Strange Glory

by Charles Marsh

  Bonhoeffer would worry, too, that his emphasis on the immediacy of action in following Jesus Christ proposed a hollowed-out version of the individual self. When Christ calls a person, he bids him to come and lose his worldly life to gain the life eternal. There is no reflection upon this invitation. And perhaps no such discipleship is to be found outside the gospels, in which those called leave their nets to follow Jesus and become fishers of men without a moment’s hesitation.47 The “vocabulary and perspective” of Bonhoeffer’s ideal thus banishes “all other modulations in and forms of theology,” refusing any other way of understanding the Christian faith in its essence.48

  Still, Bonhoeffer would stand by his ideal. These, he felt, were the right words spoken at the right time, when only a rare ardor and rectitude, an almost saintly support of suffering on the part of all the faithful, could save the church. For ultimately, what was at peril was not so many individual souls as the very body of Christ. In this sense, it was well to remember that “Discipleship … does not create constitutions and decrees, but brings human beings into relation with one another.”49 The promise for those who follow Christ is that “they will become members of the community of the cross.” They will become “people of the mediator, people linked together by the cross, and thus by a way that leads to suffering.” It is when the community is most in jeopardy that the cost exacted from the individual is greatest. Jesus goes ahead of his people to Jerusalem, and “those following him are overcome with amazement and fear at the way to which he has called them.” But they will go all the same.50

  Such were the conditions of what Bonhoeffer would call “costly grace,” the only kind one can seek when the world has become the desert. This desert world of costly grace he compares to Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion. What is most “beautiful” in the oratorio is that “all the music’s own beauty in and for itself is sacrificed, is ‘denied’ for the sake of Christ, that the music here only comes to itself through Jesus Christ and does not desire to be anything for itself but everything for Jesus Christ.” The “beauty” denied is “the true and only possible beauty” in the community of Christ.51 It delighted Bonhoeffer to learn that Bach sometimes wrote Jesu Juva and Soli Deo Gloria (“Jesus, help me” and “for the glory of God alone”) at the top of his manuscripts. Discipleship is creative participation in the glory of Christ and in his suffering. “To be called, to go forth and to sing a beautiful song—this is true christology!”

  Bonhoeffer celebrated his thirtieth birthday on February 4, 1936, in the company of Bethge and the other brethren, as he had come to call his students. Around a roaring fire in the great hall, he told stories of his journeys abroad. He spoke for the first time of his friendship with Franklin Fisher, the black man who’d been his classmate in New York and was now a pastor in Atlanta. Fisher, Bonhoeffer confessed in this intimate setting, had guided him into shared life with a people in whom one sensed “the integrity of unaffected creativity, born of a mysterious combination of suffering and humour.”52 It was an unfamiliar and radiant manner of being human that Fisher had revealed to him, and Bonhoeffer said he could never forget Fisher’s final plea that he make the story of that people known in Germany. He played his recordings of Negro hymns and taught the brothers his favorites: “Go Down Moses,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and “There Is a Balm in Gilead.” “We were so joyful and so earnest, and focused,” Wilhelm Rott recalled tenderly. Rott had arrived recently in Finkenwalde to serve as a kind of academic dean, coordinating curriculum and study groups, and covering Bonhoeffer’s classes when he was away. He would be among the last to come and among the first to go.

  There were times when “a unifying arc swung from music and play to quietude and prayer,” when the seminarians understood the importance of the “innermost concentration” for which they were being prepared. And these were the best of times.

  It was in the fullness of shared life with the Finkenwalde brethren that Bonhoeffer broke off an epistolary friendship with his third cousin, Elizabeth Zinn, whom he had met seven years earlier in Berlin and who bore a striking resemblance to his twin sister, Sabine. In fact, Zinn had written a doctoral dissertation under Wilhelm Lütgert, the same scholar of German Idealism who directed Bonhoeffer’s habilitation thesis on the concepts of act and being in contemporary theology. Zinn wrote on the eighteenth-century Swedenborgian F. C. Oetinger, who despite strong theosophical leanings remained in full standing as a Lutheran pastor and church superintendent.53 It has been reported by some biographers that Bonhoeffer and Zinn had begun discussing marriage in their letters and even had a brief engagement, although there are no extant letters that support this claim. What is certain, however, is that shortly after meeting Bethge and assembling the brethren in the monastic fellowship in Finkenwalde, Bonhoeffer felt decidedly more drawn toward “uncompromising” friendships than to marriage.

  Determined though Bonhoeffer was to promote engagement with the world, the monastic life inevitably and by design has the effect of making the world seem far away, at least intermittently. So it might have seemed, when on May 1, 1935, a scant eight months after the death of President Hindenburg and Hitler’s consolidation of dictatorial powers, the führer announced Germany’s rearmament at Berlin’s Tempelhof airfield. Far from recognizing the news as further evidence of a threat engulfing their country, many of the men at Finkenwalde, like most Germans, glowed with pride to hear the news of Germany’s reemergence as a military power. The “shame of Versailles” would finally be lifted. When, after Hitler’s speech, Bonhoeffer asked whether a Christian could object to war, there ensued a heated debate.

  Their remove from the moral reality must have given Bonhoeffer to believe that a huge amount of work still lay ahead. “The majority of brothers would not accept the idea of Christians refusing to serve in war.”54 In fact, the ordinands had joined Bonhoeffer’s school unaware of his pacifism, which they would discover only through these developments. As traditional Lutherans most of them would continue to believe that Christians were obliged to serve their country in war, even if the government had fallen into dictatorship. While they opposed the Nazi regime, they saw no reason for the church to be unpatriotic. Most saw their community’s political opposition as a potential moderating force, not a hotbed of treasonous sentiment, which could only rob it of legitimacy. From this perspective, pacifism posed a threat to the viability of the opposition.

  In July 1936, Pastor Johannes Pecina and Willi Brandenburg, comrades in the Confessing Church, were among the first of the nearly one hundred of its ministers to be arrested under a law criminalizing all activities associated with non-“assimilated” (non-Nazi) churches and organizations. The first Finkenwaldean to be arrested was Wilhelm Rott, the Tübingen- and Berlin-trained theologian two years younger than Bonhoeffer. In an essay published that same year, “What is ‘Positive Christianity,’ ” he had criticized Nazi ideology forthrightly but had limited his objections to the treatment of Jewish Christians. That was enough to land him in prison.

  Several months earlier, on December 1, 1935, a front-page story in the Stettin evening paper had reported an ominous development: the chief of the SS and Minister of the Interior Heinrich Himmler had signed a decree making “all examinations held before courts of the Confessing Church invalid, all training centers set up by that church subject to closure, and all participants in them liable to punishment.” The arrests to follow marked an escalation of threat and action against the dissenting pastorate.55 By extension they were also an announcement that any personal affiliation with Bonhoeffer, the church’s most visible figure, was tantamount to treason. Prayers of intercession for the arrested pastors became a daily ritual at Finkenwalde. Bonhoeffer would travel frequently with Bethge, and other brothers as well, to visit the prisoners in the Sonnenburg concentration camp near Küstrin in the Neumark, undeterred by the evident fact that the net was beginning to tighten. His brethren had by now realized, of course, that there was no way of being a patriotic dissenting churchman.


  On the morning in January 1936 of Rott’s release after several months in jail, Bonhoeffer and Bethge sat in the Audi outside the gates, waiting. As soon as his colleague, haggard but composed, reached the car, Bonhoeffer presented him with tickets for a performance of Don Giovanni taking place that night in Berlin. Rott had enough time to return with them to Finkenwalde to pick up a suit of clothes and an overnight bag. The three would spend a night on the town to celebrate his freedom. Rott recalled that on the journey Bonhoeffer spoke to him in grim terms about the political crisis, but during dinner at Rheinhardt’s following the performance at the Kroll Opera House, the conversation was only of happy subjects: music and theology and the delights of the great city.

  On August 1, 1936, the games of the 11th Olympiad opened in Berlin. Berlin had won the bid to play host over Barcelona in 1931, when Hitler’s intentions were still open to speculation. Now the Games would be the führer’s opportunity to show the risen German state to the whole world. With the help of his propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, he spared no expense in projecting the illusion of a free, Christian nation.56 The new Olympic stadium, along with nine additional sporting venues, were constructed at a staggering cost of twenty-five million marks; a hundred million marks more was spent transforming the city into a gleaming new Rome, with elevated train lines, subways, and even new streets built throughout the western half to ease traffic around the center of action.

  The complex of event sites throughout northern Berlin-Grunewald would be called the Reichssportfeld. But the jewel in the crown was the Olympiastadion, created by Werner and Walter March according to Hitler’s exacting specifications. With seating for 110,000, it was the largest sports arena ever constructed, and featured an imperial chamber for Hitler and guest dignitaries. Lesser mortals entered through a phalanx of brawny statues carved by the Nazi sculptors Josef Thorak and Arno Breker.

  Also in Roman fashion, a ten-mile “Via Triumphalis” led from Alexanderplatz along Unter den Linden into the Reichssportfeld. It was the route along which the Olympic torch would travel its final miles from Greece into the German capital. The torch, which the ingenuity of German chemists ensured would continue burning through any amount of wind and rain, was borne by a golden-haired Berliner named Schlingen. As he approached the Olympiastadion to ignite the Olympic Flame within, men of the SS and the SA raised their arms in salute.

  With the intent of camouflaging its racist policies, the German government removed its most visible anti-Jewish banners and encouraged the compliant local press to tone down their rhetoric during the two weeks of the Olympiad.57 So while iconography of the Nazi state remained visible around Berlin, the cruder and more explicit public markers of the regime’s animus were temporarily warehoused. In anticipation of the international guests, the yellow benches in the Tiergarten that signaled an acceptable place for Jews to sit had been repainted, and public notices prohibiting Jews to enter public buildings were removed. Members of Nazi organizations were told momentarily to suspend anti-Jewish conduct and displays. This meant a hiatus, too, for popular racist publications, such as Der Stürmer, Julius Streicher’s weekly, with its vicious screeds and cartoons of strong-jawed SA men crushing “reptiles, rodents, vampires and spiders identified by Stars of David” and illustrations of “Jewish-looking” men, with grotesque physiognomies, stalking blond Aryan women.58 As to the actual population, the city made every effort to remove from its streets anyone deemed unsightly.59

  At the same time, organizers were aware that many visitors would be keen to sample the city’s famous sex clubs, cabarets, and bathhouses. Although most such establishments had been shut down as vestiges of Weimar decadence and the degeneracy of certain racial types, the restrictions were temporarily lifted, putting, among other unloved Berliners, about seven thousand prostitutes back to work. Himmler even suspended Paragraph 175 of the Nazi penal code, which criminalized homosexuality, allowing once-popular gay bars to reopen for the Games. “We must be more charming than the Parisians, more easygoing than the Vietnamese, more vivacious than the Romans, more cosmopolitan than London, and more practical than New York,” the magazine Der Angriff explained.60 Applied to fashion and etiquette, these cultural aspirations gave women the freedom to wear hemlines five centimeters higher than normal.

  David Clay Large writes in his history of the city of Berlin,

  Some foreign reporters remained skeptical about the show of civility they witnessed during the games.… William Shirer, who covered the Olympics for CBS News, understood that the Nazis had “put up a very good front for the general visitors.” Most of the foreign press, however, were taken in by the friendly atmosphere and organizational virtuosity. Both the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune spoke of a warm welcome surpassing anything the Americans had ever experienced at an Olympiad. Frederic T. Birchall of the Times, praised the stadium as a structure “built for the ages, revealing the far-sighted vision” of its creators. The British Daily Mail declared that no festival could be more splendid than the one taking place in Berlin, and gushed that visitors would find the city “magical.” The World of Sports, also British, proposed that if visitors could forget their “prejudices” and the “rumors” about Nazi Germany, they would take away an experience of “lasting good” based on “the friendship of the sporting youth of the world.” Even journalists from France, which had been shocked most by Germany’s recent remilitarization of the Rhineland, expressed admiration for the cordiality of the Olympic hosts, noting with particular gratitude that Berliners had shouted “Vive la France!” on the French team’s arrival.61

  As part of the campaign to project an image of openness and toleration, the Reich Church invited Bonhoeffer to preach in an enormous tent erected near the Olympic stadium and to give a half-hour lecture on “the inner life of the German Protestant Church since Reformation.” “They want to publish a booklet with our pictures for propaganda reasons,” Bonhoeffer told Bethge, who would not join him in Berlin until the second week. “I think this is ridiculous and dishonorable and I will definitely not send them anything.”

  Despite abominating the regime’s transparent efforts at image control, even Bonhoeffer could not help feeling genuinely excited about the Olympic Games themselves. Over the years, he had traveled abroad frequently for the solace of unfamiliar spaces, to satisfy his craving for new and diverse worlds. Now his hometown was to be for a time the crossroads of the world. He bought tickets for track and field events, and as a surprise for two Finkenwalde students who had never been on an airplane, made arrangements for a chartered flight from Stettin to Berlin. His parents’ new home on Marienburger Allee, fifteen minutes on foot from the Reichssportfeld, would make the perfect base for his band. Bonhoeffer happily filled his days with sporting events and all the related festivities in the Olympic village and beyond.

  But he missed the most talked-about events of the 1936 Olympics, when Jesse Owens, a black sprinter born in Oakville, Alabama, defeated the German Luz Long in the long jump, on his way to collecting an unimaginable four gold medals. Regarding reports that Hitler had refused to acknowledge Owens’s victories and shake his hand, Owens replied, “When I passed the Chancellor he arose, waved his hand at me, and I waved back at him.” Owens denied that Hitler snubbed him. “It was FDR who snubbed me,” he said. “The president didn’t even send me a telegram.” Hitler, to be fair, did not congratulate any winning athlete.

  In every way, the Reich was the greatest victor of the Olympiad. Despite Owens’s haul, the host nation captured the most medals—eighty-nine in all, including thirty-three gold: useful proof of Aryan superiority—and the excellent organization and festive atmosphere were universally praised. Forty-nine national teams had traveled to Berlin, more than for any previous Games, and the major events were broadcast live internationally—another first in Olympic history. Frederick T. Birchall wrote for the New York Times that the 1936 Games had returned Germany “to the fold of nations” and restored a human face to its malign
ed citizens.62 The whole world owed Hitler and the German people a debt of gratitude. The U.S. team—including its eighteen black athletes, who had been welcomed by the home crowds with polite applause—came in a respectable second in the collection of medals, taking home fifty-six in all. Although Jews and other non-Aryans had been banned from competing for Germany, nine Jewish athletes from other countries won medals, including five Hungarian Jews. Seven Jewish men represented the American team in Berlin. “Hitler is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, political leaders in the world today,” Birchall gushed in his Times piece, earning the right to the gold medal for hyperbole, “and the Germans themselves are a wholly peaceful people who deserve the best the world can give them.”

  Bonhoeffer’s summer rehabilitation was short-lived. Although he had declined the invitation to preach, he did agree to give a lecture at the Church of Paul the Apostle on August 5. He was surprised to be met by an overflow audience, to whom he proceeded to speak with perilous candor of the Confessing Church, Finkenwalde, and the German church crisis. The talk was well received by the many international guests present and promptly condemned by Reich officials.

  On the day Owens sprinted to his second gold medal, Bonhoeffer heard from Erich Seeberg, the Nazi dean of the theology faculty at Friedrich-Wilhelms—and son of Reinhold Seeberg, Bonhoeffer’s dissertation adviser, who had died in 1935—that his adjunct position had been terminated. His affiliation with the university was finally severed. But even recognizing the decision as a predictable consequence of his outspokenness—an inevitable cost of discipleship—he panicked. Perhaps it was the shock of losing his remaining ties to the academic guild: he would no longer be able to think of himself as a member of the professoriate, however tenuous that relationship had always been. Until now, he was not merely a teacher of humble parsons in an unaccredited seminary, but also a controversial figure in the grand old faculty that had once included Adolf von Harnack and Friedrich Schleiermacher. His conspicuous marginality there had been of use to him. Now he feared becoming irrelevant. On the basis of what status could he now claim a public voice?