Pink Floyd always was, and still is, wildly popular and successful here in Germany. The legendary rock group’s former bass player and singer, Roger Waters (above), still has quite a following here too as a successful solo artist. That following does not, however, include the German government, nor does it include supporters of the current government of Israel, who last fall successfully petitioned the broadcasting honchos who run Germany’s public television network ARD to drop a planned live concert by Mr Waters from the programming schedule. The grounds: as a supporter of the BDS boycott movement and a passionate advocate of justice for Palestine, Waters was accused of being an “antisemite”.

Israel’s interests, whether real or imagined, carry a good bit of weight here in the former stomping grounds of Herr H and his millions of supporters, which included a great many who simply had no idea what was going on in those concentration camps -- if they are to be taken at their word -- and now there are even more millions of their children and grandchildren who sincerely feel deep shame and revulsion at what was done by their relatives and their country. Understandably, they want the world to know that times have changed in the land where the Holocaust was organized and administered.

Dr. Norman Finkelstein: tireless campaigner against Zionism's crimes and hypocrisies.

Jews were not the only group targeted and murdered en masse, which may come as a surprise to some. But thanks to what the courageous academic, author, and crusader for Palestinian rights Dr. Norman Finkelstein calls Israel’s and Judaism’s “Holocaust Industry”, there is no danger that those Jewish victims of Nazi bloodlust will ever be forgotten. This cannot necessarily be said of the many Sinti and Roma, gays, disabled persons and others who shared that horrible fate. [Not to mention communists, socialists and other sworn political foes of fascism.] We don’t know how many of those others were wiped out, but we all know how many Jews were murdered: six million. Most people who are not illiterate can tell you that number immediately. Dr. Finkelstein is a Jew, both of whose parents were interned in concentration camps by the Nazis. It should not be possible to tar him as an “antisemite” but the Israeli government does it anyway, as is also the case with members of the group Jewish Voice for Peace and many other Jews now banned from entering the country. Finkelstein’s honesty and passion for justice also cost him a professorship at DePaul University. His new book has just been published.

Times have in fact changed. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish persons are now living in Germany again, their numbers growing pretty rapidly. A great many of them are young people moving from Israel to live in ultra-hip Berlin. I have never been in Israel, although for years I was related by marriage to a good many orthodox Jews, but I have been in Berlin many times and I can easily imagine that it might be more pleasant for many young Israelis to blend into that multicultural megalopolis than to remain at the eye of the Zionist storm, especially if one does not identify strongly with the religious aspects of Israeli culture (as many of these Israeli immigrants do not).

Berlin is surrounded by the former Deutsche Demokratische Republik, communist East Germany as it was then, now once again part of the (dare I say it?) Fatherland. Most East Germans could not be reunified with the Klassenfeind (“class enemy”) fast enough after the “fall of the wall” in 1989, but these days an awful lot of them are very disillusioned and disappointed, as are many others in the former Soviet Bloc. The majority of those Eastern Europeans renounced the official socialist ideology with obvious pleasure, having apparently never taken it terribly seriously except to the extent one had to in order to stay out of trouble. They tried to walk the capitalist walk and they expected to be welcomed as long-lost brothers. And in many newspaper editorials and speeches by politicians, they were. But 28 years after reunification, in practice those in East Germany are still the objects of West German scorn and arrogance. Many of them have repaid that ongoing slight and condescension by adopting the views and politics of the aforementioned Herr H, expressing their hatred of foreigners, immigrants, refugees and Jews at the drop of a hat, and in many cases going a good bit farther. In some recent years the number of attacks on foreigners and refugees by Germans has reached one thousand for a single year, although it is the rare violent crime by a refugee here that the media continues to find much more horrifying and newsworthy.

Not all German Neo-Nazis and associated sympathizers are East Germans, not by a long shot, but it is fair and accurate to say that the center of ultra-right-wing evil here is the federal state of Saxony. Where Bach and Wagner once made musical history, a different cultural phenomenon is now growing rapidly, and in Saxony that fact actually made the xenophobic Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) Saxony’s biggest political party in the September 2017 parliamentary election (see my article “The German Election: The West’s Nervous Breakdown Continues”). Nationwide, the party hauled in almost 13% of the vote, taking so much support from the ruling Christian Democrats and Social Democrats that, four months later, attempts to form a new governing coalition have not yet succeeded.

Neonazi resurgence is seen in many parts of Europe, includjng Germany.

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]o in Berlin, we now have a large number of Jews living in a single city surrounded by a population which nourishes quite a lot of Neo-Nazi hatred of Jews and immigrants and refugees. It is no surprise that this causes the German government great anxiety. The government was also mortified and embarrassed when a group of demonstrators, which allegedly included many Muslim immigrants, burned Israeli flags at a recent public demonstration in Berlin. That demonstration was organized in response to US President Donald Trump’s announcement that he had decided to move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. This flag-burning so infuriated conservatives in the government – who had already spent much of the last year trying to outdo each other with public displays of anti-refugee zeal, and proposing new measures to deport as many refugees as possible – that they immediately began to demand the deportation of any immigrants unwilling to “accept Israel’s right to exist”, and began as well to propose major new programs and laws against antisemitism. The political dimension of the demonstration was practically never mentioned.

As we have seen, the government here brands most criticism of Israel, including virtually everything to do with the BDS boycott movement, as “antisemitism”. While the German government joins the rest of the EU in officially opposing Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory, calling them “obstacles to peace”, in practice it demands no changes in that policy in exchange for European weapons sales and other support for the Israeli government and military -- exactly like Israel’s Ally Number One, the USA. Last year the German Foreign Minister and Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel was snubbed and publicly humiliated by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who refused to meet with him as scheduled, after Gabriel visited some groups of pro-Palestinian activists in an embarrassingly pathetic and transparent attempt to show some “balance”. Once again, reference was made to the long-dead “Peace Process” as if it still existed. Even this, however, was too much for Bibi, who had not been informed in advance, and immediately cancelled his own scheduled subsequent meeting with Gabriel in a raging hissy-fit, leaving the latter with egg on his face to stammer mild expressions of surprised concern to the media. Gabriel, in typical obsequious German grovel-before-Israel fashion, insisted that while it was all a bit overdone and unnecessary, it would not harm Germany’s ties with Israel in the slightest. Which really says it all, in a nutshell.

Nazis march commemorating Rudolph Hess.

In a speech last year, the German Head of State, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier – himself for many years the Foreign Minister under Merkel, and a former failed Social Democratic candidate to replace her as Chancellor – referred darkly to alleged poorly-disguised antisemitism as the true motive behind much left-wing criticism of Israeli policy. As outrageous as I found this assertion, I was even more outraged by the fact that I heard not one word of public criticism of this sneering smear in subsequent media reaction to the speech. Germany has groveled before Israel so habitually for so long that it is hard to imagine what it would take to arouse any real resistance here to Israeli apartheid and war crimes. During last year’s international arts festival “Documenta”, which takes place every year here in part with government support, the performance of a scheduled theatrical production called “Auschwitz On the Beach” -- which attempts to draw attention to the disgraceful manner in which Germany and the EU are complicit in the drowning deaths and Libyan captivity, torture and slavery of refugees attempting to reach Europe -- was also cancelled. Many Jews and supporters of Israel were furious at the implied comparison between these refugee deaths and the Holocaust, which must in their opinion always be treated as an unparalleled crime unique in history. The festival’s staff quickly capitulated and the only thing most people ever saw of the work was the subsequent controversy, having been denied the opportunity to see it and make their own judgements.

In his 2011 address to the Palestine Center in Washington DC on the occasion of the annual Shirabi Lecture, retired US diplomat Chas Freeman stated: “… the cruelties of Israelis to their Arab captives and neighbors, especially in the ongoing siege of Gaza and repeated attacks on the people of Lebanon, have cost the Jewish state much of the global sympathy that the Holocaust previously conferred on it.  The racist tyranny of Jewish settlers over West Bank Arabs and the progressive emergence of a version of apartheid in Israel itself are deeply troubling to a growing number of people abroad who have traditionally identified with Israel.  Many – perhaps most of the most disaffected – are Jews.  They are in the process of dissociating themselves from Israel.  They know that, to the extent that Judaism comes to be conflated with racist arrogance (as terrorism is now conflated with Islam), Israeli behavior threatens a rebirth of antisemitism in the West.  Ironically, Israel – conceived as a refuge and guarantee against European antisemitism – has become the sole conceivable stimulus to its revival and globalization.  Demonstrably, Israel has been bad for the Palestinians. It is turning out also to be bad for the Jews …”

In the same address Ambassador Freeman stated: “Examples of criminal conduct include mass murder, extra-judicial killing, torture, detention without charge, the denial of medical care, the annexation and colonization of occupied territory, the illegal expropriation of land, ethnic cleansing, and the collective punishment of civilians, including the demolition of their homes, the systematic reduction of their infrastructure, and the de-development and impoverishment of entire regions.  These crimes have been linked to a concerted effort to rewrite international law to permit actions that it traditionally prohibited, in effect enshrining the principle that might makes right.

“As the former head of the Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) Legal Department has argued:

“ ‘If you do something for long enough the world will accept it.  The whole of international law is now based on the notion that an act that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries . . . International law progresses through violations.’ “

In the seven years since those words were written, the situation has only worsened. It is clear to any open-minded observer that much of what the German and Israeli governments insist on describing as growing “antisemitism” is actually growing international revulsion in response to the policies and war crimes of the Israeli government and military, policies and crimes committed with plenty of support from the USA and the EU. Of course there are, and always were, bigots and racists and Neo-Nazis who would and will hate all Jews whatever happens in Palestine. Their numbers may be growing somewhat as well, or they may simply be growing more outspoken about views they have always held, in the current epidemic of nationalist hysteria nourished in particular by social media. But to continue to assert that the true antisemites and the rapidly growing number of persons worldwide – including millions of Jews – who vehemently oppose Israeli ethnic cleansing and military occupation are all motivated by antisemitism, is to be willfully blind.

It does credit to Germany that its citizens and political elites sincerely wish to atone for the sins of the Nazis. It is a crime, however, to insist that Palestinians should pay the price for that atonement.

In fact, many of Germany’s allies have never expressed much regret over their own genocide, massacres, and ethnic cleansing – whether the extermination of 100 million Native Americans in the United States, the murder of an estimated 60 million persons in India under British rule, or the brutal elimination of 10 million in the Congo by Belgium – and Germany itself is refusing demands to pay reparations to Poland and Namibia. But direct reparations to the victims of such historic horrors and their survivors, whether feasible or not, would certainly be a more just means of atonement than support of a colonial racist regime which is itself committing slow genocide against an imprisoned and largely defenseless population.

Germany adds insult to injury when it enshrines in government policy the vicious lie, echoing those equally vicious smears from Tel Aviv, that passionate advocates of the Palestinian cause are motivated by racism.

(Gregory Barrett is an American translator, musician and writer living in Germany.)

Sophie Scholl-
THE FINAL DAYS

My generation has seen that history does repeat itself. We know world wars I and II and we have seen “regime change” in action from country to country, from Libya to Iraq. Those who think that history does not repeat itself might read some of these lines about what once happened and what is happening today.

Sophie with soldiers.

After World War II the area with the great fountain in front of Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilian University (LMU) on the famed Ludwigsstrasse was named the Geschwister Scholl Platz in honor of the anti-Nazi brother and sister Scholl who led the student White Rose resistance movement in 1943 against the Nazi dictatorship. In the main building of the university—in which I also studied in the 1960s—not many years earlier Sophia and Hans Scholl had distributed anti-regime leaflets and paid for it with their lives.

In the best known film about the Scholl siblings, The Final Days, (2005, see addendum) Sophie (Sophia) Scholl joins the White Rose student organization run by her brother Hans. They have prepared copies of their sixth anti-Nazi leaflet. Sophie and Hans place stacks of the leaflets outside university lecture rooms. With only minutes left until the period ends, Sophie then goes to the top floor and pushes the remaining copies over the balustrade. As Hans and Sophie are leaving, a janitor who saw Sophie scatter the leaflets holds them until police arrive and arrest them. The siblings are taken to the Munich Stadelheim Prison and interrogated by the Gestapo. Initially Sophie claims she and Hans had nothing to do with the fliers; she just noticed them in the hall and pushed a stack off the railing because it is in her nature to play pranks. She is about to be dismissed when the order arrives to hold her. The investigation has incontrovertible evidence that Sophie and Hans were responsible for the distribution of anti-Nazi leaflets. Sophie concedes her involvement (as does Hans) but determined to protect the others she maintains that the production and distribution of the leaflets in cities throughout the region were entirely the work of her brother and herself. Sophie argues that before 1933 (the date of the Nazi take-over) laws guaranteed freedom of speech. She then describes atrocities committed by the Nazis including reports of concentration camps related by soldiers returning from the Eastern Front. She assumes all blame, and refuses to name accomplices.

Sophie, her brother and a married friend with three children, Christoph Probst, are charged with treason, troop demoralization and abetting the enemy. In a show trial they are condemned to death. Sophie declares that many people agree with what she and her group have said and written, but they dare not express such thoughts. She has the courage to tell the court that “where we stand today, you (the procurator) will stand soon.” That same day Sophie is guillotined. The blade falls and the picture goes black. Footsteps are heard, then Hans's voice exclaims "Es lebe die Freiheit!" ("Long live Freedom!"), before the blade falls again. Probst is brought in next and the blade falls once more. In the closing shot, thousands of leaflets fall from the sky over Munich. A title explains that copies of the White Rose manifesto were smuggled to Scandinavia and then to England, where the Allies printed millions of copies of the "Manifesto of the Students of Munich" that were subsequently dropped on German cities. The first frames of the credits list the names of the seven members of the White Rose group who were executed, more than a dozen who were imprisoned, and supporters and sympathizers who received draconian punishments.

Twenty-five years later during student rebellions across the West, in Munich Sophia and Hans Scholl were remembered. They were already symbols of resistance; now they became a reminder that history does indeed repeat itself. Courage was the question. Courage has always been the ultimate question for each of us. After all, knowledge requires courage. Again today, in another place and time, I have recalled the Scholls. Maybe that is part of the reason that in recent days I began keeping a Facebook log of manifestations of Fascistic violence throughout Italy, echoing the way it began in the 1930s in Germany, and now what is happening in many places in the world.

December 6, 2017: Fascists-Nazis are on the attack across all of Italy. Today Nazi-Fascist demonstrations in front of the offices of the Liberal La Repubblica, one of Europe's major newspapers, and the leftist Espresso weekly magazine, both in Rome. "We're here to stay, they announce. "No truce now." and they are strong throughout the country. Masked faces, fire bombs in the center of Rome. Fascists-Nazis! No holds barred.

December 7, 2017: militants of Fascist Forza Nuova (New Force) are rampaging throughout Italy. After yesterday's demonstrations at the newspaper, La Repubblica and left-wing weekly Espresso, handmade bombs were planted early this morning in front of a Carabiniere station on Rome's central Piazza San Giovanni. At the same time the press is reporting on extensive million Euro financial dealings of Forza Nuova (FN) in Kiev, Ukraine and in Crimea. These are dangerous signals of the growing Fascist menace and financial maneuvers to support it. Let no one think spreading Fascism in Europe or the USA is merely sensationalistic journalism. It started this way for Hitler in Munich and Mussolini in Rome. The Nazi government in Ukraine is becoming a symbol of what is possible elsewhere. The history of Fascism is being repeated.

December 10, 2017: militants of Forza Nuova and anti-Fascists clashed on the streets of a cold Milan, the capital of north Italy, clashes squashed then by police anti-riot forces. The tam tam of the social networks got many anti-fascists on the streets in record time and the Fascists got the worst of the conflict this time. The Fascists were on the streets to demand that public housing be awarded only to Italians, not immigrants. Opposition to immigrants is a major point on the Fascist agenda which creates support for their organizations such as Forza Nuova in Milan and Casa Pound in Rome, in general, among the lower working classes especially in Italy’s major cities.

Everyday history repeats itself. Especially historical evils. It does not require courage to become aware of what evils are happening around us. Courage is however required to do something about those evils. Before arriving in Munich I had witnessed the first stirrings among the student population in Berkeley. I had admired the fiery orators, and imagined emulating them. I marveled at their awareness and interpretations of the events in the world: the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Wall and the Cold War.

Munich-München: While living in Munich after Slavic studies at Berkeley I began reading my Lenin and my Marx more seriously, more personally, studies which eventually changed my world outlook. I had trouble grasping the historical difficulty of synchronizing European Socialism with Russian Communism and the significance of the concept of revolution. Not that I believed then in the possibility of the resurgence of Nazism that had assassinated its best people; Hitler was dead and gone forever. As was his evil spirit, I thought. But I still did not realize that the much ballyhooed de-nazification never actually took place. Instead the U.S. government had enlisted German Nazis in its war against the Soviet Union. Russia too grabbed the few nuclear scientists it could in its efforts to catch up with America’s nuclear capabilities, while the USA and the Vatican assisted a great number of top Nazis to escape to Latin America. Yet the times of revolution in Europe seemed were over and done, and I accepted the maxim that the history of Nazism could not repeat itself. On the other hand, it became clearer each day that Germany was an instrument of American power—not an ally as some claim today—but a vassal and an occupied country. I had witnessed it happening; authority in new Germany was infested with ex-Nazis. In 1967 the war in Vietnam was raging, over a half million US soldiers were there and the yearly military draft of young Americans growing. In that period German youth looked at everyone over forty with suspicion. Nazi! Fascist! Murderer!

[dropcap]U[/dropcap]niversity students in Munich were becoming infused with the ardor that eventually blossomed into revolutionary 1968 and gave birth to the terrorist Red Army Faktion, also known as the Baader-Meinhoff Gang. Hans and Sophia Scholl had been beheaded only a little over a decade earlier. Die Weisse Rose, the White Rose, might live again.

One precise historical precedent to the 1967-68 student revolt in Munich was remembered by some young people aiming at remaking society: on November 7, 1918 Munich workers led by the bearded Berlin journalist, pure-of-purpose Kurt Eisner had staged a socialist revolution—local and more or less spontaneously—and people discussed the role of “good intentions”—that only good could flow from good—and the eventual emergence of the ideal political leader. It was still disconcerting to me that Eisner’s politics was bloody business. For Eisner’s revolutionary regime—in the words of Max Weber ‘run by poets, semi-poets, mezzo-philosophers and schoolteachers’—left a trail of blood and violence behind it. There is a place in Munich’s Müllerstrasse where the Workers Regime executed a certain Countess Westarp and nine hostages. At some point in those years I read and remembered the Brecht quote: Welche Niedrichkeit würdest Du nicht begehen um die Niedrigkeit abzuschlagen? Eisner’s subsequent electoral defeat and assassination by the anti-Semitic Bavarian aristocrat, Count Anton von Arco-Valley, in April of the next year led to a bloody military repression of the “Socialist” participants in Catholic Bavaria’s only political deviation to the left: in the cellar in the St. Georg Palais the reactionary White Guard shot twenty-one youths of the St. Joseph Gesellenverein. Bavaria was then ripe to become the seedbed of the National Socialism of Adolph Hitler.

And it was from that history that I learned to mistrust “spontaneous revolution” ... if, that is, it is not one of the first stages of the process of real revolution. I deduced that alone spontaneous uprisings and revolts lead to repression, reaction and the crushing of the revolutionary spirit for long periods afterwards. For what kind of a evolution could a Saupreusen journalist (a Prussian pig as real Muncheners called Northerners) organize among unorganized Munich workers who were just hungry and destitute at war’s end, while even the revolt of the Spartacists-Communists led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, with a real party and the best leftist leaders of Germany behind them, was failing in Berlin.

Historians like to pose terrifying “what if questions”. Since, as it seems, Eisner’s ‘purity of purpose’, instead of engendering good, willy-nilly paved the way for evil, the question here is again spontaneity and chance: What if Eisner had not left Berlin for Munich? Would there still have been a Bavarian Socialist State? And if not, would Adolf Hitler still have been welcomed in aristocratic Catholic Bavaria to march with his men down the avenue past Munich’s great university? And would the history of twentieth century Europe have been different? Or would the same Hitler or another Hitler have emerged elsewhere?

Busy as we youth were in the 1960s with the festive side of Munich, Oktoberfest and Carnival parties, my friends and I didn’t often discuss political subjects like Capitalism and Socialism. Yet, my own past in the American South seemed dead and sometimes I heard a summons, like a call to the future, a future that weighed on my past. I began to wonder about that past: if instead I had been born German in the post-WWI period, I too might have fought for the same ideals as Sophia and Hans Scholl; or, like Brecht I too might have committed ‘any vileness in order to eliminate vileness’. Or, I came to realize, if I had been born German of an earlier generation I could have been together with Rosa Luxemburg—or perhaps by a twist of destiny become a National Socialist Nazi.

Time and place are a mystery. Everything seems to be circles and repetitions. And chance. Subjects and objects. Who decides which is which? Who decides such things? Who brings a Hitler to Munich? How and why do people like Hans and Sophia Scholl emerge from the morass? Is that truly all chance? For as Sophia said in her final words: they wanted to regain their past … the past when the law guaranteed freedom of speech. Their image of the past seems to us reconstructed. Personal. Distinct. Makes you realize that the past is always incomplete. And that history is people. So what about the personal courage she displayed? Though interesting, history cannot account for it … nor for cowardice, either. So the closest to truth might be our own interpretations of what we think might have happened … which is not always even close to reality.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]here are times when each single event seems absolute. Eisner in Munich. Rosa Luxemburg in Berlin. I am now cognizant that nothing is absolute, for things are linked and go on changing, fundamentally, and from one moment to the next until you suddenly realize history is repeating itself. So you come to believe less and less in absolutes. You have to mistrust absolutists who demand specific answers, who demand yes or no, who prefer white to black, this to that, and use expressions like ‘in the final analysis’.

It seems I seldom understand what is happening to me while it is happening. And I’m nervous and unclear about what exactly is going on in my world today. But I believe if you open your eyes and begin to really see, you understand everything is ambiguous, ambivalent, two-edged and paradoxical. One says that is life. Still, I am aware of the helplessness you feel when you are unable to see what it is you yourself are doing. Am I alone in that? Or is it the same quagmire with others? I have hated to choose; as if I knew the correct answers and the right choices. I can only guess. I like to think I might have some minimal influence on events—maybe as much as one grain of sand influences the level of the sea. And even if I could exert any influence it might cause damage as political and military leaders prove day by day.
However, in sleepless nights, alone, you might wonder about your own courage. In such moments you might ask yourself: Would I have Sophia’s courage? Courage! The necessary quality, right and just, to awaken awareness of injustice and create dissent. The dissent that can then create the awareness that resistance is the next step … the step toward rebellion and finally revolution.

I believe it was in that period in Munich that I began realizing that I was a social being—another European idea many old friends mistrusted. But I now know, for example, that you can live in America all your life and pay taxes and vote and believe in the Constitution and hang out the flag and hold garage sales and donate to the Red Cross and to missionaries in Africa and go to church on Sunday and always fasten your seat belt and never have an inkling as to what social justice means. One wonders if heroes are born or created by circumstances.

Throughout history heroines like Sophia Scholl have emerged and stepped onto center stage. In the name of justice they have challenged Power by a demand for an apparently normal right even if established Power labels that demand state treason. But always they challenge Power: Antigone, Joan of Arc, Anne Frank and Sophia Scholl.

The question Sophia asked herself was how the individual must act under a dictatorship. She and members of The White Rose instructed Germans to passively resist the Nazi government. The pamphlet used Biblical and philosophical support for an intellectual argument of resistance. In addition to authorship, Scholl helped copy, distribute, and mail pamphlets while also managing the group's finances. She and the rest of the White Rose were arrested for distributing the sixth leaflet at Munich University on 18 February 18, 1943. In the People’s Court on February 22,1943, Scholl was recorded as saying these words:

“Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don't dare express themselves as we did.”

Else Gebel who shared Sophie Scholl's cell recorded her last words before being taken away to be executed: "It is such a splendid sunny day, and I have to go .… What does my death matter if by our acts thousands are warned and alerted. Among the student body there will certainly be a revolt."

In a historical context, the White Rose's legacy has had significance for many commentators and artgists, as a demonstration of personal courage, and as a well-documented case of social dissidence in a society of violent repression, censorship, and conformist pressure. Playwright Lillian Garrett-Groag stated in Newsday on February 22, 1993, that "It (the White Rose) is possibly the most spectacular moment of resistance that I can think of in the twentieth century... The fact that five little kids, in the mouth of the wolf, where it really counted, had the tremendous courage to do what they did, is spectacular to me. I know that the world is better for them having been there, but I do not know why." In the same issue of Newsday, historian Jud Newborn noted that "You cannot really measure the effect of this kind of resistance in whether or not X number of bridges were blown up or a regime fell ... The White Rose really has a more symbolic value, but that's a very important value."

On February 22, 2003, a bust of Scholl was placed by the government of Bavaria in the Walhalla Temple for prominent Germans located near Regensburg in Bavaria. The Scholl Siblings Institute for Political Science at MLU is named for Sophia and Hans Scholl. Many local schools as well as countless streets and squares in Germany have been named after the Scholls. In 2003, in a nationwide competition to choose the top ten most important Germans of all time, Scholl and her brother Hans finished in fourth place, above Bach, Goethe, Gutenberg, Bismarck, Willy Brandt, and Albert Einstein. If the votes of young viewers alone had been counted, Sophia and Hans Scholl would have been ranked first. Earlier, readers of Brigitte, a German magazine for women, voted Scholl "the greatest woman of the twentieth century".

CINEMA, LITERATURE AND THEATER

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n the 1970s and 1980s, there were three film accounts of Sophia Scholl and the White Rose resistance. The first film was financed by the Bavarian state government and released in the 1970s, entitled Das Versprechen (The Promise). In 1982, Percy Adlon’s Five Last Days presented Lena Stolze as Sophia Scholl 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. In February 2005, the movie about Scholl's last days, Sophie Scholl—Die letzten Tage – (The Final Days), featuring actress Julia Jentsch in the title role, was released. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2006. For her portrayal of Scholl, Jentsch won the best actress at the European Film Awards and the Silver Bear for best actress at the Berlin Film Festival.

In literature, Shattering the German Night (1986) about the White Rose by Jud Brown and Annette Dumbachs was reissued in an illustrated edition in 2006 as Sophie Scholl and the White Rose. In February 2009, History Press released Sophie Scholl: The Real Story of the Woman Who Defied Hitler by Frank McDonough. And in February 2010, Carl Hanser Verlag released Sophie Scholl: A Biography by Barbara Beuys in German.

Playwright Lillian Garrett-Groag’s play The White Rose features Sophie Scholl. We Will Not Be Silent, a drama by David Meyers of Scholl’s imprisonment and interrogation premiered at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia in July 2017.