YMMV / The White Ribbon

• Harsher in Hindsight: The conclusion reached at the end of the film, that the children were the ones committing the crimes, is eerily reminiscent of a horrifying murder case that happened in Israel only a year later: a girl named Tair Rada was brutally murdered in her school’s bathroom, and the janitor, Roman Zadorov, was convicted based on shoddy police work, relying on refuted evidence and a confession from the alleged perpetrator who spoke poor Hebrew; later evidence surfaced suggesting even more strongly that he was innocent, and it was probably her schoolmates who had murdered her, but the Supreme Court denied his appeal.
• Moral Event Horizon: The Pastor's publicly berating his daughter in front of her class. It leads to her taking revenge against his humiliating authoritarianism by stabbing her father's pet bird to death.
• Spiritual Adaptation: Whoever conceived this film must have been a reader of the Swiss psychologist Alice Miller, whose 1980 book Am Anfang war Erziehung (in English For Your Own Good) paints a detailed account of the kind of brutal, humiliating, authoritarian approach to parenting portrayed in this film as it was historically promoted and practiced in Germany, and theorizes that exposure to this over generations led to German society idolizing a dictator like Hitler and carrying out his orders to murder millions.
• The Woobie: Most of the children in the village, particularly the midwife’s mentally handicapped son, who gets attacked and mutilated by whoever is committing the crimes. To say nothing of the fact that he may very well end up being murdered during Aktion T4.

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