Beyond the Multiplex

Sophie and her brother Hans (Fabian Hinrichs), along with a handful of other Munich university students who made up a group called the White Rose, engaged only in mild resistance: They were evangelical Protestants who dared to distribute leaflets criticizing Hitler's destructive war and the massacre of innocents on the Eastern front, and to spread reports that Jews and others were being sent to concentration camps. (The full scale of the Holocaust was not yet known, but the White Rose students had a pretty solid inkling.)

But as the film makes clear, their activities seemed especially dangerous to the functionaries of Nazism. The leaflets themselves are extraordinary: "Every word that comes from Hitler's mouth is a lie," one announces. "For Hitler and his followers, there is no punishment on Earth commensurate with their crimes." It ends: "We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!"

Indeed, the students were hoping to prod the conscience of the German people, who by 1943 were at least dimly aware that they were losing the war and that something prodigiously rotten was happening beneath all that virile, Fatherland propaganda and Hitler's increasingly nutzoid oratory. At their show trial before one of Hitler's shrieking, attack-dog judges, the Scholls -- both in the film and in real life -- calmly observe that he and the rest of the court officers will soon be standing before the bar of judgment, and that the world is not likely to judge them kindly. One lawyer present remembered later that the faces of people in the courtroom were "pale with fear -- the fear that spread outward from the judge's desk."

This reversal, in which Sophie and her brother, en route to inevitable conviction and execution, seem more like legitimate authorities than those prosecuting them, lies at the heart of the picture. Sophie's confrontation with a Gestapo interrogator named Mohr (Gerald Alexander Held), a more or less regular German, a career cop who is a fellow traveler rather than a committed Nazi, is Rothemund's centerpiece. At first Sophie lies to save herself, as anyone would, and nearly succeeds in escaping. But as the truth emerges she becomes increasingly defiant, and when Mohr tries to offer a deal that will save her life, it seems increasingly that he is begging her for some kind of redemption or forgiveness he won't find.

All that might be dry Dostoevskian philosophical drama if not for the actors involved. In Jentsch's extraordinary performance, Sophie is a real girl with no death wish, who must face the fact that her predicament, both personally and ethically, can have no other conclusion. Held, meanwhile, makes you see Mohr's humanity without losing sight of the horrible compromises he has made. He longs for Sophie to see the reasonableness, the common sense, of his actions, but no longer believes in them himself.

Americans have barely heard of Sophie Scholl or the White Rose. But she's incredibly famous in Germany, right?

We have 190 schools in Germany named after Sophie Scholl. When the biggest German TV station asked the audience who were the best Germans of all times, [former West German Chancellor] Konrad Adenauer won, but Hans and Sophie Scholl were rated No. 4. People under 30, however, voted Hans and Sophie Scholl far ahead.

Why are younger people so interested in an episode that, as dramatic as it was, occurred more than 60 years ago?

I think and hope that they share the same interest that I have. We are the grandchildren's generation. You know, after World War II Germany was totally destroyed, and it took many years to reconstruct the country. Then, after 1961 there was the Cold War. In 1990 there was unification, which was very emotional for all Germans, East and West. Now Germany is reconstructed, reunited, and there is no Cold War. Our minds are open for the grandchildren to ask questions of their grandparents.

I am a director of the last generation that can ask eyewitnesses. The murderers, the resistance fighters, the followers [he actually said "follow-men," which is a terrific word] -- they all will die in the next few years. It's the last chance to ask them about what happened, and I think this is rather magical. Many people like me ask their grandparents about this time, and the majority -- of course the murderers, but also the follow-men, because they have a bad conscience -- refuse totally to talk about it. Why they shouted "Heil Hitler!" why they took the money [from murdered or exiled Jews] without asking where the money came from.

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