She is nominated for an Oscar and is celebrated for her roles in “Anatomy of a Case” and “The Zone of Interest.” Actress Sandra Hülser talks about what it was like to play the wife of Auschwitz commandant Höß without getting too close to her.
“Area of interest” – this is how the SS described an area of 40 square kilometers in the vicinity of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Their interest lay in the maximum destruction of life. The British author Martin Amis set his 2014 novel “The Zone of Interest” in this area. He modeled one main character on Rudolf Höß, the commandant of Auschwitz between 1940 and 1943, and another on his wife Hedwig Höß. “The Zone of Interest” is now the name of a film by British director Jonathan Glazer. It is loosely based on Amis' novel, but unlike Amis, it keeps itself and the audience away from any horror of Nazi proximity and slipping into the shoes of endlessly powerful atrocities. He looks closely at them, the perpetrators and the power, without allowing himself to be seduced by them.
Glazer masterfully depicts the banality and bureaucracy of evil. And the hustle and bustle in the modern villa that the Hösss live with their five children and the staff. It's right next to the concentration camp, with only a wall in between. Christian Friedel plays Rudolf Höß as what Hannah Arendt called an “administrative mass murderer.” During the day he decides on “charges” and “continuous operation”, and in the evening he gently reads to his children to help them fall asleep. But few people can fall asleep in the villa; here you often lie awake at night. All that can be seen in a deep sleep is Hedwig Höß, mistress of the house and the family's brutally normal everyday life. She is played by Sandra Hülser.
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