It feels like the great films I’ve seen linger forever – images seared in, memorable lines indelible and feelings evoked still close to the surface.
The White Ribbon, released in 2010, is one such film that left a lasting impression. In black and white, it depicts the residents of a northern German village, dominated by a baron, sometime before World War I. Inhabitants of the village young and old are sliding down a slippery slope of moral decline. A number of men in leadership positions are loathsome, especially in their treatment of women and children. Perhaps the cruelest scene of the movie was not one that depicted physical violence, but verbal abuse towards a woman that served faithfully as caretaker (and more) for the town’s widowed physician. As for the children, although it is only suggested, it appears that many are budding sociopaths that perform serial acts of meanness.
Movie reviewer Lasalle (Citation2010) said about the film, “No child is trained to become a martinet, and no one says anything about a master race. Rather, the kids, from their elders, get quiet lessons in moral absolutism, sternness, emotional violence and heartlessness”.
For weeks after seeing the film, I started thinking more deeply about the children in this pre-World War I town. I realized that they would become young adults during the time Hitler would rise to power. They lived an incubator in which they adopted the brutality that they experienced, often against unsuspecting victims. They were being unwittingly primed for carrying out the atrocities that later came to characterize their future lives in Nazi Germany.
Seeing this film has led me to wonder about what the times we live in today are a prequel for.
As LaSalle (Citation2010) remarked, “It didn’t have to be Nazism that took hold a generation later. It might have been any ideology that encourages blind devotion that flatters people’s vanity by telling them they’re intelligent for not thinking and that they’re virtuous for believing themselves better than their fellow citizens”.
The White Ribbon begs the question: What is this moment in history making our children morally susceptible to? As group workers we have an opportunity to consider this question, to observe what our children reflect in this moment and to offer a context that can help to cultivate a counterforce.
It’s time for group work.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Reference
- Lasalle, M. (2010, January 15). Review: White ribbon. Retrieved from https://www.sfgate.com/movies/article/Review-The-White-Ribbon-3275853.php