This article considers three examples of engagement with cultural texts in times of crisis to show how the White Rose pamphlets fit into a broader tradition. The three examples are: Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), written in exile in Istanbul during WWII, Józef Czapski’s Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp (1948), based on lectures given to fellow inmates in a Soviet camp during WWII, and Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), a memoir that describes clandestine classes on English literature given by Nafisi after the Islamic Revolution in Iran. The article shows how the uses to which cultural texts are put in such contexts are often ambiguous and contradictory: rather than telling an idealistic story of the redemptive power of culture in the face of political and social disasters, the aim is to articulate the role that cultural texts can play in inspiring intellectual resistance, while attending critically to the specificities of individual case studies.

本文考虑了三个在危机时期接触文化文本的例子，以展示白玫瑰小册子如何适应更广泛的传统。这三个例子是：埃里希·奥尔巴赫 (Erich Auerbach) 的《模仿：西方文学对现实的表现》 (1946)，二战期间流亡伊斯坦布尔时写成；约瑟夫·恰普斯基 (Józef Czapski) 的《失落的时光：苏联战俘营中关于普鲁斯特的讲座》 (1948)，基于对二战期间苏联营地的狱友，以及德黑兰阿扎尔·纳菲西 (Azar Nafisi) 的阅读洛丽塔 (Reading Lolita)(2003)，一本回忆录，描述了伊朗伊斯兰革命后纳菲西教授的英语文学秘密课程。这篇文章展示了文化文本在这种情况下的用途往往是模棱两可和矛盾的：而不是讲述文化在面对政治和社会灾难时的救赎力量的理想主义故事，目的是阐明文化的作用文化文本可以激发知识分子的反抗，同时批判性地关注个案研究的特殊性。