Niebuhr was at his best when “analyzing the structures and behavior of political systems and offering theological interpretation” of events “as a basis for common action for a wide audience.” In aspiring to greater public relevance, he tended to communicate his ideas in a manner that left his theological commitments unspoken. The public theologian, he understood, would inevitably be misunderstood at times, as would demurrals on doctrine’s finer points, but he resolved nonetheless to be a circuit rider in “defense of the Christian faith in a secular age” while also making common cause with secular progressives in responsible action.33 In an autobiographical essay, Niebuhr explained, “I have never been very competent in the nice points of pure theology; and I must confess that I have not been sufficiently interested heretofore to acquire the competence.”34
Niebuhr would achieve celebrity by the end of the decade, so that by the 1950s any serious discussion of domestic or foreign policy had to make space for his Christian realist considerations. Yet his personal involvements in progressive social and racial organizing peaked in the years of Bonhoeffer’s Sloan Fellowship at Union. The summer of 1931 would find Niebuhr rushing through a demanding schedule of lectures at southern Negro colleges and academies sponsored by the American Missionary Society. He was hoping, he said, to awaken quiescent black students to the activist energies of religious belief. His clarity concerning racial inequality would never be sharper, even during the civil rights era. In Moral Man and Immoral Society, Niebuhr put it plainly: “the white race in America will not admit the Negro to equal rights if it is not forced to do so.” In numerous papers, published and unpublished, he would lament the travails of his seminary students as they tried to organize white and black tenant workers in the South. Moved by their suffering and self-sacrifice, he would often come to their public defense. But when many of these young radical Christians abandoned pragmatic piecemeal reform for doctrinaire Marxist radicalism, Niebuhr would become increasingly reluctant to offer his full support.35
Bonhoeffer would never acknowledge a theological debt to Niebuhr. His worries that Niebuhr’s theology lacked confessional richness were basic and well founded. The two, nevertheless, would stay in touch over the next decade.36 Bonhoeffer often wrote to him in German, which Niebuhr read well, though he replied in English. When, in the summer of 1939, Bonhoeffer found himself at a fateful crossroads, Niebuhr would offer him refuge in New York. Whatever their disagreements as to method, the vocation of public theologian as Niebuhr defined it excited Bonhoeffer and refreshed his perspective.37 Niebuhr’s influence can in fact be discerned every time, after 1933, that Bonhoeffer equates a faith deprived of ethics with dead religion, and holds that “costly” grace requires not that one become a saint, a genius, or a clever tactician but rather an honest, sober, and unflinching realist.38 It is the Niebuhrian voice that resonates in Bonhoeffer’s eventual resolve as a member of the German resistance “to speak of God at the center of life and address men and women … as responsible human beings.”39
Bonhoeffer was both moved and inspired by Niebuhr—by the example of a theologian who engaged the social order with civil courage and ultimate honesty. For his part, Niebuhr found Bonhoeffer altogether sympathetic, despite his imperious gaze during class and habit of slowly laying down his pen a few minutes after the lecture began. Niebuhr appreciated Bonhoeffer’s prodigious intellect, his intensity and ardor; and he understood what a rare thing it was that a German theologian, with all his native prejudices, should choose to spend a year in America. Niebuhr was also confident that he could exert a positive influence on the restless twenty-four-year-old Berliner who held two doctorates to Niebuhr’s none.40
FROM LEFT: DIETRICH BONHOEFFER, HARRY WARD, REINHOLD NIEBUHR, PROFESSOR SWIFT, AND HENRY SLOANE COFFIN AT UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, NEW YORK, 1931
Though outgoing by nature, Bonhoeffer, in the first weeks of the semester, preferred the company of the other European Sloan Fellows: Erwin Sutz, a theology student from a German-speaking canton in Switzerland, and Jean Lasserre, a Reformed French pastor from Lyons. While Sutz was fluent in French, Lasserre knew little German, and Bonhoeffer struggled with French. So when the three were together, they spoke English. Sutz and Lasserre, like Bonhoeffer, had attended humanistic secondary schools and believed that Americans were overly concerned about practicality, and too little about ideas for their own sake. “We were European[s] who liked to reflect before acting,” Lasserre recalled, “while the Americans gave us the impression of wanting to act before [they] reflected.” The trio’s intellectual affinities inspired “frequent and intense” exchanges—debates on the finer points of doctrine sometimes lasting until two in the morning—that brought them “close together.”41 There was also music to share. As accomplished pianists both, Sutz and Bonhoeffer often played duets in the large Social Hall overlooking the quadrangle, Lasserre listening appreciatively.42
But their camaraderie remained decidedly more fragile than it may have appeared to their American classmates. Bonhoeffer was typical for most Germans of his generation. The widely loathed Article 231 in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles—attributing sole responsibility to Germany for the catastrophic Great War and imposing on Germany vast reparations and punitive measures—had embittered a nation already suffering under massive unemployment and runaway inflation. By 1930, popular resentment toward the treaty had served to unite republicans and nationalists alike “in a federation of self-pity.” At first, Bonhoeffer, Lasserre, and Sutz danced around their conflicting views of Versailles, but over the course of the semester, they felt more comfortable discussing their disagreements, including the whole contentious matter of loyalty to nation, in an environment free of ghosts.
On a cold blustery weeknight, Bonhoeffer and Lasserre went to a Manhattan cinema to see All Quiet on the Western Front, which had been released the previous August. Based on the international best-selling book by German writer Erich Maria Remarque, the film follows a group of students—patriotic young men eager to defend the fatherland—as they enlist in the army, train for combat, and head resolutely to the front, where each encounters unimaginable horrors and perishes.
“The theatre was full,” Lasserre said. “The audience was American but, since the film had been made from the German soldiers’ point of view, everyone immediately sympathized with them. When French soldiers were killed on screen, the crowd laughed and applauded. On the other hand, when the German soldiers were wounded or killed, there was a great silence and a sense of deep emotion. This was a rather difficult experience for both of us because we were seated next to each other, he a German and I a Frenchman.” Bonhoeffer seemed embarrassed by the portrayal. Of course, the experience was all the more perplexing since “the Americans had fought on the side of the French against the Germans.”
From “a fraternal point of view,” Lasserre continued, it moved him deeply to see how Bonhoeffer took pains to console him when the movie had ended.43 “I was very affected and he was also affected, but because of me,” Lasserre recalled. “I think it was there both of us discovered that the communion, the community of the Church is much more important than the national community.”44
As the end of the fall semester drew near and Advent with it, Bonhoeffer was having an unusually hard time getting into the spirit of the season.45 He had never spent Christmas apart from his family, and memories of past festivities that his mother planned with great care left him in a melancholy mood.
But homesickness did not account for the sum of his feelings. He wrote to his friend Helmut Rößler in Berlin to confess that his hope of finding a “cloud of witnesses” had “been bitterly disappointed.”
“One feels like one is standing on an observation tower looking out over the whole world,” he said, “and no matter where one looks, most of what one sees is infinitely depressing.”
The “frivolous attitude” of the mainline churches in America had been vexing from the start, but now they seemed to hold a mirror to his soul. Monday-morning edi
tions of the New York Times, with their page-three summaries of sermons preached the previous day, read like dispatches from the wasteland, with headlines conveying a Protestant establishment seeking relevance at all costs: “Jesus hides the Creeds,” “Pastor urges strong values,” “After all, it’s character that counts,” “Dr Fosdick urges his congregation to make the best of a bad mess.”
“In New York, they preach about virtually everything,” Bonhoeffer said, “except … the gospel of Jesus Christ.”46
Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, rector of Riverside Church—the massive Gothic edifice that, together with the seminary, occupied a whole city block—reigned as the benevolent prince of the Protestant establishment. Bonhoeffer, however, had not heard of him before coming to America, though he knew the name Emerson from having read the New England transcendentalist who viewed God as coterminous with Nature’s benevolent spirit. Following one Sunday at Riverside, the two thinkers were forever linked in the German’s mind as artisans of the American deity. Fosdick preached “an ethical and social idealism borne by a faith in progress,” and “in the place of the church as the congregation of believers in Christ there stands the church as a social corporation.”47 He meant to inspire harried urban sophisticates and awaken hopes for brighter tomorrows, bolstering resilience in anxious times, verve against the malaise, and a useful and industrious faith—all noble aims. But Fosdick’s gospel was bereft of miracle, modernized and Americanized. “The sermon has been reduced to parenthetical church remarks about newspaper events,” Bonhoeffer lamented.48 At least Emerson sought communion with the supernatural pulses of the brooks, ponds, and forests.
And these critical observations came months before Bonhoeffer wandered into the sanctuary of St. Mark’s in the Bowery for a Good Friday service that featured hip-priest William Norman Guthrie unpacking the seven last words of Christ in a recitation inspired by Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Guthrie was aiming for a more “convincing revelation of the Heroic Son of Man.”49 It could not have been farther from the Good Friday service at St. Peter’s Basilica seven years earlier, with its “magnificent singing” and “extraordinarily festive adoration of the cross.”50 Having once been temporarily relieved of his “episcopal ministrations” (after staging a church dance to the Egyptian sun-god), Guthrie tempted fate again on Good Friday 1931, rejecting the cross altogether. “I do not want that kind of Christ,” he said. A Christ sent to die for the sins of the world? No, Guthrie declared, “I deny the reconciliation of the Cross.”51 Instead he would treat his flock to a syncretistic smorgasbord of exotic tastings: a Brahmin priest intoning Hindu prayers, a Mohawk Indian in full body paint, a Zoroastrian holy man laboring over a fire ceremony, and a barefooted dance troupe from Barnard College improvising an Annunciation Day piece.52
For now, Bonhoeffer’s dislocation would owe more to conventional American Christianity. “So thank God Christmas is coming just now in the middle of all this,” Bonhoeffer wrote to his parents, “otherwise I would [fall completely into] despair.”53
A ray of light came in an invitation to spend Christmas in Cuba as a guest teacher at the German school. With Sutz, his Swiss friend, he left New York on December 11, 1930, delighted to be out of the wintry city and see the landscape turn greener as the train rolled south. He told Sabine that while she would be enjoying a white Christmas in Berlin, he would be sweating “beneath the tropical sun.”54 From the port of Tampa, the two caught a regional train to Key West and there boarded the SS Governor for a seven-hour voyage over rough waters to Cuba. Over four days, they traveled thirteen hundred miles, covering the same distance that separates Berlin from the south of Spain.
The weather was “splendidly warm,” Bonhoeffer reported from Havana: in the mid-eighties and clear. After “the recent icy, cold weeks in New York,” the tropical gardens, which were “as green as in summer,” and the blue sea close by were a balm for the soul.55 Palm trees cast silhouettes in the late afternoon and created an “incomparably beautiful” effect. Hummingbirds flittered like butterflies.56 Cuba was a sanctuary of birds—pelicans, cranes, herons, flamingos. And there were vultures as well!
During his brief tenure at the German school, where he taught religion classes in the last days of the semester, Bonhoeffer found time for leisurely walks through Havana and outings into the countryside.
“Huge pineapple fields, banana cultivation, sugar cane, tobacco plantations are all over the country. The streets are incredibly bad, and there are almost no pedestrian paths at all outside. All the mountain regions still seem to be completely undeveloped.” He observed the human dimension as well: “The living conditions are the most primitive I have ever seen. They build windowless huts out of palm leaves and stalks and seem to use them only at night and for shade in the summer. The children often run around completely naked, and usually half naked.”57 The deprivations notwithstanding, Bonhoeffer said he found it striking “that the Spanish population apparently gets along much better with the Negroes than do the Americans.”
He had great fun speaking Spanish again in Cuba. “And now that I am back here again, I notice how little joy the English language gives me.” It sounded “so flat and superficial.”58
On the fourth Sunday in Advent, December 21, 1930, he preached in the sun-flooded chapel of Havana’s German Lutheran Church. The scriptural text was Deuteronomy 32:48–52, the moment in the Israelites’ flight from bondage when Moses ascends Mount Nebo and views the lush Canaan valley, the promised land of milk and honey. “For you shall see the land before you, but you shall not go there, into the land that I am giving to the people of Israel.” Whether the result of the balmy air, or the hypnotic light slanting through the open windows, or the congregants waving their pew fans in the thick Sunday heat—or simply his own indifference—Bonhoeffer’s sermon was decidedly mediocre. In his white linen suit and tan derby shoes, the tanned and stylish German could not quite summon the beleaguered patriarch sloughing through “disappointments, tribulations, defeats, apostasy and unfaithfulness.”59 God’s promise to his chosen people “is a very serious matter,” Bonhoeffer blandly proposed. “But Advent, too, is a serious matter; in fact, it is an enormously serious matter.” The beloved before him responded accordingly.
DIETRICH BONHOEFFER AND ERWIN SUTZ IN HAVANA, 1930.
In the last year of his life, on a hot summer day inside a Berlin prison, Bonhoeffer would remember the failed Havana sermon as a casualty of the “luxuriant tropical heat” and a time when he had nearly “succumbed to sun-worship.” He was ever after on his guard in warm weather. “It was a genuine crisis, and a hint of it assails me every summer when I get to feel the sun,” he said.60 “I could hardly remember what I was really supposed to preach.”
On the eve of his return to New York, he joined Sutz, who had spent most of his own time in Havana with family friends, for a stroll through the Paseo de Matti, the park in the center of the Prado, before retiring to the terrace of his guesthouse, the air sweet with the scent of butterfly flowers and morning glories. He was in a reflective mood. In a progress report to his superintendent in Berlin, Bonhoeffer posed a number of questions formed over the preceding four months in America, clarifying his hopes for the spring ahead.
The trip to Cuba had also occasioned a surprising discovery of the other America. “The separation of whites from blacks in the southern states really does make a rather shameful impression,” he wrote after the train ride through the Deep South. The conditions were “really rather unbelievable.” Segregation was enforced in so many unexpected ways: “separate railway cars, tramways, and buses south of Washington.”61 Bonhoeffer had studied this reality in his courses and had begun doing library research and some interviews, but Yuletide marked his first personal encounter with the institution of racism—and with the object of its oppression. Bonhoeffer had never seen so many black faces, but in Cuba, “Negroes and Negresses” constituted the majority.
His search for the elusive fellowship of authentic witness now took the form of ques
tions raised by the fall semester: How can one speak authentically about Christianity? Where are Christian truth and its “criterion” to be found in actual experience? If the institutional churches should fall into utter chaos, how—and, again, where—might the gospel be seen, heard, felt, and embodied in the fullness of its mystery and power?62 How does one understand the spiritual character of a nation that has “so inordinately many slogans about brotherhood, peace, and so on” but at the same time “legislates and practices racial segregation”?63
He returned to New York with a clear purpose for his remaining months in the U.S., and soon he and Sutz, as well as Lasserre, would be discussing the prospects for another trip into the Americas.
Before his arrival in New York from Germany in September 1930, Bonhoeffer had never had a conversation with a person of color. Once, on his ten-day excursion to Libya in late spring of 1924, he had noted in his journal the “Arabs, Bedouins, and Negroes sitting on donkeys in great, picturesque white cloaks,” traversing the streets of Tripoli in a “colorful throng of peculiar figures.” But that was the extent of his professed interest in race.
His teachers at Union introduced him to what the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal would later call the “American dilemma” via readings from Du Bois, Johnson, and the rest. Still, it was not until a seminarian named Franklin Fisher sought him out that he came to know a black man. And it was not until Fisher invited Bonhoeffer to join him for a Sunday-morning church service in Harlem that the German visitor had any experience of American preaching and worship that seemed to him authentic and vital. This first time he worshipped with black Christians would be a revelation. Fisher—the son of one A. C. L. Fisher, pastor of 16th Street Baptist in Birmingham and a graduate of Howard College (now Howard University)—had come to New York not only for the unique opportunities Union offered African American seminarians, but also to learn more about the Harlem Renaissance, then in full flower.64 Assigned to the Abyssinian Baptist Church as a pastoral intern, Fisher would, with a gentle kindness, guide the stranger in a world foreign to most Americans, let alone Europeans. And Bonhoeffer was more than pleased to discover a tradition that stood “fairly untouched, indeed, avoided by the white church.” It was the beginning of Bonhoeffer’s intense, six-month immersion in American black Christianity and culture.
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