die Weiße Rose

"I read the names of the White Rose. I had never heard of any of them. But as i read those names an inexpressible hope leaped up in me... and I was not the only one who felt this way... This hope - which made it possible for us to go on living - was not just the hope for our survival... It helped so many that still had to die: even they could die with hope... It was like a secret light that expanded over the land: it was joy. I remember one day I went out on the street to meet a friend and he said: "Don't look so radiant, they'll arrest you!"

We didn't have much of a chance to survive, but that was not what it was about. It wasn't survival. It was life itself that was speaking to us through the death of the Scholls and their companions... You can live without owning anything. But you can't live without having something ahead of you, ahead of you in the sense of something inside of you. You can't live without hope."

The impact of the White Rose cannot be measured in tyrants destroyed, regimes overthrown, justice restored. A scale with another dimension is needed, and then their significance is deeper; it goes even beyond the Third Reich, beyond Germany: if people like those who formed the White Rose can exist, believe as they believed, act as they acted, maybe it means that this weary, corrupted, and extremely endangered species we belong to has the right to survive, and to keep on trying.

[in Sophie Scholl and the White Rose, Annette Dumbach & Jud Newborn]