BERLIN — At the end of Bertolt Brecht’s “Life of Galileo,” there is a sharp exchange. Andrea Sarti, a student of the astronomer, says, “Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.” To which Galileo shoots back: “No, Andrea. Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.”

Michael Wolffsohn, a German historian, mentioned Galileo’s line the other evening with reference to Syria, an unhappy land of the dead and dying in need of heroes to redeem humanity. The hopelessness of resistance does not diminish its redemptive power in terrorized societies; in fact, hopelessness may even be one of the defining characteristics of heroic resistance.

Abdalaziz Alhamza, the young man sitting beside Wolffsohn at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin, prompted the historian’s reflections. “We don’t have the necessity today to resist in Germany because this is a free country,” Wolffsohn said. “Resistance is the readiness to incur lethal personal risk.”

That is what Alhamza has done. He is from Raqqa, the stronghold of the Islamic State, a town now synonymous with beheadings, immolation, enslavement of women and every form of barbarism. Alhamza, who is 24, left Syria two years ago and in April 2014 founded a resistance organization called “Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently” (R.B.S.S). ISIS has killed four of its members.