Saints and Villains

by Denise Giardina

  Despite the need to flee one such engulfing attachment or perhaps in order to justify it, Hans von Dohnanyi fell in love with all the Bonhoeffers, not just Christel but father mother brothers sisters aunts uncles cousins in great busy swarms, ranks of ancestors embalmed in countless dusty oils on the flower-papered walls. Small wonder too he doubted if he belonged in such abundant company.

  Dietrich, sweet and cheerful and not quite like the rest of the family, made Hans feel less an outsider. Dietrich had gone off to Tübingen, where all male Bonhoeffers took their university degrees. He joined the Hedgehog fraternity (composed of beer-swilling, sword-wielding nincompoops), which all male Bonhoeffers except his brothers had joined. Karl-Friedrich called fraternities absurd, but Dietrich wanted to please his father. He was miserable without the family, and returned to Berlin for good at the end of the first year.

  Karl-Friedrich, who had already been noticed for his research on splitting atoms, rolled his eyes and groaned whenever Dietrich brought up his studies, so he learned not to speak of what he was doing unless Dohnanyi was present. Hans, holding Christel’s hand tight against his leg beneath the table, always asked. Then he would sit with his elbow propped on the white tablecloth and chin resting upon his left hand while Dietrich, swept away by pent-up excitement, waved his knife and fork and rambled on about Heilgeschichte and exegesis and hypostasis until Karl-Friedrich would moan, “Can’t you simply tell us how many angels can dance on a pinhead and be done with it?” Karl and Karl-Friedrich would excuse themselves and head to the study for a cigar. Dohnanyi and Christel, pleased for an excuse to linger, nearly alone as it were, urged, “Go on.”

  Hans and Christel were married in 1926. Then it was the turn of Dietrich and Sabine. They, of course, would be different. Dietrich had found no one, had not even tried, and Sabine married a Jew.

  She feared her family might object, and so she announced her intentions with the added threat that, if denied marriage, she would bear Gerhard Leibholz’s child out of wedlock. Father and Mother Bonhoeffer turned pale and assured her such extremes would not be necessary. They gave their blessing. It was the most sparsely attended of the weddings, since many of the relatives who’d turned out before, if for no other reason than to sample the food prepared by the Bonhoeffers’ excellent cook, declined to attend. Chief among the absentees was Mother Bonhoeffer’s brother-in-law, General Rüdiger Graf von der Goltz. Uncle Rudi was famed for the length and curl of his mustaches and for putting down a left-wing revolt in the Baltic region with what he liked to call “decisiveness” (Karl-Friedrich called it butchery). He was also known to speak with grudging approval of the ridiculous Adolf Hitler. He cabled that he could not countenance his niece marrying an Israelite. Furthermore, the Jew Leibholz’s father was a Wilmersdorf councilman friendly with the Socialists. Uncle Rudi would most certainly not attend. He was not missed.

  Sabine’s young man, as Mother called him, was tall and ungainly, with a plain, kindly face and a head that seemed too large for his body. He was also one of the most brilliant young legal minds in Germany, according to Hans, who told this to Sabine as she and Baby Suse (now eighteen and very pretty) stood arm in arm in their white dresses and waited for the dancing to begin. The ballroom of the Grunewald house had been freshly painted a pale green, the gilt mirrors and candelabra and parquet floor polished, the glass chandeliers taken apart and cleaned piece by piece, the tables decked with white lilies. Gerhard, the bridegroom, was trapped in a corner surrounded by his new brothers and cousins, who teased him about the difficulties of living with Sabine. Dietrich was not among them. He stood at the door handing out nosegays of white rosebuds and baby’s breath contrived by the parlormaids earlier that morning. His blond hair was carefully combed, and a starched collar forced him to lift his chin in a Prussian manner. He offered a nosegay to an uncle von Kalckreuth who was so caught up in conversation with a von Kleist cousin bemoaning the new Socialist government—“They bumbled into power and they’ve no more notion what to do than does a goose. It’s time for men of breeding to take charge of the country”—that he waved away the nosegay without noticing what it was or who offered it.

  “What of Dietrich?” Hans nodded toward his brother-in-law. “Will he ever marry?”

  “Of course he will!” Suse said. “Why wouldn’t he?”

  “He seems such a naïf, that’s all. It’s as though he lives inside his head and nowhere else. He won’t last this evening, you know, not even for Sabine. He’ll be overwhelmed by the crowd and go off to his room for peace and quiet.”

  “Our Dietrich is a bit of a lamb,” said Suse, who had bobbed her hair and shortened her skirts and learned to smoke Turkish hashish, though she hadn’t told the family, “but he just needs someone who can draw him out.”

  “Why don’t you take him in hand?”

  “Perhaps I shall. I’ll invite him to a party.”

  “Oh, Suse,” said Sabine, “he’d be miserable. He’s not a thing in common with your friends.”

  “You don’t know. I’ll trundle him along to Max’s flat next weekend. All sorts of odd birds show up at Max’s parties.”

  At dinner Sabine and Gerhard sat side by side on chairs draped with gold cloth. The bridesmaids, Christel and Suse among them, recited poetry to the new couple. Then Suse sang “Ringel-Reihe-Rosenkranz, ich tanz mit meiner Frau” to Dietrich’s piano accompaniment and much applause from the audience. The dancing began. Gerhard came to claim the first dance with Sabine. Later she sought out her twin and led him by the hand to join in a waltz.

  “Gerhard is so sweet,” Sabine whispered in his ear, “but clumsy. And you, Dietrich, are the best dancer in the family.”

  He smiled at the compliment, but he was near tears. She squeezed his hand.

  “You’ll be fine,” she said. “It’s not as though Göttingen were a world away.”

  “I know. But everything will change. Not that I’m displeased. It’s as it should be.”

  Dietrich danced with Suse, with Christel, with his mother. Then he disappeared into his room and only came out to say farewell after the newlyweds changed to traveling clothes for the honeymoon trip to Lugano. He went the next week to a party with Suse, where everyone sat cross-legged on the floor and smoked hashish from pipes while Lotte Lenya moaned from the phonograph. They argued about Brecht and Klee and the latest films, waving their arms and talking all at once. Dietrich shrank into a cobwebbed corner. At ten o’clock he kissed Suse on the cheek and escaped into the crisp night air of Berlin. The hashish had left him quite light-headed. He pretended every shadow that met him beneath the smoky streetlamps was Sabine, run away from her husband and searching for her own true self. Once, on an empty sidewalk, he even swept up such a shadow in his arms and swung it around with a neat two-step, then stopped sheepishly and continued on his way home.

  Gloria in excelsis deo

  et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis.

  Laudamus te,

  benedicimus te,

  adoramus te,

  glorificamus te

  Glory to God in the highest

  And on earth peace to men of good will…We praise thee

  We bless thee

  We adore thee

  We glorify thee

  New York

  1930–31

  UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY was a world unto itself, an enclosed ivy-covered stone rectangle with a green courtyard in the center that purposely mimicked a college at Oxford or Cambridge. Nooks and crannies abounded and narrow staircases twisted inside corner towers. A stone’s throw to the north was Harlem.

  On the first day of the new term the seminary hosted a reception for new students in the refectory. Young men in suits and ties wandered uncertainly between the refreshment tables. Professor Reinhold Niebuhr marveled at how the setting—dark oak paneling and clusters of chandeliers—lent the well-scrubbed faces of the young men an air of angelic seriousness. They were by and large sons of the American middle class who would fit into one of t
wo categories the faculty had jokingly devised. The Moles, a majority, would be uncomfortable with the neighborhood that surrounded the seminary and would retreat within Union’s stone walls, would make book-lined caves of their rooms and, when they wanted to take the air, wander the cloisters with pipes in hand. Even many of those who were drawn by Union’s growing activist reputation would find Depression New York to be a cultural trauma and seek a quiet haven away from it when they could. But for the Alley Cats, the minority closest to Niebuhr’s heart, the seminary was itself a smothering source of cultural dislocation and the world outside its doors, where people scrabbled about in search of food, sex, art, and illicit liquor, was irresistible. The faculty were themselves drawn to one group or the other. The Alley Cats, Niebuhr thought, would make the best ministers, or at least the most honest.

  Then there were the rare ones who belonged in neither place. Niebuhr had been charged by President Coffin with looking out for the two new exchange students and introducing them to their American peers. But Niebuhr thought they seemed more interested in sizing up each other. One was a slender man in an ill-fitting suit with a high mop of curly brown hair, a large nose, and stooped shoulders. The other, in expensively tailored pinstripes, was sturdy, with a round face, tight lips, and a shock of thin blond hair that promised to have disappeared in a few years’ time.

  “Who are they?” Niebuhr had asked Coffin before the students were formally introduced.

  “Jean Lasserre is pastor of a working-class mission in the northeast of France,” Coffin said, “and Dietrich Bonhoeffer recently received his doctorate from Berlin University.”

  “Let me guess which is which,” Niebuhr said dryly.

  The Frenchman and the German, standing near the door looking extremely nervous, were watching the room but stealing glances at each other and not saying a word.

  “Get over there,” Coffin said, “before they start another war.”

  But before Niebuhr could move, Harry Ward, Professor of Ethics, had descended upon the foreigners and was exclaiming, “You must be Lasserre, ah, yes, yes, yes, I admired your paper on the war immensely!” The Frenchman beamed and the German turned a brilliant pink.

  “That’s the kind of white man who wears his blood vessels close to the surface,” said a voice behind Niebuhr.

  Niebuhr turned to find that two seniors, Fred Bishop and Myles Horton, had joined him. They were among Niebuhr’s favorites, quintessential Alley Cats. Niebuhr could recall an earlier reception when they had eyed each other as warily as did Bonhoeffer and Lasserre. Bishop, a dark-skinned Negro, had leaned nonchalantly against an oak-paneled wall and jiggled a cup of punch in his hand. Only the quick movement of his eyes had betrayed his nervousness.

  He had spoken as soon as Niebuhr approached, before the older man could introduce himself. “I hear in the old days before Prohibition they used to serve sherry at this reception. Not that I miss that. I had sherry once. Far as I’m concerned, it tastes like concentrated cat piss.”

  And sipped his punch, never taking his eyes off Niebuhr, who stuck out his hand.

  “Reinhold Niebuhr. Professor of Applied Christianity.”

  “Applied Christianity?” The Negro had raised his eyebrows. “Sounds like How to Put On a Bandage.” Only then did he take Niebuhr’s hand. “Albert Frederick Bishop,” he said, “from Birmingham, Alabama. They call me Fred.”

  Just then another student had wandered past, a short wiry young man with slicked-back hair, wearing boots and a pair of pants an inch too short, staring up at the portraits of past presidents in black robes which lined the refectory walls and oblivious to the glances from other students that followed him.

  Fred Bishop said, “If that isn’t the crackerest-looking thing I’ve seen since I left Alabama. Looks like one of those hillbillies who still the liquor they sell in those speaks on Lenox Avenue.”

  “What do you know about Lenox Avenue speakeasies?”

  “I got here night before last,” Fred said. “I’ve looked around.”

  Niebuhr was amused. “Then why don’t you go over and introduce yourself? Maybe he’s from your neck of the woods and could use the help of a sophisticated fellow like yourself.”

  Fred’s face tightened, but he said, “Sure,” and wandered over to the student in boots. They shook hands.

  “Fred Bishop.”

  “Myles Horton,” the other said in a nasal Appalachian twang. “Glad to meet you. Where you from?”

  “Birmingham. You?”

  “Tennessee.”

  “I guessed something like that. You look like hills. Chattanooga maybe?”

  Myles said, “My people were too far up a hollow to see the butt end of Chattanooga.”

  They had been angling nervously, like cats longing to sniff each other. Fred suddenly laughed and said, “Well now, ain’t we the lucky ones? Poor little Negro boy and hillbilly boy been let in this here nice school by all these good Yankees?”

  Myles smiled and said, “Well, they can go home and feel fine about being kind to us.”

  They had forgotten about Niebuhr. At reception’s end they were still talking, huddled over their empty plates at a table in the corner. And they became fast friends.

  That had been two years earlier. Now Niebuhr asked, “How’s the South?”

  Myles Horton said, “Going to hell, Reinie. They’re eating dirt in Tennessee.”

  “Same in Alabama,” Fred agreed.

  Niebuhr asked, “How’s your father, Fred?”

  “He’s doing just fine. Every poor old lady in the church brings him half her garden.”

  “Prerogatives of the clergy,” said Niebuhr.

  “Not for me,” Fred said. “I don’t like living off the labor of little old ladies. But my father still thinks I’m coming back after graduation. Assistant pastor at Sixteenth Street Baptist.”

  Myles said, “Me and Fred got it figured out. We’re heading south to the hills and do some hell-raising.”

  “You’re heading to the hills,” Fred said. “You can raise hell up any holler you want to. I’m going to Atlanta, back to Morehouse soon as a position opens up. Just got to bide my time.”

  “I don’t know,” Myles said. “Waiting for some old guy to retire or keel over, that don’t put the cornbread on the table.”

  Fred shrugged. “Maybe I’ll stay at Abyssinian until then.”

  “Sure,” said Niebuhr, who was looking over Fred’s shoulder, trying to keep an eye on the foreign students. “Dr. Powell will take you ahead of his own son any day.”

  Dr. Powell was Adam Clayton Powell, pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, and his son Adam Junior was an entering student at Union Seminary. Fred had been serving his parish internship at Abyssinian Baptist.

  “Where is Powell?” Niebuhr asked. “I’d like to meet him.”

  “He won’t show for this reception,” Fred said. “Adam Junior’s been to Europe and Africa and he’s already running the biggest soup kitchen and job bank in Harlem right out of his daddy’s church. Not to mention what else he knows. It would be like hanging out with babies.”

  Myles said, “I’m getting bored myself. You fellows want to come to my room? I got something there from back home.”

  Fred nudged Niebuhr. “Come on up. This is the stuff for real. Nothing bad in it, not iodine or soap or formaldehyde. Pure corn stilled by a man who takes pride in his work.”

  “Thanks,” Niebuhr said, “but I’ve got some responsibilities here. Matter of fact, you boys could help me out.”

  “Uh-oh.” Fred followed Niebuhr’s glance to where the foreign students still stood alone and farther from each other than before. “Them?”

  “Them,” Niebuhr agreed.

  “Aw, man.”

  “It wasn’t so long ago you were new,” Niebuhr reminded him. “Remember how lonely you were, and you weren’t even from a foreign country.”

  “Well,” Myles said. “Alabama.”

  “Where are they from?” Fred asked.r />
  Niebuhr pointed. “That one’s from Germany.”

  “Oh, yeah, the red-faced fellow,” Myles said.

  Fred said, “Like I want to spend my senior year entertaining Kaiser Wilhelm instead of enjoying the last I’ll see of Harlem.”

  “Come on, guys,” Niebuhr coaxed. “Show a little compassion.”

  Fred said, “I’m not ordained yet, Reinie. I got one more year before I have to show compassion.”

  They did allow themselves to be led over to the exchange students and dutifully introduced, Bishop and Horton to Bonhoeffer and Lasserre. But they slipped away as soon as was politely possible and made for Myles’s supply of bootleg whiskey.

  Dietrich was constantly bumping into people. The corridors and rooms of the students in Hastings wing were as narrow and cramped as the servants’ quarters at home in the Wangenheimstraße. And twice as noisy, Dietrich thought. He could not imagine his parents’ servants carrying on in the manner of the American students, dashing down the hall at full speed when late for class, calling to one another in loud voices, entering any room with an open door and flinging themselves across the bed while laughing at some amusing story. At first Dietrich didn’t go out much and kept his door closed. But after a few days loneliness forced him to try to imitate the others. He left his door standing open, feeling as awkward and foolish as if he were walking down Unter den Linden in his underwear, and sat at his desk pretending to study and trying not to notice who walked by. He heard the footsteps of passersby slow down and now and then caught someone staring curiously in at him. But something in his manner caused each one to mumble an incoherent apology and go on down the hall.