Error led to death. You stand, wet and cold, in the dark under the endless night sky, straining to catch your breath: you have killed her, you have killed her, you have killed her. Hear the water’s sounds against the bridge and imagine the car beneath the surface: it must be black in the depths. You will not go to jail, but in this mistake -this accidental, unwilled moment- you have drowned not only an innocent but also the dreams of your father and assassinated brothers.
They are dead, the men who shaped you. And now she is likely dead as well, as are your ambitions, which were pure -pure enough for government work, as they say. Shaking, you begin to walk: you need to think, need to speak to trusted confidantes, need time to determine how best to deal with this disaster-
-and the howl of the trauma breaks into your rational monologue, a scream of guilt and terror: the world will judge you; you killed her; you didn’t mean to; she was lovely; it was an accident-
You walk past homes: no, you cannot knock on these doors. Feel the hand that would summon help in your wet hair: this is how her hair felt, or would have felt if you’d gotten around to running your fingers through it; and it is how your wife’s hair feels. Goddamn all this: all this for lust, or do you still believe you offered her a ride for politeness?
-of course! It was nothing: just being a gentleman, the testimony of that deputy aside. The car never parked; no one drove into the darkness to disappear into anyone’s warmth: it was simply a matter of being lost -true in either case, now that you think of it and feel the shame again-
You’re in a house; you’re back at the bridge; and here are your friends talking to you, but you’re wild: your mind has come apart and frantically chases all possibilities to their most distant ends, as though it cannot let any thought escape, as though one may be the salvation that can undo this accident -this accident which was a killing, wasn’t it?
No: it isn’t. And as you reason out why it isn’t -with that marvelous Ivy League mind assembling laws and precedents and exculpatory arguments- your psyche is punctured again and yet again by the shock of the trauma: you wanted peace, you wanted love, you wanted warmth and happiness, like everyone, and this is what an instant wrought, not because of you but through you. You, an observer in your life. You: a witness to happenstance and now to be blamed as its author. Well: weren’t you, driving drunk in the dark with your mind elsewhere?
She is in the water, and you see her: eyes open, hair spread out in the cold black ink gently lapping up around the pylons, and so you decide: you will be in the water too. You swim for 500 yards and 500 years and later say to your friends, when they -stunned and reasonable- ask why you didn’t call for help:
[I had] my own thoughts and feelings as I swam across that channel … that somehow when they arrived in the morning that they were going to say that Mary Jo was still alive.
(She was, you later learn: she was alive for hours, pressed into the bubble of air in the car, unable to open the doors, certainly assuming that help was on the way as the water rose, afraid and alone and relying on you-
-but you never get very far down that line of reasoning, not except when in your cups late at night and alone, when your wife has slipped into her coma and you wonder what you might have done if you were president -no more war! no more poverty!- but it’s best not to think of any of this at all).
And years pass: for how long do you assume personal moral continuity? Are you the man you were? Would you make his mistakes? Are you to blame for his frenzy, his delirium? Your just causes: aren’t they more important than the trivial matter of your own deeds? You owe it to the people to never give in to your grief, such as it is -and you feel how slight it is, how easily it is forgotten.
But the fantasy that guided you on that night, the delirious waking dream that convinced you to walk away from her as she drowned, the lunacy that you cannot explain, recurs. Sometimes you wonder if they might not burst through the door to announce that she is alive, or that she died before the car sank, or that the car was sabotaged, or that evidence shows you did all you could.
This is your dream: you didn’t find yourself one day awake in the streaming sunlight, aware that you were morally responsible for something unwilled, punishable for crimes you committed when deranged, yoked to deeds you didn’t intend to author. You wish to be judged -as do we all- only for what you willed, not for the contingency and happenstance of your life. You dream of being judged for your intentions, which were always good.
So when you die, only the good is to be spoken: you wanted what you thought was best, as do all of us, so we will pretend that is enough.
![Sophie Scholl, of the White Rose resistance group; killed February 22, 1943.
Clive James, despite his atheism, wrote that Sophie Scholl “was probably a saint” and compared her to Jesus Christ; her face on German postage stamps is as great a symbol of transformation as Saul’s conversion, a demonstration that neither a state nor a human is ever beyond redemption.
There is some question, however, as to whether every member of our species remains human; in their spellbound, somnambulistic stupor, the Germans of the 1930s and 1940s can be said at the very least to have permitted as inhuman a machine as was imaginable to assemble itself from their institutions and indeed their very body politic: the infernal Nazi state which defies credulity and has thus become myth. We feel that the Germans, the Wermacht, the Nazis, the Gestapo, must have been monsters, not ordinary typical humans as we are.
Whatever they were, there were few dissenters in their midst; and even if one objected to Nazism, one knew one could do nothing; and had one a family, what would running out into the street to be shot down by the SS as they came to capture one’s neighbor do anyway but assure that one’s child, too, would die in a camp, or at least be orphaned? Against sufficient power, morality is purely sacrificial; even if we can accept this for ourselves, can we accept it on behalf of others who need us?
Perhaps this is why the White Rose was comprised of the young, though not exclusively. A small, hopeless band of Germans who resisted the Nazi regime, they engaged in the simple, chiefly symbolic act of circulating essays which attempted to wake readers from the sociopathic trance in which they seemed to have been lulled by Hitler.
That students, powerless and doubtless aware that they faced assured death were they caught, turned to the essay as a means of protest is significant; they were using the expression of the West’s cultural heritage, its literary and rational tradition, as means to combat the negation of that heritage: irrational authoritarianism:
It is impossible to engage in intellectual discourse with National Socialism because it is not an intellectually defensible program. It is false to speak of a National Socialist philosophy… At its very inception this movement depended on the deception and betrayal of one’s fellow man; even at that time it was inwardly corrupt and could support itself only by constant lies. After all, Hitler states in an early edition of “his” book (a book written in the worst German I have ever read, in spite of the fact that it has been elevated to the position of the Bible in this nation of poets and thinkers): “It is unbelievable, to what extent one must betray a people in order to rule it.”
In their leaflets, which quoted Goethe and Aristotle, they argued both for intellectual resistance and for sabotage, and called attention to the slaughter of the Jews, the Poles, and others, asserting every argument against the Nazi machine they could muster: on theological, practical, political, patriotic, historical, artistic, and moral grounds they fought the lies of propaganda and the delirium of the trance-state.
As they surely knew would happen, they were caught; in 1943, all were arrested by the Gestapo, tried, and executed. There is a great deal more about their story here; it is as moving as anything I know. As one playwright noted:
The fact that [these] little kids, in the mouth of the wolf, where it really counted, had the tremendous courage to do what they did, is spectacular to me. I know that the world is better for them having been there, but I do not know why.
The emphasized last line seems crucial to me; I can only suggest that in their sacrificial courage, their refusal to abrogate their innate moral duty -which tens of millions of their peers had happily neglected-, and their sagacity despite their youth, the White Rose confirm that there was the finest sort of humanity even in the midst of that infernal machine. Maybe it is that they remind us that heroism is possible for all.
(Note: I’d written and abandoned dozens of posts about them several months ago while briefly fixated by ideas about morality, resigning myself to the customary sense of oafishness one feels when speaking of the very precious, but was reminded of them again by the eminent B. Michael’s note about Holland, 1954, a Neutral Milk Hotel song which mentions them. It isn’t surprising that Jeff Mangum alludes to them; one can easily grow as obsessed with the White Rose as with Anne Frank, and I find it hard not to search photos of Sophie Scholl for signs of her core, the source of her heroism, the looming loss).](http://1.media.tumblr.com/2KfNZVJctnqb9hzwRxnQbudFo1_r1_400.jpg)
