White Rose - in The Media

In The Media

The following is a non-exhaustive chronological account of some of the more notable treatments of the White Rose in media, book and artistic form.

The New York Times published articles on the first White Rose trials on March 29, 1943 and April 25, 1943, entitled "Nazis Execute 3 Munich Students For Writing Anti-Hitler Pamphlets" and "Germans Clinging to Victory Hope in Fear of Reprisals," respectively. Though they did not correctly record all of the information about the resistance, the trials, and the execution, they were the first acknowledgement of the White Rose in the United States.

Beginning in the 1970s, three film accounts of the White Rose resistance were produced. The first was a film financed by the Bavarian state government entitled Das Versprechen' (The Promise) and released in the 1970s. The film is not well known outside Germany, and to some extent even within the country. It was particularly notable in that unlike most films, it showed the White Rose from its inception and how it progressed. In 1982, Percy Adlon's Fünf letzte Tage (The Last Five Days) presented Lena Stolze as Sophie in her last days from the point of view of her cellmate Else Gebel. In the same year, Stolze repeated the role in Michael Verhoeven's Die Weiße Rose (The White Rose).

A book, Sophie Scholl and the White Rose, was published in English in February 2006. An account by Annette Dumbach and Dr. Jud Newborn tells the story behind the film Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, focusing on the White Rose movement while setting the group's resistance in the broader context of German culture and politics and other forms of resistance during the Nazi era.

As mentioned earlier, Udo Zimmermann composed a chamber opera about the White Rose (Weiße Rose) in 1986. Premiering in Hamburg, it went on to earn acclaim and a series of international performances.

Lillian Garrett-Groag's play, The White Rose, premiered at the Old Globe Theatre in 1991. Several plays have also been written by teachers in the USA for performance by students.

In Fatherland, an alternate history novel by Robert Harris, there is passing reference to the White Rose still remaining active in supposedly Nazi-ruled Germany in 1964.

In an extended German national TV competition held in the autumn of 2003 to choose "the ten greatest Germans of all time" (ZDF TV), Germans under the age of 40 placed Hans and Sophie Scholl in fourth place, selecting them over Bach, Goethe, Gutenberg, Willy Brandt, Bismarck, and Albert Einstein. Not long before, women readers of the mass-circulation magazine Brigitte had voted Sophie Scholl as "the greatest woman of the twentieth century".

In 2003, a group of students at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas established The White Rose Society dedicated to Holocaust remembrance and genocide awareness. Every April, the White Rose Society hands out 10,000 white roses on campus, representing the approximate number of people killed in a single day at Auschwitz. The date corresponds with Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Memorial Day. The group organizes performances of The Rose of Treason, a play about the White Rose, and has rights to show the movie Sophie Scholl – Die letzten Tage (Sophie Scholl: The Final Days). The White Rose Society is affiliated with Hillel and the Anti-Defamation League.

In February 2005, a movie about Sophie Scholl's last days, Sophie Scholl – Die letzten Tage (Sophie Scholl: The Final Days), featuring actress Julia Jentsch as Sophie, was released. Drawing on interviews with survivors and transcripts that had remained hidden in East German archives until 1990, it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in January 2006. An English language film, The White Rose, was in development for a time in 2005/06, to be directed by Angelica Huston and starring Christina Ricci as Sophie Scholl, but has since been abandoned, as it no longer appears on the Internet Movie Database site. Another American film project about the White Rose continues to be under development by co-author Jud Newborn of the 2006 book Sophie Scholl and the White Rose.

White Rose has inspired many people around the world, including many anti-war activists in recent years. Scattered throughout 2007-2008, 5 hoax pipe bombs were placed at various military recruitment centers with the words "Die Weisse Rose" written upon them.

In February 2009, a biography of Sophie Scholl, Sophie Scholl: The Real Story of the Woman Who Defied Hitler, was published in English by the History Press. The book, by the Oxford-educated British historian Frank McDonough, includes material related to Hans Scholl and featured in the national press in the UK and rose up the best seller lists. This renewed interest in Hans and Sophie Scholl led to the first ever showing on UK national television of Sophie Scholl: The Final Days on Channel 4 in March 2009.

The UK-based genocide prevention student network Aegis Students uses a white rose as their symbol in commemoration of the White Rose movement. There are numerous study guides to the White Rose, notably one available from the University of Minnesota's Holocaust Center.

In 2009, Dan Fesperman published a novel entitled The Arms Maker of Berlin in which activities by real and fictional White Rose characters play a significant role in the story.

In 2011, a documentary film by André Bossuroy addressing the memory of the victims of Nazism and of Stalinism ICH BIN, with the support from the Fondation Hippocrène and from the EACEA Agency of the European Commission (Programme Europe for citizens – An active European remembrance), RTBF, VRT. Four young Europeans meet with historians and witnesses of our past… They investigate the events of the Second World War in Germany (the student movement of the White Rose in Munich), in France (the Vel d'Hiv Roundup in Paris, the resistance in Vercors) and in Russia (Katyn Forest massacre).They examine the impact of these events; curious to how the European peoples are creating their identities today.