Instead he began to frequent the concert halls. The men he sought were music lovers. Concerts would be among the few diversions they would allow themselves, and he guessed they would seek the solace of music as often as possible. He was right. On his third attempt, a performance of the Berlin Philharmonic, he ran into both Dohnanyi and Dietrich Bonhoeffer at the interval.
Dohnanyi was coolly polite, and obviously keen to get away. Dietrich seemed more hesitant and for a moment resisted Dohnanyi’s tug at his sleeve.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, referring to Arvid and Mildred but afraid to say their names aloud.
Falk nodded. “I’d like to talk to you.”
“Not possible.” Dohnanyi intervened quickly. “Come, Dietrich.”
And they were gone. But Falk was able to see where they were sitting. And when the concert was over he got close enough to jostle Dietrich and slip a note into his pocket. Their eyes met briefly and then Dietrich turned away.
The note had asked for a meeting the next day at the Renaissance hunting lodge built by the Elector Joachim II on the shore of the Grunewaldsee. It was a spot they had frequented long ago, Dietrich and Elisabeth and Falk and Suse, because they considered its irregular towers and turrets romantic. Falk still had a snapshot taken one winter, all of them bundled in coats and hats and scarves. Smiling at the camera. So young. He smoked a cigarette and watched Dietrich make his way toward him. They stood for a time, watching a pair of loons on the lake, not so close as to seem to be together. It was a bitterly cold day and it was soon apparent no one else was about. Dietrich was the first to move closer. An act of generosity, Falk thought.
“So?” Dietrich said.
Falk said, “I have friends in Poland.” He mentioned names. “I know what you’re about.”
“Do you?” Dietrich said.
“Not the details,” Falk admitted. “Nor do I want to know. I only wish to pass on that I have information about a resistance movement that is growing among university students. Independent of your own activities.”
“Ah.”
“They are responsible for the Munich leaflets. You know what I’m talking about?”
“Yes. I’ve seen them.”
“I know the leaders of this movement. They want to make contact with the larger resistance. I don’t know that it’s possible, but I promised I’d ask. They mean well. They’re obviously very brave. And very bright, if a bit foolish the way young people can be. You understand?”
“I understand. But I must tell you the others will not want to bring them in, because of the very foolishness you have mentioned.”
Falk offered a cigarette and lit one of his own. “Do you agree?”
Dietrich hesitated. “No,” he said after a moment. “I think the young people put us to shame.”
They smoked awhile in silence. The loons had flown away, leaving the lake flat and empty. Dietrich said, “You must tell them to be very careful. No unnecessary risks.”
“Yes,” Falk said.
“I will speak with my brother-in-law.”
“You know what he will say.”
“What else can I do?”
“The leaders are some young medical students named—”
Dietrich put up his hand. “Don’t tell me.”
“Very well. I’d like to bring them to Berlin to meet you. You wouldn’t have to tell them much, just enough to let them know you’re legitimate. They’re impressive young men, the sort who could lead the nation someday. There’s another bunch of students in Hamburg who are just as active, and they’ve got contacts at universities across the country. Perhaps you could suggest some ways they can help that run less risk of drawing attention from the Gestapo, such as preparing for the moment when—” Falk dropped his cigarette butt and ground it beneath his feet. “For the moment that is so hard to imagine just now.”
“It seems to me,” Dietrich agreed, “it would be useful if students were prepared to take to the streets. My brother-in-law has contacts with former trade unionists still working in the factories who are ready to step down when word comes. Why not students as well? But as for a meeting, I don’t—”
“Please,” Falk interrupted. “Next month.” He suggested a date in late February. “I’ll be back in Berlin then for a meeting. I could bring them to you here, at this very spot.”
“All right,” Dietrich said. “But only if you don’t use my name.”
They shook hands. Falk left first, strolling at an easy pace, a soldier on leave enjoying a bit of fresh air and quiet. Dietrich watched until he disappeared into a stand of birch trees.
The Americans flew over Munich by day and the British flew by night. The young people waited in the garage studio off the Leopoldstraße. Hans Scholl and his sister Sophie, Willi Graf, and Alex Schmorell, called Shurik. Outside the sirens commenced their plaintive wailing. Hans Scholl smiled. He went to a cabinet and brought back a bottle of wine and four glasses, passed them around. Shurik was pulling up planks from the floor of a closet and hauling out cans of paint. A present from his sometime lover Lilo, who had once filled canvases with great slashes of black and purple and green but claimed now the muse had deserted her. End the war, she told Shurik, and I shall buy more paint.
Willi took brushes from jars of water, wiped them, and handed them around. Outside there was a distant barking of flak, and then a series of irregular concussions.
“Too far north,” Shurik said.
They sipped their wine. The young men talked, made jokes, but Sophie was silent, staring at the blacked-out window, lips moving as though praying. The explosions were louder and closer. The edges of the blackout curtain glowed like white neon. A concussion set a tremor along the floorboards, then came a slow tearing sound as houses crumbled a few streets away.
Hans set down his glass and stood.
“The party begins,” he said.
They had learned when to go out, just when the wave passed. When everyone else still cowered in shelters and would do for another hour or so. When the whoosh of heat blast had subsided, and the fires gave enough light to see by but the worst flames could be avoided. Of course, it was dangerous. A shift in the wind and a firestorm would blow right over them. Willi Graf looked up just in time to call them away from a collapsing wall. Flying debris cut Shurik’s cheek. Dangerous, but lovely as well. They dodged and darted about like enchanted creatures, sprites or fairies, in the yellow light of the flares which blossomed in the sky above and drifted down like falling petals.
They sprinted with the cans and brushes to the university, to the main gate in the Ludwigstraße, and by strobelike light they painted
FREEDOM
in letters four feet high.
Falk Harnack had always loved Munich. Compared to the granite pile of Berlin, Munich was a pastel paintbox, a stage set for a fantastical opera. Or was before the bombings. Now the effect was of a smashed pastry shop. Swirled confections of rococo white and gold littered the streets, and plaster like fine powdered sugar sifted over ruins of pink and green and Ester-hazy yellow.
The streetcars no longer ran because the tracks had been ripped from the pavement, so Falk shouldered his duffel bag and hiked north toward the student quarter. Until he reached a wall at the southern end of the English Garden. A gaggle of Russian conscripted workers scrubbed halfheartedly at purple graffiti.
FREEDOM!
Falk had started to turn away when he realized an SS man guarding the prisoners had noticed him. Falk approached, shaking his head.
“What sort of scum would do this?” he said, offering the man a cigarette.
“Scum is right,” the guard replied. “It happened last week too. And it’s peacetime paint—hell to get off.” Gestured toward the scrubbing women as though they were draining his energy.
“So I see.”
“How the hell they got hold of real paint, I don’t know. Anyway, a lousy welcome home if you’ve been at the front.”
“Yes, for me it is,” Falk agreed. Since h
is meeting with Bonhoeffer he had been at his cultural post in Poland, not at the front, but pretended otherwise, lingering awhile longer making small talk about the crisis at Stalingrad, so he could continue to enjoy the wall. Even as he considered what he would do to make sure it didn’t happen again.
Hans and Sophie shared rooms in a courtyard off the Franz-Josef-Straße, and that was where Falk Harnack found them. Studying. Sophie had been to visit the mother and father in Ulm and brought back a cinnamon cake. She cut a slice and offered it to Falk.
“Are you mad?” Falk said.
She froze, wondering why he would react so to the cake, but he was talking to Hans as though Sophie were not present. Like her brother and his friends, Falk did not quite take Sophie seriously.
“Sophie,” Scholl said. “Leave the room.”
“I want to listen. I have a right. I take the same risks.”
“And I want to spare you at least some of those risks. Leave the room.”
She went out to the kitchen, but stood just behind the closed door, her ear to the crack.
“Yes,” Scholl said, turning back to Falk. “We are mad. It is what this regime does to decent people.”
Falk stepped closer. “I thought you wanted to know about the resistance.”
“I do,” Hans answered defensively, “since we happen to be part of it.”
“Let me tell you something. My brother and sister-in-law are dead. Mildred was gang-raped. Her breasts were burned with lit cigarettes. Arvid received electric shocks to his genitals and was beaten so badly his eye was dislodged from its socket. They were hung with piano wire, which nearly decapitated them.”
Behind the kitchen door, Sophie put her hand over her mouth.
Falk continued, “I learned all this from a guard I bribed at Plötzensee. I’m telling it to you because you seem to think this is some kind of game we’re playing.”
“You’re referring to the graffiti.” Scholl’s voice held a slight tremor.
“Yes.”
“Do you know what kind of stir it’s creating? I bet they know in Berlin.”
“Of course they do. The resistance knows. And they’ll not let you within a mile of them as long as this sort of thing continues, because the Gestapo also knows. It’s a childish gesture. It’s not worth the risk. It’s so easy to get caught.”
“No, it’s not. We only go out during bombing raids.”
“Bombing raids!” Falk threw up his hands.
Sophie came back in the room. “It’s not just that the bombs cover what we’re doing,” she said. “It would be so easy to hate the British and Americans. The bombs are killing thousands of people. Old people, children. But when we use the air raids, I can even be thankful for the bombs. Then I don’t hate anyone. Except the Nazis. I would shoot Hitler myself if I met him in the street.”
Hans looked at Falk and shrugged, as if to say, This is how a woman reasons. He lit a cigarette and began to pace. “At least we’re doing something. In Berlin they only talk. The leaflets are a risk as well. What about the leaflets? Do we stop that too?” He paused. “You’ve spoken to someone in Berlin. About us.”
“Yes,” Falk said.
The day after Falk Harnack returned to Poland, Hans Scholl visited a secondhand bookseller, Herr Söhngen. Herr Söhngen was antifascist and had agreed to pass messages between Hans and his contacts. This time he whispered to Scholl, “I am so sorry, but the book you requested, Totalitarianism and Utopia, is out of print.” Shaken, Scholl stared at Herr Söhngen, unable to speak. It was the message agreed upon if the Gestapo hung around asking questions. He glanced around at the customers browsing the meager supply of books on the shelves, caught the eye of a middle-aged man in a well-made raincoat and gray hat. The man smiled—or so Scholl thought—and went back to browsing. Scholl thanked Herr Söhngen and went out, taking a circuitous route back to the university while glancing back often to see if he was being followed.
That evening he told Shurik and Willi Graf, “We must step things up. There may be nothing to lose.” Then he began to weep uncontrollably.
Later Shurik and Willi sprinted through empty streets while the sirens warned of incoming British bombers. Before they ducked into the shelter in Theresienstraße, Willi grabbed Shurik’s arm and said, “Perhaps we should lie low for a while. Hans is liable to snap.”
“He isn’t the only one,” Shurik answered as he turned away.
The next leaflet boasted a new title. Instead of the more modest Leaflet of the White Rose, it was emblazoned across the top
LEAFLET OF THE RESISTANCE
“They’ll be angry in Berlin if we claim this name,” said Willi Graf, ever the cautious one.
“I’ll have the meeting with Falk’s contact soon after we distribute it,” Hans Scholl said, holding up the thin black stencil to the light. “This will let them know we mean business.”
The text of the leaflet had also been a source of friction. Professor Huber, an anti-Nazi member of the faculty, had helped with the writing. The students were fond of Huber, a professor of philosophy who often dropped veiled barbs at the Nazis into his lectures. But Huber was a Conservative—his distaste for the Nazis stemmed from his belief that they had brought dishonor and defeat to the great German nation. He inserted a sentence which read, “The youth of Germany must learn to emulate our glorious Wehrmacht, not the butchers who have taken control of our beloved nation.” But Hans and Shurik would have none of it. They had been at the Russian front, they had seen the atrocities of not only the SS but the “glorious Wehrmacht” as well; Professor Huber had not. “We are not nationalists,” Shurik said. “We are internationalists, democratic socialists.”
“This is a new time,” Scholl told his stunned professor. “A time when students teach their teachers.”
FEBRUARY 3, 1943. The students are drinking tea in the Scholls’ flat and Mozart is playing on the radio, which suddenly falls silent.
Shurik looks up from the chessboard he is sharing with Willi. “Has the electric gone?”
Then the radio spits static and emits a metallic drumroll. A bleak, distant voice says The Battle of Stalingrad is over. The Sixth Army under the illustrious command of Feldmarschall von Paulus has succumbed to the enemy. Three hundred thousand of our brave men have been lost on the field of battle. Our beloved Führer declares three days of national mourning….
The students sit still as the gloomy second movement of Beethoven’s Fifth fills the room. Then Hans Scholl goes to the radio and switches it off.
“The next air raid, more graffiti,” he says. “No matter what they say in Berlin. This is the end. The people will rise up now.”
Sophie is weeping; so is Willi. Everyone knows someone from school who has been serving with the Sixth Army at Stalingrad. Only Shurik is strangely happy, because he is remembering his long-dead Russian mother. “The Russians,” he says several times. “I knew it would be the Russians.”
The leaflet is printed.
LEAFLET OF THE RESISTANCE
Fellow Resistance Fighters!
Stunned and distraught, we behold the loss of the men of Stalingrad. Three hundred thousand German men have been senselessly done to death by the inspired strategy of a World War I private. Führer, we thank you!
The German people are in turmoil. The day of reckoning is here, the day German youth demand restitution from the most horrible tyrant our people has yet endured. For us there is one slogan—Fight against the Nazis! We want true learning and true freedom of expression.
The name of Germany is dishonored for all time if the young people of Germany do not rise up, take revenge, and establish a New Europe, a Europe of the spirit. The dead of Stalingrad implore us.
The leaflets are hidden beneath the false floor in the studio closet, the stacks growing as the students acquire more and more paper, at great peril. They have agreed these leaflets will be sent first to universities in the hope they draw students into the streets. And in order to do that, Hans Scholl decides,
they must not be distributed singly through the mail and phone booths. Instead they will be left in piles around the university buildings, so groups of students will find them and discuss them together.
Shurik objects strenuously. Too dangerous, he says. There must be some other way to distribute them, at night perhaps. But Scholl can think of no other way. And since the danger is very real, he decides to take it upon himself, without telling the others.
But he has never been able to fool Sophie.
FEBRUARY 17, 1943. The weather is unseasonably warm, more like April than February. The trees, tricked by the heat, have begun to show green buds. Sophie takes a walk in the English Garden and then, back in the flat, throws open the window of her bedroom. White curtains billow out like beckoning arms. She turns on the phonograph, searches through her albums, and takes Schubert from its dust cover. The Trout Quintet. Sophie dances around the room, turns into a trout, wriggles and purls through cold clear water with open eyes.
FEBRUARY 18, 1943. The main entrance of the Ludwig-Maximilian University is in the Ludwigstraße. Across a courtyard and through heavy doors into the marble central hall. A decapitated Medusa with her head-dress of snakes is depicted in the floor tiles. A strange decoration, Sophie has always thought. She can’t think what it has to do with learning, has never liked to look at it. Instead she peers up through three floors of open space, past marble balustrades, to the skylit dome.
Usually the hall would be echoing with footsteps, conversations, laughter, friends calling to one another. Now there is silence, for lectures are in session. In ten minutes or so, the dismissal bell will sound. Hans and Sophie Scholl must move quickly. Her brother will be glad she is along now, Sophie thinks. He has no choice, for she laid in wait for him at the studio, caught him just as he was stuffing leaflets in his briefcase, and showed him her own satchel already filled and ready. No time to talk her out of it, and so here she is.
Saints and Villains Page 47
