Transnational Memory in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon and Cate Shortland’s Lore

Abstract

Buffinga argues that while on the surface Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon and Cate Shortland’s Lore offer visualizations of a specifically German past. The White Ribbon’s focus on the collapse of the old European order and the subsequent rise of fascism and Lore’s focus on mass migration and displacement at the end of World War II serve to highlight important aspects of transnational European memory. Ultimately, however, both films universalize these memories. By means of an unreliable narrator and by creating a shadow narrative, Haneke challenges viewers to reflect on their own participation in contemporary forms of social brutality and conspiracies of silence, therefore universalizing the memories of a pre-1914 German village. Similarly, Shortland’s film universalizes the experience of post-war German displacement by embedding her film in the framework of a coming-of-age story and by employing fairy tale tropes. Finally, both transform elements of one of the hitherto most provincial and “German” of genres, that is, the Heimat or homeland film, into a universally exportable product.