Moving forward
White Rose scholarship can be a battleground between legend and truth. It's worth it. Voices of real people make it so.
April and May 2023 have been great months for thinking. Thinking about what has been accomplished, thinking about what the Center for White Rose Studies can achieve.
Most of all, there has been time to think about what we are doing now. Where we are. What and whom we need. Time to think more deeply about how this magnificent puzzle is coming together. From July 1994 when Hans Forster said, “Don’t write about the White Rose if you’re going to tell the same old wrong story,” to 2023 with friends new and old who are pushing us to our thirtieth annivesary next year, determined that the story won’t die - it has been and is being quite the journey.
When people who read our publications or this Substack contact us and ask questions, there’s nothing finer. The questions may be about facts we’ve written, whether challenging us or saying, “Aha!” Maybe “I had never thought of it that way.” Topped only by “what can I do to help” questions – you have no idea how thrilling those questions are!
Following are my personal commitments – to this work; and to you, our readers and coworkers.
I will:
Post here three times weekly, barring physical illness.
Write at least one post per week for paying readers only. These posts will focus on our continuing research and on Center for White Rose Studies operations. Not general interest posts, but nitty gritty.
Post our goals here, once they are better defined. Short-term, mid-term, long-term. If you see something that grabs you and holds you fast, please comment or contact us.
Finish the historiography. More on that next week. I want the historiography to serve as touchpoint for serious scholars who care about their research.
Explore technology that will enable more active give-and-take, something I value.
These resolutions are inspired by a week that has been a little tough. Tough as in first-world problems. But not conducive to creative thinking. I’ve therefore worked on my seemingly interminable scan-shred project. Once I finished financial, accounting, and administrative paperwork, I hit a very large stack of White Rose documents. Scan only, no shred!
I’m not reading every single document, but there are a few that make me pause and reread for the hundredth time. The smiles come through Dr. Traute Page nee Lafrenz’s memories about her friends. To her, they weren’t heroes, they were anything but. They were people she loved. That love sparkles in her words.
Or Prof. Dr. Hermann Krings’ encouragement – towards the beginning of our work, when we did not comprehend his impact on Willi Graf. Hermann Krings’ two speeches, autographed by that thinker and national treasure, caused me to consider the impact made by specific words for informed dissent, active resistance, notions of freedom (after all, the NSDAP used that word too) – how unambiguous language powers conversations.
Or the two 4” binders full of correspondence with Jürgen Wittenstein, starting with my naïve acceptance of his account as truth, slowly changing to doubt, and then eventually becoming complete distrust. I saw myself, I saw us, growing up as we learned to listen to what he was not saying, or what he said differently, or how he always turned conversations towards himself and not to the circle who did the work. Towards the end of our eight-year correspondence, it became clear to me that he barely knew any of the friends at all.
Or Dr. Armin Ziegler’s thorough-thorough-thorough dissection of every word in White Rose History Volume I and most of Volume II. That man loved to argue!, to debate minutiae. The Histories are better for his being pingelig (his word for himself, meaning picky), but in at least one letter, I asked him, ‘Can we please not argue today?’ I miss him. Very much.
In one series of emails, we discussed the serious disconnect between getting the White Rose story right (our mutual desire) and the general German obsession with cementing the Scholl legend as fact, photoshopping out flaws so “heroes” look like saints. If not like demigods. A summary of that discussion will provide the basis for a post in the very near future. His insights deserve deeper discussion.
Or the precious and brief exchanges with the Schmorells, Probsts, Geyers, Lilo, Hubert Furtwängler, even Otmar Hammerstein, and others. I did not know it then, but their time was short. I never would have dreamed that the last letter from Micha Probst would come so soon before his death.
Scan project encompassed more than letters from White Rose families. The simple letters with the Kohlermanns in Bad Dürrheim (where Sophie Scholl did a Fröbel Praktikum) meant much to me. Even more when I learned that that children’s sanatorium was shut down after 111 years, and that grand old house was torn down, only seven years after Hellmut Kohlermann opened their doors to us to explore for almost a day.
I could ramble on about the almost-30 years of letters and documents. You will hear much more about them in future.
As I tell the little, personal stories behind the bigger story contained in our Histories, you’ll understand why I insist on getting it right, on ensuring that everyone – not just Scholls – is honored for their sacrifice. The families of those who were executed, as well as friends who survived, plus contemporaries who bore truthful witness… the voices of these people must be heard. They shall not be silenced.
I’ll also present to you the difficult issues that arise if (when!) you decide to do the hard stuff. One Ziegler email jumped out of the stack at me today. I had asked about my reading of a particular Scholl-related letter; the text seemed clear, but explosive. I wanted to be certain I wasn’t misunderstanding.
This was around the time that ten or so German not-scholars had attacked me personally. Not my work. They could not find fault with my work. They did not like me, they did not like the fact that I said Scholls were Lutheran not Catholic (really) and that White Rose friends were not particularly religious (there is a subset of wannabes who paint White Rose as religious movement, totally false), they did not like questions I had asked. So they went on a twelve-month rampage, condemning me in the German press. It was bizarre. When I defended myself, when Ziegler defended me, the newspapers refused to print our rebuttals.
Therefore when I asked Ziegler this one question, his response was essentially, ‘You ain’t seen nothin’ yet if you ask THAT question out loud.’ So I did not. For once, and only for once, I let something slide.
But that question still needs to be asked. And it will be.
My sincere hope is that this Substack and our publications will help YOU have the courage to ask the hard questions. Not to shrink from the pushback you may receive.
Scholarship is not a popularity contest. It is getting your hands dirty in stubborn archives. It is wrestling with seemingly contradictory facts. It is puzzling out dates, reading bad handwriting. It is figuring out whether a document is real, forged, or altered. It is not accepting the easy story, but looking for reality.
Scholarship is hard work. But it’s fun when shared. Even if there are days when you want to say, ‘Can we please not argue today?’
“Scholarship is not a popularity contest.” Excellent point!