Sophie Scholl and the White Rose

by Annette Dumbach

  At this point Manfred Eickemeyer was angry; he didn’t care about the German heritage, the canvases of great paintings; maybe the German people deserved what they were getting, and should drink the cup “to the bitter dregs.”

  Kurt Huber was shaking all over, almost writhing in his chair, his face flushed. Yes, he said loudly, maybe there is only one way, clandestine propaganda, sabotage and . . . “assassination.”

  They stared at him, not believing what they had heard.

  The silence was broken when Hans Hirzel, a young high-school student from Ulm, dropped in unexpectedly to say goodbye to Hans. He was the brother of Sophie’s close friend Susanne Hirzel. Before the evening ended, Hans and Sophie would give the boy eighty marks to buy another duplicating machine, hide it in Ulm, and help them prepare for the new round of activities when the three medics returned from the front.

  Kurt Huber was leaving the party now, shaking hands with the tall young men off to the battlefields he would never see. He asked them to drop him a line, give their impressions. Hans said they would.

  Hans and Alex would have exchanged quick glances, affirming that they would not tell Huber that they were the White Rose, at least not yet.

  They watched the older man leave through the courtyard, escorted by Christoph Probst to the streetcar stop. They would have waved; the professor would wave back.

  He must have looked small, tired, and very lonely.

  TWELVE

  SOPHIE, Traute, and other friends gathered outside Munich’s Ostbahnhof to see the young men off. They waved energetically as the train moved out toward the east, and went home to face the empty rooms of a suddenly colorless summer.

  It took three days for the military train to reach Warsaw. The student company had a few hours between trains and took a stroll through the city, which was baking in a fierce heat wave. Conditions had grown far worse in Warsaw than they were the last time Willi had passed through on the way to the front, and he noted in his journal: “The misery stares us in the face. I hope I never see Warsaw in these conditions again.” Hans, in a letter he wrote later to Professor Huber from Russia, mentioned that the friends went to the Jewish ghetto. “The city, the ghetto, and everything related to it made a decisive impression on everyone” was the rather guarded way he put it.

  By the time the medics arrived in Warsaw, in July 1942, starvation and epidemics had wiped out much of the Jewish population, which had been driven into the Jewish quarter’s walls and barbed-wire fences. A few weeks before, the SS had launched the deportation drives from the Warsaw Ghetto to the extermination camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek.

  The decision to destroy the Jewish people completely—the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” as it was called delicately in the corridors of power of the Third Reich—had been made about one year earlier. The implementation of the long-awaited program actually began on June 22, 1941, the same day that Hitler’s armies overran Russia, in spite of a mutual treaty of nonaggression.

  Jews from all over the occupied territories, and even some from the Reich itself, had been herded into the Warsaw Ghetto, as they were in ghettos throughout occupied Poland. When Hans, Alex, and Willi arrived there, pouring out of the gates of the ghetto, prodded by men in gray uniforms, emaciated and blank-eyed men, women, and children were marched in disheveled rows through the sizzlingly hot streets of Warsaw down to the railway station, to be thrust into sealed cattle-cars.

  There were Germans in uniform who taunted and gratuitously tormented their victims—some sent snapshots home to display their licensed sadism—and there were also Germans deeply shaken by what they saw, but who seemed unable to put their experiences and feelings into words, except to say that “the situation is beyond description,” or as Willi did, “misery stares us in the face,” or that they were “depressed” or feeling “extremely low.”

  It took more than a week for the train to reach Wjasma, the gathering point for the central front and for the 252d Division to which they were assigned. Wjasma, a small town, was almost completely destroyed; there was nothing there, as Willi noted, “but dirt, misery, and German marching music,” and, on a hill amid the ruins, an intact wooden church.

  They moved on to the town of Gzhatsk, some sixty miles west of Moscow, actually the farthest penetration point into Russia made by the Wehrmacht. It was here that the great eastern offensive stalled and gradually sank into the mud and snow.

  In spite of the misery and devastation, the young men lifted their eyes beyond it and were intoxicated by the huge expanse of the steppes, the open skies, the mystery of Russia. “Beyond the border begin the wide, the endless steppes,” Hans wrote in his diary soon after their arrival, “where every line dissolves, where everything solid disintegrates and becomes a drop in the sea, where there is no beginning and no middle and no end, where man is homeless and only melancholy fills his heart.”

  It was not only the naked and limitless landscape that captivated them; they found themselves in an exceptional position because of Shurik’s presence. With him they were able to enter the wooden doors of cottages and hovels and huts that were barred to Germans. Willi wrote simply: “The land opened itself up to me through Alex.”

  One can imagine the shock, the terror, and then—slowly, incredu-lously—the smile lighting up the faces of the peasants when they met Shurik, this tall young man in a dusty gray enemy uniform, speaking their language easily, offering them vodka, putting out his hand in friendship. He would tell them, as Willi, Hans, and perhaps Hubert Fürtwangler stood by a bit awkwardly, that he was born in Russia, that he felt it was his homeland and that someday he would come and stay forever. He was charged up, nearly ecstatic; his childhood memories and fantasies were fulfilled: Russia was what he always knew it would be; in spite of what people in Germany might think or say, he experienced no disappointment.

  He wrote a warm, emotional letter to his parents in Munich on August 5, 1942, shortly after arriving in Gzhatsk.

  We traveled a total of twelve days to arrive, and here we’ll stay. The front is about ten kilometers from here. Gzhatsk is almost completely destroyed and the Russians are still firing, sometimes by day, sometimes at night. But our camp is in the woods and is completely out of danger.

  I speak often and much with the Russian people, with simple people and with the educated, especially with physicians. I am extremely impressed. If you compare the present Russian generation to the German or French, you reach an amazing conclusion: they [the Russians] are so much younger, fresher and more appealing.

  At this point Shurik may have wanted to reassure his father that his love of Russia was untainted by Communist indoctrination:

  And oddly, all Russians have one opinion about Bolshevism: they hate nothing more in the world than that, and most important: even if the war does not end well for Germany, Bolshevism will never return here. It is over, done with, and the Russian people, the peasant as well as the worker, hate it totally.

  I have to end now and go to the surgical station where I work.

  If possible send wooden matches,

  Greetings to all,

  I kiss all of you,

  Your Shura.

  Soon the young medics were invited into farmhouses, sang folk songs, joined in the dancing, and provided the local people with schnapps and medicine. Shurik reported home later in August that

  these twenty years of Bolshevism have not made the Russian people forget how to sing and dance, and everywhere you go, you can hear Russian songs. New and old ones are sung. Played on balalaikas and guitars and so beautiful. . . . Regardless of their poverty, the people are terribly hospitable. The samovar and everything else they own are put on the table when a guest arrives.

  All of this fraternization, of course, was strictly forbidden by the German military, and went on mostly in the evenings, a good distance away from German installations. Summer nights are white, long, and sultry on the Russian plain, and the spontaneous festivities took on an almost baccha
nalian aspect, with cannons booming and crimson rockets shrieking through the air and spattering the sky a few kilo-meters away.

  Hans felt himself “ripped apart,” singing and dancing in a kind of frenzied way by night, and tending the wounded and dying by day. He had wild and restless dreams when he finally was able to sleep. Willi too, in spite of a far more contained temperament, was caught up in the intoxicating world of the steppes, the songs, the cannon fire, and the vodka: “In the early morning hours it is wonderful outdoors,” he wrote in late August.

  Pity that we’re in the forest where you can’t see the horizon. The encirc-ling trees narrow the view. In the evening we listen to Russian songs at a woman’s house. She works in the camp. We sit in the open air, behind the trees, the moon comes up, its rays falling in the spaces between the rows of trees, it’s cool, the girls sing to the guitar, we try to hum the bass part, it’s so beautiful, you feel Russia’s heart, we love it.

  A few days later, Willi made an entry that offers a rare glimpse of his deep shyness and utter naïveté regardless of what he had observed being done by his own army in the burnt-out villages. The entry concerned a visit to the house of a Russian girl, Sina, who spoke some German and apparently worked in his camp; he had mentioned her offhandedly several times previously.

  In the afternoon I visited the house where Sina lives; actually I came to ask for eggs. On a record player I hear Russian music, songs. We begin to talk about everyday life. I am shocked by the enormity of the rage against the Germans. A real aversion. They talk about Moscow, the city is supposed to be beautiful. It’s actually easy to find your way to the Russians if you want to make the effort. I feel very good being with them.

  In their bunker at night, they read Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment; Willi commented that he was reading it for the third time. The feverish power of the story of a man exploring the limits of a world where there is no God expressed their own spirits, their dizzying thoughts about the meaning of good and evil and freedom and Russia.

  “At this point in my life,” Willi wrote,

  Dostoevski has been important, and that’s because I have gotten to know some Russians better in the last few weeks. Being together with Alex opened up this land for me, a land that was almost unknown or at least incomprehensible. . . . We sit with peasants and sing together and they sing wonderful old songs. You forget for a whole moment all the sadness and the horror that is happening around you. Wonderful afternoons and evenings we have with the Russians—while the cannons and guns rarely stop roaring and we take care of the sick and the wounded. Two worlds around us. . . .

  “It’s interesting,” Willi goes on,

  that the simplest people: peasants, fishermen, craftsmen, know Dostoevski and are involved in what he writes—not superficially but in the deepest sense. You can’t say the same about Germany, the people that truly know Goethe are not numerous. Here poets are really part of the people and are understood by the people. I deeply regret that I don’t know more Russian. It would have been so indescribably beautiful to have been able to really talk to certain people!

  The experience in Russia was undoubtedly one of the highest peaks of their young lives. It was unique—because of Shurik—and it was brief, lasting less than three months. Hans’s, Alex’s, and Willi’s exalted and almost mystical reaction to Russia may seem an enigma, but it grew out of German attitudes toward the Slavic East.

  Settled stolidly if sometimes insecurely in the central plains and valleys of the European continent, relatively unprotected by seas and mountains, the German people have looked eastward with interest, suspicion, and desire for over eight hundred years. Across their own uneasy and shifting eastern borders, they have kept watch on the Slavic world up to the Urals and Siberia, regarding themselves as constituting a kind of bulwark against primitive hordes, against the dangerous and mysterious world of the Orient.

  Russia, the Orient, the East—these words seem almost interchangeable in the German vocabulary of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. Feelings about “the East,” about Russia, this land of czars and peasants and onion-domed churches, were always ambivalent, much in the same way Westerners regard the countries of the so-called Third World: a place to acquire raw materials and foodstuffs cheaply, to relieve population pressures, to colonize, to experience adventure, and to carry one’s own religious, commercial, or patriotic mission to lesser breeds, or a place simply to expand to—for the sake of expanding.

  In the medieval period, in the thirteenth century, the Teutonic knights moved into the East, conquering and colonizing northern Slavic peoples and the Baltic regions. Later, in the early eighteenth century, Peter the Great and subsequent czars called German “experts” into their undeveloped country, considering them dull but reliable and well-trained technicians from an advanced society; they could help modernize and unify a Russia vastly swelling beyond its Muscovite borders into a mammoth multilingual and multinational empire.

  Over the centuries, Russia had been seen as a kind of frontier for Germany. As do all frontiers, it meant both menace and freedom. Along with this came a certain contempt for Russia’s inhabitants, society, and state. As Germany struggled in various ways to unify itself into one political order out of an array of princely states and duchies in the nineteenth century, the tides of Bismarckian nationalism and militarism won out and crested in a wave of national arrogance and a feeling of superiority in relation to other peoples and cultures. With it, the contempt for the Slavic East inevitably waxed. It was to wane briefly after the First World War, at least for some Germans, with the advent of the October Revolution in Russia and the dawn of a new world under “scientific socialism.” But even this short-lived dream was shattered for the German left, after a decade of Stalinism ate away like acid at the portrait of the Russian Utopia.

  The quest for German lebensraum in the East—the belief that the Russian steppes existed for German needs, and that the Slavic peoples were inferior races to be used as brute labor to work the soil—never fully disappeared from German thought. It was to spring full-blown into life as national policy when Adolf Hitler and his associates began to promulgate their vision of the future of the Eurasian continent after 1938.

  But, as with all beliefs, there had always been a countermotif to this point of view in Germany, the other end of an almost purely black-and-white spectrum of opinion about Russia—the motif shared and deeply felt by Alex, Willi, and Hans.

  “The Russian soul” is an expression heard often in the German language, and it usually has generally positive connotations. It refers to depth of feeling, artistic sensibility, an expansiveness of heart and a spontaneous generosity; however, it also has undertones of unbridled passion and orgiastic experience. It is associated with wild swings of mood from the pinnacle of exaltation to the chasm of nihilism and despair, from the tenderest gesture of kindness to drunken brutality on the rampage: in short, all the aspects of humanity—except the disciplined, or measured, and Apollonian ones—are contained in the throbbing vessel called the Russian soul. It has nothing to do with the Russia of Lenin, Trotsky, Brezhnev, or even Sakharov, although perhaps it does have something to do with Solzhenitsyn. The idea of the Russian soul seems to tap some deep need in the German psyche; its values are primeval and free, both repellent and thrilling to a controlled, work-oriented people. In the nineteenth century, the Russian soul was an expression of longing in both cultures, Germany and Russia, for true freedom and true community, contradictory as those ideas may seem. Anarchy and unity, obedience and freedom, are defined and invented and imagined on page after page of literary and philosophical tomes in both countries.

  The hunger for national unification, for national importance, and the desire for a special “spiritual” kind of freedom unknown in the West, were not the only traits that the two most autocratic societies in Europe had in common: in the post-Napoleonic era, they both rejected the values and body of beliefs of the Enlightenment coming out of Western Europe; both
turned ferociously against the French Revolution with its emphasis on the leveling of classes and the fraternité of equal men; both rejected the idea of parliamentary democracy, which they saw as a triumph of numbers over values, of quantity over quality. Indeed, for both Germany and Russia, Western Europe was a marketplace that destroyed integrity and principles for the sake of compromise and gold (the word they used for this notion was “corruption”). And both societies turned away from the idea of the private man, living anonymously in the city, freed from the moral pressures of community, village, and town (they saw this as “alienation”).

  German and Russian intellectuals and literati regarded the emerging industrial bourgeoisie as a threat to the true orders of noble, artisan, and peasant, and both groups saw their respective nations as the civilizing—if retrogressive—vanguard that would bring the truth back to Europe, the truth lost in the centuries of exploration and modernization since the Renaissance, the truth of a pure and “whole” life as in the preindustrial world of peasants and priests.

  The intellectual systems of both countries nourished one another. German philosophical idealism, embodied in the works of Hegel and Schelling, made an enormous impact on the Slavophiles of Russia, and in turn, Russian writers like Dostoevski, Gogol, even Tolstoy and Turgenev—but especially Dostoevski—struck a deep chord in the German romantics and their youth movements.

  “Has anybody ever understood the human meaning of nationalism in a more German way than the great Russian moralist?” asked Thomas Mann, referring to Dostoevski, in a work he was writing in the midst of the First World War, when Russia and Germany were enemies. “If spiritual affinity can form the foundation and justification of political alliances, then Russia and Germany belong together.”

  Categorizing feelings or attitudes toward other nations tends to water down the complexity of ambivalence: till the present day it would be unjust and inaccurate to present German views on Russia in a purely negative or purely positive light. But there is no question that the Russian people, literature, and landscape already existed in a romanticized, idealized, and dreamlike form in the minds of the members of the White Rose before any of them set foot on Russian soil. And by 1942, with their regimented nation at war with Mother Russia, their longings and their beliefs about “the enemy” undoubtedly were factors in stiffening their resistance to the Nazi cause—and to every value associated with technology, efficiency, modernization, facelessness, and so-called progress.