kinder geschichte

Rating: 9/10 (4 June 2010)

It's a film about decent people, good parents and loyal churchgoers. This unshaken conviction is shared by all the adult characters. The only person who hesitates about his moral status is Martin, the Pastor's son, who is testing God's attitude toward him when he's walking on the banister of the footbridge: if God doesn't kill him, then things can't be as wrong as they seem to be. Of course, Martin's God is wearing his father's (Pastor) face of the cruel, scrupulous punisher.
In the society of decent people, good people, parents do not enter any sort of dialogue with their children. They produce lengthy speeches and whenever they ask a question, they answer it for the children, too. In the community of decent people, a child is their parent's commodity: you can beat them till blood is drawn, humiliate them and abuse them. A child is seen as a potential source of problem, disorder; an empty vessel to be filled with moral principles by means of pure aggression. Obedient mothers support this model of unremitting violence without uttering one word of protest.
But of course, it is not the principles that are beaten into the children's heads that remain. What remains and what the children learn is only HOW the moral lessons are taught. Their heritage is aggression and thoughtless violence towards anything that is not perfect (handicapped Karli) - or that is treated better than they are (the caged parrot that Klara kills with scissors, the little brother left to die at the open window, the Baroness's son, or even a flute made from a twig that doesn't sound as good as it could).
Some people argue that the character of the teacher stands out from the general emotional portrayal of the village community. I am not sure; the way he's telling the story does not match the content at all. It seems that even he does not give enough attention and enough thought to what is going on. Being a teacher - he should be the first to notice and to fight against the domestic violence. He's given many opportunities to enter the world of the children, who trust him more than their own parents. But in the end, he has just the same paternalist words of rebuke: for Martin on the footbridge, and for the girl who tells him about her "dreams" anticipating subsequent acts of violence.
How Nazism was born? Yes, of course. In the heads of children punished for any sign of weakness, any sign of human empathy, any sign of feeling at all.