Strange Glory

by Charles Marsh

  91. Victoria J. Barnett, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Relevance for Post-Holocaust Theology,” Studies in Jewish-Christian Relations 2, no. 1 (2007): 55.

  92. “Statement by the Executive Committee of the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship Through the Churches,” in Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 12, pp. 174–75.

  93. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 12, p. 492.

  94. See Wendebourg, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer und die Berliner Universität.”

  95. Karl Clodius, professor in Berlin, economist, and Balkans expert, worked with the German delegation in Sofia. Barnett, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Relevance for Post-Holocaust Theology,” p. 55. Despite the claim of the official report from the German Legation in Sofia, there is no evidence that Bonhoeffer told German officials that he “had tried to prevent the adoption of the resolution condemning the Aryan laws in general.” Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 12, p. 177.

  96. Cited in ibid., p. 179.

  97. Ibid., p. 31.

  98. Rasmussen, in ibid., p. 318.

  99. Cited in Bethge, Bonhoeffer, p. 319.

  100. Cited in Scholder and Bowden, eds., The Churches and the Third Reich, vol. 1, p. 491.

  101. Cited in Barnett, For the Soul of the People, p. 4.

  102. Scholder and Brown, eds., The Churches and the Third Reich, vol. 1, p. 491.

  103. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 12, p. 140.

  104. The German Christians had come to regard the paragraph as an international liability and avoidable distraction. Their focus became politics and power. For more on this, see Scholder and Brown, eds., The Churches and the Third Reich, vol. 1, pp. 488–91.

  105. Ibid.

  106. Fischer cited in Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 12, p. 511.

  107. Merz cited in ibid., p. 512.

  108. In fact, Merz blamed Bonhoeffer for the breakdown: “I can at most say that, in a way, I saw it coming,” though “it’s Bonhoeffer’s own fault for having gone at this thing too precipitately and for having let go of it too hastily. Nothing good can come from such treatment. But we won’t be able to make this clear to him because he is simply too young and slipped into academia too early and too one-sidedly.” Ibid.

  109. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, p. 303.

  110. Althaus cited in Ericksen, Theologians Under Hitler, p. 100.

  111. Klaus Scholder, in his seminal study The Churches and the Third Reich, noted that Bonhoeffer’s “August Version” of the Bethel Confession might well be remembered as a clear and forceful statement of the hope that still existed in the summer of 1933, that effective organizing and theological protest could arrest the church’s realignments. “While ponderous in form, burdened with numerous proof texts from the Bible, from Luther, and above all from the confessions,” the Bethel Confession was, in many respects, “theologically and politically clearer and more precise” than the more famous Barmen Declaration drafted the following year.

  112. Wendebourg, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer und die Berliner Universität.”

  113. Erich Seeberg in Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 12, p. 159.

  114. Gertrud Staewen’s communication of September 25, 1933, to Charlotte von Kirschbaum: “Bonhoeffer is extremely depressed about the situation in the church. Obviously, as he says, almost all those who a short time ago were willing to stand fast on ‘G[erman] C[hristian]’ matters are now in retreat, so that one can only fear the worst for the National Synod.” Letter located in the Karl Barth-Archiv, Basel.

  CHAPTER NINE Crying in the Wilderness

  1. Whitburn, “Bonhoeffer Without His Cassock,” p. 81.

  2. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Life in Pictures, p. 72.

  3. Clements, Bonhoeffer and Britain, pp. 22–24.

  4. Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, pp. 144–45.

  5. Ibid., p. 144.

  6. Zimmermann, “Some Weeks in London,” p. 77.

  7. Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 145.

  8. Clements, Bonhoeffer and Britain, p. 26; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 13, p. 251.

  9. Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 145.

  10. Ibid., p. 146.

  11. “Welcome to Our Church,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer Church, Sydenham, 1999, p. 15. Publication of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Church, Sydenham; nd.

  12. Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 146.

  13. Bosanquet, The Life and Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 97.

  14. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 13, p. 39. Bonhoeffer’s exchanges with Barth in the fall of 1933 marked a shift in the relationship, or perhaps more precisely clarified the relationship. The scholar Mark Brocker is correct that Bonhoeffer and Barth’s association remained always “fitful” and never developed fully into friendship. “Their minds never completely met,” wrote Brocker, “but passed by one another … a hair’s breadth apart.”

  15. Citations from a letter from Karl Barth to Bonhoeffer, written on November 20, 1933, in Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 13, pp. 39–41.

  16. Letter from Bonhoeffer to Karl Barth written on October 24, 1933, in ibid., pp. 21–24. He wrote to explain his decision: “I found myself in radical opposition to all my friends; I was becoming increasingly isolated with my views of the matter, even though I was and remain personally close to these people. All this frightened me and shook my confidence, so that I began to fear that dogmatism might be leading me astray—since there seemed no particular reason why my own view in these matters should be any better, any more right, than the views of many really good and able pastors whom I sincerely respect.”

  17. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 10., p. 64. See note 28.

  18. Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 147.

  19. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 13, pp. 134–36.

  20. See ibid., pp. 429–31.

  21. See ibid., p. 118, editor’s note 2, pp. 121–22.

  22. Ibid., pp. 121–22; Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, pp. 364–66.

  23. Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 147.

  24. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 13, p. 81.

  25. See ibid., pp. 27–28; Clements, Bonhoeffer and Britain, p. 36.

  26. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 13, p. 41.

  27. Ibid., p. 56.

  28. Ibid., pp. 22–23. See note 10.

  29. Zimmermann, “Some Weeks in London,” p. 78.

  30. Stephen Plant, in Bonhoeffer, Christ and Culture, edited by Keith L. Johnson and Timothy L. Larsen (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2012), p. 78.

  31. Zimmermann, “Some Weeks in London,” p. 78.

  32. Ibid., p.78 Alan Jacobs: “It turns out that while many of the early cinemas were converted stage theaters, there was an explosion of purpose-built cinemas in London at the end of the twenties and beginning of the thirties (despite the Depression). The two chief architects were Oscar Deutsch, who worked primarily in an Art Deco style, and George Coles, who specialized in building ersatz Egyptian temples. Probably the largest of Coles’s cinemas was the Troxy in Stepney Green, just down Mile End Road from Whitechapel. It seated over 3,000 and was quite an attraction. Since it opened in 1933 (first film shown there: King Kong) I can’t imagine that Bonhoeffer wouldn’t have known it well.” Correspondence with the author.

  33. “History,” St. George’s German Lutheran Church, n.d., http://www.stgeorgesgermanchurch.org.uk/page1.html (accessed June 15, 2008).

  34. Clements, Bonhoeffer and Britain, p. 26.

  35. Zimmermann, “Some Weeks in London,” pp. 77–78.

  36. Clements, Bonhoeffer and Britain, p. 22.

  37. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 13, p. 151.

  38. Bonhoeffer, No Rusty Swords, p. 182.

  39. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 13, p. 135.

  40. Clements, Bonhoeffer and Britain, pp. 67, 66.

  41. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 13, pp. 337, 341.

  42. Ibid., pp. 339–41.

  43. Ibid., pp. 383, 392.

  44. Clements, Bonhoeffer and Britain, p. 67.

  45. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 13, p. 382.

  46. See “The German Evangelical Pastors
in London to the Reich Church Government,” note 2, and “49. Friedrich Wehrhan to the Reich Church Government,” in Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 13, p. 77.

  47. See “54. To Karl Friedrich Bonhoeffer,” in Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 13, p. 81.

  48. Ibid., p. 392.

  49. Ibid., p. 395.

  50. See ibid., p. 32, note 18.

  51. Bell asked Bonhoeffer to meet him in Brighton, where he had a meeting with area clergy. Trains left Victoria Station for Brighton every quarter of an hour, and Bell’s driver and his assistant would be waiting for Bonhoeffer up at the station. The two men would have tea at the Church House, after which they would drive on to Chichester together and talk further. See ibid., p. 37. Bell’s book, which had appeared originally in English in 1929, was published in winter 1934 under the title Die Anglikanische Kirche.

  52. Clements, Bonhoeffer and Britain, pp. 29–33.

  53. See Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 13, pp. 43–44, 87–89. Part of the success of his appeals to Bell lay in his flattering estimation of the bishop as the most influential voice of the ecumenical movement. Coupled with Bonhoeffer’s repeated claim that the German church was “no longer an internal issue” but “the question of [the] existence of Christianity in Europe,” indeed the decisive test of the ecumenical movement’s credibility upon which the fate of “the whole world of Christianity” depended, Bell readily took up the mantle of international ambassadorship of the dissident German church. Ibid., p. 118.

  54. See ibid., p. 36, note 2.

  55. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, p. 335.

  56. Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, pp. 147–48.

  57. Cited in Poewe, New Religions and the Nazis, p. 104.

  58. Bergen, “Storm Troopers of Christ,” p. 50.

  59. Other theologians and religion scholars on the board were Karl Fezer, Helmuth Kittel, Hanns Rückert, Friedrich Karl Schumann, Otto Weber, and Arthur Weiser. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 13, p. 69, note 4.

  60. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, pp. 338–39.

  61. “GERMANY: New Heathenism,” Time, November 27, 1933, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,746354,00.html#ixzz1uIKz4WFQ (accessed October 10, 2013).

  62. Cited in Bergen, Twisted Cross, p. 65.

  63. Clements, Bonhoeffer and Britain, p. 39.

  64. See Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, p. 355. After the war, Hossenfelder was able to maintain his employment in the church and given the influential job of overseeing and assigning the placements of ministers in congregations from 1954 to 1969.

  65. The Oxford Group was not affiliated with the Oxford Movement of the nineteenth century. In an interview in “Hitler or Any Fascist Leader Controlled by God Could Cure All Ills of World,” New York World-Telegram, August 25, 1936, Buchman was quoted as saying, “I thank heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler.”

  66. Driberg, “Thank Heaven for Hitler,” p. 69.

  67. Niebuhr, Christianity and Power Politics, pp. 160–62. In other words, a Nazi social philosophy has been a covert presumption of the whole Oxford Group enterprise from the very beginning. “We may be grateful to the leader for revealing so clearly what has been slightly hidden. If it would content itself with preaching repentance to drunkards and adulterers one might be willing to respect it as a religious revival method which knows how to confront the sinner with God. But when it runs to Geneva, the seat of the League of Nations, or to Prince Starhemberg or Hitler, or to any seat of power, always with the idea that it is on the verge of saving the world by bringing the people who control the world under God-control, it is difficult to restrain the contempt which one feels for this dangerous childishness.” After that Buchman would be nominated for two Nobel Peace Prizes and would be affiliated with Alcoholic’s Anonymous.

  68. Hossenfelder returned to Germany a disgraced man. On December 20, 1933, he was forced to relinquish his church offices as well as his more cherished role as Reich leader of the German Christian movement; see Scholder, The Churches and the Third Reich, vol. 1, pp. 570–71; see also Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 13, p. 106, note 10.

  69. See Scholder, The Churches and the Third Reich, vol. 1, pp. 570–82.

  70. Rasmussen, “Editor’s Introduction to the English Edition,” DBW, vol. 12, p. 6.

  71. Theodor Heckel to the German Congregations and Pastors Abroad, January 31, 1934, in Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 13, pp. 91–92.

  72. Ibid., p. 77. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, p. 352. When Heckel was pressed by dissenting German pastors in England on how the Reich Church could justify the assimilation of church youth groups into the Hitler Youth, he responded with the banal defense that “the incorporation of the Evangelical Youth into the Hitler Youth had been accomplished in some places without any friction.” Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 13, p. 108.

  73. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 13, pp. 91, 118, note 2, 128–30.

  74. “The Declaration by the Pastors in Great Britain,” found in ibid., p. 112. This decree was written on February 9, 1934, and stated that: (1) The Evangelical Church stands on the ground of the Reformation. (2) It is founded on the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. (3) The Aryan paragraph is not recognized by the German Evangelical pastors in Great Britain, and they expect it not to be implemented anywhere by the Reich Church. (4) The German Reich Church does not dismiss any pastor in Germany who accepts the above points, except in the case of other, serious offenses against discipline. (5) The pastors declare that, following the dissolution of the Church Federation, they have no further obligation to the Reich Church; they are nevertheless prepared, on the basis of the above and in Christian love and fellowship, to remain in the Reich Church. (6) The German Evangelical churches in Great Britain, declaring themselves prepared to be members of the new Reich Church, nevertheless declare specifically that, as is already the case, they have the right to resign their membership in this association of churches at any time.

  75. Clements, Bonhoeffer and Britain, p. 45.

  76. Ibid., p. 45.

  77. See “85. From the Diary of Julius Rieger,” in Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 13, p. 124.

  78. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol., p. 175.

  79. “146. From the Diary of Julius Rieger,” September 11, 1934, in ibid., pp. 216, note 5.

  80. Ibid., p. 216.

  81. “143. From the Minutes of the Session of the Reich Council of Brethren,” in ibid., p. 212, note 7.

  82. See ibid., pp. 307–10.

  83. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Life in Pictures, p. 82.

  84. He was disappointed by the poor turnout of Confessing Church leaders, who he later learned had been intimidated by superiors. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, p. 391.

  85. Ibid., p. 389.

  86. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 12, p. 260–68.

  87. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 13, pp. 289–90.

  88. Paul Althaus cited in Tödt, Tödt, Feil, and GreenIlse Todt et al., “Editors’ Afterword to the German Edition,” in DBW, vol. 6, p. 290; Ericksen, Theologians Under Hitler, p. 79. By all reports, Althaus had been, over the years, an amiable colleague and generous to students. He had always demanded “a certain pontifical respect,” which was not unusual in German academe. After 1933, however, he insisted that students rise to their feet after he entered the classroom and join him with right hand held high in the “Sieg Heil!”—but that was no longer unusual either. With a “narrow head (praised as ‘Nordic’ in the Third Reich),” piercing eyes, and “a fresh complexion,” Althaus gave National Socialism religious respectability. He promoted German nationalism in the doctrine of the orders of creation and a Hegelian fondness for synthesizing the singularities of experience into a perfect unity, which in 1934 meant integrating the Nazi doctrines of blood and soil, nation and race into Lutheran thought. Althaus did not seek to identify Christianity and Germanism vis-à-vis the German Faith Movement, but the results were equally catastrophic. In 1934, he signed the Ansbach Recommendation, which repudiated the Barmen Declaration and conferred on Hitler the blessin
gs of the Protestant churches and theological faculties: “As believing Christians we thank the Lord our God for giving our nation in its time of distress the Führer to be our ‘pious and loyal sovereign’ and for wishing to establish good governance with discipline and honor through the National Socialist system of government.” Totalitarianism as realized in Hitler constituted “a perfectly satisfactory form of government.”

  89. Webster, Karl Barth, p. 29.

  90. Cited in Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 6, p. 15, note 58.

  91. Bonhoeffer, DBW, vol. 13, p. 292.

  92. Ibid., pp. 284–85. Karl-Friedrich had studied biochemistry with Max Planck and undertaken research on heavy water. Unwilling, however, to take part in the Nazi government’s experiments in nuclear energy, he shifted his focus to “the interaction between leaves and air.” He had been the most politically outspoken of the Bonhoeffer children, but because he had served alongside his fallen brother Walter in World War I, he “enjoyed a certain prestige in the house.”

  93. “152. George Bell to Edward Keble Talbot,” in ibid., p. 224. In this letter of October 16, 1934, Bell said that Bonhoeffer was likely to leave England by the end of 1934, but he remained until December 1935 and visited these Christian communities in March of that year. E. K. Talbot was the son of E. S. Talbot, the first warden of Keble College, Oxford; in addition, Bonhoeffer spoke with Father Tribe O’Brien, Reverend Eric Graham, principal of Wycliffe Hall (Oxford), and Canon Tomlin of St. Augustine’s, Canterbury.

  94. Christopher Howse, “The Levelling of Mirfield Church,” Telegraph.co.uk, November 13, 2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherhowse/6562705/The-levelling-of-Mirfield-church.html (accessed September 10, 2008).

  95. Clements, Bonhoeffer and Britain, p. 86.

  96. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, p. 412.

  97. Clements, Bonhoeffer and Britain, p. 79.

  98. Ibid., pp. 83–84.

  99. Ibid., p. 84.

  100. Rieger, “Contacts with London,” pp. 97–98.

  101. Clements, Bonhoeffer and Britain, p. 83.