Michael Haneke’s latest movie “The White Ribbon”, ... is the study of social relations in a German farming village on the eve of WWI. ... the persistence of feudal relationships not only explains WWI, but the rise of fascism and WWII as well. Although Nazism is most associated with the motto Kinder, Küche, Kirche, “The White Ribbon” illustrates that these values had deep roots in German society. And Haneke’s main goal is to show their underlying perverse realities.

Unlike any film I have seen in years, “The White Ribbon” has the dimensions of a novel. ...

Three men symbolize the village’s warped ethos. At the top of the ladder is The Baron (Ulrich Tukur) who exemplifies Junker values. The villagers depend on him for their livelihood even when he is indifferent to their most basic needs. When the wife of one of his peasant hands falls to death in his sawmill (either from rotting floors or sabotage), her oldest son takes revenge in the best way known to him. During a harvest celebration paid for by the Baron, a kind of seasonal ritual going back perhaps a thousand years, he sneaks off to the Baron’s cabbage path and hacks it to pieces with his scythe. After he is caught, the Baron takes retribution by firing his father who then hangs himself in despair. In the feudal conditions of prewar Germany, labor markets in the countryside were as static as one of the levels in Dante’s Inferno.

Beneath the Baron is the Pastor (Burghart Klaussner) who is enough to turn anybody into an atheist. A rigidly authoritarian figure, especially to his own children, he decides to tie his teenaged son’s hands to the bed each night to prevent him from masturbating. The name of the movie originates from his decision to force his children to wear white ribbons as a reminder of their sins.

Finally, there is the Doctor (Rainer Bock, who played a Nazi general in “Inglourious Basterds”), who treats his long-time mistress, a midwife in his hire, as a piece of dirt. In one of the film’s most powerful scenes, he hurls invective at her in the course of explaining why he chooses not to screw her any longer. In the absence of the kind of physical violence that usually accompanies such a scene (face slaps, etc.), it reaches a far higher level of pain. His hatred for women is palpable.

Within this deranged universe, there is one voice of sanity. It is the local schoolteacher (Christian Friedel) who provides voice over commentary throughout the film. He symbolizes the urbane enlightenment values that get trampled underfoot in this rural dungeon held together by the iron bars of Protestantism and Privilege. ...

While Haneke clearly intended the schoolteacher to be the character audiences would most clearly identify with, we are left with the conclusion that he was odd man out in pre-WWI Germany. This was a society soaked in feudal backwardness even as it was home to some of the most advanced industrial technologies in the world and a large socialist movement.

Turning to Arno Mayer’s “The Persistence of the Old Regime”, we discover why this was the case. It was rooted in the material reality of class relations. Germany, like most of Europe including even Britain, had never made a clean break with the powerful agrarian aristocracy.

Mayer makes the economics behind this quite clear. While Germany had the reputation, even deservedly so, as an industrial powerhouse, no more than 15 percent of the population was employed in the capital goods sector (steel, machine tools, etc.) Meanwhile, the landed aristocracy enjoyed enormous power through its vast holdings. A mere 3000 individuals owned some 15 percent of Germany’s arable land. Around the turn the turn of the century, more than 60 percent of the active work force was farm hands like those depicted in “The White Ribbon”.

Even as the new industrial bourgeoisie was in the ostensible position to assert itself, it was habitually appropriating the symbols and values of the feudal classes. Mayer writes:

Indeed, not only in Prussia but throughout Germany the nonagrarian economic elites and their retainers in the free professions never sought or found an autonomous social, cultural, and political ground from which to challenge the old society. The new men of exceptional wealth and talent fervently solicited or accepted the imperial and noble seal. In particular during the half-century preceding 1914, the “enriched bourgeois” systematically pressed their procurement of titles that legitimized “their connection with the dominant class and . . . adapted the new social forces to the old aristocratic environment,” thereby also “reinvigorating” the formerly hostile nobility with “new blood and new economic energy.” With equal effectiveness and greater frequency the new capitalists, after appropriating the aristocratic life-style, propelled their sons to become reserve officers, to join dueling fraternities, and to marry into the old society. This social climbing, including the ennobling marriages of daughters, never really waned. Nor was it dismissed as either ludicrous or eccentric. In fact, it may be said to have intensified with the atrophy of liberalism before 1914.