Circles within circles: The beauty of collaborative work
Collaboration works best when credit is shared, when footnotes correctly track source of ideas or information, when communal knowhow is celebrated.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about found places – the houses and locations related to White Rose that I was able to finally, but finally!, see and photograph. The Harterts’ home on Kalvarienberg in Bad Tölz serves as prime example of a place I’d searched for since 1995, with no luck.
Turns out there is more to that story than Birgit Groβ of Tölz’s information center and Christoph Schnitzer and Martin Hake of the Tölzer Kurier.
While emailing back and forth with Martin, he had an aha! moment of his own. Seems that no one in Bad Tölz was aware that Hans Scholl was a frequent visitor to the homes of the Borchert and Hartert families in Tölz – until Martin stumbled across my White Rose History, Volume I. ‘That was you!’ – He wasn’t even looking for information about Hans Scholl. His research involved the Tölzer Hermann Scholl, who owned an observatory. Who knows if Hermann was related to the Ulmer Scholls?
No matter. His search for +Scholl +Tölz led him to my work. Which in turn formed a rabbit hole that Martin dove down, digging further until he uncovered the title transfer that identified which house the Harterts had owned. He also was able to get photographs and copies of letters from the Borcherts, whose house no longer stands.
It gets better.
Christoph Schnitzer and I had just about given up on ever finding the Drei Burschen Hütte in Lenggries that Willi Graf referenced in his diary the last week he was free. Both of us had independently pursued similar lines of inquiry: Alpenverein, skiers from the Lenggries area, old maps, you name it, we have tried it. It was likely a code name or nickname, one that would have been familiar to Willi Graf and his non-White Rose friends in Munich. But it is a dangling thread. Dangling threads bother me.
Martin has an idea: Willi Graf’s friend Walter Kastner had family in the Lenggries area. Martin is tracking them down, looking for property they owned. I think he’s on to something! The circles-within-circles has a bright golden thread: Dr. Wilhelm Kastner of Bad Tölz was close friends with Martin’s parents. Wilhelm Kastner moved to Tölz in 1955. No idea yet whether he is related to Willi Graf’s friend Walter.
Believe it or not, it gets better. I told Martin and Christoph about my search for Herta Probst’s residence in Bad Heilbrunn for three months after the war. Martin has some ideas along those lines too. In a follow-up email, he asked if I were aware that Christoph’s second book contained the war-time diary of a Pfarrer at St. Kilian’s in Bad Heilbrunn.
I didn’t even finish reading the email before I retrieved that book and read every word. Plus the bookend pages that addressed Bad Heilbrunn from 1933-1945. (I’m trying to figure out how or why this small town seems to be an acid test for the reliability of a person’s character, at least as related to White Rose. Erich Schmorell and Herta Probst loved Bad Heilbrunn. Wittenstein hated it.)
As with most histories from that era, Bad Heilbrunn’s story is complex. The town joined Bad Tölz (the county seat) as one of the first in Germany to declare itself Judenrein. The NSDAP used both towns – Kurorte or health resorts – as examples of what good German towns should do.
And yet, Pfarrer Josef Rupp of St. Kilian’s (1924-1936) was an outspoken opponent of the NSDAP, at the same time the spas in Bad Heilbrunn were prohibiting Jewish guests. He lived with constant threats to his life. In 1936, he was forced (by whom?) to resign. The diarist Rudolf Hauser took his place. He journaled from August 24, 1939 to July 31, 1945. Note to self: Order the 411-page document from the Stadtarchiv!
These circles within circles, weaving a tapestry both dark and bright, aren’t done yet. Birgit Müller, archivist in Bad Heilbrunn, has reported back that she has been looking for Herta Probst and has not found her yet in Heilbrunn’s records. But she is keeping her eyes open. Why do I think that Frau Müller is going to end up being a good resource for Christoph Schnitzer and Martin Hake as well? And vice versa? I have some ideas of my own, triggered by conversations with these people.
This past week, while corresponding with Dr. Martin Kalusche, I asked him if he knew where I could find a copy of Wittenstein’s PhD in psychiatry. Wittenstein has long claimed that he was going to get his PhD with Professor Kurt Huber, but he’s always been vague about that.
Dr. Armin Ziegler asked Wittenstein point blank about the topic of that alleged PhD that was to have been with Huber but that was completed with someone else. Wittenstein told Ziegler that his PhD topic was along the lines of abnormal sex among prepubescent boys. Again, when pressed for more information, he remained vague.
Dr. Kalusche found Wittenstein’s PhD! The dissertation was only sixteen pages long. Wittenstein did no original research. He used four (4!) case files generated by others. Topic had nothing to do with prepubescent boys, much less with abnormal sex (which wouldn’t have been a Huber topic anyway). Instead, it was entitled Psychosen bei Multipler Sklerose [Psychoses in Multiple Sclerosis].
These are but two examples of the astounding value of collaborative work on a subject as expansive as White Rose resistance.
Brainstorming with Armin Ziegler provides a third example. It’s no accident that so many footnotes in both volumes of our White Rose histories reference emails or conversations with him, or obscure sources he had dug up, crediting him for those obscure sources.
On the flip side, Dr. Ziegler loved the clarity my database brought to the White Rose timeline. I would talk out my logic for determining specific dates. When he would say, “That makes sense!,” I knew it was right. If he had doubts, I double-checked.
None of us can know everything. Especially something as overwhelmingly vast as the Shoah, or even one small corner of it like White Rose. We have this big picture, bird’s-eye view. And from that, we assume we know things we do not know. Details matter.
Coming back to Christoph Schnitzer’s second book, Die NS-Zeit im Altlandkreis Bad Tölz und ihre Folgen… I haven’t done my deep dive into this book yet – deep dive will mean entering relevant information into The Database. But Christoph, who is a journalist and not a historian, does what too few historians do:
Provides context.
Tells the good and the bad, without regard for personal feelings.
Names names.
It’s that second part – telling the good and the bad, without regard for personal feelings – that is missing from so much of the “historical record” related to the Shoah, specifically to German resistance.
Circling back (see what I did there?) –
I hate that the fear of plagiarism has destroyed the beauty of collaborative work. As you know from what I have written, I am more cautious now than I was in 2012, when I had no idea people were stealing my work.
Our archives project WILL be collaborative. We WILL actively invite scholars and students to join us at table. We WILL encourage groups of various religious, political, and ethnic backgrounds to contribute their perspectives, their unique viewpoints.
But we’re also going to require commitment to ethical scholarship. Collaboration works best when credit is shared, when footnotes correctly track source of ideas or information, when communal knowhow is celebrated.
Because oh! How beautiful it is when we have those aha! moments, triggered by an “I don’t know!” from someone else.
How beautiful it is when the tapestry is whole.
© 2023 Denise Elaine Heap. Please contact us for permission to quote.
I’m so excited that you were able to find Wittenstein’s dissertation - all 16 pages of it! 😆
Also, that tapestry is stunning.