{"id":2531,"date":"2021-05-06T22:04:10","date_gmt":"2021-05-06T21:04:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whiteroseproject.seh.ox.ac.uk\/?page_id=2531"},"modified":"2021-05-06T22:04:10","modified_gmt":"2021-05-06T21:04:10","slug":"love-and-do-what-you-will-why-theodor-haecker-spoke-to-the-white-rose","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/whiteroseproject.seh.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/love-and-do-what-you-will-why-theodor-haecker-spoke-to-the-white-rose\/","title":{"rendered":"Love and do what you will: Why Theodor Haecker spoke to the White Rose"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

We know that Catholic inner exile Theodor Haecker spoke to members of the White Rose from his works on at least four occasions \u2014 and that his words spoke to them with a particular intellectual appeal. The dynamic eschatological account of history, evil, and the grandeur of human freedom that echoes in the White Rose leaflets, letters, and private journals suggests that this sixty-three-year-old philosopher had found receptive readers among these restless young adults.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On a sleety Thursday afternoon in early February 1943, members of the White Rose and their wider circle of acquaintances convened to hear Catholic philosopher and inner exile Theodor Haecker read from his book Sch\u00f6pfer und Sch<\/em>\u00f6pfung<\/em> (Creator and Creation<\/em>) (1934). They met at Manfred Eickemeyer\u2019s studio, with the White Rose\u2019s duplicating machine likely somewhere in the building. In attendance were about thirty people, some young and others not so young: students, booksellers, artists, intellectuals. Only the night before Hans Scholl, Alexander Schmorell, and Willi Graf had been graffitiing streets around Munich University with slogans like \u201cDown with Hitler\u201d and \u201cFreedom.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Freedom was the main topic of Haecker\u2019s lecture; and Haecker was insisting upon his own freedom of speech that night, given that he\u2019d been prohibited from public speaking since 1935. Just two weeks later, Hans and Sophie Scholl would be caught as they distributed the sixth White Rose leaflet in the hallways of the university. Risk taking seems to have been a shared tendency in these days, when Allied bombs were falling from the air and Germans were processing the reality of defeat at Stalingrad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Theodor<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

My research for the White Rose Symposium has circled around this one night, who was at Haecker\u2019s reading, why they were there, and what was read. I\u2019m convinced that we need new ways to understand how, why, and what it was about mentors like Haecker and his friend Karl Muth that \u201cspoke to\u201d the intellectual and religious restlessness of the White Rose students. We need to allow these forgotten figures to \u201cspeak to us,\u201d even when we run into obstacles along the horizon of our own scholarly expectations and interdisciplinary expertise. We need to call in the help of the best research into the hermeneutics of inner exile (Rotermund & Rotermund, Dodd, Klapper), so that we can connect the dots between all the available sources: works published during the Third Reich, private letters and journals preserved after the war, official documents, and memoirs that offer their own takes on what ignited these young adults.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Did Haecker know about the White Rose\u2019s leafleting campaign at the time? Nothing suggests that he did, but it\u2019s hard to imagine him stumbling upon any of the first four leaflets without noting their curious proximity to his philosophical lexis and his eschatological critique of National Socialism. He\u2019d been developing this critique in both his published inner-exile writings (where it twitches beneath the surface) and in his unpublished journals (where he names it without restraint). We know he\u2019d read to the White Rose from these journals and that their conversations had included explicit reference to Hitler and his regime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My paper includes a profile of Haecker\u2019s idiosyncratic anti-Nazism, which first appeared in print in 1923, several months before the Beer Hall Putsch. The essay he would read to the White Rose in February 1943 had been written in 1933, during months when the gestapo was investigating him because of a 1932 essay where he\u2019d vilified the swastika as the twisted, spinning cross, the symbol of the diabolical swindle duping of Germany.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With that in the background, Haecker wrote Creator and Creation<\/em> to address the kind of big questions that human beings tend to ask in dark times: Why did God create the world as it is? Why does He let evil happen? What role can the individual human person play in the worst of times when tragedy is everywhere? The finely wrought essay crescendos toward a celebration of the freedoms that rest beyond the grasp of the state, namely, the freedom that is<\/em> human conscience. But Haecker goes beyond even the free, ethical scope of personal conscience to propose a higher, sovereign freedom exemplified in the lives of saints and martyrs. This sovereign freedom is the divine gift of willed participation in the creator\u2019s \u201cfree act of a holy will to love, to give, and to communicate Himself.\u201d  What does this mean for human action in the world? It\u2019s an agapic mandate, ama et fac quod vis<\/em>, a phrase that Haecker borrows from St. Augustine: \u201cLove and do as you will!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Haecker read on February 4 is ultimately a proposal that the possibilities of human freedom extend beyond freedom from<\/em> oppression and even beyond freedom to<\/em> build a better life. He\u2019s describing a radical freedom in<\/em> love, a freedom to which not even death poses a limit. Was this the kind of freedom that Hans Scholl meant when he yelled those last words at the guillotine?  \u201cEs lebe die Freiheit!\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr.\u00a0Helena M. Tomko\u00a0is associate professor of literature in the Department of Humanities at Villanova University in Philadelphia. She studies the Catholic presence in early twentieth-century German literature and culture,\u00a0in particular writers\u00a0associated with the \u201cinner exile\u201d during the Third Reich. She completed her doctoral studies at St. John\u2019s College, Oxford, having studied for her undergraduate degree at Bristol University. Her book,\u00a0Sacramental Realism:\u00a0Gertrud von le Fort and German Catholic Literature in the Weimar Republic and Third Reich<\/a>,\u00a0was published in 2007.\u00a0Her recent articles have appeared in venues including\u00a0German Life and Letters,\u00a0Oxford German Studies,\u00a0New German Critique,\u00a0and\u00a0The German Quarterly.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We know that Catholic inner exile Theodor Haecker spoke to members of the White Rose from his works on at least four occasions \u2014 and that his words spoke to them with a particular intellectual appeal. The dynamic eschatological account of history, evil, and the grandeur of human freedom that echoes in the White Rose … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2531","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/whiteroseproject.seh.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/whiteroseproject.seh.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/whiteroseproject.seh.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whiteroseproject.seh.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whiteroseproject.seh.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2531"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/whiteroseproject.seh.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2531\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2532,"href":"https:\/\/whiteroseproject.seh.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2531\/revisions\/2532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/whiteroseproject.seh.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}