The White Ribbon

By Ashley Burger 

The White Ribbon, a film set in Germany right before World War I, explores what it was like to live at that time and how the culture and the customs affected the people who lived there. The plot explores various ‘accidents’ happening around the town of people mysteriously getting injured. The movie shines light on what is really happening at that time and is pretty straightforward. The child-rearing practices are cold and sometimes cruel, the father is the definite head of the house, there is an ignorance and fear of death, and a sense of hopelessness to life like nothing can be done.

Most of this movie lines up directly with the article The Evolution of Childhood, by Lloyd DeMause, which explores the history of childhood and child-rearing practices. It was so interesting to see what DeMause describes in action in this movie. The way children are treated are very different from today. They used to be seen as evil and full of the devil. It was instructed to not even touch your baby at one point, which of course has affects on the parent-child relationship from then on. We see in The White Ribbon the lack on empathy and affection between the parent and child. We also see how they discipline their children.

The children were punished for coming home past curfew by getting their food taken away and receiving whippings. These are some of the same practices DeMause discusses in his article, along with the factor of guilt. DeMause and the movie believe that the whippings and punishment hurt the parents more than it hurts the child. They believe when the parents have to punish their child it aligns with god punishing them. God is punishing the adult by giving them a bad child.

In The Evolution of Childhood, parents would take children to see corpses to scare them and give them a sense of reality. There was a constant fear of death. Children would have to sit in rooms with corpses or view animals being hung and prepared to eat. In The White Ribbon we see a corpse being prepared for a funeral and then a scene with a boy looking at a corpse. He looked astounded and it really gives us a look at what kind of damage that could do to a child, especially viewing a parent dead. There is a constant fear of death in this movie, but then also a feeling of, we cannot change it so we will just succumb to it.

When the mother of the family falls through the ceiling and dies, the husband just accepts it as part of life. The son, however, wants to seek revenge and feels emotion towards his mother’s death. He is punished for feeling these emotions and giving into his impulse to ruin the cabbages. Therefore, no emotions are really shown or delt with at this time. As Anna tells a young boy of death she expresses little emotion or compassion as the boy is filled with fear. There is such a sense of hopelessness.