Strange Glory

by Charles Marsh

  Franz Hildebrandt was one of the first to call.25 It was, in fact, one week into his planned three-month visit that the Barthian missive landed in Sydenham. Though not personally acquainted with the Swiss master, Hildebrandt had his own vexed relationship to him, having written critically of Barth in a book called Das lutherische Prinzip (The Lutheran Principle) (1931). When Barth learned that Hildebrandt too was in London, he sent his greetings (via Bonhoeffer) to the man who “is supposed to have said some nasty things about me.”26 Barth would carry on claiming, improbably, that he himself had never read the critique.

  Hildebrandt had been working as an assistant pastor in Kleinmachnow before his own sudden departure from the fatherland. Like Bonhoeffer, he firmly believed that in the face of the Aryan paragraph faithful Christians were obliged to make a total break from the apostate national church. “We must be radical on all points, including the Aryan paragraph,” the two had written in one joint statement.27 “Radical” in this context meant calling for the immediate resignation of Nazi pastors and theologians.

  But while Bonhoeffer had chosen to come to London, Hildebrandt had run out of options in Germany. His mother was of the Sellingers, a prominent family of Jewish Berliners, mostly merchants and industrialists. And so Hildebrandt came to England with no plan but to “follow Bonhoeffer into the foreseeable future, as his guest at his new home, and then see what to do.”28 For his part, despite the trying circumstances, Bonhoeffer was delighted to be sharing his flat with a good friend and intellectual sparring partner. Indeed the two, whom Zimmermann had described as happily locked in a “state of permanent dispute,” would pick up where they had left off, arguing for hours about literature, music, art, politics, and, of course, theology.29 Butting heads over the history of ideas, Hildebrandt defended the German idealist tradition from the Barthian attack, while Bonhoeffer, sympathetic to Eberhard Grisebach and Martin Buber, argued for the priority of the personal encounter. Hildebrandt supported the Protestant Christians People’s Party in the Reichstag elections of 1933, while Bonhoeffer argued that only the Catholic Center Party had half a chance of defeating Hitler.30 The exchanges were “serious but good humored, aggressive and witty” and continued amid “all the day’s events and meetings.”31 For Bonhoeffer and Hildebrandt it was like being graduate students again.

  The mornings began late with a “sumptuous” breakfast and a copy of the London Times, both delivered by the housekeeper at eleven o’clock. Afterward, Bonhoeffer went about his daily tasks and worked on his sermons, until two o’clock, when he’d join Hildebrandt for a light lunch back at the parsonage. The ensuing discussion and debate would end only when the two finally sat down at the piano. Evenings were for the theater and the cinema, followed by drinks and dinner and more conversation, often continuing well after midnight, the flow of meditation, music, theology, and storytelling, “all following one another, blending into one another—till 2 or 3 a.m.”32

  Julius Rieger became another familiar face at the Church Hill parsonage. A fellow Lutheran pastor who had been assigned to the Seaman’s Ministry in London, Rieger had met Bonhoeffer at the 1931 World Alliance conference in Cambridge, but it was not until 1934, the same year that Rieger would establish a relief center for German Jewish refugees in England, that a friendship formed.33 The two pastors regarded each other as “excellent sounding boards for sermons and parish goings-on.” And under Rieger’s influence, Bonhoeffer got over his long-held disdain for middlebrow art, at least as far as movies were concerned. Once a week, schedules permitting, Bonhoeffer and Rieger caught a thriller or western at a Piccadilly Circus cinema, followed by a late dinner at the Shanghai Restaurant in Soho, a popular Burmese spot near the Charing Cross station. On nights when they craved home cooking, they went to Schmidt’s in Charlotte Street, washing down generous portions of Bavarian fare with German beer. Occasionally they might take high tea at the New Criterion.34

  Expected and unexpected, friends and acquaintances came and went, sometimes staying only overnight, sometimes for weeks, in the tiny flat. At some point in that first London year, the housekeeper suffered a complete nervous breakdown and was institutionalized—a case of “religious madness,” Bonhoeffer pronounced with a sigh—the truly vexing result that for quite some time, “we had nobody to help us at all.”35

  In late March 1934, the dismal winter yielded to the English spring, and the resplendent burst of life delighted Bonhoeffer with its fragrances and colors. From the café in nearby Horniman Park or his own second-floor windows he could admire the verdant vistas southward to Kent and Surrey and “northwards across London as far as Hampstead Heath.”36 The season came as a “revelation.” There were days when nature’s newness could make him forget “everything else,” when forests and fields, as far as the eye could see, were blanketed with wild rhododendrons and bluebells—a “triumphant” flower he had seen before only in the hill country of south-central Texas.37 Clear days and a certain angle of light recalled his student days in Rome seven years earlier. But the bad news from Germany continued unabated.

  An undeniable urgency entered Bonhoeffer’s preaching in London. His sermons followed the liturgical year—Reformation Day, the German Totensonntag, Remembrance Sunday, Advent, New Year, Lent, Easter, Pentecost—but they were unpredictable in other ways. He spoke with an unsettling directness, and he would readily deviate from the theme of the season and the text from the lectionary if the times called for it.

  Shortly after returning from America, Bonhoeffer had pronounced the German Evangelical Church “a wreath of blossoms,” ornate and funereal.38 But by the time he delivered his farewell sermon in London on March 10, 1935, he had resolved that “with single-minded purpose, Nat[ional] Socialism has brought about the end of the church in Germany.”39

  “Bonhoeffer the preacher made few concessions to his hearers,” Keith Clements wrote in his fascinating study of the London year. He did not assume a professorial air or flaunt his erudition; with few exceptions his language was forthright and gin clear, lacking his accustomed flourishes. Still, he sought to evoke the effects of human encounter with the divine, and to stir a heightened sense of expectancy. He’d been rereading his Kierkegaard, the mournful Dane’s feverish mediation on St. Paul’s admonition to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling.” In Kierkegaard’s book by that name, faith is presented as a leap into the unknown, and the eschatology is pervasive. “God is coming! Are you ready?” Bonhoeffer asked the congregation. It is unlikely that very few could claim to be, or that they shared the preacher’s intensity, or noticed the pains he took to connect with them. Bonhoeffer’s sermons were meticulously handwritten and often typed out in complete manuscripts. Twenty-three such manuscripts—“comprising just fragments in two cases”—have survived; five were originally preached in English. Though attendance was spotty, Bonhoeffer preached as if to the whole world. His first sermons, coinciding with the beginning of Advent 1933, sounded the clanging cymbals of the Father’s in-breaking decision: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son …” But not to be forgotten was that this decision summoned each individual to make a decision of his own. It was the Kierkegaardian either/or: Shall I pick up my cross and follow Jesus, or remain mired in idolatry and despair?40

  On December 3, the first day of Advent, his starting point was Luke 21:28, the absurd venture of hope in a time of abandonment: “Now when these things begin to take place, look up, and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

  “Can we hear it now, the knocking, the driving, the [striving] forward?” he asked. “Can we feel something inside ourselves longing to leap up, to free itself and open itself to the coming of Christ? Do we sense that we are not just talking in images here, but that something is really happening, that human souls are being raised up, shaken, broken open, and healed? That heaven is bending towards the earth; that the earth is trembling, and people are desperate with fear and apprehension as well as hope and joy?”41

&
nbsp; And then: “Do you want to be redeemed? That is the one great, decisive question that Advent puts to us. Does there burn within us any ember of longing, of recognition of what redemption could mean? If not, then what do we ask of Advent? What do we want from Christmas?…a little sentimentality, a little uplift within … a nice atmosphere?

  “But if there is something in us that cares to know, that is set afire by these words, something in us that believes these words—if we feel that once more, once more in our lives, there could be a complete turning to God, to Christ—then why not just be obedient and listen and hear the word that is offered us, called out to us, shouted into our ears?

  “Take courage, fear not, do not be worried or anxious.… Christ is coming.”42

  In the autumn of 1934, Bonhoeffer preached a series of four sermons on 1 Corinthians 13, the hymn about love that has become such a staple of wedding ceremonies. “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast.… Love never fails.” Bonhoeffer arranged the series so that the final installment would fall on Reformation Sunday, taking up the last verse of the chapter: “So faith, hope, love abide; but the greatest of these is love.”43

  That he chose it for that holiday is, of course, no coincidence. This was no simple plea for fellow feeling. Though the point may have well been lost on the congregation, Bonhoeffer was making a case for the necessity of love in connecting Luther’s great doctrine of “justification by faith” with righteous action in the here and now. Luther’s dogma of sola fidei must mean “something more than lazy piety or abstract intellectualism,” he insisted.44 Works have no redemptive power of their own, but faith, hope, and—above all—love oblige us to act nonetheless.

  “And the church that calls a people to belief in Christ,” he emphasized, “must itself be, in the midst of that people, the burning fire of love, the nucleus of reconciliation, the source of the fire in which all hate is consumed, and the proud and hateful are transformed into the loving.”45

  The churches of the German Reformation have taught many marvelous things about Christian freedom and the triumph of grace, he insisted, but these churches have not built loving hearts. Look around you, Bonhoeffer implored the faithful, look at the German church and nation. He referred to the Protestant youth groups and to Reich Bishop Müller’s “decree concerning the restoration of order.” The declaration, which came to be called the “muzzling decree,” prohibited pastors from mentioning in sermons or discussing with parishioners any matter related to the church crisis. Violation of the decree would result in suspension, salary cuts, and, pending disciplinary hearings, dismissal from the ranks of the ordained clergy. Niemöller, he reminded them, had been sent into forced retirement and the worst was still to come.46 The Reich educational ministry had dismissed Barth from his post in Bonn.47 The theological faculties were now peddling a corrupt Aryan faith. “Is it not obvious? They have not made people who love!”

  “It does nobody any good professing to believe in Christ without first being reconciled with his brother or sister—including the nonbeliever, his brethren of another race, the marginalized, or outcast,” he explained.48

  “[Even f]aith and hope as they enter into eternity are molded into the shape of love. In the end everything must become love,” said Bonhoeffer. “Perfection’s name is love.”49

  He would finally be introduced to George Bell on November 21, 1933. The bishop of Chichester was one of Britain’s most respected ecumenists, and though Bonhoeffer had heard him speak at a 1932 ecumenical conference in Geneva—earlier that year Bell had been elected president of the Universal Christian Council for Life and Work—the two had never met.50 Nevertheless, Bonhoeffer had been so impressed by Bell’s address that he translated, with the help of his students Elisabeth Reinke and Berta Schulze, the bishop’s Brief Sketch of the Church of England into German. In Bell Bonhoeffer perceived a kindred spirit and a likely ally for the Confessing Church: earlier in the fall, Bell, on behalf of the Church of England, had formally protested the German Protestant Church’s acceptance of the Aryan paragraph.51

  Despite differences—Bell at forty-eight was a “sagacious, broadminded catholic Anglican,” while Bonhoeffer, twenty-seven, was a fastidious neo-orthodox Berlin Lutheran—their common commitment to the ecumenical church brought them together. And as in so many of Bonhoeffer’s friendships, there was also a shared love of music and theater. Bell had composed several hymns in the Anglican songbook, including a well-known anthem of Christian unity: “Christ Is the King! O Friends, Rejoice.” As dean of Canterbury Cathedral from 1925 to 1929, Bell launched the Canterbury Arts Festival, which, funded by the church trust, would go on to commission T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. In time, the two churchmen would discover further commonalities. Both, it turned out, were born on February 4, and each had lost an older brother in the Great War.52

  Their meeting in Chichester on November 21, 1933, marked the beginning of an intense friendship, Bonhoeffer coming to regard Bell as his most loyal British ally in the Kirchenkampf, and Bell relying on Bonhoeffer as a trustworthy source on the situation in Germany.53 Things there were going from bad to worse. A week earlier, on November 13, 1933, in the Berlin Sports Palace, the German Christian Faith Movement had staged what turned out to be a spectacular and grotesque stadium crusade for the soul of the Aryan nation. The message of Teutonic religiosity had never before enjoyed such wide exposure. Nor had it ever been so perversely enunciated.54

  In addition to the audience of twenty thousand members, there was a contingent of foreign journalists. Before this overflow crowd, Reinhold Krause, leader of the Nazi Party in Berlin, derided the Old Testament as a book about miserly Jews, pimps, and cattle dealers that should be ripped out of the Bible and mentioned only as a foil representing a tyrannized faith.55 Hymns, liturgy, and preaching must, Krause said in his keynote address, serve and quicken the spirit of pure Germanism. He demanded that the cross be removed from churches and that the colorful banners that draped church halls and sanctuaries, those marking feasts in the Christian calendar, be replaced by the red and black of swastikas. The Aryan paragraph must be “implemented everywhere without exception,” he said, and all traces of “Jewish influences” purged from the Christian religion. Included among those texts requiring such radical redactions were the writings of the “Jew Rabbi,” Paul of Tarsus.56

  Despite the general enthusiasm for the Führerprinzip in the Sports Palace, the huffy Krause, a former high school teacher, delivered a screed so unremitting in its raw anti-Semitic virulence that even some German Christians walked out in disgust. The night would prove a colossal diplomatic imbroglio for Hitler’s church sycophants, and Hitler lashed out, promptly relieving Krause of his duties. Though the Führer may have credited the sentiment, such raging animus on the world stage was not what was wanted for the capital preparing to host the 1936 Olympic Games. Repudiated even by Müller and other German Christians, Krause, in his bitterness, would form an organization called the German People’s Church Movement. This body would take the Deutsche Christen mission of reconciling Christianity and Nazism to new, hitherto unimagined extremes of heresy, with its sole thesis that a pure German faith “means the end of the Christian church.”57 Krause’s group would soon align itself with Wilhelm Hauer’s German Faith Movement, in which a Teutonic-Hindu concoction of Aryanism would replace Christianity as the German Volk’s proper religion.

  As a further consequence of such perverse extremism, the German Christian movement temporarily lost momentum among ordinary Germans, and the Confessing Church saw its membership soar to six thousand by the end of the year. But the dissenters’ position would never again be as strong.

  Müller and his German Christian crew were embarrassed but hardly vanquished by Krause’s Sports Palace harangue. Redoubling his efforts to win back Hitler’s trust, the Reich bishop would again prove his excellence as a lackey. In a bold and devious move, he consolidated the Evangelical Youth Ministry and the Hitler Youth, effectively turni
ng every organization for young Protestant youth into a chapter of the Hitlerjugend. Hitler would be pleased with Müller’s skillful implementation of this delicate maneuver, which, in fact, had been the Führer’s brainchild.

  The historian Doris Bergen, whose work on the “twisted cross” of Nazi religion has cast a penetrating light on the shadowy German Christian movement, once noted that the quest for racial purity was not simply a matter of ecclesial housecleaning, nor was it a mere rhetorical strategy. “Members of the movement acted on their words,” Bergen observes, “and in the context of a brutal anti-Semitic state, those actions took on terrible significance.… Through their request for an anti-Jewish church, the German Christians endorsed, imitated, and profited from the crimes of the Third Reich.”58

  The Stuttgart-based Deutsche Theologie had been recently launched as the mouthpiece of the Nazi theologians, with a distinguished editorial board including such scholars as Hermann Wolfgang Beyer, Heinrich Bornkamm, Karl Fezer, Friedrich Gogarten, Emanuel Hirsch, and Gerhard Kittel. A special issue on Martin Luther had appeared in November.59 The editors did not state as their purpose the promotion of Nazi theology. Actually, in contrast to the vitriol of Krause and an emerging neo-pagan faction their mission now seemed conservative—saving time-honored Lutheran practices from the twin toxins of popular rage and dissident church protest. Their aim was to create a safe home for traditionalists within the mercurial Reich Church.

  For the short term at least, Müller not only survived the Sports Palace debacle but emerged a hardened and more cunning leader of the Reich Church. Fortified in this way, he next set his sights directly on the Confessing Church and its brash young spokesman in England. Indeed, far from being the wilderness in which Barth had imagined Bonhoeffer to be wandering, London would equip the young pastor with a host of new relationships and resources that would make him a much greater thorn in the side of the Reich Church. By the summer of 1934, support for the dissenting church among the German congregations of England would be consolidated, and Bonhoeffer would skillfully use his influence in ecumenical circles to frame the Kirchenkampf as a choice between the true church (the Confessing Church) and the cult of the Antichrist (the German Christians). But he would first have to contend with the angry clerics manning the bishopric in Berlin.