Last week one of our former White Rose Project student translators, Poppy Robertson, visited the DenkStätte Weiße Rose in Munich, a permanent exhibition in the university’s main building, established and maintained by the Weiße Rose Stiftung (White Rose Foundation). Poppy studies German at the University of Oxford and was one of the first student members of the White Rose Project. She worked on a new collaborative and student-led translation of the White Rose resistance pamphlets (Flugblätter).
The White Rose Project’s relationship with the Weiße Rose Stiftung began in July 2018 when Dr Alex Lloyd visited the DenkStätte and met with Dr Hildegard Kronawitter (First Chairperson of the Foundation) to discuss the idea of a student-led translation of the White Rose leaflets. Dr Kronawitter provided the foreword to the subsequent publication of the leaflets, The White Rose: Reading, Writing, Resistance (2019), and in June 2019 Dr Lloyd was awarded a Knowledge Exchange Fellowship by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) to support the work of the White Rose Project in collaboration with the Foundation. Knowledge exchange is defined as ‘the mutually beneficial sharing of ideas, data, experience, and expertise, and involves collaboration between researchers and external organisations or the public’.
Dr Lloyd writes:
The partnership has been extremely rewarding. It has enhanced my understanding of how the White Rose history has been – and continues to be – disseminated in Germany, and it has enabled me to better appreciate what the Oxford Project can do in its own (different) context to tell this important story.
Sadly we had to postpone our planned international symposium – at which Dr Kronawitter had been scheduled to give the welcome address – due to the Covid-19 outbreak. Instead, we took the symposium online and you can read Dr Kronawitter’s contribtuion on our Digital Symposium page.
We are delighted that the Knowledge Exchange partnership between the White Rose Project and the Weiße Rose Stiftung will continue this coming academic year thanks to generous support from TORCH. This means that our collaboration will be able to continue into an important year for the White Rose: we’ll be marking the 100th anniversary of Sophie Scholl’s birth in May 2021.
