Bonhoeffer, for his part, felt an affinity with Kleist-Retzow from the start. He appreciated her high-born Prussian sensibility, her forthrightness, and her fierce independence.11 A woman of fervent and deliberate piety, Kleist-Retzow cared deeply about the renewal of the church and supported the neo-orthodox movement in German theology. After reading Barth’s “The Christian as Witness,” she said, her heart leapt with gladness. She relished her theological discussions with Bonhoeffer and was grateful for the concern he showed for her welfare. That he would grant an old lady a little room in his life seemed to her “a great gift.”
Like Bonhoeffer’s mother and many others in the German nobility, Kleist-Retzow saw through the artifice of the new regime and recognized the “decay at its roots.” Although she had close relations fighting on behalf of the Reich, she saw their service as the dutiful expression of a by-gone martial valor. As for herself, like Bonhoeffer’s grandmother, Kleist-Retzow would, if necessary, readily defy the orders of the “brown demons filling the streets.”12
BONHOEFFER AND HIS NEW AUDI
But it was faith, not birthright, from which she drew her strength. She be-lieved firmly in a church of the pure gospel and that “suffering is victory in faith.” Over the next two years, that conviction would be tested: she would lose her son-in-law and all four grandsons on the Russian front.13 Her only daughter she would lose to the Nazis, after the girl became a virulent anti-Semite during her studies in Berlin.
By late June of 1935, the Emergency Pastors’ Seminary, or simply Finkenwalde, was suitably restored, now resembling a hunting lodge, a more-than-comfortable home for the young director, his twenty-three charges, and Peter Onnasch, the son of the regional church superintendent, who would serve as general administrator.14 Bonhoeffer decorated the front entry hall with reproductions of Albrecht Dürer’s four apostles and “a simple but beautiful chandelier.” He also hung his beloved “brassaro” there, the “wonderful old Spanish portrait of Christ” that he had purchased at the monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial during his Barcelona pastorate, the simplicity of the image always drawing him back into the sixteenth century.
He kept the original window curtains. The dining room came to resemble a monastic refectory, with two massive wooden tables and a podium for the lectio, the ancient monastic practice that Bonhoeffer introduced to these young Protestant men under the less papish guise of a pleasing mealtime ritual (still it elicited a smattering of complaints). Bonhoeffer made the common room the building’s “crowning glory.” In this spacious salon, giving onto the garden, the “brothers” conversed, played records on his gramophone, sang hymns, and, following an old Bonhoeffer family rubric, performed skits and staged musicales.15 For these, there was live music; Bonhoeffer had succeeded in securing the donation of not one but two grand pianos. “The times when Bonhoeffer and a student sat down together to play a piano concerto,” Albrecht Schönherr, one of the seminarians, recalled, “were among the highlights of our life together.”16
Studies were conducted in groups of three. The little chambers with views of the garden, formerly used as bedrooms, were now equipped with writing desks, shelves, and chairs for this purpose. As for sleep, twenty-five cots were arranged in two rows in the large bunkroom. Bonhoeffer kept a private room above the garage with a view of the slope to the Oder Estuary.17
The first session at Finkenwalde began on August 26, 1935, and would continue through the second week of October. For those who had never heard Bonhoeffer speak, and even those who had known him at Friedrich-Wilhelms University (about half the class), his lectures at Finkenwalde came as a revelation. The students soon understood that “they were not there simply to learn new techniques of preaching and instruction” but as initiates into a new manner of being a Christian. Dissent and resistance, they were taught, required spiritual nourishment: prayer, Bible study, and meditation on the essential matters to expand the moral imagination. Bonhoeffer, whose insatiable hunger for intimate fellowship had led him to this lovely tract of land in upper Pomerania, now made community his art, with beauty and discipline as complementary elements. By design, each day would begin and end in quiet meditation. The brethren would rise and proceed in silence to the dining room for prayers; there, in the early-morning light, they would sit until God had spoken some word for the day into their hearts—or until a half hour had passed. Then morning praises were sung. After hymns, the men read antiphonally from the Psalter. There followed a reading from the New Testament, and prayers, sometimes from the prayer book, otherwise extemporized. Morning worship concluded with another hymn, after which, upholding the Benedictine taciturnitas, the men would return to their bunk room in silence to make their beds and “put their things in order.”
After breakfast, devotional exercises began, with two or three men sharing a room, each in his own carrel. For the first half of this period, they were to meditate on scripture. Bonhoeffer instructed them to center their thoughts for an entire week on a single passage, not for some purpose of exegesis—as would have been expected in the universities—or even for homiletic inspiration, but “to discover what the verses had to say” in the quiet of the morning. “Is there not in these repetitions of the same thought,” Bonhoeffer said, “the tremendous suggestion that every word of prayer must penetrate to a depth of the heart accessible only through ceaseless iteration?”18
“We were to pray over it, to think of our life in its light,” one student recalled, “and to use it as a basis for intercession on behalf of our brethren, our families, and all whom we knew to be in special need or difficulty.” Only then, in the late morning, did the men begin the day’s academic work, assembling in the dining room for lectures and seminars. Bonhoeffer’s assignments were unlike any they had been given before. “Listen to what the formularies of the sixteenth century mean for us in the twentieth,” instructed one of the lessons. Or: “By way of an incisive and thoroughgoing exegesis of the opening chapters of the Book of Acts, reflect on what God wills and hopes for his church.” Another: “Why is it that a Christianity expressing itself only in the spiritual realm can never be thought obedient to Christ’s summons to discipleship?” Half the answer was to understand that these were not really subjective exercises; the theological turn to life required distinct interpretive skills and rhetorical effects best achieved in preaching, but there was only one right answer. Bonhoeffer asked the students to submit drafts of sermons, which he read carefully, subjecting each “to searching but brotherly criticism.” He then used their drafts for group discussions on the proper role of preaching and instruction in a dissident church.
Bonhoeffer did not shy away from offering his own sermons as exemplars of the genre. Preaching meant proclaiming the Word in the clear and measured exposition of scripture. His own idiom, he felt, had evolved to the point of banishing every trace of rhetorical manipulation. With the calculated deceit of Hitler’s histrionics saturating the airwaves, truth’s answer demanded simplicity. Bonhoeffer preached from a deep well of refined erudition, and he would not let his voice overrun thought. He never told stories or offered anecdotes. “In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, [his sermons] were extraordinarily impressive,” Schönherr recalled. “There was not one word too many. Only the matter itself was spoken, sometimes in such a compressed way that what he had to say seemed almost forced out.”19
After morning studies, the brothers had a half hour of free time before assembling in the chapel for song. Few shared Bonhoeffer’s passion for music—many were musically illiterate—but they all participated in the singing. Bonhoeffer gave them no choice. Music was the theological language par excellence. “The hymns of the ancient church, of the Reformers, of the Bohemian brethren,” the songs of those “who had lived and suffered through the Thirty Years’ War,” especially those written by Paul Gerhardt, they “all came alive for us,” Wolf-Dieter Zimmermann said, “and we felt them to be our own. They mirrored our situation, they echoed our praise, they voiced our petitions, they ar
ticulated our repentance. In this group experience the church became once again a living reality for us, without boundaries of time or place, and we became increasingly conscious of being her members, men committed to her service, come what might.”20
An unstructured interlude between lunch and teatime would be followed by the homework period in the late afternoon, dinner, and—on most weekday evenings—special lectures and topical conversations. Bonhoeffer introduced the rite of compline, the prayers before sleep, as the bookend of the monastic day; held at nine thirty, the evening office took “much the same form” as morning prayers. The hour as described in the Roman Breviary, which Bonhoeffer had likely read, was typically divided this way: the introduction, the psalmody (often accompanied by anthems), the hymn, the capitulum, the response, the gospel canticle, the prayer, and the benediction. After the blessing, Bonhoeffer instructed the brothers to maintain the “great silence” until bedtime, “for God’s word was to be the last of the day just as it had been the first.”21
Often described as an illegal or underground action, the seminary at Finkenwalde nevertheless operated for a time without state opposition. The regional church that supported the school, the Old Prussian Union, included many of the congregations least hospitable to the German Christians. With the university faculties thoroughly nazified, such seminaries—especially Finkenwalde—became remarkably fertile centers of confessional theology, while they lasted. A “younger generation of theologians,” wrote Bonhoeffer hopefully, longed for something more than slogans and abstractions, more than new wine in old wineskins. “The damage done to the credibility of our preaching by our life and by our [hesitation and] uncertainty,” Bonhoeffer said, “compels us to think again and to embark upon new practical ventures.” The church having betrayed its mission, its only renewal was in a return to first things. His hope was that Finkenwalde would flourish as a place marrying the theological quest for “concrete, down-to-earth life together” and the “common regard for the commandments.”22
For one or two semesters, Finkenwalde students took courses in practical ministry. In addition to biblical studies and preaching, practical ministry included instruction on performing baptisms, weddings, and funerals; visiting parishioners in hospitals and at home; as well as administering church budgets and programs—all the nuts and bolts of parish life. Years earlier Bonhoeffer had made no secret of his disdain for the requirement that all university students spend a term in a preacher’s seminary. He even succeeded in avoiding it himself, in recognition of “his previous scholarly training, evidenced especially in his postdoctoral thesis.”23 Now, however, he could see its value.
While Finkenwalde operated within the ecclesial structures of the German Protestant Church, the decision to study with Bonhoeffer carried real risks. Only two months after classes began, the Old Prussian Union Council decided that the Confessing Church might call itself a “confessional movement” or “confessional front,” but it did not have the legitimate status of Kirche (church). Thus study with Bonhoeffer became a badge of dissent, and in the eyes of the church authorities it was to mark oneself out as a “radical fanatic” and a disloyal German. Such pastors might sometimes be called “Dahlemites,” after the posh Berlin suburb of Dahlem, indeed Martin Niemöller’s parish, where a coterie of dissenting ministers had defied the Reich Church and proclaimed the Confessing Church the one true Lutheran church in Germany. Dahlem was also known popularly as a neighborhood of American expatriates and diplomats. Consul Fulton, for example, among others at the American embassy, was a member of the Berlin-Dahlem Lutheran congregation.24 Thus the better informed among the parents of Finkenwalde seminarians would suffer “considerable anxiety” to see their sons depart for Pomerania, even if the family was not political or expressly disenchanted with the Reich. Finkenwalde would be unable—and little wished—to escape notice as the dispenser of a rival theology and instruction in a time when the church was a captive and instrument of the Nazi state.
The pedagogical structure was vital to the formation of the dissenting consciousness. “The next generation of pastors, these days, ought to be trained entirely in church-monastic schools,” Bonhoeffer told his Union Seminary friend Erwin Sutz, “where the pure doctrine, the Sermon on the Mount, and worship are taken seriously—none of which are at the university and cannot be under the present circumstances.” The avoidance of the Nazi contagion required nothing short of hermetic quarantine. Amid this winter of godlessness it was only in such a monastic greenhouse that the “pure doctrine” of the Sermon on the Mount could take root.
“In my days at a German university,” recalled the Finkenwalde student Paul F. W. Busing, “no one took any responsibility for nurturing the spiritual life.”25
There weren’t many alternatives. The preachers’ seminaries had all but vanished by 1935. Pastors were now trained almost exclusively in the university faculties, which had become bastions of Nazi propaganda. But as Bonhoeffer had been disillusioned to observe, even before the upheavals of 1933, the spiritual disciplines had never figured prominently in German theological training, the contemplative dimensions of Christian life having long been “confined to conventicles or sects.” This attenuation in concern for the soul was in some sense an ineluctable outcome of the Reformation and the Enlightenment’s religious legacy.
Among the twenty-three in Finkenwalde’s first class was a slender, gentle young man, a minister’s son named Eberhard Bethge. Aside from those who had taken classes with Bonhoeffer in Berlin—about half of the first class—most other Finkenwaldeans knew little if anything of the Berlin theologian. This included Bethge, who hailed from a rural backwater in Saxony. He had studied at Wittenberg for a time, but, having been expelled for voicing support for the Confessing Church, he needed to complete his ordination process elsewhere.26 Finkenwalde was one of his few options.27
Their first afternoon together had been a festive affair. The day was bright and clear, the conversation anticipating the new semester. As the students gathered on the lawn for the opening reception, Bethge asked one of his new classmates when Pastor Bonhoeffer was expected to arrive. The student smiled and nodded in the direction of a tanned, blond-haired fellow in a white linen suit. “That’s Bonhoeffer,” he said, “the sporty dresser.” Bonhoeffer may be the only monk ever so described by his brothers.
At twenty-nine, Bonhoeffer was three years older than Bethge, but he looked younger. Bethge introduced himself and the two men chatted briefly, sipping white wine on the summer lawn. Within a few weeks they had become inseparable, and Bonhoeffer would think of Bethge as “my daring, trusting spirit.” In the company of other acquaintances, Bonhoeffer’s conversation was narrower than it had been in years past, ranging mostly between the theological and the political, especially the Kirchenkampf. Everything was different with Bethge. Bonhoeffer had had intense friendships before—with Jean Lasserre, Erwin Sutz, and Franz Hildebrandt, for instance—but this was a closeness unlike any other.
In his unfinished novel, Bonhoeffer describes the camaraderie of Christoph and Ulrich, two persons who had grown into such perfect union that they knew each other “down to the most minute detail of their behavior, opinions, interests, abilities, and innate characteristics.”28 Bonhoeffer had never felt such a bond with a female, with the exception of his twin, Sabine. But her marriage had relegated her to the ranks of those near him whom he nevertheless held at a certain distance. This unguarded closeness was something different, and felt exhilarating. Some seminarians, indeed, wondered whether Bonhoeffer had fallen in love with the boyish country pastor. At times, as one might expect, it became a source of resentment among the brethren that Bethge had become the “ausgesprochener Liebling des Chefs”—the chief’s clear favorite. When one student joked that Bethge had become the “representative of the Führer,” he did not have Hitler in mind. The unflattering epithet arose in part because Bonhoeffer insisted that no brother ever speak of a fellow ordinand—or of the chief himself—in his absence, and “i
f this should happen, that he, the ordinand or Bonhoeffer, be told about it immediately afterwards.”29
Eight years later, after one of their last evening visits while Bonhoeffer was in prison, he would write of “the advantage of having nearly every day for eight years experienced every event together, discussed every thought,” for then “one needs only a second to know how things are for the other, and actually even that second is unnecessary.”30
In Finkenwalde’s music room Bonhoeffer played piano accompaniment to Bethge’s delicate tenor. He taught Bethge, a son of the manse, to love Chopin and Brahms. In return, Bethge inspired Bonhoeffer, scion of the Bildungsbürgertum—the humanist haute bourgeoisie—to appreciate the choral music of the Reformation. Heinrich Schütz, Bethge’s favorite church composer, would become Bonhoeffer’s as well. And by the end of the school year, Bonhoeffer asked Bethge to become his confessor—another Protestant adaptation of Catholic sacrament, whereby brothers gained a clearer conscience, if not absolution. After the Gestapo closed Finkenwalde on September 28, 1937, until shortly before Bonhoeffer’s arrest in April 1943, he and Bethge would remain together, when in Berlin sharing a bedroom in Bonhoeffer’s parents’ home on Marienburger Allee. They also kept a joint bank account, signed Christmas cards from “Dietrich and Eberhard,” fussed over gifts they gave together, planned elaborate vacations, and endured numerous quarrels. Karl and Paula Bonhoeffer, as well as their children and their families, kept any reservations they had about the duo to themselves, and soon welcomed “Herr Bethge” into the family circle.
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