What makes a nation great? Faced with this question in 1808, when practically the whole of the German-speaking world was under French control, Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria created the Walhalla, a temple of German-ness towering over the Danube. Historian Neil MacGregor called this building the ‘highest form of passive resistance’, a bit like a National Portrait Gallery created as a first step to national liberation. Among the many busts of emperors, politicians and poets, one finds a bust of the young student Sophie Scholl, a 21-year old student of biology and philosophy who, together with her brother Hans, was executed in 1943 for urging fellow students at Munich University to oppose the Nazi-regime by means of illegal leaflets. The story of Sophie and Hans has been subject of at least two films The White Rose (1982) and Sophie Scholl. The Final Days (2005) and many TV-adaptations. Every German town and village seems to have a street or a school named after Sophie and Hans, and every bookshop seems to stock books by and on them. Interestingly, these books can often be found in the spirituality section, and not in the history section where you might have expected them. Luckily, Paul Shrimpton's book Conscience before Conformity, helps to explain this specific point to the English-speaking world. The reason why Sophie, and Hans, are great role models for the German nation is that they dared to let their Christian informed consciences speak against the Nazi-regime while living, studying, and working in the midst of it, knowing that they would pay with their lives for this bravery.
Shrimpton's book takes an original angle to study the history of the Scholls and their resistance group. He argues that the Scholls were deeply influenced by the writings on conscience by the nineteenth century theologian John Henry Newman (1801-1890). He develops this point starting with Newman's reception in Germany in the inter-war years, highlighting the work and translations of the philosopher and cultural historian Theodor Haecker (1879-1945). Haecker was driven by the conviction that by the early 1930s his country had descended into a cruel national egotism and ethnocentrism that justified itself by means of Darwinian racial science. He described the ‘modern intellectual man’ of his day as someone who is no longer spiritual, who is ‘the ambiguous fudge of good and evil, wanting in all decision, and incapable of saying ‘no’ to anything’ (p. 12). One wonders what Haecker would have made of today's consumerist society enthralled by social media and often misled by strong opinions and ‘fake news’?
In the subsequent chapters, Shrimpton presents the lives and actions of the Scholl siblings. He makes ample use of the letters that they exchanged with their family and friends. What is unique in Shrimpton's presentation of these letters is that he points out to the intellectual and spiritual growth that both brother and sister experience as they first try to make sense of their lives within the Third Reich and their growing concern that what their nation experiences should be opposed. Shrimpton does not shy away from the fact that, initially, the Scholl family was a very well established, well-off household within the Nazi-regime, although the father of the family, a major, never hid his discontent with the regime. This caused him to be imprisoned for a time.
Both Hans and Sophie were enthusiastic members of the Hitler Jugend. However, slowly, but surely, their eyes were opened. Both brother and sister dare to be different, which, initially consisted in studying the sort of poetry, philosophy, and theology that the regime had forbidden. In this way, the Scholls came to know Newman's writings on conscience. Shrimpton then carefully tries to reconstruct, although sometimes one gets the impression that he also actively constructs, the impact of the encounter with the Christian, Catholic, intellectual traditions of Newman, Przywara, and Maritain on the students and their friends as they engage in writing and distributing pamphlets against the regime.
After the Second World War, Sir Winston Churchill said that ‘the political history of all nations has hardly produced anything greater and nobler than the opposition which existed in Germany. These people fought without any help…driven only by the uneasiness of their consciences.’ (p. 279). Shrimpton's book is a tribute to a kind of political theology that developed from informed Christian consciences under great duress. Had the Scholls been Catholic and not Lutheran, then the Roman Catholic Church would, in all likelihood, have recognised them as saints. However, I am sure that the wide recognition of the Scholls in Germany as role models for students, their mark on the German historical conscience, Sophie's place in the ‘Walhalla’, can be seen as a kind of secular recognition of this heroic, but hidden, Christian sainthood.
