Strange Glory

by Charles Marsh

  In May 1944, he would be helped by Dohnányi’s attempt at thwarting his own investigation by the Gestapo and delaying “a major hearing in his trial.” With the July coup attempt in prospect, Dohnányi “deliberately infected himself with scarlet fever and diphtheria.” His wife (Dietrich’s sister), Christine, smuggled the pathogenic substance into the Buch military prison hospital with a concealed note that read “red paper and stain on the mug…= infected!” And the infection led to severe paralysis of his extremities, with Dohnányi being moved to military quarantine in Potsdam. As hoped, his trial was postponed, and with it the disclosure of anything that would incriminate Bonhoeffer. Roeder’s investigations into the preacher’s evasion of service ended with an entirely bureaucratic whimper: “The facts found relevant under criminal law were finally reduced to the fact that a legal UK classification had been granted by an unauthorized office.”

  In the short term, Bonhoeffer had successfully traversed a minefield. That the fanatically driven Roeder and Judge Advocate General Sack would uncover the more serious matter of his involvement in the conspiracy would remain a fear not realized. The name of Bonhoeffer would work its way into the enquiry but the evidence of complicity would remain obscured. It would take a different prosecutor working in the aftermath of July 20, 1944, to discover it and seal Bonhoeffer’s fate.

  Until then, he continued in guarded confidence of his acquittal and release. He wrote Bethge to say that the two would soon “see each other in freedom.” Even if he had to spend Christmas 1943 alone in prison, he was hopeful now that, after New Year’s, he would be reunited with his family, his fiancée, and his friend in the clear light of a winter morning.

  More than a month later, in a letter of February 4, his thirty-eighth birthday, Bonhoeffer imagined himself and Bethge together once again, as in those bygone times that now stirred a stream of remembrance:

  Eight years ago in the evening, we were sitting around the fireplace together, and you … had given me the D major violin concerto, and we listened to it together. Then I had to tell you all stories about Harnack and times past, which for some reason you particularly enjoyed, and finally we decided definitely on the trip to Sweden. The year after that, you gave me the “September Bible,” nicely inscribed, and the first name on the list was yours. Then followed Schlonwitz and Sigurdshof, celebrated in the company of a good many people who are no longer with us. The singing outside my door, the prayer during the worship service that you led on these days, the Claudius hymn, for which I thank Gerhard—all these are wonderful memories, which the dreadful atmosphere here cannot diminish. I am full of confidence that we shall celebrate your next birthday together, and who knows? perhaps even Easter! Then we’ll get back to what is really our life’s work, and there will be plenty of good work to do, and what we have been through in the meantime will not have been in vain. But we shall always be grateful to each other that we have been able to live through the present time in the way we are both doing. I know you are thinking of me today, and if these thoughts include not only memories of the past but also hope for a future together, even though it will be a changed one, then I am very happy.

  “By then I will certainly be out,” he said, “for, given the nonsense they are pinning on me, they will have to release me at the court appearance.”

  Surely, Bethge would be so resourceful as to wrangle a short leave from military duty for this joyous occasion, Bonhoeffer added.

  In prison, Bonhoeffer’s thought took new directions, while at the same time attention to his first loves intensified, in the manner of a mature artist, layering brushstroke upon brushstroke.18 He recalled his student years and his convivial exchanges with professors Adolf von Harnack and Karl Holl. He grew nostalgic for the vanished ideals of German liberalism. A decade had passed since he had last been a full-time member of the university. One of his final seminars in the summer of 1933 had been a line-by-line reading of Hegel’s Lecturers on the Philosophy of Religion. Once again, he found nourishment in that “great scholarly tradition of the nineteenth century,” even as its restrictive intellectual boundaries, once a kind of protection, collapsed gently before his fresh awakening to what he called the “polyphony of life.”

  He spoke of loss and of letting go, of academic careers unfulfilled, of engagements pending, of letters unfinished; sometimes the litany proved too much to contemplate: “I must break off for today.”19 But he knew he might easily have wound up one of those who’d been “torn to pieces by events and by questions.” With that deliverance in mind, he opened himself to the inevitable incompleteness of things, accepting even the upheavals and intrusions with a disarming gratefulness.

  “That which is fragmentary may point to a higher fulfillment,” Bonhoeffer said, one “which can no longer be achieved by human effort.” Strive though we might, the only work that mattered would be done by grace alone.

  Filled with appreciation for the wholeness he had once known, Bonhoeffer turned to the small and sometimes broken things—not with resignation but with compassion.

  A stanza that I came across from Storm resonates with this mood and echoes over and over in my consciousness, like a melody one can’t get out of one’s mind:

  If outside it’s all gone mad

  in Christian ways or not

  still is the world, this gorgeous world

  entirely resilient.

  A few fall flowers within view of his cell window, a half hour’s exercise in the prison yard, a beautiful linden tree—minor glories were enough to confirm the transcendent one. He remembered the story of a man who had “a nightmare that a bomb might destroy everything” and who, upon waking, thought, How sad for the butterflies!20 In the end, Bonhoeffer said, “the world is summed up … in a few people one wants to see and with whom one wishes to be together.”

  On January 17, less than three months before his arrest, Dietrich and Maria had become engaged, though in deference to her mother they had kept the arrangement a secret. Upon his arrest, however, the news had become public.21 Their brief romance is a tragic story, often told and nearly always embellished—as, for instance, in a BBC film adaption, which, in one scene, has Bonhoeffer and Wedemeyer stealing a kiss through the barbed-wire fence of the Flossenbürg concentration camp.

  Bonhoeffer despised the way he came across in his letters to Wedemeyer—as “a paragon of virtue and a model of Christian behavior,” like some ancient martyr—though he could hardly help it. But he was right about their overall effect. He often sounded like a father writing admonitory notes to his daughter. He needled her, too, as when he raised concerns about her fondness for Rilke. Sparing Wedemeyer accounts of his personal anguish, which he continued to convey unflinchingly to Bethge, Bonhoeffer bumbles along in search of solid footing. Eberhard remained “his daring, trusting spirit,” his friend, while Maria was to be his wife. And therein lay the conflict; his awareness of each role intensified. His singular friendship with Bethge—now idealized more than ever—represented the joyful and freeing counterpart to marriage, which, so far as it entered his mind, had always been equated with duty, obligation, necessity, and law: an arrangement necessitated by original sin.

  On August 28, 1944, even in the wake of the miserable failure of the officers’ plot, and the summary executions of Claus von Stauffenberg, Friedrich Olbricht, Werner von Haeften, and Albrecht Mertz von Quirnheim the month before—he wrote a poem for Bethge’s thirty-fifth birthday. This poem was called simply “The Friend.”

  Not from heavy soil, where blood and race and oath …

  but from the heart’s free choosing,

  and from the spirit’s free longing,

  needing no oath nor legal sanction.

  These were the sources of their affection.

  Playmates at first,

  On the spirit’s long journeys into wondrous, faraway realms,

  which, veiled in the morning sun, gleam like gold,

  toward which in noonday heat the wispy clouds

  drift
along in the blue sky,

  [and] in the excitement of night, by lamplight,

  beckon the seeker like hidden, secret treasures.

  Theirs, he intoned, was a love that “no one planted,” “no one watered,” but “it grew freely and in cheerful confidence.”

  Like a clear, fresh wellspring

  where the spirit cleanses itself from the day’s dust,

  where it cools itself after blazing heat

  and steels itself in the hour of fatigue—

  Like a fortress, where the spirit returns

  after confusion and danger,

  finding refuge, comfort, and strength.

  Theirs was a love that lived “under the wide sky,” unlike “things formed from weighty, earthy stuff.” Stuff like labor, the sword, and marriage.

  When the sirens howled their midnight cue,

  Long and silent were my thoughts of you,

  how you might be, old times when you were here.…

  After a long silence, at half past one

  comes the signal that the danger is done.

  I took this as a friendly sign from on high

  that all dangers are quietly passing you by.…

  This is what the friend is to the friend.

  Over the destiny of wife and husband—as the gloomy contrast is set—creeps the shadow of wrath, while the weight of sin presses against “the heavy soil of earth,” to be borne by husband and wife on account of the first transgressors in the garden. Marriage commands. Marriage compels assent to doctrine. Marriage imposes alien laws. Marriage adjudicates an ancient curse. These, too, are notions to be found in the poem.

  “The wife is to give birth to her children in pain, and the husband, in caring for his family, is to reap many thistles and thorns and must work by the sweat of his brow,” Bonhoeffer wrote. The very wages of sin were these. “This burden is meant to lead husband and wife to call upon God and to remind them of their eternal destiny in God’s kingdom.”

  There is no poetry in these grim postulations, also written for Bethge, but now as a kind of cautionary epithalamion. They can only be understood as an oblique reminder of the comparative bliss of friendship. With marriage comes “difficulties, impediments, obstacles, doubts, and hesitations.” The holy estate of matrimony might be honorable, worthy of praise as “a decisive triumph,” but the true fellowship of souls such as he and his friend enjoyed was a state of “unimaginable freedom and power,” an ineffable lightness as against the leadenness of wedlock.

  Renate and Eberhard would not read the sermon at their wedding, as its author intended; Dr. Bonhoeffer had mistakenly filed the manuscript away with his son’s will. Still, the meditation gives evidence of Bonhoeffer’s thinking on the subject as he tried to make a complicated emotional transition of his own, from Bethge to Wedemeyer. Whatever he felt in his heart of hearts, Bonhoeffer took the prospect of his marriage seriously for as long as he believed in the chance of his release. He wanted to discuss with Maria the details of the celebration, what text should be read, and the menu. They spoke of where they might live, how they might furnish their home, and the other logistics of cohabitation: Bonhoeffer thought, for instance, that he would be the better cook. Given time, he believed, he could assert his Pygmalion-like influence. He suggested that Wedemeyer improve her English, though she could not see a point in doing so. Wishing she shared his love of music, he insisted that she spend more time practicing the violin, which she seemed to play in a manner particular to the provincial nobility, plodding but with feeling.22

  By the spring of 1944, Bonhoeffer had settled into regular rhythms of reading and writing. Alongside the dates on his letters, it was his custom to enter Latin designations for the Sundays, and he followed the readings and prayers of the hours in his Losungen, the Moravian prayer book his governess had given him as a child. Within the first six months, he had read the Old Testament through “two and a-half times.”23 He organized his days according to the church calendar and tried to infuse cell block 92 with monastic order, extending its gifts of hospitality to every part of the prison. “Waiting with Christ in Gethsemane”—this solemn phrase inspired the liturgical shape of his days: meditation, thanksgiving, intercessory prayer, praise, and lament. “If we are to learn what God promises, and what he fulfills, we must persevere in quiet meditation on the life, sayings, deeds, sufferings, and death of Jesus.”24 The first Christmas in prison, he’d hummed carols and hymns to himself; adorned his Adventskranz with a reproduction of Filippo Lippi’s Nativity; and “feasted on an ostrich egg.”25 He consoled fellow prisoners and guards alike. “Pastor, please pray that we have no alarm tonight!” a sergeant once whispered. Even the medical orderlies “became attached to him, and often sat up late talking with him in the sick quarters.”

  The failure of the July 20, 1944, coup attempt ushered in a new phase of Bonhoeffer’s imprisonment. As the man responsible for issuing and receiving army reports and dispatches, Bethge from his post in Italy was the first in his unit to hear of the failed plot and “report it to his superiors.”

  In subsequent letters—the first dated the following day, July 21, 1944—Bonhoeffer expressed the hope that despite “his premonition of impending death,” he might live to enjoy his relationship with Wedemeyer as much as he had once relished the one with Bethge. But not long thereafter the correspondence with Wedemeyer would come to an end, even as his letters to Bethge became charged with a new energy. A fresh awareness began to inform Bonhoeffer’s writings, and it coincided with an intuition that, contrary to earlier optimism, he was not to get out alive.

  There had been intimations of a theological transformation in earlier efforts. Still, when he read Bonhoeffer’s meditations on a “religionless Christianity” and “a world come of age”—written between the spring of 1944 and Christmas, when they ended abruptly—Bethge expressed surprise and excitement. Questions that had been raised over the course of their long friendship resurfaced with “singular intensity” under “the impression of total war” and the expectation that it was only a matter of time before his involvement in a capital crime was uncovered. Now, Bonhoeffer invited Bethge to perform with him an intellectual pas de deux of exquisite intricacy, and Bethge gladly joined the dance that his longtime teacher would lead with flashes of inspiration and brilliance. For his part, Bethge, “whose different gifts complemented those of his friend, provided the critical sounding board.”

  Bonhoeffer attested to having undergone a “great liberation from guilt and self-doubt” during his final year in prison. What had stirred it? Discipline, control, and ardor—these were the qualities to which he had long aspired, and insofar as he’d attained them, they would sustain him until the end. But a new element had entered his being as well. Bonhoeffer discovered the value of hilaritas—good humor—as the quality of mind, body, and spirit most important to animating the greatest human achievements. “High-spirited self-confidence,” speaking the Yes and the Amen in gleeful defiance of the Nothing, a cheerful audacity—“spread hilaritas!” Bonhoeffer directed Bethge, in a kind of eureka.

  It was when he first read Barth’s Church Dogmatics II/2, Bonhoeffer said, that hilaritas leapt off the page at him. And now that his eyes were opened, he discerned hilaritas shimmering and sparkling in all of humanity’s beautiful and good creations: in the triumph of grace as narrated over five hundred pages in Barth’s disputation of the God who has saved all humanity in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, crucified, dead, and risen; in Raphael and Mozart; and in Walther von der Vogelweide, the Knight of Bamberg, Luther, Gotthold Lessing, Peter Paul Rubens, and Hugo Wolf, to name but a few. Hilaritas connoted boldness, audacity, and a “willingness to defy the world and popular opinion”; this one did by living out of the “firm conviction” that with his work one is giving the world something good, “even if the world is not pleased with it.”

  Ignited by hilaritas, Bonhoeffer opened his mind to “the knowledge accumulated over the years”: the ancient church fathers Irenaeus and
Augustine; the medieval philosopher Nicholas of Cusa; the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius; the pillars of the Enlightenment, the Romantics, and the great system builders, Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard. Now, in his consciousness, all of these would coalesce into what remain some of the freshest, most vivid, and yet confounding theological meditations of the modern age.

  The power of Bonhoeffer’s prison writings lies precisely in their being unshackled to convention, the freedom he indulged in “trial combinations” and “lightning flashes” of spiritual insight.26 It is as though Bonhoeffer’s lifelong protest against the world-constitutive ego and its thought-systems had at last assumed the wholeness of literary form. From his cell, he had surveyed the story of modernity. “God as a working hypothesis” was no longer required, he said in accord with philosophical secularists—no longer required for science, politics, or morality (or even philosophy and religion), not for thought in any measure. What, then, shall the “anxious souls” do, Bonhoeffer asks? In the year before his death, he grasped an enlivening worldly godlessness that felt closer to the gospel than any formal religiosity he had known.

  What is Christianity, or who is Christ for us today?” That is the question Bonhoeffer posed to Bethge in a letter of April 30. The language of Christian faith could no longer forestall its own death by a thousand equivocations.

  “We are approaching a completely religionless age,” Bonhoeffer wrote, “people as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore. Even those who honestly describe themselves as ‘religious’ aren’t really practicing that at all; they presumably mean something quite different by ‘religious.’ ” The rickety scaffolding of Protestantism had tumbled finally to the ground in the wake of the German church’s complicity with the Nazis; every attempt “to force it once again” into the shape of a powerful institution “will only delay its inescapable reckoning.” Religion as it had been lived before was obsolete.