Strange Glory

by Charles Marsh

  Bonhoeffer and Bethge returned to London, spending their free days in the National Gallery. Niebuhr, meanwhile, dispatched an urgent memorandum to colleagues and church associates in America and abroad. Failure to secure a position for Bonhoeffer, he warned, boded ill for this man who “has done a great work for the church.” To Paul Lehmann, one of Bonhoeffer’s classmates in 1930–31 and now professor of Christian ethics at Union, Niebuhr confided that “there will be some difficulty getting [Bonhoeffer] out,” but if they failed, he would surely land in a concentration camp. Even knowing little or nothing of Bonhoeffer’s involvement with the resistance, Niebuhr was now aware from their meeting of Bonhoeffer’s determination to refuse the draft. That alone would now constitute a crime punishable by death. For his own refusal, Hermann Stöhr, secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, had been taken to an empty field near Stettin and shot in the back of the head.26

  REINHOLD NIEBUHR’S LETTER TO HENRY SMITH LEIPER IN SUPPORT OF DIETRICH BONHOEFFER’S APPOINTMENT TO UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY IN 1939

  Niebuhr would succeed in arranging a position or, more precisely, a patchwork of part-time jobs—one with the German refugee program, another as an itinerant preacher, a third as a visiting professor. These would keep Bonhoeffer employed through the end of the year. Meanwhile Niebuhr had hopes that a chair might be endowed to create a permanent place at Union.

  The invitation came not a moment too soon. Back in Berlin, Bonhoeffer heard from Klaus and Hans that war in Europe was indeed imminent; in May, a month after his meeting with Niebuhr in England, Bonhoeffer received the long dreaded call-up.

  On a warm morning in June 1939, Bonhoeffer left Germany on his second journey to America.

  “I’m flying over the Channel in the glow of a pink sunset,” he wrote to Bethge on June 4. “It is 10 o’ clock, but still very bright. You will be tired and gone to bed now.… I am well.”

  DIETRICH BONHOEFFER ON A SHIP TO AMERICA IN THE SUMMER OF 1939

  After a weeklong layover in England, he boarded the Bremen for the five-day ocean voyage to New York. Pleased with his spacious cabin and the appointments of the ship, he read and napped in a lounge chair on the hardwood deck. He was content to be alone. “The weather is wonderful and the ocean is quiet,” he told Bethge. “I will spend a lot of time thinking of you and all the others.” “Today is Sunday. No worship service,” he wrote from the deck of the luxury liner on the second day. The change in time zones had already prevented his taking part remotely in Bethge’s worship “as it was happening”; the growing distance had already caused a clear new day to dawn in the mid-Atlantic. “But I am fully with you, today more than ever,” Bonhoeffer said. “If only the doubts about my own path were overcome.”27

  He found New York much changed since his last visit nearly a decade before. The new Empire State Building had transformed the skyline, though it stood mostly tenant-less. Robert Moses’s titanic public works program was evident, with new bridges and roadways in the works. In April the World’s Fair had opened in Queens to great fanfare. In the Bronx, Lou Gehrig was playing in his last season for the Yankees; he would retire midsummer, having set the record for consecutive games played (2,130). The movie The Wizard of Oz premiered on August 17 at Loew’s Capitol Theatre, almost without Judy Garland’s iconic “Over the Rainbow,” which, the producers feared, might slow down the story. John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, published by Viking Press, won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Somewhat less conspicuously, an unabridged edition of Mein Kampf appeared for the first time in English.28

  Bonhoeffer could not summon the sense of optimism and adventure and wonder that had attended his last sojourn in New York. The hard lessons of the previous years had brought him closer to Niebuhr’s realism, and Harlem was no longer on his mind. At the World’s Fair, his heart sank to see the “Temple of Religion,” where, under an enormous tent, Christians and Jews were preaching in turns, as if in a circus act.

  He arrived at Union Theological Seminary in the middle of the summer vacation, on the first day of a heat wave. The brick and limestone fortress sprawling between Broadway and Claremont Avenue on the city’s Upper West Side was a world away from the rustic estate where Finkenwalde had not too long ago flourished, even further from the modest parish houses of the collective pastorates. He unpacked his bags in the room for visiting scholars—the “prophet’s chamber,” it was called. But what kind of prophet was he? At least he had plenty of space. With the temperatures soaring into the high nineties, it was impossible to shut the windows—and with one giving onto the interior courtyard, the other onto Broadway, the street noise persisted until late at night, even then abating only little. The airlessness was enervating.

  And so was the lack of society. Niebuhr had advised him to come to New York as soon as possible, which Bonhoeffer took to heart. But when he arrived in New York City on the morning of June 12, his American hosts, decent and thoughtful people, were nowhere to be found. Niebuhr was still in Scotland with his family, preparing for his Gifford Lectures, scheduled for September. The convivial Lehmanns had decamped to Indiana, where Paul held summer classes at Elmhurst College; he confessed that he was unsure when exactly he and his wife, Marion, would be back in town. Paul Tillich, who wholeheartedly supported Bonhoeffer’s appointment, was sequestered in his Maine retreat, and in any case not involved in the details of the younger German’s case. Though deeply grateful for the support of his American friends, Bonhoeffer, in his vulnerable state, was suffering their absence.

  He passed the time by smoking cigarettes, reading, and taking walks. He visited the Metropolitan Museum, where he lingered over El Greco’s View of Toledo, a “landscape … entirely in green,” and Hans Memling’s Christ Giving His Blessing. He tried to catch up on the latest American theology, and he thumbed through recent issues of the Nation and the Christian Century—including the column “How My Mind Has Changed,” which he thought “instructive.” He bought Niebuhr’s newest book, Interpretation of Christian Ethics—which he found “filled with wrong and superficial statements”—and a volume titled The Kingdom of God in America by H. Richard Niebuhr, Reinhold’s younger brother and a Yale theologian; that he found a little more palatable. In fact, he would borrow a few of its observations for his own final summation of American Christianity, an essay titled “Protestantism Without Reformation.”29 Still, he found all the books and articles ultimately uninspiring. “The decisive shift to the Word still does not seem to have been made,” he concluded.

  There was plenty of time to send postcards home. And every few days he rang Karl-Friedrich for a quick chat; his brother was in the final month of a sabbatical year at the University of Chicago. He made entries in his brown leather journal—a going-away present from Bethge. Never one to inventory his interior life, Bonhoeffer was left with few other options amid the shock of separation. Later in prison, on hot summer days in his stifling cell, he would tell his parents not to worry about him, seeing as how he had survived the heat of “Italy, Africa, Spain, Mexico—and perhaps worst of all in New York in July 1939.” As a sensitive child, he had always been content with small pleasures, whether accompanying his mother as they sang the Gellert-Beethoven songs, collecting wildflowers in the glades near his home, or reading stories aloud with Sabine after school in the garden. In his Union dormitory, he drank coffee, ate moderately, smoked immoderately, and sat at his desk with a floor fan, taking the little relief it offered.

  He was able to make contact with a few acquaintances who didn’t live according to the academic calendar.30 Paul Griswold Macy—a scion of the Macy’s department store fortune and a sturdy Protestant churchman—met Bonhoeffer on his first night in town for drinks at the Parkside Hotel. Another moneyed Manhattanite, Henry Smith Leiper, showed him around the Federal Council of Churches, an entire city block filled with ecumenical offices, and hosted a dinner party for him at a midtown restaurant. Bonhoeffer also reconnected with the theologian Henry van Dusen. Unfortunately,
he found Van Dusen even less sympathetic than during his previous stay at Union, when the two quarreled over doctrine. “A poor and self-righteous theologian of the American mold,” Bonhoeffer concluded. “I don’t like him.”

  Coffin, the seminary president, invited Bonhoeffer to come with him by train to his country house in the Berkshires. Of all his New York acquaintances, Bonhoeffer liked Coffin, with his refreshing candor and deliberate piety, best of all. Bonhoeffer’s admiration only grew as he discovered Coffin to be a clear and practical man who understood “the necessity of preaching the gospel with a generous conviction”—a side of him Bonhoeffer had missed the last time in New York. “Niebuhr preaches a half hour about the ‘failure of man’ and the last two minutes about the ‘grace of God,’ ” Coffin said with a smile. At that Bonhoeffer could smile, too.

  Bonhoeffer told his parents that the Connecticut countryside reminded him of the area around Friedrichsbrunn. He breathed a little easier on the porch of Coffin’s Lakeland home, with a glass of cold gin and the “fresh and luxuriant” landscape rolling to the horizon.31 He had never seen fireflies in the eastern Harz Mountains, but during the evening in the Berkshires, “thousands of fire-flies,” along with “flying glow-worms,” flashed against the fading daylight like shooting stars. “Quite a fantastic sight!” he wrote in his diary. Aiming to lift Bonhoeffer’s clearly flagging spirits, the Coffins or their friends held dinner parties in their homes or took him to concerts and plays; ultimately, however, they would fail to relieve him of his apprehensions. The best efforts of these energetic men and their fine families could not overcome his acute sense of dislocation.32 Everything felt freighted with melancholy.

  A journal entry reads,

  Since yesterday evening my thoughts cannot get away from Germany.… In the morning a car drive that was in itself beautiful, to a woman acquaintance in the countryside, i.e., in the mountains, became almost unbearable to me. One sat for an hour and chatted, not at all stupidly, but about matters that were so utterly trivial to me, whether a proper musical education is possible in New York, about raising children, etc. etc., and I could only think how usefully I might have spent these hours in Germany.…

  In the evening the cinema: Juarez with P. Muni.33 A good film. My thoughts were captured for a while.…

  [But] this inactivity, or rather active pursuit of trivialities, is simply no longer bearable. I would have liked to take the next ship.

  The situation at home, it was now clear, had depleted his lifelong love of idle pleasures to a remarkable degree. Dietrich had become consumingly serious.

  Amid the outings and pleasantries and cocktail hours of the New York summer set, Bonhoeffer had found no time for Bible study and prayer, but this would change.

  “All I need is Germany, the brethren,” he lamented. “I do not understand why I am here.”34 He proposed to Bethge that they mark their first Sundays apart with the promise that “someday we will worship together in eternity.” Bonhoeffer had already reached the conclusion that a year in America would be far too long—despite Niebuhr and Coffin’s hopes that he would stay at least that long.

  Back in Manhattan, he sought relief from the weight bearing down on him from the assurances of scripture. In the Bible’s cold, sober comforts, there were no quick remedies to be found. But he wasn’t seeking anything of the kind. He read Lamentations, the Psalms, and the Hebrew prophets. They spoke to the virtue of patience: “It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord” (Lamentations 3:26). As he had done at Finkenwalde, he followed the daily readings in the Losungen, the devotional book of the Moravian Brethren that his governess had given him as a child. He pondered the lines from Isaiah: “You are my servant, I have chosen you and not cast you off” (41:9). And Psalm 28:7: “The Lord is my strength and my shield; in him my heart trusts; so I am helped, and my heart exults, and with my song I give thanks to him.” How excellent were the daily readings, he said. Despite the divide of an ocean, reading them in sync with Bethge and the brethren sustained a spiritual bond, one to overcome any earthly distance.

  In the prophet’s chamber, he wrote in fits and starts. Over the years he had rarely labored over assignments, sermons, books, or letters. Writing mostly involved the smooth transcription of well-organized thoughts. Now the subject seemed more complicated than even the mysteries of the Incarnate, Crucified, and Risen Christ. He was trying to understand himself.

  “Is it cowardice and weakness to run away from the here and now?…I can hardly tear my thoughts away from Germany.

  “I am [not] quite clear about my motives. Is that a sign of uncertainty, inner dishonesty, or is it a sign that God leads us over and beyond our own powers of discernment; or is it both?” Introspection, a new pursuit for him, had reduced him to probing the most elementary matters.

  “I would not have thought it possible that at my age, after so many years abroad, one could get so dreadfully homesick.… The whole burden of self-reproach because of a wrong decision comes back again and almost overwhelms me.”

  It vexed Bonhoeffer, too, that Bethge seemed not to share his urgency to correspond, and he scolded his friend in his own voluminous epistolary outpourings. Bethge acknowledged with gratitude the “abundance of letters” coming from New York, while Bonhoeffer complained that he hardly received a thing. Bethge apologized and tried to explain, suggesting that some of his letters were getting lost in transit. He also worried that letters and photographs would only inflame Bonhoeffer’s loneliness. Sometimes he pled that he was “so overworked” or even unwell. “I would really ask you to bear in mind what the new situation has demanded of me and not be angry, so that we can look forward to our reunion without ill thoughts.” Bonhoeffer could easily fire off a letter and a postcard nearly every day; Bethge had no such spare time, having not been relieved of his pastoral duties and other obligations, and there being, besides, not much to report from Sigurdshof: “The weather is so bad. I was desperate to go to the Baltic Sea. But there is a storm. Not even tennis is an option right now. Ms. Pastor Gelhoff died unexpectedly. Cerebral hemorrhage or something similar.” None of it was enough for Bonhoeffer.

  “I wait for mail! It can hardly be endured. I will probably not stay long.”

  Meanwhile, the gospels’ very own urgency was making itself felt: “ ‘Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh’ (Mt 25:13)…. God’s word today states: ‘See, I am coming soon—.’ (Rev. 3:11). No time is to be lost, and here I am losing days, perhaps weeks.… I cannot be alone abroad. That is utterly clear to me.”

  Bonhoeffer did not seek out his old classmates. Although he stopped by the West Side YMCA on Fifty-seventh Street—to which he was introduced through Charles Webber’s social ministry class—he did not worship at Abyssinian Baptist. Adam Clayton Powell Sr. had retired two years earlier, handing the mantle in 1938 to his ambitious twenty-nine-year-old son. But it was not the younger Powell who kept Bonhoeffer away. Bonhoeffer’s search for a cloud of witnesses had been fulfilled in the fellowship of the brethren—here lay the love and burden of his heart and soul. The Harlem church had once nourished him, and invigorated his moral imagination, and for that he remained grateful. But the American dilemma had been overshadowed by German suffering in the joyful pursuit of his pastoral calling.

  Bonhoeffer did ask about race relations—mentioning a “noon conversation with two students from southern states about the problems of blacks”—and he was saddened to learn that apart from the Castigan-Wagner Bill, an anti-lynching measure debated in both houses of Congress in 1934 but ultimately filibustered into oblivion, “nothing seems to have changed.” Not until 1968 would federal statute outlaw lynching, a measure passed under the auspices of the Civil Rights Act.

  He asked, too, about American Jews and noted in his journal the “great increase in anti-Semitism” in the United States. He had seen two advertisements in a local paper that read, “A mountain resort: ‘1000 feet—too high for Jews.’ �
� And: “Gentiles preferred.”

  He heard a sermon at Riverside Church on Sunday, June 18, given not by Harry Emerson Fosdick but by Halford E. Luccock, professor of homiletics at Yale. Luccock ruminated on William James’s phrase accepting a horizon, which Bonhoeffer found “discreet, opulent, [and] self-satisfied,” recoiling from what seemed to him a veritable “temple of idolatry.” The sermon left such a bad taste that he sought out another service the same night—somewhere he might hear the gospel preached, to clear his mind of Luccock’s insipid remarks.35 If accepting an ultimate horizon was the essence of religion, he said, then may a thousand Friedrich Nietzsches blossom. John McComb’s evangelical sermon on “being conformed to Christ” at the Broadway Presbyterian Church was something of an improvement—but “what dreadful music.”36

  Bonhoeffer’s final summation of mainline Protestantism, “Protestantism Without Reformation,” would confirm many of his observations from a decade ago, but he could now barely conceal his disdain for American Christianity and its “I-centrism.” Indeed, the essay fairly burns with contempt for the “denominations of America.” “I am now reflecting often on whether it is true that America is the land without Reformation.” Or even more bluntly: “God has granted its churches no Reformation.” The American churches had surely produced thrifty churchmen, earnest theologians, and revivalist preachers, but they had failed as yet to reckon seriously with the “scandal of the Cross.”