As it would turn out, Dohnányi and his colleagues had overestimated Bell’s influence. Allied leaders were simply not interested in a German churchman’s revelations about a planned coup d’état and the viable non-Nazi government to follow. Nor did they particularly care what the Anglican bishop of Chichester judged to be the best way of defeating “a monstrous tyranny.”35 To the extent that the Allied leadership paid any heed at all, they greeted the various “communiqués” from the German underground with suspicion and finally disdain, particularly the conspirators’ demand for assurances “of German territorial integrity and of their own position as leaders of a postwar Germany.”36 From the Allied perspective, the very idea of altering, let alone suspending, their intricately laid military plans to place their hopes with a band of disaffected former Nazis was nothing short of ludicrous. Neither the Americans nor the British would ever seriously consider the option. That much became clear in January 1943, when, at the conclusion of the Casablanca Conference, Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued a joint announcement: the Allies would accept nothing less than Germany’s unconditional surrender. Until that word arrived from Morocco, the Berlin circle would continue to chase the chimera of assistance from the Allies.
All the Sigtuna conferees stayed in the sprawling crème stucco villa set on a green hillside on the outskirts of the medieval village. The estate overlooking Lake Mälaren ordinarily housed the Nordic Folk School, founded in the nineteenth century by the Swedish pastor Manfred Björkquist to promote Christian spirituality and humanistic dialogue. It was not lost on Bonhoeffer, that the Folk in the Swedish Folkhögskola (folk high school) conveyed quite a different meaning than the Volk of the reigning German idiom: not the nation destined to rule over all states but the folkish fellowship of peoples, of common humanity.
Apart from Bell, there were several other ecumenical leaders present, including representatives of the Scandinavian Protestant churches.37 But it was to Bell alone—his most trusted ecumenical colleague—that Bonhoeffer confided the full details of the plot to kill Hitler. They broke away from the others, going to the nearby Nordic Ecumenical Institute, which had become a vital point of convergence during the years when the ties that bind the Nordic countries had frayed from one another and the ecumenical movement was being ground to a halt by the war.” As he and Bell sat together, little did Bonhoeffer suspect the futility of this risk he was about to take. He asked Bell to ascertain whether the Allies would be prepared to negotiate with a new government; as he spoke, he grew excited at the prospect of a European reconciliation born of this coordinated effort.38 On the night of May 30, the eve of the conference, as Bonhoeffer dined in Stockholm with Hans Schönfeld, his Geneva-based colleague, who’d joined him on the trip, the British Royal Air Force had conducted its first heavy bombing of Germany. The target had been Hamburg, but the mission was diverted to Cologne owing to heavy fog over the port city. Nearly a thousand airplanes rained fire over Rhein-Ruhr, obliterating thousands of houses and other buildings.
The news was not the only reason Bonhoeffer was glad to be in Sweden. He had happy memories of his earlier visit in 1939, shortly after his thirtieth birthday. A photo from that time shows him boarding a ferry to cross the Baltic with twenty-six students from Finkenwalde—all of them turned out like earnest young preachers in their bowlers, suits, ties, and secondhand trench coats (except for Bonhoeffer, of course). The students had managed to get passports from the local authorities, but they were not allowed to carry any German money with them. Most had never left their homeland and were full of apprehension. But their experiences in the homes and congregations of Swedish pastors and host families came as a great refreshment. By the time the party arrived in Stockholm on the night train from Lund, four newspapers in the capital and Uppsala had run stories on the German visitors, quoting Bonhoeffer’s remarks about the “unforgettable days” and the “rich impressions” and “friendliness” of their encounters.39 This trip, three years on, would not be so fondly remembered, once the naïveté of its premise—the hope of winning Allied support for the conspiracy—had been revealed. Nevertheless, the effort would represent Bonhoeffer’s most daring mission as a participant in the resistance.40
Years later Bell would remember that Bonhoeffer and Schönfeld had told him in “great detail [of] the character and purposes of the German resistance.” The briefing included the “names of the leading personalities,” he said, “the same who were involved in the Hitler plot of 20 July 1944.” It was then left to Bell to ascertain whether the Allied governments might be willing to accept a successful coup as evidence “that the whole Hitler regime had been destroyed”—thus clearing the way for a peace settlement with the new leadership.41
Upon returning to London, Bell dutifully conveyed Bonhoeffer’s request (albeit in writing) to Anthony Eden, Churchill’s secretary of state for war.42 But in January 1941—nearly a year and a half before Bonhoeffer and Bell’s exchange—Churchill had clearly stated England’s intent to greet all inquiries about support for a German coup with “absolute silence.” Since then, the prime minister’s mind hadn’t changed: he remained immovably committed to the Allied military strategy, as Eden well knew. And so when Eden did finally reply on July 17, 1942, he categorically told the bishop that “it would not be in the national interest for any reply whatever to be sent to [the two German pastors]” and that “no action could be taken” by the government.43 Eden expressed sympathy for the dangers and difficulties faced by the opposition but allowed that they had given little evidence of seriousness.
In the months following the Sigtuna meeting, the United States Air Force would join the RAF’s steady strategic bombing of German military assets.
As to its express purpose, the June meeting in Sigtuna came to nothing. But it was productive in another way: coupled with a visit by Moltke a month earlier, it created networks of communication that would contribute to the rescue of a significant number of Norwegian and Danish Jews in September 1943. Moltke’s warning to his Danish friend Merete Bonnesen that the Nazis planned to transport Danish Jews to German camps sparked planning for rescue operations that would deliver 7,400 Norwegian and Danish Jews to safety in Sweden. But these rescue missions succeeded “thanks to the groundwork which the Sigtuna group had prepared through high level participants.” In a fictitious diary that he had begun keeping while in the Abwehr, daily evidence of his supposed fidelity to the Reich, Bonhoeffer observed with feigned ruefulness that “theologically the German influence seems in recent times to have unfortunately diminished sharply in favour of the Anglo-Saxon.”44 Throughout February, Bonhoeffer kept this camouflage, or “pretended,” diary (as Bethge much later explained to George Bell) to disguise the purpose of his trips abroad in case the Gestapo searched his parents’ Charlottenburg home—and indeed this seemed inevitable after his Abwehr colleague Wilhelm Schmidhuber’s arrest in late October 1942 for “currency violations.”45 (He had helped provide financial support to the Jews smuggled out of Germany in Operation 7.) Bonhoeffer represented his intention as being “to inform his countrymen still in power, that they are losing the ideological war in Sweden to democratic and freedom-loving British and Americans.”46
From his upstairs room on Marienburger Allee or his studio at the Kleist-Retzow estate, on trains and planes, in hotel rooms, on retreats and in various hideaways, Bonhoeffer would continue throughout the summer of 1942 to work on Ethics. While striking a chastened note—“An ethicist cannot be a man who always knows better than others what is to be done and how it is to be done”47—Bonhoeffer’s meditations nevertheless draw on the theological intensities of Barth’s jubilant defense of God’s sovereignty. Beyond all understanding, obedience to God remained a venture into the unknown—a journey without maps, a “total” and “unconditional” decision, guided by trust alone. On June 26, Bonhoeffer left Berlin for two weeks in Italy. Little is known of this trip. His bogus diary offers only the most pedestrian summaries of his movements, blandly desc
ribing places over which he had earlier rhapsodized. A part of him must have relished the irony of the exercise; at times the journal seems like an inside joke at the Gestapo’s expense. “Main impressions: the Laocoön,” he wrote. “Curious, until now the Laocoön never made any particular impression on me.” He praises the xenophobic rector of the Collegium Germanicum as a “very collected, clear, smart old world officer” and ridicules a stupendously dull Nazi named Wilhelm Schmidhuber (who was, of course, Bonhoeffer’s comrade) as a “bon vivant.”48
When she first met Bonhoeffer in the fall of 1935, Maria von Wedemeyer was just a nine-year-old accompanying her grandmother, Ruth von Kleist-Retzow, to worship services and morning prayers at Finkenwalde. Before the Gestapo closed the seminary in 1937, Kleist-Retzow asked Bonhoeffer to instruct Maria, now eleven, and two other grandchildren for their imminent confirmation. But he did not meet Maria again until June 1942, when he paid a visit to Kleist-Retzow on his return trip from Sweden. Whatever he knew of Wedemeyer in the intervening six years—apparently very little—he had learned from Kleist-Retzow.49 Maria was the daughter of a provincial aristocrat with twenty thousand acres in Pomerania. She read Rilke, loved dancing and skiing, and rose to the call of the autumn hunt. She would have been expected to marry into the landed gentry and content herself as a nobleman’s wife. But the “sprightly” teenager he met on the Kleist-Retzow estate in June 1942 charmed Dietrich with her clear blue eyes and confident smile. He noticed she bore a remarkable resemblance to his twin sister, Sabine, as a teenager. Bonhoeffer was smitten.
Still a very young man emotionally, Bonhoeffer was uncertain about how to proceed or what to make of his new affections. But he’d be equally perplexed by the feelings that were developing in the months before his reunion with Maria. On the train from Klein Krössin to Munich on June 25, 1942, he wrote Bethge a letter confessing that he felt as if he was “on the verge of some kind of breakthrough.” He was not referring to his forthcoming encounter with Wedemeyer. He had in mind a new apprehension of himself, which he wanted to share with his best friend.50
He wanted Bethge to know that the arc connecting the disciple to the physical world extended farther than he had ever imagined. He felt singularly open to “the worldly [weltlich] realm”—intrigued and “amazed” by life. “I am living, and can live, for days without the Bible,” he said. But when he opened his Bible again after an absence, he could hear and experience the “new and delightful … as never before.” “Authenticity, life, freedom, and mercy” had acquired a new significance for him. A worldliness heretofore unknown was unexpectedly refreshing his spiritual being, and with it he felt a growing aversion to all things “religious.” What a glorious discovery, the vast new spiritual energies he was feeling! It was an impulse to let things take their own course and try his best not to resist. It was his first intimation of spirituality outside the church.
Bonhoeffer does not mention his visit with Wedemeyer directly, though the letter makes clear that Bethge already knew of it—Bonhoeffer allows that he has not written to her and has no intention of doing so. He would even be content, he says, to go without seeing her again and simply savor “the pleasant thought of a few highly charged moments” in her company. Still, he knew himself well enough now to realize that pleasant thoughts would, sooner or later, “dissolve into the realm of unfulfilled fantasies”—a realm that, in his case, was “already well-populated.”51
Indeed, little would follow on those “highly charged moments” for the next three months; there would be no visits, phone conversations, or correspondence. On October 31, Bonhoeffer sent Wedemeyer a letter of condolence on the death of her brother Maximilian, a casualty on the eastern front. Nothing more is said until November 27, when Bonhoeffer wrote Bethge to report on his recent stay at the Wedemeyers’ estate in Pätzig. It had been an agreeable visit: contrary to his great fear “that the house would have an excessive spiritual tone, its style made a very pleasant impression—but it ended awkwardly.” After learning of her daughter’s correspondence with Bonhoeffer, Ruth von Wedemeyer expressed sharp disapproval of the familiarity between the thirty-six-year-old pastor, who appeared to Ruth temperamentally middle age, and her third child, who was barely eighteen.52
During these same three months, much had changed in Bethge’s life. At the age of thirty-three, he had begun courting Renate Schleicher, Bonhoeffer’s seventeen-year-old niece, who lived next door at 42 Marienburger Allee. As a child, Renate and her siblings had played in the garden beneath Bonhoeffer’s second-floor window—and now she was being wooed by his closest friend and confessor. By the end of November, the pair were engaged, although Renate’s parents—Ursula (Bonhoeffer’s older sister) and Rüdiger Schleicher—did not approve of the match and insisted that the couple undergo a yearlong separation before carrying things any further.
Bonhoeffer couldn’t help but notice that he’d worked himself into a parallel predicament. At thirty-six, he was closer in age to Maria’s mother, Ruth von Wedemeyer, née von Kleist, than to Maria. Ruth was a tall, slim, dark-haired woman of forty-six whose husband, Hans, had been called out of retirement and sent to the eastern front, perishing in the Ukraine. With no knowledge of Eberhard and Renate’s situation, Maria’s mother imposed a one-year moratorium on the relationship with Bonhoeffer, as must have been a common remedy to protect girls not yet finished with their schooling. Though Bonhoeffer might be an eminent theologian and esteemed pastor of the Patzow faithful, the age difference and the peculiar cast of the courtship made Ruth von Wedemeyer uneasy. As it happened, Maria was said to have been perfectly “relieved and happy” about the delay.53
Bonhoeffer had never had a girlfriend. A long-distance friendship ten years earlier with a student named Elizabeth Zinn had dissolved in confusion; he then chose to pour his heart and soul into Finkenwalde. Zinn would go on to marry the New Testament scholar Günther Bornkamm. Through it all, Bonhoeffer’s friendship with Bethge, now in its seventh year, had sustained him fully.
But Bethge’s engagement to Schleicher, though deferred for a year, threw everything out of balance. Wedemeyer’s fascination with Bonhoeffer, and the slow turning of his attention to her, were no doubt owing to an all-too-common desire for intimacy in those days of mounting personal losses for everyone. Her father had died in August, and before the year’s end, she would also lose her brother and her two closest cousins. In the wake of such sorrows, Bonhoeffer’s pastoral instincts drew him closer to the Wedemeyer and Kleist-Retzow families.
The announcement of Bonhoeffer and Wedemeyer’s engagement on January 13, 1943, would come as a surprise to both families.54 The Bonhoeffers knew that arrests were imminent; moreover, they had never met Maria. When, after Dietrich’s arrest and imprisonment in April, Dr. Bonhoeffer finally did meet his son’s intended, he found her “nice and intelligent.” With “oval eyes” and a “noble provincial forehead,” Maria reminded him of Robert Graf von Zedlitz-Trützschler, the former Oberpräsident of Silesia, Posnen, and Hessen, who was her maternal grandfather.55 Observing his son’s happiness with Eberhard for the previous seven years made it even more difficult to comprehend that this girl had become the object of his son’s romantic attachment. On the other side, much as she admired Bonhoeffer, Wedemeyer’s grandmother, Ruth von Kleist-Retzow, could not hide her displeasure. Had the flamboyant abbot of Finkenwalde, whose cause she had generously supported, really asked for the hand of her teenage granddaughter in marriage? Eventually, Wedemeyer’s mother would tighten her original moratorium, forbidding all correspondence and phone calls until her daughter attained her majority. Bonhoeffer responded to the situation with “great sensitivity,” Wedemeyer would later write. He complied with the decree to the last iota.56
From the start the engagement had been fraught with complications. The imposed separation, though accepted with equanimity—one might even say unwitting relief—cast the romance in an ethereal light. “I think that if I wanted to I could prevail. I can argue better than the others and coul
d probably talk them into it. But that seems dreadful to me,” Bonhoeffer gallantly reported to Bethge.57 Theirs was, and would remain, an engagement of the spirit.58 But by the time the two were finally allowed to write and then to see each other, Wedemeyer—known to friends as a free-spirited girl and unafraid to speak her mind—would address her fiancé as “Pastor Bonhoeffer.”
In turn Bonhoeffer treated her like the confirmand she had been years earlier. She had found him pompous and even comical back then. Once, in class, he told the students he had learned his first ten sermons by heart and if they did not leave the room at once, and quietly, “he might be tempted to prove his claim!” He would in fact go on to flunk Wedemeyer, who was later to be confirmed by another pastor.59
In time, Wedemeyer grew easier in the engagement. She would opine on subjects great and small—literature, music, the art of painting Christmas ornaments, the peculiarities of provincial life. She was not afraid to sound silly or to offer a breezy aside, just to leave the dapper theologian (such a serious man, she sighed) wondering what would come out of her next.
MARIA VON WEDEMEYER AROUND 1942
She said she loved his book Creation and Fall, her favorite of all his writings. But it was not easy reading. So she mainly dipped into it at bedtime, and even then she could hardly finish a sentence before falling asleep. She meant no offense. The “beginning of a sentence often interests me a great deal.” And the next morning, she would promise herself that she would do better that night; all day long she would look forward to reading more, but then “the same thing happens.”60
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