September 1 - September 5, 1942.
Summary:
Magdalena Scholl demands that the jail in Ulm relax the conditions attached to her husband’s sentence and permit him to receive multiple letters from their sons on the Russian front — even if it is past the usual deadline. Her request is granted.
Sophie visits her father in jail and says he looks so “young” in his prison uniform.
She also writes Lisa Remppis a letter, talking about her father, a vacation she is planning with Elisabeth, Lisa’s boyfriend Gust, Russian forced laborers - and Schurik. She sees the same characteristics in Alex as she does in the Russians who work in the munitions factory, especially “faith in others combined with an infinite readiness to help them.”
Sophie takes her neighbor’s little son Dieter Rennicke with her when she picks pears in the Aichers’ yard. She recalls fun times she had there with Otl, as he “unsoccessfully” pelted her with stones while they harvested fruit. Those memories unleash an emotional dam and she is finally able to write Otl a long letter.
She focuses on the ongoing Goethe debate, where she and Otl oppose the pro-Goethe opinions expressed by Carl Muth, Hans, and presumably Inge. Despite Hans’ anti-Goethe words in his diary, when he is around Dr. Muth, he supports Goethe’s “anti-romanticism.”
Sophie also continues a discussion she and Otl have had through the years regarding the meaning of music. Where Beethoven’s music may have more meaning, it is like a plow that stirs one up and leaves a person like a furrowed field. In contrast, Bach (she says) is like seed cord, containing an element of crystalline clarity and indestructible order.
You can play Beethoven when you’re in a gloomy, less cheerful mood, but if you try to play Bach in that state, it doesn’t work, because every passage is absolutely transparent and clear and cannot be glossed over, and you have to take hold of yourself like crazy if it’s going to work after all. But the reward when you are done is that you get up from the piano feeling exhilarated.
In an indirect - but clear - jab at her brother Hans, Sophie refrains from giving Otl a definitive response regarding her musicological arguments. She says she simply does not know enough, there are too many angles to consider, and she might regret talking about her current views too widely. Waiting to express an opinion until she had all the facts? Not at all like her brother!
Otl and Sophie essentially find themselves opposed to Dr. Muth, Hans, and Inge, because they believe one does not have to adopt Kierkegaard’s (and hence Theodor Haecker’s) “either-or” methodology when critiquing a writer, philosopher, or theologian. Otl and Sophie reason that there is plenty of room for paradox, that one can just as easily adopt a “both-and” stance.
Why this matters:
Quoting directly from White Rose History, Volume II: “Perhaps it is this aspect of Sophie’s character that so endears her to White Rose readers more than half a century later. Her openness – that willingness to accept ‘both-and’ – caused her to be extraordinarily sensitive to a world colored by black, white, red*… and gray. We find it easier to identify with her because, like us, she often said, ‘I don’t know.’ She left the posturing and speechifying and big words to her brother.
“But when Sophie examined things from every side and determined that one was more right, more just than the other, nothing could move her from her conviction. Maybe that makes her involvement with resistance all the more compelling.”
*Black-white-red: Colors of the Nazi flag.
Notes and references
Inge’s rationale for Sophie’s statement — that their father looked so young in his prison clothes — made no sense. She said “they” had decided it was because Robert Scholl had always been loyal to his ideals about what was good, and because he had left them behind in his youth “like a hobby horse.”
In Sophie’s September 2 letter to Lisa Remppis, she said she was not worried about her father, though she was grieved that he was in prison, but it was for his own good. Additionally, Sophie said she had not forgotten a word they said (the people who brought her father to his current situation). Revenge seemed to have been on Sophie’s mind a great deal those days.
It is a genuine pity that Inge Scholl chose to censor the letter from Sophie Scholl to Otl Aicher.
Aicher, Otl. innenseiten des kriegs. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag GmbH, 1985.
Aicher-Scholl, Inge. Sippenhaft: Nachrichten und Botschaften der Familie in der Gestapo-Haft nach der Hinrichtung von Hans und Sophie Scholl. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, 1993.
Jens, Inge (Ed.). At the Heart of the White Rose: Letters and Diaries of Hans and Sophie Scholl. Translation by J. Maxwell Brownjohn. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1987.
SAN, KV-Prozesse, Fall 3. 3282. Letter from Lina Scholl to prison officials dated 9/1/42. Publication in 2025/2026.
Podcast © 2024 Denise Elaine Heap. White Rose History, Volume II, Chapter 15, © 2002 Denise Elaine Heap and Exclamation! Publishers. Please contact us for permission to quote.
This podcast is a project of WHY THIS MATTERS, a newsletter of Center for White Rose Studies, that explores the reasons that voices silenced more than eighty years ago still speak to us today.
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Chapter 15, part 2: September Morn