
While The Zone of Interest has left viewers bewildered, Max offers a completely polarising view where it flips every truth around viewers focusing on The Commandant’s Shadow instead it reveals the exact behavior that allowed Auschwitz to exist. However, rather than viewing the Final Solution through the eyes of how it was merely a job in a 9-5 setting, German director Jonathan Glazer gives Daniela Volker’s documentary history a dial that focuses on family, those orphaned children had no idea that their extremely cold and russet-skinned father was the worst person of our civilization who committed genocide, but as they grew old and saw the Nuremberg Trials, it was hard not to wonder how the world viewed their brutalizing ideal world Other people felt differently about Auschwitz than childhood fantasies. Did the offspring of the Camp Commandant himself and other mere mortals still possess a connection to history where they understood the weight of their ancestors’ actions, or were they happy to play the role of the perpetual silent witness?
Even though October 7 may seem like a distant tragedy, the real pain is that ‘The Commandant’s Shadow’ does not take the status of ‘never again’ as an absolute law and suggests that it cannot be done.
Völker and her subjects perhaps unsurprisingly have the courage to interpret these words as more than a mere promise. It is unfortunate, however, that this film’s rather pointless focus on archival footage prevents it from appreciating how that slogan could be turned into its most potent form an act of forgetting.
Even so, it is reasonable to expect the focus of this documentary to be on Hans Jürgen Hoss, the youngest of the five children of the Commandant: aged 87 in the course of the documentation. 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 strange enough when someone essays those words “I had a really good childhood in Auschwitz” but the nonchalance with which it is spoken is more disturbing than what it intends to convey.
The grotesque recollections of Hans’ boyhood at the gates of hell, and there are many when Volker makes him recall the details, are both breathtaking and disturbing. Hans maintains that he and his siblings thought their father was simply a prison guard like any other at least, what sane and sensible child at that age knows exactly what their parents do for a living? He could view the crematorium from his bedroom window (a fact or detail that one of Glazer’s films rather mercifully allowed the children of the Hoess family to forget) but swears that he did not witness the tragedies that were taking place behind those doors. In any case, it does not matter whether you believe him or not. It goes without saying that ‘The Commandant’s Shadow’ is not focused on bringing an elderly man to justice for crimes he committed as a young boy. The movie is focused on an elderly person with phenomenal information about the crime and quite the opposite of beating an old man, VOlkert successfully managed to emphasize that it was Hans’s son Kai who made for the most inquisitive audience.
It is worth mentioning that Kai possesses all of the exchequer of a fifty-something pastor whose family burden made him confine his life into oblation and self repentance, He has attained an economic distance away from the personality of his grandfather but still close enough to feel the love for his father.
Hans seems without a care when it comes to his own memories, child-like in the core as well as over-the-top effervescent (He smiles in an almost gleeful way while explaining how English soldiers crossed the Zone of Interest and captured his young brother and sister at the point of a gun as if it were a scene in some boy’s war games). Such comforting memories of the ‘good old days’ need a necessary corrective, and that’s what Kai does.
In large part, it seems that Hans’ son is the first and often only internal voice of criticism one gets to hear through his direct address into the camera, from a series of 1:1 surgical shots of talking heads as Kai refutes his father’s position of supposed oblivion, claimed Hans for himself since his inception. The film contains its best and most obtrusive scenes when Kai, in an attempt to articulate his father’s sense of time, addresses him and gelatinously but meticulously like when you’re trying to get a tough rust out of a human being gets down to the task.
When Hans expresses astonishment that he has only recently come across the memoir that Rudolf penned while being tried for trying to kill six million Jews, Kai reminds him that such a book was available in their house when he was growing. In the same breath, Kai attempts to shade the book in question as an attempt to self-exonerate in order to protect one’s image, quite a clinical stance that Rudolf would have wanted to adopt, that of an executor rather than one that has millions of commands to see his vision executed.
The documentary reinforces this idea by juxtaposing the reading of selected passages from the book with appropriate Holocaust images. It is indeed the case that Völker has an agenda that seeks to highlight the same horrors that ‘The Zone of Interest’ dealt with in nearly abstract terms, however, this was giving more detail than necessary it is not the pivotal facts that are important in this film: the facts of genocide, but the facts of the generations that came after and filled the void created by the genocide, even though those generations have souls forever tattooed by the trauma of what has been lost forever.
Coming ‘The Commandant’s Shadow’, tells of a new pair of characters, born and bred out of the Final Solution Anita Lasker Wallfisch, a Jew who survived Auschwitz because she played in the concentration camp’s orchestra, and her daughter Maya who was brought up with the psychological scars that are, quite evidently, ancestors of Anita Lasker-Wallfisch’s.
Though the director of the movie admits that he doesn’t want to reveal the split between the women, raised by Anita who supports her daughter in saying she is the “wrong mother,” paces Völker, both of whom talk and at the same time, don’t really strive to comprehend the Shoah’s second generation. All the ladies struggle in their own ways about the loss which they have not experienced as such but have lingered about since the time before they were born, but this film is so focused on placing blame on their children for the actions of their parents that it neglects the more important issue what role such history really comes to play today.
Maybe bringing Hans back to Auschwitz to see his father’s gallows serves some maudlin purpose, but it is difficult to see how bringing him back can yield solutions considering the people he hates. Hans muses: “I don’t think we’ve learned from the Holocaust. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be antisemitism again like there is now.” Such sentiments, however heartfelt, are lost amidst the more graphic images this film chooses to depict which concern the education of Hans on the issue at hand and the ill-defined gaps in his willingness to absorb the education, which have a bearing on his memories of his father and or son.
“The Commandant’s Shadow” may have wished to go in that direction when attempting to figure out why Hans has not seen his sister for a long time. Hans’ sister is a former model and a cancer patient who has her own issues with the participation of others, but Hans’ fan base does not allow him to include such details. Fans expect retreat cathedrals and soothing orchestral music instead of visceral explorations.
It is also understandable why the climax in which Hans and Anita are united in the film, with the walls of Auschwitz nowhere in sight, is the worst scene in the entire movie.
Volker is more astute than to try and present this awkward encounter as a useful response to the debacle of our past, but she doesn’t 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 apathetic about the entire ordeal. “The Commandant’s Shadow” seeks to hope it can somehow rehabilitate its subjects for their mental scars, or at the very least, make them look at their primary injuries differently. Sadly, “never again” turns out to be a false slogan of hope for a film that is entirely about suffering the suffering of both its characters and a world that quite obviously learned nothing from the parents of the children that were most often born to teach them.
For More Movies Like The Commandant’s Shadow Visit on 123movies