The White Ribbon consistently thematizes the pressures of individuation in a society that operates according to patterns of abstraction and the goal of normativity. In this regard, let us return to the subtitle and the opening credits. The etching of the letters on the screen foreshadows later moments of physical and mental inscription on the bodies and psyches of the young. Haneke originally scribbled three potential subtitles on the script from the 10th of April, 2008. As alternatives, he noted: “The Story of the Teacher” (Die Erzählung des Lehrers), “The School of Virtuousness” (Die Schule der Rechtschaffenheit), “A Children's Story from Germany” (Eine Kindergeschichte aus Deutschland), and “A German Children's Story” (Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte). By choosing the last variant, the film already introduces doubt, vagueness, and uncertainty—it undermines a subtitle's purpose. With the genetivus subiectivus and genetivus obiectivus of the composite noun “Kindergeschichte,” we wonder whether this is a story of German children or a German story for children. Are they the subjects or the objects of this narrative? The indefinite pronoun “a” rather than “the” further complicates the generalizing impetus propelling any interpretation. How does this singular story stand in relation to other German children's stories? Is it one possible history (Geschichte) of German children? The question also arises: who is using this invisible stylus to write in cursive, in Kurrent script, across the black screen?

Handwriting marks the intersection of social and biopolitical concerns, as education produces middle class, bourgeois individuals as well as a people—the German Volk—in the course of the nineteenth century. Script, taught in schools, is one means of integrating children into literate society. Kurrent, also known as German cursive, and its simplified variant Sutterlin (introduced in 1911 and propagated widely starting in 1935) only disappeared from schoolbooks in the first half of the 1940s. The Kurrent font thus acts as an authenticating effect. In 1913, this would have been the handwriting style children learned. However, the old-fashioned script in the credit sequence is illegible to anyone who is not of advanced age. Even the people involved in the film's production had to familiarize themselves with the now antiquated German cursive: some advertising posters contained an incorrect double “h” in “deutsch” as well as in “Kindergeschichte” (fig. 9). The slowly unfurling script, in a style most viewers are unable to read, focalizes attention on the subtitle's limited comprehensibility.