Sophie Scholl would have turned 100 this Sunday. One would love to hear what she would say about today’s young people, about current politics, about the pandemic. But Sophie Scholl was sentenced to death and executed on February 22, 1943 at the age of only 21. 100 young people are standing in front of the Propylaea on Königsplatz this Sunday morning. They symbolize 100 years of Sophie Scholl, of which the young woman did not live so many.
The actors at their appearance on the Königsplatz.
(Photo: Robert Haas)
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In black pants and red T-shirts, schoolchildren and students from Munich and other parts of Bavaria form a living memorial. Sometimes they dance elegiacally to melancholy piano sounds, sometimes rhythmically to electronic beats and hold up the famous Scholl portrait a hundred times, on which a hair clip makes them look so girlish. They recite it from their letters and the leaflets that were fatal to Scholl and her colleagues in the White Rose. You learn that you loved the water, nature and Fritz Hartnagel. She was a young woman who was hungry for life and could not understand that other people put people in danger.
This performance, initiated and rehearsed by Farina Simbeck and Thomas Ritter, should stimulate thought about Sophie Scholl, says Hildegard Kronawitter when greeting the 200 spectators who are admitted to the performance. For many years, the chairwoman of the Weisse Rose Foundation has been committed to remembering her and her “resistant actions, which were characterized by courage, steadfastness and personal responsibility”, as Kronawitter explains.
This morning she speaks for patron Lord Mayor Dieter Reiter (SPD), who apologizes. In his words, he spans today’s youth and the questions that young people have probably asked themselves at all times: “How do I want to live? What is important to me?” The vivid memory of Sophie Scholl means that we stand up for truthfulness – in contrast to those who divide with lies and half-truths and stir up fears, emphasizes Reiter.
The resistance fighter was also commemorated at the Perlacher Forst cemetery. There, Mayor Katrin Habenschaden (Greens) laid a wreath on Sophie Scholl’s grave for the city of Munich. “It is our task and that of the generations to come to uphold the memory of the ‘White Rose’ and Sophie Scholl,” said Habenschaden. Already on Friday, Bavaria’s Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU) reminded Scholl – with a wreath and a kneeling in the Ludwig Maximilians University.
On the occasion of the birthday, the White Rose Hall in the Munich Palace of Justice is now also being redesigned. From here the Nazi judge Roland Freisler sent Scholl to his death together with her brother Hans and her colleague Christoph Probst.
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