Strange Glory

by Charles Marsh

  Perhaps Bonhoeffer was intrigued by Wedemeyer’s eager tone. But until the Nazis closed the prison doors on him, he quite often responded to her opinions with boyish sarcasm or professorial bravado. Occasionally, he even corrected her writing.

  Maria was also the first person Bonhoeffer had ever known who did not speak of his father with reverential awe. She found Dr. Bonhoeffer imperious and distant, and she did not like the shape of his mouth: something about it made her sad. Karl-Friedrich, whom she also met on the same visit, did not fare much better. His hard laugh made her cringe and wonder whether he was mocking her or was merely a nervous type.

  But Maria took immediately to Paula, who welcomed her into the family with quiet and affectionate purpose. Her unfailingly forthright manner and attention to little things put Wedemeyer at ease. She gave the girl eight small photographs of her son and prayed with her in the early mornings.

  Wedemeyer liked the family’s simple home, on the cul-de-sac with the garden in full bloom. In the room upstairs that Bonhoeffer had kept with Bethge, she lingered among the objects of her betrothed. “The desk where you wrote your books and letters to me, your armchair and ashtray, your shoes on the shelf and your favorite pictures”—all these things seemed so much a part of him. In this room, as in all the rooms of the house, she felt close to her fiancé, closer than she had ever felt in his presence.61

  Bonhoeffer had visited her family’s estate in the late fall of 1942, shortly before they announced their engagement. One Wedemeyer family custom that seems to have annoyed him was the running of laps around the property and “getting splashed with buckets of cold water by the servants”—this even before breakfast had been served.62 He also found the family’s hushed reverence for music and art rather precious; at the Bonhoeffers’, where witty improvisation always carried the day, these were things to dive into playfully. The Wedemeyers’ seasonal trips to town for the opera or theater had the air of pilgrimage about them.

  Describing the couple years later, Renate Bethge would say that she never saw them together and that only after Bonhoeffer had gone to prison did she and other members of the Bonhoeffer family consider them a pair. Bonhoeffer’s first biographer portrayed Wedemeyer as a “medium-sized,” “not too slender” girl who “did not wear make-up.”63 But a photograph from the year of her engagement reveals the elegant face Karl had admired, with high cheekbones, dark eyebrows, and red lipstick. Bethge, who after the war became Bonhoeffer’s Boswell, does not even introduce Maria until the very end of his thousand-page treatment.

  Why did Dietrich Bonhoeffer pursue Maria von Wedemeyer?

  Bethge’s engagement and his sudden withdrawal had come as a surprise. Bonhoeffer also took it as a test of his own mettle—his capacity for entering into and sustaining a romance with a woman and thus keeping pace, as it were, with the man who was his soul mate. If he could mirror the arrangement that Bethge had entered into with natural gladness, he might be able to remain close to his true companion. Such would prove wishful thinking, however; upon learning of Bethge’s engagement, Bonhoeffer sought assurances from his friend that their own relations would not suffer any alienation, that they would continue to travel together, have new adventures inspired by the new arrangements. Bonhoeffer imagined a time after the war when the two couples would take joint holidays, in the course of which, at some point—and in one singularly fantastic example—the men would leave their wives behind and continue alone together to Palestine.64 The thought of a life in the Holy Land with his friend was a frequent fantasy.

  But Bethge harbored no such hopes for preserving their intimacy. He told Bonhoeffer that things would inevitably change. For marriage was what “remains stable in all fleeting relationships.” Bonhoeffer protested that “we should also include friendship among these stable things.”65 He told Bethge that their “attunement and familiarity” with each other, “achieved through years of not always frictionless practice,” was “something we must never lose.”66 To this Bethge objected—in a bold and forthright manner that promptly ended the exchange: friendship was “completely determined and sustained by its own particular substance” and thus lacking stability in principle.67 Marriage, on the other hand, stood on the firm ground of a formal, legal contract, ordained by God, and the outward respect this confers, giving it permanence, even amid the flux of such tumultuous days. And, Bethge added, “it gives me a sort of calm and makes me feel more manly.”68

  Bonhoeffer’s engagement to Wedemeyer, finally proposed and accepted in letters exchanged in January 1943, would create its own impression of intimacy and permanence. But after his arrest and imprisonment in April of that year, Bonhoeffer understood that his marriage to Maria was never to happen. And it was his love for Bethge that would endure.

  In November 1942, Bonhoeffer joined his former student Wolf-Dieter Zimmermann, his wife, and a few mutual friends for a weekend at Zimmermann’s parsonage in Werder on the Havel. The town, twenty kilometers southeast of Berlin, one of the few surviving congregations of the Confessing Church, provided its pastor a wooden house on a hill overlooking the river. Among the handful of guests at the dinner table was Werner von Haeften, an old friend of Zimmermann’s and now staff lieutenant of the army high command.

  As Zimmermann recalled the evening of the first meal together, Haeften sat uncharacteristically silent, as the conversation ranged over literature and music and the challenges of heating the drafty wooden house. But as the dishes were being removed and coffee was served, Haeften—as if having reached the climax of some interior monologue—turned to Bonhoeffer and asked, “Shall I shoot?” When Bonhoeffer did not answer directly, Haeften added, “I can get inside the Führer’s headquarters with my revolver. I know where and when the conferences take place. I can gain access.”69

  Haeften’s question landed like a grenade. Zimmermann tried “to steer the conversation back to casual concerns and calm the others down.” But Bonhoeffer wanted to pursue the matter.

  He told Haeften that the “liquidation of Hitler” would accomplish nothing in and of itself. It might even make matters worse. The real objective of any assassination had to be “a change of circumstances, of the government.” This standard, Bonhoeffer explained, that every action must yield specific political ends, was precisely what made work in the resistance so difficult; everyone involved labored under the constant pressure to prepare and review each step with the utmost care. He might have added: only thus could murder be justified.

  The others at the table were eventually drawn into the discussion Bonhoeffer and Haeften would continue well past the dinner hour, about how best to lay the groundwork for a new government. Haeften was not satisfied with Bonhoeffer’s answer, finding the approach too measured. Enough was now known about the brutalities of the Nazi regime. It was time to take action and suffer the consequences, whatever they might be.

  Haeften was, in Zimmermann’s judgment, a “gentle type—enthusiastic, idealistic, and a man of Christian convictions.” But he was also from a distinguished family of military officers, and as such naturally preferred to hammer out a plan of attack rather than to muse on the proper conditions for a coup. “He kept asking questions, digging deeper,” inviting Bonhoeffer to clarify. “Theoretical reflections” did not suffice in the current crisis. Given his proximity to the high command, he thought he might be one of the very few in a position to get the job done. With great emotion he confessed to the little gathering that he was able and ready. What did his own life matter compared to those of all who might be saved by removing the madman?

  Bonhoeffer agreed with the need for concrete action but also stressed the need “to be discreet, to plan clearly, and then consider all unforeseen complications.”

  “But shall I?” Haeften asked again. “May I?”70

  Bonhoeffer said he could not make the decision for him. Haeften would have to struggle with the question in his own conscience. But what was clear to Bonhoeffer—and this much he allowed forthrightly—was that no one cou
ld ever emerge from this situation morally innocent. By neither course—action or inaction—could one be spared guilt, but the Christian could take consolation in the knowledge that guilt is “always borne by Christ.”71 Bonhoeffer had not given Haeften a specific answer, but insofar as Haeften sought to know what was ethically permissible, the proposition that “both the no and the yes involve guilt” was as good as affirming the choice of assassination.72

  The next week Haeften returned to his military duties. Two years later, as an aide-de-camp to Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, he would play a key role in the July 20, 1944, attempt on Hitler’s life. Later that same day, with sunlight streaming into the tribunal chamber in central Berlin, Haeften and his fellow conspirators would be condemned by General Friedrich Fromm. Shortly after the stroke of midnight, Gestapo agents led Haeften and three comrades into the courtyard of the army high command on Bendlerstrasse, where they were executed by a ten-man firing squad.73 There was indeed no escaping guilt.

  Christmas would find Bonhoeffer with his family and with Bethge. It would be their last one together. Shortly before New Year’s Day, Bonhoeffer wrote a letter to his closest comrades in the conspiracy: Dohnányi, Oster, and Bethge. The letter would come to be known by a name suggesting casual self-reflection: “After Ten Years: A Reckoning Made at New Years 1943.” In substance, however, it is more like the profession of a worldly faith. “Are we still of any use?” he asks—“we” being the aristocrats of conscience, the cosmopolitan elites, the “children of the church.”74

  Bonhoeffer had been startled into a new way of thinking. The tumultuous years of resistance and conspiracy had created in him an irrepressible need for summing up and casting forward—and, as in one particularly luminous section of Ethics, “Christ and Good People,” the need for a compassionate yet decisive rethinking of Christianity’s exclusive claims.75

  Ten years is a long time in anyone’s life. As time is the most valuable thing that we have, because it is the most irrevocable, the thought of any lost time troubles us whenever we look back. Time is lost in which we have failed to live a full human life, gain experience, learn, create, enjoy, and suffer; it is time that has not been filled up, but left empty. These last years have certainly not been like that. Our losses have been great and immeasurable, but time has not been lost. It is true that the knowledge and experience that were gained, and of which one did not become conscious until later, are only abstractions of reality, of life actually lived. But just as the capacity to forget is a gift of grace, so memory, the recalling of lessons we have learnt, is also a part of responsible living.76

  Bonhoeffer surveys the ruins of the nation, the churches, and the vanquished ideals of the Bildungsbürgertum: “We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds. We have become cunning and learned the arts of obfuscation and equivocation. Experience has rendered us mistrustful of human beings, and often we have failed to speak to them a true and open word. Unbearable conflicts have worn us down or even made us cynical.” He said he had learned “to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspect, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and reviled, in short from the perspective of the suffering.”77 We have lost much, things far beyond measure, but the time has not been wasted. “Indeed, the insights and experiences we have gained and of which we have subsequently become aware are only abstractions of reality, of life itself. Yet just as the ability to forget is a gift of grace, so too is memory, the repetition of received teachings, part of responsible life. Who stands firm amidst the tumult and cataclysms?”78

  “The huge masquerade of evil has thrown all ethical concepts into confusion,” he confessed. “That evil should appear in the form of light, good deeds, historical necessity, social justice [as well as in] is absolutely bewildering for one coming from the world of ethical concepts that we have received.… The failure of ‘the reasonable ones’—those who think, with the best of intentions and in their naive misreading of reality, that with a bit of reason they can patch up a structure that has come out of joint—is apparent. With their ability to see impaired, they want to do justice on every side, only to be crushed by the colliding forces without having accomplished anything at all. Disappointed that the world is so unreasonable, they see themselves condemned to unproductiveness; they withdraw in resignation or helplessly fall victim to the stronger.”

  Bonhoeffer continues, “Who stands firm? Only the one whose ultimate standard is not his reason, his principles, conscience, freedom, or virtue; only the one who is prepared to sacrifice all of these when, in faith and in relationship to God alone, he is called to obedient and responsible action. Such a person is the responsible one, whose life is to be nothing but a response to God’s question and call.”79

  Where are these responsible ones? Who are they? Bonhoeffer’s answer is astonishing not only for its fierce defense of individual valor, but also for its echoes of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism. Bonhoeffer longs for the virtues of civil courage and ultimate honesty. In the ten years since Hitler’s ascent to power, there had been no shortage of heroism, bravery, and self-sacrifice. But civil courage, which is to say, the discipline of dissent, had been trampled beneath the mobs and the masses. The issue of ultimate responsibility had, in these dark circumstances, become a question “not [of] how I extricate myself heroically from a situation but [of how] a coming generation is to go on living.” Then there is the seemingly prosaic matter of stupidity, which in Bonhoeffer’s estimation is as dangerous an enemy of the good as evil itself. One may wage protest against evil; evil can be exposed and, if need be, overcome by force. But stupidity mounts a broad and insidious defense in this way: “Facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed.… —and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental.” Great caution is needed to challenge stupidity, for the hour had grown too late to change the stupid man through persuasion or inner transformation—even though in normal times it is true that internal liberation, “living responsibly before God,” is the path to true freedom. “The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom,” the Hebrew psalmist wrote. But now stupidity had become calcified in the Nazi herd and the mass structures of the Reich; as a result, the dictates of ultimate honesty—and indeed the application of unflinching Niebuhrian realism—led to the sober conclusion that the only remaining option was “external liberation.” Until the day when external liberation has been achieved, Bonhoeffer wrote, “we must abandon all attempts to convince the stupid person [through reason].”80

  And so there must be a return of aristocrats of conscience. “Nobility arises from and exists by sacrifice, courage, and a clear sense of what one owes oneself and others, by the self-evident expectation of the respect one is due, and by an equally self-evident observance of the same respect for those above and those below. At issue all along the line is the rediscovery of experiences of quality that have been buried under so much rubble, of an order based on quality.” The social order he calls for sounds much like a bygone code of chivalry—by no coincidence, since that code arose with the ideal of the Christian warrior. But where the medieval knight saved the widow and the orphan from the infidel and the brute, in this day the danger was from the hollowing effects of totalitarianism and the leveling of all thought and feeling to the basest instincts. Against such a corruption, only quality could mount an adequate defense, but quality must cease to identify itself with privilege and rediscover the imperative of honor. This meant in social terms renouncing “the pursuit of position” and the cult of celebrity, in favor of “an opening upward and downward, particularly in the choice of one’s friends, a delight in private life, and the courage for public life.”

  In cultural terms, the renewal of quality demanded a return from the newspaper and radio to the book, from feverishly acquisitive activity to contemplative leisure and stillness, from frenzy to composure, from the sensational to the reflective—“from the idol of virtuosity to art
, from snobbery to modesty, from extravagance to moderation.”81

  No one person is, of course, “responsible for all of the world’s injustice and suffering.” No one person holds within him the powers to redress the world’s sorrows. “We are not Christ.… We are not lords but instruments in the hands of the Lord of history; we can truly share only in a limited measure the suffering of others.” Still, if we want to be cosmopolitan Christians, we must “take part in Christ’s greatness of heart, in the responsible action that in freedom lays hold of the hour.” “Inactive waiting,” the curiosity of mere spectators, a dearth of imagination, empathy, sensitivity, and inner feeling—all these made plain the desperate need for a New Nobility, one possessed of “strong composure, unperturbed energy for work, and great capacity for suffering.” What is woefully and critically wanting, Bonhoeffer teaches, is a “greatness of heart.”82

  “What remains for us is only the very narrow path, 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. ‘Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land,’ Jeremiah is told to proclaim—in seeming contradiction of his prophecies of woe—just before the destruction of the holy city; in light of the utter deprivation of any future, those words were a divine sign and a pledge of a great, new future. To think and to act with an eye on the coming generation and to be ready to move on without fear and worry—that is the course that has, in practice, been forced upon us. To hold it courageously is not easy but necessary.… We still love life, but I believe that Death can no longer surprise us.