Strange Glory

by Charles Marsh

  “God beyond necessity; beyond need,” Bonhoeffer had said in a Barcelona sermon. “Servile, fearful, shirking complexity,” he wrote in prison, “God does not want us to live that way.

  “The same God who makes us to live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually.” “Before God, and with God,” we live without God, even as God draws closer to humanity in its new freedom. Faith begins not with the ascent to truthful propositions, the heart’s modulations of trust, the Kierkegaardian leap or even with the “first step” of obedience; it begins with simple, grateful praise of God as the mystery of the world, who exists beyond necessity and desire.

  The profound this-worldliness of Christianity”—Bonhoeffer first used the phrase in the letter to Bethge the day after the failed coup. In the last few years, he said, he had come to know and to understand more of this powerful notion. “The Christian is not a homo religiosus, but simply a human being, in the same way that Jesus was a human being.” He did not mean “the shallow and banal this-worldliness of the enlightened, the bustling, the comfortable, or the lascivious,” but rather a worldly concentration that involves the same discipline, skill, and patience of this difficult artwork—and “includes the ever-present knowledge of death and resurrection.”

  Bonhoeffer recalled a conversation with his friend Jean Lasserre during their road trip across America. The two had asked themselves what they most wanted of their lives. Lasserre, who would go on to be a pastor in Calais and a member of the French resistance, said he wanted to become a saint. Bonhoeffer had been impressed by this declaration and said it was quite likely that the man had done just that. But for himself Bonhoeffer expressed a different hope. He wanted only to learn to have faith.

  Of course, Bonhoeffer had not for a long time “understood the depth of this antithesis”: the mutual exclusivity of the two aspirations. He thought he could learn to have faith by trying to achieve spiritual perfection. “I suppose I wrote Discipleship at the end of this path,” he admitted, acknowledging the dangers of that approach, “though I still stand by it.”36 Later on, however, he’d discovered, “and am still discovering to this day,” that one only learns to have faith by entering into “the full this-worldliness of life.”

  He allowed that he was grateful to have been given these insights. “I know that it is only on the path that I have finally taken that I was able to learn this. So I am thinking gratefully and with peace of mind about past as well as present things.” Discipleship was but a stage in the journey, one that he had now moved beyond.37 After the war, it would comfort his family to read the prison letters and to know that the strenuous austerity of his writings of the 1930s had given way to a faith more open, munificent, and sensuous.

  Until the events of July 20, 1944, the members of the Bonhoeffer circle remained guardedly hopeful that the criminal investigations of Dietrich would end in his acquittal. All that changed after the coup d’état failed.

  On that afternoon, Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, a nobleman born in the family castle in the Bavarian town of Jettingen, carried a bomb into Hitler’s headquarters in east Prussia. The July 20 plot drew from the highest levels of German society and government, including the so-called “Goerdeler Circle,” led by the former mayor of Leipzig Carl Goerdeler and the diplomat Ulrich von Hassell; the “Kreisau Circle,” clustering around Count Helmuth James von Moltke and his Silesian estate in Kreisau; and the Abwehr cell, headed by Hans Oster, Henning von Tresckow, and Colonel Stauffenberg. Other clusters remained informed of plans for the coup but without being directly involved with the assassination attempt. The Freiburg circle, for instance, with whom Bonhoeffer met several times, issued a memorandum that “sketched the contours of a post-Nazi government” and included “the first acknowledgment that the German people owed reparations to the Jews.” These scions of the German nobility were joined by the trade unionists Wilhelm Leuschner and Julius Leber as well as by leaders of the Social Democrats.

  The failure of the July 20 conspiracy brought to light the secret meetings and discussions, the traitorous deeds contemplated and attempted over the previous year; and in but a few days to follow, more than 170 people related to the plot were arrested, interrogated, in many instances tortured, and then brought before a commission of the Reich Central Security Office. Still, this hectic moment saw no immediate change in the circumstances of either Dohnányi or Bonhoeffer. And so the family took hope that their “early arrest could [yet] save them in the end,” since no proof of complicity had yet been discovered. Over the next several weeks, however, Himmler’s Gestapo, excited by an enraged Hitler, raided the homes and offices of everyone related to the conspiracy. They discovered letters, diaries, and other documents leading to further rounds of arrests, including arrests of conspirators involved in earlier plots. And yet: no connection to the coup attempt was imputed to Bonhoeffer.

  On August 3, Bonhoeffer sent Bethge what he called “Outline for a Book.” The four-page précis of another project never to be finished reveals the “exciting flash of recognition” that sparked his final writings; it also renders implausible any claim that he had not embarked on a distinctly new path of thought. Bonhoeffer had remained deeply concerned for Bethge’s safety. He wrote of having heard about the “ ‘tropical heat’ in Italy,” referring in code to the heavy fighting there and withdrawal of German troops. But he also meant the heat wave smothering most of western Europe. As temperatures in Berlin soared into the nineties and sweat flowed from his head onto the pages of his Dilthey, Bonhoeffer sank into a sweet reverie of his Italian travels with Bethge. There was the trip to Florence in the summer of 1936, a time when they had been poor, he recalled, and all he could give Bethge for his birthday had been “an evening of ice cream.” As ever, he longed for the “clarifying conversations” of their best times together, but he remained hopeful that this new “kind of work” could take shape through their written exchanges and with much prayer. It excited him mightily that the book outlined in his letter would be their first real collaboration, and, not knowing this work would be his last, he eagerly solicited Bethge’s ideas.

  Bonhoeffer devoted much time to the project in the fall of 1944 and winter of 1945, and according to Bethge, he “had probably written a considerable amount before it became impossible to continue.” But all that survives of the effort is the short sketch sent to Bethge, handwritten on August 3, 1944, in blue-black ink and, in parts, in old German script—along with lengthy and often cryptic sections of other letters, in which Bonhoeffer tested out his ideas.38

  He imagined a short volume of a hundred pages—an essay, he called it, with three chapters—in which he would take inventory of Christianity in “a world come of age.” Even the “Outline for a Book” indicates that he had in mind something with the urgency of a manifesto. Defying the idea of religion as a working hypothesis, as “a stopgap for our embarrassments,” or a mode or modulation of human experience, Bonhoeffer proclaimed a God beyond human necessity. This brought him back to the basic question: Who is God?

  “God is not primarily a general belief in God’s omnipotence,” he wrote in his notes for the first chapter. God is not a metaphysical proposition, or the being compared with which nothing greater can be conceived, or any such reality derived by the philosophers by inference, however sublime or inspiring. “That is not a genuine experience of God. That is but a prolongation of a piece of the world.” What God is is “encounter with Jesus Christ,” Bonhoeffer said—which is to say that a genuine experience of God only occurs in social terms, in the encounter with the Thou. God is the experience of a particular truth: “a transformation of human life is given in the fact that ‘Jesus is there only for others.’ ” That is the only Christian prerogative (as it was also, importantly, the basic German Jewish conviction, minus the Christological dimension). Being a Christian, then, means participation in the story of Jesus: “a new life in ‘being there-for-others,’ ” discovering transcendence i
n “the neighbor within reach in any given situation.” “Human relationships are the most important thing,” Bonhoeffer said. Needing nothing, “God allows himself to be served by us in all that is human.”

  Barth had once pictured the church as a structure with four sides open to the world, with practices of hospitality, forgiveness, and reconciliation as the marks of Christian devotion. In Bonhoeffer’s “Outline for a Book,” however, the structure collapses—the world having evolved beyond religion in the old sense—while the community of Christ, accepting exile as its lot, stands in solidarity with the distressed and the excluded. Bonhoeffer introduces the concept of “the hero whose creativity thrives on limitations.”39 Such a hero is one who cares for the lonely and the bereaved; attends to “the fatherless and widows in their affliction”; acts boldly against the powers of death in whatever form they take; renounces the desire to turn God into the summation of need and ambition; lives in humble gratitude for the opportunities of life; sings a hymn to “the small but journal wonders,” to borrow from W. H. Auden, whom Bonhoeffer is thought to have met briefly in New York in the summer of 1939.40

  All other options had failed: German Protestantism had first sought legitimacy by defining a spiritual dimension beyond state intrusion. Lutheran orthodoxy had sought to redeem the church by making doctrinal rectitude the absolute measure of faith. The Confessing Church had affirmed the Lordship of Jesus Christ over all others and fought for the purity of the church. The ecumenical movement had rallied around the naive hope that Christ’s peace would prevail in history. But none of these efforts could so much as dent the impregnable armor of the Nazi monolith—or save the Jews from mass slaughter. And so Bonhoeffer’s final thoughts in prison came as an invitation to rethink the Christian witness and the church’s complicity in war, mass death, and genocide.

  During the Finkenwalde years, Bonhoeffer had discussed the need of “completely free, trained pastors” who would preach the Word of God and discern the spirits of the age. Such pastors would live closer to the ground, “immediately ready to serve … at the outbreak of any new emergency”—ready even to “renounce all the privileges of clergy, financial or otherwise.” It had been Bonhoeffer’s hope to inspire a new generation of rapid-response, free-floating churchmen equal to the exigencies of any mission. But Finkenwalde had long been boarded up, and with it went the emergency seminaries, houses of study, and other places of spiritual formation. Even a phalanx of pastors trained and deployed to meet these harrowing times were not equal to the emergency.

  In Machtstaat und Utopie, a book Bonhoeffer had read with admiration, Gerhard Ritter said of the rulers of his utopian state that “they will not be isolated as a class for they will be continuously replaced by people advancing from lower levels.” But they will be distinguished from the rabble “in their possession of elite intellectual gifts and moral maturity.” The fate of Christianity in “a world come of age” depended in Bonhoeffer’s view on just such a “new elite of people,” with moral sensibilities shaped by “a view from below,” forming an aristocracy of responsibility—a nobility of righteous doers and prayerful pilgrims. These “new elites” would enlist to the cause all who exhibit the highest values, safeguarding “in their silent deeds the besmirched words freedom, humanity, and toleration.” Around “the silent sanctuary of lofty words, a new nobility will develop, must develop, in our time. The aristocrats of responsibility shall alone render the necessary judgments in a world come of age. Neither birth nor success, will be the foundation of this nobility, but humility, faith and sacrifice.”41 The Christian must hereafter live as if moving gently through a “quiet sanctuary”—and thus we come to an understanding of his religionless Christianity.

  The whole edifice of institutional Christianity—what corresponded to religious life for nearly all who claimed to be religious—must be rebuilt from the ground up. The church must give away all its property! Pastors should take no salary but live on unforced donations and wages earned in some concurrent secular vocation. In this world, as in the apostolic age, clergy and laity alike would “participate in the worldly tasks of life in the community—not dominating but helping and serving.” They will confess “in every calling that a life with Christ means to be there for others.” They will not be afraid “to confront the vices of hubris, the worship of power, envy, and illusion” as “the roots of evil.” They will praise the virtues of moderation, authenticity, trust, faithfulness, steadfastness, patience, discipline, humility, modesty, and “contentment.” They will not underestimate the significance of human example (which has its origin in the humanity of Jesus, and is so important in Paul’s writings!); for the Church’s word gains weight and power not through concepts but by example.”

  It is exceedingly difficult to believe in God without a living example, Bonhoeffer said, although Protestantism had built its franchise on that very absence. Of this “I will write in more detail later,” he said.

  More than five thousand people would eventually be arrested on charges related to conspiracy, and of those at least two hundred would be executed. Not all those rounded up were actually connected with the July 20 plot, but the Gestapo used the occasion to settle scores with many whom it merely suspected of sympathizing with the opposition.

  In the Nazi star chamber, Judge Roland Freisler bellowed and gesticulated wildly, shouting down the reasonable pleas of many men and women now victims of their conscience. Freisler had been a prisoner of war in Russia and a committed Bolshevik, before later becoming an ardent Nazi, and he greatly admired the “terror methods” of the Soviet vanguard, especially Andrei Vishinsky’s performance during the Soviet purge trials of the 1930s. These he tried to emulate in Berlin.42

  The vast tribunal chamber, draped with swastikas and overflowing with Nazi dignitaries, looked more like a Bavarian beer hall than a hall of justice.

  On the opening day of the trials, Count von Moltke told the court that his decision to take part in the coup was a matter of conscience—based on his conviction that “the German position in Poland” was immoral. “My personal political experiences have caused me great problems,” he continued, “because I worked to promote the German heritage in Poland. And since then I have experienced various changes in my attitude toward Poland.”

  This launched Freisler into the first of his tirades: “Are you blaming these various changes on National Socialism?” he barked.

  “I was actually thinking of the many murders,” Moltke answered quietly, “that occurred here and abroad.”

  “Murders! You really are a filthy louse,” Freisler shouted. But Moltke continued speaking in a soft voice, his face lowered in concentrated thought.

  “Are you cracking under your own villainy?” Freisler asked.

  After a silence, Moltke tried once again to speak of the “murders,” but Freisler interrupted him.

  “Yes or no! Give a direct answer!”

  “No,” answered Moltke, raising his eyes directly to the court: “His own villainy” had not caused him to crack.

  On September 20, Gestapo Commissioner Franz Sonderegger made a discovery that portended the worst for many members of the resistance in the Abwehr.43 In an outpost of the military intelligence headquarters in the Berlin suburb of Zossen, numerous crates of documents had been stored for safekeeping during the air raids. It was here that Sonderegger—who, with Roeder, had been originally responsible for the arrests of Dohnányi and Bonhoeffer—came upon the Abwehr’s secret files. These files incriminated Dohnányi in the Stauffenberg plot beyond dispute; implicated, too, were his comrades in the Berlin circle, including Bonhoeffer. The papers found in “Portfolio Z”—the three “slips of paper”—did not link Bonhoeffer directly to the July 20 plot, but they contained one of his handwritten notes on the conscription of clergy for military service.44 “It was an innocuous note but given the context of the Zossen files, a connection had finally been established between Bonhoeffer and the conspirators.”

  Reports of the discovery o
f the files spread quickly through the conspirators’ network, reaching the Bonhoeffer family circle. Bonhoeffer’s mother, Paula, who, shortly after the coup attempt, had expressed her great relief that no connection had been made to “our two,” fell into a despair from which she would never fully recover. Word also reached Bonhoeffer in prison. This put an end to any remaining hopes for acquittal.

  It was not Bonhoeffer’s intention to die a martyr or otherwise submit to the verdict of the state. So his first response to the news was to launch an escape plan. Though designed some months earlier, the plan had been held in reserve until now.45 With the help of a sympathetic guard—the reliable aforementioned Corporal Knobloch, who’d also arranged Bethge’s visit—he would try to slip out and go underground, possibly to wait out the Führer’s crumbling reign from a monk’s cell in Ettal. It was “a desperate measure,” perhaps, but not an especially complicated feat. On September 24, 1944, Renate Bethge, along with her parents, Rüdiger and Ursula (neé Bonhoeffer) Schleicher, rendezvoused with Knobloch in a Berlin suburb. They gave him a book of ration cards and a package of food and clothing and instructed him to keep the provisions in a storage shed “on an allotment garden” until Bonhoeffer’s escape from Tegel.46 But despite preparations, the plans would be abandoned.

  On October 1, 1944, Klaus Bonhoeffer paced back and forth in his home. An arrest was imminent, he had learned, and suicide seemed the only honorable option in this darkest of hours. It was only through the intervention of his older sister, Ursula, that brought a distraught Klaus to his senses; he now understood that this way out represented a capitulation to Nazi terror and wasn’t consistent with the family’s principles.47 His arrest came that afternoon. The next day, Knobloch visited Karl and Paula at Marienburger Allee to inform them that the escape plan had been aborted. Dietrich, rightly fearing retributions against his family, had decided to stay put.