Sophie Scholl was the 21-year-old young woman at the center of the White Rose, an audacious group of German students at the University of Munich who were beheaded by guillotine after producing six leaflets that attacked Hitler, condemned the mass murder of Jews, and urged Germans to join the resistance. In this class, we will examine Scholl’s acts of resistance and interrogate the origins of moral courage.

Rebecca Donner is a 2023-2024 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard and a 2023 Visiting Scholar at Oxford. In recognition of her contribution to international historical scholarship, she was recently elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her most recent book is the New York Times bestseller All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, a deeply researched fusion of biography, espionage thriller, and scholarly detective story about her great-great-aunt Mildred Harnack, an American graduate student who became a leader of one of the largest underground resistance groups in Germany during Hitler’s regime. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, and the Chautauqua Prize.