Bonhoeffer’s workload in Barcelona was lighter than at any time during his student days: he would preach an occasional Sunday sermon, and his youth ministry required no more than a few hours a week. Much of the time was filled poring over the four-hundred-page dissertation he had lugged to Spain, knowing that, sometime soon, he would need to revise the manuscript for publication—“to rewrite a great deal and delete an entire section,” he estimated.59 And he knew that further academic labors awaited him following his yearlong stint on the Mediterranean. To qualify for a university professorship, he would need to habilitate, to prove himself again, which meant a second dissertation. At the least, he had hoped to return to Berlin with a few pages of notes on the new project, but all he had to show by the time his brother left were the phrases theology of childhood and the question of consciousness. Since he would be expected to begin the Habilitationsschrift right upon his return to Berlin, he began to feel the pressure. But a decision to deliver a series of public lectures at the Lutheran church in Barcelona made any progress on the academic research exceedingly difficult.60
Whether it was the late nights, the ocean air, or the remoteness of university rigors, he could not say for sure, but he seemed amused at his lack of inclination to study. “A week has gone by without my having either the desire or the leisure for writing.”61 After a couple of hours at the office, or in the sacristy, taking periodic breaks to play the organ, he would leave for the day. Lunch, a hearty meal as served by the three señoritas at the boardinghouse, usually lasted from one thirty to three. Only then did Bonhoeffer try to get some work done. Every afternoon, he went to his room with reasonably good intentions—or so he told his parents. But as the sun began to warm his westward windows and the street life settled down for the siesta hour, he would surrender to “the temptation” more often than not. “[The] spirit is usually willing, but the flesh is weak,” he explained. “I sink down onto my bed with a book, but soon it’s all over.”
Work seemed no more compelling after his nap. Usually, he’d grab his jacket and head out, often to the movies. For one peseta—if he entered at the matinee hour—he could watch “two or three, often even four films … shown one after the other.” He found most of the offerings “incredibly dumb and boring,” but he kept going, and the Spanish that he had studied in his free time in Berlin served him well enough in its native land. An exception was the 1926 adaption of Don Quixote, which featured the Danish Laurel-and-Hardy duo Pat and Patachon in a Spanish-Danish production.62 Bonhoeffer, who had never read Cervantes’s masterpiece, soon obtained a copy, and with it another excuse to put off his scholarly work.63
He wasn’t hiding his indolence terribly much. Dr. Bonhoeffer was so alarmed by his son’s dispatches that he spoke with Professor Harnack, who in turn counseled Dietrich to get started on his postdoctoral studies—reading and taking notes—and not wait until returning to Berlin. Dietrich ignored the advice. As spring turned to summer, the days lengthened, blotting out any hope of academic effort. By late May, the temperatures soared above 90 degrees Fahrenheit (low-mid-30s Celsius), and nightfall brought little relief. Barcelona was “simply too hot for serious scholarly work.” He deleted some sections in his “Sanctorum Communio,” at the insistence of his editor—but that, together with the two phrases noted above, was the sum of his labors. “You walk silently and slowly about the glaring, hot streets and look for a bit of shade,” he explained to his superintendent in Berlin.64 Even the pulpit was insufferable, built into a corner of the sanctuary that the late-morning sun struck with merciless force.65
The climate did at least stimulate his theatricality. One afternoon he returned to his rooms with what he called the “mid-summer tremors.” He reported to his mother that his body had reached “the absolute boiling point for human flesh,” forcing him to wrap himself in blankets with a pot of hot lemon tea and a handful of aspirin and sweat “out the entire afternoon.” It was just as well to put the brakes on his scholarly ambitions, he said, at least momentarily, as “practical things need to be done.” Indeed, while he might have sapped his academic energies beneath the “brilliant sun, sea and sky,” Bonhoeffer nevertheless made a crucial discovery: an unexpected joy in practical ministry. He was good at it, too, involving himself in people’s lives more directly—even on occasions when no champagne was served—and he seemed quite happy to concentrate his remaining months on parish life. At the same time, he made free-form sketches in his notebooks and experimented with different styles of theological writing. How might the experience of God be rendered if he let the old categories fall away? “Theology constantly runs the risk of standardizing piety,” he said, “that is, of restricting it through the enforcement of specific rules.” He intended to test the limits.66
It was not only the ways of his stolid alma mater that left him unsatisfied and searching for a more expressive approach. All academic theology seemed to him of a piece. One day in Barcelona, Bonhoeffer picked up his copy of The Word of God and the Word of Man and became suddenly aware of the imperious tone of Barth’s voice. The book had always been Bonhoeffer’s favorite—he had once called it a liberation. But now the dizzying rhetorical heights, the cataclysmic effect of bringing the infinite crashing into the temporal—the audacity that had once so excited him—seemed unsubstantial, unable to hold a single real thing. “Barth has become quite dangerous for me personally,” Bonhoeffer said, “a fact I sense with increasing clarity here in the life of the congregation.” Now, when he met anyone possessed of “an extremely strong piety or even pietism,” he found it increasingly difficult to distinguish between that person’s ardor and Barth’s ballyhooed audacity.67 But there were of course other factors provoking Bonhoeffer’s reconsideration of his intellectual habitus.68
Mediterranean Catholicism had impressed him with its peculiar energies. While Pastor Olbricht ranted broadly about papists, his assistant marveled at the lush, at times even untamed, spirituality of Catalonia. He was entranced by the exotic goings-on, where Olbricht derided the feast days as “all humbug,” even convening a parish business meeting on the afternoon of Ash Wednesday; to Bonhoeffer’s great dismay, this meant he would miss the “magnificent” street processions “where ashes, bones, and children’s skeletons were hauled about by priests wearing habits from the Inquisition, black pointed cowls and all,” in a ritual of penitent lamentation.69
As Lent came to an end, he would be sure not to miss any of the Spanish Holy Week. His Barcelona letters and journals paint a portrait of the young theologian as an exuberant and wide-eyed pilgrim. After Easter and Pentecost, there would be the astonishing “bustle” of the Corpus Christi feast, the celebratory adoration of the Holy Eucharist “with confetti, paper serpents, [and] wailing instruments” and parades of giants waving “grotesque flags” as they danced and begged for alms; everywhere people rushed about, “creaking and squealing” with their noisemakers or their own voices.70 There were processions of local dignitaries, civil authorities, clergy, and choirboys; of the military and its marching band; of recently confirmed children in white bridal gowns that set “their dark faces quite apart”; and of other children costumed as saints, Joseph, or the mater dolorosa, the “mother of sorrows.” There was a figure of Christ with a crown of thorns bearing the cross, and following behind a “whole host of small angels, then St. Anthony, then an ancient hermit.…
“Then the monstrance arrived, the ornate sunburst in which the Eucharistic host is kept, and everyone—priests, soldiers, angels, giants, entire families—went down on their knees until the vessel passed by; then suddenly paper serpents and confetti swirled from all directions onto the sacrament, and the archbishop strode placidly through the crowd. Another military band followed in the rear, bringing the procession to an end.”71
Bonhoeffer followed the parade all the way to the cathedral, where a larger crowd gathered in the piazza in the twilight for the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. There he beheld a scene so “genuinely rare and beautiful” that he
felt transported, he said, to “a period five hundred years ago.”72 The choirboys stood in their crimson robes under flickering lanterns, alongside them infantry and cavalrymen resplendently uniformed with “large, fantastic, warrior-like knight’s helmets” and “people wearing multicolored garments.” When the priests and monks, together with their pupils from the collegiate school, entered in “radiant white robes” through the “mighty main portal of the cathedral,” the monstrance was at last returned to its home on the altar. In that “unique illumination” of lanterns and torches, as a breeze stirred the canopy over the bishop, and everyone knelt within the church and outside, Bonhoeffer had an intimation of paradise.73 “Corpus Christi lasts eight days, so I’m hoping to see more,” wrote the uncommon Lutheran.74
He would say that he felt as if “a theology of … spring and summer” were replacing “the Berlin winter theology.”75 For the pageantry of sun and sea and spangled sky described a new field of vision. One day, standing on his balcony, it occurred to him that he had reason to doubt “whether Barth could have written in Spain.” In any event, the more elemental existence steadily worked its magic on him. “My theology is becoming more humanistic,” he would conclude.
If his thinking about God was being stretched and shaken, certain habits of mind did not change at all. He would continue to cajole his parents for money.76 To college friends back in Germany, he would still boast of his popularity with the younger set, his prowess on the tennis court, and the decadence of Mediterranean life, in which he indulged (within acceptable limits). He told one acquaintance, “I drink hardly any water, but rather exclusively wine.”77 To another he allowed that he spent most of his day in the bathtub.78 And in conversations with his mother, he fretted mightily still over his wardrobe. He needed studs for his dress shirts. He could use some new shoes—a couple of extra pairs, in fact, because, as he said, “the general view is that one needs a lot of shoes here.” He needed sports clothes suitable for the summer weather: he had been “shocked” to realize he had forgotten to pack his “mountain outfit.”79 He also needed new tennis whites and six pairs of crew socks of the same color, his club’s rules requiring one to play completely in white.
At the same time, the year in Barcelona inevitably broadened his social awareness. Covetous of finery though he may have remained, he judged himself “ever more sensitive to the plight of those who really are in need and cannot be adequately supported.” It angered him to see Olbricht speak gruffly to an indigent who’d stopped by the church asking for help. Beyond the comfortable sphere of the German colony, in neighborhoods to the south and directly east, on his daily walks or in the cafés or in the course of some pastoral effort, Bonhoeffer discovered a different cast of characters. He would describe them vividly and with tenderness of heart, these men and women with whom, at one time, he likely would have never “exchanged even a single word.” In this way he met “vagabonds and vagrants, escaped convicts and foreign legionnaires.” He met “German dancers from the musical revues,” “lion tamers,” and “other animal trainers who have run off from the Krone Circus during its Spanish tour.” There were “German-speaking misfits,” among them “contract killers wanted by the police.” All of them had heard of the sympathetic Berliner and sought him out for counsel. Bonhoeffer grew to enjoy their company, too: the “criminal types,” the “little people with modest goals and modest drives, who committed petty crimes,” and those driven by wild, wayward passions—the “real people”! And the stories they told, vivid and honest “to the last detail,” gripped him with a blunt force, as of the gospel’s concern for the least of these his brethren. These people labored “more under grace than under wrath,” Bonhoeffer was sure; and they were “a lot more interesting than the average church member.”80 In a letter to Helmut Rößler, a former classmate in Berlin, Bonhoeffer described himself as learning to accept people “the way they are, far from the masquerade of the ‘Christian world.’ ”
As his society became more capacious and broad, he also discovered a larger and more varied inner world. That he—once the hothouse flower par excellence—could come to feel so truly at home in a strange country speaks to transformations both within and without.
In the second week of the new year, 1929, Bonhoeffer traveled by ferry to Majorca, some 150 miles south of Barcelona, to minister to the faithful there. He had hoped also to work on his last public lecture to be delivered in Barcelona later that month. But his plans were changed by the warm sun and sea and the fragrance of an early spring that hung in the air of the hotel courtyard, where he took his breakfast “without a coat!” The lecture would be put off until February so that he might make himself a late Christmas gift: “eight days of solitude” in the blue Balearic Sea.81 Once he took care of his small pastoral obligation, he felt as if he had the whole island to himself: in the mountains, where he hiked snowy trails, and on the beaches of the southern coast, where he basked in warmth, listening to the rustle of the wild palms, with a book open in his lap.
His manuscript notes for the farewell lecture would not be assembled until his last weeks in Barcelona. It was good reason to panic, and so, as had been his custom in Berlin, he fired off a desperate plea for help to his friend and classmate Walter Dress. The request, not only for advice but for a copy of Paul Tillich’s Religious Situation, went unanswered. This time he was on his own. Earlier in the fall, Bonhoeffer had announced a four-lecture series on an ambitious range of topics, though to date he had managed to deliver only two. His first talk, on the evening of November 13, 1928, was concerned with making special topics in Old Testament scholarship accessible to laypeople. “The Tragedy of the Prophetic and Its Lasting Meaning,” he entitled that one (based on Bernhard Duhm’s book, Israels Propheten); the small audience he drew answered him with polite applause and blank faces. The second lecture, “Jesus Christ and the Essence of Christianity”—this title playing on Harnack’s famous Essence of Christianity—was not as basic as it sounded: in it he sacrificed accessibility to rhetorical experimentation as he advanced a withering critique of the Protestant liberal idea of “religion.” He also relied heavily on Barth, who may not have been able to write in Barcelona but offered an abundance of pithy phrases for a theologian exposing the flaws of bourgeois peity. What religion amounted to was the creation of idols, the hubris of imagining that to speak of God one had only to speak of humanity in a thunderous voice. This anthropomorphic captivity of the God-concept was, lamentably, its essence, Bonhoeffer told the small audience of mostly laypeople. Against this background of human religion and its pantheon of false gods, Bonhoeffer argued that “the essence of Christianity” was, by contrast, to be found only in the story of a God “who traverses the path to human beings,” the “eternal, transcendent God who comes with loving compassion for human beings, most of all for the unworthy, for the sinner.” So it is that the church, its faith and its practices, must be retrieved from the trash heap of “post-Enlightenment secularization” and the gospel preached once more out of its original strangeness, and mystery.
Bonhoeffer continued,
To the nineteenth- and twentieth-century mind, religion plays the part of the parlor, as it were, into which one doesn’t mind withdrawing for a couple of hours, but from which one then immediately returns to one’s business. One thing, however, is clear: namely, that we understand Christ only if we commit to Him in an abrupt either-or. He was not nailed to the cross as ornament or decoration for our lives. If we would have Him, we must recognize that He makes fundamental claims on our entire being. We scarcely understand Him if we make room for Him in merely one region of our spiritual life, but rather only if our life takes its orientation from him alone or, otherwise, if we speak a straightforward no. Of course, there are those not concerned with seriously considering the claims Christ makes on us with His question: Do you wish to make a complete commitment, or not? They should rather not get mixed up with Christianity at all; that would be better for Christianity, since such people no longer ha
ve anything in common with Christ. The religion of Christ is not the tidbit after the bread; it is the bread itself, or it is nothing.
Aside from such forthright evangelical convictions, much of Bonhoeffer’s meandering account of modern theological thought required a fairly extensive knowledge of Western philosophy. It is unlikely that the expatriate parishioners who braved the cold November night to hear about the “essence of Christianity” were quite prepared to hear so much on Plato, Kant, and Nietzsche, let alone Goethe and the Buddha, Hellenistic religious syncretism and pagan mystery cults—of Antaeus, Attis, and Dionysus, as well as that of the Thracian-Phrygian god Sabazios—historical critical Bible scholarship, the anthroposophists, or Dostoyevsky.
Bonhoeffer’s last Barcelona lecture, delivered on April 8, 1929, was one he would live to rue. For among its fundaments—belied by its prosaic title, “Basic Questions of a Christian Ethic”—was a nationalistic feeling for the fatherland. What Bonhoeffer came to regret was the lecture’s having connected the individual’s “immediate relationship with God” and an obedience to the will of the nation. Despite an expansive mind and wanderlust, he was still in the sway of an imposing cultural inheritance, and, as in his doctoral dissertation, the Christianity of the Germanic warrior tradition. Bonhoeffer acknowledged the centrality of Jesus Christ. The path from God to human beings “is the path of love in Christ, the path of the cross.” Nevertheless, he portrayed Christ as a singularly ethereal being,82 even as aspects of his Christian ethic appeared indistinguishable from Teutonic Vaterlandsliebe.
“Ethics is a matter of blood and a matter of history,” Bonhoeffer said. “It did not simply descend to earth from heaven. Rather, it is a child of the earth, and for that reason its face changes with history as well as with the renewal of blood, with the transition between generations.”
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