Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

If the culture critic Clive James had his way, it's not Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg who'd be the subject of a Hollywood film but the anti-Nazi activist Sophie Scholl. In his magnificent Cultural Amnesia, James devotes a chapter to the young woman about whom "there are few facts to record, because she did not live long." He sums up her life thus:

"Sophie Scholl was guillotined by the Nazis at Stadelheim prison in Munich on February 22, 1943, at five o'clock in the afternoon. She was twenty-one years old. In life she had been reserved with strangers but full of fun with those she loved. Without being especially pretty she had radiated a moral beauty that left even her Gestapo interrogators self-consciously shuffling their papers, for once in their benighted lives hoping that the job of killing someone might pass to someone else. If there can be any such thing as a perfect person beyond Jesus Christ and his immediate family, Sophie Scholl was it."

James insists that the world would be a better place if Sophie Scholl were a household name like Anne Frank, because "we would have an image of how life can be affirmed by someone who didn't have to be a victim at all, but chose to be one because others were." Then, he makes a statement that has a remarkable resonance in light of the Cruise- Stauffenberg debate. "A Hollywood movie about her life would make her world-famous, but until recently it was difficult to think of an actress who might have been given the starring role. Then Natalie Portman came along."

When Clive James had his brilliant idea he could not have anticipated the friction that would be created when a Hollywood star encountered modern German history. One does not wish to stir up controversy here but Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem, and she did star (when she was 12!) in Leon, a film from the days when apocalyptic body counts in the streets of New York were popular cinema fare. We might as well get these "issues" on the table now so that all those with an interested in protecting the memory of Sophie Scholl can find reasons to reject Natalie Portman.

By the way, in this Cultural Amnesia Podcast Clive James talks about Sigmund Freud as well as the jazz greats Bix Beiderbecke and Louis Armstrong. "And then, to finish, Sophie Scholl, a female resistance heroine you may never have heard of, but whose bravery resonates today." Tomorrow, here, bad religion in the form of duplicitous Protestantism.