In the past six decades of German cultural memory, the figure of Sophie Scholl has undergone a series of metamorphoses. She has developed from being a traitor and a suicidal failure into a distant, legendary heroine. Today, her story of resistance against the Nazi regime and her iconic and tragically fatal act of scattering seditious leaflets in the University of Munich atrium is heroically retold in classrooms throughout Germany. Placing Scholl in the context of historiographical development since her execution in 1943, this essay intends to look at how director Marc Rothemund has further modified the shape of Sophie Scholl with his film Sophie Scholl — Die letzten Tage (2005; Sophie Scholl — The Final Days). Fred Breinersdorfer, the screenwriter of the film, claims he was initially reluctant to write the script because he could only see Scholl as that distant historical figure, “jemand der immer auf einem Sockel steht, nach der Schulen benannt sind” (someone who is always on a plinth and whom schools are named after). This distance from the revered historic hero is, however, exactly what the film has succeeded in transforming.

This chapter presents an analysis of how the film normalizes its hero, not only to move beyond the previous generation's glorification of heroes, but furthermore to allow modern audiences to experience history as viscerally as possible. Using Sophie Scholl and her interrogator Robert Mohr as examples of representative “good” and “bad” Germans, this chapter will comment on the relationship between cinematic experience, memory, and authenticity. Here, specific notions of memory such as cultural memory, prosthetic memory, and postmemory will prove to be of use.