Strange Glory

by Charles Marsh

  Bonhoeffer indeed sought to spare his parents the worst of his experience, but his reports to Bethge are entirely unguarded. His first letter would, however, not be sent until November 18, 1943. Forbidden to correspond with anyone but a relation, he was able to do so with Bethge only thanks to a sympathetic Corporal Knobloch, who acted as a conduit for letters to Bethge during Bonhoeffer’s detainment.4 Knobloch, who appears to have been a churchman acquainted with Bonhoeffer’s writings and may have heard him preach years earlier, would carry the letters home with him, posting them from his personal address. In turn, Bethge would send his letters to Knobloch, who delivered them to Bonhoeffer in prison.5 “You are the only person who knows the ‘acedia’-‘tristitia’ that, with its ominous consequences, has often haunted me,” he told his friend. Indeed, no one but Eberhard had observed this “melancholy of the heart,” which could sometimes overwhelm Bonhoeffer.

  At night, when he sat alone in his cell, by the light of a single candle (another luxury permitted him after the days of solitary confinement), he recalled the countless “evening conversations” he’d had with Bethge. “I imagine us sitting as in old times following supper (and the regular evening work) together in my room upstairs and smoking, occasionally playing chords on the clavichord and telling each other what the day has brought.” There were “infinitely many questions” he wanted to ask—about Bethge’s new military service, his travels, his pastoral work. What it felt like “being married.” In September 1943, Bethge had received his call-up orders, and after basic training in Spandau, he entered the army an ordinary infantryman, stationed in Rignano, Italy. From there, his unit sometimes traveled south to Velletri, where in the distance he could see the Allied fleet near Nettuno and Anzio and could hear echoes of their furious shelling.6 His job as Schreiber, or company clerk, kept him out of combat.7

  Bonhoeffer also wanted to confess to Bethge, over the same imaginary dinner, “that despite everything I have written, it is horrible here.”

  Terrifying thoughts pursued him “well into the night.” He coped with them only by “reciting countless hymn verses”—but even then, he would usually awaken with a sigh or a gasp, instead of a blessing or word of praise. “One becomes accustomed to the physical deprivations,” he wrote, “in fact one lives for months at a time as if bodiless—almost too much so—but one never becomes accustomed to the psychic pressure.… I have the feeling that what I am seeing and hearing makes me years older, and the world often feels for me like a nauseating burden.”8

  Still, some thoughts were too dark to share even with Bethge. He’d conducted a brooding self-examination, recorded as “Notes I, May 1943” and “Notes II, May 1943,” the fragments surfacing only after his death. It was these “notes” that constituted the “little study” he had blithely mentioned to his parents, though they are the thrashings of a very anguished soul.

  The ravages of time—the gnawing of time…

  …

  —time as help—as torment, as enemy.

  boredom as expression of despair.

  …

  Separation—from what is past and what is to come

  “If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength being small”

  …

  Prov. 31 laughs at the time to come

  Matt. 6 do not worry…

  waiting

  boredom

  …

  continuity with the past and the future interrupted

  discontent—tension

  impatience

  yearning

  boredom

  night—deeply lonely

  apathy

  urge to be busy, variety, novelty

  dullness, tiredness, sleeping…

  Fantasizing, distortion of past and future

  suicide…

  the closing of the book,

  sum total.

  The telegraphic lines eventually made their way to Bethge, who doubtless recognized the unifying sensibility. But when Bonhoeffer wrote them in May 1943, in clean Latin letters, they were like so many silent screams.9

  During the two years between his arrest and his death, Bonhoeffer never stopped writing: there were letters, poems, prayers, drafts of novels, plays, and stories; there were outlines of future books and essays; aphorisms and exegeses of scripture; sketches on various themes. Collectively, his letters and prison papers document a great unburdening.10

  He resisted the notion that he suffered in prison. To suggest that he was suffering, as some friends did, seemed like a “profanation” to him. The first weeks had been wretched, as he only obliquely revealed to his parents and more candidly to Bethge. Still, it would be a perverse “indulgence” to claim suffering—and he had no hankering after martyrdom. “These things must not be dramatized,” Bonhoeffer cautioned. “A great deal here is horrible,” he said, “but where is it otherwise?” The Jews suffered; the families of the fallen brethren suffered; the mental incompetents murdered by death squads had suffered; his anxious parents suffered. “No, suffering must be something quite different, must have a quite different dimension from what I have so far experienced.”

  Seven hundred men were housed in Berlin’s Tegel prison. Most endured months of interrogation with no right to counsel. With few exceptions, their warders lacked common decency. The sick were beaten and tortured. Men in the throes of convulsions and other nervous seizures were left unattended. Every aspect of the place—the overflowing latrines, the endless repetition of the same questions, the chains and manacles—seemed designed to break the spirit.

  But if any prisoner enjoyed special favors, it was Bonhoeffer. At first the prison officials were not aware that he was a Protestant theologian and pastor; nor did they recognize him as the son of the famous psychiatrist, Dr. Bonhoeffer, who, as a state employee, had received a dispensation from the Nazi Party to continue his directorship of Berlin’s Charity Hospital through 1938. Nor did they know that this Pastor Bonhoeffer was the nephew of General Paul von Hase, former city commandant of Berlin. When these and other details came to light, the warden made sure Bonhoeffer got extra portions of food, hot coffee, and cigarettes. A few times a week, he was served his meals as the prison staff were, on china plates with silverware. The officials treated him with “exceptional politeness,” Bonhoeffer said, “and some even came to apologize.”11

  On occasion, Captain Walter Maetz, the commandant of Tegel, called on Bonhoeffer and accompanied him on his walks in the prison yard. Maetz permitted Karl and Paula to bring their son “colorful bouquets of dahlias” and grapes from their garden, reminders of how beautiful “the world could be on these autumn days.” His uncle Hase once visited, and the two drank champagne and talked for five hours.12 Bonhoeffer told his father he found the new courtesies embarrassing: he refused the extra portions of food—although he was happy to accept the champagne, the cigarettes, and the other privileges.

  On his wall he hung a reproduction of Dürer’s Apocalypse—a rendering of Revelation 12:7, the battle between good and evil, with St. Michael leading the angels against the dragon.13 On his table of cast iron he would place the flowers from his parents.

  Set against the backdrop of the death camps, the complaints of a Lutheran pastor whose meals sometimes arrived on china with silver cutlery might well seem trivial. They did often seem to resemble the indignation of slighted nobility. But he did not intend to let little offenses pass unnoticed. A line ran from the particular to the general—from the petty humiliations to the colossal abuses of power. This was a lesson Bonhoeffer had been taught as a child, and one he would carry with him to the end.

  And so, he protested the conditions mightily and with forthright contempt—confident that on account of his privilege precisely he was obliged to voice the concerns, great and small, of all. When the soup contained only a sliver of pork, he complained that the meat rations fell short of a proper diet. He complained that kitchen staff sliced the bread and sausage unevenly. Once he was so incensed at the skimpy portions that he
summoned a prison guard to watch as Bonhoeffer weighed a wedge of bratwurst to prove it was fifteen grams, not the twenty-five required by law. He complained that the prison doctors and officers received heaping plates of meat with cream sauce, whereas the prisoners’ meals on Sundays and holidays were “beneath contempt,” “consisting of watery cabbage soup completely devoid of any fat, meat, or potatoes. On these days nobody will be checking on the food.”14 On winter nights, prison guards often put out the lights in the cells while forbidding inmates from lying in their cots until taps was played, thus forcing them to stand alone in darkness. Even worse was the lack of an air raid shelter for the general prison population; Tegel stood near the massive Borsig Fabrik, a machine works factory that had some priority as a target of British attacks. “The screams and frenzied struggles of the prisoners locked in their cells during a severe attack, some of whom are here only for very minor offenses or may even be innocent,” Bonhoeffer wrote, “is unforgettable for anyone who has heard it.” (He would never refer to the air attacks as “terror bombings,” the term many Germans used to claim a moral equivalency between Nazi aggression and Allied attacks.) When the night skies were lit up by the green flares called “Christmas trees,” launched to illuminate the targets of the RAF Pathfinders, Bonhoeffer spoke of the paradox of wrath and grace, reminded of the Old Testament prophet Amos’s description of the divine wrath as an unquenchable fire.

  Not since university days had he had so much time to read—even after his release from solitary confinement, he was still forced to remain in his cell for fourteen hours a day. Now able to return to his studies, he requested books in philosophy, science, art, political theory, history, and literature. The prison library had limited offerings, and so he read whatever his friends and family sent, devouring books, sometimes with scholarly purpose, sometimes on a whim. As a result, the bibliography of his internment is rather idiosyncratic. In addition to Stifter’s novel, his favorites included Jeremias Gotthelf’s Geist und Geld, the poems and stories of Theodor Fontane, and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker’s The World View of Physics. He read Immanuel Kant’s writings on anthropology and Wilhelm Dilthey’s Weltanschauung und Analyse des Menschen seit Renaissance und Reformation, a study of humankind and the emerging worldview in Europe since the Renaissance and the Reformation. “I’m back to working with more concentration and am especially enjoying reading Dilthey,” Bonhoeffer wrote to his parents. He read Walter Otto on Greek mythology, the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset on the philosophy of history, and Adolf von Harnack’s history of the Royal Prussian Academy, which he found “beautiful indeed.” He also immersed himself in Nicolai Hartmann’s Systematische Philosophie, excited at the prospect of several weeks devoted to the German idealists.

  A letter to Bethge describes the “random mixture” in which he had recently indulged: a history of Scotland Yard; a study of the origins of prostitution; a book by Hans Delbrück—though “the problems he deals with don’t actually interest me”; Reinhold Schneider’s sonnets—“of uneven quality, though some were very good.” He had read “a huge English novel that goes from 1500 to the present”; Hugh Walpole’s Herries novels; and the medical corps handbook, this so he might be prepared “for any eventuality.”

  DIETRICH BONHOEFFER IN BERLIN’S TEGEL PRISON IN THE SUMMER OF 1944

  He read Dostoyevsky’s “Totenhaus” (Memoirs from the House of the Dead), as he became “preoccupied” with the necessity of hope in a time when his hopes of release had disappeared. “I’m reading [Dostoyevsky] with great interest,” he said, “and am impressed by the sympathy, devoid of any moralizing, that people outside show toward the inmates. Would this lack of moralizing, which comes from religiousness, perhaps be an essential characteristic of this people and would it help explain more recent events?” In his last letter, he would ask his parents to deliver H. Pestalozzi’s Lienhard und Gertrud and Abendstunden eines Einsiedlers, Paul Natorp’s Sozialpädagogik, and Plutarch’s Große Männer: Biographien, to the Gestapo prison at 8 Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, to which he was moved on October 8, 1944, a windowless cell he would inhabit with one wrist chained to a heavy iron clasp.

  He read most anything but theology—with one important exception. The latest installment in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, volume II/2, thrilled Bonhoeffer endlessly. This was the high point of Barth’s opus. Indeed, many modern theologians have argued that II/2 displays such staggering genius that had Barth written nothing else, he would still deserve a place alongside Martin Luther and John Calvin in the Reformation pantheon. For in this volume Barth turned on its head the contentious doctrine of double predestination—that God had predestined some to salvation and others to hell. God’s grace is irresistible, Barth said, concurring with the church fathers, and for this reason no finite reality could finally deny its saving power or hide from its reach. All humanity—past, present, and future—has been redeemed from the curse of sin by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ; everyone was now the “elect man.”14 Comparing Barth’s effort to the cathedrals of Rome, the symphonies of Mozart, Bonhoeffer found it altogether convincing. With meticulous detail and symphonic grandeur, Barth had captured the essence of God as love overabounding. Bonhoeffer would draw extensively from this volume in his prison writings.15

  Bonhoeffer’s interrogation in the first months of his imprisonment proceeded under the command of Dr. Manfred Roeder, the Reich’s senior military prosecutor. Appointed by Admiral Max Bastian, president of the Reich war court, Roeder would be the one to prosecute Dohnányi as well. In the background of these efforts stood the bitter rivalry between the Gestapo and the Abwehr, the Gestapo being eager to “discredit” the Abwehr by mounting “a corruption case against Dohnányi.” Roeder’s first objective in Bonhoeffer’s case was to prove him guilty of evading military service. In pursuit of this objective Roeder would prove dogged.

  At the end of July 1943, four months into his arrest, Bonhoeffer was finally notified of the charges against him, and, according to the terms of the indictment, he “appeared to be guilty” and “reasonably suspected in Berlin and in other places” on two counts: evasion of military duty, and assisting others in evading duty. Also itemized were numerous activities related to the Confessing Church. Notably absent was any mention of Operation 7, or of any other activity related to the resistance. Considering the crimes of which he would eventually stand accused, the charges of 1943 seem minor, certainly less serious than high treason. But they nevertheless left him subject to the violation of statute “§ 5 Section 1 No. 3 KSSVO,[2] § 74 RStGB,” the crime of “subversion of military power” (Wehrkraftzersetzung, which can also be translated as “undermining military strength”), which was punishable by death. Horrified, Bonhoeffer answered the charges with defiance while also attempting to mitigate them.

  VIEW OF TEGEL PRISON YARD FROM BONHOEFFER’S CELL

  “I do not need to tell you what even the fact of an indictment for subversion of the war effort means for me professionally and personally and for my family,” he wrote Roeder in a huffy letter of August 2. “You know my professional and personal relationships well enough to appreciate [the effect]. If the law requires an indictment, then it must be issued; this I understand. That I did not expect it may be attributable to my deficient knowledge of the letter of the law, as well as to the fact that I have felt—and, following further consideration of what you told me on Friday, continue to feel—innocent of the charge.” Ignorance of the law is never much of a defense; it was as if he had not yet realized the seriousness of his situation, or believed he could, by reason of his prominence, be forgiven an honest mistake. He closed, affably, “May I finally add to this something that actually goes without saying, that if in fact my work for Military Intelligence is no longer regarded as important I will immediately make myself available for another form of service.”16 Roeder would issue the formal indictment on September 21, taking no account of Bonhoeffer’s letters to him, often signed with an ingratiating “Heil Hitler!�
� “Be strong. Admit nothing,” Bonhoeffer told himself in preparation for the hearings. He had taken the precaution of memorizing a version of events, which he had constructed with Dohnányi and Joseph Müller.

  On September 16, 1943, Kurt Wergein, an attorney and professor of legal philosophy, was appointed as Bonhoeffer’s defense counsel. As Bonhoeffer wrote his parents on September 25, he was “really glad when first the authorization for the attorney and then the arrest warrant arrived. So the apparently aimless waiting may be coming to an end at last after all.” He remained hopeful of a favorable outcome, still treating his predicament like a petty squabble: “Initially R. [Roeder] would have liked to finish me off; now he has been forced to content himself with an utterly ridiculous indictment that will garner him little prestige.” Indeed, the possibility of his being “sentenced but released” still had some basis at the conclusion of the initial hearings.

  There had been cause to worry when Roeder turned his attention to Operation 7. But when no evidence against him in that connection materialized, Roeder focused on the only availing issue: Bonhoeffer’s UK classification.17 Even so, the interrogations languished, and when a number of papers related to the case were destroyed in an air raid, Bonhoeffer’s hopes of a “favorable outcome” rose.