Strange Glory

by Charles Marsh

  He also distinguished himself as a graceful dancer, preferring the open waltz, the quadrille, and the française. He also found time to take up fencing.19

  In addition, there were three or four one-hour tennis matches every week, which by most reports he usually won. There was hiking in the Schönbuch Forest, where he sometimes visited the twelfth-century Cistercian monastery and the sunlit cliffs of the medieval village of Bebenhausen.20 It is not certain whether Bonhoeffer participated in the monthly Stocherkahnrennen, the race of punting boats on the Neckar whose goal was only not to finish last—as each member of the losing crew had to drink a “half-litre of sun-warmed cod-liver oil.”

  The letters and journals of his freshman year are reports of a confident, occasionally temperamental, eighteen-year-old, happiest when playing the piano or the lute in the great hall, performing Schubert lieder and learning new folk dances.21 Classmates spoke of an affable young scholar who excelled in academics while finding time for music and sports with enviable ease.

  During the fall term of 1923, Bonhoeffer spent the last two weeks of November as an enlisted member of the Ulm Rifles Troop. All his fellow Foxes joined this training program of the Black Reichswehr. Try as he might, though, Bonhoeffer’s brief foray into “quasi-military service” was not a success. Accustomed as he’d always been to governesses, tutors, and housekeepers, he had no gift for roughing it as a soldier must. On holidays in the eastern Harz, even when the family took their Sunday-afternoon walk to the Feuertum, the fire tower, at the forest’s edge, some servant would come along to chaperone the children or serve a hearty picnic. On his second day at the Ulm training camp, Bonhoeffer was reprimanded for emptying his washbasin out the bathroom window (rather than in the nearby cesspool; his penalty was to scrub down the barracks with a toothbrush). While most of the other men spent free time playing cards or board games, Bonhoeffer read Kant and played the piano. Still, he did manage to learn the elements of shooting, and by the time camp ended, he had grown fond of his superiors and the camaraderie of the barracks.22

  Proud of his accomplishment at Ulm—he had endured a Hedgehog rite of passage—he was nevertheless glad to be back at Frau Jäger’s. As he told his parents, it was a relief to eat with a proper knife and fork and bathe with warm water.23

  He left for Italy on the afternoon of April 3, 1924. Toting his leather-bound Baedeker, his pens, books, and writing paper, and his saratoga—as well as wardrobe for warmer climes—he appeared in every way the sophisticated traveler. In this Italienreise, Bonhoeffer was, as described, following family tradition, but he was also expressing a more personal desire to cross borders and make discoveries in his quest for originality.24

  “Fantasy begins to transform itself into reality,” he wrote in his journal, as the train crossed the Brenner Pass and headed north into the Italian Alps. He worried that reality would not meet his expectations, that he would be left disappointed; and he worried over the prospect that all his wishes would be fulfilled! In Bolzano while waiting for a transfer, Bonhoeffer found a quiet corner in a rose garden near the station, where the “red glow of sunset” over the “magnificently beautiful Dolomites” set a deliciously melancholy mood.25 But by the time the train reached Bologna, he found himself happily drawn into spirited conversation with other passengers, mostly Italians. During a four-hour layover, he and his cabin mates would stream into the city streets—a banker, two tourists, and a Catholic theology student. Under “beautiful clear moonlight,” they strolled along the Via Emilia to the Piazza Maggiore through arcades and porticos on a two a.m. walking tour of the “venerable former capital of Northern Etruria,”26 standing under the shadows of La Garisenda, “the most towering of the leaning towers,” all the way to the San Pietro Cathedral. Bonhoeffer was thrilled that his first attempts at real conversation in Italian had gone so well, pronouncing them in his journal “a great success.”27

  The train departed Bologna just after daybreak, reaching Rome in early afternoon, a twenty-four-hour journey in all. Bonhoeffer’s jubilant mood was deflated somewhat by the shock of the routinely chaotic train station. As he hankered for a hot shower and a change of clothes, his first encounters in the Eternal City were with the sudden swarm of beggars and hucksters, followed by the “knavery” of an overly solicitous cabdriver and of a pensione desk clerk demanding full payment in advance for his stay, as well as for the previous two nights. Every logistical complication—and there were many—irritated him, and the kaleidoscope of new impressions left him disoriented. “It is confusing,” he wrote. The “enormous bustle on the streets,” traffic rushing by “at furious speeds,” “cars with fascists throwing pamphlets,” grown men shouting to one another across crowded piazzas, “women with baskets of flowers, colorful oil carts juggling through the masses with much screaming”—he was a long way from the Grunewald. The “later it gets,” he wrote, “the greater the turmoil in the streets.”28

  Belying the stylized umbrage he takes in his Tagebuch, Bonhoeffer was soon having a wonderful time. By the end of the week, in fact, his diary entries suggest a state of near giddiness; and in the story told over the next six weeks, a series of revelatory and rapturous moments build to a crescendo of previously unimagined joy.

  The Coliseum conveyed incredible “power and beauty.” He lingered “in reverie” for an hour in the ancient arena, now “overgrown” and “entwined with the most luxurious vegetation,” encircled by “palm trees, cypress, pine, herbs, and all sorts of grasses,” the overgrowth only heightening the mystical splendor. “The great Pan is not dead,” he wrote.29 He visited the Forum, the Palatine, the triumphal arch of Emperor Septimius Severus, and the Pincio, in whose monastery his great-grandfather von Hase had sojourned among the Nazarenes. Every sight elicited a superlative. The Palatine was “the most beautiful place in Rome,” graced by “magnificent grounds, spacious views,” and traces of archaic houses and imperial palaces. The blend of humanist and Christian expression appealed to Bonhoeffer. In the weeks ensuing, he followed the way of his Baedeker: the Museo Nazionale Romano, the Pincio (again), Ponte Molle, the Trevi Fountain, the Santa Maria sopra Minerva, the Callixtus catacombs, the Via Appia, the Vatican, Trajan’s Forum, the Villa Borghese, the Villa Farnesina, a flash of Titian, Raphael, Leonardo. It was all so intoxicating that he misplaced his travel money, precipitating a frantic search, retracing his steps, before he found it in his hotel room. The city’s offerings seemed endless, though he did not rate every sight as sublime. He was disappointed, for instance, by the Capitoline, with its lumbering Renaissance style and “garish reconstruction.” The “few old ruins” and “the grand freestanding staircase” should have been left undisturbed, he decided. The Pantheon’s exterior surfaces and “uniform architectural structure” seemed compromised by “atrocious” interior renovations, thanks to Vatican impositions and all those sixteenth-century pontifs who “lacked any sense of style and good taste.”30 Good thing, he added, that Roman Catholicism was much greater than the popes and their minions. Bonhoeffer’s Italian journals, with their mannered entries recorded after each day’s brisk excursion, linger longingly on the churches. His brother Klaus, who’d joined him in Rome, gravitates to other interests. On one occasion, Klaus is seen entering a small chapel at Vespers, only to exit quickly. But Dietrich retreats to a small chapel at Vespers, following the canons’ every move with rapt attention. In the Lateran Church, its apse lined with mosaics and open to the air, a “feeling of mystery” drew him toward a candle-lit alcove behind the confessional, where the “prophets of the Bernini school” kept their eternal silent watch.31

  His Roman itinerary led to “magnificent cloisters” and vestigial nooks, and always to deeper mysteries. Entering the “magnificent old basilica” di San Paolo fuori le Mura just before sunset, Bonhoeffer felt himself immersed in unexampled purity and shadowy enchantment, the place “full of atmosphere” amid the “organ music and angelic singing from a darkened side chapel.” He walked home along the Via Ostiense, as the fadin
g daylight turned from yellow to red and blue. Large tatters of rosy clouds “emerged and shimmered across the sky,” the “deep blue[s] of nightfall” transfiguring the “deep green cypresses and pines,” so that houses along the way stood as if in the glory of Eden.32 The Bonhoeffer brothers rented a room from a family named Joccas that spoke only Italian, though they might easily have found expatriate German or German-speaking landlords. Mealtimes in the boardinghouse were a veritable Tower of Babel, Dietrich said, with “Italians, Russians, Greeks, French, Britons”—and at least two Germans—sitting at the common table trying to make conversation.33

  Sometimes, daunted by the effort required to be social, Dietrich took a book and dined alone in a trattoria. The affable Klaus never felt such a need. One night Dietrich met Maria Weigert for dinner near the Trevi Fountain. His former Grunewald classmate was spending the summer with relatives in Rome. After the two had enjoyed a “good robust wine,” Dietrich bade his onetime rival good evening and retreated to an overturned pillar in the Forum to dream “magnificent dreams.” Like the young Goethe captured in Tischbein’s portrait, recumbent among the ruins in the Roman Campagna, Bonhoeffer sat beside the three columns of the Temple of Castor and Pollux, with the blue darkness as “background for the glowing orange trees” of the Pincio.

  ROME CIRCA 1920

  He had shipped a small library from Berlin to Rome, but aside from a few stolen moments in cafés or before bedtime—he mentions one stormy morning spent “a little in Heiler” (presumably the Marburg theologian Friedrich Heiler), and also dipping into some Goethe, mostly Faust—he found little time for reading.34 While taking in the city on foot, he read only until the skies cleared, preferring to devour—as he would put it—the book of experience. He did keep one actual book, the Baedeker, always within reach, and on occasion also consulted Jacob Burckhardt’s guide to Italian painting. Burckhardt held that art should be met with a studied admiration tempered by a certain willful naïveté—and this combination inspired in Bonhoeffer no few sophomoric judgments: to the width of the mosaic arches at St. Maria Navicella he ascribed an “architecturally unflattering effect,” and there was “nothing special” about the Santa Prassede—true perhaps if one considers only the plain stone wall and “rather inauspicious door” on the street.35

  But such pseudo-intellectual hiccups—and there were but few—hardly diminish an abiding appreciation of the world’s splendor, one then typical of the wellborn. It is the critic’s prerogative, he said, to “arbitrarily interpret, interpret, and further interpret the artworks.” But Bonhoeffer was content to approach beauty more as an expectant admirer. “I believe that interpretation is not necessary in art,” he said.36 In this refusal, he maintained an Aristotelian purity: intuition formed by refinement and learning was enough to apprehend the beautiful and the good, which categories in classical times would have been considered transcendental.

  He was amazed by how naturally he adapted to the “different atmosphere” and made himself at home. Even the Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini on the Via Veneto—the place where the bones of four thousand friars lay in their famous crypt and desiccated corpses, draped in Franciscan habit, sat upright—seemed inviting. “Lit only by dim natural light seeping in through cracks”—the spectacle had once been savagely mocked by Martin Luther as a heap of “Pope’s dung.”

  On Palm Sunday 1924, Bonhoeffer rose early and hurried to make the morning Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica. He went in anticipation of a grand spectacle, which he had read about in his Baedeker and in Goethe; he was not expecting the profoundly meaningful experience that transpired.

  In north German Lutheranism, Palm Sunday had come to represent a brief, oddly formal pause on the way to Easter Morning. But the Sunday Mass at St. Peter’s proved much more than the mere baton passing it had become in the evangelical sprint to the resurrection. The service was “infused completely with the expectation of the Passion.” Bonhoeffer found a place next to a young woman who invited him to follow along in her Latin missal, as she spoke the soft musical cadences of the liturgy; the creedal invocation of the Lord’s conception and birth (“qui conceptus est de spiritu sancto, natus ex Maria Virgine”—“who by the power of the Holy Spirit became incarnate of the Virgin Mary”); the “tender and melodious” responses of the people. As the music and spoken word echoed in the vast candle-lit vault, the sun beaming in through the cupola, Bonhoeffer was seized by a thought that would remain the most enduring insight of his trip: “The universality of the church!”37

  The final benediction left him wanting more. So after lunch it was on to the Chiesa del Gesù, the “magnificent church” near the Palazzo Altieri, which housed the crypt of St. Ignatius of Loyola. Bonhoeffer marveled at the multitude of “white-robed Jesuits,” swaying like a “sea of flowers,” who read passages from Lamentations, while large families waited their turn at the confessionals, “illuminated by slowly darkening altar candles.”

  During Vespers at the Trinità dei Monti, forty girls, “in a solemn procession wearing nun’s habits with blue or green sashes,” took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. They sang the canonical hour with “unbelievable simplicity, grace and great seriousness.” There was “not a trace of routine to be observed,” and the “whole thing gave one an unequalled impression of profound, guileless piety.”38 It was “worship in the true sense.” Standing outside on the terrace above the Spanish steps, Bonhoeffer savored the “most magnificent view overlooking the domes of Rome,” as the sky, bathed in the red light of the sunset, once again offered its intimation of ethereal glory. “Magnifico!” he sighed.

  “It was the first day on which something of the reality of Catholicism began to dawn on me,” he wrote in his journal.39

  Most of Bonhoeffer’s Holy Week entries record his emotional reactions to the sweep of magnificent events, but in one intriguing exception he recounts a boy leaving the confessional with his father. From the vestibule, Bonhoeffer observed the pair make their way to the front altar to light a candle, only for the child to break off suddenly and return to the booth. Why had he done that?

  The boy, Bonhoeffer was certain, had remembered an unconfessed sin.

  Earlier that same day, Bonhoeffer had stood transfixed before The Boy Extracting a Thorn, a first-century sculpture in the Capitoline. The statue moved him as no other in the museum had, he said. Now, as he contemplated this child raised to be “excessively scrupulous,” and longing for purity, Dietrich was outraged. He resolved that such heightened self-scrutiny, and the fear it bred of error, was the “worst crime one can commit against the young”—even more egregious “in relation to the church.”40 The church, he concluded, should teach its children that grace forgives all the sins—spoken and unspoken—of a contrite heart.

  Four days later, on Holy Thursday, Bonhoeffer was back in St. Peter’s for the early Mass. He returned in the afternoon for the great procession to the papal altar, after which the priests swept the altar clean, in a ritual of purification. The next day, Good Friday, he was again among the first to arrive for the early service, which was, he said, distinguished by the “extraordinarily festive adoration of the cross,” before which the priests knelt, kissing it.41

  By the afternoon Mass, he was following along with a missal of his own, a gift from his new friend, a Catholic seminarian by the name of Platte-Platenius (who had been among the train passengers taking in Bologna by moonlight). Into his notebook Bonhoeffer feverishly copied the “Christus factus,” the “Benedictus” from the Gospel of St. Luke; and, once again, the Miserere, the beautiful penitential prayer in Psalm 51: “Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam,” “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love.” He registered not a hint of Protestant discomfort when a doughy-faced castrato descended from amid the choir to sing three alto solos. In fact, the eunuch’s song produced quite the opposite effect: “a peculiar rapturous ecstasy … thoroughly inhuman.”42

  Bonhoeffer held the missal close, as
a catechumen might. “Every [word] flows from the main theme of the Mass; the sacrificial death and its continuous reenactment in the sacrificial Mass of communion.”43

  That same evening, he engaged in a rare theological debate. Amid the exhilarating pageantry of Holy Week there had hardly been occasion for more than the odd and fleeting defense of the Protestant faith. But Platte-Platenius provoked Bonhoeffer. The seminarian claimed that modern Catholicism remained “fundamentally the same as early Christianity,” the creeds and councils of the Magisterium having moreover “clarified” and “made intelligent [sic] the essence of the faith.” Bonhoeffer took the bait, replying with the conventional Reformation point of view: Catholicism had “falsified the original” and turned the effervescent spirituality of the early Christians into static dogma. In allowing the symbolic and doctrinal encrustations to fall away, Protestantism had restored Christianity to its primordial purity.

  But that was as far as the duel of budding theologians went.44 Fairly consumed by his desire to get to the next Mass on time, to worship in what Martin Luther had called the “synagogues of Satan,” Bonhoeffer had no interest in an extended back-and-forth.45 He would continue on his blissful way through the Eternal City: “Das Stück Erde,” he wrote, “dass ich so sehr liebe” (“This piece of earth, that I so very much love”).46 His journal’s only harsh words for Italian Catholicism—“The objective fact certainly never plays the most important part”—he would later cross out in black ink.47 He would not, however, cross out his criticism of German Lutheranism as “provinziell, nationalistisch und kleinbürgerlich”—provincial, nationalistic, and small-minded.