Calm Before the Storm
"Gradually one notices that the mosaic is beginning to take shape. Lines and patterns appear, and then one does not lose his orientation any more."
Hans and Sophie Scholl were having one of the best days of their lives. The calendar may have said February 17, 1943, but it was spring. Even Professor Huber’s lecture could not lure Hans inside.
Gisela Schertling joined the Scholl siblings at their apartment for lunch. They were just messing around, doing nothing of consequence. To Gisela’s relief, they did not even mention leaflets. They made plans for a nice supper – Seehaus, English Gardens, meet them back at the apartment at 7 pm sharp – and Gisela retired to her room for a couple of hours.
While she was gone, Hans and Sophie straightened up somewhat. They carried the duplicating machine and Remington typewriter to Eickemeyer’s studio and stored them carefully behind boxes in a corner of the basement, along with the backpacks used to transport them. No major spring cleaning, merely a little housekeeping.
Otl Aicher came by around 4:30 that afternoon. Inge Scholl had returned to Ulm without him, apparently not interested in visiting her younger siblings. This would be a good opportunity for him to continue his conversation with Hans and Sophie about their work, without Inge’s untrustworthy ears. Except it was not a good time for Hans and Sophie. Come back tomorrow morning at 11, Hans told him. We will talk more then.
Gisela showed up punctually for supper, and the threesome wended their way through Schwabing’s narrow streets and the dusky beauty of the English Gardens for a splendid repast. Could it get any better than this? How about lunch tomorrow, Sophie asked Gisela.
That woman would have supposed that she would see Sophie in Professor Huber’s Leibniz class the next morning. It was Thursday, after all, and ten o’clock on Thursday meant Huber and Leibniz. Instead, Sophie arranged to meet her at their apartment around noon. Gisela thought nothing of it.
How could she? This day might have been nice and relaxed, with not a treasonous word spoken or unspoken. But by now, Gisela said later, “I had a feeling of indifference to all that happened. I did not have the emotional strength to fight the things that were piling on top of me.” She could not expose Hans and Sophie, and she could not stay away from them. Life had to take its course, come what may.
Long before Gisela Schertling left the Scholls’ apartment around 10 pm, the Gestapo’s Special Commission was studying Professor Richard Harder’s profile of the author of the two leaflets that had appeared in Munich. Except for his assumption that one person had written both flyers, the philology professor came close to defining both Hans and Professor Huber’s personalities and motivations.
The writer (singular) was extremely intelligent, and contrary to the Gestapo’s original conjecture, was not a loner. He was German, politically savvy, close to Bavarian ways and customs. The latest leaflet demonstrated the extraordinary knowledge that only an “insider” of the system could have acquired.
Though there was but one author (Harder said), the leaflets had been written at different times and drew heavily on current events. He knew German history and literature very well, and most certainly was Lutheran. His religious literary construction, combined with his use of Luther’s translation of the Bible, was a dead giveaway.
“The author” was not any old revolutionary. He felt comfortable in an academic setting and had been deeply immersed in National Socialist thought. He was not perfect and had committed several logical errors, particularly in the leaflet Call to All Germans. Despite language that sounded pro-Jewish, “the author” was not the least bit philo-Semitic. He also had never been abroad, and while he may have known literature and history, he had a poor grasp of international politics.
The leaflets clearly targeted students, especially the second one. The person responsible for these words had his finger on the pulse of the student body. But, Harder concluded, “his intellectual products are in the end little more than literary exercises. His words may have the tone of an embittered loner, but it is certain that only a small, specific clique stands behind them.”
Harder did not believe the Gestapo had much to fear. “They are not the effluence of a politically powerful, active group. The language [in these leaflets] is too abstract for that. The words will not (and cannot) find resonance in larger circles of soldiers or workers.”
That may have been his opinion, but Robert Mohr and the team of agents working on the Special Commission were not taking any chances. Someone suddenly recalled those damnable Leaflets of the White Rose that had materialized the previous summer. Could they possibly be related? The order was given to send a copy of all four flyers to Professor Harder first thing the next morning.
As far as Hans and Sophie were concerned, everything was a Go for the next morning’s business. Hans was pleased that the leaflets they had mailed to themselves had been promptly deposited in their respective mailboxes. That meant that at the very least, a postal employee was not intercepting their secret mail.
Brother and sister therefore rested before going to bed on the 17th. Sophie put a recording of the Trout Quintet on the gramophone, penning a cheery note to her friend Lisa Remppis while exuberant music filled the room.
I have just been playing the Trout Quintet on the record player. Listening to the andantino makes me want to be a trout myself. You can’t help rejoicing and laughing, however moved or sad at heart you feel, when you see the springtime clouds in the sky and the budding branches sway, stirred by the wind, in the bright new sunlight.
I’m so much looking forward to spring again. In that piece of Schubert’s, you can absolutely feel and smell the breezes and scents and hear the birds and the whole of creation cry out for joy. And when the piano repeats the theme like cool, clear, sparkling water – oh, it’s sheer enchantment.
Willi Graf wrote a similarly joyful letter to his friend Marita Herfeldt that night. He was sending her his borrowed copy of Thornton Wilder’s Cabala – she had to promise to return it when she finished reading it! – and appreciated her digging up an issue of Carl Muth’s Highland magazine.
He told her how much his back-to-back weekends in the mountains had meant to him, how he had been refreshed both times. “[I] let the warm sunshine fall on my face. It was hard to return to the city, to participate in the hectic and the business of the metropolis. The peace and clarity out there do one so much good.”
“One can keep himself unblemished from all those things one encounters in the city,” Willi continued. “But such times are simply the ‘Sun-Days,’ and one must later draw strength from them.”
Marita had said something in her last letter that struck a chord regarding his current dilemma, if it could be called that. She observed that humans live in “two worlds,” a physical, tangible world, and the world of the intellect and spirit.
Yes, Willi replied, that’s it! It may take a long time – in fact, it may require one’s whole life – to recognize the substance of that intellectual and spiritual sphere. “What does it matter if it takes years,” he asked. “We continually move in its circle, even if the possibilities appear at times to be obstructed [from our view].”
It was more important, he reckoned, that one prepare a good foundation. Then when doubts arose or theories collapsed, there would be a decent place to begin again. Even if circumstances were not conducive to intellectual or spiritual pursuits, one must dedicate at least an hour a day to their contemplation. “I am trying [to do so] at least, even if the days ahead appear so terribly uncertain.”
“Gradually one notices that the mosaic is beginning to take shape,” Willi said. “Lines and patterns appear, and then one does not lose his orientation any more. The magnetic poles are fixed and firmed up, even if restlessness increases.”
He told her he still read Stifter, still chased his elusive goal of devouring everything that man had written. And – this was hard, but he was doing it – he read a book of dogmatics, chapter by chapter, every single night, “looking for coherence.” His sister Anneliese later identified this as Michael Schmaus’ book that Willi had mentioned to her.
“Is this the testimony of a fanatic rebel,” Anneliese asked post-war, “one arrested the following day for high treason and denounced as an antisocial parasite?”
The quiet evening those other antisocial parasites enjoyed a few blocks away was interrupted by a telephone call from Otl Aicher. It was late, he explained, but Inge had just called. Something about a book by Gerhard Ritter, Machtstaat und Utopie (Dictatorship and Utopia), that was it. Inge said it was sold out.
Hans Scholl did not think the message was very important. Come by the next day, he said, 11 or 11:30 (as had already been agreed). Assuming he told Sophie about the telephone call – and he probably did – she would not have assigned high priority to its meaning. Hans Hirzel was in trouble. What could they do to help him?
Certainly, if Jakob Bürkle’s post-war assertions were true and he had in fact warned Hans Scholl about a possible denunciation a few days earlier, the siblings would have been concerned. But not to the point of panic. And positively not to the point of aborting the next day’s mission.
Glorious music aside, Sophie’s final meditation that night had nothing to do with creation’s cry for joy. “I would rather have unbearable sorrow than senseless life,” Fritz Hartnagel remembered her words. “I would rather pray for burning thirst. I would rather pray for sorrow, sorrow, sorrow, than to know a void.”
The above is an excerpt from White Rose History, Volume II: Journey to Freedom (May 1, 1942 - October 12, 1943). Currently working on digital format. Online store price is pre-order only. Fully footnoted, since this is not like any White Rose History you will have read before.