Even while avoiding a head-on with the Final Solution as their current democracies race rightwards, German-language filmmakers have begun to examine other aspects of their parents’ Third Reich. The latest is Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, director Marc Rothemund’s first theatrical (after three TV movies) collaboration with Fred Breinersdorfer, whose script follows “facts as closely and faithfully as possible” in this, another “based on . . .”

Winner of three Lolas and two Silver Bears at Berlin, the feature uses recent interviews and Gestapo minutes unavailable until 1990, in dissecting “the issue of civil courage” and, more to its purpose, fleshing out the continuation of a tale of “one of the few heroines in German history.” For 1982 both Michael Verhoeven’s The White Rose/Die weisse Rose and Percy Adlon’s Last Five Days/Fünf letzte Tage received several prizes for their consideration of the same events, though the former focused on wider prior developments and concludes where Rothemund begins, whereas the latter limits itself to the viewpoint of middle-aged cellmate Else Gebel (Irm Hermann, in the rôle now taken by Johanna Gastdorf).

Attention in this newest telling is squarely on twenty-one-year-old Sophie Magdalena (Julia Jentsch), recruited by her brother Hans Fritz (Fabian Hinrichs) as the lone female component of the White Rose, university students in Nazi birthplace Munich whose aim is to bring the public to face the facts of 1943 and thus end National Socialist power and the war alike. Engaged to a soldier evacuated from the disastrous Eastern Front, she claims that as a woman she will be more inconspicuous disseminating their propaganda leaflets at Ludwig-Maximilian University. But the siblings are observed by an early-morning janitor, detained, and taken handcuffed to Gestapo headquarters in the Wittelsbacherpalais.

Bullying and insinuating by turns, threatening and gentle, after three days canny veteran inspector Robert Mohr (Alexander Held) is nearly fooled by her dignified insistence on innocence. However, evidence accumulates as additional participants are arrested, improbabilities crop up in testimonies, and others are reported to have confessed. Sensing in the woman something of his own rebellious son a year younger, the inspector offers her an out, which she refuses. Championing individual conscience and the freedom of speech abrogated in 1933, she grows in stature and confidence as she, her brother, and father-of-three Christophe Probst (Florian Stetter) are almost immediately taken before the highest, People’s Court, transferred for the occasion from Berlin.

In a closed kangaroo trial from which Mohr and the siblings’ parents (small-town mayor Robert and ill Magdalena, played by Jörg Hube and Petra Kelling) are effectively excluded, legally improper hanging Judge Dr. Roland Freisler (André Hennicke) rants, drowns out opposition, and sentences the three defendants, who will meet again only for a bribed minute to share a smoke and embrace. Accepting full responsibility in a noble attempt to shield others, the heroine breaks only for lonely seconds but then smiles.

Harking back to issues of personal morality in an immoral state, concerns familiar here in Thoreau’s injunction to “serve the state with conscience” and go to prison rather than collaborate in injustice, Sophie Scholl also aspires to speak to today’s world, its wars, genocides and indifference. While good enough, the result is not as compelling as it might have been.

Aside from the troubling impression that the resistance is at heart ethnocentric and inspired to spare German bloodshed and make possible that country’s leadership of a new Europe -- had not three-hundred thousand Aryans fallen at Stalingrad, would protest have been mounted? -- the method itself leaves the viewer cold. The purposely dull color scheme is well taken, but the whole comes across as stagey, particularly noticeable in the rushed and Expressionistic final scenes. Symbolic light through windows -- in one of which, crossbars prefigure the later dark Crucifix on a bare white wall -- Mohr’s Pilate gesture of washing his hands, Freisler’s bloodred robe and cap, are too facile.

Though she may wring her hands below desktop sightline, the heroine’s human anguish in choosing martyrdom is not brought home, for neither opening warbling to the radio’s “Sugar” nor closing sepia snapshots nor disembodied geliebter fiancé Fritz (who later married her younger sister Elisabeth), serve to picture a full emotional life. Instead, bald debate is what we get, as ideas are shot back and forth in what becomes a morality play, an admirable but not entirely successful one. 

(Released by Zeitgeist Films; not rated by MPAA.)