Willi Graf of the White Rose: Faith under Fire (original) (raw)
Related papers
Willi Graf of the White Rose: Words, Will, and a Way to Resist
The White Rose Project at the University of Oxford, 2020
This excerpt (digital posting) is from my presentation that was supposed to take place at the University of Oxford in March 2020. Due to the pandemic, the symposium was postponed. http://whiteroseproject.seh.ox.ac.uk/index.php/willi-graf-of-the-white-rose-words-will-and-a-way-to-resist/
At the heart of the White Rose: cultural and religious influences on the Munich students
Treasures of the Taylorian. 3:1, Cultural Memory. The White Rose: reading, writing, resistance, ed. A. Lloyd (Oxford: Taylor Institution, June 2019), 2019
Confronted with the extraordinary deeds of heroism of the White Rose students, it is natural to ask where they acquired their deep convictions, their strength of character, their fearlessness in action. Of course we will never know their inner thoughts, but we can at least trace many of the ways in which they were influenced in the rich trail of letters and diaries 1 they left behind them; we can also learn from the Gestapo interrogation records and court proceedings, 2 though clearly these have to be treated with caution.
WWI and the Myth of the Crucified Soldier
From the legend of the crucifixion of Canadian Harry Band in Belgium, in 1915, to the 1916 poem by Robert Service, “Jean Desprez,” and from the 1918 statue called “Canada’s Golgotha” to the 1975 story by Roch Carrier, La Guerre, Yes Sir!, as well as the 2008 film, Passchendaele, the image of the crucified soldier has evoked a sense of the moral depravity of the sacrifice of young men (and women) to the maw of war. In spite of the fact that, as Jonathan Vance attests, “The Great War became a crusade, a holy war that pitted Christians against the pagans of Europe. At stake was not the territorial integrity of Belgium or the holdings of some farmers in Picardy, but the very values upon which Christianity was founded,” the blasphemous image of the crucified soldier, in which a man takes the place of Christ on the cross, gained credence at the time, and continues to speak, to not only criticism of the savage enemies, but to an evolving response to the horrors of war.
Concerning German remembrance of "Die Weiße Rose"
Globkult, 2023
Up to now, the focus in historical and political education lies on Germany´s bitter past of Nazism and the Holocaust. To a lesser degree, historical tribute is paid to the legacy of the anti-Nazi resistance. Aside from the failed plot of July 20, 1944, as an outstanding historical event, the student resistance group of the „Weiße Rose“ serves as a shining example of courage and ethical purity. Again, in events commemorating their martyrdom, the motives of the Scholls and their friends are rarely elaborated in full scope but elevated to an abstract ideal. Not by chance, in various films and exhibitions, the role of Sophie Scholl as a female resister is given particular emphasis. What is often overlooked or bypassed are certain relevant biographical details as well as the historical circumstances of their acts of courageous resistance.
Christian Rescuers of the Holocaust: What Made Their Faith Unique
The majority of German Christians did not help the Jews during the Holocaust, and some even became anti-Semitic or supporters of the Nazi regime. This paper explores why some did choose to help as well as what made their faith unique to other Christians that did not.
Moreana, 2000
T he Oxford Encyclopedia of the Rejàrmation (1996) offers the entry "Books of Martyrs," by J.-F. Gilmont, which devotes nearly six columns to the Protestant works of Ludwig Rabus, Jean Crespin, John Foxe, Adrian C. van Haemstede (of Antwerp), and others, but little more than one column to Anabaptist memorials of those martyred for holding to believers' baptism, and a half-column to early modem works on Catholic martyrs on the European continent. But in the same year 1996, Brad Gregory completed his lengthy Princeton dissertation, "Anathema of Compromise," guided by Anthony Grafton and Theodore Rabb, which has become the more compact and updated book here under review. Professor Gregory, of the History Department of Stanford University, has ably produced a fully cross-confessional study of martyrs, martyrologies, and the solidification that both gave to the distinctive communal identities that emerged from sixteenth-century religious renewals and upheavals. Martyrologies thus take their place among the instruments of "confessionalization." Gregory' s work treats each of the three traditions of Protestant, Anabaptist, and Catholic martyrs and martyrologies in chapters of text and back notes extending weil over seventy-five pages each. This review will frrst treat these central, foundational portions, Chapters 5-7, before discussing how Gregory sets his documentary account into a historical