Strange Glory

by Charles Marsh

  “Are we still of any use?” he asks again in conclusion.83

  The conceptual precision of the philosophical theologian is unmistakable throughout—even as the essay smolders in the crucible of historical crisis, which promises that the future will be dark and personal goals will remain unfulfilled.84 Equally unmistakable is Bonhoeffer’s stance of self-censure. He was writing, once again, not for academic theologians but for his colleagues—his brethren in the conspiracy. “Nach Zehn Jahren”—“After Ten Years”—stands as the definitive reckoning for the Christian elites of the German resistance. And so its rhetoric is carefully generalized, anticipating that its readership might inadvertently come to include the Gestapo. Nevertheless, it proposes a clear way forward for the conscience of the disciple.

  On February 18, 1943, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, once a scholar of German Romantic drama, proclaimed total war in a defiant speech at the Berlin Sports Palace. (It was an apt moment, as he had recently assumed the additional title of Reichsbevollmächtigter für den totalen Kriegseinsatz an der Heimatfront, the Reich Plenipotentiary for “Total War” on the Homefront.) That same day in Munich, the Gestapo arrested the university students Hans and Sophie Scholl, a brother and sister, for treason, condemning them to death. The conspiracy, as mentioned, had its flowerings not only in Berlin but throughout the nation; many brilliant and resourceful Germans had applied themselves to various efforts, and more than a hundred plots to overthrow the Führer have been documented. All the meticulously planned schemes would come to naught. But the Scholls were engaged in a different kind of resistance.

  With a cadre of sympathetic friends, they often met in “an Italian wine shop” or in some dorm room to discuss how they might respond to Nazi atrocities. “They would recommend books to one another, read aloud, and hold talks”; eventually their opposition took the form of publishing subversive leaflets, which one day they scattered freely through the lecture halls and other buildings of the university. One leaflet distributed by their group, the White Rose, read, “Every word that comes from H’s mouth is a lie. When he says peace, he means war, and when he blasphemously uses the name of the Almighty, he means the power of evil, the fallen angel, Satan. His mouth is the foul-smelling maw of Hell, and his might is at bottom accursed.… whoever today still doubts the reality, the existence of demonic powers, has failed by a wide margin to understand the metaphysical background of this war … the struggle against the demon, against the servants of the Antichrist.” The brother and sister, along with four other members of the White Rose were beheaded just four days later, on February 22. By now, words alone could cost one his life.85

  Bonhoeffer’s involvement in the resistance would last until March 13, 1943. On that day, Fabian von Schlabrendorff smuggled a time bomb, disguised as bottles of cognac, onto an aircraft scheduled to carry Hitler back to Germany from the Army Center Headquarters in Smolensk. But the detonator failed—owing perhaps to the low temperatures inside the plane at altitude—and the plot was discovered.86 When the knock on the front door came on the evening of April 4, 1943, Bonhoeffer was sitting at his desk in his upstairs room. Some of his writings, including parts of his unfinished Ethics, were hidden in the rafters. The fictitious diary he had kept to disguise his conspiratorial exertions lay on his desk. He surrendered to Gestapo agents and was led out of the house in handcuffs and into a black Mercedes waiting at the end of the walkway. He was thirty-seven years old.

  Hans von Dohnányi was apprehended the same day, along with his wife, Christine von Dohnányi, Bonhoeffer’s sister. In the following year, other intimates would be arrested: Klaus Bonhoeffer on October 1, 1944, their brother-in-law Rüdiger Schleicher on October 4, and Eberhard Bethge on October 30. The growing list of Bonhoeffer relations behind bars would lead the chief of the Gestapo to conclude in his summary of charges stemming from the failed July 20 officers’ plot that “an entire circle of conspirators” had emanated from the Bonhoeffer house.

  For now the charges against Bonhoeffer included offenses related to his UK classification, avoidance of military service, and various “minor” acts of subversion, among them assisting Confessing Church pastors and advising students on ways to avoid military service. The indictment further mentioned numerous illicit wartime activities related to his work in the Confessing Church.87 What it did not include, however, was any charge of plotting to kill Hitler, or of taking part in Operation 7, or any other crimes of conspiracy or treason. Bonhoeffer would remain in prison for more than a year before his interrogators gained knowledge of these further illegal involvements.

  What had become of Bonhoeffer’s theology of nonviolence? During the Kirchenkampf of the previous decade, Bishop Theodor Heckel, head of the Reich Church’s external relations, had denounced him as “a pacifist and enemy of the state.” And an enemy of the state Bonhoeffer had surely remained. But was he still a pacifist? He prayed for the defeat of his country and the assassination of the Führer, and in praying with the conspirators, he conferred God’s blessings on tyrannicide. Bishop Bell would recall that when he first heard Bonhoeffer refer to Hitler as the Antichrist, the remark was followed by an even more incendiary one: “We must therefore go on with our work and eliminate him whether he is successful or not.” The answer is complicated, pragmatic, and, in its application, singularly, and finally, Lutheran: “sin and sin boldly”!88

  Bonhoeffer moved within an inescapable paradox; he gave his blessings to those who conspired to murder the Führer while affirming the essential nonviolence of the gospel. Responsible action meant killing the madman, even though such action violated God’s commandment not to kill. How could it be otherwise? In the face of Hitler’s atrocities, the way of nonviolence would bring inevitable guilt—both for the “uncontested” injustices and for the innocent lives that might have been saved. To act responsibly in these circumstances meant killing the madman if one could, even though such action violated God’s commandment not to kill.

  Was Bonhoeffer overthinking what should be a direct ethical mandate—destroying an evil regime to stop a genocide? As a Lutheran pastor, Bonhoeffer would have to navigate perilous (or at least, unfamiliar) theological terrain in order to reach the conclusion that permitted tyrannicide. In the face of Hitler’s atrocities, the way of nonviolence would itself bring on inevitable guilt; for allowing injustices to go “uncontested” was to allow the loss of innocent life.89 And so sin—whether through action or inaction—was a certainty.

  In this connection it was useful to remember Luther’s understanding of the working of grace. Humankind, despite its best efforts, was inevitably engulfed by sin, from which Christ’s death on the cross offered the only redemption. It was for this reason—not out of perversity, as many Catholic critics would claim—that the father of the Reformation had reasoned that the Christian must sometimes “sin boldly.” His counsel was not an incitement to wantonness but rather to heightened awareness that only Christ saves. One came to Christ a sinner in the best case. One could at least sin for the sake of righteousness. Bonhoeffer did not try to resolve the paradox by assuming moral innocence but accepted the paradox by incurring the guilt born out of responsible action.

  Such reasoning would not, however, suffice to release Bonhoeffer from his moral conundrum, the perplexing choice between strict obedience to the Word and taking one’s share of responsibility for the state of the kingdom on earth. He would continue to see himself in a Grenzfall—a borderline situation—pressed to discern moral exceptions to the commandment that no divine law had previously expounded and that only concrete reality could reveal. He would bear his uncertainty as a spiritual discipline, “with all its problematic elements,” taking joy in suffering. Arriving at no real resolution, he would abandon any hope for innocence, incurring the guilt born of responsible action. Of the two evils, it was the one he could abide.

  Bonhoeffer knew, of course, that he would not be the one to murder Hitler.90 He had virtually no conception of the logistics involved—he barel
y knew how to hold a gun, his three-week training with the Ulm Rifle Club having been a comedy of errors. Still, he’d vowed on numerous occasions that he would not hesitate “to kill the madman” if he somehow had the chance. It was not bluster. It was his way, perhaps, of acknowledging the moral equivalence of aiding the assassin and actually pulling the trigger. Like responsibility, the stain of guilt seeped outward from the action precipitating it.

  He thought of it this way: If he were walking along the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin, or Oxford Street in London, and he saw some lunatic plowing his car into the crowd, he could not stand idly on the sidewalk. He would not say to himself, “I am a pastor. I’ll just wait to bury the dead afterward.”91 In whatever way he could, he would try to stop the lunatic driver. Honoring a peace ethic did not bind one to a radical pacifism, an indifference to exceptional and extreme circumstances. A peace ethic acknowledges that in historical existence certain extreme circumstances inevitably arise that require actions unacceptable in the pacifist’s worldview—these are the so-called Grenzfälle, the extreme cases, the boundary situations. In such instances, the decision to use violence must be risked if the pure principles of peace block the way to responsible action and the relief of innocent suffering. “My peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you.” So said Jesus on the night when he was given up. The heavenly peace is not won through a paralyzed acquiescence to villainy for the sake of an ideal. The kingdom is to those who take action: for these reasons, Bonhoeffer concluded that in the face of Hitler and the prevailing brutalities, only the violent shall bear it away.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  1943–1945

  ~

  “The Greatest of Feasts on the Journey to Freedom”

  In a high-security holding cell the Gestapo reserved for dangerous criminals, Bonhoeffer slept fitfully his first night in prison. The threadbare blanket was little protection against the cold of an April rainstorm. In the next cell, another prisoner wept audibly.

  Early the following morning, a slot in the door scratched open, and through it appeared a tiny portion of bread on a tin plate. The prison staff addressed the men as “scoundrels,” “scum,” “traitors,” “swine.” It would be four months before Bonhoeffer was even shown the warrant for his arrest.

  Sometime toward the end of the first week, he was moved to an isolation cell on the top floor. He was not allowed books, newspapers, or tobacco; he could not write letters. Only after forty-eight hours was his Bible returned to him. “It had been searched to make sure I had not smuggled in a saw, a razor blade, or the like.”

  For the next twelve days, he would remain in solitary confinement, shackled hand and foot. The cell door opened only to admit food or for the removal of the latrine bucket. In all other respects, it was as if he weren’t there, the staff answering no questions, meeting his every utterance with silent indifference. Nor was he permitted the regular half hour of free time in the prison yard allowed ordinary prisoners. Nights carried the muffled sobs of men broken by confinement, his new congregation.

  Alone, Bonhoeffer prayed for his invisible neighbors, morning and night, pronouncing upon them his silent blessings. Although there was a sanctuary in the center of the prison grounds, religious services were forbidden in these years.1 Later, when he was released from solitary confinement and finally allowed pen and paper, he would write prayers for the salvation of his fellow captives on sheets of paper bearing the watermark Beroer 4b normal. These he would mail to his parents, who, in turn, delivered them to the prison. The prayers were not jotted down “spontaneously” but composed “after extended meditation and experienced discipline.”2

  With the urgency of the psalmist he recited prayers by heart: “I am lonely, but you do not abandon me. I am restless, but with you there is peace.” Or: “I thank you that you have brought this day to an end.” He praised God for each new day, for granting him strength and allowing him to borrow hope from family and friends. But God would not bring down the walls of the prison as he had those of Jericho. Nor would a violent earthquake shake the foundations, freeing him as Paul and Silas were freed in Acts. Bonhoeffer knew this. And so in the first weeks, he fell into a deep despair. Over the years of the Kirchenkampf, he had observed holy silence and practiced the contemplative disciplines, but in solitary confinement, when silence was imposed, he did not feel the consoling presence of his beloved in Christ, only the cold surroundings of concrete and iron. It was overwhelming loss, to which no prayer or blessing seemed equal.

  Scribbling anxious notes in his journal, he contemplated extreme measures: “Separation from people, from work, from the past, from the future, from marriage, from God…Smoke in the emptiness of time … The significance of illusion … I am already dead, draw a line, summing up.” Suicide, another sin in most circumstances, had become a decent option for many conspirators, an honorable act of defiance.

  His thoughts also turned to his aging parents, who were desperate with worry. “I do want you to be quite sure that I’m all right,” he would tell them when at last he could write his first letter, on April 14, 1943; after that he was able to write them and his brother Karl-Friedrich every ten days. Prison, he assured them gallantly, was nothing more than a “steam bath for the soul.”

  “It is quite possible to satisfy one’s morning appetite with dry bread—and by the way, I am also getting all kinds of good things—and the cot does not bother me in the least. Between eight at night and six in the morning, one can get plenty of sleep. I have, in fact, been particularly surprised that, from the first moment, I have almost never had a craving for cigarettes.… The considerable internal adjustment demanded by such an unexpected arrest and having to come to terms and put up with a completely new situation—all this makes physical needs completely secondary and unimportant. I am finding this a truly enriching experience.”3

  After nearly two weeks in isolation, Bonhoeffer was moved to a somewhat larger cell on the third floor, “a sweeping view across the prison yard to the pine forest,” he told his parents. There, in cell block 25, Bonhoeffer spent the next eighteen months.

  By April 14, 1943, Bonhoeffer had obtained stationery, his Bible, and a few things to read from the prison library. And by the end of April he was allowed to go outside for the half hour of fresh air; he told his parents of being allowed once again to smoke, of sometimes “even forgetting briefly” where he was: “Here in the prison yard a song thrush sings most wonderfully in the morning and now also at nightfall,” he said.

  On Sunday mornings, he could hear the church bells beckoning the faithful to morning worship in the neighborhood surrounding the prison. During air raids, when he was transferred to a second-floor cell, he could “look out just at the level of the church towers,” which was “quite lovely.” It moved him to think that some people—mostly the elderly—were still going to church; that amid the turmoil, preaching and the liturgy continued. He missed the music of church above all. “[Still] the wind sometimes bears fragments of hymns to me,” he said.

  Bonhoeffer did not know the full extent of his parents’ anguish—that in the same roundup of suspected traitors, the Gestapo had seized his sister Christine and detained her in the police prison on Kaiserdamm on the charge of “aiding high treason,” and that her husband, Hans von Dohnányi, had been incarcerated in the Berlin-Moabit military detention center at Lehrter Strasse. Christine was held for two weeks, after which charges against her were dropped; she was released on April 23.

  He also did not know that his mother suffered fainting spells and had assumed a palsied demeanor, as she descended into the same darkness that had engulfed her twenty-two years earlier after her son Walter’s death. “Everything just happened too suddenly,” Paula said. Still, Bonhoeffer begged his parents’ forgiveness for the grief he was no doubt causing them.

  Sometimes he wrote two drafts of a letter home, trying “to formulate things so that they would not become sad.” He told how, after the first two weeks’ interrogations
had ended, he had been treated much better and even had the time to read again. At first, he’d found it difficult to focus on his work, but by Holy Week, he had been able to give himself over to an “intensive study” of the Passion narrative, particularly John 17, in which Jesus offers his high priestly prayer: “Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee …”

  He was getting some rest, too, he told them. After the hectic months preceding his arrest, it was a kind of relief going to bed at eight o’clock and looking forward to the stillness of the night. “I have dreams every night, and they are always pleasant.”

  He had even begun a “little study on ‘The Feeling of Time.’ ” Perhaps not since his childhood meditations on eternity had temporal experience been so perplexing. The essay, he said, arose “out of the need to make my own past present to myself in a situation in which time could so easily appear ‘empty’ and ‘lost.’ ” But that was not his immediate inspiration. A previous occupant of his cell had scribbled over the door, “In a hundred years it will all be over.” That inscription overhung the chamber like some fatalistic needlepoint. Though, as he told his parents, he did not entirely agree with the sentiment, he did allow that there’s a lot one could say on the subject.

  Mornings after breakfast, from about seven o’clock until noon, were for writing. In the afternoon he read. “I always have all sorts of things to learn.” If he had the energy, he would write again until dinner. “In the evening I am then tired enough to be glad to lie down, if not yet to sleep.”

  His dispatches home are mostly without complaint, but as in better times, he might seek help with his furnishings, his wardrobe, and the accoutrements of his grooming. The heels on his shoes were falling off. He would be grateful if his mother and father could send the newer brown pair or, even better, the high black lace-ups. He also requested his favorite brown suit, since the one he was wearing from the time of his arrest was now beyond soiled. Other necessities: a hairbrush, toiletries, a coat hanger, plenty of matches, a pipe with tobacco, a pouch for these, and also pipe cleaners, and some German cigarettes. And might they also stick a copy of Schelling’s Moral Philosophy, volume 2, and Adalbert Stifter’s novel Indian Summer in one of the parcels? As balm for their own suffering spirits, he proposed that the three of them—father, mother, and youngest son—commit to memory some of the great Reformation hymns.