This year our undergraduate project members again worked on producing creative translations inspired by the White Rose pamphlets and the history of the White Rose. You can see some of their incredible and thought-provoking works below. We’ll be updating this page over the next couple of months as the finishing touches are put to all the translations.
‘Schuldig’ by Klara Zhao
In the course of our sessions reading through the pamphlets of the White Rose resistance group, one word stood out to me beyond all the rest: “schuldig”. In the spirit of that youthful passion so prominent in the words of the students, I wanted to bring to the fore the word to which the White Rose often took recourse in their condemnations of the Third Reich. Of course, it was also the word that ultimately signified their downfall – the guilty verdict that proclaimed the execution of this young resistance group.
In this picture, there are two principal perspectives: a man in a suit, in a plain but not overtly morbid world, who takes a step over the fractured image of guilt pasted over the other side. In the text, the instances of “schuldig” are attributed sometimes to the Third Reich, as directed by the words of the White Rose, sometimes to the White Rose themselves, as was the final verdict, uttered by those who we see as the truly “schuldig”. In this, I hope to capture the complexities of real-time guilt proclamation and reception, a historical reality laden with its own problems, which resounds perhaps in dissonance with the clarity of retrospection.
‘Schuldig’ is the German word for the English ‘guilty’. This word appears multiple times in the White Rose resistance pamphlets.
