Cultural Amnesia (107 page)

SOPHIE SCHOLL

About Sophie Scholl (1921–1943) there are few facts to record, because she did not live
long. In Munich in 1942, Sophie’s brother Hans did his best to keep his sister out of the White Rose resistance group. Sophie, however, was very good at insisting. Apart from their
father, the Scholl siblings (
Geschwister
is the useful German word) had few adult companions in their little group. It was a bunch of kids. Not
surprisingly, there was not much resisting they could do. But to print and distribute handbills was daring enough, because there could be no doubt about the penalty if they were caught.
Sophie could have been spared that penalty had she wished, but once again she insisted. The example set by the
Geschwister
Scholl is of high importance
in Germany and beyond, because as Aryans they were protesting against the fate of the Jews purely out of common humanity. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen made a serious mistake when he left them out
of his book
Hitler’s Willing Exe cutioners
: his thesis that the whole of the German non-Jewish population was devoted to
“eliminationist” anti-Semitism was bound to look shaky if it deliberately ignored a group of young non-Jews who avowedly were not. There are several books about the White Rose.
One of the best is an edition of the relevant
documents by Sophie’s sister Inge,
Die Weiße Rose
(new enlarged edition,
1993), which contains transcripts of the handbills, records of the Nazi court, memoirs from friends and acquaintances, and, on page 32, a photo of Sophie fit to break the heart. The Nazi
decision to soft-pedal the publicity about the Scholl case paid off. In her excellent book of memoirs
Berliner Aufzeichnungen
(Berlin Notes), Ursula von
Kardoff reveals that hardly any of her bright young friends in Berlin, sceptical about the Nazis though they were, got to hear about the Scholls even a year later. Their fame was a post-war
event, steadily growing until now, with, it is to be hoped, no end in sight. Could a nation that has never plumbed the same depths put so much value on such a story? In 2005 a movie about
Sophie came out in Germany, called
Sophie Scholl: Die Letzten Tage
(The Final Days). More than a million people went to see it. Whether a Hollywood
movie will ever be made for a world audience is another question.

Finally, someone has to make a start. We only said and wrote what
many people think. They just don’t dare to express it.

—SOPHIE SCHOLL AT THE WHITE
ROSE TRIAL IN MUNICH, QUOTED BY RICHARD HANSER IN
Deutschland zuliebe
(FOR THE SAKE OF GERMANY), P. 15

S
HE DIDN’T STAND
a
chance anyway. The mere fact that the reliably fanatical Roland Freisler had been sent to preside over the court sealed her doom. But once again in her young life she was bearing witness, and to
such effect that even the clinically insane Freisler was momentarily rendered speechless. When he got his breath back, he used it to remind her of his mission, which was to render her speechless
permanently. Sophie Scholl was guillotined by the Nazis at Stadelheim prison in Munich on February 22, 1943, at five o’clock in the afternoon. She was twenty-one years old. In life she had
been reserved with strangers but full of fun with those she loved. Without being especially
pretty she had radiated a moral beauty that left even her Gestapo interrogators
self-consciously shuffling their papers, for once in their benighted lives hoping that the job of killing someone might pass to someone else. If there can be any such thing as a perfect person
beyond Jesus Christ and his immediate family, Sophie Scholl was it.

Sophie’s brother Hans, the leader of the little resistance group that called itself the White Rose,
was already pretty much of a paragon. The Scholl family weren’t Jewish and Hans could have had a glittering career as a Nazi. He even looked the part: with a face whose measurements fitted
the Aryan ideal to the millimetre, he was a page from the sketchbook of Arno Breker. Yet in spite of a standard Third Reich education, including membership in the Hitler Youth, Hans figured out
for himself that the regime whose era he had been born into was an abomination. By the time he reached this dangerous conclusion, armed insurrection was out of the question. A few Wehrmacht
officers were the only people with guns who didn’t think that Hitler ruled by divine right. Any effective opposition was going to have to come from them. The only means of resistance open
to Hans and his like-minded fellow students was to hold secret meetings, write down their opinions and spread them surreptitiously around under the noses of innumerable snoops. There were a few
adults in the White Rose, but mainly they were just a bunch of kids. They could never hope to do much more than circulate their skimpy pamphlets. Long before the end, Hans had guessed that even
to do so little was bound to mean his death. He died with an unflinching fortitude that would have been exemplary if the Nazis had let anyone except his executioners watch. Plans by the Munich
party office to have the young conspirators publicly hanged in the courtyard of their university had been scrapped on orders from Berlin, doubtless for fear that a show of courage might be
catching. Philip II of Spain had once taken a similar decision when he heard from the Low Countries about heretics delivering defiant speeches from the stake. He issued orders that they should be
drowned in secret. The brains in the Wilhelmstrasse were thinking along the same lines.

You would have thought to be as good as Hans Scholl was as good as you could get. He did what he did through no compulsion
except an inner imperative, in the full knowledge that he would perish horribly if he were caught. Yet if moral integrity can be conceived of as a competition,
Sophie left
even Hans behind. Hans tried to keep her ignorant of what he was up to but when she found out she insisted on joining in. Throughout her interrogation, the Gestapo offered her a choice that they
did not extend to her brother. They told her that if she recanted she would be allowed to live. She turned them down, and walked without a tremor to the blade. The chief executioner later
testified that he had never seen anyone die so bravely as Sophie Scholl. Not a whimper of fear, not a sigh of regret for the beautiful life she might have led. She just glanced up at the steel,
put her head down, and she was gone. Is that you? No, and it isn’t me either.

She was probably a saint. Certainly she was noble in her behaviour beyond any standard that we, in normal
life, would feel bound to attain or even comfortable to encounter. Yet the world would undoubtedly be a better place if Sophie Scholl were a household name like Anne Frank, another miraculous
young woman from the same period. In addition to an image of how life can be affirmed by a helpless victim, we would have an image of how life can be affirmed by someone who didn’t have to
be a victim at all, but chose to be one because others were. At present, Sophie’s story is not widely known outside the country of her birth: a big light to hide under a bushel. The recent
movie about her has so far not, like
Downfall
, resonated beyond Germany. A Hollywood movie about her life would make her world-famous, but until recently it
was difficult to think of an actress who might be given the starring role. Then Natalie Portman came along. At this point I will seem to digress: but I hope to make a connection later on.

A lot of people must have sat there with their fingers frozen in the popcorn as they watched the then thirteen-year-old
Natalie Portman in
Leon
(known as
The Professional
in the United States) and thought this girl isn’t just good,
she’s
good
. Apart from the happy accident of her enchanting looks, what she emanated was something much more rare: natural moral stature. It could be
said that a movie like
Leon
had to get its natural moral stature from somewhere. But who cared, when the man with the flak emplacement under his raincoat
was taking out the sleazeballs a bunch at a time? While Leon, the taciturn French terminator weirdly resident in New York (How did he score his green card? Did he marry Andie MacDowell?),
wordlessly massacred swarms of heavies, the audience, including myself, chuckled its endorsement in
the dark. In those days, undimmed by the shadow of recent events,
apocalyptic body counts in the streets of New York were popular film fare. Yet I can remember being disturbed by, even a bit disappointed by, the fact that little Natalie Portman was there to
complicate the story—the nice way of saying she spoiled the fun. Usually I enjoy movies about loner hit men using wit, guile and lovingly maintained ordnance to wipe out creepy people who
deserve to die. Value free?
Tant pis
. I even enjoyed the original French version of
Nikita
, which was just about as
value free as the genre can get. In
Nikita
, the hit person of the title didn’t even know whether her targets deserved to be iced or not. She was just
an instrument, a curvy part of her own gun. I still had a whale of a time.

I’m not even sure if movies like that are bad for me. Clearly my pleasure in them taps into the same current of
fantasy by which, finding thieves in my apartment, I ensure that they do not leave alive. In reality, if I found thieves in my apartment they would probably leave with everything of value I
possessed. But in my imagination I suddenly remember that old souvenir Japanese ceremonial sword stashed behind the partition between my bedroom and the
en
suite
bathroom. Having begged for permission with a craven mien superbly feigned, I slink off to take a leak and come back as Toshiro Mifune in
Sanjuro
, scaring the daylights out of them before I even take a swing. What follows is a whirlwind multiplication of the strict Sharia penalty for theft. An idle
reverie no doubt, yet without such fancies I would feel even more helpless about the way the world is going. Like all those young Chinese suit-wearing lower-echelon businessmen scattered through
the world who dote on the omnipotence of some kick-boxing ham actor and thus brighten lives in which they are at the mercy of their own mobile telephones, we need these dreams to live, or we
think we do. What was so bothersome about Natalie Portman’s mere presence in
Leon
was that it set another standard, one which is no dream at all.
It’s a reality; the reality of uncompromising goodness; the unreal reality we find it worrying to hear about, because it would be so hard to live with. Embodying sensitive decency in a role
which asked her to be mad keen about guns and to bare her tiny midriff to the ambiguous gaze of a mature imported assassin with a bad shave, she certainly made the film more
interesting than it might have been, but a touch of quease was hard to wish away. What’s a girl like you doing in a joint like this?

She did it again—or at any rate she did it again for me—in
Beautiful Girls
, a movie I knew nothing about when I first happened to switch it on during some long plane ride. I missed the opening titles and at first didn’t
realize that the perfect little dream girl was Natalie Portman again. It’s a good film. I own a video of it nowadays, and I still find it hard to watch any of it without watching it all.
But there can be no doubt that her scenes stand right out of the picture. In some respects they are designed to. For one thing, they’re written that way. Everywhere else in the picture,
everyone talks the standard, scabrous demotic of any movie about a gang of young American friends growing older, from
Diner
through
The Big Chill
to forever.
Beautiful Girls
is an especially deep reservoir for that kind of talk. I love it: it always was the
quality of the slang that made me envious of America. But Natalie Portman’s character, Marty, talks another language entirely. Marty (when she tells Timothy Hutton her name, you have to be
my age to think no,
you’re
not Marty—Ernest Borgnine is Marty) talks the mandarin dialect of a J. D. Salinger Wise Child. “I just happen
to be the tallest girl in my class.” Where have we heard that proud precocity before? Of course: it’s the upper-crust young English girl in the title story of
For Esme with Love and Squalor
, the one who heals the war-ravaged American soldier’s soul with the benevolent rays of her crystal spirit.