Over one hundred years after the birth of Sophie Scholl, is it possible to see beyond the heroic figure to the real person behind the myth? This is the central question of Maren Gottschalk's new biography. The book provides extraordinary detail of the life of Sophie Scholl and the Scholl family through letters, diaries, and interviews with the family members who survived, their friends, and colleagues. It traces the origins of Scholl's political resistance through the anti-war beliefs of her parents and their dedication to democracy during the Weimar era. In later chapters, we also gain insights into Scholl's developing network of anti-Nazi friends and how her beliefs and opinions were shaped and challenged by those around her. For all those interested in how political resistance is informed and shaped by the intricacies of daily life and in particular how people can be compelled to take huge risks to campaign for change, this book is a useful source.

The biography also gives a clear picture of how difficult it was to resist fascism and how state propaganda permeated the lives of the Scholls. Sophie Scholl and most of her siblings joined the Hitler Youth or the League of German Girls and took on leadership positions within these organizations. We are shown how these youth organizations offered opportunities and leisure activities, but also how quickly the state punished actual or suspected transgressions. Once Sophie Scholl had decided to resist the regime and to spread antifascist messages, finding ways to disseminate this information and how to balance the risk to herself and her family was a difficult task. The last five chapters are a detailed picture of the barriers Scholl and her brother Hans faced during the Third Reich.

The central aim of the book—to see beyond the postwar myth of Sophie Scholl—is ambitious. Rather than a heroic figure who was destined to fight the Third Reich, the book tends to frame the Scholls as an ordinary, middle-class family. For example, chapters three, four, and five paint an incredibly rich picture of a childhood spent riding bicycles, swimming, and playing with dolls. Sophie Scholl's love of drawing and her interest in art are supported with reproductions of her sketches, and there are many photos of the Scholl children engaging in the kinds of activities familiar to many today. This portrayal of Sophie Scholl in particular as typical is also a challenge to all those who lived during the Third Reich. If she could see through the propaganda, find out about the horrors of the regime, and work against it, why did not others? However, the genre of biography places a contradiction at the heart of this aim because the very nature of a biography marks the subject as somehow different or special, as “normal” people are not commonly the subject of a biography. How can we see Sophie Scholl as both a typical girl and young woman of her age and yet someone who made an atypical choice?

This framing of the Scholls also causes the biography to stray into cliché, in particular clichés that are not supported by the evidence from their lives. In Chapter four, the Weimar Republic is cast in the familiar light of a democracy lacking in democrats, a statement which minimizes the role of Robert Scholl, the patriarch of the family, who, according to the previous chapter, had served as a mayor throughout the 1920s, first in Ingersheim an der jagst, then in Forchtenberg, and was a supporter of the republic (42). Sophie Scholl's transition from girlhood into womanhood is similarly discussed with generalizations about menstruation and her apparent desire to have children, overlooking the complexities of the construction of womanhood in her lifetime (90). The book also addresses the difficulties of using Scholl's diaries to reconstruct her opinions and that it is possible to overinterpret the “spontaneously scribbled lines of a sixteen-year-old” but is unclear about the methodological approach to avoiding this eventuality (94). Navigating the difficult path between seeing Sophie Scholl as exceptional and heroic on the one side and an ordinary girl on the other is not entirely balanced throughout.

The final chapter of the book examines the legacy of Sophie Scholl and the White Roses both immediately after their executions and today. Gottschalk acknowledges the challenges here; hundreds of the leaflets were handed to the police, and of those that were not, it is impossible to know what the recipients did, if anything, after receiving one. For their contemporaries in the resistance network, the leaflets provided a sense of solidarity and an acknowledgment that even though it was difficult to speak openly against the regime, those who opposed it were not alone. For us today, the book and the legacy are a reminder to speak up for human rights and freedom, even though it might be difficult to find the right opportunity or the right words.