demonstrated, they were not people like us. They possessed an idiosyncratic, historically-contingent worldview: they had their own cosmology, their own anthropology, and, crucially, their own moral law.

Höß did not do what he did as a cog in the machine, but because he was motivated by a specific set of beliefs. In his post-war memoir, Meine Psyche, he explained that, since the Jews had declared war on Germany, exterminating them at Auschwitz was as justifiable as bombing Allied cities. There is no ‘banality of evil’ here to be found: beneath his evasions and excuses, Höß revealed himself as a fervent ideologue. ‘I remain a National Socialist’, he wrote before he was hanged in 1947, ‘in the sense that I still believe in this idea of life. It isn’t easy to give up an idea, a worldview you believed in for twenty-five years’.

Although it is vastly better, by any measure, as a work of art, the message of The Zone of Interest reminds me of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, a novel (and film) which ranks among the least proficient portrayals of the Holocaust. The book ends with the sardonic and nauseating line: ‘Of course, all this happened a long time ago, and nothing like that could ever happen again. Not in this day and age.’ Glazer wants his film to fulfil a similar didactic purpose. ‘This is not about the past’, he said back in December; ‘it’s about now’. We shouldn’t say ‘look what they did then’, he more recently declared in his infamous Oscars speech, but ‘look what we do now’. The point of The Zone of Interest is that the Holocaust could happen again – or, more disquietingly, that it could be happening right now. The omission of Höß’s personal capacity for physical violence is part of this refashioning of the Holocaust into an urgent modern warning: if such a thing could have been perpetrated by ‘ordinary’ bureaucrats, then we really ought to be on our guard.

Where does all this lead? Unsurprisingly, post-7 October, to Israel. The highest-rated review of The Zone of Interest on the website Letterboxd reads: ‘Truly horrifying how many people are going to watch this movie, rate it highly and bestow it awards and whatever, and then still be pro-Israel. This is literally about you.’ Glazer would seem to be open to this line of interpretation. Like so many artistic engagements with the Holocaust, The Zone of Interest exaggerates what is universal about the evils of Nazism at the cost of what was particular. This allows it to make a comment, perhaps even a ‘warning’, about contemporary politics – while sacrificing vital historical truth in the process. If Glazer’s Oscars speech is anything to go by, that might have been the point all along.