
The Zone of Interest is a deeply perplexing film, and in complete contrast to Max’s standpoint, it inverts every truth. Furthermore, inverts the truth of Auschwitz’s establishment, which is presented in The Commandant’s Shadow. Jonathan Glazer does not, however, expect his audience to understand the Final Solution only as a workday, 9 to 5, and in Daniela Völker’s film Hasri Gives a rough idea of how family-oriented it was. All of those children, who had at least lost one of their parents, had no idea that their father with a russet-colored skin was ‘a monster’ par excellence who had committed genocide. It is easy to imagine what they felt when they saw the Nuremberg trials. All of them, especially in childhood where in their imagination had a completely different view of Auschwitz. Did the children of the captain and other more common people, like him still believe in a history that had an end, or were they just excited to always play the part of a mute observer?
The pain is that ‘the commander’s shadow’ does not treat that and other events as absolute and applies the ‘never again’ even if October 7 seems like an old tragedy able to happen.
Volker and her subjects, unsurprisingly, lack the conviction to view those words as anything more than a promise. What this film fails to illuminate, however, is how that slogan could be turned into its most potent form, an act of forgetting.
A decade older than Hans Jürgen Hoss, the youngest of the five children of the Commandant whom the documentary hopes to focus on, resides in Germany. Hans’s life is relatively well known he was born in 1937 in Dachau and at the age of three moved to a neighboring house of Auschwitz, remaining there until in his photographs. To this day, Hans does not seem to settle into the compassion conflict he creates by remembering his childhood years with pleasure. It is disturbing when regarding such outer statements as ‘die Auschwitz. Ich had a really good childhood in Auschwitz,’ or even more when it is said with unfelt nonchalance.
When it comes to the memories of Hans’ boyhood at the gates of hell, it is quite apparent that Völker finds him truly breathtaking and disturbing, and there are many recollections. He believes that along with his siblings, they had some absurd expectations of their father, I mean, which normal child gives a thought about what their parents do for a living? He was able to see the crematorium through his bedroom window and although he claims that he wasn’t able to see the tragedies taking place, his account and those details from the movie are quite dismissive. In any case, it does not matter whether you believe him or not. All of us can agree that the commandants’ Shadow was never about presenting a frail old man to face trial as retribution for the wrongs that he may have committed in his childhood. We meet an old man who is not only privy to details of the crime but also quite the opposite of Kai, Hans’s son. In contrast to Volkert’s impression of violently interrogating him. This meeting is about showing the young man around and intimately thinking deeply about these senseless things called crimes.
Kai, on the other hand, has matured into a guarded man in his mid-fifties, bound by familial duties and dedicated to his work, which might explain why he holds great personal value.
From his perspective, his memories don’t seem to mean everything, as one might expect, however, a child has a core as well as extreme gusto (He has an almost gleeful smile on his face as he explains how English soldiers entered Zone Of Interest and with a gunpoint took his young brother and sister, as if it were some story in a boys’s war game). For these pleasant recollections regarding the past the ‘good old days’, some revision is warranted and this is what Kai does.
For the most part, it appears that Hans’ son serves as both the initial and, on several instances, the sole internal critique that can be heard who directly channels an interplay with the camera in a brusque headline-style reproduced uterine gashes that saturate the series that Leah accuses him, in his patent cases of fugue to himself, of having owned ever since. Some of the best and also most intrusive scenes of the film, are when Kai tries to explain to his father how he imagines time but in a very gross, slow, and careful way like when you are trying to unbolt a stubborn nut from a man.
In a more anecdotal context, when Hans is shocked by the fact that he has only recently found out about the memoir that Rudolf wrote during his trial for attempts to kill six million Jews, Kai asks him how such a book was available while he was growing up in Kai s house. At the same time, Kai tries to color the book in question as an ad hominem, that is, a self-defensive in order to save one’s reputation, rather than a clinical that Rudolf would wish to pretend to as an agent instead of the hundreds of agents that have to witness orders being carried out with the hope that their vision will be fulfilled.
To this explanation, the documentary adds images of the Holocaust and reads excerpts from the book thus visualizing the images Völker has embedded in the book. There Völker has an agenda indeed of trying to see what the same naked brutality that ‘The Zone of Interest’ advanced in almost I suppose this way they were doing just the opposite to the other film, they were supplying more than was required and I think in this movie the important thing is not the genocide facts, it is important the facts of the people who survived the genocide and became the descendants of those times and although this generations they have for the rest of their lives stamped on their souls the pain of what has been lost.
‘The Commandant’s Shadow’ chronicles the story of Anita who is a Jew and a concentration camp survivor as well as her daughter Maya. This film covers the psychological aspects of the final solution through the blend of Anita’s and Maya’s character analysis. Anita Lasker was a part of the Auschwitz orchestra which ultimately helped her survive. Along with discussing her ideologies and identity, this film also explores the ideologies of her daughter, Maya through insightful character analysis. In Doina’s words, “Maya has as I believe inherited all the psychological burdens suffered by Anita Wall Fisch and has grown up as a complex personality.”
Doina, the director of the film doesn’t show the split up between Völker and Anita. He also paints Anita as a flawed character, while supporting her daughter’s dissociation. Such multi-dimensional aspects of the story further the key theme of the film loss and its ever-evolving psychological effects. All the ladies in the talk were complex organisms and muddled thoughts, feelings, and emotions bow bowa suffocating amount in their own ways. The children in the film are exposed for planning such loss just to avoid admitting to sticking blame onto their historical past. The film delves deeper into the history and evolving societal factors rather than looking for space to blame its characters for their parents.
Possibly taking Hans back to Auschwitz to witness his father’s gallows paves the way for some sadistic purpose but considering those who he loathes, it’s quite puzzling as to how exactly bringing him back helps in any way. Hans reflects “I do not suppose that we learned anything following the Holocaust. If we did, there would be no this sort of antisemitism as there is currently.” Every emotion bears some context and in this case, the emotion is lost in the visceral portrayal that the movie opts for while simultaneously addressing Hans’ education and the gaps his memories have regarding his father and son.
When “The Commandant’s Shadow” is attempting to delve deeper into the reason behind Hans’ estrangement from his sister, Hans’s dramatic development explodes. His sister, a former model, is a cancer patient who has her own social challenges, though outside of Hans’s perspectives and audience, her presence is insignificant. A profound absence replaced her with a cult of admiring fans who presume Hans’s stirring performances during the retreat are simply over. They anticipate cathedral retreats and orchestral music instead of primal narratives.
It is no surprise that the grim climax where Hans and Anita are together and Auschwitz is not even shown is the most tragic climax of all movies.
One would blindly doubt Völker’s sensibility if she thinks that this unpleasant can in any way salvage our torn past. But she does not know what else to do with the emotional void that the scene seems to evoke in its actors once again, especially Anita, who appears almost indifferent about the whole affair. It is the assumption of “The Commandant’s Shadow” that her subjects could in some measure be cured of their mental injuries or at least be made to look differently at their mental wounds. It is sad that we have perfected the never again refrain into a cynical catchphrase of this kind in regard to a film that in its entirety is about the pain that its characters endure as they inhabit a world that so obviously did not learn from all the puerile toys they were told were parents.
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