It did not matter that, as a Protestant, he could not receive communion: “I am still a guest here after all.” The transcendent beauty of the Benedictine rites enthralled him all the same—such a welcome relief from the “dreadfully legalistic” Lutheran recitation of confessional. Pope Pius XII had issued a motu proprio, a kind of ad hoc decree, in which the Holy Father called on all Catholics to pray for peace in the Roman churches. Why should I not pray as well, Bonhoeffer wondered, and for all the churches, Roman and Protestant? So during Mass he prayed for the peace of the universal church and of the world.20
“This form of life is naturally not foreign to me,” he told his parents, “and I experience its regularity and silence as extremely beneficial for my work.”21
Bonhoeffer wrote Bethge every day, sometimes twice a day. He sent telegrams, and when possible—when the lines weren’t down—spoke with him on the telephone, the uncertainty about Dietrich’s conscription making the need for contact and its comfort more urgent. Bethge could not match Bonhoeffer’s effort. But he wrote often, several times a week; and at Bonhoeffer’s insistence, he offered more personal details than was his custom. In return Bonhoeffer sent gifts of tobacco, sausages, clothes, and books.
His letters to his parents, forthright though formal in their customary simplicity, reveal little. He remained the respectful son, circumspect, full of purpose, given to measured judgments. But with Bethge, it seemed, he felt—perhaps for the first time in his life—freedom from the lifelong pressure to present himself as an exemplar of propriety and probity. The guardedness had started at home: as if the call to ministry were not burden enough, his mother had once told him, “You are my most special one.” He was ever vigilant to banish complacency of the kind God had sent the prophet Amos to warn the people of Israel. The Lord, it was to be remembered, had elected his people but was no respecter of persons.
To overcome the trial of their “unnatural” separation, the two must cleave only more closely to each other, Bonhoeffer told Bethge, who was living at the time in the Burckhardthaus in Berlin-Dahlem. “All sorts of external things are running through my head,” Bonhoeffer said, and he wanted desperately to share them in person with his chosen confessor.22
Not all of Bonhoeffer’s concerns were matters of life and death. There was, for example, the issue of Bethge’s hopelessly provincial attire. From their first meeting, Bonhoeffer made his new friend’s fashion sense—or lack thereof—a personal project. Although it seemed futile instilling some sense of style in the country boy from Saxony, Bonhoeffer never stopped trying. Even fearing that Bethge’s own conscription was imminent—as it happened, Eberhard would manage to avoid the draft until August 1943—Bonhoeffer arranged with a Berlin haberdasher to furnish dress shirts, ties, a suit, and various outfits for special occasions; he also provided Bethge with some cash to make purchases on his own, once he got the hang of it.23
Then there was the business of their annual Christmas shopping. They’d been giving Christmas presents as a pair for several years, paying for them out of their bank account. At first, the practice created some awkwardness with some members of Bonhoeffer’s family (these relating mostly to the logistics of reciprocity now that “Mr. Bethge” was on the list of recipients), but by 1940, Christmas presents from “Dietrich and Eberhard” had become a family tradition. Bethge kept the “household” accounts and paid their taxes, whereas Bonhoeffer decided how to spend the money; it had evolved into an efficient partnership, this mutual dependency.
As December approached, Bonhoeffer wrote to Bethge with his suggestions for gifts. Dietrich would purchase as many as he could on his weekly trips into Munich. He’d already acquired the perfect gift for his mother: a good-sized bag of sugar. With wartime rationing in effect, Bonhoeffer had “saved” his small daily portions from breakfasts at the monastery; now his mother would be able to prepare all the Christmas favorites, the Kuchen and Süsses; he was sure she’d be thrilled. For cousin Hans-Christoph von Hase, he was in search of the Furche edition of John Calvin’s letters to the Huguenots; if that was not to be found in Munich, he would buy instead the first volume of Ricarda Huch’s history of German art. Bonhoeffer thought they might forego gifts for their siblings this year, using the savings to do something special for the Finkenwalde families, the wives and children of those who had been called to the front.
He would need Bethge’s help to round up the other items on the list: a copy of German Satirical and Polemical Writing, or an outdoor thermometer of fine quality, for his father. For his godchildren, a framed print of Stefan Lochner’s Birth of Christ. As for Finkenwalde’s faithful patron Ruth von Kleist-Retzow, he knew she would love nothing more than a sweet and thoughtful letter. As for Bethge’s family, what about a copy of Adelheid for his aunt Lene—there was one on the shelf in their room at the Bonhoeffers’ country house. And for Eberhard’s mother, Elisabeth, Bonhoeffer thought a flask would be nice.24
Then there was his most urgent question: Would Bethge come to Ettal for Christmas? “I suggest you do,” Bonhoeffer said, promising to introduce him to the brothers, and their Benedictine spirituality; then they could spend a day in Munich before taking the train to Friedrichsbrunn. They simply must be together, Bonhoeffer urged. Bethge could bring his mother, if he wanted. She had never been to Friedrichsbrunn, and now the house had heating and electricity. Still, it might be better if he and Eberhard kept Christmas alone; they could sleep by the fire, read books aloud to each other, and play the piano at all hours. When Bethge said yes, Bonhoeffer was ecstatic.25
“So we will be together as before!” he said.26
Not everything came off as Bonhoeffer had hoped. He was sorely vexed to learn that all the sleeping cars from Berlin had been commandeered by the military. It was a long ride—eleven hours—to Munich, and he wanted Eberhard to enjoy it in comfort. He even dispatched his father’s chauffeur to try his luck at the station with agents of the Deutsche Bahn, but to no avail. With abject apologies, Dietrich recommended reading a volume of his favorite Henrik Ibsen plays—The Wild Duck, A Doll’s House, and Ghosts—as a pleasant way to pass the time.27 Bethge assured Bonhoeffer that he did not at all mind traveling second class, preferring it, in fact.
Bethge arrived in Ettal a few days before Christmas; suddenly, it seemed, the clipped days of the winter storms yielded to “wonderful weather for skiing.” As he hadn’t for some time, Bonhoeffer slept soundly—yes, like a baby, he said. Not even the sirens of the air raid watch kept the two from rising late in the morning, as was their preference.28 After a languorous Christmas Eve dinner at the Ludwig der Bayer, Bonhoeffer and Bethge strolled to the monastery for the midnight Mass in the chapel there.29
After Christmas Day lunch in the refectory, Bonhoeffer sat down to write a letter to the brethren. On occasion, he would write to students and pastoral comrades collectively, inspired by the Pauline model of instruction and exhortation.30
In his hotel room, Bonhoeffer dictated the letter to Bethge, who typed it with plenty of sheets of carbon paper; later Bonhoeffer would address each copy in longhand. Bethge had fairly mastered the process since the previous year, when civilians “had been forbidden from sending publications to members of the armed forces.” After the seizure of Finkenwalde’s mimeograph machine, they began making carbons of newsletters on the typewriter, each of which Bonhoeffer would sign, like this Yuletide greeting, to give the impression not of something published but rather personal correspondence. It was a clever arrangement, since carbons did not count as publications under the strict terms of the publication ban.31
In the Christmas greeting of 1940, Bonhoeffer recalled the cataclysmic shock of World War I, the shattering of the old order, and the “ever new phases” of collective anger that followed. He asked, is our present situation significantly different? He thought it was, but only as an even “sharper clarification of our existence in this world.” The eruption of villainy they were witnessing was unprecedented—that much was indisputable. But the Christia
n mission had not changed. He proposed an analogy from photography, asking the brethren to contemplate the way a time-lapse image makes visible, “in an ever more compressed and penetrating form, movements that would otherwise not be thus grasped by our vision.” In such a way the new “war makes manifest … the essence of the ‘world’ ”; revealing the perversions of idolatry in their infinite multiplicity, now apparent as never before with the human will unmoored from any moral constraints.
In such a time, the meaning of Advent assumes a heightened urgency: What other power but God’s can arrest the “vast and unavoidable” inclination of the heart toward destruction? It is a difficult message that many find unfathomable: Jesus the Jew, born homeless in a manger, the son of God. “Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder” (Isaiah 9:6). This is the message of Advent—that God comes among us, but as a stranger! What an outrage! What an insult! Germans, he warned, do not want a stranger for a savior. They want a “vacation from life,” “a wisp of magic asking nothing and promising everything,” each soul seeking “a vacation from myself.” Having wished “to be transported into a fairy land,” they now find their flight from reality stalling; thus is the “essence of the world” revealed in the “manifest reality” of the present age. Luther had long ago proclaimed the tormented ego to be the precursor of grace; in his Christmas message, Bonhoeffer likened his warrior-nation and the war to this self-imprisoned heart and thus invoked Luther’s anguished account: Germany as the cor cuvum in se, the heart turned in on itself, standing in need of grace.32
But Bonhoeffer’s probing analysis of a church without Christ, while theologically in line with Lutheran thought, is insular, even triumphalistic: Nazi tyranny as an occasion, a propaedeutic perhaps, for salvation. But the doctrine of original sin remained a pillar of Christian orthodoxy, nowhere looming larger than in Luther’s justification by faith, to which Bonhoeffer’s brethren were heirs. He drew on these themes to make sense of the world and his students’ entanglements in its brutal arrangements. But how could a Christian—one such as Bonhoeffer—celebrate the coming of the Messiah, the God who would be mocked, scourged, and crucified as King of the Jews, while everywhere the Jews of Europe were beset with terror at the approach of the year that would see the first mass killings?
Proclaiming the truth of the gospel while pondering the end of Christianity, as he would do in the coming years; plotting the assassination of Hitler while affirming the ethics of pacifism; celebrating the sacrament of marriage while binding his affections joyfully to another man—Bonhoeffer came to embody some of the perplexing contradictions that modernity had imposed upon the faith. Yet he could not be pried from his adherence to its essential orthodoxy: God holds the world mercifully in his hands. This was the strange and glorious gospel that Bonhoeffer had taken vows to proclaim, despite little evidence of what most of the world would recognize as “good news.” Nothing, however, could preempt grace’s imminent intervention in the world: “Salvation is at hand! The night is far spent; the day is at hand! The rule of the world, already denied to its ‘principalities and powers,’ has been laid on the shoulders of this child! God holds the world in his hands and will never let it go.”33
BONHOEFFER AND EBERHARD BETHGE MAKING MUSIC AT ETTAL BENEDICTINE MONASTERY, DECEMBER 1940
Sometimes, of course, the gospel can only be proclaimed in a whisper, within the echoing dark, from the anxious middle.
Over the next two years, his missives to the brethren would typically begin on a more somber and plaintive note. He wrote as if offering a eulogy for fallen comrades, naming the dead. He would mourn the loss of F. A. Preuß, Ulrich Nithack, Gerhard Schulze, and Konrad Bojack, men who with “earnestness and joy” “trusted in word and sacrament,” before they were killed on the eastern front. Many others would be called to the “heavenly congregation”: Hans-Otto Georgii, Martin Franke of Pomerania; Engelke from Brandenburg; Heyse from Sachsen; Nicolaus from the Rhineland. “They have gone before us on the path that we shall all have to take at some point.” More than half of Bonhoeffer’s students would die in the war.34
In his courses and Bible studies, Bonhoeffer had taught pacifism as the way of the cross. He supported the notion of the conscientious objector, though never applying for that status himself. War had always been a reality impervious to grace. Discipleship formed the language of peace. But with few exceptions, his former seminarians had enlisted of their own will. In frank and open letters, they related to him the dizzying effect of immersion into sometimes barbaric warfare after following the spiritual discipline at Finkenwalde. He would never condemn any of those who took up arms for the Reich, neither those who submitted to the draft nor those who freely enlisted. Neither did he expect that the brethren would be torn between the freedom to love and the order to kill; there was no place on the battlefield for such rumination.
It was in response to the nightmarish reality as it unfolded that Bonhoeffer crafted his theodicy, his view of war as preparing the way for grace: How could God allow such things to happen to young German men, many of whom had no love of the Führer, and most of whom—speaking of those training for ministry—had acted only out of duty, letting their soul “be subject unto the higher powers,” as St. Paul instructed? For both those brethren at war and those still in parish life, he offered the same encouragement: extend particular grace and mercy to those serving in the battle, especially those benumbed, even crazed, by the brutalities and the killing.
Bonhoeffer told Bethge that the ethics manuscripts might be called Preparing the Way and Arrival (Wegbereitung and Einzug)—each a more evocative and daring title than those of his earlier books (Discipleship and Life Together)—or simply Ethics, as the book would be called on its posthumous publication.35 Bonhoeffer found the work “dangerous” but endlessly “stimulating.”36 It felt like “a decisive break,” he said. “Sometimes I think after this time, that Christianity will only live in a few people who have nothing to say.”37 Bethge confessed to being “startled” by aspects of the new work.38
His reading in Ettal reflected the shifting currents of his thought. He’d finally gotten around to George Santayana’s The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel, which he’d bought in New York during the hot summer of 1939. In that book, a professor of philosophy at Harvard recounts the story of a young man born into money who comes to realize that his exalted sense of duty often undermines his personal well-being. Bonhoeffer recognized himself in the character of Oliver Alden, the novel’s protagonist. Oliver is “lonely, even ridiculous,” forever pouring “himself out for every conceivable thing without being convinced of the inner meaning of that outpouring.” Like Santayana’s “last puritan,” Bonhoeffer believed that he had never given himself permission to feel free—“free for the authentic and utterly unique pouring out of his life.”39 He had lived too much out of loyalty to the past or in expectation of future trials; he had been a prince of self-restraint. How lovely it would be “to surrender to the strong desires” of the present!
Bonhoeffer had also read Reinhold Schneider’s Power and Grace (Macht und Gnade) with “great pleasure,” recommending that Bethge buy it too, before it sold out: Schneider having been charged with subversive activity, his books were banned, not to be restocked. In any case it was not Schneider’s view of the government but his dialogue between the artist and his demons that captivated Bonhoeffer.40 There was also the American author Eric Knight’s This Above All, a best-selling novel about a conscientious objector who abandons his post in the British army.41
Bonhoeffer had also brought with him to Bavaria his Braunfels edition of Don Quixote, and as always he was reading his Kant and also Ibsen, looking especially at the play Brand while in Ettal.42 He read Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point. He managed to obtain as well the latest installment in Barth’s Church Dogmatics (volume II/1), which pondered the question of God’s identity: God’s being, Barth
explained, was in God’s becoming.
On February 4, Bonhoeffer turned thirty-five years old. Naturally and as always, he spent part of the day reading the Bible, but now it was with a new freedom and clarity. He also listened to the music of Heinrich Schütz, sent by Bethge as a birthday gift. Schütz’s compositions, inspired by Lutheran theology and the German polyphonic tradition, came as a great joy to Bonhoeffer.43
Drawn to the Baroque and Romantic periods, Bonhoeffer—until meeting Bethge—had given scant attention to this seventeenth-century composer and music-master to the royal court of Dresden, but after listening to Kleine geistliche Konzerte and Symphoniae Sacrae, he fell under the spell of Schütz’s “whole rich world.” Music nights with Eberhard were never complete without a rendition of “Bone Jesus,” “Habe deine Lust an dem Herren,” or “Jubilate Deo omnis terra,” with Bonhoeffer playing piano and Eberhard singing these clear, free songs that gave their lives “wholeness,” as Bonhoeffer said.44
Snow had continued falling on Ettal until the end of January. The Christmas break in Friedrichsbrunn had been glorious, but now Bethge was back in Berlin. Filling the lonely hours proved difficult for Bonhoeffer after the month together. Resuming to write, he now pondered the meaning of “penultimate and ultimate things.” He’d been inspired by his exchanges with the Benedictines on the Catholic tradition of natural theology. Now he would apply himself to defending the integrity of created life—of “natural and bodily life”—against the Nazi program of legalized euthanasia and eugenics.45 Away from war and the noise, he drew analogies between God and nature: the divine spark luminous in the created order was “like the young boy who is speechless gazing upon his hero … like the man … calmed by the gaze of his beloved … like all of us who are silenced in reverence and awe at the heart of nature, under the starry heavens.”46
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