In 2019, Sandra Hüller, one of Germany’s foremost stage and film actors, starred as Hamlet in a production at the Schauspielhaus Bochum, in the Ruhr Valley. For most performers, the part is challenge enough. But as Hüller prepared for the role with the theatre’s artistic director, Johan Simons, their discussions kept drifting to the character who animates Hamlet’s fantasies of revenge: his father’s ghost. In most stagings, ghastly makeup and lighting convey that the character is spectral. Could this lingering spirit be conjured without melodramatic clichés? Simons and Hüller agreed that it would be potent for the father to rise from within the son—speaking through him. As Simons recently described the conceit, “The father is so deep in your soul that you can’t get away from him—he is always in you.”
In the opening scene of the modern-dress, German-language production, Hüller stood alone onstage, her hands hanging uselessly by her sides, her eyes downcast. In a trembling near-whisper, she spoke lines that Shakespeare originally wrote for Hamlet’s friend Horatio: “If there be any good thing to be done, / That may to thee do ease and grace to me, / Speak to me.” Hüller smiled faintly to hold back tears, and her voice broke as she muttered, “You are here, you are here.”
When it came time for Hamlet’s encounter with the Ghost, an eerie chord resounded, and Hüller’s soft, breathy voice suddenly dropped an octave. She was no longer Hamlet, or not entirely. “Pity me not!” Hüller said, her eyes hardening and her voice quickening as she channelled the Ghost: “I am thy father’s spirit, / Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night, / And for the day confined to fast in fires, / Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purged away.” As Hüller played it, Hamlet wasn’t seeing a ghost; he was being possessed by it. Hüller’s previously gentle demeanor was displaced by lurching motion, and when the Ghost furiously commanded his son’s obedience—“List, list, O, list!” in Shakespeare’s original—she practically vomited up the words: “Hör, hör, o, hör! ”
The scene was as scary to watch as any horror movie, but it also felt profound: the sins of the old were literally infecting the bodies of the young, emphasizing the generational rot at the heart of the play. German critics hailed Hüller’s performance as revelatory—not just as an examination of character but as an exploration of the capacities of stage art. Der Spiegel said that witnessing Hüller wrestle with Hamlet and the Ghost simultaneously was like watching “an exorcism.”
Before the show opened, Hüller read an essay that portrayed “Hamlet” as a critique of the conventions of Renaissance revenge tragedy—and of the society from which those conventions emerged. “Shakespeare wrote the play at the edge of these times when blood revenge was still a thing,” she told me recently. “Shakespeare’s showing it one more time, but in the most absurd way—because everybody’s dead at the end. The play is saying, ‘This can’t be the way.’ ” At the Schauspielhaus Bochum, the climactic duel between Hamlet and Laertes swerved away from physical violence: neither combatant would make the first move. Instead, Hüller and Dominik Dos-Reis, the actor playing Laertes, hurled the phrase “fang an”—“start”—back and forth, battling not just each other but the demand for a bloody confrontation. The moment culminated, as it does in Shakespeare’s text, in an unexpected gesture of forgiveness. “They shake hands before they die, and say, ‘We don’t want to be like our fathers,’ ” Hüller said. “And, to me, that is something that applied to the world as it is now. That seemed to be something that I could identify with. Not to redo all the things that our ancestors have done before but to change them—to break the chain.”
Hüller liked that the production showed the effect of violence without actually showing violence. “When you show violence, I believe, it must have a strong form,” she told me. “You can’t treat it like any other sort of narrative in a story. It means something when you show a rape onstage, or when somebody gets slapped in the face onstage. It is crossing a line.” Her voice, usually soft, shifted to a more forceful register. “I have heard a lot of directors point out, ‘Yeah, but that’s what’s in the story,’ ” she continued. “I know what’s in the story. But still, I can decide, because I am the artist, what to show of it, and what not. I can decide how I want to shape the world that we are building onstage.”
Hüller is becoming better known to audiences beyond the German-speaking world through her appearance in two widely praised movies, both of which are centrally concerned with violence, and with how to represent violence. In “Anatomy of a Fall,” from the French director Justine Triet, Hüller plays Sandra Voyter, a successful novelist. When her husband, Samuel, a less successful writer, is found dead, sprawled beneath an open window of their Alpine home—his body is discovered by the couple’s preadolescent son, who is partially blind—Voyter comes under suspicion of murder.
The film is partly in English, a language in which both Hüller and the character she plays are fluent, and takes the form of a courtroom drama—but the did-she-or-didn’t-she question is a red herring. “Anatomy of a Fall,” which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year, is less concerned with whether Voyter is guilty or innocent than it is with probing murkier questions of blame and interdependence within a marriage. Hüller portrays Voyter with a labile complexity, and the camera often lingers on Hüller’s face as it shifts like quicksilver between playfulness, defiance, and evasion. In the movie’s opening scene, Voyter is seen leaning back in a chair, glass of wine in hand, charming a young female interviewer with an explanation of how she could ruthlessly pin her to the page in a novel, if it suited her artistic needs. This flirtatious power play becomes even more charged retrospectively, when it emerges that Voyter has had extramarital affairs, at least one of them with a woman. Voyter’s considerable self-possession is later revealed to be a fault line in her marriage. During a discussion in the couple’s kitchen—an audio recording of which becomes evidence at the trial—Samuel complains that he has sacrificed his own work to support hers. Initially, Voyter is tender, soothing her riled spouse, attempting to convey her affection while still challenging his sense of victimhood. But the argument escalates into violence, with Voyter overcome by anger just as Hüller’s Hamlet was taken over by a ghost. The climax of the kitchen argument is rendered in sound alone, with the listeners in the courtroom—and the movie’s viewers—forced to imagine who is doing what to whom.
The fight between the spouses, which is presented in court as the key to whether Hüller’s character is responsible for her husband’s death, in fact addresses a more complex, and more widely applicable, question: whether Voyter is responsible for her husband’s life. Hüller told me that she’d never seen a woman like Voyter represented in a movie before. “I know a few women who live in the sort of relationship where they protect their husbands from the truth, because it’s too hard,” she said. “I was a big fan of the idea that someone has the balls to say it—that, as Justine put it, ‘I love you, but what you think is wrong. I am not responsible for your pain—you are responsible for your pain.’ ”
Triet, who a few years ago cast Hüller as a high-strung movie director in the black farce “Sibyl,” wrote the part of Voyter with Hüller in mind. “She has a kind of physicality—I knew that I could film her without makeup, without her being ultra-feminine—and also a kind of humanity, a way of being that is absolutely self-confident and unapologetic. These traits led me to say to myself, ‘I can go far with the idea that this woman is not perfect, while knowing that the viewer will follow her and love her until the end.’ This isn’t a given with all actresses—there are some who would have been either overly theatrical or way too sophisticated.” The film is self-consciously slick while withholding the crisp resolution of the usual whodunnit. The viewer is left wondering where the truth lies—as is the couple’s son, who, having lost a father, realizes that he holds his mother’s fate in his hands.
Whereas “Anatomy of a Fall” gave Hüller the chance to play a character whose culpability is disquietingly ambiguous, “The Zone of Interest,” which will be released in the U.S. in December, offered her the opportunity to portray an individual whose guilt is not in question. The movie, written and directed by the British filmmaker Jonathan Glazer, is loosely based on the historical novel of the same name by Martin Amis. Hüller plays Hedwig Höss, the wife of Rudolf Höss, who served for several years as the commandant of Auschwitz. Glazer refrains from explicitly depicting the violence of the Holocaust; most of the film is set just beyond the camp’s perimeter, at the Hösses’ well-appointed family home, where Hedwig is raising the couple’s five children, tending an ornate garden, and wearing a wardrobe luxuriously augmented by thefts from the exterminated. When Höss is transferred to a position north of Berlin, Hedwig petulantly refuses to leave the comforts of Auschwitz, forcing him to go alone. Hedwig, blinkered by the bounty of her domestic environs, seemingly ignores the infernal light and smoke from nearby chimney stacks, and otherwise blocks out the machinery of mass death: the barking of guard dogs, the rumbling of crematoria, the crack of pistols, the screams of prisoners.
Glazer has described the making of “The Zone of Interest” as a process of constructing two films—a visual one and an aural one—which he then layered on top of each other. (Johnnie Burn devised the disturbing sound design.) Stylistically, the film could not be more different from “Anatomy of a Fall,” nor could it make more different use of Hüller’s skills as an actor. Rather than toying with a viewer’s sympathies through the use of closeups, Glazer maintains a cold distance, often keeping the camera static and framing a scene as if it were taking place on a stage. At the movie’s beginning and end, and at a turning point in the middle, the screen suddenly fills with solid black or red, like a stage curtain descending. (The soundtrack keeps rumbling.) Such effects recall the kind of avant-garde European theatre productions in which Hüller regularly appears.
Although Hüller could hint at the psychology of Sandra Voyter through the set of her mouth or the raising of an eyebrow, capturing Hedwig required a broader physicality, drawing on skills that Hüller had acquired through theatre work. “The word is basically the last thing that you use onstage, since ultimately everything can be told through the body,” she once said to an interviewer. Hüller is tall and slender, but as Hedwig she adopted an ungainly gait—shoulders hunched forward, feet spread apart. Her movements, she explained to me, were based on some members of her extended family, and were intended to reflect Hedwig’s experiences before Auschwitz, which involved farm life and repeated childbearing. Małgorzata Karpiuk, the movie’s costume designer, told me, “We designed Sandra’s dresses to be maybe a bit too long, or a bit too small, or too big—so that they are beautiful but not perfect. Hedwig wanted to be elegant, but they are not elegant. And when Sandra started to move, she did not move elegantly.” Hüller said, “Hedwig can only be this person because she makes other people suffer—that, alone, does something to your body. The weight of the guilt that she doesn’t really feel. That’s in the body.”
When Hüller was approached to play Hedwig, she was initially skeptical. “I always refused to play Fascists—which, of course, especially in international productions, come your way from time to time as a German actress,” she told me over lunch at a restaurant in Leipzig, where she lives with her twelve-year-old daughter. (Hüller is not with the girl’s father.) The neighborhood was filled with galleries and restaurants, and the pavement of its main street, Karl-Heine Strasse, was studded with Stolpersteine—memorial plaques outside buildings whose former residents were murdered in the Holocaust. We sat in a pleasant outdoor area, and Hüller’s dog, a Weimaraner mix, rested beside her on a blanket that Hüller had brought from home. (The dog appears in “The Zone of Interest” as the family pet.) “I didn’t like the idea of putting on a Nazi uniform like that, or using language like that—to get close to the energy of that, or to discover there would be fun in that,” Hüller went on. “I have seen colleagues that actually have fun doing it. Maybe it’s still in their bodies from former generations. They like to change their language and speak like that”—the tone of her voice changed, her usually soft-spoken, careful speech becoming harsh and rat-a-tat. Reverting to her own voice, she asked, “Why do they do it? They could speak like a normal person.”
Hüller also disapproves of projects that use the Nazi era as a canvas upon which to paint a dramatic story that has little to do with Fascism. (Netflix’s recent soapy drama “All the Light We Cannot See” could be considered a prime example.) She was therefore attracted to the pointed absence of drama in Glazer’s screenplay: nothing much happens beyond what we know is happening offscreen, as the murderous apparatus under Höss’s command becomes ever more efficient. She told me, “Jonathan and I had a lot of conversations about the traps in this kind of story we wanted to tell—which is not really a story. There is a couple, and one wants to leave, and the other doesn’t.”
Both “The Zone of Interest” and “Anatomy of a Fall” demanded that Hüller adjust her customary approach to film roles. Usually, she explained, “I fall in love with the characters, I know what they would do in a situation, I have the feeling that I understand them.” With “Anatomy of a Fall,” though, there were central opacities. Hüller was never told by Triet whether Sandra was guilty or not; Triet’s only instruction was to play her as if she were innocent, which accommodated the possibility that Voyter was a deft dissembler. Hüller came to see Voyter as being “like a very good friend who doesn’t tell you everything.” Hedwig Höss, however, was not someone Hüller wished to identify or empathize with at all. Her solution to the artistic challenge of playing a Nazi was to withhold her own humanity from the character. “I wanted to use my power as an actor not to give the character any capacity to feel love, joy, fulfillment, connection—all these things, just take them away,” she told me. “The idea was to make the story as boring as possible—to give them as little excitement and joy as possible. They live the most unfulfilled life that someone can imagine, and they don’t know it—but we know it.”
Rudolf Höss was convicted of war crimes in 1947, and hanged at Auschwitz. Hedwig Höss wasn’t tried alongside her husband, but in the sixties she provided testimony at a trial of surviving Auschwitz functionaries; photographs taken outside the courthouse, in Frankfurt, show Hedwig staring icily at the photographer in a camel coat and heels, her hair drawn back from the broad planes of her face. Hüller listened to a recording of Hedwig’s testimony before filming began, and decided against modelling her own vocal delivery on it. Hedwig’s voice sounded weirdly high, Hüller noticed, like a little girl’s. “I very much had the feeling that she was taking on a role, or a character,” Hüller said.
Hedwig Höss died in 1989, at the age of eighty-one. During the Nuremberg trials, her husband had said that she knew what he and his colleagues were doing on the other side of the wall. The foul stench of the burning bodies, he had noted, meant “all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on.” Hüller said of Hedwig, “Of course she knew, because she saw it. She acted like an innocent person.” By playing a Nazi wife who speaks in the most ordinary of tones as she stomps around her ill-gotten domain, Hüller found a way to give eloquent voice to her character’s complicity.
Hüller was born in 1978 and grew up in Friedrichroda, a town in a mountainous region of Thuringia that, until she turned eleven, was part of East Germany. She was the elder of two children, with parents who were educators. The first foreign language that Hüller studied was Russian; holidays were often spent in Czechoslovakia or other Communist neighbors. The education system stressed principles of antifascism. If certain Socialist edicts were absurd—Coke cans were banned, as icons of Western consumerism, and were therefore coveted as status symbols—her family’s life generally felt reassuring and equitable. “You were not bombarded with products that you had to choose from,” Hüller told me. “There was one milk, and one bread, and everyone had the same. If you wanted something special, you had to take your time and stand in line and wait until you got some, and maybe it was finished at the moment you arrive. And that’s life—you can’t have everything.”
Christian Friedel, who plays Rudolf Höss in “The Zone of Interest,” also grew up in the East, and he told me that “the system was more a ‘we’ than an ‘I.’ ” Hüller concurred: “What I learned was the power of community—that everybody is responsible for the community, and has their part to do for the community, and that we are stronger together.”
Hüller dates the end of her childhood to 1989, in part because it was the first time she saw adults who were unable to hide their confusion and fear. “There was also a lot of joy—we saw people dancing in the streets,” she said. “But no one knew how the system worked, and what would happen to the jobs, and what would happen to the houses and the companies.” East German citizens may have been expected to embrace the West, but many people who had enjoyed secure employment suddenly found their skills harshly subjected to the caprices of the marketplace.
The demands of capitalism in a formerly Communist country form the backdrop of Maren Ade’s brilliant film “Toni Erdmann,” from 2016. Hüller plays Ines, a career-obsessed business consultant working joylessly in contemporary Romania, advising executives to increase profits by laying off employees. Ines’s routine is interrupted by the arrival of her father—a music teacher, played by Peter Simonischek, who has a Socialist sensibility. Dismayed by her grim workaholism, he assails her with practical jokes, involving everything from whoopee cushions to giant false teeth. Under his influence, Ines’s rigidity is replaced by an increasingly madcap recklessness, allowing Hüller to display her gift for physical comedy. In the film’s climax, Ines invites colleagues to a team-building birthday brunch at her apartment; when the doorbell rings while she is trying to wriggle out of a too-tight dress, she discards her clothes altogether, then spontaneously—and excruciatingly—informs her boss that he has shown up at a “naked reception.” Ines, an avatar of naked capitalism who is also a loving daughter, is simultaneously reprehensible and winning. “I had doubts about playing her in the first place, because she says and does things that I didn’t agree with,” Hüller told me. “But I realized she was just standing up for her beliefs, like I would.”
Hüller began acting in high school, and applied to the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts, in Berlin, which required her to audition with a scene from “Romeo and Juliet.” She told me, “I wasn’t very fond of the idea—I didn’t care for the character.” Hüller performed the soliloquy in which Juliet prepares to be placed inside a dark tomb from which she believes Romeo will retrieve her. Before drinking a sleeping potion, she frets about waking in a panic and using an ancestor’s bone to “dash out my desperate brains.” Hüller decided to have Juliet swallow the potion before delivering the monologue, rather than at its end, as the stage directions suggest, and performed her morbid fantasies as a drug-induced hallucination.
The teachers were evidently impressed by her audacity, and Hüller moved to Berlin. She lived in Prenzlauer Berg, a neighborhood in the former East, sharing an apartment with a friend from home. It was 1996, and the area was still largely untouched by the effects of capitalism. The living conditions were meagre—the apartment’s heat came from a stove that Hüller had to feed with coal or wood—but the social conditions were thrillingly dynamic. “There were so many free spaces, so many abandoned houses, and parties everywhere,” she recalled. The Ernst Busch Academy, by contrast, was famed for the strictness of its instruction. One teacher advised Hüller to play a nun, because wearing a habit would force her to stop relying on her hands to express herself.
After graduating, Hüller left Berlin, despite its cultural centrality. “I could never deal with the tension there,” she said. “I always had the feeling that I had to be somebody, or put on a certain face, when I got into the streets. I never felt relaxed.” She spent two years at a theatre southwest of Leipzig, then moved to Switzerland to join the Theater Basel. In 2003, she was named Young Actress of the Year by Theater Heute magazine, in part for playing Juliet in a Shakespeare production. Hüller reprised her hallucinatory interpretation of Juliet’s soliloquy, and discovered that the character was more rewarding than she had realized. “I had razor-cut my hair just before the audition in Switzerland, so I went to it almost bald, and that is how I played her,” she said. “I started to like her very much, and to find her very modern, because at the start she doesn’t run to Romeo. I always had this picture of Juliet being really sweet, and that’s what I hated about it. But then I realized she doesn’t have to be sweet, because Romeo has to love her anyway. I can do whatever I want, and he will still look at me with those loving eyes. So, I did everything I wanted, and he still loved me.”
Hüller’s success in Basel led to her first cinematic role: the protagonist of “Requiem,” a 2006 drama directed by Hans-Christian Schmid and based on the true story of Anneliese Michel, a young Bavarian woman whose epileptic fits and hallucinations were understood by her Catholic family to be instances of demonic possession. After undergoing dozens of exorcisms, Michel stopped eating and died of malnutrition, in 1976. The actor Jens Harzer, who appeared in “Requiem” as a priest, recently recalled that Hüller—though a newcomer to movies—“dominated” their first scene together: “She knew exactly what she wanted and what she did not want, had an idea, a plan, followed her path, and knew not to make herself dependent on me.” Hüller, whom the Times praised for her “astonishingly physical performance,” has said that her work in theatre, in which she often must conjure worlds on bare sets, was excellent training for the part, noting, “I don’t have to have visions in order to play them. I have enough imagination to picture what it means when you see something that really isn’t there.”
While filming “Requiem,” in southern Germany, Hüller sometimes had to return to Switzerland to uphold theatre commitments in Basel. “I had to be onstage at night, so I was driven back—three, four, five hours—so that I could be back on the film set in the morning,” she recalled. The economics of the performing arts in Germany encourage actors to strike a balance between stage roles and higher-paying film parts: theatres across the country are subsidized by the state and by local governments, and actors are regularly hired as full-time employees, an arrangement that enables them to enjoy far less precarious careers than they would in the United States. It also allows theatre directors to take artistic chances that might not fly in a more commercially driven system. Hüller became a member of the company at the Schauspielhaus Bochum in 2018; she’s no longer a full-time employee but continues to perform there as a guest, even though Bochum is more than four hours west of Leipzig by train. “Johan Simons chose to be here, so I didn’t have a choice,” she told me when I met with her in Bochum recently. She and Simons, who is Dutch and is known internationally for his bold stagings of operas and plays, have collaborated on at least ten productions.
This fall, she has been appearing at the Schauspielhaus in a freewheeling adaptation of Luis Buñuel's “The Exterminating Angel,” which I saw during my visit. She had arrived in Bochum just a few hours before being due onstage, and would be delivered back to Leipzig immediately after her curtain call. The evening’s production, conceived by Simons, had transplanted Buñuel’s scenario—a dinner party from which guests discover they cannot leave—to an abandoned classroom, with the guests stationed at children’s desks. Simons had also interpolated musical numbers, and at one point Hüller, who played the party’s host, sang Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” in a platinum wig, with vocals as delightfully deranged as the original’s.
Hüller is a gifted singer: she has recorded background tracks for the Notwist, a well-known German indie band, and a few years ago she released an EP of original material in English, “Be Your Own Prince,” which features layered harmonies and experimental lyrics. (Challenged by a friend to write a song about pornography, Hüller coupled the term with assonant words—“eternally,” “intimately,” “honestly”—in an unexpectedly wistful number titled “You & Me = Pornography.”) Even greater than her skill as a singer is her skill at disguising how good a singer she is. A high point of “Toni Erdmann” occurs when, at an awkward social function in Bucharest, Ines’s father cajoles her into a karaoke performance of Whitney Houston’s “Greatest Love of All”; Hüller’s singing grows less inhibited—and less in tune—as the song progresses.
“The Exterminating Angel” drew on some of the same comedic skills, at a broader register fit for the theatre, with Hüller hurtling across the stage in high heels, using all her powers of control to make it look as if she were losing control. The production was very weird—and fun to watch. It was no “Hamlet,” but not every production can or should be. Hüller told me, “I think that, secretly, Johan just wanted to have a musical piece.”
Despite the logistical difficulties of maintaining a stage career, Hüller has no intention of giving it up, as it lets her have a different kind of artistic freedom than movie acting does. The films that she makes are mostly auteur-driven, she noted: “With a Shakespeare play, a Kleist, an Ibsen, I can take it and do with it whatever I want. But, when somebody just wrote the script, I have to decide before I go into the work if I am willing to do the things that are written down.” Frauke Finsterwalder, a director with whom Hüller worked on another film released this year, “Sisi & I”—a costume drama in which Hüller plays Irma Sztáray, the lady-in-waiting to the Austrian Empress Elisabeth—told me, “Sometimes when you work with theatre actors, you have to make sure they don’t treat the film as a stage and overact. You never have to tell Sandra, ‘That’s too much.’ She understands the medium well.” In one scene in “Sisi,” a reluctant Irma is persuaded to participate in an amateur dramatic performance. “I don’t know how Sandra pulled it off—to be not a bad actress but, rather, someone who has never been onstage,” Finsterwalder said. “She’s been on all the big stages in the German-speaking world—played men, women, whatever. While shooting the scene, she kept on telling me, ‘I am so embarrassed.’ And that’s of course because Irma is embarrassed—Sandra was so much into it that she was very uncomfortable herself.”
Hüller said that even when performing in a film she tries to embody one of Simons’s precepts about stage acting. “He is someone who teaches you to let everything that happens onstage really happen in your head, or in your body, or in your heart,” she told me in Bochum. “It’s not about hiding anything. Everybody knows that it’s you, wearing a costume. So why would you pretend to be somebody else?”
When Hüller was playing Hamlet, Simons told me, he talked with her about the ways Hamlet is paralyzed by grief. The play, Simons said, “is about somebody who doesn’t know his orientation in the world—and in a way he can only stay still.” In the performance, when it came time for a twenty-minute intermission, Hüller never left the stage; instead, she remained standing in one spot, trapped in thought. Before long, some audience members started staying in place for the intermission, too, so that they could witness the electric drama of Hamlet, and Hüller, thinking.
While Hüller was growing up in the German Democratic Republic, she was distantly aware that what often seemed to her idyllic was not entirely so. “I remember when we had parties and friends over, and when political things were discussed the windows would be closed, even when it was summer,” she told me in Leipzig. Like many residents of the city, Hüller is mindful of the special role that it played in the reunification of Germany; she urged me to visit the Nikolaikirche, a Gothic church in the heart of the city where, in 1989, weekly prayer meetings evolved into pro-democracy protests. A month before the fall of the Berlin Wall, more than seventy thousand residents marched in the face of riot police and called for peaceful reform—the largest demonstration the G.D.R. had experienced in decades.
In the past several years, the former East Germany has seen a resurgence of right-wing extremism. In June, the racist Alternative für Deutschland party, or AfD, elected its first district administrator—the equivalent of a mayor—in Sonneberg, a town in Hüller’s native state of Thuringia. Hüller bristles at any suggestion that residents of the former East are particularly susceptible to the allures of nationalism; recent AfD successes in the Western states of Hesse and Bavaria support her position. “I think it’s coming back all over the country,” she told me. “I think the fairy tale of the de-Fascistization of Germany never really took place. But now we live in a climate where it is possible again to say Fascistic things out loud.”
It was therefore an especially charged moment to explore the dynamics of a Fascist family, in “The Zone of Interest.” Hüller told me, “When I looked at Hedwig and Rudolf Höss—I mean, they were really simple people. They wanted to be farmers, and wanted to have a beautiful life, and then this idea came along—and they decided for it. They decided, consciously or unconsciously, to accept the luxury and beauty or safety of their life at the cost of the lives of other people right next to them.”
Whereas many feature films about the Holocaust portray its leaders as thoroughly monstrous—in “Schindler’s List,” the S.S. officer played by Ralph Fiennes lounges on the balcony of his home, adjacent to a concentration camp, and shoots at prisoners for sport—“The Zone of Interest” unnervingly suggests that Rudolf was both a mass murderer and a mild-mannered family man. “You have told them that Daddy will be coming home?” he anxiously asks Hedwig in a phone call, after being transferred from Auschwitz; Hüller’s character says yes, but her face projects the irritated impatience of a spouse eager to get off the phone. During a Q. & A. at the New York Film Festival, Jonathan Glazer noted that Rudolf Höss’s demeanor has been compared with that of a “flower-picking schoolteacher.” Hüller, seated next to Glazer, cast her eyes down, her composure undercut by a sudden welling of revulsion.
Before committing to be in the film, Hüller told me, she researched the wartime history of her own family. “I know that my great-grandfather on my mother’s side was in the war, and that he had been imprisoned in Russia, and that my great-grandmother raised her two children alone for ten years,” she said. After he returned to Germany, following the war, “he never talked about prison.” She added, “The Russian Army went through the village where my great-grandmother lived with the two kids, so I assume she must have seen and experienced things that were traumatic. She also never talked about it.” Hüller’s paternal grandfather was from Karlovy Vary, a spa town in an area of Czechoslovakia that was annexed by the Nazis in 1938, and from that side of the family an anecdote of resistance had been passed down: “I know that my grandmother on my father’s side always made the children comb their hair in the other direction than Hitler did.”
As a schoolchild, Hüller had visited the Buchenwald concentration camp, in Weimar, on more than one occasion, and she had watched documentaries about the Holocaust that showed piles of corpses at Auschwitz. To make “The Zone of Interest,” Glazer was granted permission to film on a set built just outside the actual camp, which is in southern Poland. The house that the Höss family lived in still stands, but the production team decided to build a replica that would appear starkly new, as the home had been in the early nineteen-forties.
The set allowed Glazer to arrange an unusual way to film. Much of the interior action was shot on unattended cameras, which rendered it impossible for the actors to know when they were being filmed. There was a kind of obscenity, Hüller felt, in the possibility that an actor playing a Nazi might be tempted to turn his or her head to better catch the light. “We could go from one room to another, or be on the stairs, and everything would be covered,” she said. “You would never have an entrance, like onstage. You were there, all the time.”
In an early scene, Hedwig bends over a flower bed in her garden, but there is nothing in Hüller’s characterization that would lead a psychologist to describe Hedwig’s affect as that of a “flower-picking schoolteacher.” One day, Hedwig chastises a servant girl over a minor misunderstanding, noting that she could have her husband scatter the girl’s remains across nearby fields. Christian Friedel, Hüller’s co-star, told me that she refused to probe why Hedwig was so self-absorbed: “Sandra said, ‘I don’t want to give my tears to her.’ ”
There was a metaphysical element to Glazer’s use of surveillance cameras, Hüller said: “It made us feel like we were being watched, not only by these cameras. There were so many energies in those rooms. It had a lot to do with taking responsibility, and with former generations.” Every day, Hüller and Friedel had conversations about the intensity of the experience. Friedel told me, “We were sometimes unsure what we were doing here, in this place, so close to the camp, feeling the ghosts of the past. Sometimes I realized that I forgot where we were. And then I would think, No, I cannot forget being so close to the camp. That’s what these people did.”
Hüller concluded that representing the character of Hedwig onscreen was not the true moral challenge of the project. “I would almost say that the real work I’ve done was more to be in Auschwitz—to really be in that place—for such a long time,” she said. “Playing Hedwig Höss was the smallest part of the process—of facing this crime, and being there as a German person.”
Before filming began, a guide took the actors and crew members on a tour of Auschwitz. They visited the former barracks and crematoria, and also saw display cases containing heaps of material that had been seized by the Nazis: leather shoes, prosthetic limbs, eyeglasses. These vitrines, which embody the film’s aesthetic—horror, viewed clinically—are featured in the film. Hüller said of the tour, “I had the reflex to expect some kind of cathartic moment. You know, it’s a romantic thought—you’re in Auschwitz as a German, and suddenly all the guilt of your ancestors falls away, and you understand, and you are free. And then the ghost is gone.” She went on, “The first thing I learned is, Auschwitz doesn’t do that. It says, ‘You will have to live with this forever. Humanity has to live with this forever. And there is no way of escaping it.’ ” ♦
