Sophie Scholl’s Show Trial

sophie-scholl-trial-germany_

Justizpalast, Munich Germany, Site of Scholl and Probst Trial, 2/22/43 “What we wrote and said is what you all think too! Only you don’t have the courage to say it out loud!”  The below excerpt from “With You There Is Light” is a dramatic interpretation of the Scholl siblings’ and Christoph Probst trial. Because the…

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Sophie Scholl, Diary Entry December 1941

December 1941

The following passage is an excerpt from “With You There Is Light: Based on the True Story about Sophie Scholl and Fritz Hartnagel.”  Medical students at the University of Munich, Hans Scholl and Traute LaFrenz, met up with Sophie Scholl and together went skiing in Coburg, Bavaria. Sophie’s quote as expressed below is an actual…

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Seventy-Five Years Ago Today

Sophie Scholl quote translated by Alexandra Lehmann

Seventy-five years ago today Sophie Scholl sketched “FREEDOM” on the backside of her conviction for “treason.” F R E E D O M. She would die hours later, forgiving her executioners as the passageway to eternal life. (See: Pastor Alt’s eyewitness testimony to her last Communion.)  If one wants to know this great hero of…

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Christmas Greeting from Stalingrad

With You There Is Light Sophie Scholl Alexandra Lehmann

Translated here into English for the first time with permission of S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt. To Sophie Scholl from Fritz Hartnagel, December 1942. Yesterday, my dear Sophie, as the Russians fired on our position with heavy artillery and the sirens went berserk, a little bird suddenly sat at the edge of our trench and peeped…

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Reading to the Religious: With You There Is Light

With You There Is Light, Chapter 3

November 26, 2017 After Service at the St. James Episcopal Church, North Salem, New York The first excerpt I read last Sunday came from Chapter Three of “With You There Is Light.” Sophie Scholl attended St. Georges, the Protestant Church in Ulm, with her mother. Sophie noted reading Exodus 17:11 in her journal so I imagined…

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Reading #4 from “With You There Is Light: Based on the True Story about Sophie Scholl and Fritz Hartnagel”

November 17, 2017. Books & Books in Grand Cayman, B.V.I.                     “Is today’s information overload the opposite problem of censorship?” The interested diverse crowd at my reading in November wanted to talk about Nazi Germany’s censorship and elimination of personal freedoms. We were discussing the Party’s control…

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer (German, 1906-1945)

German resistance With You There Is Light

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German theologian, pastor and political resistance activist involved in Berlin’s July 1944 plot to kill Hitler.  Bonhoeffer assisted in providing intelligence that led to the uprising. Executed before the war’s end, he left behind diaries and letters written while in prison that testify to an enduring and unwavering faith. Here below is…

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#Resistance during the Age of Trump: Not at all like German Resistance during World War II

Ridgefield Library With You There Is Light Alexandra Lehmann

Note: The below personal essay describing a reading experience in September, 2017 provided this writer with the opportunity to further define “With You There Is Light” and its publicity platform. Although “resistance” is a popular word at present, future author readings will not address today’s appropriation and the attempt to often equate it with its…

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Re-Visiting The White Rose Student Resistance Movement in Munich

white-soe-installation

New Munich Student Resistance Installation (LMU, 2/17)     Munich, June 10, 2017. Re-visiting the new installation at the University of Munich (LMU) furthered my commitment to sharing the history of the White Rose student resistance movement. During World War II, siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, and Alexander Schmorell, began active opposition against Hitler and the Nazi Party.…

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