Michael Haneke's films undermine certainties, activate critical thinking skills, reveal the fragmentary and contingent nature of the world and how we think about it: these have become truisms in discussions of his oeuvre. Perhaps a less common way of interpreting his works would be to emphasize that they are self-reflexive about being self-reflexive. They are inordinately “meta.” Haneke's films reflect critically on the way in which we work through the past and reveal how hard it is to grapple with historical legacies, especially in a media-saturated age. They make apparent the blockages in memory, and they demonstrate the value of media artifacts like photographs in overcoming these obstructions. His works showcase our unconscious resistance to accountability. They also thematize our conscious problems with this resistance, especially when we have been trained to see it as morally repugnant. We have come to accept that it is imperative to work through the past, especially National Socialism. However, Haneke's films also suggest that being enjoined to “never forget” might be less emotionally effective than allowing ourselves to always be haunted—haunted by images of many pasts that ghost through our minds.

Haneke's acclaimed 2009 film The White Ribbon (Das weiβse Band) brings together these various aspects. It engages with our response to Germany's traumatic twentieth-century history, especially after the end of the analog era. This black-and-white digital film has been seen as many things: a family drama, a whodunit, a film-festival darling, and an example of successful art-house cinema. It is also a morality tale, mind game, study on the function of media, and “heritage film with a vengeance.” The White Ribbon can be placed in a German tradition of Enlightenment critique, where horror emerges from rationality. Furthermore, The White Ribbon focuses on practices of transmission, inscription, and recording on a personal and social level. It delves into child-rearing practices that impress themselves on the body and mind, from one generation to the next. The film looks at what we gain when something is lost in translation; it presses superimposition into the service of truthfulness, mixing historical trajectories (pre–World War I Germany, Nazism, left terrorism of the 1960s, Islamic radicalism post-2001).