It would be a month before a flustered Olbricht found “some peace and quiet to respond to [his] questions.”6 When he did, he was at pains to make clear that Advent was the busiest season for most ministers, a fact he had hoped the new man would have understood. Thus, he had further hoped—indeed, expected—to have Bonhoeffer in Barcelona by Christmas. When was he planning to arrive?
As to matters sartorial, Olbricht said he himself wore “the same heavy overcoat” in Spain that he’d worn in Germany. The days offered plenty of sunshine, even in winter, but houses were poorly heated, and the night often brought bitter winds off the sea. Bring your “warm underwear, heavy suits, and an overcoat,” Olbricht advised.
Bonhoeffer wrote back to thank Olbricht, and, ignoring the question of when he would start, raised another about his dress: Would he need dinner clothes, or “special evening wear”?
In answering the second letter, Olbricht said there might be occasion for a tail coat, but that, in his opinion, a dinner jacket would serve better. In that bit of counsel the sarcasm is debatable, but not so in the next: one item the new assistant should not neglect to bring was his clerical robe.7 Olbricht was even less patient concerning vacation plans. Having hoped the new man would be in place for the height of the season, he was dismayed now to learn that he should not expect Bonhoeffer until the lull time of mid-January.
When, by the third week of January, Bonhoeffer had still not reported for duty, Olbricht wrote again, this time in desperation: he had booked passage to Majorca, where many of his parishioners had second homes. But it was not a holiday: a parishioner had died in Palma, and Olbricht had to conduct the funeral service.
“A shame you’re not here yet,” Olbricht wrote, evidently straining to uphold his Christian charity. “Now, another service must be canceled.”8
Finally, on the eighth of February, following two weeks of farewell parties with friends and family, Bonhoeffer boarded an overnight train in Berlin, settling into his sleeper to begin the journey to Barcelona. Even then, however, he did not travel directly to Spain. Realizing he had to change trains in Paris anyway, he thought it only sensible to linger there for a week’s holiday. After all, he had never been to Paris.
Arriving at the Gare du Nord, he took a taxi to the Hôtel Beauséjour, at 99 rue de Ranelagh in the 16th arrondissement. The hotel, a favorite of German tourists, had been highly recommended by an old high school classmate. But soon Bonhoeffer would have cause to wonder whether he’d picked the most propitious time to visit. He endured seven days of cold rain. But he made the best of it, spending morning in the cafés reading, afternoons in the Louvre, and evenings at the opera. He would hear Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto and Georges Bizet’s Carmen—both splendid performances.9
In Paris, as in Italy, Bonhoeffer felt himself drawn to the sensual spirituality of Roman Catholicism. He attended a “festive high mass at the basilica of Sacré Coeur,” the imposing Romano-Byzantine church at the summit of Montmartre. Here, a new social perspective emerged, one very different from his experience in the Eternal City. Where the magnificent churches in and around the Holy See drew a predictably cosmopolitan range of worshippers, in Paris he saw more local color among those entering the fellowship of the saints. Afterward, he would write: “The people in the church were almost exclusively from [the neighborhood]; prostitutes and their men went to mass, submitted to all the ceremonies; it was an enormously impressive picture”; taking in the scene, Bonhoeffer said he could see quite clearly how close, “precisely by reason of their lot and offenses,” these “heavily burdened people” remained to “the heart of the gospel.”10
The “heavily burdened people” of Montmartre called to mind the denizens of Berlin’s gritty Tauentzienstrasse, where the city’s vital commercial center was ringed by its red-light district.11 Before this, Bonhoeffer had never given much thought to the underclass. To be sure, Professor Friedrich Mahling had discussed the theology of what he called “urban ministry,” encouraging his students to confront the special troubles of congregations suffering high unemployment. But Grunewald had sheltered Dietrich from Berlin’s beleaguered precincts. And his intellectual interests lay elsewhere.
But in the candle-lit Mass at Sacré Coeur, a flash of insight came to him. A rough and seedy area like this presented “an extremely fruitful field for church work.” Breathing the rarefied air of Romantic theology, one might easily forget that the face of Christ was to be sought not only in majesty on high but also, perhaps more intimately, among the ordinary and the downtrodden.12 Not that he was entirely innocent of a certain self-satisfied solemnity in viewing the lower classes at worship. But the fact remains that he had never before witnessed the intense communion of the poor with their God, never listened for the voice of the thief on the cross, crying, “Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom.” The prostitute and the thief abode nearer “to the heart of the gospel” than the “vain man praying,” Bonhoeffer—aged twenty-one, barely yet a man—at last understood in his inmost parts.
Shortly before sunrise on Tuesday, February 14, 1928, he boarded a train bound for Barcelona and fell into a deep sleep. When he awoke they were just outside the village of Narbonne, and as he lifted the window shade “the landscape verging on spring seemed right out of a fairy tale.” He “suddenly felt transported to the area around Naples.” Almond, peach, apricot, and mimosa trees shimmered in “radiant fields.”13 In the distance, the gothic spires of the then-unfinished Cathédrale Saint-Just et Saint-Pasteur stretched heavenward in the late-morning sun. At Narbonne, he moved into a luxury coach for the remaining 160 miles and enjoyed a hearty lunch with a good red wine. Nearing the border of Spain, he saw the snowy peaks of the Pyrenees rising in the west and the blue Iberian Sea glistening in the south. During a short stop in Port-la-Nouvelle, Bonhoeffer stood at the open window, feeling the warm salty air on his skin and admiring the “cloudless” sky. The “sun burned” bright as on a midsummer day.
He reached Barcelona early in the afternoon of February 15. Despite an unpleasant exchange with a rude customs official, he was soon walking through the archways of the Estació de França, into the bustling district of Sants-Montjuïc, where Olbricht was waiting in a car.14
Bonhoeffer moved into a boardinghouse at 59 Calle San Eusebio in the Gracias neighborhood. He had been offered accommodations with a German family but told Olbricht he would rather live “among the natives.” He would soon grow fond of the innkeepers, three Spanish women, only a few years older than he was, who could not say “Señor Dietrich” without getting tongue-tied and giggling.15
The arrangements suited him well. The boardinghouse was on a quiet street, just a five-minute walk from the German-Lutheran compound at 2 Calle Moyá. His room, one flight up, was spacious and clean, with floors made of smooth local stone. There was a bed, a worktable, a pair of chairs, and a basin for washing. A fine view of the northern hills could be had on either of the two balconies, which absorbed the warmth of the morning sun and were shielded from the cold winds, so that even in winter he took his morning coffee outside. “The sky is a glorious blue,” he wrote to his family, “and I can look out onto two small streets and the houses, which, except for the roofs, are completely white. Down below, little children yell and play in the street, and people passing by call out all sorts of things. On the whole, the picture bears a strong resemblance to southern Italy.”16
He found a bar on the Mole, the strand of Barcelona’s harbor, where he could have an aperitif and a half-dozen raw oysters for one and a half pesetas. He thought the Spanish white wines excellent, but with the oysters he preferred vermouth and soda water. He liked the café con leche, but found the Spanish cakes and pastries “too sweet and fluffy.” When his room was too cold in the evening, he’d take his books to a neighborhood café with a woodstove. On milder days, he’d take a streetcar to the cafés on the Plaza Cataluña, to read the newspaper or watch the people go by.17 He was pleased to be writing again in his journal—describing “th
e ethnic mix,” the “strikingly austere, masculine facial features … of the otherwise small, delicate, sinewy people,” the “extremely fat ones,” and “children whom you might consider obese.”18 He also admired the mixing of the social orders, the way “prosperous, rich, petit bourgeois, and really poor-looking people … all mingled together.”19 It was quite different from Berlin’s stratified café culture. In Barcelona’s parks the air held the perfume of lemon and almond trees and the saltiness of the nearby sea.
POSTCARD OF THE “BARCELONA. PLAÇA REIAL” FROM DIETRICH BONHOEFFER
Best of all were day trips into the Serra de Collserola, the mountains that framed the sea to the west. With a book and writing paper in his backpack, he could reach the mountains by the funicular but would usually hike up the winding trail to the top of the Tibidabo. Local legend had it that this dramatic peak, the highest of the western range, was where the devil had tempted Jesus, indicating the town and sea and hills, the whole world that lay below: “All these tibi dabo (I will give to you).” Bonhoeffer wrote his mother a letter from that spot, saying he was waiting for the devil to come but so far he had failed to turn up.20
“One evening up there recently,” he continued, “I watched a sunset whose colors I will never forget. A blue and then at last a haze of perfect violet settled around the mountains, and through it one could see shimmering the peculiar contours of Montserrat, the holy Mountain of the grail; in the foreground there were enormous cacti and trees in bloom.”21
On another occasion, he hiked into the Montseny, a mountainous beech forest some sixty kilometers northeast of the city. He wanted to see the abbey of Sant Miquel del Fai, before ascending the narrow, craggy paths to the Turó de l’Home and its majestic views of the rugged Catalonian coastal range.
The German colony of Barcelona numbered about six thousand, but fewer than three hundred belonged to the Lutheran congregation. Fewer still attended Sunday-morning services with any regularity. Fifty souls in the pews was considered a decent turnout.22 Many parishioners, an affable lot overall, spent weekends at their seaside homes, the best off enjoying their villas in rich coastal enclaves. The global stock markets wouldn’t crash until the following year, in 1929, and meanwhile there was high living to be enjoyed by the German expatriates, most of whom had been sent to Barcelona by a prospering firm back home or else were thriving capitalists in their own right.23 The Lutheran parish mostly reflected the petit bourgeois sensibility of the larger German community; Bonhoeffer said he had never seen people so visibly impressed by their own wealth. He heard the director of the German bank boast about a recent gala for which ten thousand pesetas had been spent on the decorations alone. There was also the businessman who’d imported dancing girls from the Moulin Rouge for his lavish parties on the Mediterranean.24 The ostentation of the locals was disquieting to the new pastor, but as he had not lost his well-bred taste for the finer things, he rarely declined an invitation.
In fact, as word spread through the expat community of Olbricht’s dapper new assistant, Bonhoeffer’s company became much sought after. Socializing with these new-money parishioners was, on the whole, “very pleasant,” he wrote, though he was unaccustomed to their idea of conversation.25 His life in Berlin had been an easy triangulation of university, family, and neighborhood, with no domain obliging him to make intellectual allowances for any other. But in Barcelona, Bonhoeffer was amused and no doubt a bit disappointed to find that even after two months, he had not met a single person with whom he could speak in the “Berlin-Grunewald style.” The conversations lacked depth, and “he lived without any exchange of ideas.” Still, he appreciated the hospitality of his parishioners and their many tender affirmations.
“Every evening last week was booked up with invitations and other things,” he told his parents. “Yours truly has the advantage of being admitted everywhere, and even being a rather popular guest.” Late-night meals—as was the Spanish style—took getting used to. Sometimes he would not return from a dinner party until two a.m.—could they believe it? He sang in the German choral ensemble and performed musical skits at the German Club. Though never one for card games, he took up “skat,” which was popular among his compatriots. At the posh Club Pampaia, Bonhoeffer made his mark as a bon vivant and competitive tennis player (he had to ask his parents for the membership dues when he realized he couldn’t afford them on his modest church stipend). When invited to the club’s annual masquerade ball, however, he replied, atypically, with regrets, out of concern that the sight of the young pastor costumed for Fat Tuesday might “prompt some sort of dumb gossip.” It seems unlikely, though, that any members of this parish would have been offended.
The parishioners’ friendliness came with a benign disinterest in religion. Most felt toward the church the same blind loyalty as they did toward their sports teams and the German National Party—only in the case of the church, as Bonhoeffer observed, there was much less desire to get personally involved.26 It may be that they had never been given much reason. The beleaguered vicar to whom Bonhoeffer had been seconded, “a large, raven-haired man in his early fifties,” spoke “frightfully fast and indistinctly.” He was cleverer than one might expect of a pastor, but “not elegant.” He had “a good sense of humor” and was “anything but unctuous.” These are the words of the new assistant. Following their first meeting, Bonhoeffer felt certain they would get along, but he seemed less sure of Olbricht’s power to inspire: “I can’t imagine yet how he will preach.”27
Not that the new man came overly enflamed with the Spirit himself. If Bonhoeffer did not begrudge his new flock their religious apathy, it was because he understood their disaffection and their boredom, in a profound sense, sharing those feelings.28 Indeed, the question then forming in his mind was whether Christianity—despite the bland outward cast it had assumed—could still become a vital and meaningful reality for people who had found better ways to spend a Sunday morning.
As assistant pastor, he would work mainly in the children’s ministry and with the high school youth group. He also taught an occasional class at the German school. He enjoyed these assignments, since the spiritual formation of adolescents and children remained a mystery to him on many levels. He found “their stunning naiveté about religious questions” endearing, and their capacity to feel simultaneously trust and suspicion a worthy challenge.29 Bonhoeffer’s favorite Romantic poets celebrated the child’s free and spontaneous nature—as had his own mother. But every theologian he had read either ignored or trivialized the spirituality of children, notwithstanding Jesus’s famous admonition in Matthew 19:14, “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them.” Bonhoeffer’s earliest comments on the subject may seem a bit awkward and pietistic, but they were grounded in scripture. “For, indeed, God is closer to children than to adults. Remaining pure means remaining a child, even after you have become a man.”
To the Lutheran youth ministry Bonhoeffer brought a “blaze of intellect” and “confidence.”30 He was careful, being young himself, to avoid patronizing the young. He respectfully presented them with new ways of thinking—philosophy, theology, literature: everything that excited him—and expected mature and thoughtful responses such as would have been expected of him as a boy in Grunewald. Engaging the children and teenagers alike as natural thinkers, restless and searching, he was sure they would respond once their imaginations were sparked.
But young Germans coming of age in Spain had “experienced nothing, or very little, of war, revolution, and the painful aftermath of this period.” They lived “well and comfortably” and enjoyed “perpetually good weather,” spending most of their free time outdoors. It seemed that no one in his youth group had ever been confronted with serious intellectual issues; the result, Bonhoeffer allowed with a sigh, was a merry band of “lazybones, good-for-nothings, [and] precocious” children utterly lacking in curiosity or passion.31 His father would have been appalled. But the pastor had his work cut out for him.
In his fa
vor, the students were impressed with him, though not so much on account of his intellect as his sartorial flair. It seems Pastor Olbricht’s teenage son was one of the first to notice Bonhoeffer’s style, pronouncing it “modern and worthy of imitation.”32 The boy was especially taken with the assistant vicar’s Panama hat, worn at a rakish angle; he asked his father if he could get one too. Bonhoeffer had also let his hair grow longer in Spain; with his sun-bleached curls and khaki linen suits, he projected an infectious joie de vivre.
DIETRICH BONHOEFFER IN BARCELONA, 1928
Whatever the catalyst, the congregation and youth group did flourish under Bonhoeffer’s direction. Just a few weeks after he’d begun conducting the liturgy and the children’s service, attendance in the youth program grew to fifteen, having started at one.
“Girls up to the age of fourteen, boys on the average ten to eleven years old,” he wrote in his journal. “The latter are wonderfully fresh and lively. I showed them the splendid things that the children’s service could offer, and that caught fire. Have to see what happens next time. This session has virtually transformed me; the slight anxiety that I couldn’t get going with the practical work has vanished.”33
Bonhoeffer preached his first sermon on March 11, the second Sunday of Lent, 1928. He chose Romans 11:6 as his text: “And if by grace, then it is no more of works: otherwise grace is no more grace.” This verse, like the whole of St. Paul’s letter to the churches in Rome, was ever dear to German Protestants. The Lutheran Reformation of the sixteenth century turned on the epistle’s theme of salvation sola gratia—coming to sinners through grace alone, a gift by no means deserved by reason of any works, and certainly not owing to any priestly mediation.
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