Strange Glory

by Charles Marsh

  When God became flesh in Jesus Christ, “the whole human race recover[ed] the dignity of the image of God,” Bonhoeffer explained, upholding the theological significance of the human form, the bodily life perverted by Nazi ideology. “Therefore, any attack even on the least of these is an attack on Christ, who took the form of [humanity,] and in His own Person restored the image of God in all that bears a human form…‘my body’—not only in its achievements and overcomings but in its ordinariness and breakdowns—has ‘the right to be preserved for the sake of the whole person.’ ”47

  The human body, he continued, “is not intended only as protection against bad weather and the night, or as a place for offspring to develop. It is the space in which human beings may enjoy the pleasure of personal life secure with their loved ones and their possessions.”48

  Bodily life is meant for joy: “Eating and drinking not only sustain bodily health, but also the natural joy of bodily life.” Clothing is not only a “necessary covering” for the body, but “an adornment” as well. Relaxation and leisure not only facilitate “the capacity for work,” but also grace the body with the measure of rest and joy that is its due. “In its essential distance from all purposefulness, play is the clearest expression that bodily life is an end in itself.”49 Breaking from work one morning, Bonhoeffer wrote to Bethge, “Sometimes I am startled and fear that, the (‘flesh’) is energetically engaged in this work apart from the Spirit.”50 The truth of this in his own life was revealing the truth of it in all.

  Bonhoeffer’s emotional resources, it must be readily acknowledged, were not equal to his intellectual ones, even at this mature age. After he’d written all he could of a morning, the remains of the winter day typically seemed interminable. He began taking the regional train more frequently into Munich, meeting with resistance comrades, reporting as required to the Reich office, and inquiring as to his draft status. He went to the ballet—a “riveting” performance of Beethoven’s Creatures of Prometheus—the symphony, and a few movies, which he found dismal. The German film industry now cranked out “terrible, pathetic, clichéd, phony, unreal, unhistorical, badly acted, kitsch!” He would also travel to Switzerland for his work in the conspiracy.51

  In mid-February he suffered a nasty bout of scarlet fever. At the same time, he felt the net of circumstances tightening. The number of Ettalites called to military service had grown so that classes at the monastery school had to be canceled or combined. Reports of more brethren lost or in danger or under arrest arrived every day. “Gurtner’s death hits us hard.” “Gabriel-Halle is in Dachau.” Herbert Jehle was detained by the Gestapo in southern France. “Neuhäulser suddenly became ill and went into the hospital,” Bonhoeffer wrote. In the coded language of his letters, “going to the hospital” usually meant being sent to one of the concentration camps; in this instance, the Catholic priest Johannes Neuhäusler had been taken to Sachsenhausen.52

  The reports also told of nervous breakdowns and suicides. Adding to the stress was Bonhoeffer’s knowledge that his parents suffered “insurmountably under it all.”53 He had decided not to resist the draft if it came to that, mainly out of concern for what might consequently befall his family and friends, who would likely be charged with aiding and abetting criminal behavior. To be sure, after 1939 conscientious objection was no longer a legal option. To assert it was to invite the fate of his pacifist friend Hermann Stöhr and the Austrian Franz Jägerstätter (beatified in 2007 by Pope Benedict XVI), who were arrested and murdered by the Gestapo.

  When finally accepted into the Abwehr in late October 1940, Bonheoffer was granted the so-called UK, or unabkömmlich, status, meaning “indispensable” to state security and thereby exempt from military service. But his UK exemption would not take effect upon first joining the military intelligence, only after he started working as a courier “assigned to engage in covert talks with foreign church leaders who would communicate with Allied leaders.” The exempt status also needed to be renewed periodically. And so he would remain ever fearful that it would be revoked. Bethge would remember that the entire time from 1940 until his arrest in February 1943 was “constantly accompanied by the struggle to renew the UK classifications.”54

  This was the first winter of the war, and it would be a season of many endings. “Life Together was my swan song,” Bonhoeffer poignantly explained. Finkenwalde was now an abandoned building on a wintry plain in Pomerania. Even more disquieting, he began to fear that the ties to Bethge were fraying.55

  Only in Bethge’s company did Bonhoeffer relax his finely tuned rectitude and reveal his inmost fears and disappointments—and also the bits of humor he found in life amid the ruins. On hearing, for instance, that their beloved clavichord had a broken string, he told his friend not to worry, for “should a bomb fall on it, it is gone anyway, and if no bomb falls, we can still repair it later.” He noted in another letter that in addition to the work on euthanasia and the penultimate-ultimate, he was making sketches for a short essay for one of the brethren on the “spa ministry”—or as he put it, “the spa ministry!” With Bethge he felt free to add the exclamation mark.56

  Bethge’s letters to Bonhoeffer were deferential and affectionate, but they did not convey the same urgency or reciprocate the other’s emotional claims, certainly not to the latter’s satisfaction. Nor were they as frequent: equally maddening. In trying to summarize their six-year relationship, Bonhoeffer would reach for an ever-deeper intimacy, whereas Bethge saw fit only to thank his mentor for “the secure feeling of knowing someone with whom counsel and solutions are to be found in all circumstances.” In such measured terms would he sometimes also try to temper Bonhoeffer’s solicitations, though to no avail. On one occasion he conveyed the wish that Bonhoeffer have many “good stimulating friends” in his life. But Bonhoeffer swatted away the suggestion with a quick reply. “One can well wish such a thing for oneself,” he said. “And yet the human is created in such a way that we seek not the many but the one particular.” The heart wants what the heart wants. Bonhoeffer celebrated their “anniversary,” as he put it, by sending Bethge two long letters and an embarrassment of gifts: a fur-lined hat and money for a viola da gamba. “You really choose well,” Bethge, no doubt blushing, replied. “And all the extra treats!”57

  The generosity was totemic. There were relationships, Bonhoeffer said, in which the partners challenged each other to achieve their better selves, others that resembled “intrusive forays” into inner realms, and still others that remained distant, unfamiliar, and indifferent—“noncommittal chats which barely veil the distance, unfamiliarity.” But his relationship with Bethge was of a wholly different kind. He likened it to a conversation in which there existed “a mutual giving and receiving of gifts,” where neither was ever domineering, violent, or indifferent; and to a “natural harmony” where all that “remains unspoken signifies a gesture pointing toward as yet undiscovered treasures, toward riches still hidden in the other which will be disclosed when the time is right.”58

  Bonhoeffer had always felt incomplete apart from Bethge. But now his declarations had become uninhibited and, in the dependency they revealed, inevitably tragic. Had anyone but Bethge ever witnessed the explosive temper for which Bonhoeffer often begged forgiveness? But unto whomsoever much is given, of him much shall be required. Bonhoeffer demanded of Bethge not only that he be a “faithful helper and advisor,” “daring, trusting spirit,” a source of “extraordinary joy,” but also that he suffer the teacher’s “severe tests” and “violent temper” with patience. “[This], I too abhor in myself and of which you have fortunately repeatedly and openly reminded me,” he said.59 But it is not only the lurking volcanic temper that inspired Bethge’s increasingly hesitant tone and reserve in reply. The letters of that winter plead for a connection that Bethge was not willing to accept.

  Bethge was not remotely unaware of being unable to match Bonhoeffer’s affections. He knew he had become, on this account, a disappointment, and that knowledge saddened him. H
e would apologize for the infrequency of his letters, but Bonhoeffer would not complain now, straining toward a heightened intimacy, offering expressions of his unrequited ardor in the way of a man who believes the heart can be won by persuasion.

  “The day is over,” Bonhoeffer wrote to Bethge on February 4, moments after a long phone conversation between them. “[But] before I go to sleep I want to spend more time with you.” The sound of Eberhard’s voice, he said, had recalled “especially vivid” memories of birthdays past, when Bethge had made him the gift of a song, sung in his gentle tenor. The day had brought other pleasant moments as well. His parents had sent a nice letter, along with two cakes, a bottle of schnapps, and an azalea plant. He heard from his sisters and his godson. Still, nothing could compare to the joy of speaking with Eberhard, or of knowing that despite the geographical distance between them, the two had sung the same morning hymn and prayed the same prayers; their shared devotions and personal intercessions have given “meaning and substance” to this as to every day. That day’s hymn was Bethge’s favorite, Schütz’s “Eile mich, Gott, zu erretten” (“Hasten to save me, O God”), and until he went to bed that night, Bonhoeffer carried the sheet music around with him, humming the lines to himself, he said, with “a warm and grateful heart.”60

  Bethge’s birthday present would arrive a few days late, but when it came, Bonhoeffer was ecstatic. “I am utterly at a loss for words,” he said. “It is truly beyond all bounds, completely impermissible, and nevertheless a tremendous joy.” Bethge gave Bonhoeffer two silver cordial cups, a perfect complement for their after-dinner schnapps—“precious vessels intended for precious contents,” mused Bonhoeffer, the perfect reminder of their many evenings together.

  “I keep glancing at them in disbelief,” Bonhoeffer continued. “Clearly you spent months searching and eventually turned your wallet inside out to give this joy to me. It is incredible that you even came upon such cups. Now they await a worthy inauguration, the chance to use them with you!…I shall drink the first glass to the constancy of our friendship.” When Bonhoeffer took the cups to a farewell celebration for him at the monastery, one monk allowed that they looked like the ideal wedding present.61

  On February 15, after the largest accumulation of snow in a decade, the skies cleared and the day dawned cold and blue. Bonhoeffer told Bethge that the two Benedictines who checked in on him most days wondered what had become of that “Bättge.” “They always want me to greet you for them; it seems as if they think something of you—strange!”

  “You see, you simply must come back,” he said. “I miss having a partner.… I miss Finkenwalde.”62

  On February 19, 1941, Bonhoeffer announced that he had finally resolved some visa problems that had temporarily restricted his travel abroad and he would be leaving the monastery within a week. He planned to spend a few nights at the Europäischer Hof in Munich before heading for Switzerland on the 24th, on what would be his first real errand for the conspiracy. He hoped to return to Berlin after about a month—or as soon as he could collect his parents from Oberammergau, the village four kilometers south of Ettal, where Paula and Karl were vacationing.

  “I hope you will pick us up in the Mercedes,” Bonhoeffer said to Bethge. “I would be eager then to go with you to Friedrichsbrunn over Easter.”63

  Although that reunion was over a month away—it felt “so absurd,” so long a time—the prospect allowed Bonhoeffer happily to work on the mundane preparations. Their mail should now be sent to the Bonhoeffers’ house in Marienburger Allee, where they would once again share the second-floor studio. The books, supplies, and clothes that would be coming from Ettal by post should be taken directly upstairs. In all, he seemed indifferent to how the coming months would make unprecedented demands on his time and energies.64

  The purpose of the March trip to Switzerland was the renewal of Bonhoeffer’s “lines of communication with his international contacts.” He managed to meet with two German émigrés—Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze, the Berlin social theologian living in exile in Basel, and Otto Salomon, his former editor at the publishing house Christian Kaiser Verlag, whom he visited in the scenic town of Rapperswil on Lake Zurich—and also with the ethicist Alfred de Quervain, who had settled in Canton Bern, the Dutch ecumenist Wilhelm Visser ’t Hooft, director of the World and Life Council in Geneva, and others. It would have been inconceivable to go to Switzerland without seeing Erwin Sutz. Sutz had become the “mailbox” for Bonhoeffer’s written exchanges with colleagues in England.65 So the two former Union classmates, friends now for more than a decade, squeezed in an afternoon together in Rapperswil, where Sutz was still pastor of the Reformed church.

  His covert agenda was packed, but Bonhoeffer did manage to squeeze in a brief tête-à-tête with Barth. As it turned out, the visit was not so well timed, which he gathered from the fretful demeanor of Barth’s wife, Nelly, when she greeted him at the front door. Things were uneasy within the plain three-story house on Bruderholzallee, for the great Reformed theologian, who, as noted earlier, had single-handedly retrieved the language of Christian Orthodoxy from its modernist reductions, had performed an even more astonishing feat: he had managed to move his beautiful assistant, Charlotte von Kirschbaum, into the household.

  Nelly led Bonhoeffer back to the staircase, covered in red carpet. “On the wall alongside them were prints of famous philosophers and theologians, ascending from Kant to Schleiermacher to Nietzsche … to Blumhardt to Wilhelm Hermann to Harnack.”66 Under the solemn gaze of Mozart and John Calvin, whose portraits hung at the same level above the doorway to the book-lined study, Barth from behind a small desk offered Bonhoeffer a seat, in what proved for both men, it would seem, an awkwardly formal exchange.

  Even after Switzerland, the months ahead would be hectic for Bonhoeffer, consumed with travel, shifting plans, and impromptu meetings, but he wouldn’t seem the least harried or unhappy. He had always felt rather at peace in the itinerant life, and it was no different now. In fact, it was as if the chaos relieved him of boredom, his greatest fear, and blotted out as well the expectations he felt from others. In perpetual motion, he lived with a heightened awareness of the fragility of things, and that awareness eased his inhibitions in a spirit of carpe diem as natural to the Christian as to the hedonist. “What remains for us is only the very narrow path,” he wrote, “sometimes barely discernible, of taking each day as if it were the last and yet living it faithfully and responsibly as if there were yet to be a great future.”67 In a more strictly Christian way, he crafted the art of “inner dying,” the ars moriendi, glimpsed eternity from a new perspective, and felt free to go as far as he could go into the world. He said he felt the grace of a steadying joy, a blessed stillness within, even in flight.68

  Over drinks one spring evening with one of Barth’s wealthy friends, Gerty Pestalozzi, on the balcony of his villa near Zurich, Bonhoeffer suddenly felt a profound sense of “refreshment and delight.”69 It was more than just the rush of alcohol and a fine view of the Zürichsee at sunset.

  “The Christian … has no last line of escape into the eternal from earthly tasks and difficulties,” he would write, “but, like Christ himself (‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’), he must drink the earthly cup to the lees.”70

  This meant the obvious rituals of self-sacrifice—“being crucified with Christ,” suffering for a just cause, crossing the threshold to treason in his case—but draining “the earthly cup” did not mean neglecting the daily, transitory tasks, even if the day’s business was shopping for silk underwear in a Geneva haberdashery. It was indeed a stylish pair he’d found on the Rue du Marché; and he would tell Bethge about a fantasy of strolling along the Promenade de Luc in nothing but his shimmering golden briefs. He was reaching a place beyond simple spiritual ardor, where duty vanished into grace, and life seemed to him charged with longing for the things of this world, as well as thoughts of the next. Returning to Munich, he found awaiting him at the hotel a letter from Wilhelm Ihde, director of
the Reich Chamber of Literature. Bonhoeffer recognized the name as that of a zealous Nazi and the author of mawkish historical tracts, whom Joseph Goebbels had recently appointed to enforce the Reich’s publishing standards. Ihde was writing about Bonhoeffer’s failure to submit Discipleship and Life Together for official approval, a violation subject to a fine of thirty marks.71

  Bonhoeffer objected, promptly filing an appeal—no doubt intended to bolster his image as someone working dependably within the system. He also disputed Ihde’s charge that the omission amounted to disloyalty. Furthermore, there was nothing subversive about the books, he said. Discipleship was “a purely scholarly work” and “everywhere acknowledged in theological circles” as such. The same holds for Life Together, which he wrote solely for theologians—for all his publications, in fact: “Not one” could be considered subversive or deserving of a fine.72 Ihde denied the appeal, coming to the conclusion that, at least in this instance, would be shared by Bonhoeffer’s most sympathetic readers: his writings were indeed subversive in effect.73

  In Discipleship, Bonhoeffer had imagined the world as a vast and menacing realm of temptation and terror; against this the Christian must keep his vigilant watch, holding high the cross. In Life Together, Bonhoeffer had somewhat soothed the individual’s wounds laid bare in Discipleship, applying the balm of beloved communion. But what would the likes of Ihde make of the new book he had not yet published?

  Ethics marks a turning point in Bonhoeffer’s thought, a step into new territory. Both daring and luminous, it refracts the “breakthroughs” of recent months and though the form is fragmentary, a coherent existential narrative emerges. He ponders the most difficult and urgent of questions. Might “extreme actions” be required of morally responsible people in extraordinary circumstances and exceptional cases? Why were there more humanists and atheists (like his brother Klaus or his cousin Hans) than Christians in the ranks of the resistance? How could the integrity of the person be preserved against dehumanizing technologies? How might the created holiness of all bodily life be safeguarded from Nazi eugenics and euthanasia laws? But Ethics is not an instructor’s manual or a work of practical wisdom; it is best read as a collection of theological dispatches, albeit by a dissident theologian in the grip of what Bethge would call “the lure of the political.” At more than three hundred pages, it is in every way Bonhoeffer’s most mature work, and in every way bears the traumatic scars of its time.