Freedom versus fascism – a revolutionary lesson
Too often in our fight for liberty and justice, we define political rivals as "socialists-communists" or "fascists." Labels muddy the real issues. Let's look to White Rose for their thoughts.
Susanne Hirzel incorporated a saying by the Führer into the essay required to pass her Abitur. “A powerful revolution has stormed across Germany.” In February 1940, those words all but guaranteed a “1,” the equivalent of an American A.
Of course, the revolution referenced was Hitler’s own “movement,” started in Munich, spread across German-speaking Europe, soon across the world. So the propaganda went.
Falk Harnack treated Lilo Ramdohr to another sort of revolution a few months later. He invited Lilo to visit him in Berlin, where he introduced her to Arvid and Mildred Harnack. They mentioned no specifics about their resistance work. Lilo later recalled that they spoke of their great love for Germany, for all of mankind. She would say she knew she had been in the presence of greatness, that that meeting in spring 1940 revolutionized her way of thinking.
Eighteen months later, in December 1941, Lilo spent New Year’s Eve with Falk and his family. While Arvid and Mildred were still mum about their activities, Lilo left that place understanding that they were “revolutionaries for peace,” that their idealistic view that the USA and the USSR could have lasting peace was not quixotic, but real.
Although Werner Scholl had been contemplating revolution and active resistance to the Nazi regime since at least September 1939, it would be February or March 1942 before Sophie Scholl would fully grasp her younger brother’s viewpoint. While she fulfilled her six-month war auxiliary service requirement in Blumberg, Otl Aicher visited her. He was stationed not far away, across the border in France. Fritz Hartnagel visited Sophie as well. Fritz’s treks from Weimar to Freiburg (or other vacation spots) were disastrous for him, as Sophie continually rejected his friendship.
Otl? That was another matter. In his 1985 memoirs, Otl vividly recalled one such meeting.
He and Sophie had only twelve hours to catch up, sunset Saturday evening to sunup Sunday. First they found a Gasthaus with a corner table where they had privacy and could talk. Otl said they must have looked like a newly married couple on a honeymoon, the way the innkeeper’s wife coddled them.
Once they’d worn out their welcome, they rented a room. Snuggled under the covers, they talked the entire night through. Time was too precious to waste it agreeing. They consciously chose issues they needed to flesh out – God, the war, revolution, voting rights, God, the soul, “Self,” philosophy, religion, and back again to God. They talked about Hans, and both of them spoke of the need to heal wounds with their parents. Otl did not explain Sophie’s parental situation, merely saying that he felt the need to make amends with his. They read poems to one another and made notes about the discussion.
In September 1941, the last time they’d been able to talk privately, Sophie had confessed her suicidal ideations to Otl. While Otl never revealed what drove Sophie to have those thoughts, he had spent the intervening months steering her away from the most egregious of Augustine’s works.
Slowly Sophie had begun to understand that Augustine’s insistence on humans’ worm-like subjugation to a harsh deity was not right. Otl noted that in 1942, Sophie told him she had figured out for herself another problem with Augustine’s theology. Augustine wrote of a dialog with God, but Augustine’s version of God never permitted the deity to respond to human prayer. Flaw in that logic, she happily announced.
Sophie would never fully escape Augustine’s demeaning dogmatics. But understanding this critical weakness in Augustine’s works proved at least partially liberating.
As spring 1942 turned to summer, this idea of revolution repeatedly showed up in the thoughts of the students who wrote and distributed the Leaflets of the White Rose. Willi Graf was reunited with two student-soldier friends from those hard days in the Black Forest. Willi, Hubert Furtwängler, Adalbert Grundel – Bertl, aka “The Revolutionary” because of his obsession with the topic Immunity Against the Nazis – these three comrades drew close as they contemplated current events.
The leaflets voiced the students’ desire for a revolution that would overthrow Hitler’s regime. Alexander Schmorell’s section of the third leaflet gave fellow citizens concrete examples of ways they could sabotage the Nazi war machine. Philosophy wouldn’t cut it. They needed action.
Late December 1942, Sophie Scholl met up with Otl Aicher once again. He had gone AWOL, deserted, pretending to be ill, then simply left the military. Nuns, nurses in Bad Hall had taken him in. Apparently without telling her parents, Sophie departed Ulm on December 22 to visit her soulmate.
Otl had endeared himself to the Sisters by volunteering in the kitchen. Once Sophie arrived, the Sisters turned a blind eye to their comings and goings. Otl set up mattresses on a balcony so the twosome could bask in the warm sun, undisturbed. The good Sisters told him simply that he should use the kitchen entrance, so they would “see nothing.”
Sophie told Otl about Christoph Probst and Willi Graf, two friends she said he had to meet. He promised to come to Munich for that purpose. (Otl already knew Traute and Alex.)
Otl then told her about the Russian front. It’s unclear if he were aware that Fritz Hartnagel was still in Stalingrad as they spoke. Otl spared no punches and recounted Nazi atrocities towards the Russians and anyone they encountered. “Anything I touch on behalf of this State supports a crime,” Otl mused. “Everyone who fights the Nazis helps to shorten the war and mitigate the disaster that awaits us.”
That night in Sophie’s hotel room, the two friends talked late into the night. Stalingrad. War. Friends. Death. Sophie told Otl that they wanted to “send a political signal that Hitler could be defeated.”
In 1985, Otl recalled this conversation as if it had taken place yesterday.
The value of a person can be seen in the dignity of his death. How and for what a person will die defines that person. Every individual has the right to an honorable death that belongs to himself alone. That the Nazis stole this dignity from millions of people turned them into cynics of a naked insanity.
We tried to determine what dignity or honor the death of one of these friends could possibly have, a friend who had perhaps already fallen in Stalingrad.
He and Sophie decided that they would be willing to sacrifice even their closest friends to death, if it meant that Germany could be saved. They did not like what that meant in real terms. It was something they intuited more than believed.
Over dinner the next day, the discussion took an even more serious turn. Otl observed that it was ironic they were sitting in the heart of fascism, the middle of the original fascist country, Austria. “Linz is close by. Braunau is a little further west, halfway between here and Munich. ‘He’ was born in Braunau. He went to school in the upper grades in Linz. He got his start in Munich.”
Sophie floored Otl with her response. “How could it be that it’s precisely the Catholic countries and states that seem to have such a strong affinity to fascism? Bavaria, Austria, Italy, Spain, Portugal.” They talked long and hard, establishing a definition for fascism before discussing.
Note: The Council on Foreign Relations defines fascism thusly – [F]ascism is a mass political movement that emphasizes extreme nationalism, militarism, and the supremacy of both the nation and the single, powerful leader over the individual citizen. This model of government stands in contrast to liberal democracies, which support individual rights, competitive elections, and political dissent.
In many ways, fascist regimes are revolutionary because they advocate the overthrow of existing systems of government and the persecution of political enemies. However, when it advances their interests, such regimes can also be highly conservative in their championing of traditional values related to the role of women, social hierarchy, and obedience to authority. And although fascist leaders typically claim to support the everyman, in reality their regimes often align with powerful business interests.
Apparently Otl did most of the talking initially. He boiled fascism down to its essence – authoritarianism. They did not have time for niceties. Otl, a devout Catholic, tried to find examples to counter Sophie’s claim about Catholic states and fascism. He struggled. Lamennais, Félicité Lamennais! He had been a republican, little r. Yes, but Lamennais had been excommunicated. But his “disciple” Carl Muth, he too advocated for a republican form of government, even to the point of writing in favor of separation of church and state. Oh yes, he had been threatened with excommunication too.
Sophie continued her argument. She believed that the true test of a ‘Christian society’ “was not how a government treated its leadership, but how it related to the lowly and disenfranchised, to minorities.”
As usual when these two friends debated religious topics, Otl defended his Catholic faith, with Sophie unflinchingly going on the offensive. The more Otl floundered, trying to find excuses for fascism in Catholic nations, the stronger Sophie spoke. “There has never been a government based on Christian principles, since the powerless have always been trampled underfoot and the powerful have been honored.” She was adamant.
Otl would not give up just yet. History, history. Surely he could find a historical example. What about German enlightenment, which tried to bring ‘Christian’ principles into the political arena? Oh right. The unions and political parties had embraced the enlightenment, while the churches – both Catholic and Lutheran – “anointed despots.” Otl had to acknowledge that “they [clerics] were incapable of recognizing Christian values if they developed outside the walls of the Church.”
Otl recalled that Sophie brought the debate back to reality, pointing out that he continued to argue theory, but theory did not change the world. If something does not exist in concrete form, it is not real. “Reality stands in judgment on theory.”
Still he would not stop his apologia. Until he had his own “aha” moment. Following is an excerpt from White Rose History, Volume II.
[R]egimes needed theory to mask what they were really doing. A ruler can say he wants peace while waging war. He can throw around the word “liberty” while doing everything possible “to put a ring in the nose of its citizens.” Propaganda, school curricula, newspaper editorials, Otl threw these out as illustrations of political theories that were used to further illegitimate goals and aims of corrupt governments.
“Public welfare before private good, public service, not self.” Otl said those words exemplified how Hitler’s government employed theoretical words that sounded nice to enslave the German nation to his fraudulent regime and criminal deeds.
No sooner had he uttered that phrase than he and Sophie looked at one another. “Our conversation began to be painful, opening rippling wounds.” Because it dawned on them that Hitler’s mantra was nothing more than a direct quote from Aristotle, a quote that Augustine had repeated in his theological treatises. And they – especially Sophie – thought Augustine all but walked on water.
Aristotle, and after him Augustine and Hitler, had elevated Government to the level of a “Higher Something, a Superior Matter, a Higher Category of Existence.” There was nothing more dangerous, nothing more insidious than the Aristotelian theories of form and substance embodied in a government, any government.
For Aristotle – and Augustine, and Hitler – had it backwards. If the good of the private citizen did not far, far exceed the good of the nation, the nation could not be whole.
No amount of public welfare is greater than the securing of the liberty of the individual, the securing of private welfare, the securing of the dignity, the honor, of the least citizen.
It is at this point that a Christian state (if one is even possible) must begin, they said, by turning upside down the Aristotelian principles in order to favor the individual, the individual person, even the individual person who represents a minority, regardless whether it is the minority of race, of culture, of religion, or of ideology. Those minorities outrank the State. Even those individuals whom society forgets will stand before the throne of God, but no government will do so. (Sophie especially argued this point.) The State is not the Higher Form of Existence, but rather that miserable human being.
Sophie told Otl about a passage Hans had found in Schiller’s Solon that echoed that sentiment, a passage written “when Schiller was still a republican.” It said that the State existed to fulfill the destiny of mankind, namely the development of all the forces that are inherent within mankind.
Otl was familiar with the extract Sophie mentioned and pounced on Schiller’s deprecation of the military state in Sparta to return to his reflections on Aristotle. That slogan “Service Before Self” bothered him. How the hell, said Otl, had Hitler been able to so thoroughly pervert what should have been an innocuous catchphrase to convince an entire nation it was all right to exterminate someone simply because they were of an “other” race? “The common good proved itself to be the private interests of the ruling class.”
Which brought them right back to Sophie’s question: Why the Catholic countries? She said, “Freedom is always the affair of the single, living, thinking, active individual. The State is not free, only people can be free. Freedom is always the concrete freedom of the individual.”
Otl later said that Sophie remained quite adamant on this point. “She began trying to test it with facts. She did not trust words, pompous words. She did not trust philosophies, pompous philosophies. And she did not trust theories. She thought it was a particularly German affliction, perhaps ‘a particularly bourgeois affliction, or one peculiar to our time,’ that we had hopelessly separated action from thought, theory from reality. We satisfied ourselves with thoughts that we could observe, and we found delight in sentiments that required action.”
Wow, Otl thought. Sophie! She had come a long way from their conversations in Ulm half a year before when she had contemplated suicide. “I perceived Sophie as a moral authority. She insisted on consistency between thought and action. In the manner in which such consistency was achieved, she saw the degree of the development of an individual.”
They chatted some more about the topic, Otl finally coming around to respond to the Why Sophie had posed at the beginning. “Freedom is possible only when it can express itself. It was not only the Romans who borrowed this [Aristotelian] form of government, but the [Holy Roman Empire] of the Middle Ages too, based on the Augustinian definitions of a Divine State. And to this day, the popes defend that form of government.” The problem therefore rested with that insufferable mixture of religion and state, whereby the clergy had gotten a taste of power and refused to let it go. Change had to start at the top.
But Sophie was not content with only one question. Would there be a revolution? Would someone be able to overthrow Hitler’s regime and install a more honorable government? In Germany? After the war? …
Seriously, said Sophie, what should happen to the Nazis after the war? Sophie’s response to her own question stuck with Otl.
Sophie said she thought that everyone would be forced to wear their Party Number on their back and help rebuild a bullet-riddled Europe. Their sentence would correspond to the length of time they had been Party members. ‘We were laughing, yet we were dead serious.’
They easily agreed that if Germany were to be healthy and strong, a country that honored its individual citizens and preserved liberty and justice for all, it would have to be dismantled down to its bare bones and reformed from scratch. In other words, it would have to be totally dissolved before it could be reinvented. …
Will there be a revolution? Will there be a revolution? They could not escape this question as they ate dinner, sat together, walked, and talked in Bad-Hall-near-“his”-birthplace. Will there be a revolution?
And what would be its basis? ‘I thought we Germans had been raised to be such passive vassals that had eradicated the individual as a subject of history.’ Maybe a revolution would succeed, one that was simultaneous with the fall of the Third Reich.
Otl: Maybe our military opponents, maybe the Americans and the English who were about ready to declare victory, maybe they had enough power and political might. If they did, then instead of savoring a military victory, perhaps they would be willing to come into our house and unleash a wave of liberation, liberation that would wash over our house like a bucket full of water, not like a damp cloth. Wouldn't that be wonderful?
But who should start a revolution? Who?
Unbeknownst to Otl and Sophie, Willi Graf and his friends the Bollingers were having a similar conversation that December 1942 into January 1943. Willi’s recruiting in Saarbrücken had been met with one brick wall after another. Friendships dated back to those lonely days when twelve of them had marched in a sea of 100,000 Hitler Youth. And now those same classmates turned him down, refused to distribute leaflets in January. Everything was sunshine and laughter until he asked these friends to work with him.
What had become of their vow that they would be “doers of the Word and not hearers only?” Where were those people?
Expecting the worst, Willi Graf sat with Willi Bollinger on January 22, 1943, disheartened. Over Christmas, the two Willis had calculated the odds that resistance of any sort would turn out well. 2%. That was their estimate of success.
Nothing had changed in three weeks. Still 2% chance of success. But Willi Bollinger knew that he and his brother Heinz had to do this. “We asked ourselves how long people would allow this to continue. How long would human rights be trampled under foot without retribution for these crimes?” Crimes. Crimes.
We absolutely knew that the things that must be done were extremely dangerous, and that each of us had to seek counsel within himself to determine whether he were ready to sacrifice his life for this deed. It was to be a conscious, spiritual/intellectual [geistige] revolution. National Socialism was to be conquered by the spirit and by a moral lifestyle.
As long as I had known Willi [Graf], I knew he was not a person who allowed himself to be dragged into something on the basis of his emotions. He always had to be able to justify and defend whatever he did. That which we decided to do that very evening, it was of the same logical consistency as eating and drinking. Our spiritual/intellectual [geistige] duty was so binding that we knew we could not escape it.
On this evening we calculated the chance of the success of a spiritual/intellectual [geistige] revolution as coldly as if we were in math class. Since we as Christians understood that Evil was conquered by Death, our primary success did not appear so very important to us. Rather, we believed that it was time to begin the spiritual/intellectual protest, because our consciences made it our duty.
Willi Bollinger kept his promise. He recruited a team of committed revolutionaries who duplicated and distributed the fifth leaflet. They knew the consequences should they be caught.
And — even after the arrests and executions of Christoph Probst, Hans Scholl, and Sophie Scholl, the small ragtag band of revolutionaries around Lisa Grote continued to copy out (by hand) and distribute White Rose leaflets in Munich. Like the White Rose friends, they had been emboldened by the January 13 student protest.
By March 16, their enthusiasm was flagging. University students openly supported the Nazi regime, mocking the Scholls and Christoph Probst. Lisa Grote’s friends disbanded, ceased their efforts. “Why did no one run screaming through the streets in those days? And I ask, why did not we do so?”
From a very safe distance, Thomas Mann praised the actions of the White Rose students. Good, wonderful people! You should not have died in vain, you should not be forgotten. In Germany, the Nazis have erected shrines to dirty rowdies, to mean-spirited killers. The German revolution, the real revolution, will tear those shrines down and immortalize your names in their stead. Because even as night still lay over Germany and Europe, you knew that it did and you proclaimed: “A new faith in freedom and honor is dawning.” So wrote Thomas Mann from the comfort of his beautiful mansion, located at 1550 San Remo Drive, Pacific Palisades, California.
So yes, Otl, Sophie, there was a revolution brewing. Initially unsuccessful. There were too few workers, too disjointed, too spread out over too much distance, too disconnected by political ideology to effectively rid their country of fascism. Those who were democrats would not work with those who were republicans would not work with those who were socialists would not work with those who were communists would not work with those who were federalists would not work with those who were monarchists would not work with those who were parliamentarians would not work with those who were theocratic would not work with those who were militaristic.
They all knew they wanted freedom, justice. Far too few were willing to do the hard work. It’s easy to gripe and groan about injustice. From a distance. I include myself with those who find it difficult to do the hard work.
I’m with Lisa. Why did no one run screaming through the streets in those days? Today? And I ask, why did not we do so? Why don’t I do so when I witness injustice?
Taking a step back – not advocating revolution for revolution’s sake. Far too many on the right label anything they disagree with as socialism, communism. To their way of thinking, January 6 was a “revolution” against non-existent socialism in the name of freedom. (It was not.)
Far too many on the left label anything they disagree with as fascism. Everyone who votes Republican must be fascist, must be authoritarian, must be overthrown by a “revolution.”
Words still matter. When we march for liberty and justice, we must ensure we’re not raising sand. Revolution and reform are not synonyms. Revolution is last-ditch effort when all else has failed. We are not there. Yet. May we stay far away from that precipice. And yet be prepared to run towards it, if necessary.
For additional reading, see Tom Nichols’ “Is It Fascism? Is It Socialism?” See also Heather Cox Richardson’s May 29, 1923 post dealing with the topic, What Is Fascism?
