Strange Glory

by Charles Marsh

  Christians create their own ethics, a new Decalogue, law, and standard, said the pastor, invoking by name Nietzsche’s Superman.83 The Christian must exist beyond good and evil as well, forming ethical reality “out of eternity,” rejecting static principles and rules for the sake of passion, creativity, and life. The only law is “the law of freedom,” Bonhoeffer said on that evening, “bearing responsibility alone before God and oneself.” For this reason, “even murder can be sanctified.” What then of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ earliest teachings on citizenship in the kingdom of heaven—blessed are the meek, the merciful, the poor in spirit and pure in heart, and blessed are the peacemakers? Bonhoeffer sounded very much the child of Protestant modernism in his blithe contempt for the letter of the law. Applying the Beatitudes concretely to the present age is “meaningless” and “impracticable,” Bonhoeffer said, and goes against “the spirit of Christ, who brought freedom from the law.”84

  But if even Christ’s teachings are dismissed as legalisms, how then is a Christian to know right from wrong? He must, Bonhoeffer answered, discern God’s will anew each and every day, open always to novelty, free in the spirit, anchored in the here and now. To those who would claim, “War is … murder. War is a crime. No Christian can go to war,” the faithful German answers, on the contrary, that “when my own people” are attacked, the “commandment of love” is transcended, and the “Christian duty to fight” becomes the ethical-spiritual imperative—to fight “with strength and valor for the homeland!” It would be an “utter perversion,” he adds, to imagine that “my first duty is to love my enemy.”85

  Bonhoeffer’s appeal to the German Volk (translated as “people”) is full of unwitting portent. For if the Holy Spirit is not to be sought in every person as a temple of the living God but in the fullness of the moment, as Bonhoeffer believes (to say nothing of the particularities of race, as he implies), then to kill for the “glory of the Fatherland” might well not be murder. But in any case, “love for my own people [Volk] will sanctify murder, will sanctify war,” the pastor said, allowing, however improbably, that something of the same applied to Christians of any and every nation!

  Now, it bears noting that Bonhoeffer’s claim, despite the disquieting imagery of blood and earth, was consistent with traditional Christian teaching about bellum iustum, or just war, beginning with Augustine, who denied any good in peace when only violence could stop a grave sin. But Bonhoeffer spun the doctrine out in directions few had gone before. For not only does love justify murder when the victim is the enemy, but even the act of killing the enemy may itself be regarded as an act of love. The godly warrior prays for those he kills; and when he delivers their bodies to death, he prays for the fate of their souls, so that in leaving the fields of battle, he may be confident that the commandment of love has been honored—not in word but in spirit.

  What, then, is a Christian ethic? Could it be a radical freedom from every human law for the sake of some locally derived principle—for a Christ of the forest mists and majestic alpine vistas, the ambers warming the hearths of humble homes, and for the spirit that clings to monuments, cathedrals, and ancient buildings, binding earth, nation, and people in mystical-historic union? If so, it would then seem that “Christ existing as community,” the expansive and liberating ideal of Bonhoeffer’s dissertation, had omitted to mention some crucial restrictions that, at least, should have appeared in agate type.

  A few weeks later, Bonhoeffer packed his things for the journey back to Berlin. “My books are returning to the crate largely unread,” he wrote. Not long before returning to Barcelona from Majorca, he had set his sights on this moment: “And now in less than three weeks I really will be sitting in the train,” he wrote eagerly. But with the moment having come, he realized that the hours and the days had flown by, “almost too quickly.”86 For as he was taking down his tent, he felt the sting of having nearly mistaken his temporary dwelling for a home.

  On his last Saturday night in Barcelona, Bonhoeffer attended a performance of Carmen at the Gran Teatre del Liceu on the central boulevard known as La Rambla. Don José, the most famous Spanish tenor at the time, sang the lead. “Although the prices were indeed insane, I wanted to let you give me that for my birthday,” Bonhoeffer told his mother.87 Dietrich’s new friend Hermann Thumm, a teacher in the German school, joined him (his ticket also courtesy of the Bonhoeffers) in the gallery for what proved a splendid performance. At the age of twenty-two, Bonhoeffer had been a veteran devotee of the opera for more than a decade; and like most Berliners of his background, he never hesitated to offer seasoned judgments. This was his second time hearing Carmen in six months, the first having been on his extended Paris layover. But he found Don José’s singing that night “something quite rare.” Afterward, Dietrich and Thumm retreated to an all-night café and “enthused” so long over the music “that we didn’t get to bed until 3:30 a.m.”88

  “With one eye weeping and one laughing,” Bonhoeffer left Barcelona by train on the evening of Sunday, February 17. The city was shrouded in a silver haze, a “barbaric” chill having descended from the Tibidabo. It seemed a good time to be heading home. Ten days later, after a stop in Geneva to see Klaus (who still had a few months remaining on his Wanderjahr) and a two-day visit with relatives in Bavaria, Bonhoeffer arrived in Berlin to find his father’s chauffeur waiting. The ride from the Tiergarten to Grunewald in the black Horch Sedan passed serenely, as streetlamps flickered against the wintry sky and snow began to fall. Soon enough, he would be drinking a family toast to the “healthy, happy reunion.”89

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1929–1930

  ~

  “Covered in the Moss of Tradition”

  Among those glad to have Dietrich back was his university chum Franz Hildebrandt. There had been a time when student ennui could easily be treated by dialing “Pfalzburg 2616,” the Bonhoeffers’ number in Grunewald, or by the jolt of strong Machwitz coffee taken in Hildebrand’s Charlottenburg apartment. Lately, though, the “familiar doldrums” of both young men could only be addressed in the staggered call and response of letter writing. “Who on earth invented these horrible mornings?” Franz had written Dietrich in Barcelona. His own theological studies, be they of Martin Kegel or G. W. F. Hegel, had left Franz suffering “the worst attacks of yawning.” It would be good to be able to commiserate in person once again.

  Bonhoeffer, for his part, had been happy to be back, at least at first. For once the family festivities were over and the comfort of familiar things had faded, he suffered a rude awakening to all that he had not missed in the least. In particular, the transition back into academia was alarmingly difficult. After twelve months of languorous weather among adoring parishioners, he faced a mountain of grunt work: a full schedule of examinations, graded lectures, research for the second dissertation, and vassalage to an aloof faculty. He may have assumed that the rhythms of Berlin would revive and remotivate his scholarly ambitions, but he experienced no such effect. Something felt different. To one returning from the warm Mediterranean air, scented of citrus and almond blossoms, the very atmosphere of the gray fortress on Unter den Linden on a late Friday morning spoke only of the old “winter theology.”

  “In the course of eight days, one world has sunk,” he said, “and a new, or rather old, gray one, covered in the moss of tradition, stretches out its hand as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.… The air is close in Germany, close and musty enough to suffocate you, and everywhere it smells like sweat. But, then, what else can one do but go ahead and breathe this air and get on with everything?”1

  Any hopes of intellectual creativity were dashed by the hard knocks of university custom; life as a postgraduate student amounted to little more than grading “excruciatingly dumb seminar papers!”2 He felt not only bureaucratic confinement but a lack of vital connection. The theology faculty, bunkered in their overheated offices near the Hegelplatz, seemed more Olympian than ever. Perhaps things had always been this way, b
ut after Spain all he could see were the drab hallways, a colorless sky, the oppressive lighting of classrooms.

  “The intellectual overproduction has something repugnantly un-intellectual about it,” he complained. And again he perceived the spiritual malaise as foul air: “To me it smells too strongly of sweat; that is not an impartial aesthetic judgment of the situation, but I fear that it is Germany’s fated path, [and] that path is the murder of the ‘spirit.’ ”3 Barcelona, he realized, had launched him on an “unwitting search for truth”; he felt a fierce longing for reality, nothing less.

  He might have run away, if he’d had the nerve. Back to Spain or Italy. Or, even better, to India, or to Palestine, both places he yearned to visit. But as the search for alternatives proved as futile as it was desperate, remaining in Berlin demanded “the most resolute energy and self-control.” It was a depressing realization. “Everything seems so infinitely banal and dull,” he said. “I never before noticed what nonsense people speak in the trams, on the street—shocking.”4

  Finally, he resolved to press on and finish the program within the year. “I will go ahead and do my qualifying work for lecturing,” he said. And then what? Absence had made his heart grow fonder of things that now clearly added up to “nothing of particular consequence.” He could only hope that the picture would brighten on the other side of postdoctoral study. Or would he discover that he could only be happy on journeys to new places?5 Whatever the case, he vowed “never to forget that this kind of life is unworthy, regardless of whether one is able to overcome it or not.”

  How idyllic it had all seemed in Barcelona when Bonhoeffer wrote a long, ruminative letter to Adolf von Harnack, addressing him as “Your Excellency.” He recalled “those early days” when the aging professor convened a seminar in his house in Grunewald, for several hours leading students in awesome readings of historical theology, always in the original language. Bonhoeffer would walk the short way heading toward the forest, to reach the Harnacks’ three-story house on Kunz-Buntschuh-Strasse. They were on the outermost edge of the neighborhood, and on summer evenings the environs echoed with the sound of birdsong. Remembering those times “as if they were yesterday,” Bonhoeffer longed to sit “again for but a single hour in your seminar circle or have one of those unforgettable conversations with you.”6 Indeed, he could throw himself into “purely practical work,” because he was “accompanied by the hope” that in only six months, he would “have all that again,” though he did pronounce himself grateful for the chance to live abroad, removed from so many things about which he had become a “bit obsessive.”7

  When, in February 1930, Bonhoeffer did return to Harnack’s Thursday-afternoon seminar—this one on Augustine’s City of God, the last the old professor would teach—he was not disappointed, though his satisfaction owed more to what he was able to confess than to what he heard. He told Harnack how over the course of the year in Barcelona, he had acquired “a measure of freedom from didactic doctrines” and learned to recognize “much more precisely the limited value of pure scholarship, that [insight] in turn providing the vantage from which to reexamine everything one has worked on.” Bonhoeffer knew that no one could better appreciate such a confession than this venerable champion of free inquiry, whose surest legacy would be the summons to enlightenment, in the same spirit as Kant had challenged Germans at the end of the eighteenth century: “saperere aude,” dare to think, dare to be wise. All knowledge and belief were properly subject to probing critique. That evening, as on every other, Harnack had shown in his varied excellences that nothing was more beautiful than freedom “to speak without reserve about that which moves us.”

  That Harnack hadn’t changed was a comfort amid all the dislocation Bonhoeffer was feeling. Even the effort to “pick up the thread” of old friendships seemed thwarted, as one after another of his former classmates and companions married and started families.8 In addition to Sabine and Gert Leibholz, who had by now been married for more than a year, his former governess Maria Horn, his beloved “Hörnchen,” was now the wife of his high school classics teacher, Richard Czeppan. “Within the space of seven years there were six marriages in our family,” Sabine wrote in a memoir; “between 1923 and 1929 my mother provided all the furniture and household necessities for the new homes of four daughters, as used to be the custom.”9 Bonhoeffer’s response to these developments was gracious but wistful. In a congratulatory letter to his friend Hermann Thumm, on the latter’s engagement to one Miss Gumprecht, he acknowledged the “slightly painful feeling of being the one left behind or abandoned.” His gladness at his friend’s contentment about “the big decision” was genuine, if not ebullient: “I have always seen something in friendship that transcends the normal course of events,” he said, “and in this sense I am happy you have found what others must perhaps seek for a long time.”10 But as Bonhoeffer began to imagine a different fate for himself—and his gradual surrender to it—he beheld a somewhat melancholy self-portrait.11

  To be sure, there was more awry in Germany in February of 1929 than the sorrows of young Dietrich. The Weimar Republic was in fast decline as the economy was engulfed by the same tidal wave then sweeping western Europe and the United States. Unemployment was soaring, and most German workers were quick to blame the Weimar government—as were right-wing demagogues, who took every advantage of the situation. Since the end of World War I, the Conservative Party in Germany had become less a political entity than a club for angry malcontents. The much-loathed Treaty of Versailles, which attributed responsibility for the Great War solely to Germany, had not ceased to be a rallying point for the embittered. The humiliation generally felt inspired the new young demagogues to agitate for a return to a more authoritarian order, and one began to hear calls to “reinstate the monarchy.” When Gustav Stresemann, by then foreign minister but formerly chancellor, died suddenly in October 1929, the loss finally extinguished the liberal flame of his administration, and among the embers there smoldered once more a popular distrust of democracy.

  Within the ivory tower at Unter den Linden, Bonhoeffer was offered the post of Privatdozent, or “voluntary lecturer.” He would naturally have been placed under Reinhold Seeberg, but since he had retired the year before, Bonhoeffer was assigned to Wilhelm Lütgert, an expert in German Idealism, recently arrived from Halle. Teaching his own courses would not be possible until Bonhoeffer had completed the Habilitation thesis.

  Ruminations on a “theology of the child” merged with plans for a more broadly philosophical project; a phrase he’d jotted down in his Spanish journals, the question of consciousness, continued to appear in his notes. What began slowly taking shape was an argument about the shortcomings of modern German philosophy. The central claim was that classical German thought—the tradition running from Kant through Hegel to Feuerbach—promoted a conception of the self that might best be called “world-constitutive.” Human subjectivity had been ascribed colossal powers, which ultimately overwhelmed all others. This was to propose, in Bonhoeffer’s view, the triumph of a totalitarian ego, reality overcome by an all-invasive self. The remedy Bonhoeffer put forward bears a striking resemblance to much contemporary Jewish philosophy, though he had not read Franz Rosenzweig or Emmanuel Lévinas, and only skimmed Martin Buber’s I and Thou.

  Even in retirement, Seeberg took an interest, expressing hope that Bonhoeffer would pursue a different topic: an “ethical history of dogma,” for instance, one examining “why ethical problems receded so much in twelfth-century scholasticism.” This would have the advantage, Seeberg continued, of presenting an occasion to evaluate “the presentation [of ethics] in John of Salisbury’s ‘Metalogicus.’ ” Equally, Bonhoeffer might consider a thesis on “the history of ethics from the perspective of the Sermon on the Mount.” Seeberg thought that anything on ethics would be better than the proposed voyage over the dark seas of German ontology.

  This advice only confirmed Bonhoeffer’s belief that Seeberg—with his Conservative Party banners waving—was
not the best adviser for the second dissertation. Bonhoeffer told his friend Helmut Rößler that a sermon preached recently by Seeberg had amounted to little more than “shallow religious babble for forty-five minutes.” It had been “painful.”12 Bonhoeffer would never bother to respond to Seeberg’s letter.13

  For him there was no turning away from what he perceived as original investigation that also promised to explain the crosscurrents of his own experience. Fortunately, Lütgert would give him his head: Bonhoeffer could take on the whole of modern German thought under the supervision of a true expert.

  “The child and theology” or “an exhaustive account of consciousness”—these were the themes that attracted him.14 He’d pondered the two side by side until he decided to tackle both in the same work. The Habilitationsschrift, entitled “Act and Being,” with the ponderous subtitle, “Transcendental Philosophy and Ontology in Systematic Theology,” would be his last attempt to do theology according to the rules of the guild. The result was a dense, impatient tour de force. But unlike “Sanctorum Communio,” which had involved so many rewrites and revisions, “Act and Being,” for all its compression, almost wrote itself, flowing freely from the realization that he could address intellectual and personal frustrations while trying to understand God.

  As a Privatdozent, Bonhoeffer did not have the luxury of an office, so he worked most days from his bedroom in Grunewald, only occasionally heading to campus to retrieve books from the university library, whose doors were closed for the lunch hour beginning at noon and then for the day at 5:00. His most productive stretch came during a three-week stay in Friedrichsbrunn. There, the sun-drenched days and cool evenings of September, the relaxing breaks in the late afternoon, afforded him the peace and quiet that made it “easy to get work done.”15 Still, there is a hint of desperation in the thesis, a fear of what he had got himself into. This, after all, was his intellectual inheritance, whose weight never seemed heavier than in his final year of study: the sum of all the desires expressed in German thought to live in pure and perpetual freedom. The entire thesis, which runs just over a hundred pages, was written in the summer and winter terms of 1929, an effort of less than six months from beginning to end.