The Zone of Interest Quotes

“I looked at it out there. The figures that held my attention, as always (I too had an office at Buna, and spent many hours in front of its window), the figures that held my attention were not the men in stripes, as they queued or scurried in lines or entangled one another in a kind of centipedal scrum, moving at an unnatural speed, like extras in a silent film, moving faster than their strength or build could bear, as if in obedience to a frantic crank swivelled by a furious hand; the figures that held my attention were not the Kapos who screamed at the prisoners, nor the SS noncoms who screamed at the Kapos, nor the overalled company foremen who screamed at the SS noncoms. No. What held my eye were the figures in city business suits, designers, engineers, administrators from IG Farben plants in Frankfurt, Leverkusen, Ludwigshafen, with leather-bound notebooks and retractable yellow measuring tapes, daintily picking their way past the bodies of the wounded, the unconscious, and the dead.”
― Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest

“Under National Socialism you looked in the mirror and saw your soul. You found yourself out. This applied, par excellence and a fortiori, (by many magnitudes), to the victims, or to those who lived for more than an hour and had time to confront their own reflections. And yet it also applied to everyone else, the malefactors, the collaborators, the witnesses, the conspirators, the outright martyrs (Red orchestra, White Rose, the men and women of July 20), and even the minor obstructors, like me, and like Hannah Doll. We all discovered, or helplessly revealed, who we were.
Who somebody really was. That was the Zone of interest.”
― Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest

“… I was soon wondering if I would ever again be able to attend a mass assemblage without my mind starting to play tricks on me. It wasn’t like the last occasion, when I became gradually immersed in the logistical challenge of gassing the audience. No.”
― Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest: A novel

“For the survivors and their testimonies I want to single out from the huge and forbidding archive a volume that deserves permanent currency: Anton Gill’s The Journey Back from Hell. It is an extraordinarily inspiring treasury of voices, and one grounded and marshalled by the author with both flair and decorum. Indeed, these reminiscences, these dramatic monologues, reshape our tentative answer to the unavoidable question: What did you have to have to survive? What you had to have is usually tabulated as follows: luck; the ability to adapt, immediately and radically; a talent for inconspicuousness; solidarity with another individual or with a group; the preservation of decency (“the people who had no tenets to live by—of whatever nature—generally succumbed” no matter how ruthlessly they struggled); the constantly nurtured conviction of innocence (an essential repeatedly emphasised by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago); immunity to despair; and, again, luck.”
― Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest: A novel

“It’s a common slander of the Jews, but it’s no slander of a huge fraction of the Germans. They went like sheep to the slaughterhouse. And then they donned the rubber aprons and set to work.”
― Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest

“What you had to have is usually tabulated as follows: luck; the ability to adapt, immediately and radically; a talent for inconspicuousness; solidarity with another individual or with a group; the preservation of decency (“the people who had no tenets to live by—of whatever nature—generally succumbed” no matter how ruthlessly they struggled); the constantly nurtured conviction of innocence (an essential repeatedly emphasised by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago); immunity to despair; and, again, luck.”
― Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest: A novel

“In a conclusive rebuke to the Nazi idea, these ‘subhumans’, it turns out, were the cream of humankind. And”
― Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest

“They say that it is one of the most terrifying manifestations in nature: a bull elephant in a state of must. Twin streams of vile-smelling liquid flow from the ducts of the temples and into the corners of the jaws. At these times the great beast will gore giraffes and hippos, will break the backs of cringeing rhinoceri. This was male-elephantine heat. Must: it derived via Urdu from the Persian mast or maest—“intoxicated.” But I had settled for the modal verb. I must, I must, I just must.”
― Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest: A novel

“we took the simple step of illegalising all opposition. And the autobahn to autocracy lay clear.”
― Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest: A novel

“In the solitude of my cell I have come to the bitter realisation that I have sinned gravely against humanity.”
― Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest: A novel

“On the one hand, the people, with their peculiar “despair of politics” (as Trevor-Roper has put it), their eager fatalism, their wallowing in petulance and perversity, what Haffner calls their “resentful dimness” and their “heated readiness to hate,” their refusal of moderation and, in adversity, of all consolation, their ethos of zero-sum (of all or nothing, of Sein oder Nichtsein), and their embrace of the irrational and hysterical. And on the other hand the leader, who indulged these tendencies on the stage of global politics.”
― Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest: A novel

“They are quite incapable of coming up with anything even remotely as terrible as what I do all day—and they’ve stopped trying. Now I just dream”
― Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest: A novel

“If what we’re doing is good, why does it smell so lancingly bad? On the ramp at night, why do we feel the ungainsayable need to get so brutishly drunk? Why did we make the meadow churn and spit? The flies as fat as blackberries, the vermin, the diseases, ach, scheusslich, schmierig—why? Why do rats fetch 5 bread rations per cob? Why did the lunatics, and only the lunatics, seem to like it here? Why, here, do conception and gestation promise not new life but certain death for both woman and child? Ach, why all der Dreck, der Sumpf, der Schleim? Why do we turn the snow brown? Why do we do that? Make the snow look like the shit of angels. Why do we do that?”
― Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest: A novel

“I was thinking, how did 'a sleepy country of poets and dreamers,' and the most highly educated nation the earth had ever seen, how did it yield to such a wild, such fantastic disgrace? What made its people, men and women, consent to have their souls raped.”
― Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest

“But this is the state of mind of the artist, I’m sure: the diametrical opposite of what we call taking things for granted. Why does a hand have five digits? What is a woman’s shoe? Why ants, why suns? Then I look, with”
― Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest: A novel

“Secrecy, hiddenness, was power, they knew).”
― Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest: A novel

“I love my wife, but I’m glad I’ll never see her again.”
― Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest: A novel

“Adulterous philanderers had a motto: Seduce the wife, traduce the husband; and when I was in bed with Loremarie, I always felt a sedimentary unease about Peter—his plump lips, his spluttering laugh, his misbuttoned waistcoat.”
― Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest: A novel

“These men, the Death’s Head SS, were probably once very ordinary, ninety per cent of them. Ordinary, mundane, banal, commonplace—normal. They were once very ordinary. But they are ordinary no longer.”
― Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest: A novel

“Neffe, you're thinner. Though I'm one to talk.

Ah but I'm like the troubadour, Tantchen. Famished for love.”
― Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest

“Although I live in the present, and do so with pathological fixity, I remember everything that has happened to me since I came to the Lager. Everything. To remember an hour would take an hour. To remember a month would take a month. I cannot forget because I cannot forget.”
― Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest

“Otherwise, I adhere to that which happened, in all its horror, its desolation, and its bloody-minded opacity.”
― Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest: A novel