Women’s Meta-Commentary

Summary

Returning to the complexities of perverted moral codes and latent fascist tendencies also gives Haneke the opportunity to continue the gender legacy of New German Cinema (NGC). It, too, offered sociopolitical criticism in the form of literary adaptations, with complex female characters like Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1974 Effi Briest or Volker Schlöndorff 's heroine in Coup de grâce (1976). Figures like Maria Braun (The Marriage of Maria Braun, dir. R. W. Fassbinder, 1979) or Katharina Blum (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, dir. Margarethe von Trotta and Volker Schlöndorff, 1977) point out the semantic difference between loving and liking some- one, between making love and fornicating. Haneke, too, has often portrayed free-thinking women who can parse the differences between love and lust. However, he explicitly made his television film Fraulein: A German Melodrama (Fraulein—Ein deutsches Melodram, 1986) to refute what he perceived as the hypocrisy of Fassbinder’s Maria Braun. In his view, women are less capable of re-invention than men—they have more completely internalized society's restrictions, even if they are more critical toward them. Like Maria Braun, Katharina Blum, or Johanna (Angelica Domröse) in Fraulein, the women in The White Ribbon distinguish between copulation for sex's sake and out of love—and this irrespective of their social class, so whether baroness or midwife. But in keeping with Haneke's views of limited gender mobility, the baroness does not desert her husband and the midwife stays with the abusive doctor. Haneke also has drawn attention to the fact that the women of the Red Army Faction, a recurrent subject in NGC films such as Germany in Autumn (dir. Alexander Kluge et al., 1978) or Marianne and Juliane (Die bleierne Zeit, dir. Margarethe von Trotta, 1981), were an inspiration for figures like Klara. Ulrike Meinhof and her film Bambule (1970), about pedagogical practices aimed at wayward girls, are also an important source. Finally, Meinhof 's Christian background as well as her RAF comrade Gudrun Ensslin's Protestant upbringing play into the presentation of the young women and their revolt against the fathers in The White Ribbon.