Secularizing Sophie Scholl

An Oscar nominee for Best Foreign-Language Film is currently playing in Manhattan. It’s called, “Sophie Scholl: The Final Days,” and it’s based on a true story about a 21-year-old college student and member of a dissident group called the White Rose who is arrested for treason in 1943 Nazi Germany after she's caught distributing anti-Nazi leaflets at the University of Munich.

In today’s New York Post, Kyle Smith begins his review of the film thusly:

“The name ‘Sophie Scholl’ could become a synonym for principled, Christian resistance to evil, but this often wrenching true story about six days in the life of a college student who stood up to the Nazis does not quite turn Sophie into a hero.”

That stoked my curiosity, especially since Smith gives the film three stars. Why isn’t Sophie a hero?

Toward the end of the review Smith writes:

“A hero is someone who is brave, has definitely accomplished something and may or may not have suffered for it. But today’s media seek to redefine a hero as someone who is brave, may or may not have accomplished anything and definitely suffered for it. The distinction between heroes and victims is becoming lost.”

Hmmm. Well, I agree with Smith insofar that I think the word “hero” is used rather liberally nowadays. I’m not sure I would have expressed this thought the same way he does, however. And if Sophie’s not a hero (or heroine), I would much prefer calling her something other than a “victim.” Martyr, perhaps? Especially given this statement, from a pamphlet on Sophie Scholl published by the White Rose Foundation: "In Munich Sophie met artists, writers and philosophers, particularly Carl Muth and Theodor Haecker, who were important contacts for her concern with the Christian faith. Of foremost importance was the question of how the individual must act under dictatorship."

Given my lifelong fascination for all things World War II, I will definitely check out "Sophie Scholl: the Final Days" this weekend. In the meantime, I was curious what the New York Times thought of a movie about “principled, Christian resistance to evil.”

So I logged on to the paper's website and clicked on the review. Reading the headline, I saw that the Times would agree with how I’d characterize Sophie. “The Quiet Resolve of a German Anti-Nazi Martyr,” it read. Then I started reading the review, by Stephen Holden.

Right out of the gate, Holden strips away any notion of Scholl’s idealism being driven by her religion:

“’Sophie Scholl: The Final Days’ conveys what it must have been like to be a young, smart, idealistic dissenter in Nazi Germany, where no dissent was tolerated.”

Now why would Holden do that, I thought. I continued reading. Ah, I see. He's done that so he can drag the Bush Administration’s handling of the war on terror into his review of a film about Nazi Germany. I get it. First, remove Christianity from the equation, and then challenge your readers to place themselves in Scholl's now secularized shoes and think how they would react if Bush turned into Hitler and eliminated all their civil liberties.

Also from Holden's lead paragraph:

“This gripping true story, directed in a cool, semi-documentary style by the German filmmaker Marc Rothemund from a screenplay by Fred Breinersdorfer, challenges you to gauge your own courage and strength of character should you find yourself in similar circumstances. Would you risk your life the way Sophie Scholl (Julia Jentsch) and a tiny group of fellow students at Munich University did to spread antigovernment leaflets? How would you behave during the kind of relentless interrogations that Sophie endures? If sentenced to death for your activities, would you still consider your resistance to have been worth it? In a climate of national debate in the United States about the overriding of certain civil liberties to fight terrorism, the movie looks back on a worst possible scenario in which such liberties were taken away. It raises an unspoken question: could it happen here?”

In the eighth paragraph of his ten-paragraph review, Holden does allow this: “At each turning point, Sophie, who is deeply religious, prays to God for help.”

In a word, unbelievable.