Oh. Hello and welcome to Big Ten Live Events, the live events series from the University of Oxford.
Part of the humanities cultural programme. One of the founding Stones of the Future.
Stephen A. Schwartzmann Centre for the Humanities.
My name is Dr Vicki McGuinness and I'm head of Cultural Programming and Partnerships in the Humanities at the University of Oxford.
No, thrilled to let you know today that we are alive from inside the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
Like many places, it is closed to the public right now and we are so grateful to the museum for enabling
this to happen and also for so many people for making sure it is incredibly safe to do so.
It is quite odd, I must say, to to be here during this time because I actually used to work here for many years.
And it is actually also an opportunity to celebrate as we bring a research led and public discussion to the museum,
because this was part of the founding stones for this institution. Over 300 years ago, Big Tent Live event brings together students,
researchers and expert practitioners in their field to discuss humanities subjects such as the environment,
medical, humanities and history of disease, as well as celebrating storytelling, music, performance and identity.
Everyone is welcome in our big tent, and we welcome you as we talk about big ideas together today.
This series would not be possible without all of the people both on and off screen.
And we are so grateful to you all. And we are also thrilled that thousands of you have also watched the series so far already.
So thank you very much. And welcome back. As usual, there will be opportunities for audience questions at the end.
So if you could put your questions in the YouTube chat, I'll make sure I pick them up and put them to our speakers at the end.
Our speakers today are Dr Alex Lloyd, fellow in German by Special Selection Apps and Edmund Hall in Oxford.
Alex teaches German literature and language at the University of Oxford and has published extensively on German literature and film.
She also holds a Torch Knowledge Exchange Fellowship,
working in partnership with the White Rose Foundation in Munich and is also director of the White Rose Project.
We also welcome Tom Harring today, who is founder and artistic director of the professional vocal ensemble Some Solera.
In addition to this, he also has many other roles, as well as a singer, producer and project manager on many projects.
He was also a choral scholar at Merton College, where he read music and concentrated on performance.
German leader and also heavy metal. Apparently, the White Rose Project looks at voices of German resistance.
In 1943, five students and a professor from the University of Munich were executed.
They were part of the white rose. They were a group that called on the German people to resist Hitler.
Alex and Tom's collaboration uses translations, spoken word and performance to tell this important and remarkable story.
So thank you so much to Alex and Tom for joining us here today.
What a phenomenal backdrop we have here with the Ashmolean Atrium and Apollo looking at us today.
Thank you for joining us. Could we begin by talking a little bit more about your collaboration?
Sure. Thanks. First of all, key and thanks to the whole torch team.
And it really is incredible to be here. It's very surreal. But it's wonderful.
I'm very grateful for all the organisation that's gone into that.
The White Rose Resistance is really a household name in Germany, but it tends not to be so well-known so much in the UK.
My own interest in this group really started when I was a student. Thanks to a very famous film that came out.
But I also kind of thought about this group a little bit during my own research into the generation that grew up under Hitler.
But it was really two years ago that I kind of was reintroduced to the group.
That was thanks to a teacher at a local school who was just finishing up a book on the white rose.
And he asked me to be part of a seminar series to mark the seventy fifth anniversary of the first trials and execution.
So that was kind of how I came into it. And I'm glad that you've told the story in brief.
It really is an incredible and incredibly rich story. The where we come into it in this project is that the group of five students
and a professor secretly wrote and distributed antifascist anti-war pamphlets,
and they did this. Between 1942, 1943, these pamphlets have been translated many, many times into English.
So we weren't doing anything new there. But as I read the as I looked around and did some research,
what I realised was that I certainly couldn't find a translation of these texts by students and I couldn't find a translation that was collaborative.
And the leaflet campaign itself was a collaborative process.
And so it seemed like there could be something really exciting and dynamic about involving students in the translation process.
So that's really how the White Rose Project started two years ago.
And I got together a group of students, and they produced a wonderful translation of these tax, which was published along with some academic articles.
And it was so kind of exciting that we thought that perhaps it would be worthwhile doing this again.
And so this year,
we have a new cohort of student translators and they've been working on some excerpts from the letters and diaries of the white rose members.
Much of this material has never been translated or certainly never been published.
Having done a publication the first year, it struck me, why do anything straightforward and easy?
It struck me that it might be exciting to instead explore presenting the text and performance.
And this was also interesting to me because my own research is starting to look at the role of music in the lives of the group and in their reception.
And so this was really the moment where, well, I connected with Tom and we talked about the musical performance as a possibility here.
And it was it was really great to hear from Alex and to learn a bit more about the white race.
And I have heard of them, but hadn't really I didn't know the detail of that amazing story.
And I think what really struck me about ISIS idea was the opportunity for the choir to work on a project that would explore the
combination of spoken and sung text in a kind of really intimate way and also to help kind of facilitate how telling this story.
SANZAR is a mixed voice ensemble and we tend to focus on acappella or unaccompanied choral music,
which again kind of lent itself particularly to this project, which is really about voices and.
And yet just telling this, telling the story and how we can share it with the audiences.
So at this early stage in the collaboration was really an exciting phase.
And there was this kind of blank canvas in front of us.
And that was great to start sharing and sharing ideas together.
And I think that was really the moment I realised that it was going to be a very kind of moving sequence was.
And I started looking at some of the private letters and and particularly her diary entries from the from the prisons that the members ended up in.
And that if we could combine this with a sequence of choral pieces and that would that would be a really moving and dramatic performance.
And so what we did initially was to kind of devise a programme with the idea of actually performing it.
And so we had a performance on the 22nd of February this year in the University Church of Samarra,
the Virgin here and centre of Oxford, which was an incredible venue.
And that was the seventh seventh anniversary of the execution of three of the members.
So that was a really important, important moment. I think this is the perfect time for us to go to a clip of that performance.
I mean, it is time he starts to lose his.
Oh. Steve.
I don't know if you received my last letter. There was no mention of it in Muddles and the post I receive here is very disorganised.
I truly pity the Gestapo for having to decipher all of these completely illegible scribbles.
But they do get paid for it and duty is duty. Isn't that right, gentlemen?
Dear mother and father, I'm doing well. I'm alive, healthy and well-fed.
Have every other Dale and I usually spend it walking. The landscape here, like everywhere in Russia is very peaceful.
Dear friends. I'm actually lying in bed and have just woken up from a dream in the dream, I was at a camp in my dreams.
I'm normally travelling next to the camp. There was a big lake in the evening.
I went to see a woman who owned a boat. We sailed out across the lake.
By then, it was Night-Time. The sky was completely overcast. And in front of a wall of clouds hung the moon.
A great pale disc that illuminated the whole lake. Illuminated isn't quite the right word.
The whole lake was a sort of pale grey. That's nothing unusual.
With some distance away from the moon, there was a little red dot glowing behind the clouds.
That's the sun. The woman explained to me, we live in the only place on earth where you can see the sun and the moon at the same time.
I don't know what happened after that. They say that dreams come from noises you hear when you sleep.
That could well be true. Anyway, I like dreaming. I live in a strange world in my dreams where I'm never quite happy.
But still. Please don't think I'm being silly or sentimental. I'd hate that.
I'm actually quite the materialist. Goodnight. Sophie.
Ms. Sure, we all agree.
That was beautiful and moving. We could move on now.
Perhaps you could tell us about the pope. Sure.
In terms of working on the text and looking at the text of the students, that there is an incredible amount of material here.
As I said, untranslated material, which is really exciting,
but it also involved quite a lot of kind of careful selection and reflection to not only to find texts that would work for collaboration,
but also to find texts that were realistically translatable to students worked from October to February and they're finished.
Translations were kind of hot off the press for the concerts. It was a very spontaneous and dynamic project this year.
But we have this kind of incredible corpus of material. And so in the next election, which was was partly something that I was doing,
thinking with the students and partly something I was doing the time we wanted for the performance to really kind of focus on three three things.
We wanted to get across an idea of journey so that, you know, we don't end up with this kind of idea that these people were born resisters.
You know, this was this was a journey. This was something that developed in them and developed as a result of encounters that they
had and people that they met and friendships they made and things that changed around them.
And so, you know, we have letters from Sophie Scholl when she's 16 or Crystal paused when he's nine.
So we wanted to get some of that earlier material into the concert, as well as last letters from prison covering their arrests and incarceration.
The second thing that we really wanted to emphasise was that this was a collaborative endeavour.
There has been and that is sometimes a tendency to focus on one or two individuals in this kind of core group of six.
And we wanted to try and give voice to everyone in as much as that was realistic and possible.
And then the third thing that we wanted to do was, was not to have any kind of commentary or narration as part of the event.
There is, again, a tendency sometimes to mythologise or idealise activists like this and this group in particular.
And so one way we thought that we might be able to counter that would be to simply have their voices juxtaposed with with the music.
Yeah. And I think alongside the very rich set of texts that we had to work with, we thought carefully about the role of the choir.
And and actually what the relationship between the choir and the readers would be
and how the choices of music repertoire would actually kind of influence that role.
And as Alex said early on, we're looking at a kind of early stages before they before they got involved as an activism.
And the choir repertoire at that point, we we're looking at pieces that they possibly would have come across there, quite a musical bunch.
And so we included a couple of Barcarolle hours. One of them was in that first clip.
And then I also wanted to include some pieces from Max Ragers, eight sacred songs, which he wrote towards the end of his life in 1914.
And one of those in particular really echoed one of Sophie shows letters,
which I think was also in the clip where she described a dream she had and this Brager piece
on zir Liebe and found Tranh really spoke to that text and resonated with surfies letter.
And so it was one of these moments of alignment where suddenly everything kind of came together and it felt, particularly then in performance,
that the choir would then start to kind of really embody Sophie's voice and that some of the
boundaries between the singers and the readers would start to blur and merge a little bit.
And at this point, the choirs inhabiting that sort of memory and dreamspace in this kind of moment,
in a phase that's the calm before the storm, as it were.
Another role of the choir was to bring a kind of fresh perspective and that there as a as a kind of chorus or mass in this drama,
they could they could bring things out of the narrative that that was otherwise dominated by these individuals and that their personal stories.
And one of those was a piece by Rudolf Mauer's Berger called really dished out so viewshed.
And that is a really powerful setting that he wrote in the aftermath of the allied bombing of Dresden in 1945,
where he was choirmaster, her boys choir and the Creutz care here.
And that's a really astonishing. Photo, which I think is in the link for her on the White Project.
White Rose Project's Web site, which shows him conducting his choir but in the rubble of Dresden,
and we'd like suppose performing this piece that we sang and then the kind of third role that the choir and habited and brought,
I think, to the drama of it was through these pieces by a composer, Philip Moore.
Which are three settings of prayers by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose story really aligns very closely with that of the white race members.
He was Lutheran pastor and theologian and was very strongly involved as a in the
resistance to Naziism and was himself incarcerated and and executed as well.
And at this point in the programme,
it's really the kind of dramatic climax where these three prayers that we perform punctuate the final readings of the members from prison.
And a lot of the texts really, again, start to overlap to us. The second moment of realignment where where we can bring the two forces together.
And I think we're going to begin to play an excerpt from the concert at precisely this moment in the concert.
So we had translations of readings of these kind of last letters.
And the one that we're going to hear now is Crystal Pope's last letter says his wife
on the day of his execution pulled out like all of them as an incredible figure,
an incredible person. And that really comes across through the letters.
He was at this point, 23 years old. He was father of three.
His youngest child had just been born weeks before and he wasn't tapped on his way to see them when he was arrested by the Gestapo.
And there are, I think, specific textual moments in this that really,
really echoes so that the Bonhoeffer prayers really start to feel like private letters, which in turn makes the letters feel like prayers.
Let's go to that second clip. My beloved wife.
Thank God you and our children are well. When you think of me, you need not be worried.
Following an unfortunate series of events, I have ended up at the Gestapo in Munich, but I am not doing badly here at all.
I feel quite calm and await the things that are to come.
Never have I drawn so much strength from my love for you as I do now.
It feels as though I am very close to you. I see you before me.
I feel your love in me and my love in you. And I'm so happy because I know that this love is indestructible.
Even if you cannot understand why I'm being held in this cell. Stay calm.
Stay calm and don't worry. I am being treated well.
I am not finding life in the cells about. And the children, I see them in my mind.
One after another. So sweet, half free and wonderfully innocent.
What darling creatures you have borne me. My darling wife. My love for you often rises beyond measure.
I am unendingly grateful to you. I want to live with you and the children.
With all my love. Bristol. Some.
Amos. My wife.
It's nice to see you smile.
This. Oh.
Oh, I. Another beautiful.
Thank you so much for sharing these. It really is wonderful to see this.
We should say that the full video is available on the torch website and also on the White Rose Project Web site.
So pleased to have a look at the full performance. It's now time to go to some audience questions.
And we have some really interesting ones come in from the public. So thank you very much for sharing those today.
One I'd like to start off with is a slightly blunt one, but why has it taken so long for the White Rose text to be translated into English?
And what is. You know, what else can you say? Well, there's still a huge amount of work to do.
We've translated a tiny, tiny handful of masses of material.
And also, it's important to say that the additions that are published in German, I'm not always full editions.
So there is still archival material there that there's been some really meticulous editing and scholarship of these German editions.
I think partly, you know, now that the copyright is elapsed, it just makes things a lot easier, practically.
But it's also, I think, to do with the reception of the white rose in a sort of English speaking context,
that this isn't always well, this hasn't always been a kind of an easy story to integrate into narratives of the third race.
That's certainly a part of kind of cultural capital and on our consciousness of that period.
But, you know, I hope I hope that we've made a start. And I hope that we'll be able to kind of make make more headway.
Certainly working on this again next year. So my follow up question was, what next?
So it sounds like there's more to come. Yes, more to come. Yeah, great.
There we go. Well, we'll leave them hanging. Tentatively.
Another great question that's come in is is about the work with some solera.
And so this being a professional vocal ensemble, and you've already elaborated really helpfully that what you guys got from that book.
Could you say a little bit more about the collaboration and how that how that worked for you as a group?
Yeah, well, it was I think, firstly, it is a great opportunity for our singers to do something different.
And the majority of the work that we do in performance, we're on our own.
And as much as we can kind of try and choreograph and dramatise things, we don't have other people to play off or other characters to work with.
So this is an opportunity for us to explore that more performative aspect.
And I think, yeah, some of the ways we did that, as I said, talking about the roles of the choir and the relationship,
the readers and this kind of large, large scale kind of arch where the choir can regains its narrative agency throughout the throughout the programme.
And yeah, I mean, I think that the singers who were also just really they didn't quite know what they were getting into.
And, you know, and we're really moved and struck by the story and and a lot of them afterwards,
although I know it really did really experience it, something special.
And since then, I was actually our last concert pre lockdown and have no thinking back to it very, very fondly as well.
Well, let's hope that we will have concerts again very soon.
So I'm hearing you speak to the young people that were part of the white rose and the people we've
spoken about today as part of the group and the young people that are part of the ensemble as well.
There must be some resonance there. I could imagine where, you know,
people people find links that they otherwise you speak about them feeling very moved and not knowing what they got themselves into,
but that it could be an overwhelming experience.
But sounds like a nobody. Overall, a positive. Yeah, definitely.
And I think it's something that helped it feel I feel collaborative and and for
the readers to meet the singers and for us to actually work on it together.
Yeah, I think that in that process and then beyond that, just knowing that a lot of the members themselves are actually the same age,
if not a bit younger than than our singers and the students that really brought it all home very strongly.
Yeah. And got another aspect of that was that some of the readers were also the translators from the project.
And so there was this I think, you know,
one of the things that we've certainly felt all the way through is that this wasn't this wasn't asked devising a programme,
doing a concert and then and then saying, you know, great, well done us.
We've created something and we don't need to sort of think about it again. You know, this is a kind of ongoing.
Collaboration. And this is a programme that can shift, as we know, as we work on tax dollars.
As Tom and Sunstar think about music.
And so I think one of the things that could be really exciting to do could be to talk with the translators, you know,
have singers and translators and performers all talking together because the translators brought to the readings something really special.
You know, nobody reads more closely than a translator, and they really knew these tax.
They had done an incredible amount of really sensitive work on them and a lot of research to do justice to them.
So that was that was also, from my perspective, a great part of what we what we were able to do.
It sounds like it links exactly with how you open this talk, where he talks about, you know, the typical way that a project,
that research project could have been approached was actually what you've done here is truly co create.
So therefore, you can't actually almost predict what the end point is because of all the partners involved, which is scary.
How is that research? It's really you find it's really exciting.
Yeah, I know. No, it's great. I mean, I have to say,
one of the high points of my career so far has been this project and working
with these students and and being able to not only translate and supervise,
you know, I wasn't teaching them. I was supervising their their work and they made the decisions.
But to be able to then here that work alongside these incredibly, incredibly performed pieces of music was.
Yeah. I mean. Yeah. Scary but exciting.
Scary but exciting. That's true. It's different to writing a monograph. I would imagine.
Yeah. Of course.
With the methodologies and the project as you brought it together and having a public performance of course then the other element is bringing in,
you know, who whomever would would want to come and see it.
So the opportunity to share it. As you said, you talked about, of course, it came out of copyright, but also the reception of this material.
How do you think that could be? Would it be an ongoing part of your project, do you think?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's interesting. So the students who've been working on the translations this year have been sending in feedback.
And one of the questions that that I asked them was what what do you hope happens to your translations?
And overwhelmingly, they say, you know, we hope that people who don't know this story,
this this chapter of German history, we hope that they can learn about it,
but that they can learn about it through these texts, through the voices of these of these really incredible,
but also very accessible, you know, in some senses completely normal young people.
You know, they go to parties, they go to wine bars, they go to concerts.
They complain about how much homework they have you, but they are completely normal.
My experience is normal students. But but who do you know who are doing incredible, incredible things?
So it's also the opportunity there.
As you say, about where things are being more well known, perhaps curricular opportunities, you know, in schools and what have you.
And actually, before this event started, we bumped into one of the curators here at the Ashmolean outside,
Anya Ober, and she said, I'm rushing home to listen to this event.
So hello, Anya, because, of course, somebody from Germany, she knows this story very well.
But in British context, perhaps it's not so well known.
No, that's true. I mean, but also the three of the project's student translator so far, I think three are German natives.
And so that's been great. Also, as part of our work, you know, and I think the any other thing to say really about the audience experience,
at least for the event that we put on it, was that they were, for the most part, kind of really dropped in the deep end.
If they didn't know anything about the white race,
then they went straight into this hearing directly from these from their their readings and quite private and intimate letters and diary entries.
And that I think what we wanted to try and get across, particularly for those people,
was rather than telling the story and a kind of narrative way or giving them actually too much context even,
was that they would get an insight into the story and then and then go away and learn more, because, you know,
there's only so much we can pack into an event and actually going for that kind of
dramatic and more human sized room rather than all of the surrounding history.
There's a way to give it some kind of impact and immediacy.
It sounds like the strength really, though, was the giving them a platform for their voices,
even though they're not here anymore rather than speaking for them. So. That's quite a different approach.
You know, from from other projects, I wondered if we could move on.
So somebody is asked, what are the common themes running through the letters and the diaries of the Boy Rose members?
Is there anything surprising you mentioned about people complaining about homework, something going and going out to concerts and balls?
I mean, we hope we all will be able to do that again soon. But was there anything else you'd be able to share with us?
There is. I mean, especially in the in the last letters, there is a kind of a very acute sense of faith.
They had varying degrees of of kind of intensity when it came to that kind of personal faith and religion.
But something that does come out again and again and those in those later letters is
kind of profound sense of the presence of God in their lives and in their actions.
So that's something that's kind of I think that surprised a lot of the student translators.
Actually, it's it's very candid. But also, I mean, you know that they're also writing to family members.
And so there is also a kind of sense of of comforting.
And, you know, it's not they're not just writing for themselves that they're writing to someone else who is who who's going to be left behind.
And of course, you mentioned, Tom,
when we were talking at the beginning about how the diaries and the letters seemed to be like prayers and, you know.
But is that something that you felt when you were working with materials? Well, yeah, I think so.
And I mean, it is maybe too much for that kind of reduction to say that it's blowing these line between the
kind of sacred and secular because they weren't have been necessarily thinking in that way.
But I think the example that we had at the Bon Hoffer Prayer and and Veles letter really shows that in those kind of final moments
that the two overlap and people are some private kind of spirituality is also linking to what's kind of nearest and dearest.
And when they're writing to their to their families and praying that these these things all merge and overlap.
And it's much more as a kind of fluid part of their experience at that time.
So we've got a question here. There's a wonderful research and beautifully evoked by the concert.
What challenges did you face in translating these texts and setting this emotive music to this emotive material, to music?
You've talked about the very positive things. What are the challenges?
Well, I think one thing, though, is that the pieces that we performed, none of them actually set the tax from the UN.
So they were all existing, existing works that were kind of interspersed and juxtaposed with the readings themselves.
I don't think much of the challenges of translation. Yeah.
I mean, again, this is the who's the student speaking, but also my observation of them working, which is a really rewarding thing.
It's funny. Sometimes the biggest translation challenges are things that are completely, you know, seemingly mundane.
A particular challenge with the letters this year was, you know, how to start and how to end them, because there are things that sometimes in German,
some perfectly natural and you put it into a kind of English equivalent and it's just sounds ridiculous.
There was also the way the translation seminars often work is that we spend 20 minutes discussing
one word only to come back to the original choice that we had at the beginning of the discussion.
And that's an important part of it. But we spent a very long time talking about the word Austintown Whoof, which is Munich East Station,
which is where Villy and Hansen Alexander left from to go to the they did a tour of duty on the Eastern Front in the summer of 1942.
And so the students were translating Veles Diary, which is a series of very short entries and that sort of Osbourn Hall.
And then what time they left and where they went and who they were with just 20 minutes or so.
How do we say Munich, Munich, East Munich station station?
It matters that it's the east station because they're going to the east.
And, you know, that's you know, that doesn't seem like a very exciting example.
But but that's sort of where some of this work actually actually has to be done.
And then there are much kind of bigger ethical questions about, you know,
translating individual's private correspondence and how to do that responsibly and ethically and and
how to create also as authentic a voice as possible allowing for the fact that we are shifting it.
That very nicely leads onto something I want to pick up on, actually,
because one of the questions we've had is about a bridging, of course, you know, that sort of thing.
You've touched on it there already. Of course you'll translating.
So what are often quite private things? Is there anything that you you think actually that's too private?
We don't share that in a public context. Does it come to that?
Yes or no? But only really by virtue of the fact that we're translating published sources.
Right. So there's as it were, somebody has already taken the decision of what to publish and what not to publish.
So not really. But I think certainly at some point in the future, we end up doing more archival work with the project,
which I think will be exciting, that absolutely we would need to think very carefully about how that would work,
because, you know, part of what's exciting about this project and moving is these are real people and these are real people whose family members are,
to an extent still with us and who need some kind of agency.
And that's also, I think that there is an interesting moment in some of the readings where they've almost it's not
that they've they've been censored or myself censored because they knew that they were getting read.
And. And that is certainly kind of some of the more romantic letters you can read between the lines.
And I think that's that's also intriguing for the audience and for the listener that
there is this space to to kind of imagine some of those private things as well.
There's also the other element that makes this even more important,
the fact that they are personal, you know, they're the voices of these individuals.
So it is the strength of to you naturally led onto another question,
which is always the way which is somebody has asked already of the family members
or descendants or relatives of those individuals involved in the project,
or could they be in the future? Do you think so?
This year, the White Rose Project has partnered thanks to talk with the White Rose Foundation, Stone and Munich.
And I went I was very lucky to go for a visit in November and very generously Marcus Morrell,
the nephew of Alexander Morrell and also Wolfgang Whooper,
the son of Professor Kurt Huberta, very generously gave of their time and their hospitality.
And so I was able to talk with them about, you know, really about what their views of what we were doing are,
because, you know, they they have to, in a sense, carry this torch.
And so it was very important and for me that they should also have some kind of say, you know, at some level in this.
And so that was an incredibly moving experience, I have to say.
I hope I hope that they'll be able to be involved in some way in the future.
That's pretty hard to see that you've made that connexion and that that the foundation is is that in order to help you do that,
you have another question, and it's about the essay competition.
So apparently there was an essay competition run this year.
Katie says for a secondary age pupils in which they were asked to reflect upon what we can learn from the White Rose Group.
What ideas came out of this? Perhaps you could share some that these were these were incredible.
So this is the very first time that we've run a competition like this.
We partnered with the Oxford German network, which runs an annual national competition, the Oxford German Olympiad.
And we had around 60 entries from, I think, 45 schools across the UK.
Overwhelmingly, the responses drew parallels with contemporary times, particularly with regard to the climate crisis.
So there were some kind of parallels being drawn between Sophie Scholl and Grétar Tamberg.
But there was this kind of really, really encouraging, I should say, sense, you know,
a sense that that change is possible in the world and that the white rose is an
inspiring example of using passive resistance and peaceful means to make change.
Thank you so much. And I must say, this is not a question.
It's a comment from Alexander Huber says, Funny to hear about the erst Bahnhof.
It's about a mile away from where I grew up in Munich. Thanks. Thanks so much for tuning in.
That is, sadly, all we have time for in terms of questions. Thank you so much.
And sorry if I hadn't been able to get to you.
And today, what I would like to do, however, is just, you know, have your final thoughts, because as we've touched on already,
what is really coming out from what you're both saying is that young people and students really are at the heart of this project.
Yeah, I mean, certainly from from our text and translation perspective and historical perspective, students were at the heart of the white rose.
And the more I work on this material as a researcher, but also as a teacher,
the more convinced I am that we should have students at the heart of of translating this material.
And students at the heart of telling the story, actually. And I think that also came into the programming.
And we wanted to include a piece by a young composer and peers.
Connor Kennedy is a bass in the choir and he's also a brilliant composer and studying actually here at the moment for a detail and composition.
And the final clip that we've got is his setting.
Blessed are the peacemakers, which splits the choir into two parts.
And it was really like a kind of epilogue to the programme after the kind of high drama of the Philip Moore and the final readings and
a moment or so where we could talk a little bit of choreography and join forces with the readers towards the end of the programme.
Wonderful. Well, before we go to that clip, what remains for me is to think in a huge way or speakers here today,
not only because it's brilliant to be out of the House. It's brilliant to be in the Ashmolean.
Thank you to the film and sound crew and their colleagues in the Ashmolean for making this happen.
Thank you, Alex and Tom. Thank you very much. Thank you. So next week, we'll have another live show.
Thursday, five o'clock again. It is imagined journeys and in conversation between Professor Marion Turner of
the English faculty here at the University of Oxford and also Matthew Neal.
Matthew has his book out at the moment called Pilgrims' and Marion's book Is Chaucer a European Life.
So tune in again next week where we start at five p.m. Sorry again for the delay today.
It's our first in-person one. I hope you agree. It was definitely worth the wait.
The Boite Rose Project is an amazing project about an amazing subject.
So thank you all so much for joining us. And I hope you enjoy the final clip.
As.