In the German-speaking world, adapting films from literature has many implications. It shores up the canon of the educated bourgeoisie, the Bildungsbürgertum. It implies the wish to write oneself into this literary tradition, which confers distinction and cultural capital. It means participating in the circulation of words for geopolitical reasons (after 1945, adaptations marked West Germany's superiority over the German Democratic Republic, for instance, as inheritors of a “true” German tradition and vice versa). For Haneke, the strategy of evoking literature serves another function: it elicits déjà-vu on the part of an intellectual audience familiar with famous books relating to the lead-up to war and its outbreak. Haneke thereby augments viewers’ sense of inexorability and emphasizes the portentous nature of seemingly minor occurrences—they foreshadow the great cataclysm of World War I and World War II.

Since many of Haneke's films are based on well-known literature, a mature work like The White Ribbon self-confidently plays with convention in serving up a faux screen adaptation. The director is interested in the pre-war period, when an “epoch lies on its deathbed,” in the Austrian writer Karl Kraus's 1922 formulation. Haneke previously explored this era in his sepia-tinted 1993 television film based on Joseph Roth's 1924 novel Rebellion, which begins with documentary footage of Emperor Franz Joseph's funeral, coastline invasions, battlefields, and trenches from various theaters of war. The end of Austria-Hungary is also present in the 1997 TV adaptation of Franz Kafka's unfinished novel The Castle (1926), where confusion reigns in a waning, highly bureaucratic empire. The White Ribbon concentrates on the “last days of mankind,” the subject of Kraus's acerbic play about the end of Austria-Hungary and the German Empire under Wilhelm II. With representatives of all social strata in 1913, Haneke, like Kraus, offers us a world in miniature to indict blinkeredness, chauvinism, and aggression. A who's who of prestigious German-language actors is pressed into service to display the hierarchical makeup of society: a pastor (Burghart Klaußner), estate agent (Sepp Bierbichler), baron (Ulrich Tukur), and doctor (Rainer Bock) join the lower-ranking teacher (Christian Friedel), tutor (Michael Kranz), and farmer (Branko Samarovski).