Mischief, torture, vindictive rage: life in a northern
German village prior to the First World War is a
“children’s story” according to the subtitle that Michael
Haneke has assigned to his black-and-white portrait of a
village community haunted by their young. Das weisse
Band. Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (2009) (English: The
White Ribbon. A German Children's Story) carries echoes of
Wilhelm Busch’s classic bad boy tales Max und Moritz
(1865) as well as the horror film classic Village of the
Damned. Haneke’s ‘evil children‘, however, are neither
satirically comic characters, nor creatures from the
horror genre. With a close look at the construction of
childhood in The White Ribbon, this paper will analyse how
Michael Haneke’s ‘heritage’ film employs childhood as a
fictional device: as a carrier of symbolism, cultural
memory and historical pre-figuring. Akin to a danse
macabre, all stations of life and tiers of society are
represented in The White Ribbon: nobleman, teacher,
clergyman, doctor, midwife and peasant are united in their
helpless confusion about the sinister occurrences that
threaten the village. This bleak tableau of characters
will be deconstructed in the paper which examines Haneke’s
themes and imagery within the context of growing up in
this claustrophobic pre-war society, a society frequently
regarded as having sown the seeds of the dark chapter in
German history which was to follow. Childhood, in The
White Ribbon, becomes perverted into a victim-perpetrator
dualism that subtly upsets the villagers’ quiet existence
on the periphery of the current political crisis. Critics
have rightly identified a connection between Haneke’s
depiction of ‘poisonous pedagogy’, a concept introduced by
sociologist Katharina Rutschky, and the roots of fascism.
Do the ‘evil’ children in The White Ribbon represent
Nazism in its infancy or are they victims of a
self-perpetuating system of abuse? The nature of the
mysterious pranks in the film hints at a more complex and
universal threat which resonates throughout the twentieth
century and gains new immediacy in today’s age of
terrorism and internet anonymity. The combination of
childhood and the concept of evil is a powerful
manifestation of an elementary fear, namely that even the
most inconspicuous members of society are able to commit
random acts of terror and evil. In this paper, a
veritable ‘typology of terror’ will be identified in
Haneke’s village – encompassing both the young and their
guardians. The White Ribbon addresses many recurrent
themes that inform fictional constructions of childhood to
this day: powerlessness, insubordination, rebellion, war
and death. It leaves us wondering whether the audacious
subtitle of the film is in fact ironic.