Strange Glory

by Charles Marsh

  Else Niemöller would face the next seven years without her husband, but the kindness of the Dahlem congregation—even after church officials removed the family from the manse—would sustain her. The evening of the arrest, as she sat in her living room alone trying to make sense of the day’s events, the melodious strains of choral music broke the silence of the darkness, growing louder and louder still. Having learned of Niemöller’s arrest, the women’s choir had come to offer the comfort of song.79

  When, two years earlier, in June of 1935, Barth had been removed from his post at the University of Bonn, he’d lashed out not only at Hitler but also against the Confessing Church leadership, which had shown, in his opinion, “no heart for the millions who are suffering unjustly” and had “nothing to say about the simplest questions of public honesty.” Neither had the Confessing Church “spoken out on the most simple matters of public integrity. And if and when it does speak, it is always on its own behalf.”80

  It was a harsh criticism, especially from an academic theologian who had been willing to take the oath of allegiance to Hitler—though with a caveat: “as long as I can be responsible as a Christian.” Whether this addition had been proclaimed in a whisper, a shout, or alone in his chamber, Barth would not say. But no qualification of any kind was acceptable to the Reich Church; Barth was soon dismissed. By the fall of 1936, he was safely ensconced in the chair of Reformed Theology at the University of Basel, from which he proceeded to issue a steady stream of suggestions, rarely solicited, to his beleaguered colleagues mired in the trenches of the church struggle. Barth would pass the remainder of his career in Switzerland, attended by his exceedingly loyal wife, Nelly, and his strikingly beautiful assistant, Charlotte von Kirschbaum, who came to occupy a room in the professor’s home. That she would remain the theologian’s lover until his death in 1968 is perhaps a final testament to his ardent embrace of Trinitarian thought.”

  Still, Bonhoeffer received Barth’s every communication appreciatively, both those addressed to the plenitude of the dissident pastorate and to him personally; he bravely breasted the pontifical certitudes and the occasional reprimand—ever grateful for Barth’s attention, genuinely convinced that the master’s most important contribution to the resistance was his tireless work on the magisterial Church Dogmatics.

  As the Gestapo moved on Hitler’s orders to quash all remaining activities of the Confessing Church, Bonhoeffer chose a psalm of vengeance as the biblical text for one of his final sermons at Finkenwalde. It is significant that he “did not reject the Psalms of vengeance, as Christians have sometimes done, on the grounds that they reflected an earlier stage in God’s relationship to humanity and contradicted the love-ethic of the gospel.”81 As a student of the Psalter he would never take such a view. He hoped rather that Christians would learn to read the so-called “imprecatory” songs—those of judgment and condemnation—as accusations in the voice of Jesus the Jew against injustice and innocent sufferings, the anguished utterances of the “crucified Lord.”

  “No, we sinners are not praying this song of vengeance,” Bonhoeffer explained in condemnation of Hitler. “[I]nnocence itself is praying it.”

  September 1937 brought another decree from Heinrich Himmler: the Fifth Implementation Decree for the Law to Restore Order to the German Evangelical Church. This one outlawed the preachers’ seminaries, the surviving handful of which had heretofore been the only alternative to the theological faculties for pastoral training. Bonhoeffer and Bethge were on holiday in Bavaria when a caravan of black sedans bearing the Nazi insignia and an SS unit arrived at Finkenwalde. The now twenty-seven ordinands were all arrested within the month. All five dissenting seminaries would be closed and boarded up by December.

  “The enormous masquerade of evil” had finally reached into Pomerania. For the Finkenwalde brethren who had been living in gemeinsames Leben there would be no further days according the daily Christian hours. And for Bonhoeffer, this action brought an end to the happiest two years of his life.

  Though under the heavy boot, he would continue to look for other means of training ministers in the Confessing Church—even as he began to consider more direct strategies of resistance and confrontation. In a final effort to keep alive the flame of dissident faith, he turned to the old and mostly forgotten practice of pastoral apprenticeships. It was an idea as clever and inspired as it was desperate. And for a while it worked. Small groups of pastoral novices were assigned to willing congregations, allowing theological life as practiced at Finkenwalde to continue on a different scale, beyond the range of state surveillance. Despite Himmler’s prohibition of all religious activities “outside the immediate control” of the Reich Church, there would be, for a time, no legal challenges to the apprenticeships.82 Bonhoeffer’s vision of a Sammelvikaria—the nineteenth-century model of a collective pastorate—amounted, under the present circumstances, to an underground network, a sort of virtual seminary, assigning ordinands to dissident pastors still at large. Not all students would have real contact with their parish or even their mentor, but guidance would be communicated to them.

  In the absence of a Confessing churchman to draw the Nazis’ attention, brothers in the collective pastorates could still live together in a common house, maintaining—or “persevering in,” as Bonhoeffer liked to say—the same spiritual disciplines learned in the seminaries: the liturgy of hours, intercessory prayer, and corporate worship, all now illegal, of course. In practice, this usually amounted to groups of seven to ten men keeping the ancient ways in the face of the present profanations.83

  Two collective pastorates formed in the vicinity of Finkenwalde, one in the “rambling, wind-battered parsonage” in Schlawe, a town of ten thousand souls in Gross Schlönwitz near the Baltic Sea, the other in Köslin, a city of thirty thousand, twelve miles inland. The latter was the parish that had donated the chairs for Finkenwalde; it was also where Friedrich Onnasch, former seminary provost, now served as pastor.84 As many as ten seminarians lived together in Onnasch’s spacious manse, where secret classes were held, and where Bonhoeffer and Bethge kept a separate guest room for their visits.85 The illicit classes involved mainly the shared reading and interpretation of scripture. Each ordinand was required to register with and “inform local authorities of the parish pastor to whom he had been apprenticed.” In most instances the men complied. Bonhoeffer listed the parsonage of Block in Schlawe as his own official place of residence. “Work, meditation, worship, preaching, and biblical study remained central to the life of the ordinands in the collective pastorates.”86 But the pressure was kept up. In April 1939, the collective in Schlawe had to “relocate to nearby Sigurdshof in an empty house on the edge of the estate of a Confessing Church sympathizer.”

  Bonhoeffer’s efforts to keep alive the spirit of Finkenwalde met with redoubled state suppression. By 1938, Hitler’s lip service to the idea of the churches as “the last hope of protecting Christianity from godless Bolshevism” had outlived its political usefulness. He had never truly believed that Germany needed faith in anything more than the Nazi state’s “unified principle that could explain everything.” Ultimately, Nazism’s all-consuming perspective could not coexist with any other form of religion; even the German Christians were at last regarded as competitors to be eliminated. Hitler, in fact, would reject not only the doctrines of the church but also the neo-pagan völkisch religiosity his movement had engendered and fed off of. He came to view the esoteric practices increasingly popular among a small but zealous Nazi coterie to be as distracting as Christianity. To him the essence of faith would remain the willingness to fight, and such had already been galvanized. “In a manly time of struggle,” proclaimed one German Christian pastor at a Frankfurt rally in homage to the Führer, “one cannot get by with effeminate and sweet talk of peace.”87 Alas, men like him were by now preaching to the converted.

  Harried by an escalation of arrests, imprisonments, and conscriptions, the collective pastorates slowly disintegrated. Bonhoeffer would
carry on as an “itinerant preacher” in the northern provinces, homeless and with muted vocation, but ever grateful for the presence of Bethge. He still had the Audi, but had lately acquired a motorcycle, too; on clear days he would make the journey between Köslin and Schlawe with Bethge behind him astride the saddle. The two had become “perfectly complementary.”88 Bonhoeffer’s electricity quickened Bethge’s mild manner, while Bethge’s steadiness moderated Bonhoeffer’s dynamism, becoming for him “a hiding place from the wind … as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.”89

  The story of the Confessing Church might best be described not as one of rise and fall but as “a brief energetic moment of vision and hope, followed by a gradual, poignant dissolution.”90

  THE HOME OF THE COLLECTIVE PASTORATE IN SIZURD IN 1939

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  1938–1940

  ~

  “I Must Be a Sojourner and a Stranger”

  During a weeklong stay in Sigurdshof, Bonhoeffer was reading Psalm 119, the longest of the Psalms, indeed the longest chapter in the Bible. A collection of interwoven meditations on the precepts, works, and promises of God, the psalm is an elaborate acrostic corresponding to the Hebrew alphabet. Bonhoeffer would later send coded messages to fellow conspirators using the same device, but during this snowbound week in January 1939, together again with Bethge, he was fixated on the meaning of the nineteenth and twentieth verses: “I am a sojourner on the earth; hide not thy commandments from me. My soul is consumed with longing.”

  “The earth that nourishes me has a right to my work and my strength,” Bonhoeffer wrote. “It is not fitting that I should despise the earth on which I have my life; I owe it faithfulness and gratitude. I must not dream away my earthly life with thoughts of heaven and thereby evade my lot—to be perforce a sojourner and a stranger—and with it God’s call into this world of strangers. There is a very godless homesickness for the other world, and it will certainly create no homecoming. I am to be a sojourner, with everything that entails. I must not close my heart indifferent to the earth’s problems, sorrows and joys; rather I am to wait patiently for the redemption of the divine promise—truly wait, and not rob myself of it in advance by wishing and dreaming.”1

  Sigurdshof was the last place Bonhoeffer would teach theology. He had retained the designation “collective pastorate” for this final experiment in communal life, but the reality—five unmarried pastors covertly ordering their lives around the liturgical day, each under the cloud of conscription—more nearly resembled the desolate rendering of the Christ-follower as exile in Life Together.

  For many years—and with fierce concentration—Bonhoeffer had stressed the distinctive speech and practices of Christian discipleship. The first step was inescapably a leap into the unknown. His shepherding of students and clergy had been ever infused with the urgencies of the Christian difference. But now he began to dwell upon being in the earth and one’s relation to it, a notion disfigured in the Aryan cult practice of venerating home, hearth, blood, and soil. So many horrors had transpired in the course of human history precisely because Christians had turned their eyes upward or, worse, abandoned the narrow path—the way of the cross—for some imagined ladder of ascent. Bonhoeffer determined now to teach how a Christian dissident should think about his sojourn on earth.

  The conscription cloud hung over him, too; though he had privately resolved never to serve in Hitler’s army, he fretted about the public ramifications of his decision—not so much for his own life as for those of his Finkenwalde brothers, many of whom did not share his objection of conscience but would nevertheless be implicated in his views by association. His name had recently been added to the list of pastors banned from Berlin—banned not simply from preaching there, but even from entering the city, to his parents’ great dismay. In March 1938, on one rainy night, Bonhoeffer and Bethge made a journey into the Thuringia, “the green heartland of the nation,” driving from a point southwest of Berlin toward Erfurt. What Bonhoeffer saw along the way sickened him. Nazi banners draped on homes, buildings, and churches had by now become a familiar affront. But as the Wartburg Castle came into view, Bonhoeffer saw that the cross staked on the entrance had been replaced by a monstrous swastika, flood lit. In this fortress blending Romanesque and Gothic styles, which loomed over the Eisenach River, Luther had once occupied a sparsely furnished room while translating the entire New Testament in a feverish ten-week stretch. Even more depressing for Bonhoeffer: although this was Holy Week, most of his countrymen were celebrating the Anschluss, Hitler’s annexation by force of neighboring Austria. There could have been no more compelling evidence that the German Christian drive to complete the work of Martin Luther had begun in earnest.2 “In that I defend myself against Judaism,” read Hitler’s oft-quoted boast in Mein Kampf, “I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”3

  In disgust, the two men abruptly aborted their journey, diverting to the refuge of the Bonhoeffer country house in Friedrichsbrunn.

  By the summer of 1938, the Bonhoeffers, like nearly all German dissidents, had become convinced that unless the Nazi regime was toppled, its expansionism would plunge all of Europe into war. Like many, too, they felt personally imperiled by a new slate of racial laws, under which the passports of Jews would be required to carry the letter J. Since Gerhard Leibholz, husband of Bonhoeffer’s twin, Sabine, was of Jewish descent, the couple, together with their two daughters, would join the thousands trying to flee Germany before the borders of every nation unfriendly to the Reich were permanently sealed.

  EBERHARD BETHGE AND DIETRICH BONHOEFFER AT THE COLLECTIVE PASTORATE IN GROSS SCHLÖNWITZ

  One of their daughters, Marianne, recalled their last months in Göttingen before escaping to England:

  In the summer of 1938 I gathered from tiny hints thrown out by my mother that my parents were definitely preparing to leave Germany. I was just eleven. I knew about the Czech crisis and that there might be a war, that the likelihood of war was growing every day, that we did not want to be caught in Germany in a war because then we would no longer be able to leave the country if necessary. I knew that any plans to leave should be kept absolutely secret, and that if my parents told so little they had their reasons. I watched for hints of anything unusual in our lives, and on days when I got a strong feeling that something ominous would soon happen, I put several large [and] small crosses in my diary, according to the strength of my suspicions.

  On August 23rd my parents went to Berlin for four days and Great-Aunt Elisabeth von Hase came to supervise the household. On August 31st my father went to Hamburg for the day, on September 4th my parents left for Berlin, returning late on September 8th with Uncle Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Pastor Eberhard Bethge. On all these days I put down huge crosses.

  The morning of September 9th was gloriously sunny in Göttingen. As usual our Nanny woke my seven year old sister Christiane and me at half past six and began to help us dress for school. Suddenly my mother came into the night nursery in a great hurry and said, “You’re not going to school today, we’re going to Wiesbaden,” and to our Nanny, “We’ll be back on Monday. The children are to wear two sets of underclothes each.”

  Our car was very full, but packed to look as if we were going on a normal holiday. Christiane and I were bedded down in the back. Uncle Dietrich and “Uncle” Bethge had brought another car, Uncle Dietrich’s, and intended to accompany us to the frontier, and during the drive my parents and the uncles sat in the front seats of the two cars, changing places frequently, so that all came to sit with us children in turns.

  We stopped briefly in Göttingen where the men bought a giant torch for the journey. When we were out of the town my mother said, “We’re not going to Wiesbaden, we’re trying to get across the Swiss border tonight. They may close the frontier because of the crisis.”

  DIETRICH BONHOEFFER AND EBERHARD BETHGE TAKING A BREAK AT THE BALTIC SEA, 1938

  The roof of our car was open, the sky was deep blue, the country-side looked marve
lous in the hot sunshine. I felt there was complete solidarity between the four grown-ups. I knew that unaccustomed things would be asked of us children from now on but felt proud of now being allowed to share the real troubles of the adults. I thought that if I could do nothing against the Nazis myself I must at the very least co-operate with the grown-ups who could. Christiane and I spent most of the time singing in the car, folk songs and rather militant songs about freedom, my mother, Uncle Dietrich and “Uncle” Bethge singing with us. I enjoyed the various descants. Uncle Dietrich taught me a new round of Über die Wellen gleitet der Kahn.

  During the drive my uncle seemed to me just as I always remember him: very strong and confident, immensely kind, cheerful and firm.

  We stopped at Giessen and picnicked by the wayside. The grown-ups’ mood did not strike me as depressed. Then all of a sudden they said it was getting late and that we must hurry. “We have to get across the frontier tonight, they may close it at any moment.” We children settled in our car, our parents got in, and I remember Uncle Dietrich and “Uncle” Bethge waving farewell to us, until they became tiny and were cut off by a hill. The rest of the drive was no longer cheerful. My parents drove as fast as they could, we stopped talking so that they could concentrate. The atmosphere was tense.

  We crossed the Swiss border late at night. Christiane and I pretended to be asleep and very angry at being wakened to discourage the German frontier guards from doing too much searching of the car. My mother had put on a long, very brown suede jacket, whose brownness was meant to pacify the German officials. They let our car through and the Swiss let us in. My parents were not to cross the German border again till after the war.4