Those To Whom Evil Is Done

Rating: 8/10 (6 March 2013)

Michael Haneke doesn't believe in solving mysteries for his audience. Apparently he does believe in the left wing Freudian analysis of Wilhelmine Germany. Between the wars, German thinkers like Reich, Marcuse, Bettelheim and Adorno all concluded that the culture of sexual repression and patriarchy had been the root cause of the First World War -- not simply the outbreak, but the dogged obedience and endurance the German people had displayed during four years of hardship, hunger and slaughter. A fortiori the same root causes applied to the German desire, epitomized by Nazism, to do the whole thing over and get it right this time. The Weimar fusion of Freudian psychiatry and Marxist politics is with us to this day. It was vulgarized during the 1960s to a slogan -- Make Love, Not War -- that assumed that fighting and sex were antitheses. It is still the conventional wisdom of middle class progressives about gender relations and child rearing.
The conventional view of European life just before the catastrophe of the First World War is one of hazy nostalgia for a lost world of order and certainty. Haneke isn't having any. His little village of Eichwald, somewhere on the North German plain, is a pastoral hell of patriarchy, subordination, violent punishment, heartless religion and sexual repression, breeding envy, resentment, hatred, and self-loathing, where children's natural impulses are driven underground by force to emerge in violent cruelty towards the helpless. The social structure of Eichwald is dominated by the Baron, who owns most of the land and who most of the peasants depend on for wage labor on the estate. Representing order, learning and moral instruction are the Steward, who is a porcine and subservient brute, the Doctor, who is a self loathing sadist and pervert, and the Pastor, who coldly dispenses humiliating punishment in full "this will hurt me more than it hurts you" mode. At the bottom of the educated elite, just above those who work with their hands, is our narrator, the ineffectual Teacher, who doubles as parish clerk and organist, and who is paid too little to afford to marry. All of these men are addressed as Sir -- Herr Baron, Herr Verwalter, Herr Artzt, Herr Pastor, and (by the children only) Herr Lehrer. The children address their fathers not merely as Father -- no Daddy here -- but as Father, Sir -- Herr Vater. The younger children are sweet and open, but by the time they're 10 to 12 the kids are hard, tight and closed. And onward to 1933-45.