Sophie Scholl and the White Rose Quotes

“In a universe where all values have been shattered, where religions and histories and literatures and social structures have lost their meaning, man has to stand up again, accept his condition, accept that he is alone, and has no protection, and proceed to create his own world, his own values, his own decisions, his own actions—and be willing to pay the consequences, to be responsible for everything he thinks says, and does.”
― Jud Newborn & Annette Dumbach, Sophie Scholl and the White Rose

“At one stopover on the train journey home, Hans told his sister Inge later, he saw a young girl with the Star of David on her breast; she was repairing tracks on the line, along with other people with yellow badges on their clothes. Her face was pallid, sunken in; her eyes, beyond grief and terror. Impulsively, Hans thrust his rations in her hand. She looked up at him, then at his uniform. She threw the packet of food to the ground.
He scooped it up, wiped off the dust, and picked a daisy growing by the side of the tracks. He placed the package, with the daisy on top, at her feet. He said, "I would have liked to give you a little pleasure." He boarded the train.
When he looked back, the girl was standing there, watching the train disappear, the flower in her hair.”
― Jud Newborn, Shattering the German Night: The Story of the White Rose

“The beast in man had lifted its mask and the time of euphemistic niceties and rationalizations was over.”
― Annette Dumbach, Sophie Scholl and the White Rose

“Their eyes met; neither would forget.”
― Jud Newborn, Shattering the German Night: The Story of the White Rose

“German and Russian intellectuals and literati regarded the emerging industrial bourgeoisie as a threat to the true orders of noble, artisan, and peasant, and both groups saw their respective nations as the civilizing - if retrogressive - vanguard that would bring truth back to Europe, the truth lost in the centuries of exploration and modernization since the Renaissance, the truth of a pure and "whole" life as in the preindustrial world of peasants and priests.”
― Annette Dumbach, Sophie Scholl and the White Rose

“In Reference to Germany + Russia - The hunger for national unification, for national importance, and the desire for a special 'spiritual' kind of freedom unknown in the West, were not the only traits that the two most autocratic societies in Europe had in common: in the post-Napoleonic era, they both rejected the values and body of beliefs of the Enlightenment coming out of Western Europe; both turned ferociously against the French Revolution with its emphasis on the leveling of classes and the fraternite of equal men; both rejected the idea of parliamentary democracy, which they saw as a triumph of numbers over values, of quantity over quality. Indeed, for both Germany and Russia, Western Europe was a marketplace that destroyed integrity and principles for the sake of compromise and gold (the word they used for this notion was "corruption". And both societies turned away from the idea of the private man, living anonymously in the city, freed from the moral pressures of community, village, and town (they saw this as "alienation").”
― Annette Dumbach, Sophie Scholl and the White Rose

“The state is never an end in itself. It is important only as a means by which humanity can achieve its goal, which is nothing other than the advancement of man’s constructive capabilities.”
― Annette Dumbach, Sophie Scholl and the White Rose