The Origins of European Fascism: Memory of Violence in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon

Abstract

Michael Haneke’s film The White Ribbon (2009) narrates violent attacks that disrupt the cyclical life of a German village in 1913–14. The narrator frames the violence as a study of the origins of fascism: the alleged perpetrators are children, who rebel against the disciplinary powers of patriarchal authority. Coming to maturity during World War I, they will have become the generation of Nazism’s followers. In contrast to psycho-historical readings of The White Ribbon as a cinematic exploration of the causal relationship between the authoritarian formation of the juvenile subject and her susceptibility to fascism’s redemptive illusions, I propose an anti-psychological interpretation of the film. This reading seeks to understand The White Ribbon in terms of Haneke’s aesthetic and formal choices, which underpin his notion of “ethical spectatorship.” I argue that the film offers a dual metaphorical construction of the nexus between memory and the cinematic image, and of the mnemonic and affective aspects of the history of violence. Haneke forges a link between the European attitude to its history of fascism and its ongoing politics of exclusion, arising from its covert fascist desire for the unified self. The significance of The White Ribbon in the ongoing debate on history/memory thus lies in its critique of Europe’s current self-understanding as having outgrown its violent past. 

Notes

1. Richard Porton, “Collective Guilt and Individual Responsibility: An Interview with Michael Haneke,” Cineaste 31.1 (2005): 50.

2. See, for example, Asbjørn Grønstad, “Downcast Eyes: Michael Haneke and the Cinema of Intrusion,” Nordicom Review 29.1 (2008): 133–44; Gautam Basu Thakur, “Of Suture and Signifier in Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005),” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 13.3 (2008): 261–78; Nancy E. Virtue, “Memory, Trauma, and the French-Algerian War: Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005),” Modern & Contemporary France 19.3 (2011): 281–96.

3. Porton, “Collective Guilt and Individual Responsibility: An Interview with Michael Haneke,” 50.

4. Roy Grundmann, “Unsentimental Education: An Interview with Michael Haneke,” in A Companion to Michael Haneke, ed. Roy Grundmann (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 591.

5. Anthony Lane, “Michael Haneke and Movies,” The New Yorker, 5 October 2009.

6. See Brigitte Peucker, “Violence and Affect: Haneke’s Modernist Melodramas,” in The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 129–38; Oliver C. Speck, Funny Frames: The Filmic Concepts of Michael Haneke (New York: Continuum, 2010); and Robert Sinnerbrink, “Post-Humanist Moralist: Michael Haneke’s Cinematic Critique,” Angelaki 16.4 (2011): 115–29.

7. Lane, “Michael Haneke and Movies.”

8. In the film this unreferenced quotation contains only a fragment of the passage from Exodus which is part of the first of the Ten Commandments (the prohibition of idolatry): “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before Me. You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.” New International Version (2011), 20.2–6.

9. Garrett Steward, “Pre-war Trauma: Haneke’s The White Ribbon,” Film

Quarterly 63.4 (2010): 42.

10. Susannah Radstone, “Cinema and Memory,” in Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, ed, Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 325–42.

11. See Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness (London: Routledge, 1999).

12. Cf. Paul K. Saint-Amour, “Bombing and the Symptom: Traumatic Earliness and the Nuclear Uncanny,” Diacritics 3.4 (2000): 59–82; Sue Vice, Holocaust Fiction (London: Routledge, 2000).

13. Peter Brunette, Michael Haneke (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 130.

14. Peter Imbusch, “The Concept of Violence,” in the International Handbook of Violence Research, ed. Wilhelm Heitmeyer and John Hagan, vol. 1 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2003), 23.

15. Max Silverman, “The Violence of the Cut: Michael Haneke’s Caché and Cultural Memory,” French Cultural Studies 21.2 (2010): 57.

16. Thomas Elsaesser, “Performative Self-contradictions: Michael Haneke’s Mind Games,” in Grundmann, A Companion to Michael Haneke, 59.

17. Grønstad, “Downcast Eyes: Michael Haneke and the Cinema of Intrusion,” 133.

18. Lisa Coulthard, “Negative Ethics: The Missed Event in the French Films of Michael Haneke,” Studies in French Cinema 11.1 (2011): 71. See also Lisa Coulthard, “Listening to Silence: The Films of Michael Haneke,” Cinephile 6.1 (2010): 18–24.

19. Haneke in Grundmann, “Unsentimental Education: An Interview with Michael Haneke,” 593.

20. I thank Monika Zolkos for pointing out this connection.

21. Imbusch, “The Concept of Violence,” 23.

22. Brunette, Michael Haneke, 134.

23. Haneke in Grundmann, “Unsentimental Education: An Interview with Michael Haneke,” 593, 599.

24. Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1975), 214.

25. Brunette, Michael Haneke, 135; Grundmann, “Unsentimental Education: An Interview with Michael Haneke,” 598.

26. Slavoj Žižek, Violence (London: Profile Books, 2009).

27. Haneke in Grundmann, “Unsentimental Education: An Interview with Michael Haneke,” 593.

28. Joanne Faulkner Faulkner, The Importance of Being Innocent: Why We Worry About Children (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 52.

29. Haneke in Grundmann, “Unsentimental Education: An Interview with Michael Haneke,” 593.

30. Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’,” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, David Gray Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3–67.

31. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 29.

32. Deleuze and Guattari Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus, 257.

33. Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism.

34. Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (London: Basic Books, 1974), 181.

35. Deleuze and Guattari Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus, 118.

36. Michael Haneke, “Terror and Utopia of Form: Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar,” in Grundmann, A Companion to Michael Haneke, 585.

37. Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, 213.

38. Deleuze and Guattari Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus, 28.

39. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies: Women, Floods, Bodies, History, vol. 1, (Minneapolis, MN: University Of Minnesota Press, 1987), 434.

40. Klaus Theweleit, “Postface,” in Jonathan Littell, Le sec et l’humide: une brève incursion en territoire fasciste (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), 130.

41. Barbara Ehrenreich, “Foreword,” in Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies: Male Bodies, Psychoanalyzing the White Terror, vol. 2 (Minneapolis, MN: University Of Minnesota Press, 1987), xvi.

42. Theweleit, Male Fantasies: Male Bodies, Psychoanalyzing the White Terror, 384.

43. Cf. Steward, “Pre-war Trauma: Haneke’s The White Ribbon.”

44. Lloyd de Mause, “War as Righteous Rape and Purification,” Journal of Psychohistory 27.4 (2000): 356–445.

45. Peter Loewenberg, “The Psychohistorical Origins of the Nazi Youth Cohort,” The American Historical Review 76.5 (1971): 1457–502; Steward, “Pre-war Trauma: Haneke’s The White Ribbon,” 42.

46. In Grundmann, “Unsentimental Education: An Interview with Michael Haneke,” 593.

47. In Porton, “Collective Guilt and Individual Responsibility: An Interview with Michael Haneke.”

48. Cf. Brian Gibson, “Bearing Witness: The Dardenne Brothers’ and Michael Haneke’s Implication of the Viewer,” CineAction 70 (2006).

49. In Porton, “Collective Guilt and Individual Responsibility: An Interview with Michael Haneke,” 50.

50. Catherine Wheatley, Michael Haneke’s Cinema: The Ethics of the Image (London: Berghahn Books, 2009).

51. Haneke in Porton, “Collective Guilt and Individual Responsibility: An Interview with Michael Haneke,” 50.

52. Michel Foucault, Preface to Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, xiii.

53. James S. Williams, “Aberrations of Beauty: Violence and Cinematic Resistance in Haneke’s The White Ribbon,” Film Quarterly 63.4 (2010): 50; Elsaesser, “Performative Self-contradictions: Michael Haneke’s Mind Games, 53–74.

54. Williams, “Aberrations of Beauty,” 50.

55. Williams, “Aberrations of Beauty,” 52.

56. Williams, “Aberrations of Beauty,” 50.

57. Williams, “Aberrations of Beauty,” 52.

58. The parabolic and non-identificational character of The White Ribbon is emphasized by the use of generic rather than proper names for all characters except for the juvenile subjects (the pastor, the Baron, the midwife, etc.).

59. D. I. Grossvogel, “Haneke: The Coercing of Vision,” Film Quarterly 60.4 (2007): 36.

60. Mattias Frey, “Supermodernity, Capital, and Narcissus: The French Connection to Michael Haneke’s Benny’s Video,” Cinetext (2002).

61. Haneke in Grundmann, “Unsentimental Education: An Interview with Michael Haneke,” 569.

62. Haneke in Grundmann, “Unsentimental Education: An Interview with Michael Haneke,” 572. In his “post-humanist” reading of Haneke’s cinema, Sinnerbrink confirms the formative impact on Haneke of “the historical experiences of Nazism and post-War forms of violence and trauma, which have rendered traditional forms of humanism subject to skeptical doubt.”

63. Haneke acknowledged that the style of the dialogues in the film draw on Theodor Fontane’s nineteenth-century social realist novels.

64. Steward, “Pre-war Trauma: Haneke’s The White Ribbon,” 40.

65. See Sinnerbrink, “Post-Humanist Moralist: Michael Haneke’s Cinematic Critique,” 115–29.

66. Elsaesser, “Performative Self-contradictions: Michael Haneke’s Mind Games,” 67.

67. Williams, “Aberrations of Beauty,” 52.

68. Haneke’s unrealized plan was that in the American DVD release of The White Ribbon, the voice-over should be done by an American actor with a German accent, hence giving the impression that the schoolmaster eventually left Germany and emigrated to the United States, and thus that his reminiscence comes not just from a chronological distance but also from the site of diasporic location.

69. Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005).

70. Robert Snell, review of Social Dreaming in the 21^st Century: The World We Are Losing, by John Clare and Ali Zarbafi, British Journal of Psychotherapy 26.3 (2010): 372.

71. David Leichter, “The Poetics of Remembrance: Communal Memory and Identity in Heidegger and Ricoeur” (Ph.D. diss., Marquette University, 2009), 220.

72. Ricoeur cited in Leichter, “The Poetics of Remembrance: Communal Memory and Identity in Heidegger and Ricoeur.”

73. Williams, “Aberrations of Beauty,” 63.

74. Haneke’s ambition to subvert the past-present binary and to allow a more complex idea of time and temporality through the cinema-memory nexus is strongly performative and experimental. It enacts a complex relation of past and present, in which they extend to each other, mutually imbricate and overflow, leaving traces, remnants and “stains.”