Tapestries. Warp and weft.

Once you hear Martin Hake's words, 'Sometimes it can be next to impossible to discern the difference between perpetrators and victims,' the tapestry of White Rose resistance begins to make sense.

Weaving a tapestry. Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA.

This week, I sat at table with Martin Hake. As you would expect, we talked about the nuances of White Rose research, especially regarding places. A native Tölzer, he knows this region better than most. Although I suspect that for him, there must be a little bit of joy talking to an American who has been coming to this corner of the world since 1973. An American who remembers when Blomberg was just a mountain, when Bad Heilbrunn’s Ostfeld was a hayfield, and when Brigitte Fuchs still ran the woodcarving shop in Tölz. Although, hats off to the woman who now owns it and honors the Fuchs family’s memory.

As tempting as it was, we did not reminisce too long. Martin lives next door to Thomas Mann’s Tölzer house. The Manns lived here only eight years, but Bad Tölz influenced Mann’s writing. Whether the appearance of his border collie Motz – buried on the grounds of the Tölz home – in Königliche Hoheit, or Tölzers who informed characters in his novels and short stories, once you “get” the connection between Thomas Mann and Bad Tölz, you look for Tölz in his works.

According to Birgit of the Tölzer tourist information bureau, Martin is the town’s resident expert on Thomas Mann. I thoroughly enjoyed learning from him. We walked the grounds of the Mann house. It now belongs to an order of Catholic nuns. A second building on the former Mann property is a residence for retired nuns of that order. (Mann’s house itself is viewable from outside and is only open for special occasions.)

Discussions of Thomas Mann in Bad Tölz metamorphosed into a conversation about writers and artists in the Tölzer region, which included Ludwig Thoma, the Bavarian writer who jumpstarted my interest in Bavarian literature. Thoma and the writers of Simplicissimus penned the courage of their convictions, taking on the Kaiser and National Socialism. Simplicissimus published biting political cartoons, lampooning Hitler and his henchmen. Including clergy who supported him early on. Thoma himself spent six months in jail for one of his seemingly pro-democratic views, apparently embracing anti-war sentiments as well.

Thoma was a little older than Thomas Mann, but the two men wrote from similar viewpoints, or so a casual reader would believe. Since Ludwig Thoma’s residence was in nearby Tegernsee, and since Thomas Mann spent time in that jewel of a place, one would have thought they would have been close.

Instead, at the conclusion of the Great War, better known now as World War I, Ludwig Thoma’s life took a hard right swing. Incredibly, even as Ludwig Thoma published antisemitic screeds in far-right magazines and periodicals those last three to five years of his life, he also took a Jewish lover, Maidi von Liebermann.

Back in the days when I planned to focus my energies on Ludwig Thoma and political humor as dissidence, I could not decipher the end of his life. How this man who had gone to prison – Stadelheim! – for protesting fake morality, could then turn on a dime and support the very rightwing über-nationalists he had so despised, all while courting Maidi? It made no sense then, and it makes no sense now.

I asked Martin if he thought that Thoma would have reverted to his pro-democracy stance had he lived to see Hitler in all his brutal glory. Martin answered emphatically, No! He would have become even more radical as Hitler assumed power.

[Are there still any questions about Why This Matters? No? I didn’t think so.]

Martin then made a statement that has stuck with me and triggered a completely new line of thought. At least completely new for me, with respect to White Rose and other German resistance. We spoke about my issues with Inge Scholl and her father, about Jürgen Wittenstein’s clear pro-Nazi beliefs and his rank as NS-Führungsoffizier, about Franz Josef Müller’s blocked Protokolle and what I found in those files when I gained legal access to them. These people controlled White Rose legend for decades and continue to do so from beyond the grave. Their telling served to whitewash their personal histories, hiding behind the apron strings of more noble friends and family members.

Martin – and this is a Denise-paraphrase of a much longer section of our afternoon conversation over coffee and cake: Denise, when we really start digging into history of the Shoah, the run up to Hitler’s rise to power, progression through the twelve years of the Third Reich, and the years thereafter, we must acknowledge, we must understand that sometimes it can be next to impossible to discern the difference between perpetrators and victims [Täter und Opfer]. This applies as well to postwar Germany and to the Americans who were responsible for rebuilding Germany after the war. Nothing was black and white. Nothing.

Yesterday, Martin forwarded me the transcription of General Patton’s diary from April 1945 through the end of that year. I had mentioned that I want to visit the DP-Lager, the encampment for displaced persons in Wolfratshausen where many Jewish survivors of the extermination camps lived from 1945-1958. Eisenhower visited the Wolfratshausen location and became advocate for better and proper housing for these survivors, to the detriment of German citizens in nearby towns.

Hildegard Hamm-Brücher discussed the DP-Lager and German reactions to ‘better housing’ in her little book from 1997, “Zerreisst den Mantel der Gleichgültigkeit.” Die “Weiβe Rose” und unsere Zeit. It is reviewed here. She wrote, “German guilt was great, but the shame regarding [that guilt] was only experienced by a few. Almost no one wanted to hear about collective responsibility, much less about collective guilt. When an American officer asked me if I had known about the KZs [concentration camps], I truthfully answered yes. Why were so few truthful?” [Translation mine.]

My understanding of US involvement in the creation of these DP-Lager had been positive. Part of that black and white interpretation of postwar Germany.

Then I read Patton’s words, which I will not quote here for fear that this post could be co-opted by rightwing elements in our own country. But which left me sick to my stomach as I realized just how antisemitic General Patton had been. It’s clear from that diary that this American general, supposedly on the side of right and justice, would have had no problem whatever if Adolf Hitler had succeeded in exterminating every Jewish European off the face of the earth. Patton’s diary is preserved in our own National Archives, not blocked, not obscured from view. His venom is there for all to read.

I realized that the conversation Martin Hake and I were having is one that should be encouraged and replicated by all who would try to wrap their heads around the Shoah, who would try to understand and not regurgitate pretty platitudes, who would try to figure out how a liberal, left-wing writer like Ludwig Thoma could become a right-winger.

I’ve had quite enough of the stories that involve haloes and pedestals. I am sickened by false narratives that have legend on loop, that falsely attribute nobility to common thieves and liars. I don’t want any more saccharine musicals based on discredited and laughable histories, saccharine musicals that pretend to be fact-based but are not (shame on you, Brian Belding!, because you claim to have been a history teacher, yet you applied zero historical process to your work).

I want instead to have these hard conversations, talking about US culpability in postwar Germany. I want to dig deeper into the lives of seriously flawed White Rose (and other) heroes and comprehend why they risked everything when their personal freedoms were not jeopardized. I want to know more about the myriad shades of gray that permeated that era.

That holds true even when our heroes stumble into the gray areas by embracing elements of National Socialist dogma. How could they? How could they not?

Talk about the hard stuff, not the feel-good pretty story that makes us warm and fuzzy inside.

If we don’t have these conversations, then we will miss the point of HISTORY, of why this matters, and how history can educate our political, ethical, and personal choices today.

The tapestry of these conversations, one color woven into another… Threads of one person’s history briefly intersecting another’s. Places, people, things undergirding deeds. Black, red, gold superimposed on red-white-black. Threads disappearing into the back side of the tapestry, part of a jumbled mess. Warp stretched taut, providing structure (data). Into this warp, the weft, those brightly colored threads that are discontinous, that provide the character, that tell the story. The personality of the tapestry.

Once these tapestried conversations take place, once you hear Martin’s words, “Sometimes it can be next to impossible to discern the difference between perpetrators and victims,” and once you understand what that means… the tapestry’s story, this story that we love and cherish and people we honor, begins to make sense.

Only if we work with colors other than black and white.

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© 2024 Denise Elaine Heap. Please contact us for permission to quote.

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