Sophie was understandably tempted at times to dismiss as hopeless the entire human race.
Fritz Hartnagel was Sophie’s fiance. She wrote to him in a letter dated May 29, 1940:
Ich könnte heulen, wie gemein die Menschen auch in der großen Politik sind, wie sie ihren Bruder verraten um eines Vorteils willen vielleicht. Könnte einem da nicht manchmal der Mut vergehen? Oft wünsche ich mir nichts, als auf einer Robinson-Crusoe-Insel zu leben.
Hartnagel was an officer in the army, and passionate supporter of the same resistance movement that Sophie served. He used his position as an insider in the military to aid the resistance secretly. He and Sophie shared their thoughts deeply and frequently, speaking in person, and writing when apart.
He’d joined the army in 1936, and remained in the army until the war’s end, surrendering in April 1945, more than two years after Sophie’s execution at the hands of the National Socialists.
Sophie points out that it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to live in society and not be affected by the exploitation which people habitually inflict on one another. She sees that much of the time, many people regard everyone and everything primarily as potential instruments for their own advancement. People are seen as instruments.
This objectification — some might use the word ‘othering’ — of people is a primary evil, from which secondary evils can arise.
The ‘othering’ here is not based on a variable about the person being made into an instrument — i.e., is not based on the usual socio-demographic variables of skin color, ethnicity, etc. — This is a different type, a more elemental type of othering, based purely on the fact that the other can be used to one’s advantage. In this type of othering, the other might be quite similar to the self, across all those variables, and yet be objectified; while someone quite different by those same metrics might be left in peace.
So ubiquitous is this tendency to see others as mere instruments that Sophie ponders the possibility that one would need to be “bad in order to remain alive,” that this evil corrupts all who live in society — hence to previous musing about living alone on a desert island.
Manchmal bin ich versucht, die Menschheit als eine Hautkrankheit der Erde zu betrachten. Aber nur manchmal, wenn ich sehr müde bin, und die Menschen so groß vor mir stehen, die schlimmer als Tiere sind. Aber im Grunde kommt es ja nur darauf an, ob wir bestehen, ob wir uns halten können in der Masse, die nach nichts anderem als nach Nutzen trachtet. Denen, um ihr Ziel zu erreichen, jedes Mittel recht ist. Diese Masse ist so überwältigend, und man muß schon schlecht sein, um überhaupt am Leben zu bleiben. Wahrscheinlich hat es bisher nur ein Mensch fertig gebracht, ganz gerade den Weg zu Gott zu gehen. Aber wer sucht den heute noch?
Yet Sophie sees that her view of humanity is so negative especially when she is especially tired, and especially when she is surrounded by the very worst of people.
Presumably — she does not quite explicitly state it — at other times, she is able to have a more merciful view of humanity: not ignoring or excusing its evil, but rather to note that each person’s mission is to be “on the way to God,” and that people make indirect routes with detours.
The challenge for Sophie, and for all people, is to have no illusions about the grave evil which is afoot in the world, and yet at the same time not to give up on the human race: not to dismiss humanity as hopelessly corrupt. One meets this challenge by being “on the way to God” in one’s own imperfect manner.
