Eine Deutsche Kindergeschichte

Rating: 8/10 (7 March 2013)

"The White Ribbon" is set in the northern German village of Eichwald during 1913 and 1914, the months immediately before the outbreak of the First World War. Eichwald is a picturesque village of half-timbered houses, not too different from many similar English villages, and many of the characters would have had their English equivalents- the squire, the parson, the country doctor and the village schoolmaster. And yet it is difficult to imagine a film of this nature being made in Britain, or for that matter in France, and certainly not in America.
A British film about country life during the 1910s would almost certainly be made in the "heritage cinema" style, with rich colour photography and great attention to period detail. It would probably be nostalgic in tone, with pre-war society painted as a relatively stable, prosperous and happy one; any reference to the coming war would be to an impending catastrophe, threatening to sweep away all that that society holds dear. This is emphatically not a film of that type.
"The White Ribbon" is not shot in colour but in a harsh, cold black-and- white, which seems designed to distance it from any nostalgic feelings; the society depicted here is not one likely to inspire nostalgia in anyone except the most hardened masochist. The story tells of a series of dark and unexplained events which plague the villagers. The doctor is injured in a fall from his horse, which appears to have been caused deliberately. A peasant-farmer's wife dies in an accident at work at a sawmill. The local Baron's young son is kidnapped and badly beaten and a barn on the estate burns down.
Numerous villagers, especially those in some position of authority, appear to be hiding some sort of guilty secret. The Baron's wife is having an affair with another man. The widowed doctor is popular with his patients, but is having an affair with the local midwife and is sexually molesting his own teenage daughter. The village pastor is a severe and joyless puritan, who mercilessly beats his own children for minor transgressions- he is particularly obsessed with masturbation- and forces them to wear white ribbons as a symbol of their lost innocence and purity. The Baron's bailiff also thrashes his son. The one authority figure who appears to be a genuine man of decency and integrity is the young schoolteacher who acts as the film's narrator.
The film bears the subtitle "Eine Deutsche Kindergeschichte", "a German Children's Story". The word "Kindergeschichte" normally means a story written for children, but here it rather means a story about children, and it is very much the children and young people who are at the centre of the story. No solution is provided to the mystery of the various crimes which have afflicted the village, but there is a suggestion that at least some of them may have been committed by these young people, possibly in revenge for their mistreatment by the adult world or because they have learned this sort of callous behaviour from their elders and supposed betters.
There has been a lot of discussion of the supposed political significance of the film, discussion which, I suppose, is inevitable in the context of any German film about early twentieth-century history, especially when it deals with that generation, born around 1900, who would have been young adults during the rise to power of the Nazis. One critic attacked the simplistic notion of trying to locate the seeds of fascism in religious hypocrisy and authoritarianism, but the director Michael Haneke never makes this explicit parallel, although some have seen the name "Eichwald" ("Oakwood") as a portmanteau of "Eichmann" ("Oakman") and "Buchenwald" ("Beechwood"). It may also be significant that three of the boys are named Adolf, Rudolf and Martin, as in Hitler and his deputies Hess and Bormann.
There is no attempt to make the case, beloved of British historians of the Colonel Blimp school, that the Second Reich was merely a dress- rehearsal for the Third. There is no evidence of anti-Semitism or hatred of outsiders, no charismatic leader who could be considered a proto- Fuehrer. (All the authority figures in the village are singularly devoid of charisma). Certainly, the social attitudes on display here seem to us harsh and authoritarian, but such attitudes were by no means unique to Germany. "Spare the rod and spoil the child", for example, was once a popular proverb in Britain, and paternalistic landowners like the Baron could have been found in virtually any European country, including those where no significant Fascist movement ever developed. America was perhaps more egalitarian than Europe, but no less puritanical- in some respects, indeed, possibly more so. Indeed, one could interpret the film as making the opposite case, namely that Nazism represented a reaction against the values of Wilhelmine Germany rather than a continuation of them and that elements among the German people, tiring of a joyless emphasis on discipline, self-control and self-denial, eagerly embraced a world-view which allowed them to give full vent to man's baser instincts in their vilest form.
Perhaps the best way of approaching would be to view it not as an explicit political allegory but as a wider human allegory about the dark, irrational forces which can lurk even in seemingly tranquil village. There can be no doubt that the atmosphere of the film is one of gloom and foreboding; the village seems a sombre, forbidding place even on bright summer days. It is down to the individual viewer whether he or she interprets this mood as a portent of approaching war and dictatorship, or simply as a sense of pessimism about man's capacity for inhumanity. "The White Ribbon" is not, unlike say "Downfall" or "The Wave", a film explicitly about Fascism or dictatorship, but all three films are evidence of the 21st-century German cinema's ability to produce original and troubling ways of responding to 20th-century German history. 8/10