Mythologies: Thinking out loud
White Rose resistance. They were all Catholic. No, all Lutheran. No, they were democrats. No, they were... It's time to listen to Michael Probst and stop the fairy tales. Enough of mythology!
It seems that every day, we face new mythologies. All-protein diets guarantee you’ll live to be 100. Don’t exercise, because if you do, you’re shortening your life by those extra breaths. George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and confessed to it, saying, ‘I cannot tell a lie.’ Space lasers intentionally caused the fire in Hawai’i (really – this is a thing on Twitter, I mean X).
Some mythologies are more dangerous because they are more “believable,” at least to some. Slaves were lucky to have been shipped to America, where they learned skilled trades. On the flip side, all white people are racists. Or, the South seceded over states’ rights, not slavery, contrasted with there was no racism in Northern states. Mythology. The mythologies that oppress the oppressed are more perilous than their counterparts, although neither is acceptable.
Last year, I witnessed Southern mythology as a tour bus from the Deep South dumped – I mean, tumped – a load of Confederate-flag-waving men onto Little Round Top here in Gettysburg, shortly before Little Round Top was closed for National Park Service repairs. These beer-bellied men held forth at mega-decibels on their thesis that the South had defeated the United States Army in Gettysburg. Mythology. I could go on. And on.
White Rose has long been susceptible to similar mythologies. The initial telling of their story was tightly controlled by Inge Scholl, Jürgen Wittenstein, and Franz Josef Müller, all hardcore Nazis until April 1945. Postwar, they understood the dollar signs associated with American support for democratic education and reinvented themselves. None of the three ever acknowledged, much less atoned for, the ideology they actively supported and enforced for twelve years. Yet they were permitted to control the telling of White Rose resistance for seventy years, no questions asked.
This “permission” has its roots in two separate but equally disturbing bases.
First, we the American people focused more on rooting out Communists in Europe than we did gutting National Socialist ideology. Remember the McCarthy era? That was backdrop for funding not only the rebuilding of (West) Germany, but also the establishment of schools, newspapers, and politicians friendly to taking our money to teach The American Way.
“We” asked few if any questions. If the Inge Scholls and Jürgen Wittensteins were now willing to give the lectures we wanted Germans to hear, we did not ask nearly enough questions about their pasts and what they were doing from 1933-1945. My guess: We knew, and used that knowledge to leverage their cooperation. Their well-financed cooperation.
This “permission” is a topic best discussed by people better versed than I in denazification laws and processes. I know enough about Scholl, Wittenstein, and Franz Josef Müller to speak to their cases. Learning even more is on the short list of our research projects.
I highly recommend a book not usually associated with denazification, but that taught me a great deal about the era: Dr. Ernestine Schlant’s The Language of Silence. She turned out to be correct about so many people heralded as anti-Nazi giants before publication of this little book. Günter Grass, Werner Bergengruen (yes, the writer Inge Scholl described as anti-Nazi), just two writers whose works Schlant analyzed for their silences.
Schlant’s theory holds true in Holocaust Studies as well. Listen for what Inge Scholl, Jürgen Wittenstein, and Franz Josef Müller (and others) did not say. It’s those silences that give them away. Kristallnacht, the move to Münsterplatz 33, just two deafening silences among many in Scholl mythology.
Second, the German government itself not only enabled, but encouraged this Scholl-Wittenstein-Müller mythology. Goethe Institut is simple rebrand of and successor to Deutsche Akademie, technically founded before Hitler came to power, but gaining immense power and muscle once it (quickly) aligned with National Socialism. Goethe Institut funds the mythology; in turn, the German government funds Goethe Institut. I asked a professor at the University of Utah why they still taught White Rose resistance using Inge Scholl’s historical revisionism, although they knew it was wrong. Her response, ‘You don’t know? Goethe Institut provides that book to high schools and universities free of charge.’
Her comment led me to research Goethe Institut – an organization that means a great deal to most teachers, professors, and students of German language and culture, precisely because of their free materials. I learned it’s free, at great cost.
The list of presidents and directors of Goethe Institut from 1951 to the early 1970s includes men who never should have been allowed to influence the recitation of German history during the Shoah.
Helmuth Brückmann, CEO from 1952-58. Difficult to find much about him. It appears that he was a senior member of the NSDAP propaganda ministry and an officer in Hitler’s military. If you have information to fill in this blank, please let me know!
Richard Wolf, CEO from 1958-1965, published quite a few books from 1933-45. In 1937, he was the first person to receive an honorary degree from the Deutsche Akademie.
Max Grasmann, president of Goethe Institut from 1962-1963, had been Geschäftsführer of the Bayr. Industrieverband (CEO of the Bavarian Industry Association) from 1923-1936. In 1937, he became Director of Bayr. Versicherungsbank and Allianz Versicherung. Allianz was insurer of choice for the NSDAP and profited from the takeover of Jewish insurance companies. Allianz reps “inspected” concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Dachau. Grasmann’s postwar clearance and appointment to Goethe Institut are astounding on so many levels, none of them good.
Peter Pfeiffer, president of Goethe Institut from 1963-1971, had become a Party member in 1940. He was a Nazi diplomat, serving in Paris from 1934-38, then in Rome. He accompanied the Italian invasion of Greece, was initially intended to act as Consul General (or Ambassador?) in Moscow following the invasion of the USSR, but landed in Algeria instead. Postwar, he did not miss a beat, becoming a diplomat for the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, in addition to president of Goethe Institut.
Werner Ross, CEO of Goethe Institut from 1965-73, received his PhD from the university in Bonn in 1938 (could not readily find information regarding doctoral dissertation). He published and taught Nietzsche during the Third Reich. And afterwards.
Note that although the Goethe Institut states on its site that it needs to deal with its history from 1933-1945, it fails to mention dealing with the appointment of these men. I wonder how the history of the Third Reich and German resistance would have been documented differently had these offices been filled with men and women who had had the courage of their convictions, and not with Nazi perpetrators.
When doing this admittedly superficial research twenty years ago, I found (and saved) a speech given at a US-based Goethe Institut conference. The speaker promoted the theory that Germans were the real victims during the Third Reich. I could not believe what I was reading. This speech was archived at the time on the Web site of that Goethe Institut branch. In the late 1990s. Mythology. Horrendously false and destructive mythology.
If only the mythology stopped there, we would possibly be all right. Government-sponsored fiction turns out to be the least troublesome.
As short backstory: When we met with Herta Probst and her son Michael – the same Michael who perched happily on his daddy’s shoulders in the iconic photograph of Christoph Probst – initially they were more than a little reticent. As other friends and family members before them, they had been burned by interviewers who crammed their stories into a predetermined narrative. It was not just Americans who had done this; so had Germans. They were wary of opening up.
We sat on a terrace near the Ammersee, sipping hot tea and eating cookies. The conversation slowly became less guarded. Dr. Michael Probst, doctor of internal medicine, well-respected by peers, beloved by family, Micha, admonished us: Be careful when you write the White Rose story. Do not let it become politicized. Do not allow it to become skewed towards one position or another. Tell the whole story.
I hear his voice almost every time I write. You surely have noticed by now that when I speak of religion in the White Rose, I include all the religions represented by these friends. They were Lutheran, Catholic, Seventh Day Adventist, Buddhist, adherents to Eastern mysticism, anthroposophist, agnostic, perhaps even atheist. Even among a seemingly homogeneous group, say Catholics, they were hardly unified. From Harald Dohrn’s “more papal than the pope himself” to Willi Graf and Otl Aicher’s open critique of the church they saw as abandoning its faith for... for what?
In 1933, Willi Graf and a friend read these words, penned by Johannes Maassen. “Censorship of the press is as common these days as fresh bread, because German freedom has been sold on the open market. … We seek a national honor that is miles removed from the wretched clay of excess and the gutter. This gutter is fast becoming the norm in daily life and opposes everything that does not worship the current government. We seek the complete existence of justice, the basis of the true State. We seek a gateway for the freedom of the Volk.”
In 1934, Maassen used NSDAP rhetoric against the Party, again gripping Willi Graf. “The Church has suffered equally under terrors birthed from within: False doctrines that Christians themselves have propagated. False doctrines that threaten to destroy the true center of Christian philosophy and which will counterfeit Christian history in a fable of smoke and blood and the souls of the races.”
It's therefore not surprising that after the disastrous meeting the second week of February 1943, Willi Graf sought out Maassen near Lenggries. Tired of raising sand with leaflets that went nowhere, Willi (and Alexander Schmorell) both wanted more concrete forms of resistance and protest. Maassen would be Willi Graf’s key to the circle around Pater Delp.
Both Harald Dohrn and Willi Graf were devoutly Catholic, as were Katharina Schüddekopf and Wilhelm Geyer. But their approach to their faith and how it worked out in their lives could not have been more different.
And yet.
Michael Probst’s warning should be part of Terms of Service for anyone who wishes to bill themselves as White Rose scholar. Because it seems that every group wants to claim White Rose resistance for itself, facts be damned. Way too many Catholics claim it was a Catholic organization, way too many Lutherans claim it was a Lutheran movement. Not only are both flat wrong, but they ignore the many friends who were neither.
This issue rears its ugly head in the USA as well. A Google alert about ten years ago yielded an article by a Pentecostal pastor who claimed White Rose resistance was an evangelical faction, twisting paltry amounts of “information” into indigestible pretzels. That nonsense has been topped only by an anti-abortion group – also in the USA – that hands out White Rose awards to people who murder abortion doctors. They had been quiet for several years, but are now reinventing themselves less as a murderous cult and more as a political organization, still invoking White Rose resistance in general, Hans and Sophie Scholl in particular.
Mythology.
It’s not just religion that distorts this very real story to suit partisan ends. Politicians do it too. Again, for this reason I always, but always, talk about the full political spectrum of political beliefs among White Rose friends. They were democrats, monarchists, federalists, anarchists, Socialists, Communists. Yes, Communists. And I am not talking about the label attached to the Harnack Rote Kapelle. I am talking about Scholl.
Because Werner Scholl and one of his closest friends, Hermann Heisch, spent a great deal of time at Dürrnhof, Richard Scheringer’s farm. Scheringer was Hermann Heisch’s older brother-in-law. Werner Scholl helped Scheringer bring in the harvest, talked politics, and sang songs with the Scheringers late into the evening. Beginning in 1939/40, Hans Scholl joined his younger brother. (Hmm, wonder about the correlation between the heavy-handed censorship of Hans Scholl’s documents and what Hans wrote on the topic of politics?)
Elisabeth Scholl served as nanny for the Scheringer children in 1942-43. She was working for Richard Scheringer on February 18, 1943. In an interview towards the end of her life, Elisabeth Hartnagel nee Scholl revealed that during Sophie Scholl’s last week, during the week she spent in Ulm before returning to Munich, Sophie had visited her (Elisabeth) at the Scheringer’s farm. Elisabeth, Hans, Sophie, and Werner – but not Inge – had likely long been on the Gestapo’s radar for their association with the Scheringers.
Scheringer’s conversion to Communism from Nazism made the news in the USA. New York Times on March 20, 1931 reported:
Branding General Groener and Chancellor Bruening as standing “for capitalism against the proletariat,” former Reichswehr Lieutenant Richard Scheringer, convicted by the Supreme Court at Leipzig last October of inciting treason by National Socialist agitation in the army, announced today [March 19, 1931] that he had turned Communist. Scheringer has almost finished the brief term in the army fortress to which he was sentenced.
In a statement read to the Reichstag by Deputy Hans Kippenberger, Scheringer declared that revolutionary workers, peasants and soldiers were the sole remaining guardians of freedom. He said he had joined the army because he believed that the liberation of the German people and the tearing up of the Versailles treaty were only achievable by force and that the fatherland’s present 100,000 soldiers were destined to form the nucleus of a “grand national army.”
“The National Socialists have done nothing,” he said. “Their leaders are empty phrasemongers. Bruening and Groening and the rest of the bourgeoisie stand for capitalism against the proletariat. They prevented Germany from quitting the League of Nations, accepted the Young plan and created a system of toadyism that smells to heaven.”
The freedom of the fatherland, Scheringer concluded, lies with the revolutionary workers alone. He added that he was renouncing Fascism forever.
Before anyone screams that I am saying the Scholls – Hans, Elisabeth, Sophie, and Werner – espoused Communist doctrine, please stop for a minute. Take a deep breath. Reread. I am saying that we do not know what their political beliefs were, because of censorship. We know they associated with a family well-known for its conversion to Communism. We know that people in Ulm called Elisabeth a Communist because of that association (see Sippenhaft, edited by Inge Scholl).
But we do not know what the Scholls believed politically, religiously, philosophically. We have been allowed to read snippets here and there. From those snippets, it appears that Werner alone had a clear political (and likely irreligious) viewpoint and foundation. The rest? Who knows? Certainly no one who has written tome upon tome about their religious and political beliefs, based on snippets.
And it is not just Scholl. So again, no yelling. No accusations of “she hates Scholls.” Because this is a significant issue, and deflection does not help.
These mythologies – they were Catholic, no they were Lutheran, they hated abortion (huh?), they would’ve been against vaccines (double huh?), “they” wanted a democratic Germany after the war (who did?), “they” were all Communists (nope), they yearned for freedom (define freedom – for whom, what did freedom look like?), they… You get the picture.
Someone takes a single thread and weaves a mythology out of whole cloth.
This post is for everyone. Over the next few months, perhaps over the next year, I’ll occasionally write more about these mythologies. Additional posts will be for paid subscribers only. I sincerely hope the tough discussion stirs you up to know and learn more, to talk and to talk some more. If not here on this Substack, then in your classrooms and with your colleagues and friends.
The time for mythologies to die is now. Let’s honor the memory and work of the White Rose circle with a refreshing and very large dose of truth-telling.
© 2023 Denise Heap. Please contact us for additional information or permission to quote.
Great post! The truth may hurt, but it’s worth the search.