The outlook for the winter ahead was “perfectly horrible,” with as many as seven million Germans likely to be out of work. “The misery is frightful,” Bonhoeffer said, “and the most terrible thing of all is the hopelessness of this situation.” The nation was on the verge of a complete breakdown. “We will know how much we need the church, especially during the next winter,” he said, “but what should its message be, and in any case will anyone bother to listen?”
In the second semester, Bonhoeffer started inviting his confirmands, in groups of two and three, to Herr Heide’s boardinghouse, where he served them supper, read them scripture or recounted Bible stories, played for them recordings of classical music and Negro spirituals, even taught them chess. Sometimes he would tell a story from his travels. Evenings usually concluded with “a short spell of catechizing.” He marveled at the power of the spoken word of scripture—only slightly enhanced by his own rhetorical flourishes—to render the young ruffians spellbound, sitting before him agape.44
No dramatic conversions or revival took place; the boys were simply paying the Word full attention, its proper due. But that was miracle enough. “Perhaps the foundation has been laid for a faith that will grow.”45
In their ardor, he saw evidence of divine protection; the refusal to collapse under duress was their “great—and I think also moral—power of resistance.”46 Bonhoeffer found himself moved by these people on the margins, “far away from the masquerade of the ‘Christian world’ ”—the “little people” who lived “more under grace than under wrath.”47
The youth ministry in inner-city Berlin made Bonhoeffer acutely aware of the limitations of his training. Home visits left him with the feeling that he would have been better prepared had he studied chemistry instead of theology. “It sometimes seems to me that all our work on the care of souls comes to grief.”48 The eloquent scion of Grunewald found himself often at a loss for the right thing to say.
Parish life became the joyful counterpart to the grind at the university: “Christ existing as community.” This notion that he had developed in his dissertations had remained mostly notional—now he was living it, together with the working-class parishioners of Zionskirche. “What a liberation!” he said.49
As an early Easter present for his confirmation class, he took them hiking on trails around the family house in Friedrichsbrunn. “Except for one broken window pane everything is still intact,” he reassured his parents. On the happy occasion of the boys’ having memorized the catechism, he threw a party, celebrating with “sausages, cake and cigarettes.”50
Young Dietrich had been confirmed in the well-heeled parish church of Berlin-Grunewald, though he rarely darkened its doors. Even during the year of his ordination exams, he had attended services only sporadically.
“I came to the Bible for the first time,” he would later say of these strange months following his return from America, as a “new and unexpected meaning broke through [scripture’s] ancient words and phrases.”51 The Moravian prayer book became the source of his daily readings; the devotional disciplines he performed with relish. On four rolling acres near Biesenthal, thirty kilometers north of Berlin, which his parents had given him, he had a hut built, rather hermetic, but it served when he organized spiritual retreats for the youth group. He encouraged the confirmands to read scripture with prayerful concern for the church and an attention to God’s will. He spoke of a communal life of “obedience and prayer.” Observing Bonhoeffer’s new fervor, some family members and friends grew worried. Colleagues at the university joked of such monkish ways practiced within their ranks. But the Sermon on the Mount had moved to the center of his thinking and there it would remain, he with it: Bonhoeffer was simply haunted by the simplicity and directness of Jesus’s teachings, the concreteness of His demands, “their objectivity.”52
His homilies and other church talks kept returning to the same profound question: What kind of theologian and pastor—what kind of Christian—must we encourage for the uncertain years ahead? And it worked in the other context, too: despite his alienation from the rest of the faculty, Bonhoeffer’s question, and his manner of seeking to answer it in class, was received by some students as a welcome break from business as usual. He was, he could discern, not entirely alone there.
Wolf-Dieter Zimmermann had arrived at the university the cynical son of a minister. His first taste of the theology department had bored him “infinitely.” There was “the pedantic juggling [of] Greek words,” Professor Ernst Sellin’s “formalistic” dealings with the book of Isaiah, rote translation of medieval texts (never mind “what they meant, how they were related to God’s actions”), and all those “theological concepts [that] seemed meaningless … and gave me no guidance.” So when Zimmermann heard from a fellow student about a young Privatdozent doing something different, he went to see.
Zimmermann attended the first lecture in Bonhoeffer’s course “The Nature of the Church.”53 The “disheartening sight” of the sparsely attended class—only a smattering of students in the large hall—gave Zimmermann pause. He wondered whether he should withdraw, feigning to have entered the wrong room, but he “stayed out of curiosity,” and would be glad of it. “A young scholar stepped to the rostrum with a light, quick step, a man with very fair, rather thin hair, a broad face, rimless glasses with a golden bridge. After a few words of welcome he explained the meaning and structure of the lecture, in a firm, slightly throaty way of speaking. Then he opened his manuscript and began.”
Bonhoeffer allowed as how it had become not so unusual lately to hear people ask whether the church still had any relevance, whether they still needed God. But this question, he said, was wrongly put. The paramount concern is in fact “whether we are willing to offer our lives to the church and the world, for this is what God desires.”54
Every sentence hit its mark, Zimmermann thought. Bonhoeffer spoke directly to the issue most deeply troubling the young man.55
Not that Bonhoeffer had turned difficult ideas into easy formulas. His appeal was not as a popularizer. He lectured from meticulously written notes, venturing undaunted over the fields of ecclesiology, philosophical theology, biblical exegetics, and church history. But within that intricate intellectual scaffolding, as Bonhoeffer constructed it, was a space where existential questions of faith and life—the most urgent questions of all, though largely ignored by academic theologians—became inescapable: “Where is God? How does God meet us and what does God expect from us?”56
And then, in a different voice, he explained. To answer these questions one must begin with the Christian’s most elemental concern: “Who is this Jesus Christ, the one who encounters us in the Word of God?”
Within two months of his installation in Prenzlauer Berg, more than a hundred students regularly attended church events. And at Unter den Linden—in Berlin-Mitte, barely a half mile away though a world apart—a small circle of university students was coalescing around the young assistant professor, attracted to his peculiar combination of substance and style: a ponderous, pastoral theologian who could move mountains, it seemed, but returned always to first things. He spoke of God, Jesus Christ, and the church in ways that sounded truly radical.57
When, at the end of the fall semester 1932, Bonhoeffer proposed that the class find a more congenial place to meet than the cavernous lecture hall at the university, Zimmermann offered his modest rooms in the attic of his father’s parsonage at the Königstor near the Alexanderplatz.
Twelve students and their teacher gathered there, “sitting on every possible piece of furniture.” The seminar usually ran for three hours, the air thick with tobacco smoke. Topics ranged from the sacraments to salvation to ethics, but it was not so much the subject matter that made the gatherings unforgettable; it was the way Bonhoeffer addressed persons with an ardent, inspiring respect. And always the sessions included prayer and song: Bach, romantic lieder, Negro spirituals.
“What was far more important for us,” one student recalled, “w
as working together to find clear ways of thinking,” practicing simplicity, “learning not to slink off into side-issues, or to be satisfied prematurely with cheap and easy answers.”58
Educating theologians and pastors in a nation on the eve of enormous and catastrophic changes placed great demands on teacher and student alike. Bonhoeffer had no intention of offering intellectual shortcuts. Seeing the world anew through the peace of Christ summoned every available resource. If “pure, abstract theorizing” could illuminate concrete reality, his habit was to gently rub his brow and do the hard work—that is, to use philosophical terminology if it helped clarify the point and its application to life.59 As his student Albert Schönherr later confessed, the idiosyncratic gesture always drew his attention to the professor’s “big, Kant-like forehead.”
Seminars concluded with a gentle “Danke” and the invitation to reconvene at a nearby café to take up other subjects—which might range from current politics to reminiscences of Spanish bullfights.60
As Bonhoeffer welcomed newcomers and transient visitors each week, the class grew beyond the point of fitting comfortably in Zimmermann’s attic rooms. So the teacher decided that they would return to campus. Now, however, all the seats in the hall were filled, and it was not uncommon to find more than two hundred students sitting at rapt attention.61 More than fifty regularly joined his “open evenings,” at which the week’s lectures were freely discussed, “untethered to the syllabus or assigned topics.”62
Newcomers, and there were always some, having heard of his intensity at the podium, were often taken aback by the sound of his voice, high and slightly tremulous, “like a choirboy’s.”63
Zimmermann later found the record of his own impressions. “In old papers I have noted down about him: ‘Near and far away at the same time,’ ‘keeping a distinguished distance and yet ready and open.’ ‘He has immense powers which are also immensely disciplined.’ Conflicts were experienced and borne by him in an almost ‘holy’ way.”
Bonhoeffer’s aspect was indeed not that of a man burdened by study. He was, in fact, six foot one, broad shouldered, with a well-built, athletic frame. With his ruddy complexion, he looked more like a champion skier than a scholar.
“We followed his words with such attention that one could hear the flies humming,” another student recounted. “Sometimes, when we laid our pens down after a lecture, we were literally perspiring.”64
No doubt the effect owed to his lack of sentimentality as well as his deft and well-furnished mind; each was evident both at the lectern and in the rousing “table talk” after the work was done. But the students were drawn by something less abstract, too: the fact of his personal bearing. Bonhoeffer still lived as a bon vivant each day, as if to show that the pursuit of God could also inspire a rich and multilayered worldliness. Some hermetic disciplines notwithstanding, he was never one for sackcloth and ashes. The good things of this world, too, were full of God’s glory. Bonhoeffer would later describe a humanism of the incarnation in terms of the musical concept of polyphony, and propose that the fullness of the risen Lord enabled an actual clarity of sight. He would not banish altogether the specialized elements of his earlier academic writing, the technical concerns and the philosophical principles. These would always remain in his tool box, but only as tools for shaping, as needed, the brick and mortar of a more expressive language, out of which he tried to build a dwelling place habitable by anyone.
For Bonhoeffer had become involved in humankind not only in the philosophical theologian’s way but in the practical theologian’s way, too. Every man, as John Donne wrote, was “a piece of the continent.” And this solicitude for the individual, this care for the whole person, was especially uncommon in a professor. As one of his students would later report, in general “no one took any responsibility for nurturing the spiritual life.”65 Unless one sought out a chaplain or pastor, one was “entirely on his own.” With Bonhoeffer, it was different.
In a photograph from a retreat to the village of Prebelow, Bonhoeffer appears younger than most of his charges, even though attired more carefully, his beige tweed vest, white collared shirt, and necktie paired with hiking boots to the knee for the requisite sprezzatura. He fairly beams a gentle confidence. On closer inspection, his blond hair, swept casually to the side, is already thinning, but he betrays not a care in the world, as one young man in the front row, his eyebrows mirthfully raised, serenades the company on a flute. Two women lean together, one enfolding the other loosely in her arms. Another lad crouches alongside Bonhoeffer holding a stick comically in his teeth.66 If not exactly the choir of the saints, this fellowship of theological bohemians has nothing dour about it. Homo theologicus is homo ludens, a holy communion of joy and play.
BONHOEFFER AND BERLIN STUDENTS ENJOYING FREE TIME IN PREBELOW, 1932
Bonhoeffer would remain an outsider to the tenured faculty between 1931 and 1933—indeed, until he was finally removed from his post of unpaid adjunct in 1937. A certain distance between him and his colleagues, guarded from both directions, would always define his place in the academy. Nevertheless, in the special time between his return from America in 1931 and Hitler’s rise to the chancellorship on January 30, 1933, Bonhoeffer became an unlikely, albeit minor, celebrity of the Berlin avant-garde. The voice he gave to a prevalent spiritual restlessness spoke to students and pastors but also to artists and intellectuals.
The novelists Ernst Wiechert and Frank Thiess were among a coterie of writers who invited Bonhoeffer to their salons in Berlin-Mitte.67 Once, even the enigmatic bachelor Hans Schwarz opened his rooms, with their black-papered walls, for an evening with the artist Ernst Barlach. Barlach’s reputation had soared in these Weimar years, thanks to his intriguing wood carvings of the weak and infirm and his gnarled bronze sculptures. Barlach’s play about a hedonistic squire who contemplates suicide had recently premiered at the Staatstheater.
ALEXANDERPLATZ, BERLIN, 1932. IN THE BACKGROUND CONSTRUCTION OF THE U-BAHN (SUBWAY) IN FRONT OF THE GEORGENKIRCHE
Bonhoeffer’s own aesthetics reflected the forthright and conservative bourgeois taste of his family. And so he would mostly ignore the Expressionist novelties of Hermann Hesse, Max Beckmann, Stefan Zweig, Arnold Schoenberg, and Arthur Honegger, notwithstanding an almost expressionist flavor in his theology: whether in sermons or essays, it merged familiar images and ancient convictions with bold new shapes and slashing strokes, to keenly subversive effect.68 Indeed, Bonhoeffer’s meditations on the cross make an inescapable demand on the listener—one every bit as unsettling as George Grosz’s Christ on the Cross Surrounded by Soldiers, Barlach’s Blind Beggar on Crutches, Max Beckmann’s Resurrection, or Lovis Corinth’s Red Christ.
“If we speak of Jesus Christ as God,” Bonhoeffer said in his lectures, “we may not say of him that he is representative of an idea of God, which possesses the characteristics of omniscience or omnipotence (there is no such thing as this [ethereal] divine nature!); rather, we must speak of his weakness, his manger, his cross. This man is no abstract God.”69
“It is difficult to characterize the Bonhoeffer of those Berlin years,” Zimmermann would recall. “My memory has retained some moments of that time, whereas others have hardened into concepts, unconsciously. With astonishment I learned that he was a committed socialist and a pacifist.” The revelation came as a shock to this son of a German pastor, who had been raised on a strict diet of Luther’s doctrine of the two kingdoms. Bonhoeffer’s alternative understanding seemed to Zimmermann so extreme that for a while the student altogether mistrusted the teacher’s views on Christian ethics.70
Reading Bonhoeffer’s book Creation and Fall brings one into the Grosser Saal—the great hall—on Unter den Linden to hear the twenty-six-year-old’s discourse on the first book of the Bible. His lectures on Genesis began Tuesday, November 8, 1932, and would not end until Tuesday, February 21, 1933, spanning a fateful winter of rancorous discontent, as mass revolts by Nazi partisans brought a violent end to the Weimar Repu
blic and, in its wake, ushered in Adolf Hitler, who, but three weeks into his dictatorship, opened the first concentration camps for enemies of the state.71
The Genesis lectures were focused on the holiness of God—God as giver of all good gifts, the beginning and the ending of creation’s story. Though entirely free of theoretical armature and scholarly throat clearing, these lectures remain the most ponderous of all Bonhoeffer’s writings. The style introduces a concentration altogether different from that of his earlier work. Creation and Fall is expressionistic and poetical, meditative and devotional, but also a ruthless rending of veils. It is the work of a Christian dissident awakening to his strange habitation in “the anxious middle.”72
Creation and Fall resembled no other course in the curriculum. Only indirect attention was paid to debates proper to the guild; the published volume lacks footnotes. No contemporary of Bonhoeffer’s is mentioned by name. Creation and Fall is a dazzling, cyclonic utterance, one not to be mistaken for a systematic or historical effort. Wrought out of densely textured prose, in five-hundred-word bursts, the narrative in flow, in the emergence of structure, delineates a space for contemplation, full of awe at the righteousness and transcendent mystery of the Creator.
In the beginning God created. In the beginning there was only God, indivisible and triune. And in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. “Not that first God was and then God created, but that in the beginning God created.”
The beginning defines the essential insight that only God is God; that God creates out of freedom, not necessity; that the creature exists in proper relation to this truth only by accepting the insuperable limit it imposes. This distinction, between the Creator and his creatures, must guide our thoughts and actions in all subsequent things, for it is only from the anxious middle—existence between Eden and the Apocalypse—that we can try to discern the truth about the beginning.73
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