Sophie Scholl

At the end of Der Untergang (aka Downfall, nominated for best foreign film), the real Traudl Junge, Hitler's secretary, an old woman who died only a little more than year ago, is shown, talking about just when the realisation hit her. It wasn't directly after the war. It was years later, when she was bicycling in Munich, and passing one of the memorials for Sophie Scholl. "I realized that she (Sophie Scholl) was the same age as me, and I realized that she was executed the same year I started working for Hitler. At that moment, I really sensed it was no excuse to be young."

Sophie Scholl, along with her brother Hans, several fellow students and one Professor, formed the small resistance group "The White Rose". (More about them here.) The story made it on screen several times before - in Michael Verhoeven's Die Weiße Rose and Percy Adlon's Fünf Tage; Sophie Scholl was played by Lena Stolze both times. If you're German, you've seen at least one or two photos of the real Sophie, and recognize her features easily - a pretty, dark-haired girl with an intense expression. (Carnivale watchers, she looks a bit like Clea Duvall's Sofie.) Now there is a third film, Sophie Scholl - Die Letzen Tage, in which she's played by Julia Jentsch, who impressed me a few months ago in Die Fetten Jahre Sind Vorüber.

It's a good film, choosing as its center something the other two did not, Sophie's interrogation by the police captain Robert Mohr. (All the protocols of the case were transfered to Berlin, and hence ended up in East German archives. Since the White Rose was not a communist resistance cell, they didn't quite know what to do with them, and they weren't available to earlier film makers.) Any film relying on interrogation scenes in which there are basically two people in the room really has to have good actors, and the two here stepped up to the case. Especially since the director went for subtlety. Mohr isn't your brutal Gestapo cliché; a few occasional outbursts aside, he's quiet and honestly confounded that a young woman who grew up with the system (Sophie was with the BDM, the female equivalent of the Hitler Youth, just as her brother Hans was with the Hitler Youth) should turn against it and denounce it as evil. In a way, the dynamic between them echoes the one between Jeanne d'Arc and Bishop Cauchon in Shaw's St Joan, about which I've talked with a friend in quite a different context recently - he sees himself as trying to save her from her errors. "Building golden bridges", as it's one put within the film.

As the film also features one of the most disgusting figures of the Nazi hierarchy, top judge Roland Freisler, who conducted the infamous show trials of the Volksgerichtshof which consisted of him screaming abuse at the accused, Mohr's presentation does not mean the audience is tempted to see the Nazis as "not that bad"; on the contrary, his sincerity makes it all the more chilling because it underlines how idelogy deforms people. For of course he ultimately delivers Sophie to the court and to her death.

In each of the films, you naturally have what can be called a martyr narrative, and so each of the directors try to keep Sophie human, to underline that she was not a saint longing to die but who enjoyed her life, was planning on finishing university and on marriage, but was prepared to risk it for what she believed in. In the most recent film, this is accomplished by such scenes as Sophie, just after she realized that she will, in fact, not get out of this and will die, asking to be allowed to go to the toilet, and, once there, permitting herself to cry. Which Julia Jentsch plays as convincing as the strength in front of the interrogators, both the quiet Mohr and the yelling Freisler. Just very occasionally, she sounds to my ears a bit actorly when delivering some of the more famous quotes from the White Rose leaflets, but that may be precisely because I recognise the quote.

What particularly struck me: you know how this is going to end, and yet by the time Sophie is seeing her parents for the last time, saying goodbye before her execution, I could not help myself - I was crying. (I don't cry easily in movies.) And I wasn't the only one in the cinema. It's just a short scene, with short dialogue, which you already know from school - her mother saying "Gell, Sophie, Jesus" and her replying "Ja, aber du auch" (" Sophie, Jesus, yes?" - "Yes, but you, too") - and yet it tore me up to hear it spoken out loud and sounding completely natural.

The analytical part in me, kicking in later, is able to reflect on why the story remains so fascinating to us - because of the appeal of the lone individual(s) versus the system structure, because it's a rare example of (a German) someone doing the right thing in this time and being prepared to die for it, because the fact that these students, all having gone through the state education, nonetheless were able to see through it, reject it, and accuse it for what it was ("The frightful bloodbath has opened the eyes of even the stupidest German - it is a slaughter which they arranged in the name of 'freedom and honor of the German nation' throughout Europe, and which they daily start anew", says the last leaflet which got Sophie and Hans caught) , because you know that their hopes for a revolution were in vain, that millions more would die - but I suspect the pure emotion at the end comes down to this: ever the course of two hours, you get presented with a young courageous woman. And she dies, aged 21. So many others did, that same day, in the war, in the camps - but it's the invidual fate which manages to defeat the numbing horror of the numbers by getting through one's emotional skin every time.