A circle of friendship
White Rose was a circle of friends who knew injustice when they saw it, and knew they had to do something about it. And they chose to do something about it with friends they held near and dear.
When I was in junior high school, I could not understand why our teachers told us the friends we’d make over the next few years would make all the difference in the world to us. On the one hand, it was difficult to conceive of a world past high school, a world when we would be older than 21, much less over 30 (gasp!). So of course these friends were important.
On the other hand, if we allowed ourselves to look beyond high school or college, we – or at least I – assumed that our adult friendships would be far more important than the group of annoying, dearly beloved, if-she-says-that-one-more-time, can-you-believe-he-did that?!, precious schoolfriends. After all, our adult friends would share our career interests and would move in circles that would be beneficial to our financial future. Even before social media, we knew that connections mattered.
Fifty years later, it’s those old – scratch that, longtime – friends who keep us sane, whose values tend to align most closely to our own. Those “beneficial” friendships tend to be short-term, built on foundation of “what can I do for you today?” Yes, occasionally a business friendship transforms into a genuine friendship. Sometimes a new neighbor strikes that chord that keeps them in our lives.
When we hit crises (and we all do), when we want to celebrate major life events, when we wish to sit quietly, if we need to be around people who won’t judge us, if we want to stir up “good trouble” [TM John Lewis], or should an occasion simply require the presence of people who know what a Farrell’s Zoo is, and who successfully ate one, you know where to turn. Bonus points if they also know who played a Farrell’s employee on Bob Newhart.
In our nomadic society, we often lose touch with this circle, at least face-to-face. Facebook helps – although even the most avid Metageek would never claim that it’s the same.
Once we sit at table with one of these friends, the years melt away. Conversations are picked up where they left off. No matter what life has thrown at either or any of us sitting at that table. Because life will and does throw everything at us that is possibly imaginable, and some things so unimaginable we are broken or elated. No matter. The person or persons sitting at table knows and loves us anyhow. The circle of friends cultivated when we were 13, 18, 20, that circle has the ability to forgive, to see the best in us, to cheer us on in the toughest of times.
In many ways, we see ourselves in these friends. They are the mirror that matters most.
Lilo Fürst-Ramdohr best captured this aspect of the group of friends we call White Rose. She grasped what others failed to see, namely that every one of these students needed the others. Lilo correctly noted that they all came from dysfunctional families (yes, Scholls as well), families that did not understand their disavowal of National Socialist policies and ideology. Families that did not understand them.
Willi Graf found resonance with like-minded friends of the Bach Chorale. Hubert Furtwängler, Regine Renner, Otmar Hammerstein, Wolf Jaeger, Josef Gieles, Hans Leygraf. He could be himself around them, express his frustration about current events, confident they would not turn him in because they felt the same way. Yet more often than not, their time together consisted of glorious music, music that swelled long past the finale.
After a rehearsal on November 30, 1942, Willi walked with these friends through the English Gardens. Beautiful evening, beautiful friends. Being together, that made the night special. Regine stayed once the others left. She allowed Willi to unburden himself about the “coming things, the things that one will encounter first.” He told his diary that it was odd, how they could talk factually about that.
December 6, Hans Scholl and Alexander Schmorell joined Willi and his Bach Chorale friends for a performance of Messiah. Hans covered the performance in a single line when he wrote Otl Aicher later. “This morning, we heard Händel’s Messiah.”
For Willi, one sentence would not suffice. A Christian credo, the spirit of Advent, indescribable. And far, far more.
For Willi, the performance itself would not suffice. It was also lunch with those dear choir friends, that mattered. (I would like to have been a fly on the wall as those musically gifted friends discussed Messiah!) When someone suggested they also attend Oscar Besemfelder’s concert that afternoon, Willi agreed, skeptical that anything could top Messiah. Yet he found the two hours of “old, old songs” with lute accompaniment relaxing.
The next evening – December 7 - after Schütz motets and Christmas carols, Hubert invited Willi, Regine, and Otmar to his room for a good cherry brandy. Five days later, Regine threw a party in her room to celebrate Josef’s passing his medical boards. The choir buddies sang madrigals and Christmas carols, drank wine, and played around till late at night. Warmed by the wine, they “stopped everywhere to sing canons” on the way home. Christmas.
On the 16th, Willi & Co attended a concert where Leygraf’s – yes, his friend’s - Concertino for Piano and Orchestra was performed. Of course Willi (and certainly everyone else in Bach Chorale) liked the Leygraf piece the best! Better than Bruckner and Richard Strauss.
When the rehearsal for the Bach Chorale Christmas concert was a roaring failure, Willi & Co headed for a local pub to drown their sorrows. It had not helped that the rehearsal had been held at the home of the Mertens, site of uncomfortable political discussions that summer. The Bach Chorale friends talked until late at the Glückstüberl, likely not about politics (public place). More likely commiserating over the miserable rehearsal.
January 18, after “the work” with the leaflets, after an unsatisfactory discussion with Sophie Scholl regarding the morality of assassinating Hitler1, Willi once again went to a Bach Chorale rehearsal. For one brief moment, Willi Graf could forget the leaflets, could forget tough and impossible moral-theological questions. For one brief moment, only the music mattered.
As one who searched for meaning in a meaningless world, Willi was moved by Konrad Lechner’s attempts to clarify the pieces they practiced. “Lechner said, or at least he tried to express, what this singing means,” Willi wrote in his diary. “The manner in which he accomplishes this is incredible.”
In 1984, Regine Renner expounded on Willi’s pithy sentences. She told Anneliese Knoop-Graf that music represented “life’s fulfillment and creed” to their esteemed director. Regine said he tried to share his thoughts with the choir in “cryptic monologues.” Thirteen years later when Lechner’s widow was interviewed on the occasion of her ninetieth birthday, she recalled that Konrad Lechner was as comfortable and happy playing saxophone in a jazz ensemble as he was with his cello in a classical chamber music quartet.
That had been before the war, when the government had not yet decreed that jazz was decadent and banned its performance. The “cryptic monologues” that Regine and Willi and the rest of their group benefited from had roots in Lechner’s personal conflict with the Reich.
That night, that January 18 – one month before the fateful arrests – whatever had been planned post-rehearsal was forgotten as air raid sirens screamed. Adalbert Grundel – new to the Chorale but long a friend – invited them to dash into his home for cover. It proved to be a false alarm, but no one hurried to leave. Bertl broke out a bottle of liqueur while they talked late into the night. Bertl, Regine, Hubert, Otmar, and Willi… When “interesting conversations” sprouted among these friends, it was time well spent.
February 1, Willi went to another rehearsal of the Bach Chorale, an occasion that never failed to lift his spirits. Rehearsal started late (no explanation for the delay), which meant that they were dismissed even later. No problem, because Willi sat up drinking a cup of coffee with these musical friends whose conversation cheered his soul. Even if Stalingrad had to have been the primary topic of discussion.
I chose Willi Graf as specific example for this post because his sister Anneliese has been more forthcoming with his documents. We know whose friendships he treasured. We can read his own words as he described the impact of Bach Chorale friends and leadership on his life.
Christoph Probst and Alexander Schmorell, Lilo and Alex, Alex and Nikolay Daniel Nikolaeff-Hamazaspian, Christl and Willi, Traute and Alex, Hubert and Hans Scholl, Traute and Josef Furtmeier, Traute and Katharina Schüddekopf, Käthe and Kurt Huber, Sophie Scholl and Wilhelm Geyer, Geyer and Traute plus Käthe, Willi and Alex, Susanne Hirzel and Sophie, Hans Hirzel and Hans Scholl, Hans Hirzel and Sophie, Otl Aicher and Sophie and Hans, Gerhard Feuerle and Geyer, Gerhard and not-Sophie, Manfred Eickemeyer and Josef Furtmeier, Geyer and Eickemeyer, Willi and Werner Scholl, Otl and Werner…
This great group of friends consisted of swirling circles within circles, pushing, pulling, bending, not breaking. Think about your own group of lifetime friends. You share calculus in common with this set, choir with another, German (or languages) with another, theater, travel, photography – if you have 20-30 people in your circle of close friends, rarely will all 20-30 share 100% of their interests across the board. You’ll celebrate your favorite German teacher’s birthday with ten or so, go to Farrell’s after tutoring for Math club with five, and attend a Beethoven (or Mac Davis) concert with fifteen. Swirling circles within circles.
We would do well to see the circle of White Rose friends the same way. Beginning with the importance – the overwhelming importance – of these friendships to each and every person.
Had Willi Graf not had the small circle (Hans, Sophie, Alex, Christl, Traute, Käthe, Lilo, and likely Wilhelm Geyer) of friends working on leaflets in all the ways they worked, had he not had his Bach Chorale friends, had he not had his troublesome but valued old Gray Order friends, he would have been unable to survive the nightmares he earned on the Russian front. I hate to think how his biography would have ended without these friendships.
Had Alexander Schmorell not had his inimitable and happy friendship with Christl, had he not fallen in with Hans Scholl, had he never sat next to Lilo in art class, had he missed out on Willi’s persistent friendship, had he not had Nikolay and his other Eastern European friends to give him outlet for his Russian-ness, he would have lost the joie de vivre that made him special.
Had Sophie Scholl not had the same small circle of friends working on leaflets, had she not had Otl to confide her deep dark secrets to, had she not had Wilhelm Geyer to mentor her re art and life, had she not had her sister Elisabeth who loved her no matter what, had she not had her brother Werner to point the way in thoughts of resistance, she likely would have followed through on her suicidal ideations. It’s a pity she avoided close friendships with the other women of the White Rose – Traute, Käthe, Regine, Tilly Hahn, Lilo. Her sister Elisabeth appears to have been the only healthy female relationship in her life.
I could go on, but I think you get the picture.
I frankly hate it – HATE it – when people talk about the White Rose society or the White Rose resistance movement. Doing so overlooks the very foundation on which their resistance work was built. They were not a society, there were no members, no one “joined” their work. They were not a movement – they couldn’t agree on either religion or politics.
They were a circle of friends who knew injustice when they saw it, and knew they had to do something about it. And they chose to do something about it with friends they held near and dear.
Few of us are capable of creating a society, or starting a movement. Every single one of us is not only capable, but obligated to join those who share our values (friends) to right the injustices before our very eyes. Not necessarily the injustices on the other side of the ocean. The injustices we can see. What if we all did so?
As you gather, have gathered, or will gather over the holidays celebrating Light and Peace, as you close ranks with friends and family who mean the world to you, do two things:
First, cause a little good trouble. Do something with them that will make life better for someone else. Why waste a good gathering of friends and family?
Second, take a moment to reflect on the difference that crazy group of people makes in your life. Because yeah, odds are they are little bit crazy, or they wouldn’t be your friends. But they’re also the same people who would break out a bottle of liqueur as air raid sirens blast, or who would help you rescue your Limburger cheese from the Danube, or who would wear Bavarian suspenders to a wedding just because Christl said please, or who would eat the whoooole Farrell’s Zoo just because, or who would brave Munich traffic just to hear you speak even though they really really hate Munich traffic.
These are your people, your tribe. Hold them fast, let them know you cannot live without them.
Together with your tribe, you may just change the world.
© 2023 Denise Elaine Heap. Please contact us for permission to quote.
For deeper discussion of this topic with detailed footnotes and attribution, see the White Rose histories, © 2002, 2003, 2005, 2007.
The moral and theological implications of assassinating Hitler had often been a topic of conversation. More on this in a 2024 post for paid subscribers.
Clearly, this question ate at Willi and kept him from feeling fully at ease with their overall plan.
I’m not in the picture (since I’m a tad older), but I hope I’m part of the tribe.