Film review: Sophie Scholl – The Final Days

SBS seem to be on something of a theme lately, screening a number of films about the lives of young women under fascism. I’ve already reviewed two such films in recent months (El Calentito and Las 13 Rosas), so it was with another review in mind that I watched Sophie Scholl – The Final Days on Wednesday night. In the lead role was Julia Jentsch, whose other politically-themed roles include The Edukators, where she played a member of a group of young anti-capitalist activists who break into the houses of rich people, but ‘educate’ them rather than steal from them. This film is based on a true story – that of the eponymous twenty-one year-old Bavarian, a member of an anti-Nazi non-violent resistance group called the White Rose who was executed for treason in 1943 after distributing subversive pamphlets at her university.

At the beginning of what would prove to be an otherwise macabre film, one couldn’t help but be enchanted by the use of old-school methods of political communication. Watching Sophie, her brother Hans, and their friends mimeograph pamphlets to be direct-mailed or dropped at their university in between lectures evoked a yearning for something that is missing from modern politics. Before the thirty-second soundbite and the twenty-four-hour news cycle, any organised group could get its message heard – even under the most infamous dictatorship in human history. It was here, however, that Sophie and Hans would be caught by the authorities, beginning a process which would lead to their deaths.

There were many parallels between Sophie’s experience and that of Verónica Sánchez’s Julia in Las 13 Rosas: the use of underground anti-fascist pamphlets, interrogation scenes with a young female being tormented by a uniformed fascist, the background noise of radio speeches made by the Führer or Caudillo, the camaraderie between women imprisoned for political crimes, the show trials in which they were let down by hapless defence lawyers, and the characters’ naïve hopes that foreign intervention would liberate their country from fascism before their eventual executions. In both films, the lead character’s virtue is imparted via their comparative lack of political engagement – Sophie dodges the detective’s questions by describing herself and her acquaintances as “apolitical”, and is propelled to political action not by ideology but by her faith (Lutheran, if you’re playing along at home); Julia owns about five pieces of socialist literature. This, as well as the fact that the White Rose’s membership probably didn’t run into double digits and its activities didn’t go beyond distributing literature, illustrated well the paranoia of totalitarian regimes, for whom any activity outside their control is seen as a threat.

Besides being a small-time amateur operation, the members of the White Rose were not originally drawn together by politics. This isn’t covered in the film (which, as the title indicates, focuses on the final days of Sophie’s life), but the group was brought together through a shared interest in cultural pursuits and a background in the so-called ‘German youth movement’, a cultural phenomenon similar to Scouting which the Nazis took over and exploited for their own ends. There is an even more intriguing angle, however – Jud Newborn, an author of a book about Sophie Scholl, believes that Hans Scholl was forced out of the official (Nazi-sanctioned) youth movement due to his homosexuality, and that this caused the two siblings to side with the victims of the Nazi state. If true, this reminds us of the obsession which reactionary political movements have of policing the bodies of women, LGBTs, and minorities. (It also provides a link with the storyline of El Calentito, where the transsexual bar owner and her friend don’t need a political science degree to know that franquismo is bad for their health.)

The centrepiece of the film was not the trial but the multiple interrogation scenes in which Sophie is quizzed by Gestapo officer Robert Mohr. Initially, Sophie denies any involvement in the pamphleteering, but confesses forty-five minutes into the film. In explaining her opposition to the Nazi regime, she initially hides behind her belief that the war is unwinnable, an idea formulated based on her brother’s and fiancé’s military experiences (both have seen action at Stalingrad). Then, she reveals her humanism and idealism. She has seen a Jewish schoolteacher beaten, disabled children taken away to be killed (with the assistance of nuns), and dreams of a unified, peaceful Europe. She speaks of her concern that the German people will be reviled throughout history for their actions during the war.

Sophie’s talk of freedom and human rights is scoffed at by Mohr. “Democracy only let me be a tailor,” he yells at her at one point, before rattling off the Weimar Republic’s ills (hyperinflation, political instability, etc.) as his reasons for supporting Nazism. The portrayal of Mohr reminded me of Hannah Arendt’s description of Adolf Eichmann in Eichmann in Jerusalem – someone not particularly demonic, but whose middling life prospects compelled them to seek acceptance in a cause greater than themselves, in which the bureaucratisation of twentieth-century life allowed them to hide behind rules and procedures whilst committing unspeakable evil. Just as the high school dropout and former vacuum cleaner salesman Eichmann could tell himself that he was simply carrying out his tasks as a functionary when he sent Jews to the gas chambers, the tailor-turned-detective Mohr has no qualms about having a twenty-one year-old woman executed because the law wills it. On multiple occasions, he brandishes his pocket copy of the Reich’s criminal code, including when he mocks Sophie’s belief that humans are answerable to a higher power than mere law.

The film ends on an ambiguous note. Sophie is graphically depicted being positioned horizontally in order to fit her neck into the guillotine which would execute her, with her last words being (apparently with some historical licence) “the sun still shines” – last words which reminded me of Galileo’s (“and yet it moves”). One of the pamphlets made by the White Rose is smuggled to Britain, where it is mass-produced and then dropped over German cities by the Royal Air Force. The foreign liberation that Sophie hoped for would come to late to save her, and would produce decades of geopolitical stalemate and the division of Germany. Just like Madrid’s republicans in 1939, the German Resistance’s lack of domestic support condemned it to plead for the help of the international community, which either doesn’t come (as in Spain) or comes at a hefty price (as in Soviet-occupied eastern Germany).

Explaining what happened in Germany between 1933 and 1945 is in many ways the ultimate challenge for the political scientist. My own interpretation meshes together the thesis of Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism with a broader understanding of European genocides against non-European peoples, notably illustrated in Sven Lindqvist’s Exterminate All the Brutes. Arendt focuses on the transition of statecraft from the ‘government of men’ to the ‘administration of things’, which she traces to the control of Western states by industrial capitalists and to the need of those states to control the societies of their colonies. (George Orwell detailed similar outlines of this phenomenon in his critiques of American Trotskyist-cum-neoconservative thinker James Burnham, who welcomed the New Deal, Stalinism, and Nazism and the managerial class those systems produced.) The mass genocides carried out by Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, per Arendt, were made possible by the ability of public functionaries to hide behind bureaucratic procedure and to not think about the human consequences of the orders they were carrying out. As mentioned above, the film’s portrayal of Robert Mohr and Arendt’s description of Adolf Eichmann exemplify this archetype.

Lindqvist’s book is a sketch of various atrocities committed by European states, corporations, and peoples against their colonial subjects during the late Victorian zenith of imperialism. When I read the book as an undergraduate, the most chilling passage was his description of the genocide of the Herero people of (present-day) Namibia by Wilhelmine Germany in 1897. The final sentence of the passage notes that Adolf Hitler was only eight years old at the time, as if to remind the reader that he didn’t invent the idea of exterminating en masse disfavoured ethnic groups. Everything the Nazis did was copied from someone else – concentration camps were first used by the British during the Boer War, many American states had extensive eugenics programs which inspired the Nazis’ own, and the Führer told his generals to govern occupied Poland as the British had governed India. When Mohr responds to Sophie’s tear-jerking description of the round-up of mentally disabled children to be killed by breathlessly saying “they deserved to die”, he was only expressing an all-too-common view among those in power at the time. (It would take the Holocaust to make eugenics unfashionable, but it still lives on in certain quarters, having arguably made its way into Malthusian rhetoric about ‘overpopulation’.)

In Nazi Germany, the twentieth-century disease of bureaucratic managerialism collided with a history of imperialism and genocide wrought by Europeans against subject peoples since Columbus’ landing in the Americas. Like El Calentito and Las 13 Rosas, Julia Jentsch’s portrayal of Sophie Scholl brilliantly depicts the street-level and human-scale consequences of the decisions taken by powerful men in Madrid and Berlin.