Strange Glory

by Charles Marsh

  Rüdiger Schleicher was arrested on October 4, and the day after that, Friedrich Justus Perels. Meanwhile, later that month, Bethge, as the clerk in charge of the Lissa post, was amazed to open a telegram ordering his own arrest and immediate deportation to Berlin. After anxious consideration, he decided to give it to his commanding officer, who, to Bethge’s amazement, was not unduly worried about the directive, even though he was duty bound to send Bethge back to Berlin under guard. Bethge still had sufficient opportunity now to destroy the September letters from Bonhoeffer, making the one of August 23 the last of them to survive. The earlier letters survived because Karl and Paula buried them in canisters in the garden of their Charlottesburg home so Bethge could see them, too.48 It seemed now far too dangerous for either of them to continue writing.

  In October, Bethge was transferred from the Italian front to the Reich Central Security Office on Kurfürstenstrasse in Berlin before being sent to the Lehrter Strasse prison. Lehrter Strasse had been reserved for political prisoners implicated however remotely in the July 20 conspiracy. During the interrogations (undertaken in connection with investigations of Rüdiger Schleicher and Klaus Bonhoeffer), Bethge’s contacts with Dohnányi, Perels, and Bonhoeffer were not discovered. Bethge would be charged only with the Confessing Church activities, his expressions of compassion toward Jews, his associations with conspiratorial visitors in the Schleicher home, and his failure to report such contacts. Formally discharged from the army, he was to appear before the People’s Court for trial on May 15, 1945.

  The Zossen files gave Roeder a new avenue for his interrogation of Dohnányi. As evidence not only of Dohnányi’s involvement in the conspiracy but Bonhoeffer’s as well, these documents provided the long-sought and until now elusive proof of high treason. Nevertheless, Dohnányi, Oster, and Wilhelm Canaris were able to argue that “these papers were official coded Military Intelligence materials”—not what they seemed. Remarkably, it was enough to make Roeder drop this line of interrogation, temporarily; so, at least for the moment, the Gestapo would remain unaware of Bonhoeffer’s complicity. But Roeder would press on, aware of having in his possession, finally, evidence linking high-ranking members of the Abwehr to the conspiracy; he would have to work past the captives’ denials to use it, but use it he would to bring his long investigation to a successful conclusion.

  “Personally,” he said later, “I never thought much of the Abwehr and took the view that all Abwehr officers should have been transferred after a year at most because of the many dangers besetting them, especially those of weak character.”

  “There’s no one left to cover for you!” he snapped at Lieutenant Randolph von Breidbach, a conspirator and member of the Abwehr. “General Oster’s finished, thanks to me. I’m going to clean the whole place out.”

  The same month, Bonhoeffer was transferred to the SS prison in the Reich Central Security Headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. In his cell at the epicenter of the terror there would be no more meals on china plates, nor would there be afternoon strolls with the commandant. Here began a descent into the hell of solitary confinement, torture, and concentration camps. The Bible that he had been allowed to keep in Tegel was confiscated; he was no longer allowed to correspond with Bethge. He could write to his parents, his brother Karl-Friedrich, and Maria, but only on rare occasions and according to strict guidelines; neither his parents nor his fiancée would ever again be allowed to see him. Only two short, heavily censored letters to his parents have survived.49 Along with visiting privileges there came to an end all contact with the outside world.

  Fabian von Schlabrendorff, a July 20 conspirator and Wedemeyer’s first cousin, recalled his great surprise upon seeing Bonhoeffer in the subterranean corridor that had once housed the sculptors’ studios of the School of Industrial Arts and Crafts. Acquainted since before the war, they had developed a profound mutual respect as comrades in the Berlin conspiracy. Some mornings later, the two arranged to take a shower together in a hidden niche of the washroom, and there informed “each other of their thoughts and experiences” as prisoners of conscience. Bonhoeffer spoke of his interrogations “and with what brutality the proceedings were carried through.”50 Disgusting was the word he used to describe the ordeal, which included, according to Schlabrendorff, Bonhoeffer’s first acquaintance with intentional torture.

  Between 1933 and 1945, nearly fifteen thousand political opponents of the Nazi Reich were detained in what one former prisoner called the “dark catacomb” at 8 Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. It was Reinhard Heydrich himself who, while serving as head of the Political Police in Berlin, had designed the facility to affect “police custody of a very particular kind.” “Heightened interrogations” took place on the upper floors of the south wing and were often conducted by Gestapo volunteers, who, having been passed over for ordinary posts, were keen to demonstrate—in these encounters with high-level political prisoners, these “traitors”—their freedom from all moral or legal inhibitions.

  “Still he betrayed no sign of [suffering],” Schlabrendorff said. “He always cheered me up and comforted me.… Many little notes he slipped into my hands on which he had written biblical words of comfort and hope.”51 “Spread hilaritas!” Bonhoeffer told Schlabrendorff of his firm resolve: he would resist the Gestapo “to the end and would reveal nothing.”52

  Schlabrendorff, who survived the war, later recalled the horrific four-stage torture to which he was subjected that included iron spines pressed into his fingertips, stovepipes bored into his calves and thighs, a “procrustean bed” on which he was strapped and pulled from every side, and a full-body shackle that contained him as the interrogators beat him from behind with heavy clubs. “All the participants expressed their enjoyment in the form of derisive shouts,” continued Schlabrendorff, who the next day, alone in his cell, suffered a near-fatal heart attack.53

  A few days later, Bonhoeffer was transferred from cell 19 to 24, finding Schlabrendorff his neighbor in the adjoining cell. In further exchanges—once amid the confusion of an air raid—the two men agreed that the most plausible means of survival was to run out the clock, to create distractions that might slow the investigations as much as possible.54 No one doubted that the end of the war was near. Other imprisoned conspirators had reached the same conclusion: they should probably “no longer hope for a quick release through a trial and acquittal,” but rather they should “try to escape notice by keeping silent and ‘vanishing into the sand.’ ”55

  By Christmas, however, Bonhoeffer knew that his fate was sealed. In letters to his parents, and in one to Eberhard that evaded detection, written shortly before his disappearance into the black hole that was the Gestapo’s network of torture chambers and concentration camps, he offered tender reassurances to his family, thanked Wedemeyer for her steadfastness, and bade farewell to Bethge, eternally grateful, he said, for “the liberating, fresh air” that had enabled so much freedom and growth. Awkward misunderstandings between them were now a thing of the past. Bethge had helped Bonhoeffer see how his artistic and creative side had been “suppressed” since childhood. He would never acknowledge a sexual desire for Bethge, nor would Bethge have welcomed its expression. Until the end, in fact, he would remain suspicious of inwardness and introspection; psychoanalytic accounts of the unconscious—for which his father the neurologist had little use either—he dismissed as the bad fruit of people who like to “busy themselves with themselves.”56 Back when he was reading Stifter’s novel Indian Summer, when the captive life was like graduate school, he had remarked, “For me, Stifter’s greatness lies in the fact that he refuses to pry into the inner realm of the person, that he respects the covering and regards the person only very discreetly from without, as it were, but not from within.”57 Bonhoeffer’s relationship with Bethge had always strained toward the achievement of a romantic love, one ever chaste but complete in its complex aspirations.

  Some friendships are built on competition, “in which the partners challenge each other,” wherea
s others are filled with “intrusive forays and cheap disclosures.” Still others descend into “noncommittal chats which barely veil the distance, unfamiliarity, and indifference between people.” Bonhoeffer realized at last that what he’d shared with Bethge existed on a higher plane: their partnership had been “a mutual giving and receiving of gifts, [in which] there is neither violence nor indifference.” What remained unspoken signified a gesture pointing toward as yet undiscovered treasures, toward riches still hidden in the other, which will be disclosed in the fullness of time. But the preciousness of those treasures would be in their contemplation rather than their possession. Theirs was a duet of “natural harmony,” he liked to say, like all that is holy. And so everything that remained unfinished—“the loss of so many things”—rushed toward a “great liberation”; and this, like all the loves that he had given up, though first among them, had returned to him once more, transfigured in a final beatific surrender.

  On his last day, though he knew it not as such, he joined others in singing Bach’s cantata “Eine feste Burg ist unser Gott” (“A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”). He preferred to sing it briskly, with “bouncing rhythms,” vivid tonic melodies, and appreciation of the delicate balance between what was above and what below:

  And though this world, with devils filled,

  should threaten to undo us;

  we will not fear, for God hath willed

  His truth to triumph through us.

  He had sometimes let music slumber through his brain, section by section, “listening with his inner ear,” especially to St. Matthew’s Passion, which he thought Bach’s most beautiful work. While in prison, he inscribed from memory the musical notations of sacred songs. Bethge had taught him to love Heinrich Schütz, the greatest German composer before Bach, who’d brought the sumptuous polychoral style of Venetian ceremonial song to seventeenth-century Lutheran church music. In prison he transcribed the staves of Schütz’s “O bone Jesu”—from the Kleine geistliche Konzerte, a gentle meditation on the “restoration” of all earthy desire, tendered by the “kind Jesus, Word of the Father, Splendor of the Father’s Glory, on whom the angels desire to gaze”—onto his final letters. “Nothing is lost,” Bonhoeffer wrote alongside the meticulous notation, “in Christ all things are taken up, preserved, albeit in transfigured form, transparent, clear, liberated from the torment of self-serving demands,” the joyance of recapitulation, “magnificent and consummately consoling.”

  Bonhoeffer would face death as he had lived, with tensile strength nourished from “a higher satisfaction,” and he would die a celibate. “I’ve already seen and experienced more of life than you have,” he wrote to Bethge, “except for one crucial experience that you have, which I still lack—but perhaps that’s precisely why I have already had more of ‘my fill of life’ [lebenssatt] than you as yet.”58 He was not asking for pity, much less trying to shame Bethge for the contentment it was his good fortune to find. He wanted his friend “to be glad” of what he had, “which is truly the polyphony of life (forgive me for riding my newfound hobbyhorse!).” Neither did Bonhoeffer seem remorseful, neither regretting pleasures he had not enjoyed nor being contrite for his longings. But fears of oblivion were a different matter; the worst times were those when the past felt lost forever. “I want my life,” he had whispered in the dark in the summer of 1944. “I demand my own life back. My past. You!”59

  His gift to his family on Christmas 1944 had been a poem titled “Von guten Mächten,” or “From All Good Powers.” Bonhoeffer sent a copy to Wedemeyer (who lived at the Bonhoeffers’ Charlottenburg home from October 1944 until January 1945), which was hand-delivered by the police commissioner Franz Sonderegger as a favor to the family. His parents shared the poem with Bethge and with their daughters whose husbands were imprisoned—Ursula Schleicher, who lived next door in Charlottenburg, and Christine von Dohnányi.60 This would mark Dietrich’s last word to them, and one of his last bits of written expression before being deported from Berlin.61 The city now lay in ruins: whole streets had “disappeared under piles of cascading rubble,” smoke filled the air, and broken water lines created vast sheets of black ice. But still the Gestapo was about its work.

  He told his parents the lines that had been running through his head for several days: seven verses of iambic pentameter (the standard of classical German sonnets), written in the sixth Advent season of the war.62 Breathing mortal longings, “Von guten Mächten” is finally a prelude to eternity.

  By faithful, quiet powers of good surrounded

  so wondrously consoled and sheltered here—

  I wish to live these days with you in spirit

  and with you enter into a new year.

  The old year still would try our hearts to torment,

  of evil times we still do bear the weight;

  salvation for which you did us create.

  And should you offer us the cup of suffering,

  though heavy, brimming full and bitter brand,

  we’ll thankfully accept it, never flinching,

  from your good heart and your beloved hand.

  But should you wish now once again to give us

  the joys of this world and its glorious sun,

  then we’ll recall anew what past times brought us

  and then our life belongs to you alone.

  The candles you have brought into our darkness,

  let them today be burning warm and bright,

  and if it’s possible, do reunite us!

  We know your light is shining through the night.

  When now the quiet deepens all around us,

  O, let our ears that fullest sound amaze

  of this, your world, invisibly expanding

  as all your children sing high hymns of praise.

  By powers of good so wondrously protected,

  we wait with confidence, befall what may.

  God is with us at night and in the morning

  and oh, most certainly on each new day.

  It would be a fine thing if one could enter the New Year in the physical presence of his family and friends. “If it’s possible, do reunite us!” he pleaded. If not, Thy will be done.

  As he comprehended that death was imminent—his association with the July 20 conspirators having quashed any realistic hope of release—the voices of the past faded to the deepest quiet. What would take their place?

  On the threshold of eternity, he heard a new song. The polyphony of life was indeed beautiful: the hissing glades and woodland murmurs at Friedrichsbrunn, the wind whispering through linden forests. Yet the music of the heavenly choirs, “invisibly expanding / as all your children sing high hymns of praise” of “your world,” was that “fullest sound,” engendering amazement.

  “When it says in the old children’s song about the angels: ‘two who cover me, two who awaken me,’ ” he wrote in his last letter to Wedemeyer, “this protection night and day by invisible powers of good is something that we adults today need no less than the children.”63 Nothing gained or lost shall be forgotten; everywhere resounds “the Yes and the Amen.” He asked her not to be anxious for his sake. “My past life is brim-full of God’s goodness, and my sins are covered by the forgiving love of Christ crucified. I’m most thankful for the people I have met, and I only hope they will never have to grieve for me, but that they, too, will always be certain of, and thankful for, God’s mercy and forgiveness.”

  In the hell that was the Gestapo interrogation prison, Bonhoeffer was graced with the visitation of angels. The “great invisible realm” had become now visible, and there remained no longer “any doubt about its real existence.”64

  Two weeks later, on January 17, 1945, in a letter to his parents, written in pencil, he turned to the matter of his personal effects. He asked his mother to give all his clothes to the Volksopfer public relief effort: his dinner jacket, his felt hats, his salt-and-pepper suit (which was too small anyway), the pair of brown loafers. He expressed confidence that by now his dear
mama would have a better idea than he of what he still owned. “In short, give away whatever anyone might need, without a second thought.”

  The famous last words attributed to Bonhoeffer in the hour of his death—“This is not the end for me; it is the beginning of life”—are those of a British intelligence officer writing five years after the war.65 They are an eloquent farewell, and true to Bonhoeffer’s eschatological hopes, but the officer was not present when Bonhoeffer was summoned to the gallows in Flossenbürg. In any event, his last written words seem more fitting for the pastor who had come to feel uneasy with pious language: “Please drop off some stationery with the commissar.”66

  On the afternoon of February 7, 1945, Bonhoeffer was taken from Berlin and transported to an unknown destination. It was not until the next Wednesday, when an orderly refused delivery of his weekly parcels, that his family and fiancée realized “there was no longer a recipient for their gifts” at Tegel. His parents were frantic. “We have had no news of you since your departure,” his father wrote, uncertain where to send the letter. “I hope that Christel may discover something today.”67 Christel (by which Dr. Bonhoeffer meant his daughter Christine) was dispatched to the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse prison to ask about Dietrich’s whereabouts, only to be turned away without answers.

  A volume of Plutarch, Große Griechen und Römer: Ausgewählte Lebensbilder (Great Greeks and Romans: Selected Portraits), a gift from Karl-Friedrich for his thirty-ninth birthday, had remained with Bonhoeffer even after he was moved from Tegel on October 8, 1944, in the final chaotic six months of his life. With a blunt pencil he’d written his name and address in large letters in the front, back, and middle of the book, which he placed on a table in his cell as a kind of buoy during these chaotic final days.