He formed a chamber quintet, recruiting two Igel brothers now living in Berlin to play first violin and first cello and roping Klaus in as second cello. Herr Rohloff, Sabine’s violin teacher, completed the ensemble. Dietrich, as the pianist, selected the pieces, wrote the arrangements, and led rehearsals at the Bonhoeffers’ house, where on most Saturdays the quintet performed in the downstairs living room.20 These convivial gatherings were but a continuation of the life they’d enjoyed as children, with Paula’s musicales, fascinating guests, and good things to eat.
In those university years Dietrich found his closest friend in Walter Dress. Bonhoeffer and Dress shared an interest in books, ideas, departmental gossip, and negotiating the Byzantine requirements of the program. But Dress was also the student Bonhoeffer looked up to most, and he relied on him heavily for advice. Their relationship serves to remind us that, despite a formidable intellectual maturity, Dietrich was also very much an eighteen-year-old adolescent male, living under his parents’ roof, enjoying the provisions of his attentive mother, and given occasionally to an exasperating neediness. He had never had a best friend in high school, and even before then, his siblings, especially his brothers, had observed in him a certain reserve—a reserve they sometimes took for snobbery.
One afternoon when his friend Dress was turned away at the front door, Dietrich flew into a rage and berated “these pearls of maids,” who scurried about the rooms but could not follow an instruction as simple as, “Let no one in the house except ‘Mr. Dress.’ ” “Ergo nostra culpa,” he wrote Dress in a letter of apology, adding, “odi profanum vulgus (ancillas!),” an allusion to one of his favorite odes by Horace: “I hate the unholy rabble.” The reference to the “maids”—(ancillas!)—was Bonhoeffer’s, not Horace’s.21
Mostly Bonhoeffer would talk and Dress would listen. More precisely, Bonhoeffer would pepper Dress, two years his senior in the program, with requests for advice on writing assignments, exams, and the stringency of due dates. The solicitations were fierce and frequent, extending also to purely academic matters. What, for instance, did Walter know about “Luther’s feelings for his work”? Bonhoeffer had been assigned a paper on the subject and needed some ideas to get started. Did Walter understand “Luther’s view of history”? Did Walter think Luther had a view of history? If he did, would Walter say it could be called a “dualistic view of history”? Did Walter consider Luther a dualistic thinker? What about the scholastic theologians—did they, in Walter’s judgment, have a “view of history”? To these and other questions—all from a single letter in the spring of 1925, in which Dietrich also wishes Dress a quiet vacation—the younger student importuned the older to make “speedy reply.”22 If Dress showed uncommon patience, it was doubtless inspired by his pursuit of Dietrich’s older sister Susi.23
When a speedy reply was not forthcoming, Dietrich wrote Dress again. “I tried to telephone you several times, because I haven’t heard from you. I beg you please write me.”
Bonhoeffer also needed to know what Professor Harnack looked for in a paper—and Professor Holl, too. What were their expectations? Anything Dress could tell him about Holl would be helpful. Bonhoeffer did not know when to stop.
Where does the saying “the servant should not know his master’s secrets” come from?
Did Walter know the date of the first Hebrew exam?
How long is the average research paper?
“Please write me and please write soon: Friedrichsbrunn, Eastern Harz Mountains (near Suderode)!”24 Dietrich had gone to the country house for a long weekend. That Dress was himself under the gun, writing his doctoral dissertation on the Italian humanist Marsilio Ficino, somehow escaped Dietrich’s notice.
“You have not responded at all,” he wrote in desperation. “Are you sick? Please call.”25
Bonhoeffer would write two lengthy papers for Harnack.26 In “Luther’s Feelings About His Work,” he argues that despite a general pessimism about the world, Luther maintained “inner religious certainty” that steadied him on his tumultuous journey through guilt and shame to the apprehension of unconditional grace, and “this is what we must remember.” Upon reading Bonhoeffer’s second paper, “The Jewish Element in First Clement: Its Content and Relationship to the Whole Letter,” Harnack conveyed his hope that the uncommonly meticulous young scholar would one day become a church historian.27 Bonhoeffer received the highest mark in the seminar.
Despite great admiration for Harnack and Holl, Bonhoeffer made a surprising decision when it came time to write his dissertation: he would work under the supervision of Professor Reinhold Seeberg. His parents were especially taken aback. Paula thought her son should write his thesis under Holl, since Harnack no longer kept regular office hours; she told Dietrich as much. Although a generation separated Harnack and Holl, the latter commanded wide respect among intellectuals outside academic theology, and he was, moreover, a Berliner. Seeberg, whose expertise lay in the narrow field called “dogmatics,” seemed provincial and unrefined, with his bushy peasant beard and right-wing politics. Among his colleagues, he had been the most vocal, “aggressive” supporter of total war—a “propaganda-maker” and “unapologetic nationalist,” according to Dorothea Wendebourg in her history of the Berlin theological faculty. Seeberg hated the Weimar Republic, its liberal social policies and internationalist convictions; he did not much care much for Berlin, either.
But Dietrich did not want to be stamped as yet another disciple of the Lutheran Renaissance. While he respected Holl immensely, he found Seeberg more eclectic in his approach to theological studies, interested in both the practices of faith, and varieties of interpretations drawn from other disciplines. Unlike the celebrity theologians Holl and Harnack, there was no “Seeberg School,” and this fact pleased Bonhoeffer and held out a promise of greater freedom. The rough-hewn Seeberg was also somewhat less attentive, and not even slightly deferential. In other words, he was, in Bonhoeffer’s estimation, a perfect counterweight.28
Every graduate student in Berlin had studied Seeberg’s five-volume Text-book of the History of Doctrines, and indeed Seeberg’s work encompassed a wide range of theological doctrines and disputes, not promoting any in particular. Bonhoeffer would eventually go his own way in the dissertation, as Seeberg would matter-of-factly report. But he would not abandon his concern for the volitional, or ethical, dimensions of belief—how the human will expresses itself morally—a concern he shared with Seeberg. The most important dimension of human existence remained the social dimension, Seeberg taught, and it was precisely this focus on the practical reality of human fellowship that brought Bonhoeffer to his office.29
When Bonhoeffer telephoned Seeberg to talk about the thesis, Seeberg rang back promptly and suggested a meeting that very day. When he appeared, Bonhoeffer proposed his idea of “writing on the history of doctrine … as it relates to the subject of religious community.” Seeberg was delighted. He said he had waited a long time for a student to work on such a subject, the lived experience of faith. It impressed Seeberg further that Bonhoeffer had come up with the theme on his own rather than asking that one be assigned to him, as was commonly done. Seeberg asked Dietrich to assure his father that “everything would certainly go well.” When Dietrich laughed awkwardly at discovering in this way that Dr. Bonhoeffer had already been in touch with the professor about the dissertation, Seeberg merely repeated his direction: he had “already seen” enough of Bonhoeffer’s past work to safely make this pledge to the father.30 In fact, starting in his sophomore year, Bonhoeffer would attend every one of Seeberg’s seminars, of which there were six in all during his remaining time at the university.31
Then he discovered the writings of the contemporary Swiss theologian Karl Barth, and everything changed. By the fall of 1926, two years into his program at Berlin, Bonhoeffer had become more unassumingly confident, a less preening scholar. He had left behind the anxious teenager, by turns obsessed over minor details and eager to know about classes “in which one can do the le
ast and can be absent the most.” He had hit his stride, excelling in biblical and classical exegesis and church history. He could enter into the personal religiosity of great thinkers, as when writing on Luther’s “primal experience” and “monastic struggles” and on Søren Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death. Or extend his outlook beyond Western Christendom, as in a paper entitled “Dostoyevsky and the Russian Philosophers of Religion.” Other papers confirmed impressive range and curiosity: besides “The Jewish Element in First Clement” (as mentioned), there was “The Historical and Pneumatological Interpretation of Scripture” (summer 1925, for Seeberg); “Reason and Revelation in Early Lutheran Dogmatics” (winter 1925–26, for Stolzenburg); “Luther’s Views of the Holy Spirit According to the Disputations of 1535–1545” (winter 1925–26, for Holl); “The Doctrine of Life After Death and the Last Things in Early Protestant Dogmatics” (winter/spring 1926, also for Seeberg); and “The Fifteenth Chapter of the Gospel of John and the Apostle Paul” (summer 1926, for Deissmann). All these efforts earned high marks, and Bonhoeffer rose to the top of his class.
But it was not until a fine spring evening in 1926, when he presented Harnack with an essay on the occasion of the esteemed professor’s seventy-fifth birthday, that Bonhoeffer’s prodigious intellect and organizational acumen produced a work of truly luminous insight and astonishing promise. “Joy in Primitive Christianity” offered a close reading of the Greek New Testament, with particular attention to St. Paul’s inviting expression “shared joy” (synchairein in the Greek). Paul coined the term to describe the disciples’ rapturous first encounter with the risen Christ. Bonhoeffer argued deftly that, by this synchairein, Paul meant more than emotions or feelings, even those elicited by the Lord’s appearance in the flesh after his crucifixion and burial. Rather, Paul’s neologism signified an altogether new social reality, one inaugurated by the joy of the resurrection. Bonhoeffer had taken Harnack’s central insight—ecstatic joy as the essence of the gospel—and given it a social dimension, a vitality that could be experienced, shared. If only the German church had reached the same understanding, untold human suffering might have been avoided.32
A review of Bonhoeffer’s transcript reveals that he approached all the compulsory subjects with a uniform studiousness. Aside from church history and social ethics with Harnack, Holl, and Seeberg, he took courses in Old Testament with Professors Gressman, Sellin, and Biehle, and Licentiate Dr. Gallingand. His New Testament classes were taught by Lietzmann, Deissman, and Licentiates Bertramer and Michaelis; he took philosophy with Heinrich Maier, Spranger, and Rieffert; and practical theology and pastoral psychology with Wertheimer and Mahling. In all it was a course of study that provided “extensive theological education and methodological skills in all disciplines.” Bonhoeffer was finding his voice as a young academic theologian, amid a faculty deeply formed by the canon of classical liberal Protestantism.33
During a bout with the flu in the winter semester, Bonhoeffer passed the time reading Barth and Henrik Ibsen intermittently. That spring of 1925 he gave his mother a copy of Barth’s latest, and she read it alongside Der Historismus und seine Überwindung by Troeltsch, in whom Dietrich was starting to lose interest. Not long before, in May, Bonhoeffer himself had first read Barth’s explosive new book, The Word of God and the Word of Man. Almost immediately an “ ‘entirely new’ note crept into” his journals and other writings.34
Barth wrote theology with the ferocity of a soul on fire. He had studied in Berlin a decade earlier, when Harnack was at the height of his powers, and he had worked with Holl and Seeberg as well. But rather than complete his doctorate, Barth took a pastorate in a working-class parish of Safenwil, Switzerland—a region dominated by the textile industry. Going about the duties of a small-town vicar, Barth found himself sent back to scripture when the philosophical and literary understanding inculcated in him as a student failed to answer the everyday questions of his parishioners. Soon “the strange new world of the Bible” became his obsession, and the once-familiar landscape of his liberal inheritance felt suddenly alien to him.35 The Bible—its stories and characters—pulsed with life and spoke across the centuries of the “God beyond God.” Barth felt the exhilaration of being set loose on a journey without maps.
Had he not made theological writing into an art form, Barth might have produced novels as inventive as those of Thomas Mann or Robert Musil; paintings with the emotive, intoxicating textures of Ernst Kirchner or Max Beckmann; or perhaps even symphonies in the expressionist style of Arthur Honegger or Arnold Schoenberg. But Barth’s idiom was theology, and in it he was as much an original as these others were in theirs. For him, no intellectual pursuit could possibly match the thrill and the terror of the bold and audacious venture to speak about God. With Bibles and ancient commentaries spread open on his desk—and with Mozart on the phonograph—Barth answered the singular vocation to give form to “all these puzzling words.” Audacity would indeed be his stock in trade. The second edition of his commentary The Epistle to the Romans had been published in 1921, the same year that Holl’s brief study of Luther appeared and Harnack retired. With this radically revised version was fired a barrage of missiles, seemingly out of nowhere, that transformed the landscape of modern theology for good, taking dead aim at the German Protestant church, whose intimacy with nationalist sentiment had aided the mischief that led finally to Versailles. In Barth’s understanding, the Kingdom of God is not a reality that stands alongside culture and history; it is the new, the different, the unexpected, the wholly other. Recalling the week in the Swiss Alps during which he had written a major section of the commentary, that based on Romans 1, Barth said, “It was often as though I were being looked at by something from afar, from Asia Minor or Corinth, something very ancient, early oriental, indefinably sunny, wild, original, that somehow is hidden behind these sentences and is so ready to let itself be drawn forth by ever new generations.”36
Among the University of Berlin theological faculty, however, Barth’s new theology remained more a nuisance than an inspiration. Bonhoeffer had learned of the two controversial books not on campus but from his cousin Hans-Christoph von Hase, who had transferred from the Göttingen mathematics program to theology after hearing Barth lecture.37 Borrowing his cousin’s lecture notes, Dietrich meticulously transcribed them under the heading “Karl Barth, dictated notes on ‘Instruction on the Christian Religion.’ ”38
It may seem odd today that Barth’s views should have been marked out as being so radical and subversive, particularly since he referred constantly to Jesus and wrote almost confidently about him, in a highly sermonic style. But it was precisely because of his deliberate use of the old orthodox phrases and terms that Barth cut so close to the bone. It was very much his aim to re-motivate a language that had once been so essential and familiar but which in practice—in churches, of course, but also in the everyday use of Christians’ conversation, and particularly “in second-order technical theological reflection”—had been emptied of its vitality. For a long time, perhaps for more than 250 years, Barth explained, that vitality and inner-sense had “been receding from natural familiarity, certainly in theological discourse.”
Bonhoeffer most certainly heard Barth’s name mentioned by Harnack, but it would have been with a derisive pfft, or an aach! Professor Harnack had recently found himself in a most unwelcome barbed exchange with his former student—an “all-but-dissertation student,” no less—who had so implausibly become a cause célèbre with his sulphuric jeremiads against the liberal Protestant patriarchs. In that widely observed debate, Harnack had not emerged the winner.
It was the 1920 Students’ Conference in Aarau, Switzerland. Barth had delivered a lecture—“Biblical Questions, Insights, and Vistas”—that combined expressionist word game and jeremiad against cultural Protestantism into a manifesto of neo-orthodoxy. “Jesus simply has nothing to do with religion,” Barth began. The meaning of the life of Jesus is, rather, “the actuality of that which is never actually
present in any religion—the actuality of the unapproachable, the unreachable, the incomprehensible, the realization of the possibility, which is not a matter of speculation: ‘Behold I make all things new!’ ”39 Religion exists as a human endeavor, a habit speaking about God by speaking of humanity in a loud voice, and in this manner religion, in Barth’s estimation, stands in stark opposition to revelation. Which is to say, the affirmation of God, humankind, and the world given in the New Testament “is based exclusively upon the possibility of a new order absolutely beyond human thought.” And as prerequisite to that new order, he continued, “there must come a crisis that denies all human thought.”
Harnack was appalled. He criticized Barth as a “despiser of scientific theology” and challenged him to face the modern age without retreating into the irrational.
Though he knew of strong opposition on the Berlin faculty, Bonhoeffer made no secret of his admiration for Barth. Seeberg became aware of Bonhoeffer’s shift away from the academic mainline when he read his essay “Is There a Difference Between the Historical and Pneumatic Interpretation of the Bible, and What Is the Position of Dogmatics on This Topic?” For the first time, Bonhoeffer received only an average grade. But Seeberg, who had been supremely pleased by Bonhoeffer’s solicitations and probably took some pleasure in seeing his celebrated colleague, Harnack, publically skewered, acknowledged the courage of Bonhoeffer’s dissent.
And so Dietrich Bonhoeffer became a rare bird in Berlin: a liberal who nevertheless admired Barth and felt strong affinities for the spirit of so-called dialectical theology, whose radical approach to God’s transcendence cast aside the natural explanations of everyone since Aquinas as well as the recondite metaphysics of Germany’s brightest lights. Navigating his way between the two competing schools, Bonhoeffer showed himself to be notably diplomatic or dexterous or both; it was a minor miracle that he could draw freely from Barth without alienating the Berlin faculty. And in truth, however harshly they might criticize Barth, Bonhoeffer’s advisers showed a greater generosity toward their young student’s neo-orthodoxy than Barth, at the time, would have ever shown anyone under his direction who spoke kindly of the liberal Christ.40
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