This essay examines how Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," the 1984 film The Wannsee Conference, and Alain Resnais's 1955 documentary Night and Fog each illuminate the totalitarian mindset through themes of confined physical space, groupthink, and the suppression of individual humanity. Beginning with Gregor Samsa's colonization by social and domestic pressures, the essay moves to the "hothouse" atmosphere of the Wannsee Conference, where Nazi officers collectively rationalized the Final Solution, and concludes with Resnais's documentary juxtaposition of Holocaust evidence against postwar denial. Together, these works reveal how totalitarianism colonizes both the individual psyche and collective decision-making.
The limiting nature of confining physical space — and the dialogue it produces — renders both the human mind and body susceptible to a totalitarian framework. This dynamic is not unique to any single era or medium. It appears in the fiction of Franz Kafka, in the historical drama of the Wannsee Conference, and in the postwar documentary work of Alain Resnais. Across all three works, closed environments breed ideological conformity, erasing individual humanity in favor of collective — and often monstrous — action.
Kafka's protagonist in The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa, perfectly embodies the totalitarian mindset in the sense that he is colonized by the desires of his employer, his family, and even the room in which he lives — to the point that he can hardly think for himself. The room in which Samsa dwells is so small that the man becomes a virtual prisoner of its confines. Samsa turns into an insect seemingly as a result of the limiting pressures of his physical space and his cramped social and emotional life. In fact, his existence is so confining that he can only think of returning to the office, even after being transformed into a huge and hideous insect.
Over the course of Kafka's short story, Gregor's own family rejects him after his physical alteration, despite the fact that he had long sacrificed his own pleasures and health to support his aging parents and to fund his sister's musical education and marriage prospects. Gregor dwells in a kind of totalitarian urban landscape, where all he can think about is the daily grind of his life, and the only ideology that matters is routine — an insect-like existence that eventually subsumes and captures his humanity on both a literal and metaphorical level.
The 1984 film The Wannsee Conference takes place in a similarly confined, though more pleasant and ambient space, where events unfold over a highly concentrated time frame. The "groupthink" mentality that develops over the course of the film propels a mutual direction of common thought and action among the Nazi officers present. This dangerous collective and totalitarian climate changed not just one man's life and family, but the entire course of world history — and Jewish history in particular, especially in Eastern Europe.
The film dramatizes the discussions through which the Nazi officers arrived at the exact particulars of the so-called "Final Solution" to the supposed Jewish question — the issue of living space in Europe and of Jewish cultural presence. At the conference depicted in the film, which actually took place in January 1942, the hothouse nature of the discussion among officers reflects the director's apparent theory of totalitarianism: the closed environment created the necessary "freedom" for the Nazi officials to discuss the removal of Jews from every sphere of German life and the expulsion of Jews from what they called the rightful European living space of the Aryan German people. Because everyone at the conference agreed, in totalitarian lockstep, that Jews were inferior, this horrifying decision became feasible within the Nazi mindset.
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