The Children Are Watching You: Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon

“Like any old-style modernist, Haneke likes to make the audience work.”

The White Ribbon (Das weiße Band, 2009) marks Michael Haneke’s return, after more than a decade, to German-language filmmaking, and in doing so he turns to the ultimate subject in German history (even if never stated in such explicit terms in the film): where did the Nazis and, more crucially, the support for them come from? High-minded, didactic seriousness is something we’ve come to expect from Haneke, but the surprise with the film is how much it defeats expectations. Yes, it does portray a world of — as one character puts it — “malice, envy, apathy and brutality,” but it’s also a world that’s so much more expansive than that; this time Haneke allows for more subtle, less programmatic characterisation and for moments of gentleness and compassion. This may be the effect of having had his original mini-series-length screenplay handed over to a second pair of hands, those of Jean-Claude Carrière, co-writer of most of Buñuel’s later films, who would have certainly tempered Haneke’s famously cool eye. But even more important is the narrative form the film has been given.

Although original, Haneke’s screenplay gives every impression of being the adaptation of some little-known German novel from the early years of the last century. It’s a tremendous act of artistic ventriloquy, and Haneke has spoken of how he took Theodor Fontane, the late-nineteenth-century social realist novelist, as a conscious model. The White Ribbon‘s setting in a small Prussian village in the year before the outbreak of World War I is, geographically, Fontane territory, and the film’s story has a novelistic breadth, encompassing the whole range of village inhabitants (mostly unnamed): the local baron, the steward of his estate, the doctor, the pastor, the midwife, a family of tenant farmers, and the village schoolteacher. The schoolteacher also provides another novelistic aspect to the film (and something that is a first for Haneke’s cinema1): a narrator’s voice-over.

The narrator’s voice is not that of the actor who plays him in the film (Christian Friedel), but an elderly one (Ernst Jacobi), looking back on the events of the story decades later. His voice opens the film, speaking over a black screen that ever so slowly fades into a view of the countryside seen from the doctor’s home (in an exquisite black-and-white2 characteristic of The White Ribbon, consciously modelled, as far as the human figures are concerned, on August Sander’s famous portraits); and this voice sets a clear agenda for the story:

I don’t know if the story I want to tell you is entirely true. Some of it I only know by hearsay. After so many years a lot of it is still obscure and many questions remain unanswered. But I think I must tell you of the strange events that occurred in our village. They could perhaps clarify some things that happened in this country.

Those strange events comprise a series of violent acts whose perpetrators we are never shown: the deliberate tripping of the doctor’s horse so that he is seriously injured; the abduction and savage beating of the Baron’s pampered son Sigi; arson; the deliberate exposure of the steward’s newborn baby to an open window; and an even more savage attack on the midwife’s Down Syndrome son Karli. But there are also incidents that we are witness to: the son of tenant farmer Felder vandalises the Baron’s cabbage field; one of the steward’s sons maliciously pushes Sigi into the water, knowing he can’t swim; the pastor’s eldest daughter Klara (a ringleader of the local children) equally deliberately kills her father’s beloved pet bird.

Each of the acts that we are made privy to are ones of vengeance against the repressive social order of this society. Felder’s son is avenging himself on the baron for the death of his mother in an estate accident. The steward’s son’s actions are driven by class jealousy; he’s enraged by Sigi’s flute-playing that seems to mock his and his brother’s futile attempts to whittle their own flutes out of pieces of wood. That revolt is then turned against his father: when the steward beats and kicks him, he consistently denies knowledge of Sigi’s flute, then, as soon as his father has left, begins playing it in a provocative challenge.

The white ribbon of the title also gathers other associations in the film. There are the ties used to bind Martin’s hands at night in a bid to stop him from masturbating, a symbol of the oppressive constraints placed on natural behaviour. There is also the white bandage wrapped around the injured Karli’s eyes that simultaneously marks a society’s scapegoating of one of its weaker members (reminding us of the Nazis’ later treatment of the mentally impaired) and symbolizes that society’s blindness to its own true nature. The shaming white ribbons worn on Martin and Klara’s arms project associations into the Nazi future, both the Nazis’ armbands and the badges of shame (yellow for Jews, pink for homosexuals, purple for Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc.) used in the camps.

But in The White Ribbon Haneke is too subtle to spell out these connections directly. The words “Hitler” or “the Nazis” are never mentioned, but there can be no doubt what is meant when the narrator refers to “some things that happened in this country.” Yet in interviews Haneke has gone to some lengths to deny that his film is primarily concerned with this issue of German history. Instead he claims to be offering a more generalised statement on how any repressive system can distort its younger members:

The film itself says nothing about fascism. We simply depict a group of children who absolutize the ideals preached to them by their parents. On the basis of these ideals, the children judge their parents. And when they realize that the parents do not live by the rules they preach, the children punish the parents.3

Haneke even compares the historically distinct cases of Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer who oversaw mass Jewish deportations in Eastern Europe, and the Baader-Meinhof group member Gudrun Esslin, the daughter of a pastor, and he also makes reference to contemporary Islamic fundamentalism. Now, however much we may draw some general lessons of individual behaviour and social/political phenomena when we watch a film like Visconti’s The Damned (1969) or Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1971), aren’t we essentially interested in and responding to the historical specificity of the world of the film, whether it be (respectively) Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy? The same really holds true for The White Ribbon.

Here, Haneke seems almost embarrassed and now inclined to downplay his film’s links between a repressive authoritarian system of upbringing and the country’s subsequent turn to fascism. In fact, this linkage has been made elsewhere in far more explicit terms than Haneke attempts. Take, for example, the Polish-born German-Jewish literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki. In his book of memoirs, Reich-Ranicki, who — unlike his parents, brother, and mother-in-law — survived the Warsaw ghetto, has written of the shock he felt after moving with his family from Poland to Berlin at the end of the twenties and encountering the oppression and violence inherent in the German education system: “I experienced on my first day of school in Germany something that I have never been able to overcome and that accompanied me my whole life. Accompanied? No, let’s rather say: always accompanies. I mean fear — of the German cane, of the German concentration camp, of the German gas chamber, in short: of German barbarity.”4

The world of The White Ribbon is one of powerful father figures (or surrogates for those figures) enforcing obedience to a coercive regime of control and conformity. The film’s first interactions between adults and children sketch a rising series of instances of adult/parental control. First, the midwife reprimands the schoolchildren for not greeting her and gets an immediate, smooth apology from Klara. Then the baroness is shown exerting her own brand of control when she both compels the tutor to play a duet with her and neglects her bored son (“Stay out of my sight. I get nervous when you saunter around.”). The next stage comes with the pastor’s imposition of collective and individual punishment on his family: no dinner for all, plus, for Klara and Martin, the wearing of the white ribbons and a ritualised public caning. The formal bedtime farewells that follow the pastor’s announcement point to the acceptance by each member of the family (however much it goes against their true beliefs and feelings — see the mother’s look of complaint in her eyes here, and her later tears when she prepares the white ribbons) of the system in which they live.

Every social unit of the village is ruled over by a controlling father figure. At the top is the baron whose soft paternalism — he lectures the villagers as if they were his children — masks the harsher social reality of the villagers’ economic dependence on him. At the bottom of the social order the tenant farmer Felder demands the same kind of respect and obedience as any other patriarch — he slaps his son; just like the pastor he’s addressed by his children as “Herr Vater” [Herr = Mister, Sir; Vater = Father] — thus internalising a system that’s against his own class interests. Outside the world of the village, the same pattern is repeated when the schoolteacher pays a courting visit to the home of the Baron’s young nanny Eva and encounters another controlling, authoritarian patriarch. The doctor, the victim of the film’s first incident, turns out on his home turf to be a psychological abuser of his lover, the midwife, and a physical one of his own young teenage daughter. And even the schoolteacher, the most sympathetic character, invokes the threat of punishment in his own dealings with the children.

Like any old-style modernist, Haneke likes to make the audience work. There are always gaps in knowledge, ambiguities, narrative loose ends. You’re asked to work away at connecting the pieces together. One short scene follows another, with the identities of and the connections between characters only slowly emerging. A lot of elements, both major and minor, are left unclear or ambiguous. Is Karli the doctor’s son? Did Erna, the steward’s young daughter, really have the premonitory dreams she relates to the schoolteacher? Is the baroness lying when she denies sleeping with her lover? What’s the reason for the disappearance of the doctor’s and midwife’s families? And, above all, who committed each of the mysterious assaults?

The White Ribbon and Hidden (Caché, 2005), Haneke’s last two films, both offer a mystery within a serious thematic (Nazism, French colonial guilt). But the similarities are misleading. Hidden‘s mystery, the source of the videos, is simply unanswerable. There is no logical explanation, which in David Lynch’s world poses no problem (Haneke surely cribbed the idea from Lost Highway, 1999). But in Hidden, particularly with the film’s final shot hinting at connections between the sons, the mystery is a structural and aesthetic mistake on Haneke’s part, distracting from and undermining the compelling drama of Georges’ story and its social and political implications. It’s as if Antonioni were to leave the audience at the end of L’avventura (1960) concentrating on the fate of the mysteriously vanished Anna rather than on Claudia and Sandro.

With the narrator’s “I don’t know if the story I want to tell you is entirely true,” Haneke seems first to be proposing the schoolteacher as an unreliable narrator, but we should discount this as a de rigueur postmodernist flourish that is never further developed. The children are responsible for the assaults, although Haneke deliberately leaves the details of who did what unclear. What is at issue is the collective nature of the children’s behaviour, the vague sense of disturbing threat their appearance en masse brings with them. They are simultaneously the victims of and perpetrators of violence, an index of the corruption inherent in this society, and, in the words of the note found with Karli’s beaten body, a promise of a chilling future: “punishing the children for the sins of their parents’ sins to the third and fourth generation.”

The White Ribbon is a tremendous achievement, Haneke’s best film to date. It’s also a lot more nuanced than a simple description of its main theme would make it appear. Even the character of the pastor is revealed to be more than just an unappealing mixture of high-minded religious morality and authoritarianism. His two scenes with his youngest son show a softer side to the man, especially in the second one when he is openly moved by the boy’s gift of his caged bird as a replacement for the father’s murdered one. Haneke is not merely offering a forbidding catalogue of human horrors (his Austrian films of the nineties suffered from this). There’s a real delicacy to his portrayal of certain scenes — when, for example, the doctor’s daughter Anna tries answering her young brother’s questions about death; or the single-shot of Felder entering the dilapidated room in which his wife’s body is laid out, to sit grieving, hidden from our sight. And there are the charming scenes of the schoolteacher’s hesitant courtship of Eva. The White Ribbon ends on a frozen tableau of and a fade-out on the villagers in church, gathered together at the very start of World War I with all their previous certainties about to be overthrown. The audience outside the film knows only too well the grim developments of history that lie in store, but the knowledge that the narrator and Eva are allowed in a sense to escape this (“I never saw any of the villagers again”) provides some kind of cathartic release from the impending darkness.