Uppity Woman: A Continuing Appreciation for Sophie Scholl

Ignorance and evil are commonplace.  How many know much else about Hannah Arendt but for her succinct comment on “the banality of evil?”  Evil, banal or otherwise, simple in its brutality or complex in its machinations, surrounds us now, a foul vapor that chokes the spirit. What is the role of a citiizen?  How are we to respond?

The real damage is done by those millions who want to 'survive.'The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don’t want their  little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won’t take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don’t like to make waves—or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honor, truth, and principles are only literature.

Out in the open darkness descends with crushing weight.  A light flickers in what looks to be a house.  Best to find comfort from the chill and the dark and silence.  Find it in that small house, with a small light.
      

Those who live small, mate small, die small. It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you.

Ours is an anonymous age.  If there is a problem, let someone else deal.  Nuance unneeded, details dispatched, death, destruction, and destiny await only others or those who deserve their fate.  Don’t people only get what they deserve?

But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what?

I am searching now for one uppity woman.  Yes.  Needed now: one uppity woman.  An uppity woman would confront these dragons, fight them all with a more fierce flame, send them all flameless back to their caves.  I am searching now for my own Sophie Scholl.

Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.

I have found my Sophie Scholl, but only in the pages of history.  From those pages yet she speaks to me. . She is the  white rose undying,  even in defeat undaunted. The wisdom of a spirit withers not nor wilts.   

And Sophie would look at me and say: What you would find in me you must instead find in yourself.

A brief not before continuing.
All entries by The Heretik on Uppity Women were inspired by a piece by : James Wolcott.

Additional entries on Uppity Women can be found here and here (a shorter appreciation of Sophie Scholl, her brother and a friend).  This piece incorporates some of the shorter appreciation.

Thanks to my friend Bad Tux for continuing the story and from whom I found Sophie's quote above.  Bad Tux is a very Snarky Penguin.  Visit him on his ice floe.

Thanks to Bruderhof as source of quote and white rose pic.

But back to Sophie.

ON FEBRUARY 22, 1943, SOPHIA MAGDALENA SCHOLL,
HANS FRITZ SCHOLL, AND CHRISTOPH HERMANN
PROBST  FACED DOWN THE MACHINE OF DEATH
IN NAZI GERMANY FOR THE LAST TIME.  IN LOSING
THEIR LIVES, THEY RECLAIMED  A SMALL PART
OF THE SOUL OF THE GERMAN PEOPLE.


Hans Scholl, Sophie Scholl, Christoph Probst
note: Hans wears the Wehrmacht uniform.

Along with George Wittenstein,Alex Schmorell, and other students at the University of Munich, Hans, Sophie and Christoph began to become disillusioned with what were the now empty promises the Nazis had offered the German people in the 1930s.  Many of the medical students at the University were required to serve three month tours on the Russian Front in 1942. That experience and and  the witnessing of the brutal treatment of others (Jews and others deemed to be corrupting the purity of the Aryan race) jolted the students from their detachment.

Wittenstein (who survived to bear witness) writes. . .

detachment gave way to the conviction that something had to be done; that it was not good enough to keep to oneself, one's beliefs, and ethical standards, but that the time had come to act.

During early summer of 1942, Alex Schmorell and Hans Scholl began to write leaflets that they distributed in phone books in phone booths, to members of the White Rose, and by messenger to other universities throughout Germany. 

Always around them descended an atmosphere where they might be given up by informers.  They did not succumb to their fears, but pressed on in a fight impossible to win in fact, but one they knew must be won in spirit.  Their leaflets grew more incendiary in subject and tone. The last "letter of the white rose" called for the overthrow of a criminal regime.  This did not go unnoticed.  The stakes were grave in all senses of the word.

Probst and the Scholls were informed on and captured.  Their trial lasted all of four hours.

The official charges against them in a People's Court that had no basis or standing in the German national constitution nor in any law written at the time read: 

treasonous assistance to the enemy, preparing to commit high treason, and weakening of the nation's armed security.

The illegal People's Court arrived at the following findings:

That the accused have in time of war by means of leaflets called for the sabotage of the war effort and armaments and for the overthrow of the National Socialist way of life of our people, have propagated defeatist ideas, and have most vulgarly defamed the Führer, thereby giving aid to the enemy of the Reich and weakening the armed security of the nation.

On this account they are to be punished by Death.

Their honor and rights as citizens are forfeited for all time.

 

All of them brave, Sophie was perhaps most courageous in the face of the court, in the face of death.  To the illegally constituted court that convicted her, she spoke in a strong voice words without a wavering, she spoke with a simple vision and wisdom courage alights on the brave.

SOMEBODY, AFTER ALL, HAD TO MAKE A START. WHAT WE WROTE AND SAID IS ALSO BELIEVED BY MANY OTHERS. THEY JUST DON'T DARE TO EXPRESS THEMSELVES AS WE DID.

The brother and sister Hans and Sophie Scholl along with their friend Christoph went to their deaths with the valor of the unvanquished.  But the story of their trial and its judgements must extend beyond them to the judge who tried them.  The verdict of history  is the one people must and shall remember.  The wicked and the cruel are condemned to the few days the watch and the calendar give them, while the brave live forever in the memory, immortal.

In his book on the White Rose group A Noble Treason (1979), Richard Hanser made the following observations about the presiding judge Roland Friesler:

Friesler conducted the trial as if the future of the Reich were indeed at stake. He roared denunciations of the accused as if he were not the judge but the prosecutor. He behaved alternately like an actor ranting through an overwritten role in an implausible melodrama and a Grand Inquisitor calling down eternal damnation on the heads of the three irredeemable heretics before him.

 

If there is some heaven somewhere beyond this earth, what heaven holds is held there only for those who hold most true when others lose their grasp of what is right.  All others shall find their rightful place.


IN ADDITION:

The survivor Wittenstein writes that the sixth letter of the White Rose "was written by Kurt Huber after the fall of Stalingrad and distributed by Hans and Sophie Scholl in the main building of the University on that fateful 18th of February, 1943."

"Fellow Students,

Deeply shaken, our people behold the loss of the men of Stalingrad. 330,000 German men have been senselessly and irresponsibly driven to their deaths and destruction by the ingenious strategy of the WWI private. Führer, we thank you!" ("Führer, wir danken Dir" was the slogan used over and over at all mass rallies and appeared elsewhere on huge banners. The text continues:)

"The German people are in ferment. Do we wish to continue entrusting the fate of our armies to this dilettante? Do we want to sacrifice the remainder of our German youth to the base ambitions of a Party clique? No, never! The day of reckoning has come, the reckoning of our German youth with the most abominable tyranny our people has ever endured. In the name of the entire German people we demand of Adolf Hitler's state the return of personal freedom, the most precious treasure of the Germans which he cunningly has cheated us out of."

"We have grown up under a government which deprived us ruthlessly of free speech. Hitler Youth, SA, SS have done their utmost to force us into uniforms, revolutionize and anesthetize us during the most promising years of our lives, normally devoted to acquiring education. "Ideological training" they termed this despicable method of stifling in a fog of empty phrases, our budding ability to think and judge for ourselves. Demonic and narrow minded at once, they train future party bigwigs in "castles of the knightly order" to become godless, insolent and unscrupulous exploiters and murderers, to blindly and stupidly follow their Führer. They think us intellectuals appropriate stooges to fashion bludgeons for them so that they may rule."

"Experienced soldiers are disciplined like school boys by political aspirants, Gauleiters lewdly insult the honor of female students. German female students at the University of Munich gave a dignified response to the besmirching of their honor, and male students defended and stood firm on behalf of those women. That is a beginning of our struggle for self-determination without which intellectual and spiritual values cannot be created. We owe our thanks to the brave comrades, both men and women, who have given us this brilliant example."

He goes on to say that there is only one option: "battle against the Party, leave the Party. Let us boycott lectures given by political stooges. We seek true science and genuine intellectual freedom. None of your threats can mortify us, not even closure of our universities. Every one of us must struggle for our future, freedom, and for a regime conscious of its moral responsibility."

"FREEDOM AND HONOR. For ten Years Hitler and his accomplices have abused, distorted, debased these noble German words ad nauseam, as dilettantes do who cast the most precious values of a nation to the swine. During this ten year destruction of all material and spiritual values they have shown the German people what freedom and honor mean to them. This horrible blood bath which they have caused throughout Europe has opened the eyes of even the most naive and simpleminded German.....The name of Germany will be dishonored forever, lest German youth finally rise to simultaneously avenge and atone, to smash its tormentors and invoke a new intellectual and spiritual Europe."

He then reminds students that the people are looking to them for action to rescue the nation from National Socialism, as an earlier generation of Germans had saved the nation from Napoleon and calls out to them:

"Stalingrad's dead implore us" - "Frischauf, mein Volk, die Flammenzeichen rauchen!"

(Rise up, my people, the fiery beacons beckon!)

 

George Wittenstein, a White Rose collaborator who escaped by a stroke of luck, has written a brilliant and poignant four-part essay on the White Rose that can be found starting here.

Another great reference is here.

Comments

[Tamara Sbelgio]

As the founder of Morning Star Rising, a program guiding adolescent girls toward an empowered womanhood, I am delighted to find this site!! I intend to return over and over. Thank you for the story of Sophie Scholl. In these rather dark and disturbing times, the inspiration of the undaunted courage of everyday heretiks is essential. In October 2004, we sponsored a one-day Uppity Women Film Festival in Austin, TX. Our hope is to make this our annual fund-raising event.

[The Heretik]

Keep The Heretik informed, Tamara.

[Tamara Sbelgio]

Promote Uppitude! Visit The Uppity Woman Store @ www.cafepress.com/uppitywoman. Half of the profits from sales of the wide variety of amusing and inflammatory goods support college scholarships for the Morning Star Rising girls. Twin goals of this online store are the promotion of uppitude (an insistence on the right to define one's own identity and life path) and college financial assistance to Morning Star Rising graduates. For more information see www.morningstarrising.org.
Onward and Upward!

[felix-and-matt]

WE LOVE SOPHIE SCHOLL!!!!!!! we think of her everyday and she is our hero and am glad others appreciate her thank you so much

[David Gan]

Sophie Scholl is Germany's Anne Frank, who bravely sacrificed her life for which she believed is the Truth. I wonder how many people will have the courage to do what she has done. I hope that the Kangaroo court judge suffer a fate he deserved, like those tried at Nurnberg. In midst of total chaos of Nazi Germany, she was the White Rose that pushed through the black soil of Nazi hate and destruction. She will be remembered as an eternal heroine that will never be forgotten.