More ancient history that won't go away

Michael Kimmelman has an article in The New York Times about the plot to kill Hitler:

Monday is the anniversary of the July 20, 1944, plot to kill Hitler, and services will be held here, as they are every year, where the conspirators were executed. Among those remembered, Count Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg may not ring many bells these days outside Germany, or even inside it. Others came to be famously associated with the plot. But as the German historian Hans Mommsen wrote, “Schulenburg was the inner driving force of the conspiracy.” Schulenburg’s sister, Countess Elisabeth (Tisa) von der Schulenburg, was an artist. They constituted an extraordinary pairing.
The Schulenburgs were a very old, very high Prussian clan, staunchly Nazi, and as such a reminder of the complexity of families, not least German ones, aristocratic or otherwise. Their story is a cautionary tale about judging history, or a people, any people, in black and white.
Tisa’s sculptures and drawings can bring to mind the work of Käthe Kollwitz or Otto Dix. Pictures she drew about the Holocaust are among the first by a German. Charismatic, liberated, uncompromising, and fearless, she thrived before and after the war in the circles of Henry Moore and Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and Oskar Kokoschka. A convert to socialism as a very young woman, she found a calling teaching art among the coal miners in Britain, to which she moved in 1933 with her first husband, Fritz Hess, who, to her family’s horror, was a Jew.
When news reached her in Britain in 1938 that her father was gravely ill, she returned home. Hitler attended the funeral. Anxious to leave Germany again, she found herself stopped at Croydon Airport by British authorities, who had seen newspaper photographs of the Führer with her family. To the Nazis she was a socialist. To the British she was the daughter of a Nazi. So she spent the war years in Germany.
Raised as a strict Lutheran, the descendant, among others, of Bismarcks and von Arnims, the daughter of the commander of the elite Garde du Corps cavalry regiment and later chief of staff to the crown prince, Tisa lived through the war to see her family’s land confiscated and the world she had known crumble and vanish. Both parents and all five brothers would be dead by war’s end.
She married and divorced a second time before finding consolation in the Ursuline convent at Dorsten, in the Ruhr, to which she gravitated during the ’50s— in part perhaps because its condition mirrored her own inner landscape and in part because the coal mines were there. As a Roman Catholic nun she raised money selling her pictures to support the convent and to found a Jewish museum, one of the first in Germany. She died in Dorsten in 2001, at 97.
In later years she would recall that her father, despite his anti-Semitism, always treated Hess with respect. The love of a father for a daughter could transcend prejudice, Tisa realized. Forgiveness must be reciprocated.
Richard von Weizsäcker, the former German president, described coming upon Countess von der Schulenburg shortly after the war, down in the mines of Bochum-Hordel and Wanne-Eickel. “To find someone like her was of course very surprising,” Mr. von Weizsäcker said during a telephone conversation, putting it mildly. “But she seemed, like her brother, a peculiar and outstanding personality.”
Fritzi, as Count von der Schulenburg was called, served as an officer with the same Potsdam infantry regiment in which Mr. Weizsäcker served. He recruited several of its younger officers for the resistance. Mr. Weizsäcker remembered him with awe: “He was the one to tell us what was needed,” he said. “I saw him just four weeks before the 20th of July, and he told me that soon we would be where we want to go, that we would be called back to Berlin, that we would have jobs to do. He was not typical high nobility,” he added. “Fritzi was down to earth, provocative and, my goodness, very courageous— the one who inspired us, the one who reminded us that we could not possibly wait until this terrible war found its own end.”
Fritzi’s granddaughter, a trustee of the 20 July 1944 Foundation, my friend and German publisher Elisabeth Ruge, recalled the other day that it wasn’t until the 1950s that Fritzi’s wife, Charlotte, received a war widow’s pension. Pensions in Germany could be denied in the case of high treason, and German bureaucrats decided to apply that rule to the executed plotters after the war. Ms. Ruge told me that when her grandmother protested, authorities replied that Fritzi had joined the Nazi Party in 1932. It was a German Catch-22, never mind that Schulenburg made up for his mistake, finally with his life.
As Mr. Mommsen has pointed out, even Schulenburg’s interrogators at Gestapo headquarters and during the trial that was a formality to precede his hanging, by piano wire at Plötzensee prison, were impressed by the clarity of his convictions and his composure— by his absolute calm, as Tisa discerned from a photograph of the courtroom scene. Fritzi had been a quiet boy, she noted in an unpublished memoir, but: “During these years of war he had become more serious, a man of immense willpower and self-control, with a look intense and determined. His wit and his quickness sharpened, like the good fencer he was.”
After her brother’s death, and with the end of her second marriage, the countess needed a while before despair yielded to a new “daydream of community and love,” as she wrote. The church promised redemption from the burdens of past sins, which, she wrote, weighed on her “like the heavy rucksack I had carried about so often on my wanderings.” But she wondered, “Could I just leave it at the roadside and bounce on, happily ever after?”
In a nutshell, this was the question Germany faced. Countess von der Schulenburg’s life became a metaphor for the post-war era, a metaphor not lost on the writer Heinrich Böll and others who sought her out. “They saw in her,” Ms. Ruge said, “someone who had a deep understanding of what had happened in Germany, who represented the new Germany but came out of the old one, and who had managed through her independence and sense of freedom to make something good of herself.”
The countess’s drawings of coal miners turned them into demigods; those of Jews turn ink stains into tears. That said, she preserved into her 90s her wit and unstuffy lightheartedness, her wonderment at life’s mysteries, among them the family bond.
“Tisa saw human nature in all its complexity,” Ms. Ruge said. “Again and again she started something new, finding another place for herself in the world. She loved her family, she was loyal to it despite her differences, despite the fact that at one point it denounced Fritzi as a traitor, because she was tolerant and saw from the family’s failures that you can go through life and make yourself blind.”
“But she knew that to criticize the weaknesses of others you’ve got to understand your own weaknesses,” her great-niece added. “And she saw what it meant to forgive.”