What had begun as a bold and concrete statement of faith in dissent had succumbed to the torpor of conscience by committee. “Too many cooks spoil the broth,” Bonhoeffer told Justin Rieger.111 In fact, it was hard not to see it as proof that the dissenters’ resolve was crumbling as feared.
Bonhoeffer had stumbled awkwardly on the “Jewish question” earlier in the spring, but by the end of the year he’d concluded that it could only be justly answered in favor of God’s eternal election of Israel. And so it was particularly distressing to discover that his comrades, with few exceptions, believed otherwise.
The decision to take the pastorate in London was undoubtedly born of frustration, if not despair. As he’d confessed to Barth, the reception of the Bethel Confession had come as a blow and one that had left him altogether uncertain about his future in Germany. He would not throw caution to the wind and cut his ties with everyone who disagreed with him. Rather, he requested and received a leave of absence from his department. He held out the hope of returning when his country had regained some measure of stability. He was delighted to hear a rumor that his name had been mentioned for an open chair in systematic theology; perhaps he would not be stuck forever in the quagmire of Privatdozent.112 He was trying to sort through conflicting ambitions, to trust his heart but to be realistic as well. Erich Seeberg, the Nazi dean of the faculty, had also expressed a hope that Bonhoeffer’s move would only be temporary.113 Bonhoeffer found Seeberg’s words oddly reassuring.
But when the theologian Arthur Titius learned of Bonhoeffer’s move, he told his colleagues in Berlin, “It is a great pity that our best hope in the faculty is being wasted on the church struggle.” Titius may have sat on the sidelines as the church imploded around him, but he seems to have understood the purpose of Bonhoeffer’s leave better than anyone.
Through word and deed in the wake of the great upheaval, Bonhoeffer had landed himself in a strange and precarious place. All things were in flux. And he was no exception. “You have become a different person,” the Berlin pastor Wolfgang Schlunk told him on the eve of his departure. Wishing Bonhoeffer well in England, Schlunk offered his teacher some sobering insight: “It will be difficult for you to go on working in the church, and outside the church there will hardly be any possible employment left for you in Germany.” Indeed, he said, it was only a matter of time before the university would “chase you out.”114
CHAPTER NINE
1933–1935: LONDON
~
Crying in the Wilderness
One night during Bonhoeffer’s first weeks in London, at a dinner party in his Sydenham flat, he played a piano duet with the wife of a friend. It was a Beethoven concerto, one he knew quite well. Suddenly, to everyone’s surprise, Dietrich abandoned the music as written and began improvising “in an entirely different key.” A faint smile appeared in the corners of his mouth as he spun outward; and then, without missing a beat, he lunged back for the keys. Soon the same mischievous spirit had possessed his guests, who were roaring with laughter. When the duet was over, the performance was answered with resounding applause, at which Dietrich nodded appreciatively, seeming “genuinely and wholeheartedly involved” in the moment. For all that weighed on his mind, he remained, as one guest that night put it, a man of “endless surprises.”1
In November of 1933 Bonhoeffer began his eighteen-month assignment in the eastern suburbs of London. He would take over two of the six German churches in the greater London area: St. George’s Lutheran and St. Paul’s Aldgate East.2 St. George’s stood on Dacres Road, in Whitechapel, on a wooded lot near the train station about halfway between the Forest Hill and Sydenham stops. St. Paul’s, a community dating to the eighteenth century, was housed at that time in a building in Goulston Street, near the Aldgate. Bonhoeffer’s predecessor there, a kindly Swabian named Friedrich Singer, had come to London from a German church in Newcastle but had recently returned to Germany.3
This would be Bonhoeffer’s first and only experience of living in a church manse, as it was indeed his one and only tenure as a minister in charge. The parsonage was a three-story Victorian house near the top of Manor Mount Road in Forest Hill, in the borough of Lewisham. Bonhoeffer occupied the large rooms on the top floor, while the main rooms of the parlor level were used by a German school. He liked his spacious quarters, with their pleasant view of the hills. Still, life on his own lacked for most of the comforts of his parents’ house. With its bland double-fronted exterior, the parsonage possessed neither the architectural refinement to be found elsewhere in London nor any of the natural simplicity and elegance of the Grunewald house. The rooms behind the grim facade were, moreover, quite drafty, pitifully under-heated. The presence of the parish’s verger, with his solitary digs in the basement, added little personal warmth.4
ST. GEORGE’S LUTHERAN CHURCH, SYDENHAM, LONDON
A decade earlier, an addition had been built onto the house, but no proper foundation had been laid for it, so stepping from the old part into the new always felt like boarding a ship amid a heavy swell.5 Such careless construction was of a piece with the flimsy windows, the warped floorboards, and the useless ancient heating pipes. “Cold, damp air penetrated through the windows,” recalled Wolf-Dieter Zimmermann, who visited from Berlin.6 Even the warmer seasons were uncomfortable. Bonhoeffer’s morning bath, once a beloved daily ritual, became a perfunctory splash of cold water. He was constantly fighting off colds and fevers during the first months. But he soldiered on merrily, hardly bothered even by a mischief of mice that had lodged themselves in upper rooms, where they could multiply so fruitfully.7
In the first week of December 1933, as he was still unpacking—he had shipped large sections of his library, his wardrobe, his phonograph and record collection, even his grand piano—a high fog descended on London. The mass of cold, wet, and sooty air trapped beneath an impenetrably warm sky produced a “midnight at mid-day” effect. The sun turned pale red and finally disappeared, Bonhoeffer told his parents.
When his piano arrived separately by van one morning, he was amused to discover that the Bechstein grand he’d received for his fifteenth birthday would not fit through the narrow front doors. After studying the situation with the movers, the principal of the German school, and a few passersby, he helped construct an elaborate system of pulleys to hoist the piano up to the third story, where he would arrange a makeshift music room. It was to celebrate this successful feat of engineering that Bonhoeffer threw the aforementioned dinner party. By the end of his first month, music nights would be a weekly ritual in the otherwise drowsy suburban manse, combining singers and musicians from the parish with visiting friends from Germany. He would single-handedly revive the languishing St. George’s choir and, later, in the fall of 1934, lend his own voice to a London chorus’s performance of Brahms’s German Requiem.8
As pastor of two parishes, Bonhoeffer conducted services twice every Sunday, and while he usually preached the same sermon to both congregations, he prepared for each occasion with the same care and attention he’d given to his academic lectures.
And there was much else to do besides. During his year in Barcelona, Bonhoeffer, as assistant, had shared the responsibility of ministering to a congregation of 120. The London situation was quite different. Despite a growing German expatriate community, neither St. George’s nor St. Paul’s provided an assistant. Bonhoeffer would claim he’d never worked so hard, wondering to his grandmother “how so much could be going on in such a small congregation.”9 (Perhaps it was justice for his having kept Olbrecht waiting past Advent!) But it didn’t seem a hardship: the work was gratifying and perhaps not as onerous as reported. Visiting friends were relieved to find him in excellent spirits—and with more spare time than he’d adverted to.
In total, he had charge of several hundred souls, although the average attendance at St. George’s was only thirty to forty, and only slightly higher at St. Paul’s. But the numbers don’t tell the whole story. The two congregations differed sharply as to the
ir makeup and expectations. St. George’s, Sydenham, resembled the Barcelona parish, composed mainly of small business owners, industrialists, diplomats, and other professionals.10 When ground was broken in the 1880s, the German ambassador had laid the cornerstone during a celebration that included champagne and a full orchestra.11 Soon a Gothic chapel of red brick and Doulting limestone would rise there, featuring a bell tower and a hundred-foot spire, the building hailed in the Sydenham and Penge Gazette as an “ornament to the locality.” St. Paul’s German Church in London’s East End, by contrast, served a distinctly lower-middle-class population of bakers, butchers, and artisans. It was not as grand as St. George’s or Barcelona, but it was also not as downtrodden as the parish he’d served in Berlin. He would move comfortably between his two communities.12
Shortly after his arrival in October, Bonhoeffer wrote a letter to Karl Barth that he knew was long overdue and would not be well received.
Since having formed a relationship with Barth in Bonn the summer after touring America, Bonhoeffer had felt himself obliged to keep the master apprised of any decisions taken in response to the church struggle in Germany. Indeed, Barth could be proprietary about the younger theologians he’d taken under his wing, even those, like Bonhoeffer, who had never studied with him. There is no denying that the relationship between them was special. As Mary Bosanqut wrote in the first published biography of Bonhoeffer, “they recognized each other over the heads of the theological academics.” But while they would feel a lasting mutual regard, “it was never to warm into complete trust.”13 Bonhoeffer may have been too quick to regard himself as Barth’s equal, though Barth may have been too quick to presume that Bonhoeffer (fourteen years younger) was not. One might imagine anyway that a man who’d made it his life’s work to reconceive the whole canon of the church’s doctrine and resuscitate its orthodoxy would not stand on ceremony or become exercised about another’s career choices. As it happened, Barth was livid to learn secondhand of Bonhoeffer’s decision to leave Germany, pronouncing it abrupt and irresponsible. His florid letter took the form of a fatherly dressing down. You have no business playing Elijah under the juniper tree or Jonah under the gourd vine, he said in essence. “Get back to your post in Berlin straightaway!”14
Barth could well appreciate that Bonhoeffer, like his peers, was “suffering under the enormous pressure of ‘making straight paths for your feet,’ through the present chaotic situation.” But, he insisted, we are nevertheless called “to man our positions in and with our uncertainty, even if we stumble and go astray ten or a hundred times over.”
There is a certain note of self-pity in the Swiss theologian’s rebuke: “Why weren’t you [in Germany] pulling on the rope that I, virtually alone, could hardly budge?” he asked. “How could you not be here all the time, when there is so much at stake?”
And: “What in the world do you suppose you are doing or hoping to do there?”
He couldn’t conceive how the young man, so full of conviction, could think it a “good time to go into the wilderness for a spell, and simply work as a pastor, as unobtrusively as possible”? Not in the face of the inescapable facts: that “you are a German, that your church’s house is on fire, that you know enough, and can express what you know well enough, to be of help.” These facts obliged Bonhoeffer “to return to your post by the next ship!”15 Get back to Berlin with all guns blazing, Barth demanded.
But the reprimand misfired.
Barth would remain the younger man’s touchstone of Christian orthodoxy, a standard for theological precision and doctrinal fidelity to be admired and aimed for. Bonhoeffer could even tolerate the paroxysms of paternalism, the admonitions amply delivered with blustering certainty. But his tact would be to thank Barth for his advice without taking it.
He’d tried to preempt Barth’s predictable disapproval in his letter of late October 1933, saying he had meant to write him six weeks earlier while still finalizing his plans. “I must beg your pardon,” he wrote, hoping for the same respect in return, but—to be sure—not seeking approval.16 In fact, in posting such a late dispatch, Bonhoeffer made the point rather clearly, that his deferential entreaties notwithstanding, he did not expect Barth to understand his decision to move to England.17 He would even wonder whether Barth’s singular vocation of doing theology “as if nothing else were happening” were not ultimately founded on a certain demurral on moral perplexity particular to Swiss Germans.
In fact, Bonhoeffer had not remotely abandoned his allies in the Pastors’ Emergency League. Although no longer on the front lines, he spoke every day with colleagues in Berlin during his first month abroad. He also spoke daily with his mother, who had begun attending St. Anne’s Church, Dahlem. The vicar, Martin Niemöller, had been elected in September head of the Pfarrernotbund, as the Pastors’ Emergency League was known in Germany before it became the Confessing Church. Bonhoeffer’s telephone bills were so high he usually had to borrow money from his parents to pay them—though, admittedly, that was nothing new. On one occasion a sympathetic clerk at the post office, where phone bills were settled, reduced the amount due by half.18 Still, Bonhoeffer was not unaware of the impression left by his going to London. In a letter to Erwin Sutz, then serving a Reformed parish in the Swiss mountain village of Wiesendangen, he acknowledged that some fellow dissidents saw the move as a sign of quietism and retreat.19
As his travels attest, however, the reality was quite different. He attended the League of Nations in Geneva on October 14, 1933. Then, on January 31, 1934, he traveled to Paris for a meeting of the ecumenical youth commission. The following month, in February, he met with the Council of Brethren in Hanover before going to Berlin, where he caught the flu and had to recuperate at his parents’ house. Although he would skip the May 29 meeting in Barmen—at which the Pastors’ Emergency League officially became the Confessing Church and the Barmen Declaration was drafted—he would return to Berlin on June 18 for meetings with Niemöller and Karl Koch. In late August he would spend two warm, sunny weeks on the island of Fanö, off southern Denmark. But even that was not what it might seem: an ecumenical conference was taking place there, and Bonhoeffer convened student seminars on the sand dunes along the Baltic coast. Not long after, in the first week of September 1934, Bonhoeffer would cross the English Channel once again for meetings with the French-German-British youth conference, squeezing in a visit with Jean Lasserre, his old friend from Union, at Lasserre’s parents’ house in the coal-mining town of Bruay in northwest France.20
Bonhoeffer traveled to the continent on average once a month for the duration of his London pastorate, and when he was not traveling, his thoughts were never far from his ecumenical brethren or the “lonely warriors” of the Confessing Church. Keeping up with colleagues abroad might take him to an alpine hotel or seaside resort, but the days, typically packed with meetings, were taxing all the same. Some were even miserable, owing to the recurrent respiratory infections suffered during his London residency. Under the hectic regime of frequent travels and late dinners, to say nothing of all the meats and pastries lavished on him by parishioners, Bonhoeffer suffered another misery as well, this for the first time in his life: he gained nearly fifteen pounds.
Though his comments had grown steadily more critical of the Reich Church, only once was he called back to Berlin to account for something he’d preached or published. The high consistory councilor, one Theodor Heckel, asked him whether he intended to continue on this path, which could lead only to “national indiscipline.” At their meeting, Heckel ordered Bonhoeffer to refrain from all further ecumenical activity and to sign a pledge of compliance, which he set before the young pastor on the table between them.21 Bonhoeffer refused to sign the pledge but feigned surprise at the high councilor’s rebuke, promising to think about the demand in the coming days. But two weeks’ reflection would not change his mind: again he allowed that he was unable “to sign such a revocation as you are asking of me.” Bonhoeffer said he could see no “compelling reason�
�� to suspend “this purely ecclesiological, theological, ecumenical work to which I have been committed for years.” The unpleasant flight he had taken at the crack of dawn on March 5 to see Heckel would be, he vowed to himself, his “last act of obedience” toward his ecclesial superiors.22
Back in London, Bonhoeffer realized that the German church struggle must also be pursued by means less flamboyant than frontal assault, internecine debate, and published declarations.23 He would work painstakingly to draw individual German pastors and congregations in England over to the side of the Confessing Church; to tutor members of the ecumenical movement on the German situation; to assist the refugees of Nazi Germany, who were relocating to England in growing numbers; and in his own parishes, to illuminate a way of being Christian apart from the sealed worlds of the nationalist churches.
Music parlor, salon, bachelor pad, and now hostel: his digs on Manor Mount, those two rooms of the top floor, evolved with the necessities of the situation. In those eighteen months, they would see a parade of Germans, including “a vast number of visitors, mostly Jews, who know me from somewhere and who need something.” Amid this steady traffic, Bonhoeffer said, he had hardly the chance to be lonely.24
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