Besides not overseeing the education of eight children and the household staff of ten, Paula loved to plan elaborate parties and galas; indeed, she was known—not only in Grunewald but throughout the Berlin Bildungsbürgertum, the educated upper middle class—as an excellent hostess.35 There were elaborate costumes and skits and musical numbers. Dietrich relished the preparations and the pageantry, designing the invitations, decorating the rooms, and arranging the stage props. With his mother, he selected the music and directed the skits. With his sisters, he rehearsed his lines and his dance steps. Paula kept a cedar chest filled with wigs and colorful silken fabrics, and so his costume was always a particular concern. As a small child, he liked to wear a white party dress with a “blue silk petticoat underneath.”36 Later, at a costume party in the Wangenheimstrasse home, he dressed up as Cupid, shooting blunt arrows at the young couples.37
KARL AND PAULA BONHOEFFER, CIRCA 1930
Despite differences in background and temperament, Paula and Karl Bonhoeffer agreed on the family essentials. Both were wholly unimpressed by the modish [or “trendy”] advice that parents become close friends with their children. Neither practiced corporal punishment. If a child questioned some decision, he was encouraged to explain his concern—and to do it precisely. Paula, though more approachable than Karl, was herself a force not to be trifled with.38 To go with the religious rituals, she instilled a genteel and felicitous but dutiful Lutheran piety. (Bonhoeffer may have had his mother in mind when, in a fictional sketch, he portrayed an urbane middle-aged woman who went to church only as a “salutary discipline,” suffering an “old windbag of a preacher” full of “sanctimonious prattle.”)39 But she fully shared her husband’s faith in science, never hesitating to administer medications for whatever might ail the children. Over the course of his lifetime, Dietrich, like his siblings, would avail himself of various powders for aches and pains, sleeping pills as needed, and even stimulants for an extra boost in the middle of the day (or to forgo sleep and finish an assignment). He never traveled without an ample supply of medicaments in his shaving bag. A regular visitor would later allow that he had never seen pills flow so freely as in the Bonhoeffer home.
It would be a challenge for Dietrich to make his mark among his many talented siblings. The oldest, Karl-Friedrich, born in 1899, grasped the complexities of science with uncommon ease. The next in line, Walter, born the same year, would prove a gifted young writer and naturalist.40 Klaus, born in 1901 and the brother closest to Dietrich in age, was a free spirit, though one with a sharp analytical mind; he once received a low mark in chemistry for refusing to put away his volume of Hegel during class.
Bonhoeffer’s oldest sister, Ursula, born in 1902, inherited her father’s zeal for clinical knowledge and would study social work until she married at the age of twenty-one. Ursel was followed by Christine in 1903, who like her brother Walter loved nature, receiving university honors in zoology. The eighth and youngest child, Susanne, born in 1909, three years after the twins, possessed rare emotional maturity and empathetic gifts. Had she not found fulfillment as a minister’s wife, Susanne might well have followed in her father’s footsteps and pursued a healing profession.41
From an early age, Dietrich was aware of his privilege and its obligations. But he was not troubled if, in the pursuit of things he considered just and true, he seemed egotistical as well as courageous—or that classmates sometimes found him arrogant. “No one dared get in his way when he stood up for someone else,” he would write of his alter ego in the unfinished autobiographical novel. “Then he fought like a lion and was a fierce opponent.” He might have acknowledged that his motivation to act was “less out of love for the individual than out of the need for responsibility at the core of his being.”42 But his peers, as he explained to his parents, were incapable of recognizing excellence, and were filled with envy. Only later in life would the sin of pride become a project for spiritual correction; in his school years, Bonhoeffer regarded his superior intellect as a plain fact.
This made even more vexing his inability to surpass the academic achievements of Maria Weigert, “the Jewish girl,” who lived nearby in Grunewald. “Beautiful, brilliant and energetic,” her teachers gushed. Dietrich wished his top-of-the-class status were not always qualified as “among the boys.”43 The daughter of a Berlin judge, and heir to a German banking fortune, Weigert remained best overall. It only made matters worse that Dietrich could not seem to get away from her. Even at the Individualist Club, the Bonhoeffers and the Weigerts often kept company together. Sometimes, along with other Grunewald friends, the families went on Sunday outings to the Müggelsee, a nearby lake; attired in their sturdy country clothes, they would meet in the Halensee train station—the women in Beiderwand dresses and the men in knickers, sack coats, and lace-up cap toes. Equipped with utensils, baskets of food, guitars, and other paraphernalia, the group would occupy an entire train car of the regional line.44
In a 1921 photograph of the Grunewald students in their classroom, the dark-haired Maria—one of only three girls in the class of fifteen—appears confident and at ease in her white blouse, bow, and dark skirt, gently smiling as she leans slightly on her desk. Dietrich, though three years younger, barely a teenager, already seems too big for his chair, dwarfing the boys seated next to him, with broad shoulders and a massive head.
In 1913, a year after moving to Berlin, while still renting the place near the crowded Tiergarten, the Bonhoeffers purchased a country home in Friedrichsbrunn, a village on the eastern ridge of the Harz Mountains. At first, the children were decidedly unimpressed. The move from Breslau had been bad enough. Now, with the woodsy Grunewald place still in the future, they were obliged to give up their rural retreat in Wölfelsgrund—a lovely spot with fruit trees and a large meadow and a cold stream nestled in a valley near the Bohemian border—for an old hunting lodge in an unfamiliar region. Getting to Friedrichsbrunn involved a three-hour train ride to Blankenburg and an additional half hour in two horse carriages up the mountainside through the dense spruce forest surrounding the hamlet. But the children soon discovered the many delights of the eastern Harz: excellent cross-country skiing in winter; lush, verdant hillsides and hiking trails in spring, and cool summer evenings.
The region was also rich in literary history, and in the library of the new house the Bonhoeffers created a special section dedicated to local authors. Theodor Fontane had lived in nearby Thale, the medieval village where his novel Cécile is set. In 1824, following a year of great discontent in his university studies, a restless young Heinrich Heine kept a journal of his wanderings through the mountains.45 The Harz Journey (Die Harzreise) tells of “golden sunbeams” and “festive rays” pouring through “the dense greenery of the firs,” and of “twittering birds,” “rustling firs,” and “streams splashing out of sight”; Heine would enjoy a “feeling of infinite bliss” elemented of the “green trees, thoughts, birdsong, melancholy, the blue of heaven, memory and fragrance twined together in sweet arabesques.”46
Written a century after Heine’s, Dietrich’s own writings from Friedrichsbrunn convey a similar exuberance and longing. In the mornings, he read and wrote and played the piano. In the afternoons, he made for the hills to hike or simply to nap. On occasions when he and Sabine went walking with their mother, it was enough to listen quietly, as Paula spoke of literature, music, family matters, or education, and while deer grazed in the afternoon fields amid the sunlight’s westering shadows. Sometimes the three followed a sloping path to the ridge called Pine Hill, and from a clearing in a thicket of heather bushes they would watch the sun set over “distant forests” and wooded meadows. At Pine Hill, a pair of birch benches was set against a wooden cross bearing an Old Testament inscription: “The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God and no torment will ever touch them.”47
In the summertime, Dietrich studied and cataloged the wild mushrooms he collected across the glades and meadows, taking “rapturous delight” just to pull them gently f
rom the soil and identify them by name.48 On day trips to the Bergrat Müller Pond, he carried empty tins to put them in, the arrangement being that his older sister Christine would grill the harvest for lunch if the younger children collected enough. A boulder in the upper meadow served as tabletop as Dietrich and his siblings feasted on “bright yellow chanterelles; chestnut browcaps; tall, feathered parasol mushrooms,” as well as “handsome blue tricholomae; orange agaric; and countless pungent marasmi,” and, in a pinch, “hardy edible porcini,” which Christine served with new potatoes and brown bread. Eating the simple meal, luxuriating in the “the energy of forest, sun, water, each other’s company … and freedom itself,” the boy could sense “in the depths of his being” the infinite everywhere alive.49
Some evenings, children from the nearby villages joined the twins for games. Dietrich often surprised others with his fierce competitive streak, playing to win, at least when he perceived a fair match. And he was not infrequently a showy winner, one afternoon returning with a garland he had made for himself from wildflowers and cotton grass. When Klaus caught sight of his husky towheaded brother adorned like an ancient Olympian, he mocked him mercilessly. Dietrich quickly removed his laurels in embarrassment.50
Friedrichsbrunn would always remain a place to which Bonhoeffer felt emotionally connected, returning there throughout his life. For his grandmother Julie’s ninetieth birthday, he escorted her and twenty guests on an eight-kilometer promenade through spruce and birch from Ramberg to Viktorshöhe, where a spectacular view of the hill and forest tumbling into the distant plains of Sachsen could be enjoyed from a massive timber-framed watchtower. In his last letters, written from a Gestapo prison, Bonhoeffer described the flooding memories of lying on his back “watching the clouds float across the blue sky in the breeze and listening to the sounds of the forest.” Such memories and impressions, he said, no less than the places that inspired them—not only the eastern Harz but the central uplands (the Mittelgebirge) like the Thuringian Forest, and the Weser Uplands—“made me who I am.”51
Those days in the Harz were languorous but ordered. Two servants and the housekeeper kept the cup candles burning on the windowsills, and lit the wall sconces and indoor lanterns when night fell. The firewood had been neatly stacked by the fireplace. The house would not be wired for electricity until 1943, and by then everything had come to ruin—the family gatherings, the musical evenings and the skit nights, the hiking parties to the Feuerturm, the days of reading and rest. Everything.
In March of 1918, Walter and Karl-Friedrich volunteered for military service in the Deutsches Heer, the land forces of the remaining monarchy.52 It would prove to be the last year of the Great War. Like Karl-Friedrich, who left home with a knapsack full of physics books, Walter enlisted as an infantryman out of a sense of valor and idealism, his own kit including his books and notes on nature; unlike Karl-Friedrich, however, Walter did not return from the western front. During Lieutenant General Erich Ludendorff’s Spring Offensive against the French and British, a shell exploded amid Walter’s column.53 Wounded in both legs, he languished in a field hospital before succumbing to infection on April 28, barely a month after his enlistment. Karl-Friedrich sustained injuries in the war as well, though his were slight.54
Walter was a gentle soul who loved the outdoors and was happiest at Friedrichsbrunn, where it was his custom to leave the house before sunrise with a thermos, binoculars, and notebook. He knew the local foresters by name and was always happy to join the townsmen on a hunt—though he could rarely bring himself to take aim at a deer or wild boar. He could easily spend hours listening to birdsong from a cluster of trees overlooking the meadow north of town, perfecting birdcalls on his whistle. A copy of Brehm’s Life of Animals lay open on his desk as if it were a family Bible. Dietrich always felt closest to his older brother under the open skies.55
The family hardly knew how to respond to Walter’s death, they who had experienced so little personal tragedy. Throughout the war years Dietrich had remained fairly indifferent to the deprivations of his countrymen. Amid the blight of the 1917 Turnip Winter, with its tremendous hardships of food shortages and rationing—the same year Ludendorff had rallied the nation for “total war”—Dietrich wrote his grandmother about a recent dinner party on Wangenheimstrasse featuring sausage soup, veal roast, flounder from Ostsee near Boltenhagen, fresh asparagus and carrots, fruit preserves, cheesecakes, and “very good wine”—“quite a lot” of it. Ham and eggs served with coffee, as well as bread and sweet butter, remained the standard for breakfast.56
Karl Bonhoeffer had turned fifty only a few weeks before that bright spring morning when a messenger delivered two telegrams, one concerning each son, to the Grunewald address. Sabine remembered her father turning ashen, retreating quickly into his study, where, for what seemed hours, he “sat bowed over … his face hidden in his hands.”57 No one had ever seen him so distraught or otherwise emotional. He would soon adopt a stoic frame of mind, keeping his grief to himself, but for many years he could not bear to remain in the room if Walter’s name was mentioned; and for the next ten years, he would make no entries in his New Year’s Eve journal, as he had always done before.58
The morning Walter left for war, Paula had run alongside the train as it slowly rolled out of the Thale station, telling her son over and over, “It’s only space that separates us.” After his death, she fell into a depression so severe that she ended up moving out of the house to spare the children the sight of her anguish. For more than a month in the home of the Schönes family, under the care of her husband and a colleague, Paula lay in bed, clutching Walter’s last letter.59 “Thinking of you with longing, my dears, every minute of the long days and nights,” he had written from the field hospital. “Love from so far away.”60
Twelve-year-old Dietrich was completely blindsided. At a dinner party in Friedrichsbrunn, he had serenaded Walter on the eve of his departure with a rendition of “Now, at the last, we say Godspeed on your journey,” accompanying himself on the piano.61 Bonhoeffer would later perceive in Walter’s life “early fulfillment though death for a high purpose.” At the time, though, it seemed that reality, once so beautiful and pure, was fractured. It could never be apprehended apart from sorrow; the seamless fabric of dailiness and eternity was torn asunder.62 “Human nature, what has become of it?” his uncle von Hase said in the eulogy. “No sooner do the winds of death blow on it, than it returns to the earth in a single hour.”63
Karl-Friedrich returned home from the war bitter and disillusioned, fiercely hostile to the monarchy, and declaring himself a socialist and an admirer of the English labor movement. He spouted Ludwig Feuerbach’s critique of religion—that the idea of God is finally a projection of humanity’s own longings for omniscience—and refused to take part in Advent services. Even more shocking to young Dietrich and Sabine, he openly criticized the family’s musical evenings as bourgeois frippery on the part of people with no real talent. It was, Karl-Friedrich said, a waste of money better spent in support of working-class musicians.64
Not too long after Walter’s death, Dietrich announced that he had decided to become a theologian.65 Only thirteen years old, he had no doubt about the rightness of this path.
For a while there had been some talk of a career as a concert pianist. His skill as a sight reader made him everyone’s favorite accompanist for Saturday musical evenings.66 By the age of eight, he was playing chamber music with Karl-Friedrich on cello and Klaus on violin, and accompanying his mother, as she sang her beloved Gellert-Beethoven-Lieder—the spare, melancholy hymns inspired by the poetry of Christian Fürchtegott Gellert—and other Romantic songs. On Christmas Eve, the mother-and-son duo would perform in Carl August Peter Cornelius’s Epiphany anthem, “The Three Kings,” and also Advent hymns from the era of Alexander von Humboldt and Felix Mendelssohn: “The star shines out with a steadfast ray / The kings to Bethlehem make their way / And there in worship they bend the knee / As Mary’s child in her lap they see.”
67 As a gift to his parents on Pentecost Sunday, Dietrich composed a piece for voices based on Psalm 42, “Why art thou cast down, O my soul?…Hope thou in God.” He would prove even more skillful as an arranger with his “trio setting” of Franz Schubert’s “Gute Ruh”—“Rest Well”—from the popular nineteenth-century song cycle Die schöne Müllerin.68 Ever eager to perform, he once brought his Boy Scout troop to attention with an animated rehearsal of his favorite impromptus.69
Yet he ultimately found his passion for music not as great as the one stirred whenever his thoughts turned to God, or simply when he read in one of his uncle von Hase’s leather-bound volumes of theology. His decision was further validated by Leonid Kreutzer, the renowned teacher at the Berlin Music Conservatory, after Dietrich auditioned for one of the much-sought-after spots in the freshman class. Kreutzer knew the Bonhoeffers well, attending their musicals on occasion. He liked young Dietrich and was impressed enough by his technical proficiency to admit him into the conservatory. But he told the parents that the boy lacked “expressive color” and advised against a musical career. Nor was he convinced that Dietrich truly wanted to be a concert pianist or fully understood the demands of the discipline.70
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