My first non-travel post. Maybe there’ll be others like it, maybe not.

Some thoughts on Michael Haneke’s 2009 Palm d’Or winning film ‘The White Ribbon‘ (Das Weiße Band – Eine Deutsche Kindergeschichte), which I first watched at the cinema on its release, but recently revisited with post-Trump/Meloni/Orbán/whoever-on-the-nationalist-populist-right eyes.

**Note that this may contain spoilers**

“I must tell of the strange events that occurred in our village, because they cast a new light on some of the goings-on in this country”, so begins our narrator, who we learn was once the lone school teacher of a small village in northern Germany, but is looking back many years hence on the multiple “strange events” of the year leading up to the outbreak of World War One.

Those strange events begin with the opening scene, where one of the village patriarchs is returning home on horseback, only for his horse to be deliberately felled by a trip wire tied between two trees at the entrance to his property. This is the village doctor, whose injuries are life-threatening and result in a long stay for him at hospital in the nearby town.

No one knows, or admits to knowing, who the perpetrator of this or any of the ensuing crimes is, but the semi-formal enquiries into it are overseen by the other village patriarchs, the Land Steward and Protestant Pastor. We’re also introduced to the Baron, apparently the feudal lord of the land, his younger and beautiful wife the Baroness, and their young son, the blonde Sigi.

The villagers are then largely made up of peasants, who spend their lives toiling the Baron’s land, and the children: the film’s German release was after all sub-titled ‘Eine Deutsche Kindergeschichte‘, a German children’s story.

Haneke is on record as saying that The White Ribbon “is about the roots of evil, whether it’s religious or political terrorism, it’s the same thing”. The children of the village would have been born in the first decade of the 20th Century, meaning that they would have reached young adulthood during the Third Reich.

Despite Haneke’s statement suggesting that the film is not explicitly about the causes of Nazism, some commentators have focussed their reviews on this likelihood, with several claiming that the film is too simplistic in delineating religious upbringings with Nazism.

I think such reviews miss other key themes. Depending on the leanings of their employers, perhaps some of those reviewers are being overly protective of conservative values, oversimplifying the film (in lieu of an outright straw man argument) in order to say ‘you can’t just say Nazism was born of strict religiosity’.

Religion is certainly a significant factor according to the film, but I am of the opinion that Haneke is pointing an accusatory finger more specifically at puritanical religion and religious guilt, and other themes that I shall explore later.

We see the Pastor sentencing his eldest children, Martin and Klara, to caning for being out late (“it’ll hurt us more than it hurts you”); we see the Pastor accuse and admonish Martin of ‘impurely’ touching himself, resulting in his hands being tied to the bed frame in punishment each night; Klara takes revenge on their father for the caning by viciously killing his beloved pet bird and leaving it, wings-spread as if crucified, on his desk; when Sigi is tied up and tortured, a note is left with him that quotes Exodus 20:5 – “I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me”.

Later, the Pastor’s youngest son – the picture of blonde sweetness and innocence – gifts his father a foundling bird that he has been nursing back to health, noting his father’s sadness at the loss of his pet bird.

The fictional village is Eichwald (in fact, I wondered if this was a portmanteau of Eichmann and Buchenwald, but is apparently a common German place name meaning ‘Oakwood’) in northern Germany. This is a protestant area, rather than the southern Catholic regions – particularly Bavaria – from which the Nazis rose. We also don’t know on which side of the later east-west split the village sits.

These geographical and religious factors tell me that this parable is not solely about the petri dish that spawned Nazism, but could equally be an allegory on other totalitarian states – religion may have been removed from society by the Soviet communists, but was still a significant factor in the equation of Russia’s history in the lead up to them taking power.

That said, other analogies come to mind that do point to those “certain goings on in our country” being an abstract reference to German fascism.

The aloof Baron with his assumed air of benevolence could represent the Kaiser. Late in the film the Baroness and Sigi return from a trip to Italy, where they have taken refuge following the violence suffered by Sigi. The Baroness admits to her husband that in Italy – the birthplace of fascism – she had fallen for an Italian banker whom had “courted (her) assiduously” and who had enabled Sigi – symbolic of the future of the ‘Aryan race’ – to “flourish”.

In seeking to break from the status quo, could the Baroness represent the schism between democratic Germany (or at least the German elite) and the Kaiser following defeat in 1918? Is her being “courted assiduously” to reference the various political factions, including the Nazis and Communists, that courted the German people during the inter-war years? Is the Italian banker to represent the promise of fiscal surety following the chaos of the hyperinflation of the 1920s? Or does this affair represent the supposed infidelity of the Weimar Republic against traditional conservative German values?

Other themes are ever-present. Patriarchy, class structure, parochialism and monoculture are all (tainted) golden threads.

Strict family discipline – with its suspicion and unfounded accusations, lack of recourse to proper ‘trials’, severe and humiliating punishments for minor indiscretions – creates an environment where the children lust for retribution and so ‘other’ the people who are more vulnerable or simply different to them. Those humiliating punishments could represent those meted out on Germany at Versailles in 1919; the children then taking vengeance on those within the community (and we return to that passage from Exodus).

Outsiders are essential to nationalism, of course. Right before the Baroness admits to her Italian affair, the Baron tells her that a large group of Poles have arrived to work his fields. There is no evidence that they are mistreated, but he does state that they have been crammed together to lodge in a barn.

The only other outsiders are our narrator the teacher and Eva, whom he falls for, the 17 year old nanny to Sigi’s baby twin siblings. Both are from nearby villages, so not particularly exotic, but do experience Eichwald from a slightly removed perspective.

When Sigi is attacked Eva is wrongly punished and ostricised, even though Sigi is not her responsibility; she is female and an outsider, of course, and the true perpetrators have yet to be revealed. She goes on to find work in a nearby town and maintains correspondence with the teacher.

In contrast, the father of the person who is most likely of blame (the eldest son of the woman who died at the mill) is at first publicly identified and humiliated at church, but is allowed to remain in the community, all be it now with no way of earning money for his shamed family. He later hangs himself.

His son is also the likely culprit that we see scything to pieces a field of cabbages. After a brief arrest, he returns having been let off and is assimilated without question. Perhaps a nod to returning WW1 soldiers?

The peasants barely get a scene and when they do they are toiling away at menial but essential work; celebrating a traditional harvest festival at the benevolence of the Baron (with words from the preacher); or bickering about not overstepping their place in the village’s social structure in order that they don’t bite the hand that feeds.

This is important: the tyrannical patriarchy of the pastor, steward and doctor depends on the rest of the population having no agency and the Baron remaining aloof. The women are only able to occasionally protest the actions of their husbands, but otherwise live their lives in quiet acquiescence. The children, often led by Klara, are always prying on others, listening in on the conversation of the adults from the outside of closed doors.

The white ribbon itself, tied by the pastor to Martin’s arm and Klara’s hair, is said to be a reminder of an idealised childhood innocence. It keeps the children in their place and publicly humiliates them. A metaphor for the perception of what Germany should be? Or of Germany’s Versailles humiliation? Or an acknowledgement of Germany’s exaggerated faults in causing WW1?

Meanwhile, the doctor abuses his own daughter. At the end he disappears, just like Josef Mengele did after abusing so many of the children of the holocaust.

The White Ribbon is saying that a German childhood of the time was to simultaneously be to conform and to be locked out, to have no real positive role models, and to witness malevolence in every corner of society, including unfairly experiencing its punishment. The children are bullied and have no agency; the abused become the abusers. They torture, blind and kill the person they see as weaker than or ‘other’ to them: disabled Karli.

Karli’s mother, the nanny of the doctor’s children (whom he is also sleeping with before telling her she repulses him and casting her aside), goes to the nearest town to report the crime against her poor son. However, echoing so many reports of crimes against the vulnerable – such as those committed by Hitler and Stalin – the nanny is never seen again, the crime likely never investigated.

And so, despite all evidence, when the teacher, the one person to bring knowledge and an outside perspective to Eichwald, puts to the pastor his conclusion that the children are guilty of the crimes that have taken place in the village, the pastor castigates him and says he will imprison him if he makes the same claim to anyone else. Just how totalitarian regimes put down dissent and populists put down intellectuals: tyrannical control.

And with that, we learn of the outbreak of the Great War, and The White Ribbon comes to its conclusion.

Our narrator began his warning from history by telling us that those “strange events” would cast new light on the later “goings on” of his country, but it could have been, was, and could still be, many a country. The ingredients that cultivate tyranny are many faceted, and the iniquity of tyranny’s fathers will always be visited upon its children.