Ethics reveals the shifting assumptions of a chastened believer; it is no less Christocentric than the earlier writings, but it is more open to Christ’s presence in persons, places, and movements outside the church. As Bonhoeffer thought more carefully on the subject of “natural piety” and the category of the “natural” (both drawn from Catholic teaching), he found himself often running up against a strange but exhilarating notion: “unconscious Christianity.” He was intrigued by certain unexplored possibilities in the classical Lutheran distinction between fides directa and fides reflexa—a distinction roughly corresponding, respectively, to a very visceral faith born of desire and a more reflective, conscious one, rooted in ascent. The duality was developed by Lutheran scholastics in the seventeenth century to explain how or whether a baptized infant could be said to have faith in Jesus Christ. Bonhoeffer, though not uninterested in the mysteries of infant baptism, invoked the terms for a different purpose.
The Confessing Church had finally cowered before the Führer. Its officials and caretakers of the Word had become bystanders to evil. By contrast, Bonhoeffer’s new secular comrades in the resistance fastened themselves to the concrete reality with brave defiance. This puzzling divergence inspired Bonhoeffer to cultivate an appreciation of the “good people” and propose “the beatification of those who are persecuted for the sake of a just cause.”74 The world full of depravity and menace, as portrayed in Discipleship, might seem a more accurate reflection of the Zeitgeist. But in Ethics, Bonhoeffer moved well beyond such depictions, and their implied division between God and humankind; his goal was a singularly intense and all-pervading Christomorphic order, in which all reality conforms to the divine love, taking shape in the incarnation.
These are bold, far-ranging, and (singularly) confident speculations. Understood in relation to the inner life of a Christian conspirator, however, they represent an effort at self-understanding, instruction on the theology of shared human struggle, and a benediction for secular agents of grace. If they often seem at odds with traditional views of salvation, they nevertheless bespeak a generous hope, a Christological concentration leading to a greater inclusiveness. For in doing righteousness and justice, one creates a space that necessarily “belongs to God.” It is a premise Bonhoeffer follows to an astonishing conclusion: in earlier times, he says, the church could preach that to find Christ a person must first be aware of himself as a sinner, like the publican and the harlot. But in the present time, it must be said, rather, that to find Christ a person must first seek to become righteous, like those, Christians and non-Christians alike, who strive and suffer for the sake of justice, truth, and humanity.
Those who come to the work of mercy and justice from places outside the church are animated by an energy that the church knows intimately but dares not seek to own. These unacknowledged “children of the church,” as Bonhoeffer calls them, are as much part of the world to which God reconciled himself through Christ as any observant Christian.75
“During the time of their estrangement their appearance and their language” may have indeed changed a great deal, and “yet at the crucial moment the mother and the children once again recognized one another,” Bonhoeffer wrote. “Reason, justice, culture, humanity and the other kindred concepts sought and found a new purpose and a new power in their origin,” which thus led the “theologian in the resistance” to conclude gratefully that all good and righteous people are moved by the same grace that brings the baptized infant to faith through no conscious effort of its own.76
Crisis had induced—at least in Bonhoeffer’s case—a more generous vision of the righteous and the just. Still, there remained the practical question of who but “the last gentlemen and gentlewomen of the era of Bismarck” would come to the defense of culture, humanity, justice, and reason.77 In this, he was appealing to a different German tradition and value system, one entirely familiar to his fellow conspirators and their typically elite families. His appeal was to a time-honored sense of noblesse oblige. In this turn from the phraseological to the real, Bonhoeffer was proposing less the sacrifice of privilege than its reorganization on a higher plane. The conspiracy could only be led by the aristocrats, not of blood but of responsibility.
By “responsibility” Bonhoeffer meant an utmost attention and responsiveness to the whole of reality unified in Christ; this was Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism, but with Christ restored to its center. Honesty, humanity, toleration, authenticity, trust, faithfulness, steadfastness, patience, discipline, humility, modesty, contentment—these were the virtues of the Christian aristocrat, the fruit of the spirit in a post-metaphysical age. It is no surprise to see Bonhoeffer return to the theme of Christian humanism in his late writings—discipleship as the path to a consummate humanness. “Throwing oneself completely into the arms of God” meant living in the world as if there were no God but nevertheless doing his will, with a trust and fidelity beyond dependence and necessity and fear of judgment. This more than a quietist “imitation of Christ”—which Thomas à Kempis had identified with “contempt for the vanities of this world”—was the way to be properly human; this was where discipleship to Christ led. “It is not through the art of dying but through Christ’s resurrection that a new and cleansing wind can blow through our present world,” Bonhoeffer said. “If a few people really believed this and were guided by it in their earthly actions, a great deal would change.”78
Ethics is a work of complex ambitions, among the foremost to offer theological resources to the men and women of the resistance. Its Christological notion of responsibility was a complement to the secular one, investing the word with transcendent power, and “a fullness of meaning that it does not acquire in everyday usage, even when it is placed extremely high on the scale of ethical values, as it was, for example, by Bismarck and Max Weber.”79 The conspirators and their families might be the last gentlefolk, the vestiges of a vanquished nobility—and the last human dam against the inundation of barbarism—but they needed Christ all the same. All the more so, in fact. It was a realization that would come naturally to some of them, like Bonhoeffer’s brother Klaus, an atheist who spent his final months in prison pondering the mysteries of the gospel. Visiting Klaus in prison after he’d been sentenced to death, his older brother Karl-Friedrich noticed a copy of Bach’s Saint Matthew’s Passion in the cell. He expressed admiration “that Klaus could hear music just by reading the score,” to which Klaus replied, “But the words, too, the words!”80
Bonhoeffer rehearsed the aristocratic virtues with native understanding. But he was under no illusions that these alone could fill the moral void created by the nazified church (a skepticism that Klaus and Dohnányi likely shared.) However inspiring and humbling his experience with secular members of the resistance, he knew very well that a highborn humanism could be as vacant as any kind. Bonhoeffer would never relent in his assault on bourgeois Christianity—the piety of “self-sufficient finitude,” as Paul Tillich had once called late-nineteenth-century Protestant liberalism. But he was quick to add that the moral torpor of the upper classes had contributed more than its fair share to the rise of an evil regime.
In Bonhoeffer’s unfinished novel, the child of a wealthy Berlin family remarks, “And who’s responsible for this whole calamity? None other than the classes that set the tone.” He meant those he had grown up with, the Bildungsbürgertum, the cultured elites, those everyone looked to “as a model for success in life,” but who had shown themselves to be nothing but a “bunch of rotten, obsequious lackeys.”81 Had Germans in these late days become a soulless people, devoid of all qualities except “formality and compulsion and officiousness”?82 Elsewhere in the novel, the character Renate, discussing the same subject with her friend Christoph, allows as how in her own social circles she often has the feeling of being choked to death. She refers to the very same “tired indifference” that Bonhoeffer believed had come to define the Weltanschauung of the educated classes. “Today is just like my experience a week ago when I
rode the same train,” Bonhoeffer observed on the train ride to Munich. “In every car there is on average only one person reading a book. Most are dozing off alone, half awake. Clearly almost all are retracting from some hectic pursuit. Now they have a couple of spare hours merely to brood dully to themselves, neither happy nor unhappy.” This is the emblematic condition of the times: a state of apathetic waiting for some indeterminate future. It is not submission, rebellion, or defiance that weighs these people down, dulling their senses; it is this thing called “tired indifference.” “Focusing on a book seems to belong to a past age.”83
In the late summer 1941, Bonhoeffer’s brother-in-law Hans von Dohnányi sketched out plans for the escape of seven Berlin Jews to safe haven in Switzerland. The group would be escorted through Gestapo checkpoints at the Swiss border near Basel under the guise of being secret agents for military intelligence.84 It wasn’t so preposterous: intelligence officers did occasionally use Jews as covert operatives. But the necessary documents would have to be forged.
Bonhoeffer’s role was limited but strategically vital. He used his ecumenical contacts to arrange visas and sponsors for the seven. He would also introduce Wilhelm Schmidhuber of the Munich Military Intelligence Office to Alphons Koechlin, president of the Swiss Church Federation, who would facilitate the entry into Switzerland.85 By the time the mission was executed on September 30, the size of the party would double to fourteen; the code name nevertheless remained Operation 7. Of the fourteen Jews secreted out, eleven were Jewish Christians.
Charlotte Friedenthal was one such baptized Jew. Bonhoeffer took a special interest in her case because she had worked for the Provisional Administration of the Confessing Church, in the office of Heinrich Grüber, the director of Jewish Christian affairs.86 Bonhoeffer wrote to Koechlin in support of two other Jewish refugee women as well, Inge Jacobsen and Emil Zweig. But in Friedenthal he recognized certain qualities of his former Jewish neighbors in Grunewald—indeed, of his own family.87
Charlotte Friedenthal, then forty-nine, was born the daughter of a prominent judge in Bonhoeffer’s hometown of Breslau, where she was baptized as a child. From January 1, 1934, to February 28, 1936, she had served as deputy director of the Protestant district welfare office of Berlin-Zehlendorf under Martin Niemöller. From March 2, 1936, until October 1937, she was with the Provisional Administration, becoming the personal secretary to Superintendent Albertz, the Reformed member of the administration. Her sister was married to Dr. Ernst Brieger, former chief of staff of the Tuberculosis Clinic of Breslau-Herrnprotsch, and until 1933 the only German member of the International Tuberculosis Committee. Friedenthal’s brother was the prominent attorney Ernst Friedenthal, who, like Brieger, his brother-in-law, served as a decorated officer in the Great War before assuming the post of director of the Deutsche Zentral-Bodenbank AG. Since 1939, Friedenthal had been “registered for emigration to the United States,” but “no opportunity for this has materialized to date, and in addition she is so rooted in the church and in church work that up to this point the suggestion of emigration did not seem responsible to us.… Thus now the urgent request from Brother Albertz to take her into the Swiss church, where with all certainty she would prove to be a valuable, particularly well-informed, and collegial member.”88
On September 5, Friedenthal would arrive safely in Basel,89 the thirteen others crossing to safety there on September 30th. Encouraged by this success, Dohnányi hoped to coordinate a second rescue operation, but before long Gestapo agents had discovered the trail of money that rescuers had “sent abroad to the group of fourteen and other Jewish immigrants, and the plans were thwarted.”
Bonhoeffer was delighted to hear of the success, though he had not been present for the actual border crossing. He had hurried on with Bethge for a two-week vacation on Lac Champex.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
1941–1943
~
Killing the Madman
In 1935, with the whole brood having left the nest, Karl and Paula Bonhoeffer had moved from Berlin-Grunewald to Marienburger Allee 43 in Charlottenburg. The new house was of more modest proportions, the neighborhood closer to the Charity Hospital. Before long, Dietrich had laid claim to rooms on the second floor. And so it was that, after he and Eberhard had returned from their vacation in Switzerland in late September of 1941, the thirty-five-year-old pastor took up residence under his parents’ roof once more. On his writing desk awaiting his arrival was a bottle of Danziger Goldwasser, his favorite schnapps, compliments of Eberhard, who’d arranged for its delivery by a mutual friend, having himself been called away on pastoral duties. Bonhoeffer doubtless treasured the thoughtfulness of the gesture, as he did Paula’s regular attention to tidying his room, for which effort he occasionally left his mother thank-you notes.
In response to the recent Gestapo ban on his published work—predictable, as he’d already been prohibited from preaching and teaching—Bonhoeffer spent several hours each day writing.1 Meanwhile, on the eastern front, German troops awaited Adolf Hitler’s orders to invade Russia. Reichsführer-SS Himmler had issued the fateful orders prohibiting the emigration of Jews from Germany.
Bonhoeffer had returned to a capital in crisis. On September 5, 1941, German Jews had been ordered to wear a yellow Star of David; the first deportations east would begin the following month. The Gestapo had sent the deportation orders to the Jüdische Gemeinde (Jewish community) leaders, who in turn informed those selected for “relocation,” but no one knew when the brownshirts would arrive. When they did appear—on October 16, between the hours of eight p.m. and midnight—the storm troopers gave the evacuees about an hour to collect their things before forcibly removing them from their homes. Some Jews, such as those who worked the night shift at the Siemens factory, were taken directly from their offices or warehouses to the transit stations.2
The Gestapo sometimes allowed them up to ninety minutes, or as little as fifteen. Meanwhile, a friend or family member would be obliged to fill out “the mandatory check lists and include a detailed inventory of the furniture, clothing and bank balances.” Then the apartment would be sealed, the former residents ferried to the synagogue on Levetzow Street in Moabit (northeast of the Tiergarten, roughly a mile from Charlottenburg), which had been emptied in anticipation. No distinction was made between Jews and Jewish Christians. They all waited together in the synagogue until being herded onto cattle cars on Saturday, October 18.3
Sixty thousand Jews were deported by train from Berlin in the first three weeks of October 1941; almost all would eventually be killed in the extermination camps of occupied Poland. In the wake of the mass deportations, the Nazi block captains—low-level thugs who served as “local informants”—plastered the cities with warnings for the other neighborhoods. One flyer read, “Now you too will realize that every German who in any way supports a Jew out of false sentiment, even merely through friendly encounter, commits a betrayal of our people.” Within that month of the first deportation of Berlin’s Jews, the first gas chambers were constructed in the concentration camp in Auschwitz.4
JEWS DEPORTED TO CONCENTRATION CAMPS ON THE RUSSIAN-GERMAN FRONT
KARL AND PAULA’S NEW HOME AT MARIENBURGER ALLEE 43 IN BERLIN-CHARLOTTENBURG
After the seizures of October 16, there would follow sixty-three more deportations over the next three and a half years. By February 2, 1945, 116,000 of the 122,000 Jewish residents of Berlin were gone.
While recovering from a bout of pneumonia in the first weeks of October, Bonhoeffer wrote one of several reports on the mass deportation of “Jewish Citizens” from Berlin. These reports, coauthored with Friedrich Justus Perels, who had been a lawyer for the Confessing Church, were intended for Hans von Dohnányi, who was trying to finish compiling his documentary of evidence of Nazi brutalities, which he would present to General Ludwig Beck, the leader of the German military opposition. Bonhoeffer likely also delivered a copy to Geneva—the headquarters of both the World Alliance and the Universal Christian
Council—this through his intermediary Hans Schönfeld.5
According to Bonhoeffer and Perels’s account,
More of these letters were sent out until October 18. Exact numbers are not known at this point. Persons of all ages are affected, even those who for months have been mobilized to work.… According to the reports, around fifteen hundred of the letters mentioned above are said to have gone out to the first group, of whom not all had yet been deported. The criteria according to which the selection was made are not yet clear—for example, lodgers were affected but not the main tenant and vice versa.
We have heard of similar actions in other cities. It has been determined that on Tuesday, October 21, a transport is to leave the Rhineland (Cologne, Düsseldorf, Elberfeld) headed for Poland. It is said that in Berlin further transports are to leave on October 19 and 22 as well. In the Rhineland it was reported that fifty pounds of luggage, one hundred marks, and provisions for eight days were allowed to be brought along.6
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