2. Competing Voices in Inge Scholl’s Die Weiße Rose

On 22 February 1943 Hans and Sophie Scholl were executed for treason. They had been members of a group calling themselves the ‘Weiße Rose’ [White Rose], which had produced antifascist leaflets. They had been arrested four days earlier during the distribution of such leaflets at the University of Munich, where they both studied. They were tried and executed on the same day, along with Christoph Probst, another member of the group, in a first round of executions of students and academics. Over the last sixty years, the events surrounding the Munich student resistance have been subject to numerous re-writings. The body of literature focusing on the ‘Weiße Rose’ and its place within the youth opposition to Nazism now encompasses nearly one thousand titles (Schilde 1995, 37). It is within this context that a text written by Inge Scholl, sister of Hans and Sophie, has been republished annually since 1952. Within a field of many contested discourses about these events of the past, Scholl’s Die Weiße Rose has become canonized as a classic of German literary memories of fascism. Rethinking the text and looking at the different voices contained within it raises questions of genre, gender, reception and hierarchies of remembrance as they have evolved in West German memory politics. Scholl’s text has long been established as a standard work on youth opposition to Nazism; as such it highlights particularly the importance of investigating what is remembered and on behalf of whom. Inge Scholl, the daughter of Robert Scholl, mayor of Forchtenberg, was born in 1917. As a young woman she witnessed her siblings’ increasing disillusion with the Nazi state. Following their execution, Inge Scholl and her family were arrested by the Gestapo. She was imprisoned for four months. After her release Scholl married Otl Aicher with whom she founded the Ulm School of Design in 1946 and which she led until 1974. In the 1980s Scholl was an active member of the German peace movement. She died in 1998. Die Weiße Rose was first published in 1952 in West Germany by the publishing house Frankfurter Hefte. On its initial publication the book entered a public arena in which the student resistance was remembered yearly in commemorative speeches at the University of Munich. Yet, it appeared at a time when different forms of public commemoration showed competing tendencies. For example, in the same year Robert Scholl wrote a letter to the Süddeutsche Zeitung complaining that the anniversary of the execution of his children had passed unremarked by the newspaper (Kirchberger 1987, 39). The 76 WOMEN WITHOUT A PAST? early success of the text is however demonstrated by the fact that an expanded edition was published by Fischer-Bücherei in 1955. Over the next forty years, further expanded editions were published in 1972, 1982 and 1993 by Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag and S. Fischer. In addition, there have been many translations and several republications by other publishing houses and book clubs within Germany (Scholl 1983a, 1983b, 1986, 1990).

A Process of ‘Biographization’ or an Autobiographical Account?

Both Wilfried Breyvogel and Barbara Schüler situate the original publication of Scholl’s text within what they define as the second phase in the historical reconstruction of events of the student resistance (1991, 175; 2000, 164). According to Breyvogel and Schüler this phase, spanning from 1948/9 to 1955, is characterized by attempts to refute the ‘myths’ that had arisen about the resistance in Germany and abroad in the immediate post-war period. Such a categorization implies a certain level of accuracy in texts such as Scholl’s. Nevertheless, Schüler also writes of the persistent blurring of the border between what she calls ‘poetry’ and ‘truth’ in these accounts (2000, 163). In texts by those she calls close relatives, amongst whom she would presumably include Inge Scholl, Schüler claims that an unconscious process of ‘biographization’ is prevalent (2000, 163-64). Breyvogel likewise contends that Scholl was writing to oppose the prevalent tendency to stress the heroic status of the students through a “biographische Historisierung” [biographical historicization] (1991, 165) of the events. A consideration of the role of different textual voices in the alleged process of ‘biographization’, shows how they create or refute expectations of genre. It is my contention that the text can be productively considered as an autobiography. In the immediate post-war period Inge Scholl wrote two texts for her parents: ‘Erinnerungen an München’ [Memories of Munich] and ‘Biographische Notizen von Hans und Sophie Scholl’ [Biographical Notes about Hans and Sophie Scholl]. These documents have never been published in their entirety, although detailed extracts can be read in Schüler’s monograph on the group and the latter is stored at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich (IfZ ZS A26/4). Scholl sent her ‘Erinnerungen an München’ to Ricarda Huch, who used it in her depiction of Hans and Sophie in Die Aktion der Münchener Studenten gegen Hitler (1948/9). By this time Scholl had written the text which