Strange Glory
Page 6
One week later, Bonhoeffer took the “fateful steps over the Italian border” back into Germany to enroll in classes at the University of Berlin. Though he barely made it in time, arriving on the last day of registration, he was ready to be back in the great metropolis his family called home.
CHAPTER THREE
1924–1928
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University Studies
“I haven’t written to you for a fairly long time,” Bonhoeffer wrote Sabine in June 1924. “The last time I did, I tarried in more beautiful regions.”1
Sabine was visiting relatives in Breslau when her twin brother returned to begin his studies. While Italy had no doubt overwhelmed him with its magnificence, Berlin, he would find, still had a multitude of charms, especially in late spring. In Grunewald, the hyacinths and daffodils were in bloom, the warm air scented with linden blossoms. The gap year at Tübingen had served its purposes: Bonhoeffer had studied modern philosophy, systematic theology, church history, and biblical languages, attended Professor Karl Hasse’s popular lectures on “Forms in Beethoven’s Symphonies” and read political theory with Robert Wilbrandt.
Still, he had no wish to linger there. Dr. Karl Bonhoeffer had grown up speaking the region’s dialect, so his children were familiar with its idioms. Dietrich was not especially bothered by that diminutive drawl, but he’d had enough of the provincial dress and folk festivals and the vexing rail service, with local trains stopping at so many backwaters of southwest Germany that it took five transfers to get as far as Freiburg. One year in the Schwäbische Alb was quite enough for him.2
Bonhoeffer had originally hoped to spend a few weeks in Friedrichsbrunn before the semester began, but he had already delayed his return to Berlin by extending his stay in Italy—spending nearly a week in Sienna—and then joining two Igel brothers for a Wanderung in the Black Forest. The first day of classes was fast approaching, and still he had not done the reading he had hoped to finish during the two-month sojourn in Italy. “I absolutely have to get some work done,” he wrote Sabine.3 When she returned to Berlin later in the month, Dietrich welcomed her with a bouquet of flowers and gifts from his travels. He was most excited about the guitar he had found in Rome—“a neopolitan with a bass string,” in good condition and reasonably well built, although it was not actually a gift. He had purchased the instrument only after receiving money from Sabine in the mail. But the important thing was that she would now have her own guitar, and the two could play duets.4
But Sabine had some news that came as rather a shock: she was now engaged to Gerhard Leibholz, a Berliner of Jewish descent, five years her senior, who was completing a doctoral dissertation in legal philosophy. It would necessarily be a long engagement, since Dr. Bonhoeffer forbade any daughter of his from marrying before her twentieth birthday, and Sabine was only eighteen. Paula Bonhoeffer agreed with her husband’s rule. She also had concerns about her daughter’s marrying a Jew—concerns centering on the practicalities of such a mixed marriage. Although Sabine’s fiancé had been baptized into the Lutheran Church as a child, he had dark eyes and a prominent nose, and his grandparents were practicing Jews. His father, William Leibholz, a widower with a fairly secular outlook, owned textile factories near Berlin, and had raised his children in a villa on the Königssee. And no one of any Jewish background had ever married into the Bonhoeffer clan.5 But “Gert,” as he was known, “won the hearts of the family” with his expansive mind, his kindly manner, and his broad intellectual interests. Sabine was delighted when she overheard her father say, “Of all these young people who now come to the house, I really like talking to young Leibholz best of all. He is both intelligent and unpretentious.”6
Dietrich, of course, received the news of his sister’s engagement with deliberate cheer, welcoming Gerhard as a brother-in-law. But the sudden shift in family relationships did not come “entirely without a sense of loss.” The devotion of the twins to each other, “so deep as seldom to need any expression,” was a basic element of life. In childhood, “neither had needed any other intimacy”; at least Dietrich had neither sought nor found any other. That bond would remain strong over the years and across the distances that separated them, but for now attending the wonderful news was a sense of isolation for Dietrich.7 He moved back into his parents’ house and withdrew into his studies.
Shortly after the twins’ twentieth birthday in 1926, Sabine and Leibholz were married by Parson Priebe at the Grunewald Evangelical Church. Dietrich makes no mention of the three-day celebration in his journals and letters, nor is he seen in any of the wedding pictures. Sabine, however, recalled how at the feast on the wedding eve, Dietrich appeared in his elegant attire and entertained the sixty guests with a song and dance by Max Bierbaum: “Ring-row-rosary, I dance with my wife.” The next morning he offered a “solemn but festive” rendition of Grieg’s “Hochzeitstag auf Troldhaugen.”8 He may have felt bereft, but he was in no way sulking.
The turn of the century had been a glorious time at Friedrich-Wilhelms. Still under the governance of the kaiser, the university had assembled an unrivaled theological faculty, including Adolf von Harnack, Karl Holl, and Reinhold Seeberg. These three luminaries of the Protestant liberal establishment were in a class of their own. But one would hardly expect less of the faculty that had been founded a century before, in 1809, by the great Romantic theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, the beloved “prince of the church,” whose funeral in February 1834 drew more than twenty thousand to Trinity Church and its surrounding gardens in the Friedrichstadt district. It was at Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Berlin that Hegel had accepted the chair in philosophy left vacant by the death of Johann Fichte, counting as his colleague his former roommate Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, and as his future disciple Ludwig Feuerbach. By 1924, when Bonhoeffer matriculated, the theology faculty comprised nine senior scholars, most of whom had been tenured before the Great War, in addition to adjunct professors and lecturers.9
In his first term, Bonhoeffer attended two seminars directed by Holl, one in church history and the other on the creeds and confessions. Harnack remained the preeminent scholar of the Berlin school, but he had formally retired and was thus exempt from academic obligations, though he still offered doctoral seminars. Now Holl, star of the so-called Lutheran Renaissance, and younger than Harnack by fifteen years, had begun attracting the brightest graduate students. Holl’s book What Did Luther Understand by Religion? had become a theological sensation when it appeared in 1921, outselling the year’s other conspicuous hit, the second edition of Karl Barth’s The Epistle to the Romans—which launched the radical movement called dialectical theology. Holl’s book on Luther went through two more printings in 1922, and was reissued in 1923 in a revised version. His classes filled up quickly.10
FRIEDRICH-WILHELMS UNIVERSITY, BERLIN
More than any other professor, Holl shaped Bonhoeffer’s view of Martin Luther, the catalytic agent of the Protestant Reformation. Holl offered a sober account for colleagues and fellow churchmen who had become “drunk on [too much] Lutheran pathos”: Luther did not belong only to Germans, he warned. Having captured the spirit of human enlightenment in its religious aspects, he had forged a truly universal Christian worldview. Holl’s Lutheran Renaissance emphasized “new” and unique elements of Luther’s theology, preferring his early radical themes—the freedom of a Christian, salvation by faith alone (sola fide), the priesthood of the believers. Some contemporary Catholic critics had found these themes to be symptoms of a diseased, oversexed soul and even, as in the case of Luther’s so-called discovery of justification by faith, the fruit of a memorably productive bowel movement.11
Holl’s aim was also to complement Wittenberg’s Luther with Geneva’s John Calvin, the other great Protestant Reformer and in this way to strive toward a more broadly conceived Reformation Christianity. Luther’s worrisome tendency toward the otherworldly might well be balanced by Calvin’s understanding of the “resolute permeation of the world with divine prese
nce.”12 This approach of Holl’s—teaching a Luther who was more open “to the confessional, cultural, and political traditions of churches beyond the German homeland”—was broadly appealing to his Berlin students and, in particular, to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who already gravitated to a cosmopolitan evangelicalism and a spirituality beyond the Protestant-Catholic divide.13 Nevertheless, it deserves mention that before beginning university studies, Bonhoeffer’s ample notes on books and ideas betray strikingly little interest in Luther and the Protestant Reformation. He seemed to have been from the beginning a natural ecumenist.
Bonhoeffer enjoyed Holl’s seminars immensely and would remain grateful for Holl’s marvelous theme of duty transformed into joy “in the face of the majesty of God”—such a refreshing alternative to the stentorian moralism of many Protestant liberals. Still, when Bonhoeffer would later have occasion to remember his university years, his thoughts turned more often to Harnack, the most distinguished scholar of the German Protestant Church; it was he—Bonhoeffer said—who had inspired his student’s pursuit of “truth born out of freedom.” When the seventy-five-year-old professor emeritus announced a seminar on the history of Christian dogma for the fall term, Bonhoeffer was delighted.
Of the nine on the theological faculty, Harnack, a slender man with an elegant demeanor, moved most easily among the city’s cultural elite. His house on Kunz-Buntschuh-Strasse in the Grunewald, where he often held his seminars, was but a three-minute walk from the Bonhoeffers’ on Wangenheimstrasse. On days that found the professor on campus, Harnack and Bonhoeffer would often meet at the Halensee train station to share the commute to Berlin Mitte. The Harnacks and the Bonhoeffers had long maintained comfortable social ties; Harnack’s sons Axel and Ernst, both graduates of the Grunewald Gymnasium, though a generation before Dietrich, shared Bonhoeffer’s fondness for music and travel.
Harnack remained not only Germany’s grand old man of Protestantism but also the most influential German scholar of religion throughout Europe and the English-speaking world; he was twice offered professorships at Harvard. When Harnack had moved from the University of Giessen to Berlin in 1888, within two terms his early-morning classes were regularly attended by more than four hundred students. His university-wide lectures of 1899–1900, published as the book Was ist Christentum? (What Is Christianity?), had by now been issued in multiple editions and in numerous foreign languages. In his seminal studies of early Christianity he had argued that religion was the product of historical and social factors—rather than supernatural forces, as the church had traditionally claimed—and so was best studied in the rigorous field of historical-critical scholarship. Sifting through early church documents, especially those concerning the practices and beliefs of the first Christian communities and their responses to the story of Jesus, Harnack concluded that the essence of the gospel could be reduced to the simple but profound message that God is love. This truth predated the rise of church councils and synods and their formulation of doctrines and creeds; it should, Harnack taught, be reclaimed as the eternal and unchanging heart of the faith—reclaimed, one might say more pointedly, from the institutional church, which had taken a simple ecstatic fact and transformed it into a body of static dogma and abstruse metaphysics. Had the apostles, to take one striking example, responded to their surprising encounter with the resurrected Jesus by reciting creeds? No, they had responded in spontaneous outbursts of joy—even Thomas, whose doubts eventually gave way to worship and praise: “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28). Indeed, the Gospel of Luke observes that the disciples found it difficult to believe “because of their joy and amazement”!
It should be the mission of Reformation Protestantism, said Harnack, to free the gospel “from these unessential accouterments.” Historical criticism offered the means to winnow out the “husks” of stale traditions from the timeless “kernel” of the Christian message. “The essence of Christianity,” Harnack wrote famously, “its element of permanent validity, addresses an essentially unchanging core of human nature that yearns for that ‘presence of the eternal in time.’ ” The gospel’s “simple satisfaction of this yearning was its self-authentication,” satisfying “the human yearning for the presence of the eternal.” Therefore, to speak of the essence of Christianity is to affirm the “heart’s trusting submission to a loving God,” love’s power to inspire “the person toward a life enamored of the good, energized by grace and in the service of his neighbor.” Jesus’s divinity and power should then be affirmed as the practical consequence of his intimate relationship with “God as the Father and as his Father.” In contrast to traditional formulations as Jesus as a supernatural being—the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, the revelation of the transcendent Word—Harnack described Jesus as the man, unique above all others, who achieved fully realized “God consciousness.”14
In his first month of coursework Bonhoeffer established a comfortable rhythm. A brisk swim in the morning was followed by reading until lunch—unless he had a morning seminar. In the afternoons, he met with classmates to recite and discuss passages from primary sources in church history.15 Harnack preferred an evening time for the weekly gathering of students at his home.
Theological studies at the University of Berlin meant a total immersion in the currents of Protestant liberal thought. Bonhoeffer read Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. He read Friedrich Schleiermacher’s On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers—the most beautiful of all works in German Romantic theology—which praises religion “as a sense and taste of the infinite,” the ultimate source of all human striving toward beauty and goodness, these being deemed objective realities, in accordance with the early Christians’ Platonic inheritance. He read Ernst Troeltsch’s two-volume The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, as well as Troeltsch’s writings on Christian ethics. Dietrich wrote a “very interesting paper” (he told his mother) on the sociologist Max Weber’s three-volume Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion). “After Weber, I also propose to finish off Husserl—and … to tackle Schleiermacher thoroughly,” Bonhoeffer confidently reported. He was as good as his word: in addition to Schleiermacher’s writings on hermeneutics and aesthetics, Bonhoeffer plowed through Edmund Husserl’s Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, admiring the Jewish philosopher’s razor-sharp analysis of human cognition. Over the course of the next six years, Bonhoeffer would return often to Husserl’s writings on epistemology, while also resuming his study of Hebrew begun in high school.
Bonhoeffer the student brought a broad curiosity into the highly specialized subject of systematic theology, attending lectures outside his department and, with remarkable ease, reading across disciplines—in philosophy, of course, but also in sociology, social theory, and psychology. But the disciplines in which he moved most freely remained those discussed over meals at home, in daily exchanges with his father or with his siblings, in-laws, and even Grunewald neighbors; these were medicine and natural sciences, jurisprudence, philosophy, and theology—all staples of the daily discourse of Berlin’s academic elite.16
Klaus was also back and living at home. After the carefree days in Italy, he spent the summer months working on his doctoral thesis. Dietrich told his parents that Klaus seemed “stressed out.” No wonder: he worked most mornings in his university office and then brought his files home in the afternoon. Refreshed by an hour’s nap before dinner, Klaus would be in his room writing until well after midnight.17
Dietrich, meanwhile, as always made ample room for recreation and leisure. He took pride in being able to complete difficult assignments in a single sitting and then enjoy time that was his own. He might, as on one break, hike into the northernmost regions of Schleswig-Holstein, over the Dithmarschen flats and coastal plains, and through the “flat, verdant … meadowlands” that bordered the North Sea west of Kiel and Flensburg, the country feeling “lonesome and monotonous,” he said, but in a good way. Indeed, he love
d the solace of endless plains and landscapes whose sparseness seemed ethereal, the dissolving horizons, colorless heaths, and “magnificent blue skies.”18 With his friend Robert Held, he would hike all the way to Husum, the grey town by the sea, and there set sail for the islands of Langeness, Helgoland, and Sylt, returning to town alert and refreshed, tanned by the sun scarcely felt in the bracing wind of the rugged coastal terrain.
Not that he found his studies laborious; there is hardly a hint of drudgery in Bonhoeffer’s accounts. Studying in concentrated blocks came naturally and was no burden, especially as it left him time for outings in Berlin—the symphony and theater, musical evenings at home, the cafés. Even when he needed to cram large amounts of material—once over a weekend he had to plow through another Husserl opus, this time the two-volume Logical Investigations—or recharge his Latin, he did what each day required with relish.19