The narrator

Rating: Null/10 (1 September 2012)

The idea here is to have one layer outside the film that is (conventionally) recorded , solid history, and use the actual film to examine mechanisms of the actual bleeding reality that gives rise to it. That history could be anything, since it is little more than a commonly agreed way to tell a story, Haneke simply chose something that hits close to home and almost always lends itself to sympathetic ears. And here we have a (fictional) story that is recalled by one of the participants, and in a way that is obvious it's only the commonly agreed version of what happened, if that.
By now, it is all but common knowledge: we see the generation that would grow up to be the Germany that in its moment of despair flocked to Hitler and the Nazi party, as well as witness some of the childhood trauma that perhaps explains it, explains how a society could acquiesce to Nuremberg and Krystallnacht, some less reluctantly than others, would come to crave the grandiose vision, and went on to scatter the bodies of its youth across three continents and two oceans.
On a broader level, there is a small , elusive aperture in the machinery of the universe that evil flows from, and depending on your predisposition, you will come out of the film with a few things about the nature of that evil.
You may note ancient sin that mysteriously stole into the world and poisons its way through the generations, sustaining and replicating itself like a virus.
You may note what in the Eastern world is known as karma, which is not a metaphysical proposition but a simple truth: every force in nature promulgates its reaction, and it is no different with mental pain you inflict (and had inflicted on you by your father's father).
You may note that karmic cycle of sin as nothing other than ego and desire, that aspect of self that thinks the world including its own offspring should conform to its image, and spends a lifetime tinkering with that self-image - ambition, pride, vanity, hate, all means to control life that is ever-changing and flows.
All of it true, but I like to settle for something else, which I believe explains deeper. The story is framed as memoir of an unreliable narrator, a schoolteacher.
And this is the thing; we simply cannot trust the reason of recall that would allow us to see the narrative in its entirety, to fully and deeply experience, in a single moment, the truth of what has happened to us in a way that liberates from the need to repeat (and inflict anew) the thought that is memory that is inner pain that has to take form in the world as a hayloft barn ablaze. And no doubt, that was not the last Holocaust the world is going to see.
It's a less exciting Cache, overall. The same set of gear, a set of images that form a world that we contrive to happen in order to have something to inhabit. But, this one has to labor at the same time under its own stark past and the need to exorcise it, much as Bergman did. One layer is simply outside the film, history, and that layer is its own multifaceted narrative prone to much analysis to be a powerful anchor.
Ways to improve that? How about some of the kids are aspiring athletes, and we can see in the ferocity and dogged determination of their training all that is to come including the sculpted heroes of Riefenstahl's films. Just a thought.