Adapting the Holocaust: Martin Amis’ and Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest

Abstract

Critics and reviewers have frequently dismissed the adaptive relationship between Martin Amis’ novel The Zone of Interest (2014) and Jonathan Glazer’s 2023 film of the same name. This essay argues that this is an inaccurate characterization of the connection between two works that respond to one of the main cultural challenges of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: how best to represent the horrors of the Holocaust. Both, I argue, do so at least in part through strategies of adaptation, and should be seen not just as two parts of a source-text/adapted-text binary, but as part of a larger adaptive and intertextual network. This status has a direct impact on the overlapping ways they deal with the problematics of Holocaust representation. By addressing the challenges of Holocaust representation through strategies of adaptation, Amis’ novel and Glazer’s film reaffirm both the importance of the Holocaust to contemporary literary and cinematic culture and the importance of adaptation and adaptive processes to its representation.