Introduction
pst-Holocaust Christians have generally tried to make Dietrich Bonhoeffer into a saint, a hero, and a martyr. Of all the leaders of the Confessing Church, Bonhoeffer consistently called for the most assertive response to Nazi inroads into church affairs. Moreover he was eventually imprisoned and executed for taking a further step, in his involvement with the German Resistance movement. Bonhoeffer's biographer, Eberhard Bethge, who not by chance was his best friend and student, as well as his relative by marriage, has complied with attempts to heroize by detailing almost every moment in Bonhoeffer's life and editing almost every word that fell from his pen. Along with Bethge's edited collected works of Bonhoeffer, his long biography of Bonhoeffer's short life, lacking though it is in objectivity, nonetheless remains the lodestone of Bonhoeffer studies. Bonhoeffer's Boswell, as Michael Goldberg has called Bethge, has provided Protestants with what they desperately wanted in the cold, dark, gray world after Auschwitz: the sound of a courageous moral voice.'
Yet the iconoclasts did not wait for long. Within a decade after the discovery of Bonhoeffer in Anglo-America, both Christian and Jewish authors pointed out that, like most heroes, Bonhoeffer had feet of clay. Perhaps Bethge had done his work too well, for there, along with the courageous statements, readers could find writings easily labeled as ambiguous, contradictory, acquiescent, and even antisemitic. The most strident of his critics, Stanley Rosenbaum, eventually dismissed Bonhoeffer as merely "the best of a bad lot." The "bad lot" to which Rosenbaum referred was not just German Protestants or the German people, but all of European Christianity.'
This study examines Bonhoeffer's response to the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany. It presents Bonhoeffer as somewhere between the two impassioned portraits fashioned in the last thirty years. Bonhoeffer was an utterly human figure who vacillated, but also a young man who grew up and began to think more for himself. By the end of his life, he acted courageously on behalf of the oppressed.
By virtue of his early background, Bonhoeffer was less disposed than many of his contemporaries to the virulent forms of German antisemitism. Born in 1906 in Breslau, Silesia, where his father was a professor of neurology and psychiatry, Dietrich grew up in western Berlin's fashionable Grunewald neighborhood after his father received a promotion to the medical faculty at the University of Berlin in 1912. The Bonhoeffer children-Dietrich had seven brothers and sisters-lived in an atmosphere of bourgeois privilege complete with a private governess, music lessons, and a vacation home in the Harz Mountains. With the highly educated university crowd as their social circle, the Bonhoeffer family held to liberal democratic views and enthusiastically supported the Weimar Republic.'
Young Dietrich had several associations with assimilated Jews in his neighborhood and school. Grunewald had the highest percentage of Jewish residents of any neighborhood in Berlin, a city in which the proportion of Jews was nearly five times greater than in Germany as a whole. Four out of the ten members of Dietrich's graduating class (his Abiturklasse) at the gymnasium came from Jewish households' In the mid-1920s, while he studied theology at the University of Berlin, Dietrich's twin sister, Sabine, announced her engagement to Gerhard Leibholz, a Christianized Jew. Some members of the extended family raised eyebrows at the union, but the nuclear family, especially Dietrich, appeared enthusiastic about the marriage when it took place in 1926. Three years later, while Dietrich studied for his doctorate in theology, he became especially close to a young theologian of Jewish ancestry, Franz Hildebrandt. With both a best friend and a brother-in-law of Jewish descent, the liberal Bonhoeffer thought Jewishness was of absolutely no consequence, and that Franz and Gerhard were no different from any other Germans. The Bonhoeffer family utterly disregarded racial origins, as long as one embraced Christian German culture. Their liberal view could be said to embody a subtle form of antisemitism, however, for failing to affirm Jewishness. Neither Dietrich nor his family apparently had any contact with religiously observant Jews or Jews of the ghetto.'
In Dietrich's rather sheltered world of suburban Berlin and the theological hothouse of the University, there appeared to be no Jewish "problem." After his ordination as a Protestant pastor and then further study to complete his habilitation as lecturer at the University, in 1931 Bonhoeffer took a ninemonth leave of absence to study at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. In America he appears to have encountered racism for the first time. Spending his free time in neighboring Harlem, Bonhoeffer acquired a taste for jazz and a true love for the African-American Christian culture. He wrote to his elder brother, Karl-Friedrich, about his interest in the race issue. KarlFriedrich, a brilliant physicist, had refused a position at Harvard, he told his brother, because he could not bear thinking that his children would grow up in this American culture of racism. Reflecting the naivete of German liberals, he wrote to Dietrich: "At all events, our Jewish question is a joke in comparison; there cannot be any people left who maintain they are oppressed here."
Of course, while Dietrich studied in New York, from September 1930 to June 1931, the situation changed rapidly back home. As the Great Depression arrived in Germany, the Nazi Party made great gains in the Reichstag and the streets. The winds of change blew even through the hallowed halls of the University of Berlin. Around the same time as Karl-Friedrich's letter to his brother in January 1931, a group of nationalist students, shouting "Death to the Jews," grabbed several Jewish students and threw them out of the entrance hall of the university onto the courtyard below.'
When Dietrich returned to Germany in the summer of 1931 and resumed his post as lecturer at the university, he would witness firsthand the growth of the Nazi Party and the spread of antisemitism. No record survives of any writings or speeches by Bonhoeffer from this time directed against the movement. The accession of Hitler to power in January 1933, however, required a response. His brother-in-law, his best friend, and other acquaintances suddenly found themselves labeled as "non-Aryans." The Civil Service Law of April 7, which purged government employees who were of Jewish descent, threatened Leibholz, Dietrich's brother-in-law, who was a professor of law at the University of Gottingen. He was spared from dismissal only when President Hindenburg intervened to exempt non-Aryan government employees who had fought in the war.'
Bonhoeffer's response in this critical year, 1933, was hesitant and tentative, a far cry from the Bonhoeffer of later fame, the author of Letters and Papers from Prison. In the early months of the Third Reich, the strongest stand in the family was taken by Dietrich's ninety-one-year-old grandmother (Julie Bonhoeffer). During the boycott of Jewish businesses throughout Germany that took place on 1 April 1933, she went shopping as usual to buy her butter from a Jewish shopkeeper. An SA man posted outside the store reportedly asked her, "Do you really have to buy from this Jew of all people?" She rapped her cane on his high boots, shoved him aside, and said in her Swabian dialect, "I will buy my butter where I always buy my butter." According to Emmy Bonhoeffer, Dietrich's sister-in-law who told this story, Grandmother Bonhoeffer was the shopkeeper's only customer of the day."
On the other hand, Dietrich's father, Karl Bonhoeffer, embarrassed the family by his involvement in the celebrated Reichstag fire case. When Martin van der Lubbe, the mentally impaired Dutch communist youth branded by the Nazis as the arsonist, went on a hunger strike in prison, authorities called in Karl Bonhoeffer, the eminent psychiatrist, and one of his colleagues to examine the accused. While many observers outside and within Germany believed, as many historians do today, that Nazis themselves burned down the Reichstag, the two psychiatrists who visited van der Lubbe seven times in 1933 made no mention of guilt or innocence in their final report.'
In the heady days of spring 1933, Dietrich likewise took the cowardly way out when Leibholz asked him to conduct funeral services for his father, who died on April 11. Unlike Gerhard, the elder Leibholz had never been baptized. Under the tense atmosphere of the time, the general superintendent of Dietrich's Old Prussian Union Church (the Old
Prussian Union was a component, the largest one, of the German Evangelical Church) advised him against conducting a funeral for a Jew, and he heeded the advice. He later regretted his inaction and asked forgiveness of Gerhard."'
"The Church and the Jewish Question"
With his pen and voice, Bonhoeffer did much to address the situation of Jews. His outrage in 1933, however, was directed primarily toward the discriminatory measures aimed at assimilated "Christian Jews," like Gerhard Leibholz and Franz Hildebrandt. By March of that year, the German Christian Movement, the fanatically pro-Nazi party of Protestant clergy, began plans to apply the Aryan Paragraph to the Church, which would result in the suspension of non-Aryans from the rosters of the Protestant clergy. As a result of the victory of the German Christians in the church elections during the summer of 1933, the Aryan Paragraph became official policy in the Prussian church in early September. Bonhoeffer spent much of his energy between April and September 1933 combating the German Christians and working against the enactment of this Aryan Paragraph."
By the end of March 1933, Bonhoeffer had drawn up six theses about the situation of Christian Jews for a pastoral discussion group that met in the home of Gerhard Jacobi, the pastor of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin. After the boycott of Jewish businesses began and the Civil Service Law was decreed in early April, Bonhoeffer added to his six theses a lengthy preamble that discussed the church's attitude about state actions toward the Jews. The essay then addressed both the Jewish and the Christian-Jewish "problems." He continued to rework the essay, and by April 15, just a few days after he had refused to conduct the funeral for Gerhard Leibholz's father, he finished the article, titled "The Church and the Jewish Question," which was published in the following June issue of Der Vorinarsch. Of all Bonhoeffer's writings, this short essay has been perhaps the most scrutinized, by both his hagiographers, who wish to find in this essay the basis of a strong defense of the Jews, and his detractors, who find the essay anti-Jewish. These varying assessments are possible because Bonhoeffer contradicts himself throughout the essay."
Nevertheless, in this essay lies the blueprint for Bonhoeffer's response to the persecution of the Jews for the rest of his short life. The essay outlined three positions that he would take in successive phases of his career, which I will term (1) a call to qualified obedience, which characterizes his stance in 1933-1934; (2) a call to suffering, which describes his views from 1935 to 1939 and is most visible in his work The Cost of Discipleship; and (3) a call to resistance, which eventually brought him to prison and his death in 1945.
First, in his call to obedience, Bonhoeffer legitimated the state's right within the political realm to enact measures dealing with the Jews, drawing the line at the state's intervention in church affairs affecting Christian Jews. Consistent with traditional Lutheran distinction between the two kingdoms, spiritual and secular, his attention for the next two years focused on action within the ecclesiastical arena, not on political action. His second position, a call to suffering, picked up on the theme that Christians should stand in solidarity with the Jews in their suffering. From 1935 to 1939, he tried to persuade the Confessing Church to take a strong public stand on the persecution of Jews and be willing to accept the consequences. Then after 1939, when he lost confidence in the Confessing Church, he returned to the third theme of this early essay, direct political action, and applied this idea through his own association with the Resistance movement. He articulated the idea of active resistance more clearly in his theological works from this period, Ethics and Letters and Papers from Prison.
In his conservative Lutheran persona, expressed in the 1933 essay as the call to obedience, Bonhoeffer clearly distinguished between the positions of baptized and non-baptized Jews and took a strong stand in support of Christian Jews. He categorically dismissed the exclusion of Jews by race from the Christian church as impossible. In the view of the church, he said, Jewishness was not a racial concept, but a religious one. While Bonhoeffer had doubtless heard Nazis refer to the words of Martin Luther to justify antisemitic measures, he ended his essay by quoting the Reformer: "There is no other rule or test for who is a member of the people of God or the church of Christ than this: where there is a little band of those who accept this word of the Lord, teach it purely and confess against those who persecute it, and for that reason suffer what is their due." The baptized Jew who professed Christ was a member of the church, Bonhoeffer concluded, and the church could not allow the state to determine its membership on the basis of race."
While Bonhoeffer stood firm and unwavering on behalf of Christian Jews, his remarks about Jews as Jews sound more ambivalent. He accepted the traditional Lutheran distinction between the two kingdoms and granted enormous jurisdiction to the state to act politically, free from any limitation or intervention by the church. He went even further than Luther by echoing the neoconservative Lutheran arguments of the 1920s. Theologians such as Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch had posited the national state as the embodiment of God's law, as an entity that both functioned as a divine order to preserve human life on earth and revealed God's action in history. Bonhoeffer conceded that the "Jewish question" was a real historical problem that came under the domain of the state to resolve, and he instructed the church never to criticize the history-making actions of the state. Concerning the Jews specifically, Bonhoeffer said, the church "cannot in the first place exert direct political action" or demand that the state act differently."
As if to explain, if not justify, recent measures against Jews, Bonhoeffer's essay reiterated the old-fashioned, Christian, antisemitic belief that the suffering of the Jews throughout history came as a punishment for their crucifixion of Christ. He quoted Luther again on this point: "Jews are the poorest people among all nations upon earth, they are tossed to and fro, they are scattered here and there in all lands, they have no certain place where they could remain safely and must always be afraid that they will be driven out." This pattern of suffering would only end, for Bonhoeffer as well as for Luther, with the conversion of the Jews to Christianity. So the Jewish "problem" would continue until all the Jews became Christians. These views, of course, were common among Christians before the Holocaust and have persisted within conservative Christian circles even well afterward." The theological world of the 1950s that so enthusiastically embraced Bonhoeffer would find the Bonhoeffer of this essay a stranger.
Fortunately, Bonhoeffer did not stop with obedience in his famous essay of 1933. He went on to make bolder calls for charitable action toward and empathy with the Jews. He instructed the church to assist victims of the state's discriminatory acts, to stand with them in their suffering regardless of their religious profession. He again quoted Luther-the early Luther, not the vengeful older man-who called in 1523 for merciful treatment of the Jews: "If the Apostles, who also were Jews, had dealt with us Gentiles as we Gentiles deal with the Jews, there would have been no Christians among the Gentiles. But seeing that they have acted in such a brotherly way toward us, we in turn should act in a brotherly way toward the Jews in case we might convert some. For we ourselves are still not yet fully their equals, much less their superiors. ... But now we use force against them ... what good will we do them with that? Similarly, how will we benefit them by forbidding them to live and work and have other human fellowship with us, thus driving them to practise usury?" For Bonhoeffer, Christian kindness and charity toward Jews meant sharing in their suffering.'
But Bonhoeffer's words went beyond a call for charitable actions toward victimized Jews. He articulated a principle by which the church could speak out against and even engage in direct action to resist anti-Jewish laws or state programs. While he accepted the conservative view of the state as a divine order of preservation, Bonhoeffer called for the church to ask if recent state actions, namely, the laws against non-Aryans, were actually in accordance with this role. When the state terrorized Jews and denied them basic civil liberties, Bonhoeffer asked, did it preserve law and order or
undermine it? Using this logic, the church could speak out on political issues from its traditional theological perspective. Even more radically, Bonhoeffer argued that the church might need to resort to political action against the state if the state failed to preserve law and order. He described the church's political role with the image of the church not only bandaging the victims crushed under the wheel of the state, but at some point throwing itself into the spokes of the wheel. However, Bonhoeffer backed off from this third response by saying in regard to the Jewish problem, the "compelling demands of the hour" called for charitable assistance and speaking out. He did not yet call for direct political action in 1933; this he left open, to be decided if necessary in the future by an evangelical
As with Luther, who was never a paragon of consistency, the force of Bonhoeffer's argument cancels itself out by his contradictory presentation. For each argument for church action he presented a counter-argument which invalidated that action. With his expression of Christian solidarity with the suffering of Jews came the Christian antisemitic rationale used for centuries to justify persecution of the Jews. While in April 1933 he aimed to focus attention on injustices perpetrated against Jews and rally support for Christian Jews, his views smacked of the very attitudes and prejudices that made the Nazi Party successful and the Holocaust possible. While on the one hand he called for the church to question Nazi policies aimed at Jews as to whether they fulfilled the state's role as an order of preservation, and even suggested the church might actively resist such state policies, elsewhere in his essay he had forbidden the church to speak or act in such a way. Bonhoeffer's essay reflects a humane, concerned, well-intentioned, and-in the environment of April 1933-courageous individual. But the young Bonhoeffer was very much a creation of the sheltered, upper-middle-class, Lutheran milieu in which his parents raised him. In a time of such extraordinary and rapid change, and with his penchant for language obscured by theological abstractions, the twenty-seven-year-old Bonhoeffer probably was not aware of the contradictions inherent in his essay.
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