Writers and Company56:01Martin Amis on The Zone of Interest and Primo Levi’s unshakeable influence
This week, two conversations with Martin Amis, one of England’s most engaged and provocative writers. In 2014, Amis spoke with Eleanor Wachtel about his novel The Zone of Interest, which focuses on the Holocaust from a different angle. Its screen adaptation is nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture. Followed by a conversation from 2019 about the Italian Jewish chemist, Holocaust survivor and writer, Primo Levi — whose work greatly inspired Amis’s writing — featuring Levi’s biographer Ian Thomson. Please note: this episode contains difficult subject matter and discussion of suicide.
WARNING: This audio contains discussion of suicide.
As Writers & Company wraps up after a remarkable 33-year run, we’re revisiting episodes selected from the show’s archive.
In 2014, Eleanor Wachtel spoke with the late British writer Martin Amis about his Holocaust novel The Zone of Interest. Amis died in 2023 at the age of 73.
Powerful and provocative, The Zone of Interest follows three main characters as they exist in Auschwitz: the camp commander, a Nazi officer and a Jewish prisoner tasked with the disposing of bodies.
After premiering at the Cannes Film Festival, The Zone of Interest’s film adaptation won the Grand Prix and the International Film Critics Fipresci Prize. It was named one of the top five international films of 2023 and is up for five Oscars at the 2024 Academy Awards, which take place March 10.
A loose adaptation of the novel, the film focuses on the camp commander — based on the real-life Rudolf Höss — and the mundanity of domestic life on the outskirts of Auschwitz.
In honour of the film’s success, Writers & Company revisits Wachtel’s 2014 interview with Amis, as well as a 2019 panel about Italian Jewish chemist and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, whose work inspired Amis’ writing about the Holocaust in both The Zone of Interest and Time’s Arrow.
Revisiting Holocaust fiction in a second novel
“It’s that remark of Michael André Bernstein, poet, academic and novelist. He said that our understanding of this genocide is central to our self-understanding and that is why it’s a never-ending process.
“The other thing of course is that no one understands Hitler. An amazing fact by itself that no historian claims to be baffled by Stalin. Stalin is very assimilable. He makes sense in a way that Hitler doesn’t begin to do. And there’s not one historian who claims that he isn’t baffled by Hitler.
“No one knows why he did it, what his motive was, you know, huge questions that have no chance, I think, of being answered now.
“So that allows the novelist or the poet as well as the historian to keep on exploring it.”
Explaining the unexplainable
“What sort of liberated me, I think, was reading some remarks by Primo Levi when he was asked, ‘How do you explain the Nazi hatred?’
“He lists the usual reasons that historians give and says he finds these explanations not commensurate with the facts that need explaining. And then he says perhaps we must not understand it, because to understand something is to contain it and to include it within yourself and almost to identify with people who can’t be identified with.
“He said this should give us comfort because it shows that the whole hatred was anti-human, even counter-human. He said it is a hatred that is not in us, it is outside man. What he does there is remove the pressure to understand. And I found I almost cried out with relief and kind of epiphany when I read those words. Then I felt more able to go in there myself.”
A narrator void of guilt or compassion
“[The Nazis] all had a head full of eugenics and racial rubbish. Eugenics were taken very seriously and acted upon in America in the interwar. It was pseudo-scientific garbage, since wholly discredited.
“So they had that sort of underpinning, you couldn’t even call it an ideology, a confirmation of prejudice. They had that.
“When [camp commander Paul] Doll sees issues of Der Stürmer, the illiterate hate sheets run by Julius Streicher, the Gauleiter of Franconia, he very much disapproves. He says this gives serious antisemitism a bad name.
“They thought it was intellectually respectable what they were doing, even though Goebbels admitted that it’s pretty barbaric, the method they’re using. And you know, once you start, once the value of human life has collapsed in your moral universe, then beware. Because it’s not so much the collapse of life as the glorification of death and death became the rallying cry for this type.
Once the value of human life has collapsed in your moral universe, then beware. Because it’s not so much the collapse of life as the glorification of death.– Martin Amis
“He justifies himself with euphemisms and tautologies, and his whole narrative is meant to be horrific as prose as well. He has awful habits of genteelisms and elegant variation and even grammar. His mind is a mess.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
If you are thinking of suicide or know someone who is, here are ways you can get help:
- Canada Suicide Prevention Service: 1-833-456-4566 (Phone) | 45645 (Text) | crisisservicescanada.ca (Chat)
- In Quebec (French): Association québécoise de prévention du suicide: 1-866-APPELLE (1-866-277-3553)
- Kids Help Phone: 1-800-668-6868 (Phone), Live Chat counselling at www.kidshelpphone.ca
- Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention: Find a crisis centre
If you feel your mental health or the mental health of a loved one is at risk of an immediate crisis, call 911.
