The ‘Origins’ of European Fascism. Memory and Violence in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon

Magdalena Zolkos (University of Western Sydney), Magdalena Zolkos

The cultural theory approach to national collective trauma has emphasized cinema’s possibilities of problematizing narrativity and the representation of historical violence. In addition, what needs to be recognized is the non-linear temporal aspect of traumatic memory. Michael Haneke’s 2008 film The White Ribbon offers rich material for the study of mnemonic representations of historic violence: it tells a story of violent attacks and assaults that interrupt cyclical life of a village in Northern Germany in 1913/1914. The narrator frames the story of violence as a study of the origins of fascism as the alleged perpetrators are young children, who rebel against the disciplinary powers of patriarchal authority. Coming into maturity during World War I, they will become the generation of Nazism’s followers.

In contrast to psycho-historical readings of The White Ribbon as a study of the causal relationship between authoritarian formation of the subject and susceptibility to fascism’s redemptive illusions, I propose an ‘anti-psychological’ interpretation of the film. This reading situates The White Ribbon vis-à-vis the questions of Haneke’s aesthetic and formal choices; the ‘ethics of spectatorship’; and the temporal aspects of a recollective historical narrative. The argument is that the film is a metaphorical construction of, on the one hand, the nexus between memory and the cinematic image, and, on the other hand, the mnemonic and affective dimensions of European history of violence. Rather than narrate fascist violence as a concluded episode in Europe’s history, Haneke enacts it in such ways in The White Ribbon that fascism appears integral to the question of ethics of spectatorship and to the cinematic engagement with another’s suffering. Haneke constructs a connection between the European approach to its fascist history and the on-going politics of exclusion and marginalization insofar as it expresses the fascist desire for the unified self. The importance of The White Ribbon lies thereby in its critical commentary on Europe’s contemporary self-understanding as being ‘after’ (and ‘sanitized’ of) past violence.

Magdalena Zolkos is a Senior Research Fellow in Political Theory at the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at the University of Western Sydney. Magdalena has research interests in memory studies, literary trauma theory, continental philosophy, and radical democratic theory. She is the author of Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Narrative as Political Theorizing (Continuum 2010), and editor of On Jean Amery: Philosophy of Catastrophe (Lexington 2011).