Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Some might have thought that the cultural well had run dry on the Holocaust – that writers, filmmakers, and playwrights had said all they could about Hitler’s Germany, having plumbed it so exhaustively as to entrench an existential deterrent to its reprise. But that view assumed that the species was advancing. In the last ten years or so, the late-twentieth-century idea of human progress has taken an obvious hit. The political success of Donald Trump, the MAGA crowd, and their imitators has reanimated the fear of vicious fascism and the warped ethos that allows it to flourish. So Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, loosely based on Martin Amis’s novel of the same title, is not just a brilliantly imagined dramatization of genocidal lunacy compartmentalized within the saccharine Gemütlichkeit that the Nazis idealized and retailed. It is also a cold-eyed warning about the persistent human capacity for morbid normalization.