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Strange Glory

Page 17

by Charles Marsh


  “In connection with a course of Mr. Webber’s,” Bonhoeffer wrote, “I paid a visit almost every week to one of these character-building agencies: settlements, Y.M.C.A., home missions, co-operative houses, playgrounds, children’s courts, night schools, socialist schools, asylums, youth organizations, Association for advance of coloured people [sic]…. It is immensely impressive to see how much personal self-sacrifice there is, with how much devotion, energy and sense of responsibility the work is done.”88 That a professor would lead such efforts was nothing short of astounding.

  Bonhoeffer would get deep into the weeds: visiting the National Women’s Trade Union League and the Workers Education Bureau of America; studying labor problems, selective buying campaigns, civil rights, “restriction of profits,” juvenile delinquency, and “the activity of the churches in these fields.”89 In proposing solutions, Webber drew on models and insights gleaned from the Southern Tenants Farmers Union, the Delta Cooperative, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the British Cooperative Movement, with whom he personally had worked. Upon returning to Berlin in the summer of 1931, Dietrich would tell his brother Karl-Friedrich that Germany needed an ACLU of its own.90 Through his fieldwork with this now nearly forgotten professor of practical theology, Bonhoeffer envisioned a path from the classroom to the social reality, and many catchphrases of progressive American Protestantism began to pepper his sermons, writings, and letters.91

  There was also Harry Ward, the Methodist activist and reformer, slightly older than Niebuhr and Webber and decidedly more ideological than any of his Union colleagues. Bonhoeffer referred to Ward as “Union’s point man in the cause of the most radical socializing of Christianity.”92 In 1931, Ward was the seminary’s best-known public intellectual—a status that changed abruptly when Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society was published the following year.93 Widely known for his books—Our Economic Morality, the manifesto-like Social Creed of the Churches (which the body eventually known as the National Council of Churches would adopt as its platform), The Gospel for a Working World, and Why War Morality?, published in early spring 1931—Ward combined an old-time Methodist zeal for righteous action with a crusading Marxist critique of economic inequality.

  Bonhoeffer took Ward’s popular class, “Ethical Interpretations” (jointly taught with Niebuhr), designed to equip seminarians with the skills to interpret and evaluate “current events in light of the principles of Christian ethics.” Students were required to read and analyze newspaper articles, political journals, government reports, and various legal documents—all from the perspective of “the Jesus of the proletariat.” For Ward, this amounted to learning how to discern the social order in response to three essential questions: What are the facts? What do they mean? What should be done?94

  Ward and Niebuhr would take dramatically different turns in the decade ahead: Niebuhr abandoning pacifism for Christian realism, and eventually becoming a Cold War anticommunist Democrat; Ward, meanwhile, hunkering down, as he saw things, in the trenches with Jesus and Marx, a defender of the “Soviet spirit” against all its enemies. His influence on mainline Protestantism would decline steadily as he turned hard toward a Leninist critique of capitalism, heralding the Soviet Union “as the repository for his hopes of humanity’s ascension to a higher plane of spiritual and social life, atheism notwithstanding.”95

  But in 1931, when Bonhoeffer was their student, Ward and Niebuhr were united in their critique of American liberalism. The nation, in Ward’s estimation, had become a “ ‘cult of objectivity,’ thriving on observation, experimentation and discussion” and producing a “paralysis of both the critical spirit and the moral will.”96 In the classroom, Bonhoeffer listened closely as Ward enunciated his singular version of Pascal’s wager: Christians had the world to gain from living “as if” there existed an ethical God weighing every human action in the balance. This meant, at least for Ward, a socialist revolution.

  Before that year in New York, Bonhoeffer had rarely discussed politics; when he had, it was mostly in response to his brothers, who, radicalized by the Great War, never missed an opportunity to butt heads on the finer points of the Weimar government or the morality of its democratic reforms. His friend Helmut Rößler had once complained of Bonhoeffer’s inclination to escape into ethereal regions of “comprehensive” ideas and thus “avoid the murk and mists of boiling-hot politics.”97 Indeed, there is not even mention in his notes or letters of what was the lead item in the New York Times the day of his arrival: “Fascists Make Big Gains in Germany.”98 But, as it turned out, his querulous suspicion of God-deprived Union-style theology softened in the course of his interactions with (as he put it) “the contemporary representatives of the social gospel.” He would come to regard “the sobriety and seriousness” of Niebuhr, Webber, and Ward as “irrefutable” as well as “determinative for me for a long time to come.” He would never drop his charge that “Reformation Christianity” already included the same concerns without repudiating historical theology, which repudiation he would continue to regard as undermining the Social Gospel position. Yet his signal transformation in the course of that year—as he made his “turning from the phraseological to the real”—would always be linked to what he saw while at Union, both inside the classroom and out. There was for Bonhoeffer no longer an escape from this awareness: “something … was missing from German theology,” as his cousin Hans-Christoph von Hase would later put it, “the grounding of theology in reality.”

  The Florida-born James Dombrowski was a white Methodist minister who attended Union and then Columbia University, where he earned a PhD in 1933 with a dissertation entitled “The Early Days of Christian Socialism in America.”99 But rather than pursue the academic career for which he had qualified, Dombrowski became an activist-scholar. Over the next three decades, he would direct the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (1942–46), edit the progressive Southern Patriot (1942–66), and—as executive director of the Southern Conference Educational Fund (1946–66)—work behind the scenes with many key figures of the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott, including E. D. Nixon, president of the Montgomery branch of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a leader of the NAACP. In these capacities, Dombrowski was of able service to a talented, if largely forgotten, generation of white southern progressives whose efforts broke ground for the coming civil rights movement: Howard “Buck” Kester, Constance West, Sherwood Eddy, Lillian Smith, J. R. Butler, Jessie Daniel Ames, Lucy Randolph Mason, Claude Williams, Elizabeth Gilman, and the aforementioned Myles Horton, who became, against all odds, one of Bonhoeffer’s most trusted classmates. Almost to a man or woman, these southern radicals and prophets were connected with Union faculty and alumni in some form or fashion.

  A country boy born and raised in the riverboat town of Savannah, Tennessee, Horton surely represents a type of divinity student inconceivable to Bonhoeffer before his year in America. His impoverished southern childhood would have fit well into James Agee and Walker Evans’s landmark volume, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. A product of Cumberland College, a school set up for poor whites in Appalachia, Horton had spent many a student summer working in vacation Bible schools in the mountains of east Tennessee. In an interview he would ascribe his admission to Union as owing to the seminary’s need for a “token hillbilly.” He remained intimidated by the “extremely high” intellectual level at Union, and its distance from his hardscrabble upbringing.100

  In 1932 Reinhold Niebuhr would write a fund-raising letter to select patrons of progressive causes asking for support for the Southern Mountain School, a project inspired by his former students Horton and Dombrowski. The vision was to create an “experimental school specializing in education for fundamental social change.”101 In the 1930s and ’40s, a golden age of progressive Protestant activism, the Highlander Folk School emerged as one of the most influential training centers, teaching southern workers to organize and helping launch the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). In the 1950s, the school, b
y then under Myles Horton’s direction, would switch focus from labor to the burgeoning civil rights movement and help train the generation of church-based organizers that included Rosa Parks, Ella Baker, and Martin Luther King Jr.

  These Union personalities were among “the most radical Christians with whom Bonhoeffer ever associated,” as the scholar Clifford Green notes. “They worked on urban and rural poverty, on racial justice and civil rights, on union organizing, on peacemaking, and many spent time in jails and prisons.” By the end of his Sloan Fellowship, Bonhoeffer must also have recognized these men and women as being part of the greater “cloud of witnesses” he had longed for since the eve of his arrival in New York.

  Bonhoeffer remained critical of the seminary’s indifference to “all genuine theology,” but his final assessments of the school’s commitment to “radical socializing” were gentle and appreciative. For the same students who laughed out loud at mention of Luther’s doctrine sola gratia were tireless workers in the vineyard, dressing the branches by which food, clothing, and shelter found the poor, extending the vine to the outmost highways and hedges, where the powerless dwelt and where righteous action was the highest of all virtues.102

  On January 21, 1931, after several days abed with a nasty bout of the flu, Bonhoeffer wrote a birthday letter to Sabine. Once inseparable confidants, the twins had hardly exchanged a word in months. By now, she and Gerhard Leibholz had been married five years and already had two children, Marianne and Christiane, with another on the way. Bonhoeffer apologized for the fact that his letter would likely not reach Germany by their birthday of February 4: “It’s so unnerving for me that we really are going to be twenty-five now,” he also confessed. He explained about the flu and how it kept him from going to the post office, as well as buying the present he had picked out for her, though it was “nothing special.”

  “I don’t quite know how I will spend the day,” he said. “Several people have learned of the date and are demanding we have a birthday party, which I would give at the house of one of the married students. But perhaps I’ll also find out there’s something nice at the theater. Alas, I can’t even raise a glass of wine to the occasion, since it’s forbidden by federal law; how horribly tedious is this Prohibition business, which no one believes in.”

  He further allowed that his plans following the end of the term in May were still completely “up in the air.” While he needed to return to Germany and figure out his options at the university, he really wanted to travel around the United States for four to six weeks, “perhaps through the South and West to Mexico.” There was also the thought of going “all the way around the world, that is, especially to India, if my money lasts and I can find someone to come along and if Germany doesn’t yank me back first.” At all events, he would be home again by the end of June. The plan that finally came together would take him across the United States and Mexico; India would have to wait. When he drew in Lasserre and Sutz, the three could not manage to fix an exact itinerary, though all agreed that Mexico would be the goal.103 With that much settled, Bonhoeffer began to feel the rush he always felt when a trip was in prospect.

  And as usual, he attributed to his escape high-minded purpose: “I want to have a look at church conditions in the South, which allegedly can still be quite peculiar, and get to know the situation of the Negroes in a bit more detail,” he wrote to his brother Karl-Friedrich. “[I]t really does seem to me that there is a great movement forming.”104

  They would leave the week after Easter.

  Since his whirlwind tour of Rome during Holy Week four years earlier, Eastertide had always been associated with unsurpassed beauty. Easter Sunday 1931, however, would mark a change. Bonhoeffer had never heard of requiring the faithful to buy tickets for Easter services, but such was the practice at Abyssinian—as he would discover too late. Being unable to get a seat for the Sunday-morning service left him with a sour taste as he ended his involvement with the black church. “Nothing left,” he reported, “but to go hear a famous rabbi who preaches every Sunday morning in the largest concert hall before a full audience.”

  The Free Synagogue of Manhattan (which met at the Universalist Church of Eternal Hope on West Eighty-first Street) routinely drew more than a thousand people to hear Rabbi Stephen Wise. The openness to all comers was appealing. “Pewless and dueless,” was how the synagogue’s first president, Henry Morgenthau Sr., explained it; unlike most synagogues there were no pews set aside for members and no annual fee. At the time there were sixteen vibrant synagogues in Berlin to serve the Jewish population of 120,000, but this service in New York was Bonhoeffer’s first time worshipping together with Jews. He was grateful to hear Wise deliver an “extremely effective sermon” on building a “city of God” upon the five boroughs of New York—one of peace “to which the Messiah would then truly be able to come.”

  The next Tuesday, May 5, 1931, with “a tent and a little money,” four unlikely companions sputtered out of New York City in a secondhand Oldsmobile. Just a half hour outside town they were met by the rolling hills of Essex County, ablaze with early wildflowers. In addition to the fellow Europeans Sutz and Lasserre there was the American, Paul Lehmann, along for the ride as far as Chicago. Bonhoeffer was at the wheel. He had never before held a driver’s license, and had it not been for Lehmann’s wife, Marion, he would never have obtained one in New York. The private instructor he’d hired praised his handling of the car, but officials at New York City’s Department of Motor Vehicles had a different impression. After he’d failed the road test, Marion advised him to slip the examiner a five-dollar bill. The German strongly objected and promptly failed the test again. On his third try, he reluctantly offered up the bribe; he passed.105

  Only a smattering of postcards survive as clues, but driving options were limited in 1931. It appears that the men took Highway 22 West in Newark and from there drove through Reading, Harrisburg, Altoona, and Pittsburgh.

  A postcard marked “Portland,” a hamlet in the heart of the Slate Belt, informs Grunewald that after covering one hundred miles in three hours (in surprisingly light traffic), Bonhoeffer and his mates had arrived in the mountains of Pennsylvania, where they stopped to have lunch and “enjoy the lovely surroundings and the beautiful, warm weather!”

  From there, Highway 30 West was a straight shot to Akron, Fort Wayne, and Gary. And then Chicago: here the gregarious Lehmann bade the others farewell and was dropped off at Elmhurst College, where he had lined up a summer teaching job (his father being the president). The Oldsmobile then followed Highway 66 west out of Chicago through Springfield to St. Louis; Highway 61 south to Memphis; and Highway 51 through the small north Mississippi towns of Senatobia, Batesville, Grenada, and Winona, on to Jackson and then to Hammond, Louisiana. They got all the way to New Orleans, nearly a thousand miles in two days, with only Bonhoeffer and Lasserre licensed to drive. None of them cared much for the Crescent City or the state over which Governor Huey P. Long ruled. The Great Depression had been no gentler on New Orleans than on the urban centers up north, to which it had laid waste. The visitors counted scores of empty warehouses in the once-booming port city of seventy thousand. Now, only crime was booming. Bonhoeffer navigated the cramped streets of the French Quarter to drop Sutz off at the old town harbor. The “Swiss fellow” had made arrangements to take a ship back to New York.

  Running behind schedule to make a church conference in Mexico City, Bonhoeffer and Lasserre quit New Orleans in haste and rolled toward the Texas state line. It appears, however—and there’s no explanation in the letters of this detour of some several hundred miles—that rather than taking Highway 90 directly west toward Houston, the two men drove northeast on Highway 8 to Shreveport, and from there drove due west on 80 to Dallas. Perhaps they got their signals crossed and kept driving north in Baton Rouge. Either way, vast distances still lay ahead. With Bonhoeffer doing most of the driving, there was no time to keep a journal or write letters home. The quartet had dwindled to a fellowship of t
wo. Bonhoeffer did get off another postcard, but only because the car broke down on the outskirts of Fort Worth, just before exiting onto Highway 96. He wrote to reassure Louise and Richard Ern, the mother and child from Connecticut, who had come to the United States on the SS Columbus with him, that all was going well and that despite their car troubles—“the part from the shaft to the fan … broke off,” meaning, one would assume, the carburetor needed fixing, and they had to buy two new tires—the “car is now driving admirably.” He and Lasserre had seen “a great deal of the country” and were enjoying the fragrant southern air.

  DIETRICH BONHOEFFER’S POSTCARD FROM WACO, TEXAS, TO THE ERN FAMILY

  BONHOEFFER’S POSTCARD OF PIRAMIDE DE TEOPANZOLCO IN MEXICO, SENT TO THE ERN FAMILY

  Another postcard, with a color shot of a Longhorn bull, dated May 16, 1931, informs his grandmother Julie that the hill country of south-central Texas recalled the Harz Mountains in springtime—“fresh,” “untouched,” “beautiful country.” He had also seen “the great areas where entire cities quickly emerged and people made their money overnight.” Rest assured, “We are doing wonderfully.”

  On May 17, he wrote the Erns again from the border town of Laredo to say that he had never experienced anything like the soupy cauldron of south Texas heat, with temperatures into the mid-nineties—and it was still May. But otherwise everything was going well. There were well-built roads out there. And after sunset, the huge prairie sky remained incandescent for nearly an hour.

  The young Ern would receive a picture of the Aztec ruins in Cuernavaca, with news that the travelers had just been sitting on that very pyramid, listening to an Indian shepherd boy tell stories about his life in the mountains. “There are apparently a great many poor people here. They often live in tiny huts, and the children often wear only shirts or nothing at all. The people look nice and are quite friendly.”106

 

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