Writing and Resistance – The White Rose Pamphlets: A Live Reading

At around 11am on Thursday 18 February 1943 two students in Munich
were arrested for distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets. By Monday they
had been interrogated, tried, and executed along with another
member of the resistance circle. Further arrests followed. From
15-27 February 2021 the White Rose Project will be following the
events as they happened in real time through daily posts on
Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. This year marks the 78th
anniversary of the first White Rose trials. It’s also a year when
the dates and days of the week coincide. Imagine going about your
normal routine on Monday, being arrested on Thursday, being
interrogated over the weekend, and going to trial the following
Monday morning. At the heart of our week is a live reading of the
White Rose’s resistance pamphlets, translated from German into
English by student members of the White Rose Project. Dr Alex Lloyd
(Fellow by Special Election in German, St Edmund Hall) will give a
short introduction to the pamphlets. The readers are current and
former students and academics, mirroring the membership of the
original group: Sophie Caws, Eve Mason, Adam Rebick, Elba Slamecka,
Sam Thompson, Amy Wilkinson, and Taylor Professor Emeritus of
German Language and Literature, T.J. (Jim) Reed, FBA. The event
will open and close with music by the award-winning vocal ensemble
SANSARA, recorded on 22 February 2020. This event is supported by
The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) and the
University of Oxford’s Public Engagement with Research Seed Fund.
It is part of the White Rose Project, a research and public
engagement initiative bringing the story of the White Rose
resistance circle to English-speaking audiences. Dr Alexandra Lloyd
is Fellow by Special Election in German at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.
She has published widely on post-war Germany, most recently in her
book Childhood, Memory, and the Nation: Young Lives under Nazism in
Contemporary German Culture (Legenda, 2020). She is currently a
Knowledge Exchange Fellow at TORCH working with the White Rose
Foundation in Munich, and is Project Lead on a Public Engagement
with Research Seed Fund project, ‘Resistance: The Story of the
White Rose’, in collaboration with the award-winning vocal ensemble
SANSARA. Eve Mason is a final-year student of English and German at
the Queen’s College, Oxford. Her passion for translation led her to
the White Rose Project, where she was one of the original
translators of the pamphlets for The White Rose: Reading, Writing,
Resistance. She was awarded a prize for German in the Warwick Prize
in Undergraduate Translation in 2019 and has gone on to
self-publish A String of Pearls: A Collection of Five German Fairy
Tales by Women Writers, for which she won the LIDL Year Abroad
Project Prize 2019–20. Sophie Caws is a final year student of
French and German at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. After taking German as
a beginner’s language, she now studies modern German literature
with Dr Lloyd, with a particular interest in Freudian psychology
and the literature of the former GDR. She spent 9 months living in
Leipzig, Germany, where she worked as an English Language Assistant
with the British Council and a teacher of English as a Second
Language. She was also involved in English-language community
theatre with English Theatre Leipzig, with the aim of promoting
intercultural linguistic and artistic exchange within the Leipzig
community and beyond. Sam Thompson is a fourth-year PhD student at
King’s College London, where he is completing a thesis on Classical
Reception in German-language exile literature, 1933-45. Sam
previously studied Classics and German at Magdalen College, Oxford,
where he also received an MSt in German (with a dissertation on
Austrian memory literature). His recent research interests include
the work of Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger and Anna Seghers, and
Interbellum literature more broadly.