Understanding Agency: Crime and Culpability in The Reader (2008) and The White Ribbon (2009)

Abstract

This paper critically analyses two films – the 2008 film The Reader directed by Michael Haneke and The White Ribbon, released in 2009, directed by Stephen Daldry. Both films posit the question of locating the agency of a crime. Both films are based in Germany but the story of The White Ribbon precedes that of The Reader by some three decades. They are both tales of decadence that overpowers a society to the extent that it indulges into violence against its own residents. The White Ribbon features occasions of unexpected heinous crimes committed against the children of a fictional German village while The Reader presents the trial of an ex-SS guard Hannah Schmidt who is being tried for participating in the Holocaust. Both occasions present a historical setting where crimes have been committed in the hindsight and therefore the pursuers of the dramatic narrative are largely oblivious of the extent to which culpability can be associated with the subject or subjects towards whom the agency of the crime is allegedly directed. The question of culpability therefore becomes an object of introspection more visibly in The Reader and a little subtly in The White Ribbon. The question demands probing the socio-historical circumstances in order to rightly adjudicate the agency of crime that the two narratives pose.