Why Theodor Haecker Spoke to the White Rose

Abstract

This article considers the resonance of Theodor Haecker’s writing within the White Rose movement. Haecker met with the students multiple times in 1942, the year they circulated their first five leaflets, and on 4 February 1943, two weeks before the final leaflet’s distribution. Why did this Catholic inner exile, translator of Newman and Kierkegaard, and one-time Weimar public intellectual speak to the students so powerfully as they conceived their political action and wrote their leaflets? The article draws on recent departures in inner-exile studies to propose that their fluency in the rhetorical techniques of non-conformist discourse in the Third Reich equipped them to embed arguments in their leaflets that were gleaned from the interpretive community within which they encountered Haecker. His final reading to them from his book about theodicy — why things are as they are — offers a case study in reading with care the texts they read with purpose.