Strange Glory

by Charles Marsh

  Some of his criticisms bore sharp resemblance to ones he had leveled against the German Christians. According to Bonhoeffer, the American Christian had never learned to trust God fully, or to know what it means to stand under the judgment of the Word, for he had never had to learn the lesson. Flight from persecution was the founding condition of the American religion; thus “the person and work of Jesus Christ” sink into the background and are not recognized “as the sole basis of radical judgment and radical forgiveness.”37 Where were the communities of “judgment and radical forgiveness?” he asked, despite having made no great effort to find them. Absent a Reformation crisis, when Christians might have been thrown back on the truth of the Word of God alone, American Protestants had preferred to claim “the right to forgo” suffering and “live out their faith in freedom without a struggle.” Between fight and flight, flight had been the American experience, at least in matters spiritual.

  The essay lumbers well beyond the limits of its usefulness, but ultimately the shortcomings of American Christianity are not its real concern anyway. Bonhoeffer was wrestling with a more general question about the options of “perseverance or flight in times of persecution.” Having been talked into the latter by friends with the best of intentions, he was struggling to find his way back to the former, where, he knew, he would end up.

  In Germany, baptisms now routinely concluded with the prayer that “this child will grow up to be like Adolph Hitler and [Heinrich] Himmler.” The theology departments now existed for the sole purpose of building “a religious foundation for the new State ethics.”38 Bonhoeffer had provocatively claimed that the German Protestant who is not aligned with the Confessing Church is not a Christian; to this Martin Sasse, bishop of Thuringia, responded, “In Germany, there is no life except with the Führer.” The German Christians had waged a seven-year campaign to make the churches safe for the Reich, winning virtually all their parishioners to the Nazi cause. What a pity for them that Hitler no longer cared.

  By 1939, most high-ranking members of the regime, beginning with the Führer himself, were of the mind that Christianity was no different from Judaism in its enfeebling effects on the Volk. The religion of Jesus—a Jew, after all—was at last a “malignant, corrupting influence,” a faith of and for the darker races, not compatible with the Aryan soul. Bonhoeffer had long argued that Christianity and Judaism were inseparable; in the end, the Nazis would agree, although with a grotesquely different purpose. The anti-Semitic journal Der Stürmer ran a cartoon of a Jewish man raising the hat of a Christian cleric over his head. There is no question of his race: he has an angular, attenuated nose and his bloated form is naked but for a crest with the star of David. He has also a tail and cloven hoofs. “The Church: Under good protection,” the caption reads.

  Bonhoeffer would continue to write from New York in fretful, revelatory bursts.

  “I no longer know where I am.”

  “I cannot make out why I am here … whether the end will justify it.”

  “I cannot believe it is God’s will that I should stay on here, in the event of war, without any particular assignment.”

  When the new visiting scholar first opened the doors of Union’s “prophet’s chamber” at the start of the fall semester, he would be taken aback by the mess, which no one had yet bothered to clean up after the prior tenant. An ashtray on the desk overflowed with cigarette stubs and burned matches. Crumpled writing papers, dozens and dozens of wadded-up sheets, lined the floor. The young scholar could make out a German word or two; otherwise the handwriting was illegible. Had he been able to decipher Bonhoeffer’s pinched cursive, he might have learned the reason for the previous occupant’s abrupt departure.

  “Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of the nation and thereby destroying our civilization,” he had finally explained in a letter to Niebuhr. “I know which of these alternatives I must choose, but I cannot make that choice in security.… I have come to the conclusion that I made a mistake in coming to America.”

  It had long been Bonhoeffer’s inclination, in the face of any approaching crisis, to let the logic of external events carry him forward or to withdraw from the scene as gracefully as he could. Either way, he always achieved the same result of managing to avoid decisive action. “Whenever there was a dilemma, I just left it in abeyance and—without really consciously dealing with it intensively—let it grow toward the clarity of a decision.” For all his youthful rebelliousness against faculty sclerosis, for all his hungering after new things and places, for all his spadework in the ecumenical community for the Confessing Church, he’d been a mostly passive sort, ever bobbing and weaving amid the raining blows of authority, never standing still to face the consequences of real action. But the half summer in New York—June 12 through July 27, 1939—forged a new resolve. These six weeks of feverish prayer and self-examination enabled him to know his own heart. “Manhattan at night, the moon stands above the skyscrapers. It is very hot. The journey is over. I am glad that I was there, and glad that I am on my way home again.”

  He would join the struggle that would cost him his life. He would pray, and plot, for the defeat of his country. He would find clarity in responsible action and in the free decision to suffer. And he would be reunited with Bethge.

  “I am happy to join you at the Baltic Sea,” Dietrich wrote to Eberhard from the deck of the Queen Mary. “I am very much looking forward to it. Please see to it that we have nice lodgings.… I am very excited. It is beautiful: we can share many stories on the beach.… By the way, Sabine wants to give us the trip to Switzerland as a present, I think that’s very nice of her.… What shall it be after the Baltic Sea? Do you want to have me or not? I would like to know. It won’t be long and we will meditate together again.”

  Bonhoeffer made the strange discovery that in all the decisions, he had always obscured his own motives. He wondered whether it was something characterological, “a sign of lack of clarity, inner dishonesty.” Or did it rather mean that “we are led beyond that which we can discern, or is it both?” Whatever the case, he was certain now, perhaps for the first time, that the decision was fully his own.

  “Since I have been on the ship, the interior conflict about my future has ceased. I can think about the abbreviated time in America without self-reproach. Passage for the day: ‘It is good for me that I have been humbled; that I might learn thy statutes’ (Psalm 119:71). From my favorite psalm one of my favorite verses.” The ship landed at Southampton, giving him the chance to call on Sabine and Gert once more, but then it was on to the fatherland.

  Bonhoeffer’s story after his return to Germany in July 1939 and before his arrest on April 5, 1943, undoubtedly marked a new stage in his life; but much of it remains a mystery to be solved. He necessarily entered into a covert resistance, practicing carefully calculated duplicity in the pursuit of one objective: Hitler’s demise.39 This new way, too, engaged his philosophical bent: What does it mean, he pondered, to tell the truth?

  Whatever the attendant travails, the next three years, most of that time shared with Bethge, proved singularly fulfilling. He would describe them to Sabine “as great abundance for us.” Moving his home base in Pomerania every few months, he traveled secretly from one eastern German village to another, supervising his remaining students, “the brethren” who had not yet been called to the front. With the outbreak of hostilities in September—ahead of the invasion of Poland there had been military mobilization and the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact—pressures “intensified in a new way.”40 Under increased police surveillance, Bonhoeffer rarely preached or spoke in public, and he was forbidden to publish. The villages of eastern Pomerania were teeming with German infantry awaiting deployment to Poland. All these restrictions complicated his daily plans with Bethge during those months.

  On the afternoon of June 19, 1940, Bonhoeffer and Bethge wer
e sitting in a café on the Baltic seaside when news reached them that France had surrendered to Germany. In an instant everyone rose to their feet in celebration, and some, clambering onto chairs and table, with outstretched arms, began to sing “Die Fahne Hoch”—“The Flag on High”—the Nazi Party anthem also known as the Horst Wessel Song. Making a good show, Bonhoeffer joined in, shooting a triumphant “Heil Hitler” for emphasis. When Bethge objected, Dietrich leaned into him and demanded, “Are you crazy? Raise your arm!” Later, when they were alone, Bonhoeffer explained that in the days ahead they would suffer many risks for “many different things, but not for that salute!”41

  Hitler’s massive ground and air assault would soon unleash a storm of death and destruction whereby German forces overwhelmed the Polish army, and forced the surrender of Warsaw on September 28 of the previous year. England, followed in short order by France, Australia, and New Zealand, had declared war on Germany in response to this aggression as it was getting under way on September 3. By now, however, Poland lay smoldering.

  One factor in his abortive decision to go to America had not changed: he still lived under imminent threat of call-up to active combat duty. Protestant clergymen were receiving their orders every day in large numbers; nearly all theology students and seminarians would be sent to the front within the year. Bonhoeffer applied to the Reich Church for an army chaplaincy—this seemed like a feasible way to avoid killing on behalf of the Reich. Church officials waited six months to inform him that his request was denied. And so he accepted an assignment in the office of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence. This decision, and his dual role as a secret agent in the resistance—while continuing to mentor young seminarians and pastors—would sow great confusion among those who knew Bonhoeffer; as a way of staying out of the army, however, the Abwehr allowed him to avoid doing violence on the Reich’s behalf, while also maintaining his contacts with the outside world. The exact dates of Bonhoeffer’s entry into the resistance are unclear—his progress was incremental, with no formal commitment—but it is certain that in the fall of 1939 he made his first contact with Hans Oster, the resistance leader who was also an Army general and deputy chief of the Abwehr.42 By the time the German military invaded Poland on September 1, Bonhoeffer had already expressed his willingness to be involved somehow in Oster’s plans, which centered on a military coup.43

  DIETRICH BONHOEFFER AND HIS SISTER SABINE IN WHAT WOULD BE THEIR LAST VISIT, ENGLAND, SUMMER 1939

  His service in the conspiracy notwithstanding, on June 5, 1940, Bonhoeffer’s fears were realized when he was summoned to the military recruitment station in Schlawe. After a medical examination, he was officially pronounced “KV,” which meant “fit for military service.”44 It was now only a matter of time.

  In a conversation with Dohnányi in late July, Bonhoeffer finally decided to serve as a V-Mann (Verbindungsmann, or secret agent) in military intelligence under Wilhelm Canaris, the chief and anti-Nazi conspirator of whom Oster was a close confidant. Bonhoeffer would use the position to gather what news he could, heard and overheard, regarding German military plans, and disseminate it through his network of conspirators. Through his extensive ecumenical contacts, he would also try to keep the Allies apprised of resistance activities in the hopes of garnering international support for a non-Nazi government to follow the planned coup. Bonhoeffer’s intention to avoid the draft had led him along a circuitous path to the singular assignment as a counterintelligence agent, but it had been successful. His involvement with the Abwehr released him from combat duty.

  He seemed to be worming his way in without notice, when in September 1940 the Reich Central Security Office informed him that after a thorough review of his activities since 1935, the office had reached the verdict that his teaching and preaching constituted an “activity subverting the people.”45 He would be required “to report regularly to police in the village of Schlawe, near Finkenwalde, which had become his official place of residence.”46 This amounted to a ban on living in Berlin, which he had sought to avoid by establishing residence elsewhere—first at a cottage in Pomerania and then in a guest room in Königsberg. Bonhoeffer took these restrictions in stride. The ban on public speaking covered speech anywhere in the Reich, not just Berlin. Bonhoeffer was surprised to learn that a small student gathering he had recently led one evening in Blöstau had been reported to the Gestapo. In this town on the outskirts of Königsberg, home to a university, Bonhoeffer expounded on the story of the rich young man in the Gospel of Luke, and conducted a worship service the following morning. That afternoon, he had been scheduled to give a lecture titled “The Problem of Death,” but as he was chatting casually with students at the coffee hour following the service, a squad of Gestapo agents arrived and closed down the meeting.47 Fifty years later, researchers working in a Berlin archive would discover that one of the six participants had been a Gestapo spy. The evening before, when Bonhoeffer preached the story of the rich man unwilling to forego earthly rewards and pick up the cross, the Gestapo informant thought Bonhoeffer’s interpretation “in a way that seemed to register subversive intent.” That claim would have been true in whatever time or place that parable was preached.

  Even before the war, some regime opponents within Germany had begun plotting an overthrow. This first plan, conceived during the Sudeten crisis in 1938, depended on the support of key figures within the German military. It would never be set in motion, however; with German victories in Poland and on the western front, the military leaders’ appetite for such risks diminished. The resistance groups would have to find another way of showing their seriousness if they wished to win material support from abroad.48

  During the first weeks of autumn 1940, after having made up his mind to join the conspiracy, but before having been accepted into the Abwehr, Bonhoeffer wrote a meditation that would eventually be included in his Ethics: “The Church … was silent when it should have cried out, because the blood of the innocent was crying aloud to heaven.… It has stood by while violence and wrong were being done under cover of … the name of Jesus Christ.… The Church confesses that it has witnessed the lawless application of brute force, the physical and spiritual suffering of countless innocent people, oppression, hatred, and murder, and that it has not found ways to hasten their aid.”49

  One trammel on the resistance was the difficulty of noncombatants being unable to travel outside Germany, even to neutral nations. Without his new position, he would have found himself stuck in the Reich with most of his associates. But as a civilian member of the Abwehr, he would serve as a courier and diplomat to the British government; he would take the opportunity to provide classified material to the Allies and lobby for their support of a coup attempt. The official reason for such an unlikely appointment to a Nazi counterintelligence post was the belief that Bonhoeffer’s experiences abroad would help keep the Abwehr informed of political developments in the United States, England, and Sweden, in particular.

  Most of his theological and pastoral colleagues abroad would remain unaware of his being a double agent and were understandably perplexed upon suddenly discovering his role in the Nazi government. Bonhoeffer understood the risk of inviting misunderstanding and suspicion. The best he could do under the circumstances was to ask his friends’ patience and prayer and to express his hope that they not lose faith in him. But he would not offer more specific assurances.

  Bonhoeffer undertook his move into active conspiracy without the blessings of the church—needless to say: the Reich Church controlled the institutional structures of German Lutheranism, and the Confessing Church, never recognized, lay in ruins. It is interesting to ask what the position of the dissident church would have been on this question, had it even won the acknowledgment it sought from the ecumenical movement. As it was, Bonhoeffer regarded his decision as naturally continuous with his pastoral vocation: he would serve as a theologian, pastor, and confessor in the resistance. And doing so he would be obliged to depend on his own resources. There
was no precedent for a Lutheran minister to be involved in civil subversion as a duty of his office. Fortunately, at least for his cover, Bonhoeffer’s new involvements “looked more like collaboration to some.”

  One who would take that view was Karl Barth. He could see no other reason for Bonhoeffer’s freedom to travel outside Germany as the war raged on. During his September 1941 trip to Switzerland, Barth asked Bonhoeffer directly, “Why are you actually here?” It was a fair question—and one many colleagues and associates were asking privately. Offered Bonhoeffer’s vague reassurances, Barth remained skeptical. As for Bonhoeffer’s more cryptic allusions to a coup and the creation of a new government, Barth found them altogether delusional. Over the next two years Bonhoeffer would continue to hear from mutual acquaintances that the master in Basel could not for the life of him understand what this pacifistic evangelical monk was up to.

  But how is it possible that Bonhoeffer—a professed anti-Nazi, beset with numerous bans and restrictions, the most indomitable voice of the Confessing Church—would have been given a position in military intelligence? How could the Nazis possibly have trusted him? Popular and scholarly accounts of the conspiracy have largely demurred in the face of these critical, and surely inescapable, questions.

  The answer is twofold. First, there were his connections to Dohnányi, a commissioned major in military intelligence, and to Oster, the head of Department Z, the central department of the Military Intelligence Foreign Office in the army high command. Second, inside the Nazi bureaucracy, an intense rivalry had formed between the Gestapo and the Abwehr; the point of dispute was control over state intelligence. When high-ranking military officers learned from Gestapo sources that Bonhoeffer had been recruited as an Abwehr spy, they seized the opportunity not only for the obvious purpose—using his ecumenical contacts to gather information on foreign governments—but also to strengthen the military’s hand within the regime: the prospect of such a useful operative was, however irrationally, irresistible despite the flashing red lights of his past activities. The Abwehr leadership therefore was deeply motivated to have him and succeeded in persuading the more suspicious Gestapo that Bonhoeffer’s international stature would make him an “excellent collector of information.” It was, one might suppose, conceivable that such a spirited young man had seen the light; in any case his ecumenical activities per se had posed no perceived threat to Reich security. And so he was waved through.