Strange Glory

by Charles Marsh

  Regarding the question of why Bonhoeffer would have accepted Dohnányi’s invitation, the reasons would be even more obvious in retrospect: on February 7, 1941, after seeking a deferment for two years, he would receive a classification excusing him from active military service.

  His continuing activity among the international churches gave him plausible cover for his efforts as a Nazi spy; at the same time, his work as a Nazi spy disguised his work as a conspirator recruited by Oster, Canaris, Gisevius, and Dohnányi, for the purpose of undermining the Third Reich.50 The conspirators were even more tolerant than the Nazis of his ties to the enemy, for they knew that the coup’s success would depend on not only Allied support but especially a willingness to suspend “military action against Germany in the aftermath of a successful overthrow.” The churches in the Allied countries were, after all, among the most trusted of national institutions; what better way to win over their governments than to persuade Bonhoeffer’s “ecumenical contacts … to convince the allies that a post-Hitler government represented by disenchanted members of the German military could be trusted”? Dohnányi charged Bonhoeffer with this very task of communicating to the British and French and others that the resistance, with its deep roots in military and political leadership, was reliable. At the same time, the resisters were patriots. And so Bonhoeffer must also win assurances in return that neither Germany nor the plotters would suffer because of this subversive action. “The military members of the resistance wanted guarantees of German territorial integrity and of their own position as leaders of a postwar Germany.”

  But such assurances would never materialize. Bonhoeffer’s communiqués via bishops and influential ecumenists, as well as the secret reports of other conspirators to members of the Allied intelligence, were received mainly with collective distrust. In the end, neither the Americans nor the British ever considered a German coup a serious plan worth supporting.51

  The conspirators would carry on without foreign assistance, and in the end this isolation may have doomed their effort.

  In the Nazi Reichsgau of Wartheland, the conquered province comprising greater Poland and its surrounding areas, the Reich’s regional governor, Arthur Greiser, outlined his vision of a thoroughly assimilated and unified church in his “Thirteen Points” of March 14, 1940. But by that time, Hitler’s regime no longer cared that the churches had taken the oath to the Führer, affirmed the Aryan laws, excommunicated the Jewish Christians, thrown out the Old Testament, fashioned a Teutonic Christ, and done everything else imaginable to accommodate the regime. The “Thirteen Points” were intended as the finishing touches on the hideous process of Gleichschaltung, the assimilation of all German life under Nazi rule. But by criminalizing all activities associated with the churches, those who had forfeited the faith would only find themselves forfeited in turn.

  Among the program’s mandates was the prohibition of all youth groups dedicated to religious formation. Injunctions were issued against church offerings, the printing of church bulletins, calendars of the Christian year, monthly newsletters, sermons, or reports from missionaries abroad. Laypeople were forbidden to contribute directly to congregation life, so older men and women of all ages—all Germans not called to the front—were barred from “mak[ing] themselves available for pastoral care.” The Gestapo forbade meetings in house churches, services in schools, and any religious activity on private property—all of which practices were common among the collective pastorates, as well as with rural parishes, where the loss of the local pastor meant that sacraments and the rest of church life came to an end. This purpose was effectively served by drafting the clergy en masse, not only from the Confessing Church but from the Reich Church as well. The life of the congregations could not continue without the leader: “I will strike the shepherd …”

  The “Thirteen Points” also brought an abrupt end to the Lutheran Service of the Word, whereby a layperson read a sermon written by a minister in absentia, as well as to chaplaincy programs in church-run hospitals and to the religious formation of children. High school students seeking Bible study on school grounds were threatened with expulsion, even in church schools. If students and laypeople wanted to form a study group, they were permitted only if they chose a theme or book of direct service to the Reich, such as Friedrich Schmidt’s best seller Das Reich als Aufgabe—The Kingdom as a Task, the first edition running to seven million copies—and devoted their attention to the Führer’s apocalyptic hopes, the breaking away from all non-Aryan traditions, “the decisive destruction of the churches,” the creation of “the inner conditions” for total victory—the triumph of the pure German will.

  Bonhoeffer was left virtually alone to preserve the convictions of the old Confessing Church. Moving more deeply into his double identity of theologian and spy, he began to minister to both the conspirator and the collaborator alike. By the end of 1940, he had deftly fashioned the narrowest ledge on the church’s ruined edifice as it leaned against the ghostly pillar of the resistance. From that tight spot he gave tireless voice to the embattled language of the gospel.

  His Easter sermon of 1940 proclaimed in Stettin:

  The resurrection of Jesus Christ is God’s Yes to Christ and his work of expiation. The cross was the end, the death of the Son of God, curse and judgment on all flesh. If the cross had been the last word about Jesus, then the world would be lost in death and damnation without hope; then the world would have triumphed over God. But God, who alone accomplished salvation for us—“all this is from God” (2 Cor. 5:18)—raised Christ from the dead. That was the new beginning that followed the end as a miracle from on high—not, like spring, according to a fixed law, but out of the incomparable freedom and power of God, which shatters death. “Holy Scripture plainly says / That death is swallowed up by death” (Luther)….

  The resurrection of Jesus Christ is God’s Yes to us. Christ died for our sins; he was raised for our righteousness (Rom. 4:25). Christ’s death was the death sentence upon us and our sins. If Christ had remained dead, this death sentence would still stand: “We would still be in our sins” (1 Cor. 15:17). Because, however, Christ is risen from the dead, our sentence has been lifted, and we are risen with Christ (1 Cor. 15)….

  The resurrection of Jesus Christ is God’s Yes to the created being. What takes place here is not the destruction of life in the body but its new creation. The body of Jesus comes forth from the tomb, and the tomb is empty.… We know that God has judged the first creation and has brought about a new creation in the likeness of the first. It is not an idea of Christ that lives on, but the bodily Christ. This is God’s Yes to the new creature in the midst of the old. In the resurrection, we acknowledge that God has forsaken the earth but has personally won it back. God has given it a new future, a new promise. The very earth God created bore the Son of God and his cross, and on this earth the Risen One appeared to his own, and to this earth Christ will come again on the last day. Those who affirm the resurrection of Christ in faith can no longer flee the world, nor can they still be enslaved by the world, for within the old creation they have perceived the new creation of God.52

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  1940–1941

  ~

  “Christmas amid the Ruins”

  A winter storm was blanketing the village of Ettal, sometimes in billowy down, sometimes as blinding white sheets. Every day “it snowed like crazy.” Bonhoeffer had taken a room in the Hotel Ludwig der Bayer across the street from the Benedictine monastery, where he would live for the next three months. Throughout December 1940 and into the first weeks of January 1941, the snow would continue, covering hill and dale and house. A path cut from the hotel to the monastery disappeared amid the drifts seven and eight feet high. “Extraordinary!” Bonhoeffer wrote.1

  There were nights when the distant roar of fighter planes signaled that the Allies had brought the fight to Munich, which lay a hundred kilometers to the north; there were nights when the shriek of the air raid alarms shattered the stillness, wa
rning of attack even nearer. But in Ettal, Bonhoeffer was grateful for a chance to work on his new book, Ethics, in relative peace and tranquility. As far as the Reich was concerned, however, his base would remain Munich, where the wages of appeasement had recently been revealed.

  Little is known of the house in Munich that he made his permanent residence. Oster and Dohnányi wanted Bonhoeffer stationed near Joseph Müller, the Catholic attorney who was negotiating on the conspiracy’s behalf with the Vatican, and Bonhoeffer had family relations in Munich. He also needed an official address outside of Berlin to satisfy the Gestapo restrictions, and the place in Unertlstrasse served both purposes. The house belonged to his aunt Countess Christine von Kalckreuth, and it was actually in the eastern suburb of Schwabing. “Kalckreuth was a painter and graphic artist, who opened her home to young relatives attending the university in Munich and to her artist friends.” On visits there in better times, Bonhoeffer had become acquainted with her brother Johannes, “a highly-regarded music critic.”2 Now, he would come to know Müller, who would introduce Bonhoeffer to the fellowship of kindred souls that made up his Bavarian network. Müller’s strong ties to the Vatican proved helpful in convincing Pope Pius XII to vouch for the credibility of the conspiracy in his communiqués to the Western allies.3

  Though he had waded into the conspiracy some months before, Bonhoeffer was in another sort of limbo, awaiting final clearance for service in the Abwehr. The intelligence service had not yet persuaded the Gestapo of his value, and so he remained subject to call-up at any time, pastoral exemptions having been discontinued the previous year. As a desperate measure to expedite his clearance, he tried to obtain membership in the Reich Chamber of Literature. Such membership depended on his demonstrating pure Aryan descent by means of an Ahnenpass, or certificate of ancestry. He wrote to his parents for help, saying he did not even know what an Ahnenpass was. “How do I get one?” he asked. As Paula worked on documenting their Aryan genealogy, Bonhoeffer tried to join another Nazi organization called the Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt, or National Socialist People’s Welfare.4 These efforts would come to naught, though it is fair to say that they relieved the suspicions of some officials concerning this dissident pastor who wanted to join military intelligence. Bonhoeffer had come to Munich from Königsberg, in East Prussia. Königsberg, the former imperial city, where the great Immanuel Kant had taught in the second half of the eighteenth century, had been Bonhoeffer’s “home base” for the previous six months. He had led house groups, Bible studies, hosted by families willing to risk police scrutiny and arrest, and coordinated other “visiting pastorates” in East Prussia, checking in regularly with the Gestapo to reassure them of his new “official” residence outside Berlin. For a while Bonhoeffer stayed in the house at 18 Rhesastrasse that his parents had rented before he was born and that had since become a Protestant hostel. He liked East Prussia better than Pomerania, he told Karl and Paula, and found the people “more generous.” “Königsberg too seems like a city in which one can live well, in contrast to Stettin.” But there was no time now for putting down roots; “behind everything that we see,” he said, “other experiences loom that fill our thoughts unceasingly, even into our dreams.”5 In July, he learned from a Gestapo agent that the SS had banned him from public speaking throughout the Reich.6

  He packed his winter clothes and outdoor gear, his books, pens, and paper, and boarded the train for Bavaria. Before going, however, he wrote his “dear Mama” to let her know another bundle of laundry was en route to Berlin. Throughout his peripatetic life after Finkenwalde, he had maintained a fresh wardrobe by mailing his laundry home to the help, who promptly cleaned and returned it via Deutsche Post.

  ETTAL BENEDICTINE MONASTERY

  In Munich, he would stay for the first few nights, where he had to check in with his Abwehr contacts, Müller among them. Otherwise he was on his own.

  From his room at the Park Hotel, he wrote Bethge that it felt good to be in an unfamiliar city—that youthful urge had not left him entirely. His friend had begun work at the Gossner Mission in Berlin, primarily assisting displaced ministers of the Confessing Church, while preaching occasionally in the Dahlem parish.7

  In the evening Bonhoeffer would go to the opera (there were performances of Ariadne auf Naxos and Othello) or to the grand Odeon for Bach’s Art of the Fugue, or Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony. He visited the museums in the Englischer Garten.8 These were all pleasant diversions, but he missed Bethge very much. At the Altdorfer department store, Bonhoeffer purchased a hundred Christmas cards with a reproduction of Dürer’s Holy Night—one of their favorite woodcuts—to send to each of his former seminarians.9 Bonhoeffer joked to Bethge that this year he and his friend might inscribe their card “Christmas amid the ruins.”10 One morning, Bonhoeffer found two hundred marks tucked into the side pocket of his briefcase. He couldn’t remember having put them there, but what a stroke of good fortune, he told Bethge. The money would come in handy on their Christmas trip—that is, if he could resist the temptation to buy Bethge “something very nice” in Munich, a fur wrap or a bottle of cognac, perhaps. The prospect of their reunion leavened his mood.11 Though the dissident church had all but collapsed under the weight of its own bad faith, the end of Bonhoeffer’s intense two-year experiment at Finkenwalde had seemed abrupt. It had come as part of a wave of police actions in March 1940 that dispersed the collective pastorates and unsettled the Council of Brethren of the Old Prussian Union, flushing out the last dens of nonconformity. Remarkably, internecine debates over ecclesial principle, though now mostly as an inconsequential exercise, would continue to be waged in the regional churches well into the war years. More practically, though, the end of the Kirchenkampf left Bonhoeffer in another kind of limbo: What did it mean to be a pastor without a church? Or, to serve a conspiracy in a spiritual role? To offer the sacraments in the ruin of a church? And what did it say about the institutional church that it had proved so entirely feckless in organizing opposition to Hitler?

  Following a few nights at his official base of Munich, Bonhoeffer traveled south into the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, toward the town that would be his true base. He traveled to Ettal, where he lived as a guest of the fourteenth-century Benedictine monastery. While making frequent trips back to Munich, checking in with Müller and his lot, Bonhoeffer lived in the monastic village from November 1940 until February 1941, working in solitude on his Ethics, with the snow falling steadily. By the time he left, he had completed major sections on “ultimate and penultimate things” and had “crafted a robust affirmation of the nature and the integrity of all created life.”12

  Father Angelus Kupfer, Ettal’s abbot, welcomed Bonhoeffer with a key to the cloister and the monastery library.13 Bonhoeffer knew from earlier exchanges that Kupfer was familiar with his recent books, but he would be dumbfounded to learn that the monks read aloud from Life Together and Discipleship at mealtimes.14 Having lived for years as a pariah among German Protestants, he now moved freely to the rhythms of cloister life once again, this time without the headaches of being the director. And so he was able to settle into a routine of reading, prayer, and writing.15 Not that his stay in Ettal was entirely without distractions. He was constantly looking up from his manuscript to attend to his new secret activities as a theologian in the conspiracy, and he was often without his typewriter.16 Nevertheless, he resolved that the most important thing now was to live in the present moment, with as much beauty, concentration, and inner stillness as he could sustain.

  And meanwhile, he would wait for the Abwehr to pronounce on his position.

  Just five days after his arrival in Ettal, his sister Christine von Dohnányi showed up with her two children. The boys and their mother had come seeking refuge from the bombing raids over Hamburg, where the family lived. Christoph and Klaus were enrolled in Ettal’s secondary school, the well-regarded Gymnasium, with the intention, it seemed, that they would remain there indefinitely. The situation brought on natural obligation
s for Bonhoeffer. When Christine moved into an apartment in nearby Oberammergau, he kept a close eye on his nephews—even bringing Christoph, his godson, into his own room to care for him when he came down with the flu.17 The distraction meant he would write fewer letters to the brethren, though he did remain in close touch with his parents, and of course with Bethge, the letters to him now reaching a new intensity.

  “I have everything that one could desire,” Bonhoeffer wrote. “The only things missing are a desk and what in these nearly six years has become a matter of course, the exchange of my impressions with you.”18

  There was time on some days for an afternoon hike on the snow-packed trail that traced the western ridge above the monastery. At the popular restaurant in the Hotel Ludwig der Bayer, Bonhoeffer had generous portions of Bavarian fare and sweet mahogany-brown Dunkelbier, which the monks had been brewing for four centuries. By the end of November, Abbot Kupfer had invited him to join the brotherhood for meals in the refectory. Bonhoeffer also attended Mass in the marble rotunda chapel. Everything about the monastery—its ornate altars, rococo sculptures, peasant woodcarvings, flying buttresses, the scene in the tympanum of the crucified Lord before whom the monastery’s founding couple bowed—Emperor Louis the Bavarian and his wife Margaret—he found “wonderful.”19