The movie, directed by Marc Rothemund from a script by Fred Breinersdorfer sticks to the facts and moreover tries to keep away from movieish hype. Yes, the distribution of the leaflets and the timing of Sophie's near release are a little fakey, and Held's acting is too intent. (The way he removes the damning evidence from a satchel one item at a time is badly staged - it starts to look like a magic act.) But the moviemakers give most of the running time over to the verbal confrontations between Sophie and Mohr and that's unusual in itself. What is not so unusual is the content of their back-and-forth.
The White Rose is legendary in Germany, a cynosure of disinterested political righteousness despite personal cost, all the more heroic because the members were almost all students in their twenties. To function as a tribute to the Scholls and their comrades, the movie has to present Sophie's ideas pure. No one in the audience for this movie could possibly disagree with anything she says, and Jentsch says it better than we could imagine saying it in the circumstances. If you want to hear the sensible, humane argument against Nazism spoken with ardent fluency directly under the monster's glaring eyes, then this is the movie for you.
As a matter of drama, however, Mohr's replies don't speak to what Sophie has said. On the one hand he repeats Göbbels's slogans, and on the other he simply says that he himself is personally better off under the Third Reich than he was before. It's dramatic only because we know Sophie's head is at stake, not because the two of them are meaningfully engaged in a philosophical debate.
There is a subject here, but the movie doesn't notice it. I kept thinking that if I were the guy in the studio who had begged Hans not to distribute leaflets at the university, I would be really angry, right up to the moment I was beheaded as a result of my friend's reckless idealism. This subject may slip by us because people now valorize student movements too blindly to see their shortcomings. It's hard to believe, for instance, that seasoned activists would have thought, as Hans did, that an uprising on the part of his fellow university students was imminent. And even if it had been, what could it have accomplished in the Nazi terror state?
I respect Sophie's decision to confess defiantly and her refusal to submit to re-education. (The way she later antagonizes her appointed defense counsel, a party faithful, by contrast, seems like pointless bravura.) But her ideas themselves don't demand this self-sacrifice, as a Nazi's would. However much of a legend she now is, the war was being won by the Allied forces, with or without Sophie and Hans's efforts. It's thus possible to say that Sophie had the right to live at the cost of a compromise that was meaningless because compelled. Perhaps the duty as well as the right: surely she would have been more valuable politically alive.
![Hollywood Classics Collectors Edition - Guilty of Treason [VHS]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51N71Z4GN1L._SL120_.jpg)
Article comments