Sophie Scholl and the White Rose

by Annette Dumbach

  It was not long before Hans, after discussions over ersatz coffee in the garden, began ordering and cataloging Muth’s library. He came to Solln every day between classes and hospital duty and read Plato, Claudel, Bernanos, and even Marx for hours. Inge Scholl came and stayed with Muth for a week or two at a time, bringing him food from Mrs. Scholl in Ulm, taking care of him, lifting his spirits. Sophie stayed at his house for a week when she first arrived in Munich in May 1942 and was looking for a furnished room.

  Muth introduced Hans to various friends; one was Pater Rumuald Bauerreis, archivist of the Monastery of Saint Bonifaz in Munich. Muth wrote him a note in the spring of 1942, asking the father to look after his young protégé. Hans was given access to the vast and rich library of the order. Saint Bonifaz, Hans quickly learned, was in danger of being shut down by the Nazis; he and Alex, who sometimes came along, decided to smuggle out some of the most precious tomes from the monastery library before the arrival of the Gestapo. They came back with rucksacks the same day they heard the news of the impending closure; they had found a “simple man” who owned a wagon and who, as Hans said, “understood what the Nazis are better than the generals and professors do.” The books were put on the wagon and taken to the Schmorell residence on Benediktenwandstrasse in Harlaching.

  It was at Muth’s home that they met Theodor Haecker one day in the winter of 1941. He had been a collaborator on Hochland, but had been under a speaking and writing ban since 1935. He suffered dreadfully from the imposed silence and the separation from his audience, and was unable to be subtle or evasive in expressing his contempt and rage for the Nazis. Haecker was sixty-three years old, a widower, a man with penetrating blue eyes under bushy eyebrows, with closed, unreadable features. He was tormented by what was happening to Germany and Europe, obsessed with the notion that Germany would be destroyed by God for its deeds against the Jewish people. In his diary, known in English as Journal in the Night, he wrote: “. . . a time may come when Germans will have to wear a swastika on the left side of their clothing, sign of the Antichrist. They are crucifying Christ a second time, as a people!”

  Haecker was a converted Catholic, and was a nationally distinguished translator and explicator of Kierkegaard into German; his life’s goal was to reconcile and harmonize existential concepts with Catholic dogma and thought.

  What pulled Hans to Solln and to men of the stature of Muth and Haecker went deeper than the affinity of the young for the old and wise, or their mutual anti-Nazi feelings. These Catholic thinkers, particularly Haecker, were struggling to use existentialism in a world that had gone mad. Existentialism has always been a formidable stream, if not the major current, in modern Catholic and Protestant reflection, but at that point in 1941 and 1942, it was crucial in helping Hans and his friends to come to a decision, to cross the line.

  Pascal, a Catholic, and Kierkegaard, a Protestant, had expressed the fundamental assumptions behind all existential thought. “There is no permanence for man: it is a condition which is at once natural to mankind, yet most contrary to his inclinations,” Pascal had written. “We burn with the desire of finding a secure abode, an ultimate firm base on which to build a tower which might rise to infinity; but our very foundation crumbles completely, and earth opens before us unto the very abyss.” In this manner, in the seventeenth century, did a young Frenchman come upon the dawning crisis of Western civil-ization, the crisis that led Kierkegaard two centuries later to make a desperate “leap into faith”—an acceptance of God, a belief that he exists—after enduring a near-fatal siege of angst.

  These ideas were part of the essential bond between Haecker and the young men in the White Rose. In a universe where all values have been shattered, where religions and histories and literatures and social structures have lost their meaning, man has to stand up again, accept his condition, accept that he is alone and has no protection, and proceed to create his own world, his own values, his own decisions, his own actions—and be willing at all times to pay the consequences, to be responsible for everything he thinks, says, and does. This is the existentialism of Martin Heidegger—which tragically led to his temporary submission to the will of the Leader, Adolf Hitler, as the quintessential spokesman for “a complete revolution of German existence”—and the existentialism of one of Heidegger’s most renowned admirers, Jean-Paul Sartre.

  For others who thought along this line, self-creation, this acceptance of aloneness, was not possible, at least not without help—from God. And God has to be accepted totally on faith, without rational proofs, and without his being immanent in grandiose and heavy Hegelian-like metaphysical systems.

  Existential thought can be seen as the last and only response possible to German romanticism and Russian nihilism. The modern world is alienated, cold, unacceptable; we no longer know where we belong, we are no longer in harmony with the universe. But instead of turning back, as the romantics and nationalists did, to a perfect past, the existentialist proposes that we walk on, that we accept this unbearable condition, that we create ourselves anew and make “authentic choices” even if we are alone and can expect neither help nor mercy from anyone. This kind of thinking that forces man to choose, to act in order to be, and to accept the responsibility of action, was profoundly part of the intellectual and ethical current animating men like Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He also believed that to act—in this case, to resist Hitler, perhaps even to kill him—was to become free. There is no question that existentialist thinking was an undercurrent among serious intellectuals in the Third Reich and was a crucial factor in the resistance that developed.

  Theodor Haecker, one of its primary exponents, would read aloud from his journal and from his banned or unpublished works at Muth’s home and, later, at the studio where the White Rose gathered. His need to be heard was greater than his fear of arrest. The inner tension must have been enormous; his hands shook as he read. A sample from his journal in May 1940, the kind of extract he would read to the young people:

  The fate and thus the task of the German Christian is without an example which he might follow. . . . He is alone! Everything that he feels, thinks and does has a question mark to it, questioning whether it is right. The leadership of Germany today, and of this there is not the slightest doubt and it cannot be evaded, is consciously anti-Christian—it hates Christ whom it does not name. . . . From the very beginning, the successful trick of these people sent to plague Europe has been to combine the special interests of their basely impulsive and greedy natures, intellectually speaking, soulless and half-educated, with the true and genuine wishes and claims of the German people . . . The German people will be beaten, but not struck down and wiped out. The one ray of light in my mind is this: it is better for a people to be defeated and to suffer, than to sin and apostasize.

  This was more or less the way Haecker addressed the students, and their response, their interchange, must have been of the utmost importance to him. He never overtly encouraged anyone to resist: it meant near-certain death. In fact, he told the young people that evil, the Antichrist, was in some way part of God’s plan. But he transmitted two levels of messages: one of choices and creation, and the other of resignation; Hans Scholl could never accept the latter. “Where are the Christians?” Hans shouted after hearing an “enemy broadcast” reporting that German Communists and Social Democrats had resisted the Nazis and been caught. “Should we stand here with empty hands at the end of the war when they ask the question: ‘And what did you do?’-” Sophie Scholl expressed this same emotion when she wrote in her diary, “I want to share the suffering of these days. Sympathy becomes hollow if one feels no pain.”

  The names of the White Rose did not appear in Theodor Haecker’s journal, for obvious reasons. He was taken for questioning—as was Carl Muth—by the Gestapo after the White Rose arrests and executions in February 1943. But more than a year later, on June 9, 1944, there is an odd, cryptic entry in Haecker’s diary:

  Friday morning towards 10 o’clock. High explosive bombs. T
he house and my flat destroyed. Unbelievable destruction. Some good helpers who console me by being what they are and by helping! Scholl! And also some crapule. Upright souls. And miserable souls. God is merciful! God is great! God is precise but magnanimous.

  It is a cry at the brink of obliteration, the cry of a man utterly and truly alone in the universe, the involuntary cry of a man sliding into physical and mental chaos; at that supreme moment of crisis, out of the black night of his soul, it seems that Theodor Haecker cried out for Hans Scholl.

  NINE

  WHERE BOOKS ARE BURNED, they will ultimately also burn human beings.” The poet Heinrich Heine’s warning, no matter how often it is cited, remains chillingly apt. In 1933, in Germany, the books were burned—the heritage and humanity of a nation consumed in flames as the fierce, exulting shouts of university students filled the night.

  The universities remained as shells, deceptive facades of normalcy as hundreds of professors were thrown out and forced to flee the country. The University of Munich had a “brown” reputation for years before Hitler had taken power, mainly because of the vociferous agitation of the Nazi movement in the city and its strong student auxiliary at the university. But all the universities in the Reich, whether they had a liberal reputation, like Freiburg, or a conservative one, like Munich, were “coordinated” or “integrated” into a centralized system of control and conformity.

  The German universities, distinguished and respected as they were in the world intellectual community, particularly in the fields of natural, physical, and the social sciences and in philosophy, had been hotbeds of nationalistic fervor since early in the nineteenth century. The spirit of academic freedom in these institutions did not necessarily mean an atmosphere of universalism, objectivity, or tolerance for other people’s—or nations’—points of view. Nationalism—and the surging, craving hunger for unification of all the petty German states without a common political identity—burst forth when the foreign conqueror, Napoleon, strode over German lands. To unify meant to be strong, to be strong meant a refusal to submit to alien invaders; ultimately, the refusal to submit was to become the need to conquer and dominate others.

  This outpouring of national emotion, this surge of self-discovery and self-glorification originally came not from the masses of working people in the cities or from the artisans and peasants in the countryside. It came first from the intellectuals, the artists and the professors who occupied a fairly exalted role in their society.

  But in spite of the wave of nationalism that in the nineteenth century swept Germany—and Russia and Italy, among other countries—there were always German voices speaking out against xenophobia, against prejudice, against blind passions and national apotheosis. Friedrich Schiller, toward the end of the eighteenth century, in giving his inaugural address as professor of history at the University of Jena, reminded his audience that “the first law of decency is to preserve the liberty of others, the second is to demonstrate one’s own freedom.” Even those who bitterly opposed the Napoleonic conquest of their native regions, like the Catholic Rhinelander Joseph Görres, who later was named professor of history at the University of Munich, spoke out loudly and openly against “Prussian and Protestant” waves of aggression coming from the north to conquer German lands, now that Napoleon was destroyed.

  The universities in the Rhineland and southwest Germany, like the general populace in these areas, often expressed a spirit of opposition to the forced unification of Germany under Prussia. The University of Freiburg stubbornly maintained the traditions of the French Revolution, and in the 1820s helped in the experi-mental development of local parliaments and other democratic institutions.

  It is in this region, southwest Germany, that most of the members of the White Rose were raised, and it was at the University of Freiburg that a small circle of academics also formed a resistance group against Hitler. Southwest Germany—and, to a lesser extent, Bavaria and its capital, Munich—have always felt themselves to be the “true” cultural heart of Germany, an independent force between calcified, pompous, and Catholic Austria, and the aggressive, spartan, Protestant upstart, Prussia. Generations of professors in this region disseminated protest against the hegemony of Prussia and against what they saw as false nationalism and a fraudulent sense of security this nationalism offered; for them, after Prussian soldiers arrived and wiped out their vestiges of democracy in 1848, Prussia represented “the peace of the grave and the order of the cemetery.”

  The University of Berlin was founded in 1810 as part of a reform movement in Prussia, but it quickly became a bastion of Prussian nationalism, “the intellectual bodyguard of the Hohenzollerns,” the Prussian ruling dynasty whose scion later was to crown himself kaiser, emperor of the Germans. It became clear as Napoleon rose and fell, that freedom, in Prussian terms, meant acceptance of and obedience to the state, in Prussia itself and in the German territories it began to annex. Men like Hegel and Fichte at the University of Berlin, mighty figures in the world of ideas, began to ennoble Prussia with almost religious reverence; a new messianic feeling for Germany and the German language began to sweep the land, although at that point, Fichte, in his addresses to the German nation as rector of the university, spoke about Germany as a “Fatherland of the mind,” rather than as a warrior-folk.

  But as early as 1813 the spirit of conquest, of parades and marching armies, had permeated the air. One of the great intellectuals of the era, Ernst Moritz Arndt, described his feelings about a military parade in words that cannot differ significantly from the testimony of spec-tators at a Nazi demonstration of armed might. “When a great crowd was before me,” he wrote in 1813,

  when a band of warriors passes by with flowing banners and sounding trumpets and drums, then I realize that my feelings and my actions are not an empty illusion, then it is that I feel the indes-tructible life, the eternal spirit, and eternal God. . . . Like other men I am egotistical and sinful but in my exaltation I am free at once from all my sins, I am no longer a single suffering individual, I am one with the Volk and God. In such a moment any doubts about my life and work vanish.

  The social sciences as developed in German universities later in the nineteenth century expressed this idea of aloneness and community in a more “objective” and rational manner. Ferdinand Tönnies delineated ideal types of social organization —Gemeinschaft, or community, and Gesellschaft, or society. Gemeinschaft was born of deep, unconscious factors in a people; it grew organically; it was a part of nature; it existed independent of man’s choice; it expressed a will that was larger than any one human being. Gesellschaft was the alienated, industrialized, and modern world we know today. It grew out of contract, not out of nature; it could be changed; it was based on compromise and superficial changes in the body politic.

  As the Prussian state moved its armies across Germany and its process of annexation seemed inexorable and overwhelming, the movements of resistance began to fall apart even where they had been strongest, as in southwest Germany. At the University of Karlsruhe, in the state of Baden, Professor Hermann Baumgarten, a liberal and an advocate of the values of the Enlightenment, wrote a tract in which he expressed the intellectuals’ surrender to military force. In 1866, after Prussia took Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark and annexed Frankfurt and Hannover, Baumgarten wrote “Why Citizens are Incapable of Political Affairs,” a notion with an astounding resemblance to the ideas later to be expressed by Thomas Mann during the First World War when he was still a devout German nationalist; Mann’s essay is called “Reflections of an Apolitical Man.” The citizen and the intellectual, these great representatives of the mind believed, were unable to make political decisions and were incapable of understanding the real flow of history and politics. The proof of this lay in the martial vic-tories of Prussia; before victory and power all men must bow. There was also an element of vulgarity in politics; intellectuals were actually above such day-to-day trivia as making political decisions; discussion, negotiation, and compromise dirtied on
e’s hands.

  National decisions were left to the warrior caste and its advocates. The soaring sense of triumph, of a world waiting to be conquered and tamed—perhaps not so different a feeling from the one experienced by the proponents of manifest destiny in America and imperial expansion in Britain—was most clearly enunciated by the renowned Prussian historian Heinrich von Treitschke. “No nation in the world can think so greatly and humanly of its state as Germany,” he wrote toward the end of the nineteenth century. “None strives as seriously as the Germans to reconcile . . . the power of the state and the liberty of the people, well-being and armed strength, science and faith. And because the foreigners know it, they hate us.”

  The First World War inflamed national passions to a raging fever that did not end with defeat. The Treaty of Versailles, with its “humili-ating” conditions, became the red flag that set off the nationalist frenzy. The First World War was the crucible for Adolf Hitler; without it, he would have no historical existence. Its great harvest was the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, an earthshaking upheaval that sent the child Alexander Schmorell and his father back to the German homeland. The First World War was the testing ground for the convictions of Robert Scholl; he remained a pacifist in spite of the massive pressure of the gemeinschaft around him.

  To have lost a war was the supreme disaster—to endure the imposed demilitarization of German lands, to suffer the enemy’s demands for economic reparations, to experience inflation, unemploy-ment, and anarchy in the streets—this was more than the German nation could bear. Each disaster sped up the process of infection, of rage and the desire for revenge. The national right loomed larger and more powerful as the Weimar Republic slipped from crisis to crisis in an almost nonending plummet. Writers like Ernst Jünger and Moeller van den Bruck, the foremost German translator and interpreter of Dostoevski, spoke grimly of the great crisis of the spirit, the existential zero-point of man, and envisaged the rise of a superman to lead the extraordinary chosen people, the Germans, to a new world of humanity over which they would rule.