Strange Glory

by Charles Marsh

  “We do not know of this beginning by stepping outside the middle and becoming a beginning in ourselves,” Bonhoeffer taught. The boast of our being masters of any new beginning is “accomplished only by means of a lie,” although there were deceptions far graver than this. Humankind would love to turn back to its origins, to a “land of magnificent rivers and trees full of fruit.”74 But we cannot, and this realization—that we are ultimately powerless in the face of our absolute beginning, incapable of mastering the origin for all the cunning of warriors and demigods—is our great humiliation. It is the exile’s terror, the thought that cannot be suffered in silence.

  Those in the lecture hall could not have easily missed the political resonance, the notes of defiance, in these brooding meditations on sin. He had opened the Bible to unleash the living word against a church and nation on the threshold of catastrophic apostasy.75 “The absurd, perpetual state of being thrown back upon the invisible God,” he said, “no one can withstand it any longer.”76

  The joyful, unscripted sojourns of people cleaving to Christ in an idolatrous age—here was the only remedy for egotism and delusion. Bonhoeffer said that beyond reading the Bible as God’s word to us, the time had come to begin reading it “against ourselves as well,” accepting the word’s power to implicate us as well as to redeem us.77

  He never discussed his spiritual life from the pulpit or podium. He regarded self-revelation in sermons as a vanity, if not a vulgarity. But he could not hide having undergone a profound change in the past two years.

  “I no longer believe in the university,” he would confess amid the tumult of these horrible years, a horrible year. “In fact I never really have believed in it.”78

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  1933

  ~

  Theological Storm Troopers on the March

  It was the beginning of 1933, and Bonhoeffer was still enjoying the long Christmas break from the university. Having moved back into his parents’ house on Wangenheimstrasse, he worked every morning from his bedroom, his notes carefully arranged on the oak writing table that had been his desk since boyhood. With a westward view of the neighbor’s frozen garden, he wrote lectures and sermons with the familiar economy of effort, though now with the aid of a new Alder, his first typewriter. He had finally “entered the technical age,” as he told his Swiss friend Erwin Sutz.1

  Afternoons were set aside for naps, meeting friends over coffee, writing letters. Weather permitting, there was skiing on the well-marked trails of the Grunewald. Most evenings, he went into the city for a concert or a play. Musical nights at the Bonhoeffers’ continued a pleasant Saturday ritual. During a short stay in Friedrichsbrunn, he lolled about reading Heine and Hegel.

  But for the chances of an older candidate named Pätzol, Bonhoeffer thought himself a shoo-in for the pastorship of St. Bartholomew’s Church in the east Berlin parish of Friedrichshain. His internship in the inner city had left him eager for a new clerical assignment to balance his academic work. But not long before classes resumed at the university in the second week of January, he would be passed over for the job.

  A little over two weeks later, on January 30, the unimaginable happened. There had been signs: on the very day that Bonhoeffer’s Genesis lectures had turned to the story of Cain—second son of Adam and Eve, who jealously murders his brother, Abel, to become the first “destroyer of life”—the storm troopers had appeared in the streets, bearing “their hideous rubber truncheons, their drums and flags.” On that day, too, Adolf Hitler, a German citizen for less than a year, had been appointed by President Paul von Hindenburg as the new Reich chancellor. Nothing would ever be the same in the wake of that—not the world of the mind or the world of politics; not Europe or the world outside it. A city once contoured by the “hopeless, godless vacancy of satisfied faces” was transformed suddenly with an enormous sense of purpose.2 Now was “the time of massed armies,” “the restlessness of turbulent mobs,” of “wars and rumors of war”; “the time of huge throngs moving over the face of the earth, of technicians planning grandiose feats of destruction,” a time of “suspicion, hatred and distrust.”3 Bonhoeffer’s life was now set on a collision course with Hitler’s.

  In the Protestant faculties and congregations, churchmen of fixed and iron-hard purpose, who called themselves the Deutsche Christen, the “German Christians,” were pledging their loyalty to the fatherland. They claimed that God had chosen a new Israel, the German Volk; that the Christian doctrine of revelation had brought about the disinheritance of the Jews and that Jesus Christ had abrogated Israel’s ancient covenant. They wanted a strong church of muscular virtues—a manly church, eine männliche Kirche—unified by German ideals. They even convinced themselves that Jesus was not a Jew. They boasted of their mission in the most inspiring terms imaginable: as the completion of Martin Luther’s work. Revival was in the air.4

  As a practical matter, this meant that the German Christians would pursue a fully assimilated Volkskirche, a national church based on common blood. Following the sixteenth-century principle of cuius regio, eius religio (“whose realm, his religion”), the German Protestant Church had long made room for non-Lutheran confessions. Of the twenty-eight regional churches—the Landeskirchen—extant at the beginning of 1933, twenty adhered to Lutheran tradition, two were Reformed, or Calvinist, and the other six were United, or combined—among them the Old Prussian Union Church, which included congregations in Berlin. The dispensation worked out under the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V had allowed German Protestants significant freedom as to their liturgical practices—such as whether to sprinkle the head of the catechumen or to immerse him fully in the baptistery; whether to baptize babies or only adults, according to confessional tradition—all this latitude and more while still enjoying “full membership in the national church.” The unity of the regional Protestant churches lay mainly in their common Reformation heritage. But with the groundswell of national renewal, the German Christians reached beyond theological differences for a unity even sturdier than that of common confession, a unity based on ethnic uniformity.5

  On February 1, two days into Hitler’s rule, Bonhoeffer delivered an address broadcast on Berlin’s Rundfunk radio station just after the rush hour, when the cafés and coffeehouses were most crowded and tuning in.6 No recording of the radio talk exists, although he gave two addresses on the same subject shortly thereafter, reading from scripts that do survive, one at the Technical University and the other at the College of Political Science. Both scripts contain the same withering critique of the Führerprinzip, the Führer principle, the notion that political authority should flow from the top of the government down—that is, from the Führer.7 Speaking as a pastor and a theologian, Bonhoeffer sounded very much like a diagnostician examining the nation’s soul. He was still his father’s child, offering his measured, almost clinical, observations.

  Germany’s defeat in World War I had obliterated the Protestant liberal optimism of the nineteenth century, and with it the congenial bonds of throne and Providence. Having come of age at a point when “the once well-established Western world was coming apart at the seams,” a generation of lost souls—with plenty of anger in common—had wandered in darkness, unable to find their bearings. This generation had put its hope in technology, in the masses, and in the collective. It had sought ballast in resignation, meaning in meaninglessness. “Inanimate objects appeared to emerge from this collapse as victors,” said Bonhoeffer. But nothing had been as consoling as denial. Reeling between fantasy and self-loathing, a generation in flight from actual circumstances found escape in a “metaphysic of reality.” It had repudiated finitude and fact for an ever-expanding cosmos, whose banner would become the Blutfahne, the blood flag. The metaphysical turn welcomed “any development and construction.” It was the ordinariness of things that was unbearable in these postwar years, the insatiable hunger for new horizons. Promising a new day—one of freedom from debts, from limits, and from shame—the metaphysic of reality ove
rwhelmed the responsibility to reason. Frustrated by the constraints of time and history, Germans had imagined and embraced a reality without natural limits, one based on this new imaginary principle.

  Bonhoeffer explained how German Protestants had desperately recast the Christian narrative of guilt and salvation as the story of Germany’s defeat and rebirth: World War I and the shame of Versailles followed by the gift of Hitler and the rebirth of the fatherland. Salvation depends on a savior, but the Jew of Nazareth was not what the times required. Into this void entered the Führerprinzip, with the promise of a national atonement. “Freedom from debt, limit, and shame implied a new kind of human being,” Bonhoeffer continued, a world-constitutive ego, an epochal self, the Übermensch, who aligns himself with “the forces of the eternal and divine,” ordering “his state, his economy, his community accordingly.”

  With preternatural cunning, Hitler exploited the collective humiliation and the “great and unacknowledged void” in the German soul.8 “Hitler’s rhetoric was religious,” Bonhoeffer said. “He dissolved politics in a religious aura, and all the theological terms which had been previously secularized” had now become “the great standards of his appeal.” Hitler promised deliverance and redemption, rebirth and salvation, and in so doing denounced the Reich’s enemies as godless and satanic. “He did all that in the name of Providence, for he believed that Providence had chosen him to deliver the German people.”9 In this exceedingly prescient address, delivered within weeks of Hitler’s ascent to power, Bonhoeffer warned Germany that “everyone who misappropriates the eternal law and concedes responsibility to a Superman will in the end be destroyed by him.” Bonhoeffer would begin speaking of Hitler as the Antichrist.

  After ten minutes his radio address was cut off in mid-sentence, but a short essay believed to be the basis of the address was published the following week in Der Angriff, the Berlin daily established by Joseph Goebbels as a propaganda weapon taking aim at the degenerate opposition. Bonhoeffer’s dissent served as fair warning of the struggle ahead.

  Bonhoeffer and Reinhold Niebuhr had lost touch since Bonhoeffer’s American year in 1931. But in the days following the January 1933 elections, Bonhoeffer’s thoughts returned to Niebuhr and his American associates—indeed to all the social theologians who had preached ultimate honesty and ethical realism as hallmarks of authentic faith. Ostensibly to endorse his cousin Hans-Christoph von Hase’s application for the Sloan Fellowship at Union, Bonhoeffer would write to Niebuhr in the first week of February: “Fit, open, sociable, approachable, with an independent mind,” Bonhoeffer said of Hans-Christoph, who would eventually be accepted. But Bonhoeffer also took the opportunity to reconnect with Niebuhr at a time when the American’s recent writings on Christian realism and the immoral structure of mass society had become urgent and undeniable.

  Bonhoeffer began communicating with church figures of several other nations about the developments in Germany.10 His notes, memos, and letters comprise his first unlawful actions, being violations of the Malicious Practices Act, passed in the wake of the Reichstag fire. Marinus van der Lubbe, the young communist who torched the government building, claimed to have acted alone. But typically, Hitler seized the moment. On February 28, 1933, the day following the blaze, he persuaded President Hindenburg to enact the Reichstag Fire Decree and to suspend the Weimar constitution. Under his new emergency powers, the Führer declared that the arson represented an attempted communist putsch. The subsequent trials, though travesties, gathered popular support for his curtailment of civil liberties and ban on publications unfriendly to the Nazi regime. Under the Enabling Act (in March), Hitler and his cabinet obtained power to enact laws without the Reichstag’s approval: Gleichschaltung—the assimilation of all institutions and persons into Nazi ideals—was at last triumphant. The same week, in a scenic Bavarian town fifteen miles northeast of Munich, on the grounds of a former munitions plant, a concentration camp was established. The town was Dachau.11 In response to the Nazi assault on civil liberties—which included the suspension of habeas corpus, freedom of the press, the right of free association and public assembly, free speech, and protection from unreasonable search and seizure—Bonhoeffer spoke out in defense of the liberal parliamentary state, now in ruin. He consulted his brother-in-law Gerhard Leibholz, a legal philosopher at Göttingen, and his brother Klaus, an attorney in Berlin, who held a doctorate in jurisprudence. (Leibholz had taught law at the University of Greifswald from 1931 until 1933, before taking the post at Göttingen, where in 1935 he would be removed, as a Jew, under the Nazi race laws, thereafter moving his family to England.)12 Bonhoeffer would never write a political treatise, and his later, scattered ruminations on the future of Germany (in letters and other writings after 1940) seem to favor monarchy over democracy. But in his addresses of 1933, he consistently defended Weimar’s democratic constitution and civil liberties. As the scholar Ernst-Albert Scharffenorth explains, the argument Bonhoeffer advanced throughout the year was unprecedented in the history of German Protestantism: namely, “that if mere objection alone could not prevent the state from turning justice into injustice and order into disorder, the church was obliged to abandon such ‘indirect’ political action and employ ‘direct’ political means.”13

  Bonhoeffer recognized that a “terrible barbarization of our culture” had begun. The nation was reeling under the spell of hysterical longings, magical incantations, warrior fanaticism, and “all manner of public exorcism.” As he told Niebuhr, “here, too, we will need to create a Civil Liberties Union”; the future of the church had “seldom looked so gloomy.”14

  It was with renewed gratitude for the lessons learned in America that he asked Niebuhr to convey greetings to Union friends, especially to James Dombrowski, who had recently joined the staff of the Highlander Folk School, a radical Christian organizing hub in Monteagle, Tennessee, and who—as Bonhoeffer pointed out—had never returned the German visitor’s term paper on Negro literature. Could Niebuhr track that down? It was not mere academic vanity on Bonhoeffer’s part; he wanted to refer to the essay as he aligned with the German church of the outcasts.

  On April 3, 1933, Paula Bonhoeffer wrote to her eldest daughter, Christine, with a mother’s heavy heart, concerned for Dietrich’s well-being. While he appeared to his students and friends as a rock of strength, at home he had grown sullen and withdrawn. For the first time, Bonhoeffer’s mother did not know how to respond to her fair-haired and sensitive child, now a twenty-seven-year-old theologian and minister torn between the moral mandates of his new faith and the quietism of ordinary Lutheranism.

  The Aryan paragraph was passed by the Reichstag on April 7. This calamitous decree and the adjuvant Law for the Reconstitution of the Civil Service ordered the removal of all Jews, persons of any Jewish descent, and other designated undesirables from civil service, including the churches, both Catholic and Protestant. The church action was justified by the fact that all churches received government funding. Both Catholics (who comprised about a third of the population) and Protestants (who represented most of the rest) paid taxes in support of pastoral functions—baptisms, weddings, funerals, and other services. But in the jubilant thrall of the Führerprinzip, it was the German Protestant Church that would become the German Christians’ target for total nazification. The Deutsche Christen were moved by a perverse conceit disguised as an evangelistic crusade: they were supposedly bringing the Christian faith to the Nazis, who seemed to be veering toward paganism. Acting in the name of Luther’s doctrines of the two kingdoms—that God has established two kingdoms (zwei Reiche): the kingdom of the earth, which he rules through human government and law; and the kingdom of heaven, which he directs by grace and through the church—the German Christians determined to achieve an accommodation (however tortured) of the Führer principle and the Aryan paragraph under church law. And this they would do in a spirit of obedience to God!15 Under this accommodation, baptized Jews, being a different race altogether, could no longer serve in the German
Protestant Church, whose identity was now rooted in ethnicity, or racial sameness, rather than in the confession of Christ as Lord.

  Such willful complicity gave Hitler, and his religious liaisons, full authority to assimilate the twenty-eight independent Protestant Landeskirchen into a unified Reich Church. The lines between church and state—regionally defined since the Reformation—were now radically redrawn, as church leaders submitted to the political momentum to form a single, national, völkisch church.16

  The change was not accomplished without struggle. Hitler’s appointment of his old friend Ludwig Müller as special representative to the churches set off a rush of behind-the-scenes “maneuvering” as the distinct and often competing regional churches jockeyed for advantage, aroused at the prospect of a unified national church under a single Reich bishop (Reichsbischof). Moderates had their hopes on Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, the widely respected director of the Bethel Health Center and son of its founder. But Müller seemed rather confident that “the honor would fall to him.” As the historian Robert Ericksen reconstructs the confusing chain of events to follow, the first round went to Bodelschwingh, who gathered the most votes from the regional church councils.17 Müller and his allies among the radical Deutsche Christen were outraged. They called in the brown-shirted, paramilitary storm troopers—the Sturmabteilung, or SA—to intimidate Bodelschwingh’s staff, also persuading the Prussian cultural minister, Bernhard Rust, to appoint a state commissar for the regional church. Finding himself in a hopeless position, Bodelschwingh resigned from his bishopric at the end of June. The election was then thrown open to a vote of the full church membership.