Two students against Hitler

The publication of the notebooks of Hans and Sophie Scholl, animators of the White Rose, a movement of resistance to Hitler, both guillotined in February 1943, does not only intervene in the context of an increasingly concerned historiography to highlight the existence of German interior resistance. It also marks, in a specifically French context, the response of those shocked by the company of Benevolent and the success she met, at the forefront of which the working ankle of edition of these Notebookstheir translator Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat. “” The enjoyment of the executioner will always be much more successful than the suffering of the victims “, He writes in the introduction he gives to the text. Translator of numerous works on the Shoah, in particular of the two volumes of Saul Friedländer on Years of extermination (Seuil, 2008 ; See the review in the life of ideas), he was already indignant in Ordinary holocaustpublished in 2007, of the publishing phenomenon represented by the “ Pornography of death (See the interview with Friedländer and Dauzat in the life of ideas). Thus explains a contrario, according to him, the delay in the publication of the Carnets, published in 1984 in Germany following the six volumes concerning the resistance movements in Bavaria and which waited for more than twenty years for a publisher to make them at the disposal of the French public.

It is also a question, for the prime contractor of the company, of registering in false against the theories which make rest on romantic authors and German idealism the responsibility of Nazism. THE Notebooks de Hans and Sophie Scholl are in fact in the law of training novels whose Werther De Goethe provided the model. How in this totalitarian landscape is explained to the emancipation of some ? How do you come into resistance when we are only twenty years old and no habit of democracy, the Weimar regime having changed in chaos and violence in the early 1930s ? This is the question to which the publication of Notebooks today brings some answers. It is to restore us the share of humanity revealed during the war that this translation of Hans and Sophie Scholl’s notebooks focuses.

The reader who would know nothing about the history of the German interior resistance, nor that of the white rose in particular, would find it difficult to reconstruct the stages to the sole reading of Notebooks. This tells us a lot about the way in which the deepest consciousness of certain individuals emerges, the need to resist Nazism. What Notebooks highlight, it is first of all the environment in which these consciences found to flourish. The letters that Hans intends to his parents like those of his sister Sophie describe the atmosphere of a bourgeois family, whose father, Lutheran, will make prison on several occasions for having publicly denounced the actions of the Führer. The influence of the mother, carrying not only of the values ​​of the Christian faith – it is to her that Hans is addressed when he relates the revelation of which he is the object -, but also of the values ​​of culture, music, literature and humanism, will prove to be no less important.

However, we must beware of a retrospective reading which would mask the inner work then in progress. It is above all the emergence of a conscience and the choice of freedom that we are given to discover, specifying this notion of resistenz which has designated since the 1980s, under the pen of German historians, the behaviors of rejection of Nazism within German society. It is indeed the relationship to history, omnipresent during these years 1939-1943 and yet held at a distance by the protagonists through the transfiguration they give it, which provides its romantic framework to the work and allows you to read the initiatory journey of a group of young people during Nazism. The censorship that was practicing is indeed not solely responsible for the little space that occupies in the correspondence of Hans Scholl and his sister the purely political aspect of events. We can see ourselves, through the affirmation of the power of life in the face of the violence of arms and the exaltation of freedom in counterpoint of a society where the state of exception has replaced the normal march of institutions and amputated part of culture, a return to values ​​which are both those of Christian fraternity and those of a civilization of the Enlightenment which they have barely known.

Thus lights up the distinction often established by historians of the German resistance between the white rose, often qualified as mystical movement, and for example the conjuration of July 20, 1944 which tried to assassinate Hitler for more directly political motifs. The Nazi takeover of the Nazis, Hannah Arendt has shown it well, has not only resulted in political level, but more deeply in the erect of minds. Work to conquer the spirits to which the four children Scholl had a succumbed time, joining in 1933 to the Hitler judgend Despite their father’s opposition. However, they soon became aware of their error. Hans, who had been promoted to squadron chief, joined the Deutsche judgendschaft vom 1.11.1929illegal youth movement. It was for this reason that he was arrested for the first time in November 1937 for subversive conducts. Very quickly, his letters show that there is no longer any illusion of the political intentions of the Nazi regime and the values ​​that drive him.

The first letters are among the most interesting, which describe the emergence of this critical mind. They date from 1937, when Hans carried out his compulsory work period in theArbeitsdienstorganization which then preceded military service. The opposition to Hitler and Nazi oppression is far from being born only from a political denunciation. It has its source in the vision that the young man has gradually has what human destiny should be, in the ideal of purity and absolute which animates him in contact with the awakening of his senses. Even if the Christian faith has its part in its revolt impoltments, it is the reading of the German romantics, but also of Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, Dostoyevski, of the Thoughts de Pascal and French writers like Léon Bloy, Bernanos or Gide, who nourishes in Hans as later in Sophie, student in philosophy, the refusal of any compromise and the requirement of authenticity. Each event therefore brings its stone to this self -construction, whether it is a mountain walk, a concert of classical music or the reading of a book. The echoes of war make a deceased sound, as passed to the filter of this self which is built there at the same time as he tries to escape from it.

What is denounced, even before the atrocities of war is her absurdity and the immobility in which she maintains the bodies and to which she forces the spirits. Sophie, who sees her commitment period in the Labor Service – “ I will be an old lady before I can start my studies (P. 279) – Hans sent to the confrontation grounds without ever being directly at the front because of his nurse work, between two periods when he studied medicine in Munich, both complain about lost time. He is then used to think about his own self. Sophie’s letters, if they sometimes pierce more exaltation than those of her brother, indeed reserve the same place for introspection. From his commitment to the Labor Service, where the maintenance of war is the harvesting of the war, to the studies of philosophy companies in Munich under the wing of his brother and to the commitment following her in the denunciation of the regime, Sophie, even more than Hans, wonders about the influence of such a brutal event on singular destinies.

Activities of the White Rose, correspondence says nothing, also that of those who joined the brother and the sister in their movement. We must guess the shift that occurs at Hans in contact with the Russian Front, where the worst abuses occur, and to the visit of the Warsaw ghetto, imposing the transition to action. The role of anti -Jewish persecution will indeed be decisive in the entry into resistance. The first four leaflets are sent between June 27 and July 12, 1942. They denounced the Nazi regime in philosophical terms and call the intellectuals to which they were intended to react. They openly evoke the genocide of the Jews and raises the question of German responsibility by already wondering about knowing how a nation so civilized can thus reach the pinnacle of barbarism. They also detail the means available to the Germans to fight the Nazis by multiplying the actions of counter-propaganda and sabotage. The fifth leaflet is distributed between January 27 and 29, 1943.

The arrest of their father, following a denunciation, and the ban on him to exercise a profession, as well as the death of a friend, Ernst Reden, fell on the Russian front, will strengthen the group’s will to take action. The contact made during the month of November 1942 with the brother of one of the leaders of the Red Orchestra, arrested and sentenced to death, persuades Hans Scholl that it is time to act on a directly political level. Also the “ Call to all Germans “, Which now targets the entire population, is it posted in different cities in Germany. A sixth and last leaflet, after Stalingrad, distributed despite all the precautions for use within the very grounds of the university by the two students, led to their arrest. They were tried and executed on February 22, 1943 at Stadelheim prison in Munich. In her last letter, Sophie wrote that “ Everyone rejects this common fault on the others, everyone frees from it and continues to sleep, calm conscience. But we must not dissociate others, everyone is guilty, guilty, guilty ! “, Showing that political maturity is inseparable from self -fulfillment.