The name ‘Hans Scholl’ instantly calls forth associations with his sister Sophie, their circle of friends at the
Universität München, and the resistance group known as
Die Weiße Rose.
And this resistance group will prompt associations with other resistance groups, like the Freiburger Kreis and the groups around Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Claus von Stauffenberg, as well as individuals like Maximilian Kolbe and Oskar Schindler.
Pondering the many groups and individuals who resisted the Nazi regime and its murderous activities, questions arise about motives. Why did they resist? What gave them the courage and motivation? These networks and their people achieved great things, but did so at a terrible risk to their own lives — risks which often resulted in their deaths.
Among the Germans in Germany, as well as the ethnic Germans in nearby lands, there were many in the educated elite who prided themselves on being a Kulturvolk — a civilized, educated, and cultured group. This attitude was certainly one of the motivating factors in the early phases of the resistance movement.
The educated aristocrats considered Hitler and his Nazi thugs to be boorish and brutish, unsophisticated and anti-intellectual. They responded with disgust when Hitler’s National Socialist Party took over the government and began to manage and control cultural institutions. It was natural that they should resist.
But it was also natural that their resistance would be limited.
When it became clear exactly how risky it was to oppose the National Socialists, and when it became clear that the risk was so great as to be nearly suicidal, high culture and advanced education often did not provide sufficient motivation to face torture and death as consequences for smuggling Jews to freedom and safety, for underming the efficiency of the war effort, or for provoking one’s fellow citizens to critical thought about Hitler.
Those whose resistance was based simply on their academic and intellectual standards, and on their love of fine art, quietly acquiesced and stopped resisting.
Those who continued resisting, who were willing to risk their own lives, who were willing to endure torture and imprisonment, were those who found a deeper and higher reason for resistance: those who found a more profound motivation and who found empowerment from something, or someone, greater than themselves.
In his essay Wer hält Stand?, Dietrich Bonhoeffer expresses well the failure of lesser motives. Those who were prompted by ethics and aesthetics to resist Hitler ultimately found that these ideas or ideals were not enough to strengthen them as they faced evil.
In this analysis, Bonhoeffer echoes, knowingly or unknowingly, Kierkegaard’s paradigm, in which an individual experiences the collapse of the aesthetic realm, prompting him to rise to the ethical realm; the individual then experiences the collapse of the ethical realm, prompting him to rise yet again to the spiritual realm.
In this Bonhoeffer-Kierkegaard schema, those who objected to Hitler because he was coarse, unrefined, uneducated, etc., found eventually that this aristocratic opposition to Hitler’s National Socialism failed when they were called upon to risk their lives.
Likewise, a purely ethical opposition to National Socialism’s genocidal evil proved insufficient: many saw that Hitler was evil, but such mere knowledge did not move them to act, much less to risk, or even to sacrifice, their lives.
A letter written by Hans Scholl, who'd seen combat as a soldier, in August 1942 captures this thought well:
Die Kunst soll eine erhöhte Heiterkeit in die Welt tragen, hat Hubert heute zitiert. Ach, ich bin müde. Ich finde diese Kunst im Augenblick nicht mehr.
Wo ist sie jetzt? Bei Dostojewsky nicht. Hier nicht. Im Bunker nicht und nicht draußen in der Mondnacht. Ich habe keine Musik bei mir. Ich höre nur Tag und Nacht das Stöhnen der Gequälten, wenn ich träume, die Seufzer der Verlassenen, und wenn ich nachdenke, enden meine Gedanken in der Agonie.
Wenn Christus nicht gelebt hätte und nicht gestorben wäre, gäbe es wirklich gar keinen Ausweg. Dann müßte alles Weinen grauenhaft sinnlos sein. Dann müßte man mit dem Kopf gegen die nächste Mauer rennen und sich den Schädel zertrümmern. So aber nicht.
Hans mentions his friend Hubert Furtwängler, who’d quoted to Hans something which they’d probably read or heard as students at the university. What Hubert said was something that corresponds to Kierkegaard’s notion of an aesthetic phase, and something that would have been a common notion among the German educated elite of that time. But Hans rejects, or finds insufficient, the notion that art can save humanity. Hans finds himself in a grim reality in August 1942, and art seems impotent in that moment.
Hans, like most of his family, was certainly a Kulturmensch, his journals, letters, and conversations being filled with allusions to Dostoevsky, Aristotle, Dürer, Plato, Franz Schubert, Kant, Hegel, etc. Yet being a Kulturmensch failed to provide comfort, meaning, inspiration, guidance, or motivation in the face of horrific evil. Neither aesthetic reflection nor ethical reflection could sustain Hans in this situation.
In the end, it is only the presence and reality of a higher power that provides an Ausweg — a way out. Yet the “way out” is a “way in” — it leads Hans into a firmer conviction that he must be part of a resistance movement, even if it means risking his life.
Without the presence of a higher power, every grief would be grauenhaft sinnlos — horrifyingly senseless. Then one could only turn one’s self over to self-destruction.
Instead, Hans finds renewed meaning, renewed direction, and renewed empowerment. Like his friends in Die Weiße Rose group, like Bonhoeffer and Max Kolbe and thousands of others, Hans finds that which will sustain him and empower him to move forward in his resistance work, clear-eyed about the risks and about the ultimate price which Hans and his friends would pay.
