Exciting news! The White Rose Project is able to continue next academic year thanks to generous funding from The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities. As a Knowledge Exchange Fellow, Dr Alex Lloyd will work with the Weiße Rose Stiftung (White Rose Foundation) in Munich. Its Chairperson, Dr Hildegard Kronawitter, provided the foreword for our new book, The White Rose: Reading, Writing, Resistance (Oxford: Taylor Institution Library, 2019). The White Rose Foundation was established in 1987 by members and family of the resistance group and other supporters. Its mission is to uphold the group’s memory and ‘to contribute to civic courage and individual responsibility and to promote democratic consciousness’. As Hildegard Kronawitter explains:
Since 1997, the Denkstätte Weiße Rose (White Rose memorial exhibition) has been located next to the atrium of the Ludwig Maximilian University, where on 18 February 1943 Hans and Sophie Scholl distributed the sixth pamphlet and were consequently arrested. The White Rose Foundation maintains the permanent exhibition, which tells the story of the group through documents, images, texts, and interactive media installations. It makes visible the context of the Nazi dictatorship and its war crimes, as well as the history of those ideas which influenced the group. It presents the biographies of the key individuals, and shows the network of resistance which reached other cities beyond Munich.
Through a series of podcasts, events, and publications the White Rose Project will continue to tell the story of the resistance group and its members in the UK. It will also situate the White Rose within a much larger story about the power of the written word, and how culture can inform political action.
