Strange Glory

by Charles Marsh

  The closing of the doors at Unter der Linden happened with a distinct want of ceremony. The termination letter was drafted and signed by Bengt Seeberg, a junior faculty member and as rabid a National Socialist as his father, the dean. On behalf of the student council, he asked the university “to consider the legal situation and remove Bonhoeffer for causing disorder in connection with the Confessing Church.” Copies were submitted to the rector and the dean; a note was placed in Bonhoeffer’s file. The case was closed.

  No one protested the decision; in fact, most faculty members seemed unaware that Bonhoeffer had even returned from London. The 250 kilometers between Finkenwalde and Berlin was not conducive to collegial ties, though Bonhoeffer had hardly been inclined before to socialize with the sorry characters now holding the faculty’s distinguished chairs. In fact, his extensive correspondence from these years does not mention the name of a single colleague.

  The Reich Church’s withdrawal of Bonhoeffer’s authority to teach had even broader consequences than the end of his adjunct post: it barred him from any faculty, seminary, or institution supported by a church. This prohibition included Finkenwalde, since the seminary remained under the general auspices of the state church. It was at this point that Bonhoeffer’s supervision of the training there became an illegal activity.

  Bethge had been away on a church assignment for most of July, called back to his home in Saxony to help resolve “a bitter struggle between the Confessing congregation in Helbra and its German Christian–led church council.”63 “I miss you often,” Bonhoeffer wrote to him on July 29, 1936. “Receiving your letters always makes me very happy!”

  In Bethge’s absence, Bonhoeffer put together a schedule of speaking engagements and ecumenical conferences on which he hoped his friend would join him, as a vacation for them both. He had already been invited to an ecumenical meeting in Chambry, France, by the Provisional Administration of the Confessing Church, and also to another event in Geneva.64 But the logistics were complicated. Bonhoeffer needed to arrange things so that Bethge’s presence as traveling companion and assistant would appear necessary. He wanted to show Bethge some of the places that had once brought him great happiness: “Switzerland or South Germany? Do you know Lake Constance?” he asked. “Or—dare I think about this—the Italian lakes?!”

  “The heart is more deceitful than anything else; and is desperately sick.… The semester,” he added, “is coming to an end, and I miss you often.”65

  But a series of awkward exchanges reveal some serious misunderstandings between them. Bonhoeffer had become, Bethge felt, a “demanding friend,” and their back-and-forth over travel details show how the friendship, ever more ambiguous and confusing, was affecting the other relationships each of them had.66

  Problems started when Bethge invited his cousin Gerhard Vibrans along without asking Bonhoeffer’s permission. Dietrich’s measured initial response could not disguise his profound dismay. “It wouldn’t be easy for three people,” he said. Even if he could borrow money from his parents to cover Bethge’s costs, he would not have enough for the cousin, not even if he drew upon the joint bank account he and Bethge had recently opened. “We are pretty much at the end [of that].”

  Then Bonhoeffer grew more plainly irritated. If Bethge insisted on bringing his cousin on a vacation clearly intended for the teacher and his student, then Bethge must explain to Vibrans in no uncertain terms that every consequent decision and change of plan would inevitably bring on more disputes and conflicts. It wouldn’t be a pleasant scene—“and you have to take the responsibility!”

  In any event, Vibrans would have to find his own accommodations. Bonhoeffer had no time for such details, particularly as he was starting to feel pressure about the upcoming conference. The sessions, he complained, would no doubt prove difficult and stressful, and he simply wanted his proven assistant with him.

  Had Bethge misread the offer?

  Whatever the case, Eberhard refused to withdraw the invitation to his cousin and even asked his younger brother Hans to come along as well. Bethge seemed intent on adding to their party. And so, seeing that his friend was of a mind not to be deterred, Bonhoeffer tried an appeal grounded in more prosaic concerns. “About the car,” he said, “the axle will be scraping along as it is with three people. It will be worse with four.… And then over the mountains!”67

  He reminded Bethge that he wanted to show him Italy, if only “for 2–3 days.” Bethge had appeared eager for that leg of the trip when it was first discussed. “But it will be much more complicated if we are a party of four,” Bonhoeffer said. “Maybe they can go with us to middle or south Germany. And then we pick them up again. The route back is via Hessen-Nassau, so we should meet them somewhere in the Frankfurt area.”

  Not to be overlooked either: the trip would also be “naturally somewhat noisier” with Hans along—but “I do not wish to stand in the way,” Bonhoeffer wrote, now resorting to perfect passive-aggressive rationality.

  Hans Bethge would eventually bow out for financial reasons. And so, faced now with the original intruder, Bonhoeffer tried to make the proposition as meager for him as possible. As he told Bethge, the nature of his conference duties would make Bethge’s presence at all events necessary, and there would be no place for Vibrans. If the cousin still cared to come along, he should plan to meet teacher and pupil sometime between the end of the conference and the start of their pure holiday time.

  When this was agreed, the clouds lifted: “I am happy that everything is working out,” Bonhoeffer said. “Now I am starting to look forward to Monday.” He apologized for creating “tremendous problems” for Hans and Vibrans, but he put it all down to an honest desire to avoid other difficulties, unnecessary as they were unforeseen.

  He also reasserted their closeness with some friendly advice: “Regarding the dress-code: please take the light travel suit with the two pairs of pants, and also the blackish one. I don’t think you will need the blue one. But if it’s not uncomfortable for you, it doesn’t burden us in the car. I will take along a black one. A coat is not necessary [but I’ll bring one just in case]. If I find a second one, I will take it along for you. Otherwise we will wear the one in turns.”

  The Chambry conference would confirm all of Bonhoeffer’s worst fears about the ecumenical movement. With precious few exceptions, the church leaders chose “not to take sides and insisted that they would accept delegates from all adversaries in the church struggle, thus ending up with halfhearted resolutions that did little to clarify the church situation in Germany.” Uncharacteristically, Bonhoeffer remained silent throughout the conference, “lacking enthusiasm” for the debates, apparently exhausted and distressed by the rush of events.68

  It therefore came as a welcome relief, when, on August 25, he did take Bethge (without the cousin) to Italy, a tour that would end in Rome. “Once again entranced by St. Peter’s,” Bethge later wrote, “he sought to reveal the beauty of the magnificent building to his companion.” But seeing in all the Italian cities the martial posters boasting of victory in Abyssinia gave both men a grim foretaste of what was coming at home. Returning to Finkenwalde on September 13, Bonhoeffer was greeted with urgent administrative matters and the case of one critically ill student—whom he “nursed back to health with paternal efficiency,” Bethge recalled.69 For a month, Bonhoeffer’s prolific letter writing—to Bethge, of course, but to everyone else as well—came to a near standstill.70

  In 1937, Dr. Karl Bonhoeffer was Berlin’s preeminent neurologist and empirical psychiatrist, arguably the dean of the German psychiatric establishment. That same year, the Charity Hospital celebrated his silver jubilee as the director of the psychiatric clinic. He’d officially retired on April 1, 1936, but agreed to remain in place until a successor had been found. The occasion of his final lecture drew his three sons back to Berlin, along with the nation’s leading lights in neurology, psychiatry, and brain science. In a photograph taken shortly thereafter, Dr. Bonhoeffer, in his white lab co
at, is conversing with his colleagues as brother Karl-Friedrich and Bethge wait to speak with him, alongside Dietrich intently studying large diagrams of the human brain.

  That summer, Bonhoeffer gave his own last lectures at Finkenwalde. He spoke not of the mind but of the soul and its need for community. The lectures would become his most widely read book, a minor commercial success, published under the title Gemeinsames Leben (Life Together).71 But while still directing the seminary, he would be far too busy to convert his manuscripts into anything resembling a book; with Bethge’s assistance, that job would be finished some months after the Gestapo had shut down the community. During the effort, the two would stay in an empty house in Göttingen belonging to Sabine and her husband, Gerhard Leibholz. Gemeinsames Leben was written “in a single stretch of four short weeks in late September and October of 1938,” composed at a steady, even leisurely pace, but not without distractions. Bonhoeffer and Bethge both preferred to sleep late if they could; workdays began around eleven o’clock and ended in the midafternoon, with a nap. In the evenings, they attended concerts at the Kassel Music Festival.

  Now a devotional classic, Life Together would be widely translated, read, and studied as a introduction to the spiritual disciplines—at times even as an instructional manual for Christian community. Read in its historical context, however, the five short chapters represent a poignant meditation on all that had been lost, its aim to capture in narrative a lightning flash of eternity. Israel’s Diaspora has become the condition of Christ’s disciples. To follow Jesus is to live in exile, for Christ’s body is broken and scattered.72 The world is the wilderness in which the Christian is ordained to wander, from which there is no escape. This is humanity’s curse and promise: God’s people are dispersed into the farthest corners, but in each Jesus meets us as friend and fellow stranger.

  Life Together belongs to the genre of monastic literature that has its origins in the seventh-century Rule of Saint Benedict, but the book’s literal frame of reference is the experiment of Finkenwalde. Bonhoeffer recalls his far-flung brothers’ coming together, their daily life as one body, until their communion is broken, scattering them “like seed unto all the kingdoms of the earth.” The “clamorous desire for something more” inevitably turns the gift into a possession; the simple, fragile presence of the other is obliterated for the sake of a “dream world.” But “Christian brotherhood” is “not an ideal which we must realize”; it is “a reality created by God in Christ in which we may [only] participate.” The basis of genuine community is “the clear, manifest Word of God in Jesus Christ.”73 “God hates visionary dreaming!”

  KARL BONHOEFFER, FERDINAND SAUERBRUCH, DIETRICH BONHOEFFER, AND EBERHARD BETHGE, 1938

  Despite the book’s vivid sermonic prose and eventual popular resonance, the lectures at Finkenwalde were greeted with mixed reviews, some students finding them “laborious, not brilliant.”74 The young historian Wilhelm Niesel, who had not heard Bonhoeffer lecture since the 1933 Christology seminar, had taken the train up from Berlin. He expressed his surprise with “the dryness of style and effect.” The talks were forthright to a fault, if not slightly parochial. The circle had been drawn so tight that a theologian unacquainted with the experiment in Pomerania—the dissident Niesel, for example—felt out of place. He asked Bonhoeffer afterward whether so much concentration on spiritual things left any room for pleasure. What about the cinema, for instance? Bonhoeffer must have thought it odd, given his own well-attested inclination to leisure; he tried to reassure the visitor, who remained nevertheless “suspicious of so much ‘spiritualism.’ ”75

  Perhaps to prove his point, the next morning Bonhoeffer invited Niesel on a rowing expedition on the Oder Sound. He wanted him better to understand the strenuous tone of the lectures, and had an idea of how to make that happen. When the two rowers reached the far shore, Bonhoeffer led Niesel up a small hill to a clearing from which they could see in the distance a vast field and the “runways of a nearby squadron.” German fighter planes were taking off and landing, and soldiers moved hurriedly in purposeful patterns, like so many ants. Bonhoeffer spoke of a new generation of Germans in training, whose disciplines were formed “for a kingdom … of hardness and cruelty.” It would be necessary, he explained, to propose a superior discipline if the Nazis were to be defeated.

  “You have to be stronger than these tormentors that you find everywhere today,” said Major von Bremer in Bonhoeffer’s novel.76

  Rowing back across the lake in the afternoon, Niesel, now indeed more at ease, had an intriguing story of his own to tell. He recounted an afternoon nearly twenty years before, when the rowing club of his school in Friedrichswerder was resting outside the boathouse of the Kleiner Wannsee following afternoon practice. Most of the other clubs had also finished training for the day. As Niesel and his teammates were heading off for coffee at the nearby Kohlhasenbrück Restaurant, a loud commotion drew their attention to a boat manned by a crew of two, a boat not yet docked and spinning in circles. “Behind the helmsman,” Niesel said, “we saw the ‘keelson,’ a fat boy in a white sweater.”77 After a flurry of desperate measures (and scattered laughter on the shore), the boat appeared finally to be making landfall when everything went awry. The two on board, unable to jump to the pier, lost their balance, falling backward into the water, and the boat capsized. Niesel asked Bonhoeffer whether he knew anything about “that [soggy] little heap in the white sweater,” who had talked his way into the crew despite total inexperience. Bonhoeffer nodded appreciatively, and the two laughed about the overconfident boy Dietrich had been.

  In February 1937, during the fourth year of Hitler’s reign, the Ministry of the Interior issued an order against naming from the pulpit anyone who had been removed from his position or who had left the Reich Church by reason of conscience. This was, in effect, a ban on intercessory prayer, the practice in Christian communities of praying for individual members or concerns of the parish, which petitions were also usually circulated in newsletters and other printed matter. Such prohibitions were aimed specifically at Confessing Church congregations and their so-called illegal pastors hired for “emergency” service. Indeed, most of the seminarians coming out of Finkenwalde, then only two years in operation, fit the description.

  It was now also “forbidden to hold church services and gatherings on emergency church premises or in secular spaces.”

  It was further forbidden for congregations affiliated with the Confessing Church to take up offerings during worship services.

  Without prior approval of the overseers of the Editorial Law, it was forbidden to make carbon or mimeograph copies of any parish communiqués, including newsletters, sermons, and letters to parishioners—any publications that fostered a sense of belonging.

  The force of these restrictions brought the practices of the dissenting congregations to a halt. Especially painful was the ban on intercessory prayers, which were central to life at Finkenwalde, since Bonhoeffer had long regarded the discipline of pleading with God as necessary to ignite the moral imagination of individuals and communities. “The congregational prayer has long sent shivers down my spine,” he had said in Barcelona years before. He was speaking of an experience of “incomparable beauty” when the children and young people of his church had prayed for him before the whole congregation. He felt that the act transformed the face of the petitioner into the face of one for whom Christ died. Intercessory prayer was “the purifying bath into which the individual and the community must enter every day.”78

  There followed in short order a massive wave of harassment and arrests of men who had been at Finkenwalde or followers of any non-Nazi ministers. Wilhelm Niesel, Gerhard Jacobi, Hermann Ehlers, and Wilhelm von Armin Lützow were detained by the secret police for preaching as Confessing Church ministers.

  A friend of Bonhoeffer’s, Hermann Stöhr of Stettin, secretary of the Germany Fellowship of Reconciliation, was taken by the SS and executed for being a “conscientious objector,” a status he claim
ed based on his own reading of the Sermon on the Mount. Martin Niemöller would see his passport revoked and his lectures in Berlin banned. Any student caught attending them would be expelled. But far worse lay ahead for Niemöller. On July 1, 1937, while Bonhoeffer and Bethge were visiting him at his Dahlem parsonage, a black Gestapo Mercedes pulled up outside the church. The pastor watched from the living-room window as the officers approached the front door. Bethge and Bonhoeffer were ordered to remain as the Gestapo searched the house for seven hours. Paula Bonhoeffer, who had become a parishioner of Dahlem, got word of what was happening and, with her husband, drove quickly to the scene. For the next several hours, Bonhoeffer’s parents circled Königin-Luise-Strasse in their car, peering anxiously every time they passed the front of the house. The search might have continued late into the night had one officer not detected, behind a painting, a wall safe containing thirty thousand marks. The funds, belonging to the Pastors’ Emergency League, were seized. The Gestapo also carted Niemöller away. And the next day he was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, his crime, “misuse of the pulpit.”