The enigma of The White Ribbon

Abstract

In Michael Haneke’s Das weiße Band (The White Ribbon [2009]), the color white is used to represent the enduring enigma of twentieth-century fascism. While white is traditionally associated with childhood innocence, purity, and renewal, Haneke uses the color’s other, more complex, meanings to explore the roots of fascistic behavior: in punishment, secrecy, and the assault on innocence. This essay interrogates the complexities and ambiguities of what it means to be ‘post-Fascist’ through the use of the color white.

Keywords:

• White
• Michael Haneke
• fascism
• lost innocence
• corporal punishment
• anti-Heimat

Notes

1. Victoria Finlay explains that ‘when our eyes see the whole range of visible light together, they read it as “white.”’ When some of the wavelengths are missing, they see it as ‘colored.’ So-called ‘chemical’ colors appear because some wavelengths of white light are absorbed, but ‘white’ substances hardly absorb any light at all (2002, 4–5).

2. ‘White does not exist in nature,’ Renoir once told a student. ‘You admit that you have a sky above that snow. Your sky is blue. That blue must show up in the snow. In the morning there is green and yellow in the sky … in the evening, red and yellow would have to appear in the snow’ (qtd. in Ball, 205).

3. Qtd in Brettell (2001, 233). One might be sympathetic to this point of view given that the Ancient Greeks felt the only legitimate use of color in art was to support the likeness of the object. ‘One who haphazardly throws around even the most beautiful colors,’ said Aristotle, ‘cannot delight the eye as one who had drawn a simple figure against a white background’ (qtd. in Ball, 19).

4. This sense of vibration is not unique to the ideas of the Impressionists. In the preface to his ‘Doctrine of Colours,’ Goethe wrote that ‘with light poise and counterpoise, Nature oscillates within her prescribed limits, yet thus arise all the varieties and conditions of the phenomena which are presented to us in space and time’ (1840, xviii–xix). Ironically, scientists would hardly disagree: having been born without color vision, and seeing the world only in monochromatic grays, Neil Harbisson received implants connecting antennae to his skull so that sound frequencies enabled him to ‘hear’ colors, which he could then ‘interpret’ (Parker 2016, 120).

5. One is here reminded of Sylvia Plath whose own description of the world gone white, in stark contrast with Browning, is much less assured: ‘Almost thrown, not / Thrown: fear, wisdom, at one: all colors / Spinning to still in his one whiteness’ (‘Whiteness I Remember’).

6. The irony inherent to the theory of hermeneutics is, as Nietzsche delighted in pointing out, that the name of its founding father, Schleiermacher, means ‘veil-maker’ (2010, Kermode 5).