Haneke links the subcutaneous violence in all social strata present in 1913 to the rise of fascism a decade onward, the upsurge of the Red Army Faction fifty years later, and the spread of terrorism forty years after that. Michael Rothberg's book Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009) helps us understand this melding of epochs. Rothberg explains how various groups’ histories of victimization come into conflict in the public sphere. In some of the acrimonious debates he describes, one group's history is seen to displace other histories. In this scenario, the “public sphere in which collective memories are articulated is a scarce resource” in which “the interaction of different collective memories […] takes the form of a zero-sum struggle for preeminence.” Against this view of memory as a finite entity where one past elides another, Rothberg argues that memory is an encompassing thing in a state of continual negotiation and re-negotiation. He examines the period between 1945 and 1962, which witnessed the “rise of consciousness of the Holocaust as an unprecedented form of modern genocide and the coming to national consciousness and political independence of many of the subjects of European colonialism.” Rothberg's reflections provide context for multidirectional memory in Haneke's oeuvre, where an awareness of the Shoah's centrality co-exists with the cognizance of other oppression. The competitive struggles over recognition that continue to “haunt contemporary, pluralistic societies” animate Haneke's films, where “displacement and substitution in acts of remembrance” characterize figures’ response to historical and social injustices.

In many ways, Haneke also follows Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), to which Adorno alludes in his essays on Erziehung. For Adorno and Horkheimer, writing against the backdrop of National Socialism and the collapse of the liberal state, the Enlightenment project reverts to the superstition and myth out of which reason supposedly emerged. The so-called historical progress of reason turns out to be a return to barbarism. The domination of the external world can only be had at the expense of subjugating one’s inner nature and through a pathological relationship to the body.