“Sei still sonst kommst du nach Dachau” reverberated across the solitary stretch of land that was the former Dachau concentration camp. The phrase translates to “Be still otherwise you will be sent to Dachau”, and as I wandered around the camp, I asked myself, “but what does it mean not to be still?”. Especially in light of the many protests on university campuses, I find myself anxious to fight for social justice, and not be still, while feeling lost as to how I can do so productively and powerfully.
Stillness simultaneously encapsulates both silence and idleness. In Nazi Germany, these states were rewarded, and the few individuals who proactively resisted the regime suffered from the pangs of systematic torture. Many of these individuals were stalwart pioneers of “Unity and Justice and Freedom”, as the German national anthem murmured at the time (Wikipedia). Although they advocated for what Jonathan Haidt would call “Moral Foundations” (Haidt), I believe the foundation these heroes were resting on was that of integrity on an individual scale, which gave birth to a greater collective integrity- what I call a twofold moral purpose. Therefore, once this foundation was secured, unity, justice and freedom would be the necessary fruit. Thus, we can use the White Rose’s (WR) ethos as a template for how we, as Columbia students, can be powerful and passionate in our fight for social justice. In this paper I will be analysing the essence of the WR movement through putting two different approaches to protesting in conversation to address problem of effective pacifism.
Down to the movement’s name, everything about the WR championed peace and hope for a brighter future, and its operandi was distinct from the many other resistance campaigns at the time. In 1943, a group of students and their philosophy instructor from the University of Munich rose as a non-violent, intellectual resistance movement in Nazi Germany by promoting passive resistance. The WR wrote to both the collective and the individual, by sending leaflets to citizens found in the telephone book (bpb contributors). The leaflets contained eloquent prose incorporating philosophical precepts, in an attempt to galvanize the Germans to rise against the regime. Their leaflets included exposing the atrocities of the Holocaust, as well as the perilous (and withheld) status of the war in Russia and overseas (Dacha). However, contrary to popular opinion, the essence of the WR was not to disseminate knowledge as a symbol of power, but rather to cement integrity, and the moral duty arising from it, in the German psyche.
The mantra of “be still otherwise you will be sent to Dachau” is combatted extensively in the first leaflet of the WR, juxtaposing silence with integrity. The Germans are accused of not “raising a hand” and “abandoning the will to take derisive action” (Dacha) against the regime. To condemn this silence, the leaflet invokes Schiller and Goethe, the two most revered figures in German literature, each saying that tyrannical regimes thrive off of the citizens’ stillness. Similarly, the tyrannical state of Germany thrived on this “stillness” and this point is dramatised through citing these figures.
In The Moral Foundations of Occupy Wall Street, Haidt proposes the “Moral Foundations Theory” (Haidt). This theory suggests that all political cultures and movements base their moral appeals on six clusters of moral concerns, gleaned from anthropologist Richard Shweder. These concerns include care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, and authority/subversion (Haidt); it follows that each political culture derives its support from the collective championing of its unique combination of these foundations. This theory is, however, problematic because it not only assumes that there is a robust moral imperative that can be generalized to a greater crowd, but that there is no individual responsibility in a protest, rather an emergent quality of one of these moral foundations. The climate the WR lived in was in political and social disarray, plagued by an oppressive and morally bankrupt regime. As elucidated in the final leaflet, “For ten years Hitler and his coadjutor have manhandled, squeezed, twisted, and debased these two splendid German words to the point of nausea...casting the highest values of a nation before a swine” (Dacha)- the moral foundations were ruthlessly demolished by a tyranny, rendering an existential void for the German public. Haidt’s theory suggests that protests would consequently be either ill-fated, or would have to rely on a new set of satanic “moral” foundations, where oppression becomes the norm and cheating the custom. In response, the WR’s theory, would posit that as these foundations are fickle and a function of the current regime, they cannot be the sole essence of a pacifying movement on a societal level unless there is integrity on an individual level, actively fighting the status quo.
A contemporary analog to the WR is the Umbrella Movement (UR) that emerged during the 2014 Hong Kong democracy protests. The UM was similarly a non-violent, passive resistance to the Chinese rule in Hong Kong following decolonization (Al Jazeera Contributors). Henry Wi Leung exhibits the UR in City Without Solitude and stresses the importance of provinciality in politics. If we take provinciality as relating to the parts of a country outside of the largest cities (dictionary.com), we picture rurality. Leung invokes this image to expound what he believes is necessary for social transformation- “a living spiritual landscape” (Leung). He believes that every place has a “spirit around which local life revolves”, and that this spirit is integral to “prefiguring the transformation of mechanical mass indifference into the dignified solitude of individuals” (Leung). I understand this to mean that to combat apathy, which he describes as “mechanical mass indifference”, we must discern the living spirit of the place in question. The German apathy that led to the “stillness” and “silence” the WR condemns, would, according to Leung, be resolved by forging a German spiritual landscape (Leung).
To Leung, however, this spiritual landscape has a destructive capacity, which is also a “source of creation and renewal”. To illustrate, Hong Kong’s spirit would be the typhoon, which renders the “umbrella” motif for the protests as befitting to Hong Kong’s spirit. The most obvious source of destruction in Nazi Germany was Hitler’s regime, however, few would describe it as a source of creation and renewal. The WR asserts in the fourth leaflet that they are “trying to achieve a renewal from within the severely wounded German spirit”and that this “rebirth must be preceded...by an uncompromising battle against Hitler” (Dacha). Thus, Leung’s theory for combating apathy is missing the battle that precedes the renewal- for this battle to be won, the wounded German spirit must be healed, the antidote being a rekindled sense of integrity.
The German people’s integrity was the target of the Third Reich. The powerful Nazi propaganda was a medium to tamper with integrity, contaminating it with racist, nationalistic views. It caused even virtuous Germans to question values previously held dear, leading to the perpetration of violence and injustice. This corruption of integrity would either lead to apathy or active immorality, the former being the target of discourse in the leaflets. This corruption of integrity can be seen from both the allusions to hell, slavery, or disease when referring to the regime, and the threatening tone suggesting that if there is no integrity, there is complicity in crime (Dacha). Out of this condemnation arose the banner under which the movement attempted to stir the spirits of Germans, reigniting their integrity: "Prove by your deeds that you think otherwise" (Dacha).
This social transformation, however, has a twofold moral purpose- transformation on the level of the individual and on the level of the society. This is a point of contention between Haidt and Leung, as the former focuses on society’s emergent moral foundations, and the latter emphasises the need for a “private transformation” (Leung).
Haidt focuses on the collective, rather than the individual. He distances himself from the personal by referring to “protestors” and “moral foundations”, rather than individuals and moral compasses. Although he breaks the fourth wall by referring to “your cause” (Haidt) on the first page, his theory is a generalization of protests in a binary model of the so called “1%” and “99%” (Haidt), a hand wavy aphorism of the class divide. Haidt would, therefore, agree with the WR movement’s appreciation for joined efforts. This appreciation is clarified through the reference to the “Germans” or the “German people” particularly in the first leaflet (Dacha), insinuating a unified, collective entity. Similarly, the last line of the final leaflet says that “Our people stand ready to rebel against the Nationals Socialist enslavement of Europe in a fervent new breakthrough of freedom and honour” (Dacha). This goes to show that there needs to be a collective integrity greater than the sum of its parts.
As the title of his essay suggests, Leung regards a sense of solitude as a liberating state. The word solitude differs from loneliness in that it implies a meditative sense of peace. Leung believes that “private transformation” requires solitude, though, specifically not the misconception of solitude Leung maintains Hong Kong has, which is a state of lonely depression often politicized in the context of immigrants (Leung). Drawing on William Yeats’ own experience with solitude, Leung expresses that the path to private transformation is a solitary one, and that it lead to Yeats’ renewal and revival of Irish fairy tales and folklore, what you could call a “social transformation”. To that end, he states shortly after that, the “mechanical mass indifference” should be prefigured to a “dignified solitude of individuals” (Leung)- solitude to Leung is what integrity is to the WR movement, a private transformation dawning greater social justice. This mentality extends to why Leung finds the term “umbrella” as a symbol for the protests fitting- the concept of an umbrella intrinsically connotes solitude, as you create an “existential envelope of space” (Dacha) around yourself when protecting yourself from the rain. Thus, although Leung would agree with the WR ethos that individual change is required, he would disagree that it has to be coupled with, rather than precede, collective efforts.
In fact, the WR movement denounces and then renounces the solitude Leung champions. Their ethos centres on how everyone is capable of contributing to the overthrow of the system, and therefore in the third leaflet they proclaim that “it is not possible through solitary withdrawal, in the manner of embittered hermits, to prepare the ground for the overturn of this “government” or bring about the revolution at the earliest possible moment”- there needs to be a cooperation feeding off of the private transformation (Dacha). Therefore, integrity, as the engine for social transformation, has a dual-layered manifestation, which synthesises Haidt and Leung’s approaches.
The WR movement proclaims that Germany’s edification requires integrity, as both an individual and collective feat. However, integrity is not simply an offshoot of moral foundations, which is what Haidt suggests, nor can it only be realised after an individual stability, or solitude, is achieved. Integrity is the foundation itself on which all further moral imperatives are built. As we read in the closing lines of the penultimate leaflet “Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the protection of individual citizens from the arbitrary will of criminal regimes of violence-these will be the bases of the New Europe”, which goes to show that these are the fruits of a secure foundation of integrity from the German citizens’ part. Thus, the WR movement was a bastion of peace and hope for pacification, built on a secure twofold foundation of integrity, which I believe yielded its power and influence.
I visited Dachau with my history class last year, and now attend a college fighting injustice on multiple layers 75 years after the WR members were martyred for their cause. The struggle for effective pacification continues to perturb us, and many of us feel powerless- how can we, as puny individuals, obstruct the corrosive status quo? Through gleaning insights from Haidt and Leung, and learning from the WR’s inspiring message, the takeaway is that our mark cannot be limited to a private transformation, nor a public one. Protests can take place on various scales, but are always derivatives of a solid foundation of integrity. If we want to protest powerfully and productively on campus, we must also hold our ground in class, in our dorms and in our daily interactions. With this understanding in mind, my hope is that the quote that resounds through not only former concentration camps, but also throughout the world, becomes, as advised by Maggie Kuhn, "Speak your mind even if your voice shakes” (Kuhn).
Works Cited
Aljazeera Contributors. “Hong Kong 'Umbrella Movement' nominated for Nobel prize.” Aljazeera, AL JAZEERA NEWS, 2 Feb. 2018, www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/02/hong-kong-umbrella-movement-nominated-nobel-prize-180202125012618.html.
Bpb contributors. “Sophie Scholl und die "Weiße Rose".” Bundeszentrale fuer politische Bildung , http://www.bpb.de/geschichte/nationalsozialismus/weisse-rose/.
Katja Dacha. Welcome to Katja's Dacha, www.katjasdacha.com/whiterose/leaflets/.
Haidt, Jonathan. “The Moral Foundations of Occupy Wall Street.” Reason.com, 20 Oct. 2011, reason.com/archives/2011/10/20/the-moral-foundations-of-occup/2.
Leung, Henry Wei. “City Without Solitude.” The Offing, The Offing, 1 Dec. 2015, theoffingmag.com/essay/city-without-solitude/.
“Province.” Dictionary.com, Dictionary.com, www.dictionary.com/browse/province.
“Maggie Kuhn & Women's History Month.” Presbyterian Historical Society, 11 Mar. 2014, www.history.pcusa.org/blog/maggie-kuhn-womens-history-month.\
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Wikipedia contributors. "Deutschlandlied." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 17 Mar. 2018. Web. 18 Mar. 2018.