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There and back again?
This year, Sophie Scholl would have celebrated her hundreth birthday, which meant various articles, biographies, and an instagramm account. (Echoing the very successful WhatsApp-Account project for Kurt Eisner in 2018/2019. Both these social media projects are/were run by our public broadcast companies.) I hadn't read the latest biographies, but I finally had the chance to read Barbara Beuys' biography of Sophie, which was published in 2010 and was the first to really tackle the development of the Scholls from enthusiastic Hitler-supporting teens to anti-Nazi resistance fighters and show that it took longer and was more complicated than, inevitably, legend had allowed, and Robert Zoske's biography of Hans Scholl from 2018, which was the first to extensively discuss Hans' bisexuality and the effect his being charged with "immoral behavior" while in the Hitler Youth had on him. (This had not been mentioned in sister Inge's account "Die Weiße Rose" which for years had been the most read one about her siblings. Given it wasn't until the 1970s that the infamous Nazi era paragraph 175, criminalizing m/m sex, was finally reformed, this is not surprising.)
To me, the fact that both Scholl siblings - all Scholl siblings, for that matter, for Hans and Sophie had more sisters and brothers - had started out as true believers in Nazism had never been a minus, so to speak, but a plus, because to me it proved that you can change in the most radical way for the better, even after being immersed in complete totalitarian brainwashing in your most vulnerable years. Because of the overall development in the last fifteen years or so, and especially in the last five, this aspect of their story has become even more important to me. I mean, I've seen people getting radicalized for the worse whom I had really believed I knew, and of whom I'd have thought it impossible. And there's the fact that by now millions of people live in some surreal alternate reality, believing the most incredible lies. So reading about both the indoctrination and participation and the self-deprogramming of the Scholls was in more resonating for me these past weeks than it would have been if I'd read the books a decade ago, say.
Now, one big advantage they had were their parents. Their mother, Lina, had been a deaconess before her marriage, and her staunch Protestant faith was something that she transferred to her children. Lina was also ten yeas older than her husband, Robert, who religion-wise saw himself more as a "seeker"; they had met when he was a medic in WWI. Robert, who had various offices, including that of mayor, in the Weimar Republic, was, however, staunchly anti-Nazi from the get go. How do we know this wasn't a post facto post war claim? Because not only did he get arrested for it at one point years before his children did, but there's the diary of his oldest daughter Inge, which only became accessible to the public in the last few decades. Inge and Hans were 15 and 14 respectively when Hitler came to power in 1933, and teenage rebellion certainly was one (of several) reasons why they fell for the Nazis. Inge describes Hans putting up a portrait of Hitler in the family living room and Robert putting it down again, every day, until Robert finally gave in and didn't bother anymore. Her own contribution to this us against Dad battle was playing NS-songs on piano while this was going on. She also describes various arguments with her parents. The remarkable thing, compared with how this kind of split was handled in a great many other families in not just this dictatorship, is that all through the years when the kids were enthusiastic Hitler Youths, it never seems to have occurred to them to denounce their parents. Nor did their father ultimately try to force them to listen to him. It must have been incredibly hard (watching your children spout this repellent ideology), but he must have realised that if he tried force, it would only drive them them further into the abyss, whereas he and his wife were putting all on trusting their children to eventually realise the truth themselves.
Which they did, but not overnight, and later than Inge, looking back, described it. There also wasn't just one particular moment, a sharp before and after where you can draw the liines, but a gradual development. Sophie's BDM (the female branch of the Hitler Youth) duties were over when she turned eighteen and she was already writing sceptical letters to her beloved, searching for answers and reading forbidden books, but she still went to BDM meetings despite not being a member anymore, until the start if 1941 - one and a half years before her execution. Partly because her friends were there, and partly, I guess, because it is really hard to completely reject something you've given several years of your life to. Inge, Hans and Sophie had all risen through the ranks and spent practically every free minute there. (The youngest siblings, Elisabeth and Werner, were also members but only luke warm ones; it helped, of course, that the older ones had already started to get disenchanted even before Dad got briefly arrested for saying the wrong thing, which definitely was a factor for all siblings.) The religious background helped with the gradual disenchantment, though as Beuys points out: it could have gone the other way, too. For every Dietrich Bonhoeffer, you had ten "German Christians", after all. It's also interesting that the very Protestant Scholls via a Catholic friend, Otl Aicher (who would later marry Inge), discovered French Catholic writers like Paul Claudel or George Bernanos as part of their looking-for-other-answers self-deprogramming phase. Once the war started, the reality of what was happening - and Hans as Sophie's boyfriend Fritz Hartnagel as well as eventually youngest brother Werner were all intermittently serving on the Eastern Front, which meant complete exposure to genocidal warfare and treatment of civilians - was enough to push them from horror to needing to do something about it, but the inner change had happened before that point. Zoske argues that for Hans, nearly ending up in prison (or worse) was certainly a massive wake up call and self identity questioning, but it still needn't have meant that he'd develop into an anti-Nazi activist; even years after Ernst Röhm's death, there were still gay men in the party (one of the men who came up in the investigation against Hans being a case in point), and because Hans had been a good Hitler Youth so far, aside from unauthorizedly hitchhiking with his group to Scandinavia and back, the authorities were prepared to let him go with a reprimand, and a "don't do it again" instead of imprisoning him. But: his room had been searched as part of the investigation into his behavior, and two of the books found there were in fact on the index, Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front" (defeatism!) and Sholem Asch (Jewish writers were self evidently forbidden). So at least subconsciously, he must have started to question, and that in combination with the trial let to an increasing turning away from all things Nazi.
With Sophie, there isn't, as mentioned, any such single event, but it's remarkable that by the time the war starts, she's already at a point (documented both in the intermittent diary she kept) where she's clear on the fact that a) war is evil, b) one actually has to hope for a German defeat, because c) it would mean an end to "this terrible subjugation" - "dieses entsetzliche Joch" - when just a year earlier (1938, she'd still been convinced, as documented in a letter to a friend, that "it's important to serve" (the letter was about encouraging her friend not to skip any BDM). Beuys is a good biographer, not pretending to have the answers, and just presents what's there and what isn't. (Zoske is more convinced he has the answers, which does give you the sense that he's at times carried away - for example, he goes from "Hans Scholl could have heard Thomas Mann's speeches on the BBC" (since illegal radio listening was a thing for the White Rose) as a possibility to, in the later part of the book, treating this as a fact, and stating Thomas Mann's speeches as the single most important influence on the White Rose pamphlets when there's not a single quote from the speeches in any of them, nor actual proof Hans Scholll and Alexander Schmorrell (who wrote the first four leaflets) or Professor Huber (who co wrote the fifth and sixth) or Christoph Probst (who drafted the last, unpublished one, the manuscript of which was found with Hans) had heard any of them. That still doesn't make it impossible - it's not what you tell your Gestapo interrogator, even after admitting to the pamphlet writing per se - , and it's certainly true both Hans and Sophie had read several of Thomas Mann's novels. But I just don't like it when biographers turn a speculation into a fact just because it fits a theory of theirs. The conditionalis is your friend, biographers!
Anyway. To get back to the beginning, I don't expect the majority of people today convinced that wearing masks is proof of dictatorship or that Muslim immigrants are the root of all evil or that a right extremist strongman is just what every country needs to turn into heroic pacifist antifascists. Which is why I find it comforting not solely Hans and Sophie deprogrammed themselves, but so did siblings Inge and Elisabeth, neither of whom turned into a resistence fighter, but both of which reaiised before their siblings were executed that the state they were living in was a monstrosity and always had been, including back when they were themselves convinced of its goodness. That they started to see through all the lies. That the Scholl family kept talking to each other even in the times when parents and children were convinced of very different answers and eventually found back to each other. And this is something I do hope for at least some of the people, friends and family members who drifted into radicalisation today.
To me, the fact that both Scholl siblings - all Scholl siblings, for that matter, for Hans and Sophie had more sisters and brothers - had started out as true believers in Nazism had never been a minus, so to speak, but a plus, because to me it proved that you can change in the most radical way for the better, even after being immersed in complete totalitarian brainwashing in your most vulnerable years. Because of the overall development in the last fifteen years or so, and especially in the last five, this aspect of their story has become even more important to me. I mean, I've seen people getting radicalized for the worse whom I had really believed I knew, and of whom I'd have thought it impossible. And there's the fact that by now millions of people live in some surreal alternate reality, believing the most incredible lies. So reading about both the indoctrination and participation and the self-deprogramming of the Scholls was in more resonating for me these past weeks than it would have been if I'd read the books a decade ago, say.
Now, one big advantage they had were their parents. Their mother, Lina, had been a deaconess before her marriage, and her staunch Protestant faith was something that she transferred to her children. Lina was also ten yeas older than her husband, Robert, who religion-wise saw himself more as a "seeker"; they had met when he was a medic in WWI. Robert, who had various offices, including that of mayor, in the Weimar Republic, was, however, staunchly anti-Nazi from the get go. How do we know this wasn't a post facto post war claim? Because not only did he get arrested for it at one point years before his children did, but there's the diary of his oldest daughter Inge, which only became accessible to the public in the last few decades. Inge and Hans were 15 and 14 respectively when Hitler came to power in 1933, and teenage rebellion certainly was one (of several) reasons why they fell for the Nazis. Inge describes Hans putting up a portrait of Hitler in the family living room and Robert putting it down again, every day, until Robert finally gave in and didn't bother anymore. Her own contribution to this us against Dad battle was playing NS-songs on piano while this was going on. She also describes various arguments with her parents. The remarkable thing, compared with how this kind of split was handled in a great many other families in not just this dictatorship, is that all through the years when the kids were enthusiastic Hitler Youths, it never seems to have occurred to them to denounce their parents. Nor did their father ultimately try to force them to listen to him. It must have been incredibly hard (watching your children spout this repellent ideology), but he must have realised that if he tried force, it would only drive them them further into the abyss, whereas he and his wife were putting all on trusting their children to eventually realise the truth themselves.
Which they did, but not overnight, and later than Inge, looking back, described it. There also wasn't just one particular moment, a sharp before and after where you can draw the liines, but a gradual development. Sophie's BDM (the female branch of the Hitler Youth) duties were over when she turned eighteen and she was already writing sceptical letters to her beloved, searching for answers and reading forbidden books, but she still went to BDM meetings despite not being a member anymore, until the start if 1941 - one and a half years before her execution. Partly because her friends were there, and partly, I guess, because it is really hard to completely reject something you've given several years of your life to. Inge, Hans and Sophie had all risen through the ranks and spent practically every free minute there. (The youngest siblings, Elisabeth and Werner, were also members but only luke warm ones; it helped, of course, that the older ones had already started to get disenchanted even before Dad got briefly arrested for saying the wrong thing, which definitely was a factor for all siblings.) The religious background helped with the gradual disenchantment, though as Beuys points out: it could have gone the other way, too. For every Dietrich Bonhoeffer, you had ten "German Christians", after all. It's also interesting that the very Protestant Scholls via a Catholic friend, Otl Aicher (who would later marry Inge), discovered French Catholic writers like Paul Claudel or George Bernanos as part of their looking-for-other-answers self-deprogramming phase. Once the war started, the reality of what was happening - and Hans as Sophie's boyfriend Fritz Hartnagel as well as eventually youngest brother Werner were all intermittently serving on the Eastern Front, which meant complete exposure to genocidal warfare and treatment of civilians - was enough to push them from horror to needing to do something about it, but the inner change had happened before that point. Zoske argues that for Hans, nearly ending up in prison (or worse) was certainly a massive wake up call and self identity questioning, but it still needn't have meant that he'd develop into an anti-Nazi activist; even years after Ernst Röhm's death, there were still gay men in the party (one of the men who came up in the investigation against Hans being a case in point), and because Hans had been a good Hitler Youth so far, aside from unauthorizedly hitchhiking with his group to Scandinavia and back, the authorities were prepared to let him go with a reprimand, and a "don't do it again" instead of imprisoning him. But: his room had been searched as part of the investigation into his behavior, and two of the books found there were in fact on the index, Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front" (defeatism!) and Sholem Asch (Jewish writers were self evidently forbidden). So at least subconsciously, he must have started to question, and that in combination with the trial let to an increasing turning away from all things Nazi.
With Sophie, there isn't, as mentioned, any such single event, but it's remarkable that by the time the war starts, she's already at a point (documented both in the intermittent diary she kept) where she's clear on the fact that a) war is evil, b) one actually has to hope for a German defeat, because c) it would mean an end to "this terrible subjugation" - "dieses entsetzliche Joch" - when just a year earlier (1938, she'd still been convinced, as documented in a letter to a friend, that "it's important to serve" (the letter was about encouraging her friend not to skip any BDM). Beuys is a good biographer, not pretending to have the answers, and just presents what's there and what isn't. (Zoske is more convinced he has the answers, which does give you the sense that he's at times carried away - for example, he goes from "Hans Scholl could have heard Thomas Mann's speeches on the BBC" (since illegal radio listening was a thing for the White Rose) as a possibility to, in the later part of the book, treating this as a fact, and stating Thomas Mann's speeches as the single most important influence on the White Rose pamphlets when there's not a single quote from the speeches in any of them, nor actual proof Hans Scholll and Alexander Schmorrell (who wrote the first four leaflets) or Professor Huber (who co wrote the fifth and sixth) or Christoph Probst (who drafted the last, unpublished one, the manuscript of which was found with Hans) had heard any of them. That still doesn't make it impossible - it's not what you tell your Gestapo interrogator, even after admitting to the pamphlet writing per se - , and it's certainly true both Hans and Sophie had read several of Thomas Mann's novels. But I just don't like it when biographers turn a speculation into a fact just because it fits a theory of theirs. The conditionalis is your friend, biographers!
Anyway. To get back to the beginning, I don't expect the majority of people today convinced that wearing masks is proof of dictatorship or that Muslim immigrants are the root of all evil or that a right extremist strongman is just what every country needs to turn into heroic pacifist antifascists. Which is why I find it comforting not solely Hans and Sophie deprogrammed themselves, but so did siblings Inge and Elisabeth, neither of whom turned into a resistence fighter, but both of which reaiised before their siblings were executed that the state they were living in was a monstrosity and always had been, including back when they were themselves convinced of its goodness. That they started to see through all the lies. That the Scholl family kept talking to each other even in the times when parents and children were convinced of very different answers and eventually found back to each other. And this is something I do hope for at least some of the people, friends and family members who drifted into radicalisation today.