Strange Glory

by Charles Marsh

  Though Bonhoeffer did worry about the impression he had made. He would be relieved to hear from a classmate that Barth had thoroughly enjoyed the exchange. The contrarian voice was perfectly welcome, and when the seminar resumed the next day, Barth asked Bonhoeffer to introduce himself to the other students. There soon followed an invitation to dine with the professor at home.

  “Barth [is much] better than his books,” Bonhoeffer wrote afterward. “There is with him an openness, a readiness for any objection which should hit the mark.”

  Bonhoeffer would leave Bonn very grateful for the opportunity to have heard Barth elaborating on his position and also opining on a variety of related subjects. Over the three weeks there had been “many real bons mots” to savor, leading Bonhoeffer to confess that his initial impressions of the Barth circle had probably been too harsh. Those students were, after all, people really interested in Jesus Christ and wrestling as best they could with their “pride of knowledge.” They were less buttoned up than they had at first appeared; at an end-of-semester party, in fact, they performed a play written by Barth at the age of fifteen in the style of Schiller: Leonardo Montenuova, oder Freiheit und Liebe (Leonardo Montenuova, or Freedom and Love). Still, Bonhoeffer did not regret that it was time to go back home.14

  Bonhoeffer’s plan, such as he had ever had one, was to become ordained to the ministry and work two part-time jobs: one as a chaplain at Berlin’s Technical University and the other as an unpaid lecturer in the theology department at Friedrich-Wilhelms University, where he’d done his doctorate. Even with the dissertations, successful comps, and prestigious fellowship at Union, these two unglamorous options were, at the time, the best he could hope for in Germany’s hidebound academe, particularly in a straitened economy. And neither came with an office. There was a bright side, however: he had two months free before the fall semester began. As we have seen, the long break usually meant a leisurely stay in the eastern Harz and some time on the Baltic Sea, as well as more exotic travels.

  Sutz proposed a hiking expedition in the Alps, after which Bonhoeffer could join him in Zurich for a few days. His Swiss friend liked the idea of communing with his former Union classmate for tranquil reading and talk, far from the bustle of Broadway and 121st Street. But Bonhoeffer declined the kind offer, expressing the hope that Sutz would enjoy the mountain-air solitude without him.15

  Bonhoeffer had landed an invitation to visit Cambridge, England, for an ecumenical conference called (in the chirpy parlance of still-emergent ecumenism) the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship Through the Churches. Founded in 1914, the alliance sought to encourage world peace through inter-church and inter-denominational action—or talk, at least. Bonhoeffer was eager to attend, as the burgeoning ecumenical scene appealed to his cosmopolitan sensibility, and after persuading his parents to cover the attendance fee (five marks a day), he caught a plane to the United Kingdom.

  BONHOEFFER RELAXING WITH AN ECUMENICAL COLLEAGUE ALONG THE BALTIC SEA

  “My sojourn in America,” he said later, “made one thing clear to me: the absolute necessity of co-operation” among the churches of the nations.16 “When will it be,” he would ask in the conclusion to his conference report, “that Christianity says the right word at the right time?”17

  In Cambridge, Bonhoeffer distinguished himself as a brilliant young bridge builder. His initial contribution was to insist that the movement set itself on firmer theological footing, this point being made in response to certain Anglo-American delegates who had seemed (as he might now have expected) more interested in results than convictions and rather too syncretistic as well. Bonhoeffer listened, debated, and negotiated as one in possession of that rarest theological gift—the ability to lay aside doctrinal objections for the sake of a higher good, that good being the affirmation of the global, ecumenical church. Legitimate points of dispute had surfaced, many of which could have easily derailed the proceedings. But Bonhoeffer recognized that behind creedal disputes lay the urgent mandates of peace and the attendant need to create practicable initiatives for local congregations; delegates needed to find common ground and the concrete means by which all Christians might, with one voice, proclaim Jesus the Prince of Peace prophesied in Isaiah. This was the ultimate mission of the church in the nations of the West.18 “The real key to Bonhoeffer’s message,” as the ecumenist Willem Visser ’t Hooft recalled, was his “hunger and thirst for reality, for living the Christian life and not merely talking about it.”19

  Though not as consequential as his year in New York, the week in Cambridge had its own profound impression on Bonhoeffer and his “turning from the phraseological to the real.” As a budding academic theologian he’d once sung the glories of the Prussian army and lamented the “shame of Versailles” alongside his fellow German Protestant liberals. Now he was wholeheartedly affirming a “unanimous message to the churches of the world.” Full of the spirit of a unified Christendom, he called for a substantial reduction of military armaments of all kinds, for a reasonable and just coexistence between the nations under arms, and for freedom for all nations from military aggression.20 After the conference, Bonhoeffer said he felt as if he had taken a leap into the unknown.

  Indeed, on the home front, at least among those paying attention, Bonhoeffer’s remarks in England, the once and future enemy of the fatherland, were met with a frost. Professors Paul Althaus of Erlangen and Emmanuel Hirsch of Göttingen coauthored a scathing response in the daily called the Hamburger Nachrichten, decrying the closing of the German Protestant mind. Holders of prestigious chairs at two of the nation’s finest universities, the duo declared in no uncertain terms that given the current state of affairs there could “be no understanding between us Germans and the nations that were victorious in the World War.” It was a view by no means extremist in the national context, but rather the norm, as was the claim that any German who believed otherwise was effectively disowning his “destiny and his birthright.”21

  Bonhoeffer’s hymns to a worldwide Christian fellowship and his leap into the global ecumenical movement put him, as never before, on a clear collision course with the German church, which appeared ever more eager to quash internationalism as a threat to the Fatherland.22

  “I just cannot see how to get things right … in the unprecedented situation of our public life,” Bonhoeffer said. “The cheap consolation that I am doing the best I can, and that there are people who would in fact do much worse, unfortunately is just not sufficient.”23

  On a clear autumn day in 1931, Bonhoeffer finally returned to Berlin. It was time to start the new semester. When he arrived at the Anhalter Bahnhof, the yellow-brick train station on the Wilhelmstrasse, his father’s chauffeur was waiting in a black Mercedes.

  Bonhoeffer was energized by the week in Cambridge and equally by the prospect of leaving Germany again very soon—before the end of the month, as it turned out. The ecumenical movement, to which he had remained indifferent in his student years, now figured vitally in his desire to live a life more open to the world. His wanderlust had found its means of fulfillment and a worthy justification. In the next year he would join his new brethren for gatherings in Amsterdam, London, Prague, Chamonix, Čiernohorské kúpele, Gland, and (on multiple occasions) Geneva.24

  His itinerary allowed him a transient escape from the inescapable realities that would attend his eventual homecoming: the two dreary part-time jobs overhung with uncertainty about more meaningful employment. And there was as well the ever-worsening national climate.

  While Dietrich was still in America, his brother Klaus had sent him a grim report on recent developments in Germany.25 “People are flirting with fascism,” his brother wrote. If the “radical wave” of right-wing sentiment captured even the educated classes, Klaus feared, soon it would be all over “for this nation of poets and thinkers.”26 Bonhoeffer’s friend Helmut Rößler had also warned of a “purified, glowing national pride” linking arms with “a new paganism.”27

  DIETRI
CH BONHOEFFER AT AN ECUMENICAL YOUTH CONFERENCE IN GENEVA, 1932

  Sure enough, the next two years would put Bonhoeffer’s new cosmopolitan convictions to the test.28 But the new realities would reach him more personally not long after he had moved back into his old room in Berlin-Grunewald.

  The Berlin Technical University, a Hochschule for the applied sciences, was housed in a neo-Renaissance edifice occupying a forlorn stretch of easternmost Charlottenburg. Bonhoeffer’s offer, as chaplain, to lead a theological discussion group met with exactly zero interest among the future engineers of Germany. He told his brother Karl-Friedrich of feeling like a housewife who puts a special effort into her cooking “only to see it gobbled up indifferently.” Would, however, that they had cared to consume his fare in any fashion.

  In the first week of the fall semester, a single malcontent twice tore down the fliers Bonhoeffer had taken pains to produce and post on all the campus kiosks. The first occasion had prompted the chaplain to write a “letter of concern” before re-plastering the same kiosks. When the culprit struck yet again, Bonhoeffer responded with another round of fliers and another letter, this one much less pastoral: “To the fellow student who has now felt compelled to remove this notice for the third time! Why so secretive and why always the same joke, or why so terribly angry?” And then, a plea: “Why not come round to see me sometime?”29

  Attempts to host lectures, prayer services, and Bible studies likewise ran aground, along with his every high-minded summons to “really concentrate on the gospel and not get sidetracked.” Any remaining hope was dashed when not a single student showed up for the first meeting of his discussion group, “The Crisis of the State and the Gospel.” Morning devotions, too, were canceled for lack of demand, and during office hours he sat at a temporary desk waiting, usually in vain, for a visitor.30 The few who did come to see him typically wanted help with their finances. There was one exception: he seems to have caught the attention of a fraternity that agreed to a discussion on ecclesiology—so long as it met in a beer hall near the Alexanderplatz and Bonhoeffer picked up the tab.

  Not one to be easily discouraged, Bonhoeffer sustained himself by feeling more insulted than demoralized by the philistines at the TU. He decided to turn to his other situation at Berlin University, his alma mater.

  The job of Privatdozent at Berlin University resembled the post—one might say plight—of an academic lecturer at a medieval university. Whatever income he received depended wholly on the good graces of his students, whose attendance was voluntary.31 Students paid whatever they wished; or, if they saw fit, they paid nothing. A barrage of new duties placed a great burden upon even his capacious energies, as he struggled to find projects and relationships that brought him into contact with people outside the academy. He managed to offer guest lectures and doctoral seminars; he gave public talks, prepared candidates for confirmation, graded papers, and preached sermons.

  For years Bonhoeffer had moved at an exhilarating pace: in his university studies in Tübingen and Berlin and in his travels to Rome, Barcelona, New York, Cuba, England, and Mexico. But now he was back in a city that felt to him increasingly spectral. And he was only in his mid-twenties. What he tasted was the shock that comes of reckoning for the first time with the wages of one’s dissent. He belonged to a faculty whose politics he no longer shared and a church whose preaching he found stultifying and dull—and a pervasive loneliness overtook him. To Sutz he confessed feeling “dreadfully [alone] even sitting in a whole crowd of people.”32

  The situation led Bonhoeffer into a season of new self-examination. At one point in that unsettled autumn of 1931, he decided he would rather be known as a Christian than a theologian. In the latter guise, his evolving ideas on the Lutheran doctrine of justification made increasingly uncomfortable demands on his academics and ministry. More than ever, he was desperate to understand how the Christian should act “under the constraint of grace” in obedience to Jesus, what it meant in the warp and woof of lived experience, to confess Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.

  In September, Bonhoeffer’s second book, Act and Being, appeared, drawing a small scattering of favorable notices, which he promptly dismissed as “far too scanty a recompense.”33 Weighing this second dissertation in his hands, Bonhoeffer pronounced it “an altogether disagreeable product.” His article “The Christian Idea of God,” which appeared in the Journal of Religion, one of the premier North American theological quarterlies, left him “disgusted and ashamed.”34 In fact, extensive editing of the English translation produced fairly mediocre results, the heavy scaffolding of academic God-speak producing an effect as claustrophobic as the midday trains.

  He told Sutz, “Sometimes I wish that I could go somewhere into the country to get out of the way of everything that is wanted and expected of me.”35 In the company of the Barthians in Bonn, he had felt like “an illegitimate among thoroughbreds,” but among the Berlin professoriate, he struggled to breathe. “My theological core is becoming suspect,” he said, “and they obviously feel they have nursed a snail on their breast.”36 He concluded finally that there was no one in Berlin “who can teach the elements of a vital Christian theology.” He would make a desperate bid to get the faculty to lure Barth away from Bonn—“Barth is really someone from whom poor, desolate Berlin could learn a thing or two about God,” he wrote to Sutz—but that effort was unavailing, like so many others.

  In an Ascension Day sermon, he described authentic faith as an orphaned existence. He asked how a person “torn by homesickness” can rejoice in life; how a dissident Christian can bear the rejection he must inevitably face. Perhaps remembering in particular the example of the black churches in America, Bonhoeffer expressed hope that the greater church might itself find the strength to bear the weight of its outcasts, even as it sought, in an era of propaganda and mediocrity, to bear joyful witness to the truth.

  Bonhoeffer had written in one essay that Christ means freedom—freedom from “the lie that I am the only one there, that I am the center of the world.”37 And so his feeling around the theology department must have been that of captivity, and the desolate absence of the Lord. “I hardly ever see [any] of the professors,” he said. “But I’m not especially sorry about that.”

  The massive gray-stone fortress on Unter den Linden had all the charm of a mausoleum. The affable liberal men who had once filled the ranks of the faculty—like Harnack, Bonhoeffer’s beloved teacher—had been replaced by colorless time-servers, who rarely extended a hand.

  “Luckily I have my practical work,” Bonhoeffer said.38

  On the fifteenth of November, 1931, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was ordained to the ministry at St. Matthias Church near the Potsdamer Platz. It was not an especially memorable occasion. But he was now eligible to preach and administer the sacraments.

  In his sermons from the time immediately thereafter, he spoke of the psalmist, whose felicitous piety had been rudely unsettled by his encounter with the living God.39 He said that the church must exist under the constraint that its first order of business was to proclaim “the words of Christ that there should be peace.”40 He admonished those dearly beloved to subsist without hesitation on the truthfulness of God’s promises. To have faith was to live “totally” and unreservedly in the company of Jesus.41 He launched into a recitation of the Beatitudes, Jesus’s longest and most radical teaching on the extremes to which he calls his followers. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.… Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

  These words were to be acted on in perfect trust and single-mindedness.42 Toward that very end, Bonhoeffer had begun to practice certain devotional disciplines, following the daily readings in the Moravian prayer book that his governess had given him as a child, and listening to his collection of Negro spirituals and gospel standards, which was never far away. At the same time, he affirmed the Christian faith’s blood kinship with Judaism and Jes
us’s lineage in the House of David. The strange, new world of the Bible (as Barth had called the countercultural impulse of the gospel) was at work on his own thoughts too, building brick by brick and over years a cathedral of new understanding.

  In February 1932, Bonhoeffer finally left home. A second-floor room let by a master baker named Heide at 61 Oderberger Strasse in the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood became his first German home away from Grunewald. It was not nearly so congenial, this working-class neighborhood in northeast Berlin, to which the district superintendent had assigned him when his chaplaincy at the Technical University was over. But Bonhoeffer had requested the post as a pastoral assistant at Zionskirche, the church around the corner; the assignment could not have pleased him more. “It’s just about the worst part of Berlin,” he said to Sutz, “with the most difficult social and political conditions.”

  Indeed, after his full-immersion baptism in Harlem, this move to an urban parish felt like a homecoming of sorts, except that the fifty teenage boys who fell under his supervision, sons of unemployed factory workers, proved more unruly than any child he had taught at the relatively genteel Abyssinian Baptist. “They behaved like mad things, completely crazy,” Bonhoeffer said of the youth group.

  But he discovered soon enough that boys could be brought to attention by the telling of Bible stories, the more dramatic the better. Bonhoeffer obliged, with an old reliable theatrical flair, offering “simple Biblical stuff with emphasis [on] the eschatological passages.” The result usually produced “absolute quiet,” he found, and he was pleased—and, even more, relieved. He told Sutz he was no longer afraid of meeting the same fate as his unfortunate predecessor, who had dropped dead on the job.

  Moving into a neighborhood hit hard by factory closings to be near his fifty new confirmands, visiting the boys and their families in massive public housing blocks, praying for the barely accommodated as they struggled amid “indescribable poverty, disorder, and immorality,” teaching teenagers in crisis the proper “care of the soul”—this was at last the “real work” he had longed for.43