Considering Hübener's present and past obscurity even among members of his own faith, or the negative reactions of many in the small Hamburg branch who did know him, it may come as a surprise to learn that postwar German literature is not exactly devoid of Hübeners and Hübener-types, in realistically documentary radio dramas about him like that by Paul Schallück and Johann Hampe; or as heroic fictional characters more or less based on him; and with a few syntheses of these two extremes as well, where writers of imaginative literature have employed by name the historical figure of Helmuth Hübener himself but have woven his personality into the fabric of a present-day fictional plot as a martyred hero, upon whom contemporary protagonists base their moral decisions. After a brief outline of some examples of these literary tributes, we shall examine the moral, intellectual and artistic climate in Germany after 1945, to discover very good and compelling reasons why an otherwise uncelebrated or even maligned young man would merit such seemingly incommensurate artistic approbation.

Let us turn first to one of the most famous of post-war German writers, Günter Grass, (who, it is generally agreed, almost single handedly put Germany back on the international literary map.) In Local Anaesthetic (1969), the first major novel written after the completion of his monumental "Danzig Trilogy" (The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, and Dog Years), it is clear that Grass has elevated Hübener to the central role of sanctified mythic model--whom the book's youthful protagonist, Philipp Scherbaum, attempts to emulate--even though the cursory reader of this complex work may at first miss the significant positioning of the--quantitatively--very small Hübener episodes in the overall structure of the novel.

The central image of Local Anaesthetic is, as the title suggests, dental; but the central question is socio-political: should the treatment of dental/social/political decay (carious teeth have symbolized individual and collective decay at least since Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks) be "prophylactic" or "radical?" Should, as the teacher Eberhard Starusch suggests while seated in his dentist's chair, metaphoric bulldozers be set in gear to clear the world of the corrupt system represented by chrome-plated capitalistic consumer goods? Or should the dentist's advice be followed, to act moderately, not to pull teeth--or systems--unnecessarily, to have faith in the healing power of continual development? The spineless teacher wavers between the extremes represented by his radical Marxist student Vero Lewand (who has a picture of Ernesto Che Guevara pinned to her wall) and by the stoic--if inconsistent--logic of the dentist (who threatens him with pain if he does not turn from his position supporting violence); but finally, he is convinced of the proper course of action by yet another student, Philipp Scherbaum, who also has a picture on his wall. Starusch, the novel's first-person narrator, visits Philipp at home and finds a kind of shrine to Hübener, including yellowed newspaper articles and photographs.

"Philipp Scherbaum also had a photograph pinned up between the windows of his room" we read, "a page out of a small-format newspaper, three narrow columns wide. The middle column was broken up by a picture the size of a large passport photo showing a young man of about seventeen: a firm round face, hair combed back energetically after moistening, part on the left. Under the photo smile I recognized a clean-cut, serious-looking Hitler youth; I recognized my own generation: 'Who's that?'... 'Him? That's Helmuth Hübener. Belonged to a sect. Something like Mormons. The Church of Latter-Day Saints. Came from Hamburg, but they had their stuff printed in Kiel. They were a group of four, apprentices and clerks. They held out quite a long time. On October 27, 1942, he was executed here in Plötzensee, after being tortured of course.'" Upon seeing these artifacts, Starusch seems embarrassed that he, the boy's mentor, has failed to know of or teach his students about Hübener. Instead he has attempted to regale them with stories of his own experiences (under the alias "Störtebeker") as the leader of the "Duster Band", a symbolic mystical totalitarian society-in-miniature, the reified reductio ad absurdum of the Hitler phenomenon--familiar to Grass readers from The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, and Dog Years--whose youthful members expended their energies during the National-Socialist "Millennium" vandalizing churches with their teutonic "Lord of the Flies," that obscene dwarf and blue-eyed, diminutive Hitler-figure Oskar Matzerath, (who, during their blasphemous black masses played the role of "microcosmic" Jesus of Nazareth). And although the grown-up Starusch is now a teacher, and a confessed liberal, he has allowed himself out of frustration with the present system and for lack of better ideas, to revert--at least in theory and implication--to his impatient attitude of youthful, bulldozer-like, "Nazi" destructiveness. His tales of the Duster days constitute an implicit--if uncertain, perhaps subconscious--message to his present-day students that anarchy and mob-violence should also be their ideal, as it once was his.

Nevertheless, even Starusch had been shocked when Philipp announced a grotesque plan to protest the use of napalm in Vietnam by soaking with gasoline and setting fire to--not a human being like himself, whose immolation would be largely ignored by war-hardened Germans--but rather his beloved dachshund Max in front of the "dog-loving Berlin matrons in flower-pot hats who are shoveling pastries into their mouths in Kempinski's" on the Kurfürstendamm. Faced with a real example--albeit bizarre--of violent radicalism, and horrified at the possibility, the now-repentant Starusch visits his student to attempt to convince him now to go ahead with his plan.

However, as we have seen, Scherbaum has by this point already discovered on his own the example of Helmuth Hübener, whose enlightened response to an unjustified war was not violence, or that other extreme equally condemned by Grass--apathy--but, basically, peaceful education. By circulating handbills containing information gleaned from illegal BBC broadcasts (after having prepared himself well enough to be able to take down the information in shorthand and after having learned Morse Code) Hübener and his three friends attempted to change society by legitimate and moral means, even though they were considered criminals by an unjust government. Following their example, Scherbaum decides not to sacrifice Max but to take over the editorship of the school paper, something he has previously steadfastly declined to do. He now hopes that his paper, newly and significantly titled "Morse-Code", can become an effective instrument in his struggle against injustices in society. (The first number of the paper, for example, deals with the Hübener group, and Philipp's lead article compares the activities of the ex-Nazi Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger and Hübener during 1942.

Near the end of the novel Grass records the following conversation between teacher and student: "In the school yard I spoke with Scherbaum about the increasing Vietnam demonstrations: 'There's going to be one tomorrow. On the Wittenberg-Platz.' 'Sure. And then they'll all go home.' 'Five thousand are expected...' 'Just the usual blowing off steam.' 'We could go together. I was going anyway...' 'I can't. I have shorthand tomorrow.' 'Then I guess I'll have to go alone.' 'Sure, why not? Can't do any harm.'"

We recognize in the development of young Scherbaum an almost allegorical description of the conflicting forces in Germany, especially in the Berlin of "Red Rudi" Dutschke during the turbulent period immediately preceding the publication of the novel in 1969, and of Grass's recommended course of action. His next work was to deal with this theme even more explicitly, using this time as its major metaphor the snail, which "seldom wins and then by the skin of its teeth, crawls, goes into hiding but keeps crawling, putting down its quickly-drying slime track on the historical landscape, on documents and borders, amid building sites and ruins, through draughty theoretical constructs, away from nicely located theories, skirting retreats and revolutions stuck in the sand". The snail is an inspired symbol of democratic progress, accomplishing little by little that which the bulldozers could not. Hübener was an early snail, and so, for Grass, well worthy of emulation.

But we must not forget that Günter Grass was moved in no small part to include Helmuth Hübener in Local Anaesthetic because of what seems to be an almost tailor-made literary device: the aforementioned parallel and yet antipodal nature of the two symbolic groups of German teenagers during the war years, Duster Band and Hübener Group, (with a detestable moral gnome as their "Jesus" on one hand and practicing followers of Jesus Christ on the other.) And, as it happens, this idea was in fact "tailor-made" by no less a figure than the president of the international P.E.N. Club and Germany's most recent Nobel-laureate, Heinrich Böll. In the decade between the appearance of that negative factotum Oskar Matzerath in The Tin Drum, (1959) and that of his clearly positive reciprocal Helmuth Hübener, Böll published his well-known Billiards at Half-past Nine, whose central structure is also unmistakably bipolar and whose central mythic figure is also a 17-year old apprentice beheaded by the Nazis. In Böll's novel the young fictional hero is named Ferdi Progulske, not Helmuth Hübener, otherwise the similarities are almost uncanny: besides his age, his occupation and his manner of execution, Ferdi also belongs to an unnamed religious sect whose members "didn't drink tea, wine, or beer, coffee or cognac," and he is revered by those protagonists who remember him both as an "angel" and as a Jesus figure and miracle worker (after all, he is a carpenter's apprentice!), "who repaired the little lock on... [Mother Fähmel's] jewelry box with his skilled hands, locksmiths and cabinet makers worked forty years on it, in vain; he simply touched it and it worked again..." As such, in this poetic bipolar equation, Ferdi is the quintessential "lamb", whose creed is non-violent resistance to the methods and ever-widening influence of those who have "partaken of the sacrament of the buffalo," a kind of anti-Christian counter religion typified by, but not exclusively limited to Nazism. And although his role in the structure of the novel and his importance for the living protagonists exactly presages and clearly influenced the choice of Hübener in Local Anaesthetic, it would not be fair to claim that Ferdi is simply a thinly-veiled Hübener à clef: Bölls' idea is said to have begun much earlier, in 1934, when he witnessed the beheading of a 17-year old communist in Cologne. But as the figure of Ferdi developed in Böll's mind, it increasingly forsook historical detail and was imbued with heightened mythic and symbolic attributes, until--ironically--in its final form, it coincides almost completely with the more historical Hübener as presented by Grass.

Since it is not my purpose here to trace literary-historical influences in detail, but rather to demonstrate the abundance and varying types of Hübener figures in German letters, let us quickly list just two more examples and then proceed to determine the reasons for the appeal of this type of hero as artistic "raw material" in the postwar era. In addition to the above-mentioned radio play about Hübener by Böll's neighbor and close friend Paul Schallück, there is also by the same author a gripping short story, entitled "We'll Also Be On The Other Side Soon" about a young man who is killed for his pacifistic opposition to Nazism and his refusal to recant (in fact the story is based on a young Jehovah's Witness). And it is very clear that Rolf Hochhuth's important play "The Deputy" has as its leading character a figure who is a distant Hübener-type, although it is important to the plot that he operate within a Catholic context rather than stand outside the main churches as all the other figures do, for young Pater Riccardo Fontana turns to his church for help in stopping the slaughter of Jews in Nazi Germany. Because Pope Pius refuses to protest these murders, even though he clearly knows of the Jews' plight, and clearly realizes how much the Nazis fear his intervention, the young Jesuit pins the yellow star of David to his soutane and voluntarily accompanies a group of Jewish prisoners to Auschwitz. The anti-Christ, evil dwarf or buffalo in this equation is the Pope himself, yet when Riccardo is offered the veiled opportunity to assassinate him he refuses, true to the Hübener pattern, preferring his own peaceful, sacrificial act to the other, easier but more violent possibility. Thus he replaces the Pope as the true vicar or "deputy" of Christ on earth, dying with and for his lambs.

The character of Helmuth Hübener, then, (including fictional figures more or less based on him, or those distantly related to the paradigm associated with him) while not strictly speaking ubiquitous in German writing, has found nonetheless among those authors an esteem quite disproportionate to his youth, his humble origins, his actual historical importance and his lack of subsequent notoriety among latter-day Saints. Perhaps a brief historical investigation of the climate in the literary and intellectual strata of German society after 1945, an investigation, in other words, into the reasons for Helmuth's German popularity might also uncover reasons that would compel others to henceforth view this simple Mormon boy in more significant ways, reasons which might suggest to American or Latter-day Saint minds as well as to those of postwar Germans, certain ethical, political, and historical implications.

In 1945, when the obscuring smoke of pyrotechnics and propaganda began to clear, when the stench of death began to diffuse, when the strident pandemonium of war was finally stilled, one sound replaced all the screams, explosions and harshly amplified official voices: out of the silent intellectual German landscape one faint but persistent query began to go up: "why?...why?...why?..." Seldom before has that question been asked by so many of so many for so many years. Seldom before has there been on such a broad scale a more searching, introspective kind of mass-psychoanalysis than that to which German thinkers have subjected themselves since 1945. Seldom before has the study of history been so pandemic, so immediate, so relevant, or so imperative, not only in its traditional, organized, scholarly forms, but in its personal everyday manifestations and especially in its artistic incarnations. From 1945 on, nearly all of intellectual, artistic, religious Germany was obsessed with examining the past, examining the events, the rhetoric, the very language of yesterday, in an attempt to try and find out what had gone wrong. Yet this was clearly not an attempt at self-justification, an external witch-hunt or attempt to lay the blame elsewhere, on the treaty of Versailles, for example, on Hitler, or on a few other visible Nazis--besides, the Allied powers were already involved in just such a legalistic, exterior search for justice, so their clumsy, superficial de-nazification attempts simply served to further strengthen the resolve of thinking Germans to ask "why?" Even during the public proceedings at Nuremberg, these continued their careful private search for the real reasons leading to the catastrophe.

And when the past was carefully searched, when enough documents were found and publicized, when enough events, situations and characters were artistically, one could almost even say experimentally reenacted and recreated, the answers to the "why" began coming in. And if the Allied view of what had gone awry tended to cast the blame on such as Hitler and Eichmann, the more searching German incrimination touched the common-man, the common-woman, in average, everyday situations, in the home, at work, in the churches and in the schools. No vast mythic conspiracy of diabolically evil super-beings had brought the world close to Armageddon, no Hitler personality, no Führer-principle, no Heinrich Himmler or Josef Goebbels had by some hypnotic spell nearly succeeded in conquering the world and exterminating whole societies of Jews, Communists, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and other "undesirables." The roots of evil had to be sought and were found within ordinary German people themselves. This is one reason why there are in postwar Germany no significant novels, plays, films or other artistic reenactments involving Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, or Goering, even if the Anglo-Saxon world, especially that of Hollywood, has since found the supposed mystique of the period and of such personalities to be extremely marketable. The German artistic quest has been for truth, even common, banal, if complicated truth, not for profitable mythic oversimplifications; and the truth about the near-apocalypse that was Germany--it was so determined--lies in the everyday thoughts, prejudices, superstitions and banal activity or passivity of the entire people, not in the naively Faustian mythology of an innocent people befallen by brown-shirted devils. This idea, reflected for example, in the term "banality of evil," coined by Hannah Arendt in connection with her reportage of the Eichmann Trial (Eichmann in Jerusalem, a Report on the Banality of Evil), and by the title of Albert Wucher's book, Eichmanns gab es viele (There Were many Eichmanns, Munich 1967), has been stated by so many other observers of the Nazi phenomenon, that we must necessarily limit ourselves here to artistic manifestations of the problem. Not surprisingly, then, since in the more perceptive German view, the problem of evil was not attributable solely to Hitler or a few other demons, but to the people as a whole, we also find very few attempts to artistically lionize those elite few who could have actively exorcised these devils by assassination: the plotting generals of July 20, 1944, for example. Instead of lamentations about the failure of the bomb to kill Hitler on that critical day, we find in postwar German letters a strong regret--coupled with an inherent admonition for the future--for the failure of average people to do--even passively--less spectacular right things at less critical right times.

German art of the postwar era, then, right down to its theme and structure, conscientiously reflects these factors: the everyday milieu of limping veterans, widows, orphans, and that of small businessmen, workers, farmers, bureaucrats, housewives, students, and teachers, rather than generals and statesmen; and, since it also naturally reflects a desire to come to historical grips with the past, it is replete with flashbacks, recurring nightmares (in which the dead reappear to silently accuse the guilty), and timeless protagonists with shattered watches cursed to wander through the rubble-landscape of their soul muttering "why?" till they find the truth, and finally, it is full of reenactments, both documentary and fictional, of critical--if everyday--moments, demonstrating how this hell could have been avoided, or at the very least, defeated from within.

One of the earliest and best fictional examples of this idea is found in the poignant writings of the young--but extremely influential--Wolfgang Borchert, who, before dying in 1947 of wounds and diseases incurred in Nazi prisons and on the Eastern Front, produced one short radio play and a few stories. In the following brief sketch from the story "Down the Long Long Street," the growth of collective, cumulative, mass (and massive) culpability from individual everyday deeds is reduced to its lowest common denominator:

"The little boy holds out his hands. I'm supposed to get the nails. The blacksmith counts the nails. Three men? he asks. Daddy said for three men. The nails fall into his hands. The blacksmith has thick, broad fingers. The boy has very thin ones, which bend under the weight of the big nails. Is one of them the fellow who says he's the Son of God? The little boy nods. The blacksmith takes the nails back. Then he lets them fall again into the boy's hands. The little hands bend under the weight. Then the blacksmith says: oh, well. The little boy leaves. The nails are nice and shiny. The little boy runs, and the nails make a sound. The blacksmith picks up his hammer. Oh, well, says the blacksmith. Behind him the little boy hears clink clank clink clank. He is hammering again, the little boy thinks. He is making nails, many shiny nails." Borchert's entire story, and this vignette in particular, strikes home with almost unassailable visceral logic. Here, where the very death of a God hinges upon the cooperation of an ordinary, everyday blacksmith, his faint but significant individual moral impulse to avoid complicity in the murder by taking back the nails finally yields to a fatal resignation implied in the apathetic "oh, well,"the passive equivalent of an equally inculpating aggressive cry by the crowd who periodically shout "Barabbas" as a kind of recurring background theme through the rest of Borchert's story. In either case the lesson is clear: Had the individual members of the common crowd refrained from shouting "Barabbas", had the common blacksmith simply taken back the nails, history might not have recorded the death of a God. Nor might it have recorded the atrocities of the Nazi regime and the Second World War, had more common Germans refused to shout "Heil Hitler," had more common men and women simply refused their services to an unjust cause.

In conscious anticipation of the argument that there was nothing the common people could have done, that it would have been meaningless suicide to have refused to salute the flag or cry "Heil Hitler," or provide nails for the war effort, or resist the arrest of one's Jewish neighbors, or expose the lies of propaganda, or...or..., German postwar writers have peopled their works with characters who do precisely those things, and do them with such intensity, with such inspired ingenuity, with such Quixotic abandon, that--even if they are eventually killed--their individual success in combating Nazism, while quantitatively limited in each singular case, had it been duplicated by the efforts of more and more Germans, would have undeniably been successful on a scale large enough to have saved Germany from ruin. Probably the most convincing such fictional character is the teacher Leopold Reineke in Paul Schallück's novel Engelbert Reineke, who earned his nickname "Beileibenicht" ("Not-on-your-life") by consistently following up his clearly anti-Nazi lectures in History and German Literature with loudly bathetic denunciations of such examples of "degenerate Jewish humanism", including all the obligatory Nazi slogans and clichés, all the while marching stiffly back and forth in front of his class before suddenly stopping and asking his students: "Can we judge that from here?" "Not-on-your-life," they would gleefully answer in chorus. Other examples of his everyday resistance to Nazism in the school and the community are as numerous as they are brilliant. He manages to procure a medical certificate, for example, attesting to his inability--because of a "nervous disorder"--to raise either hand above his waist. When he gives the "Heil Hitler" salute as he must whenever the flag is displayed and at the beginning of each class at school, much to the chagrin of the Nazis and to the delight of his students, his palm remains at hip-level. When the prominent Nazi theoretician Alfred Rosenberg visits his small town, and the local officials remind him his house is not flying the swastika, he pleads that his old one was worn out--having been used "too often in the last while" (German: "in den letzten Tagen", i.e. in the last days, such double-edged puns being Beileibenicht's stock-in-trade). They tell him they will send over a loaner flag. However, he breaks his flagpole in half and carefully mends it with two splints, one of which he can pull away with a string. Then he waits in the attic until the parade arrives directly in front of his house, whereupon he pulls the string, causing the flag to flutter into the yard. Putting his head out of the attic window, he releases a horrible torrent of profanity and abuse, ostensibly toward the flagpole, but actually, of course, toward Nazism and the visiting potentate; finally, he explains he is sorry he lost his temper, but, making yet another of his many puns, he places the blame on the flagpole for putting him into such a rage by breaking "ausgerechnet jetzt" (just at this moment or: calculated for this moment!).

Even though he owns as many copies of Mein Kampf as he can acquire gratis; even though his home is practically wall-papered with grotesquely enormous poster-sized enlargements of Hitler and his paladins (again, in their honor, of course, though in that scale the emphasis is on the size of the pores in their noses), he is eventually denounced and sent to a death camp. He remains, nevertheless, living fictional proof that more people could have opposed Hitler, in more imaginative ways, with more success; and, in the memory of his son Engelbert, his valiant life remains as a pattern to follow in engaging analogous problems of the postwar present and future.

But whereas "Beileibenicht" is a fictional character, the most convincing argument that individual Germans could and should have opposed fascism in more daring and inventive fashion is provided by the real-life, flesh-and-blood historical figures of the resistance movement, especially those whose activities--while no less heroic--reflect the insight that little was to be gained by assassinating diabolical leaders if the followers were still unconverted. No less estimable a person than Thomas Mann made both these distinctions clear as far back as the beginning of the war. From his exile in the US, the Nobel-Laureate recorded a number of radio broadcasts to be beamed by the BBC into his homeland, through which he called for exactly the same kind of individual, every-day resistance to the Nazi crimes mentioned above; giving it for the first time a name, or, more precisely, two names, "geistiger Widerstand" and "geistige Sabotage;" and finally, Germany's greatest 20th century creator of fictional characters proceeded to present the German public with real-life examples thereof.

This kind of "geistiger Widerstand", a kind of spiritual, mental or intellectual sabotage "of the bloody and abysmal adventure that Hitler has plunged you Germans into," had already begun, Mann told his listeners in August, 1941--it is conceivable that Helmuth was among them!--by the simple act of their tuning in a forbidden frequency and listening to the words of a forbidden and exiled writer.

He did not envision, and never called for, the kind of violent action against the demons of the Hitler regime that most Anglo-Saxon historians have treated under the title (and most of us have become accustomed to calling) "the resistance movement." "Those who know me," Mann stated in a subsequent broadcast in January, 1942, "know that I am not a revolutioner [Revoluzzer] and man of the barricades, I am...not one who calls for bloody deeds." Instead, he hoped for and attempted to educate his countrymen toward the day when Germans would arise as one and go out into the streets shouting "down with war and the destruction of peoples, down with Hitler and with all his rabble, freedom, justice and peace for us and for all men!" This non-violent act, he felt sure, would be more effective than the desperate attempts of a few to kill Hitler, a deed which, even if it could succeed, would undoubtedly lead only to new versions of the same old "stab-in-the-back" myths that helped enable him to come to power in the first place. "Of course the Nazis would shoot," Mann conceded, "but a regime of outlaws which has to fire on its own people is finished; and even then, the insurrection could not possibly cost as much German blood as there is flowing already in Russia. In the moment you decide to be free, you are free," he concluded.

In order for his idea to work, Germans from all walks of life who had been exposed to the truth had to pass it on--they had to become disseminators of the truth themselves, sayers of the word and not hearers only; thus the value to Thomas Mann's plea of actual flesh-and-blood examples of what had to be done and was being done is obvious. For this reason he devoted several later broadcasts, beginning with the one on June 27, 1943, to the White Rose group of Hans and Sophie Scholl, the nature of whose heroic deeds seemed to perfectly coincide with his program: their initially secret handbills and later their open call for the revolt, was exactly what Mann had envisioned. (There is room for speculation that Mann might have had a knowledge of Hübener's execution by this time as well, for he mentions that one of the young people reportedly said to the judge: "Soon you will be standing here!", a statement not generally attributed to the White Rose group. Most likely, however, is that the report which reached Mann either blended accounts of the two executions or that one of the White Rose members actually made some such statement.)

In any case, his hope, the hopes of the Scholls, and the hope of Hübener, that subsequent insurrections could be increasingly frequent, widespread and successful, were, of course, as history teaches, in vain. Examples of "geistiger Widerstand" were too few and too feeble. But precisely because there were too few examples of it in real life before 1945, there are relatively so many in the literature of Germany after 1945. Precisely because the principle of non-violent, democratic, individual initiative and responsibility did not succeed then, it must succeed now, postwar Germans reasoned, or in the era of bacterial agents and thermonuclear bombs, the whole world, not just a portion of it, next time all of humanity, not just one or two races will face extinction. Hübener and others like him showed the way to prevent such an apocalypse; they are the true heros of the III. Reich, and their brothers and sisters will be the true heros of the present and the future; they are the common men, women and children, without special talents, powers or station, but with an unerring intuition about right and wrong and the character to stand up and tell the truth, even the unpopular truth.