by Elizabeth Ward
In: The White Rose. Reading, Writing, Resistance edited by Alexandra Lloyd
Treasures of the Taylorian, 2019
ISBN: 978-0995456440
On first viewing, it could be argued that Marc Rothemund’s 2005 film, Sophie Scholl—Die letzten Tage (Sophie Scholl—The Final Days) breaks little new ground. Two feature films, Michael Verhoeven’s Die Weiße Rose (The White Rose, 1982) and Percy Adlon’s Fünf letzte Tage (Five Last Days, 1982), had already depicted the White Rose on screen, the latter of which had also focused on the final days of Sophie Scholl.
Rothemund’s film was by no means an isolated example of a renewed interest in resistance in the Third Reich: Max Färberböck’s Aimée & Jaguar (1999), Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosenstraße (2003), Volker Schlöndorff’s Der neunte Tag (The Ninth Day, 2004), Niko von Glasow’s Edelweißpiraten (Edelweiss Pirates, 2004), and Jo Baier’s Stauffenberg (2004) all deal with themes of resistance in German cinema. Despite their different perspectives on the National Socialist past, these films are united by one core feature: they are made for audiences with no direct memory of, let alone involvement in, the events depicted. This historical estrangement called for a new approach in depicting the Third Reich, and it is striking how these films repeatedly draw upon universalising narratives above explicitly politicising forms of ‘working through’ the past (Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit), as was the case in the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic. In doing so, they frequently depict how exceptional individuals in the Third Reich paved the way for a new, democratic order in postwar Germany. Rothemund’s Sophie Scholl is no exception.
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Elizabeth Ward 