already dead (poster)
Posted January 2, 2012
Haven’t posted in six months; sad story, burned out, blah blah blah. But I keep taking pictures and people keep coming to the site, and people definitely keep making street art… so here we are again, starting a new year.
The boards that covered the trendy new burger bar on Haight Street during it’s construction were very fertile ground for street art. This paste-up went up around the Bay Area a few months back, about the time when the OWS protests were just beginning. I’m not familiar with the source for the quote, although I’m pretty sure that it’s from music. Several groups seem to be associated with the line.
The woman in the poster is Sophie Scholl, who was beheaded in 1944 by the Third Reich for the crime of not supporting the troops. OK, not that, exactly. The actual charges against them essentially boil down to “demoralization of the troops”, plus some language about giving comfort to the enemy – from a propaganda standpoint, it’s pretty much the same thing.
There have been several movies made about Sophie and “The White Rose“, the name taken by the tiny group of German college kids who (without connections to other groups or entities who could help them), stood up to the Nazis near the close of the Second World War. The best film is probably “Sophie Scholl – the Final Days“, a powerful and careful recreation of the period leading up to her execution. The White Rose organization numbered no more than eleven, including a core group of six students in their early twenties, and their philosophy professor.
Armed with little more than naivete and idealism, and many would say foolishness, the group distributed a total of six leaflets criticizing Nazi Germany, Hitler and the war, calling for it’s end. Occupy the Wehrmacht, I guess… Sophie, her brother Hans and a co-conspirator named Christoph Probst were discovered and executed after a short trial. The final sixth leaflet was later reprinted and air-dropped over Germany by the Allies.
This link, to a review of the film mentioned above, features a copy of the source photograph used in the poster. You can read the leaftlets here.
