BONHOEFFER'S IMPACT*

A year ago, on July 9th, a majestic Christian service was conducted at Westminster Abbey in . It was an Anglican service, in the presence of the sovereign who is also head of the Church of England: Queen Elizabeth II (accompanied by her consort). It was an ecumenical event, marking the dedication of a panel of 2 0th century Christian martyrs, figures mounted over the Great West Door of the Abbey. Among those memorialized was (1906-45), whose name a few months earlier had been cleared in of the charge of treason1 . German authorities were continuing to re-think the status of those patriots who were active or complicit in the 20 July 1944 attempt to liberate their country from the dictatorship of the Fiihrer, .

[Like the entrance of the Swedish government into the field of Holocaust education last year, the action of the German government was welcome - and well-timed.]

Although Bonhoeffer and his companions in the Westminster Abbey memorial - including Martin Luther King, Jr. - are an extraordinary group, Christian martyrdom is not itself a rarity in the years since DB was born. More have been martyred in the 20th century, this age of reason and progress, than in all the previous nineteen centuries put together. What makes DB special?

*An address by Franklin H. Littell, Distinguished Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey; given 30 October 1999 at the conference on "Bonhoeffer's Dilemma: The of Violence," at Pennsylvania State University, 28-31 October 1999 Preliminary Remarks

"Bonhoeffer's Impact" is today such a comprehensive subject, with the authorized editions of his works, the fine newsletters of the German and American sections of the International Society, and the number of articles and books appearing, that I think it wise for me to center down on two themes. These themes are central to his witness. They grow steadily in importance, both in the churches and in the general society. They are themes on which I perhaps can make a modest contribution. It is a special privilege to be here with Albrecht Schonherr, one of the surviving few who knew Bonhoeffer intimately. I shall come later to another of his intimates still living: Wolf-Dieter Zimmermann. When I speak of Bonhoeffer's impact, however, I think especially of Eberhard Bethge, who celebrated his 90th birthday on August 28th of this year. Every Bonhoeffer admirer or scholar is deeply indebted to Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer's student, friend, biographer, editor - and makhetunim. I have often thought of our visit in my office in Lane Hall at the University of Michigan, to which Bethge came in the spring of 194 8 on an OMGUS program. He was at that time Studentenpfarrer at the Humboldt University in Berlin - just a few months before the Free University was to be launched in the Western sector, where it flourished until after the reunion of in 1989 led to many institutional reunions. Bethge was sponsored for a 90-day trip to the States, especially to study ecumenical and interfaith cooperation.

2 Bethge came to America to study a society that at its best practiced open and informed debate in politics and collegial dialogue in religion. He had survived the dozen years when his country was dominated by a single violent monologue, with only small, disloyal clusters of dialogue surviving in deep cover. He came then to study. During the decades between then and now, the relationship of Eberhard Bethge to religion in America has been reversed: for a number of years we have been studying with him - as a full partner and sometime guide. In both Germany and America we are indebted to him especially for his work on Bonhoeffer, but he has also been a force in lifting up the general ecumenical significance of the Church Struggle (Kirchenkampf) - the struggle which, as Arthur Cochrane years ago forumulated it, "was essentially a struggle of the Church against itself for itself."2

For example, Bethge participated in the first Annual Scholars Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, held at Wayne State University, Detroit, in 1970, and in the first academic conference on the Church Struggle and the Holocaust held in Germany - at Haus Rissen, Hamburg, a decade later. He has been a major channel in Germany for the development of a "Theology after the Holocaust."3

The two themes related to Bonhoeffer's impact that I want to lift up for your reflection are these: 1) the necessary renovation of Christian teaching and preaching in respect to the Jewish people - in the shadow of Auschwitz; 2) the essential Christian rejection of violence toward the Other - ranging from affirmation of the Language of Dialogue, with repudiation of the Language of Assault. In the Church Struggle this drew the line between the confessors of the faith and the collaborators with "the Leader from the Outside." You will recognize immediately that both of these themes have acquired additional significance and clearer outline since Bonhoeffer's death, but I will argue that neither of them would have its present insistence and energy without his teaching, witness, and martyrdom.

Bonhoeffer and "die Judenfrage" Perhaps no theme in Bonhoeffer's testimony has been more discussed and debated, especially by our Jewish colleagues, than Bonhoeffer's position in respect to "the Jews." As a matter of fact, as we meet here now a working committee under the Commission that weighs and decides at Yad Vashem who shall be honored as one of the "Righteous of the Nations" continues its months-long wrestling with the question whether Dietrich Bonhoeffer should be memorialized as a rescuer of Jews - by a tree, a plaque, and a service of memory by the eternal flame4.

There can be little debate whether or not he fought his way out of the routine theological and cultural that stains the unconscious of every Christian inhabitant of "Christendom" who has not drawn the knife on his deepest religious prejudices. As John de Gruchy5 and Ruth Zerner6 have demonstrated conclusively7, he went beyond even most of the better churchmen: where they were concerned for baptized Jews (church members) , he by April of 1933 was already questioning the state's edicts against the Jews as a "race." In that same early writing he unfortunately

4 repeated the routine dogmatic explanation for history's punishment of the Jews8 - an expression that has ever since led some Jewish writers to reject him as a typical religious antisemite. They do not consider that some people, even Christian theologians, are able to learn as they grow and to cast off received concepts they have found unworthy. And Bonhoeffer did learn, as his famous comment - which we for long dated by Kristallnacht (9-11 November 1938) - gives evidence: "Only he who cries out for the Jews may sing Gregorian chants."9 (It is perhaps more appropriate that another of his aphorisms be related to that event: "If the synagogues burn today, the churches will be on fire tomorrow."10) In any case, Kristallnacht was a watershed in his understanding of the political nature of the crisis, and in his willingness to move from non-violent resistance to political conspiracy. In this reference to Gregorian chant Bonhoeffer was not speaking of theoretical alternatives: there was a growing liturgical movement in the churches at that time including the Berneuchener Beweung (which for a time attracted even Paul Tillich) - which re-inforced the "inner immigration" by means of which some sensitive souls were insulating themselves against the Nazi culture of violence. Although he was indeed sensitive, Bonhoeffer was too harnessed by his patriotism and by his Christian commitment to go over into "the inner immigration." He was, however, over some years intermittently open to the temptation to leave Germany of the Third Reich entirely. In the Christian climate of his generation, Bonhoeffer might rank as "judaeophile." He felt a special affinity for the Hebrew Scriptures, which the Christians have since 325 C.E. called "the Old Testament." In confrontation with the political utopianism and religious abstractions of his day, he declared "The docetic heresy is the typical heresy of Greek thought. It is pagan thought par excellence. It has one opponent: Jewish thought."11 The thrust of the university culture, long before 1933, led toward abstractions and generalizations. Since the Enlightenment12, most university intellectual energy has been directed toward attaining ever more comprehensive theories to correlate and organize ever more numerous discrete observations. This method has produced enormous advances in the hard sciences, and just as often has justified monstrous inhumanity by specialists under the umbrella of the social sciences and professions.

The dangers of working by abstractions and generalizations in human affairs are subtle, in the initial stages. Remember Schleiermacher, with "the religious idea" applied to the historical ; remember Ritschl, with a values theory to which Jesus was accidental. The Deutsche Christen, with an abstract principle of "sonship" - translated as immersion in the German race, were not that far from the use of abstractions that sounded Christian to justify loyalties essentially external to the Christian community13.

A few years ago a Jewish philosopher, whose family gave the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, conceptualized the issue in terms that Bonhoeffer would have appreciated: "How can we define the prevailing mode of thinking in the world? It is a process of gaining knowledge by analysis; it is a process of differentiating and classifying phenomena, of endless dividing and sub­ dividing. It is directed toward detecting the relationships among innumerable fragments and ascertaining the influence they may exert upon one another in the hope of eventually understanding the whole.

"Judaic thinking provided a quite different orientation. It is a unifying force that synchronizes man's thoughts and acts in a harmonious whole. It is not born out of... speculation."14

Bonhoeffer's unusual ability to relate Biblical verities to concrete political choices drew him ever closer to what Pauli van Leer called "Judaic thinking." As he summarized it15, "The Church may not preach timeless principles however true, but only commandments which are true today. God is 'always' God to us 'today'." This shaped his joys and sorrows in relation to the resistance - especially the sector known as "the " (die bekennende Kirche). Bonhoeffer rejected both the church politics of assimilation and the precious appeal of what he - following Troeltsch understood as "the sect." He listened to the Ten Articles for a Free Church put forward by his friend , but took a quite different line of criticism of the establishment after the Deutsche Christen victory16: "There is not the claim or even the wish to be a Free Church besides the Reichskirche, but there is the claim to be the only theologically and legally legitimate Evangelical Church in Germany, and accordingly you cannot expect this church to set up a new constitution, since it is based on the very constitution which the Reichskirche has neglected." As the confrontation grew more intense, his theology showed it - including, as Jeffrey Pugh has discussed it, his rejection of the abstract formulation of the doctrine of God. God is encountered not through the traditional doctrine of Transcendence but in our immersion in the affairs of this world17. Bonhoeffer's theology thus was influenced and corrected by a more intense attention to the Old Testment than was common in German theological circles after the triumph of Harnack and "the Liberal Theology. " Even the men of the Church Struggle and the Theology of Crisis found it difficult to achieve a more affirmative stance toward the Hebrew heritage of the faith and the mysteriously surviving Jewish people. Both and Wilhelm Niemoeller stated after the war their awareness of missing the turn in the road.

Karl Barth, writing to Bethge when the great biography of Bonhoeffer first came from the press in Munich: "New to me [in your biography] was the fact that Bonhoeffer in 1933 viewed the Jewish problem as the first and decisive question, even as the only one, and took it in hand so energetically. I have long felt guilt myself that I did not make this problem central, in any case not in public . . . "18 Wilhelm Niemoeller, historian of the Confessing Church, put the crisis in a formulation that he repeated at our first Scholars'

Conference at Wayne State University in 1970: "It has become evident that the Jewish question was the actual central issue of the Church Struggle. But when we ask about the resistance which was achieved in this matter in the Protestant Church, then we arrive at a meager return (ein magere Ergebnis)."19 8 Our late colleague, Heinz Eduard Todt, has summed up Bonhoeffer's early perception of the crucial issue in these words: "In 1933 Bonhoeffer was almost alone in his opinions; he was the only one who considered solidarity with the Jews, especially with non-Christian Jews, to be a matter of such importance as to obligate the Christian churches to risk a massive conflict with the State - a risk which could threaten their very existence."20

Bonhoeffer's correspondence with Karl Barth indicates their agreement that a church with an Aryan Clause could not be a true church21. But when the axe fell to separate the membership, Barth had withdrawn to and Bonhoeffer had to struggle with churchmanship in an apostate church.

Bonhoeffer's Legacy in Germany Since 1945 Although the famous Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt (October, 1945) did not mention the Jews, the question was returned again and again as the enormity of the crime of the Holocaust came to be understood by German Protestants. In recent years the German colleagues have in fact made considerably more progress in their official declarations than we have in America, although an excellent Study Paper now before the United Church of Canada signals a move upward toward their theological level in the dialogue22.

In Bonhoeffer's train, what has been done in his home church? • In 1961, Working Group VI on "Christian-Jewish Relations" held its first major meeting at the Berlin Kirchentag. Its influential work has continued. • At Pentecost in 1971 a joint Roman Catholic and Protestant Kirchentag was held at Augsburg, with an attendance of 20,000. In a strong declaration on Christian/Jewish relations, inter alia the place of Jewish participants in ecumenical dialogue was affirmed, "because without Jewish roots the Christian faith develops wrongly, unbiblically;" the self-understanding of the Jewish people is affirmed and targeting for missions is repudiated; a strategic solidarity with the state of Israel and its people is proclaimed, along with involvement for peace in the Near East23. • In the renovation of this Christian thinking and teaching since the war, the Kirchentag and the Evangelische Akademien - often cooperating in the sponsorship of events and publications - have been especially important. Over decades, D. Martin Stohr - with the sometime assistance of Dr. Lenore Siegele-Wenschkewitz - made of the Evangelical Academy at Arnoldshain/Taunus a major conference, seminar and publication center for re-thinking Christian-Jewish relations after Auschwitz. Stohr also founded Studium am Israel and served as President of the German Councils of Christians and Jews. Later - as the German Koordinierungsrat replaced the American NCCJ as the major center of energy for Christian/Jewish dialogue and cooperation - he served as President of the International Council of Christians and Jews.

• In January of 1980, after five years of study in the parishes, the Protestant Church of the Rheinland issued the synodical declaration "Toward Renovation of the Relationship of Christians and Jews," which took the most advanced positions -

10 affirming the continuing life of the Jewish people, affirming God's providence in the State of Israel, repudiating missions targeting the Jews24. The Rheinland Declaration has been followed in substance by other German Landeskirchen25, most recently by the Lutheran Church of Bavaria (on 24 November 1998)26. Prime movers in the preparatory study and in the 1980 Rheinland Declaration were Professors Heinz Kremers of Duisburg and Eberhard Bethge of Bonn. When Kremers and Bethge reported on the state of their work in the parishes of the Rheinland church, at the 1978 International Theological Syumposium on the Holocaust held in Philadelphia, both of them referred back to the importance of Bonhoeffer's putting the church to the question.

Bonhoeffer and Violence The most painful transmutation of Bonhoeffer's life was from pacifism to political conspiracy, from civility to personal complicity in violence. His engagement in behalf of "the Jews" was an integral part of his rejection of a regime fundamentally illegitimate by reason of its disrespect for the rule of law and the naked violence at its core. He might, of course, have taken the path of Helmut von Moltke of the Kreisau Kreis, who despised Hitler but rejected the violence of conspiracy and assassination. As it was, his earlier imprisonment27 for another cause removed him from concrete involvement in the conspiracy's climax, but it did not save him from death with the other nearly 5,000 rounded up under the Fiihrer' s exercise of primitive revenge.

11 Bonhoeffer matured in the rarified cultural atmosphere of the university - first as the child of a distinguished professor, and then as a promising young instructor in his own right. His family was astonished when he chose Theology and service in the church: their relationship to organized religion was friendly, but without passion28. For him, however, life in the church added to the normal rules of intellectual discourse a particular sensitivity toward other persons. We have a scrap from the uncompleted novel he was working on during imprisonment at the Tegel, in which he sharply criticizes the tyranny of a minor bureaucrat: "It is the little abusers of power who lead a people to destruction from within..."29 Bonhoeffer was, to put it bluntly, supremely unfitted for participation in the politics of violence that was becoming ever more prevalent - in politics, in the university, and finally in the church.

The alliance of the Social Democrats and the Zentrum weakened and for two and a half years only desperate emergency measures by President Hindenburg held the Republic together. Bonhoeffer was in no sense a political revolutionary30: rather, a Christian theologian might step into a political Amt only when the rightful occupant of that post failed his duty31. When the situation became extreme, his resistance was expressed at two levels. First, the Christian must resist Gleichschaltung of the Christian community at all costs. Second, in the extremity the Christian's witness took the form of deliberate political conspiracy32.

12 The Culture of Violence in Weimar Germany The short-lived , operating with a basic misunderstanding of popular sovereignty, became a boiling cauldron of duplicity and intrigue parading as "the will of the people." It was in this heat and violence that the young pacifist Dietrich Bonhoeffer began his walk to political maturity. It seems to me a serious mistake to speak as though the dilemma was whether to inject violence - in the form of militant resistance, to be sure - into the scenes of action. The violence was already there, and increasing in penetration and comprehensiveness. How can we then cast Bonhoeffer's dilemma in pacifist form, as though - even today - the question was whether Christians might use violent means. The violence was already there - in their clothes, in their hair, in their eyes.

We must remember that Bonhoeffer grew to maturity in a world that even before the trauma of the 1922-23 Inflation and crisis of the Great Depression was insensitized to the suffering of large masses of people. Violence that far exceeded the classical limits of "the Just War" had become the norm, and no longer the exception. World War I was a "modern" war, levied against uniformed masses trapped in the trenches and - if casualties are counted - primarily against civilian populations.

One consequence of modern warfare was the further discrediting of Christianity and "Christendom, " which in any case had been losing ground in Europe decade by decade since the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. As Robert E. Speer, the great

13 missiologist at Princeton Theological Seminary, put it , "The European War, and no less the European Peace, have discredited the Christianity of the Churches. The Christian missionary has no chance of getting a hearing now, unless he distinguishes between Christ and Christianity and between Christianity and western civilization."

World War I had rendered Christianity incredible to the peoples

still unreached and unconverted. Euro-centric Christianity was finished: the future lay with the "Younger Churches" and in the ecumenical movement. A second consequence was the creation of "a lost generation" in the major warring nations. During three years of trench warfare, the bonehead generals - German, French and British - poured hundreds of thousands of young lives into a seesaw over a few hundred meters of soil. During 8M months between the Armistace and Germany's final capitulation, with the acceptance of sole guilt for the war, c800,000 German civilians were killed by disease and starvation during the Allied blockade. The Weimar Republic's chances of survival were seriously jeopardized from the start, and at no point more than by the fact that a whole generation of young men had been branded by a culture of violence. They had been "proletarianized" in the classical sense of the word: they were in the society but not of it.

The consequences were more fatal for Germany than for England or France. Some present may remember reading of the brutality of the British military units in the Amritsar Massacre (13 April 1919), when His Majestly's forces broke up a demonstration led by Gandhi and joined by his believers in ahimsa. Four hundred unarmed

14 civilians were killed and many more injured. The point of the reminder is this: after the First World War the British and the French had colonies to which they could ship their "lost generation." The had lost their colonies as an outlet, and the brutalized and frustrated veterans turned inward in their violence. They comprised the ranks that followed Ludendorff and Hitler in the failed Putsch in Munich (8-9 November 1923) . They became the core of the NSDAP (the beloved Altkameraden of Hitler's early oratory). These were the ones who had been victorious on both Eastern and Western fronts - and suddenly awoke one morning to discover that their High Command has sued for an armistace. Their generals didn't tell them that they had stupidly led them into a two-front conflict they couldn't win, especially after America's entry: they told them that they had been "stabbed in the back" on the home front - by the Marxists and the Jews. As the Weimar Republic staggered to its end, the street-fighters had put their brand on the kind of politics that was to mark the 1920s and prevail in the 193 0s in Germany. The NSDAP was a violent terrorist movement, and it became a terrorist regime.

As the end approached, and the parliamentary game was unable to produce even the facade of a political consensus, Germany was headed by a series of ineffectual administrations appointed by President Hindenburg under the Emergency Clause of the constitution. Even in the three final elections of 1932-33, the barely disguised terrorist machine that was the Nazi Party never

15 received a simple majority at national level. As long as the uneasy alliance of the Social Democrats and the Center Party held the middle, the NSDAP and the KPD might fight it out on the increasiungly violent streets, but a decisive final blow was blocked. In this final hour of crisis and decision, Eugenio Pacelli, Vatican Secretary of State, called Prelate Ludwig Kaas, executive director of the Center Party (Zentrum) to Rome and kept him there while he secretly concluded a Concordat with Hitler, while he kept the German bishops in the dark. The Concordat, by which Pacelli intended at all costs to strengthen the centralized control of the Roman , gave Hitler his first major diplomatic victory and gave him a pass into high society. As the Germans say, the Concordat made the demagogue, provacateur, street brawler and agitator salonfahig. The Concordat also sealed the death of the Weimar Republic. The German Catholic bishops - kept uninformed, and the laymen around Heinrich Briining - with their party secretary inaccessible, found themselves marginalized by an agreement between two skilled practitioners of totalitarian theory and practice.

As the Roman Catholic opposition was broken, the Protestant resistance to the regime was slowly emerging. Important to that minority witness was a fragile network of which Geneva, Stockholm and London were major centers. Bonhoeffer's intellectual, social and churchly standing gave him early entrance into the major circles of this emerging ecumenical movement.

16 Early in his ecumenical and international education he had been one of two "world church fellow" at Union Theological Seminary (1930-31) . He was attracted then by the thinking of the young radical theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who had just come in from a pastorate in Detroit that had educated him in the class structures, economic conflicts, and police violence that were part of the emerging automobile industry. Niebuhr was at that time still a pacifist, but moving toward the "Christian realism" that was to be his trademark. Three fellow-students became enduring friends of Bonhoeffer at that time: Jean Lassere - French and a pacifist, Paul Lehmann - later a wellknown American theologian, and Frank Fisher - an African-American who concluded his ministry in a black church near the University of North Carolina campus. Bonhoeffer was attracted to Harlem and its churches, where he found a lively religion of the poor34. Abyssinian Baptist was much more to his liking than the upscale Riverside Church. He was harsh in his judgment of the American churches, and wrote home that they had been given no Reformation. "In New York you can hear almost everything preached about - only one thing not at all, or so seldom that I at least haven't succeeded in hearing it, namely the Gospel of Jesus Christ, of the cross, of sin and forgiveness, of death and life. "35 Niebuhr, who married the other 1930-31 "world church fellow"

(Ursula Keppel-Compton), was shortly to become the most perceptive American interpreter of the German Church Struggle. He had already begun to work his way from the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) to founding the Fellowship of Socialist Christians (FSC). It was Niebuhr who arranged for Bonhoeffer an appointment at UTS in 193 9,

17 when he had served for several years as a courier between the Christian resistance and the developing ecumenical fellowship outside Germany and was daily in risk of life and limb from the . Later we shall return to this episode. As Bonhoeffer returned to Germany to begin his cursus honorum as an Instructor in the university of his famous father, the German universities - like the Republic - were in dissolution. Here again a republic - the classical Republic of Learning, in which the German universities had won world renown - was being infiltrated and corrupted by violence. In time, the student bodies were brought under control - except for a rare exception like "the White Rose" group in Munich. The professors were kept in line by the Dozentenfiihrer - the all-powerful spokesmen for "the Leader from the Outside."

As any reader of Charles Francis Adams well knows, in the German universities the intellectual dialogue had always balanced itself precariously between the personality cults of prominent professors. As students in Party uniform and instructors in black boots became more common, the Language of Assault increasingly supplanted even the formal appearance of intellectual dialogue. The unchallenged removal of Jewish professors a half decade later was a logical consummation of the descent from dialogue to the culture of the streets.

Violence in the Church Violence ruled the political sphere; violence was taking over the universities; violence was penetrating and capturing the churches.

18 "Now he began to see pacifism as an illegitimate escape, especially if he was tempted to withdraw from his increasing contacts with the responsible political and military leaders of the resistance. He no longer saw any escape into some region of piety."36

It was in the Christian church that Bonhoeffer had to bear his most painful disenchantment. During the crucial years of the Church Struggle, he became a contact man between the German resistance and Christian colleagues in and Sweden. This undoubtedly helped him to bear his bitter disappointment in German churchmen like Hirsch and Althaus (who, indeed, openly condemned as "internationalist" and unpatriotic)37. He on the other hand concluded that "nothing was gained any longer for the churches by citing their old credal statements." Increasingly the ecumenical movement seemed to him to offer the only way of uniting the various members of the body of Christ38. Even though he was not able to get the 1934 meeting of the Council on Life and Work - his primary official affiliation - to condemn , he found the ecumenical contacts and developments congenial. If we assume that he found violence repugnant in the public forum and more so in the university, we can be sure that the intrigue and back-biting - to mention only the milder forms of violence that swirled around the Deutsche Christen - tested fully his sense of vocation and his faith. Karl Thieme, son of a famous Protestant theologian in , in response to the Deutsche Christen victories converted to Roman Catholicism. Bonhoeffer stayed to fight.

Looking back across sixty-five years, the territories and boundary lines of the major church caucuses now seem clearly

19 defined. We see in sharp outline the triumphant collaborators - the Deutsche Christen, the three "intact Landeskirchen - Bavaria, Wiirttemberg and Hannover, and the Bekennende Kirche that slowly shaped up as the choices became more final. At the time, however, the terms of reference were more blurred. Wolf-Dieter Zimmermann, Bonhoeffer's first doctoral student at Berlin, has compassionately portrayed39 the efforts of those church officials who belonged neither to the betrayers nor to the heroes, but by a rear guard action tried as best they could to defend sectors of the church's turf and the people's religion intact. The churches' area of operational freedom became small, however.

Hitler's triumph in the Enabling Act which created the dictatorship (24 March 1933) was erected on the rubble of the Center Party. The German Catholic bishops, who had until then valiantly upheld classical Christian discipline, withholding the rites of the church from Nazi activists, succumbed to papal absolutism40. Only the Social Democrats followed their soon-to-be- exiled Chairman, Otto Wels (1873-1939), in voting against the creation of a dictatorship.

For a few months it looked as though the Fiihrer's victory over the churches might be complete. In a few months the other sectors of German society - labor, professions, schools, universities, agriculture, women's organizations, youth movements, etc. - were all integrated like the spokes of a wheel, with the Fiihrer at the center. The Lutheran leadership, including some who later became valiant leaders in spiritual resistance, were at first caught up in

20 the nationalist, the volkisch euphoria of the Nazi regime's first months in power. With Hitler's help, the collaborators, the Deutsche Christen exponents of volkisch spirituality, swept the parish elections in Old Prussian Union - the largest union of Protestant church administrations. In the flush of his triumph over the German Catholic bishops, and in the setting of his victories in the Protestant parish elections, the Fiihrer attempted to establish a German National Church with one of his satraps at its head.

This was one of the two significant moments in the 12M years of the Thousand Years' Reich when Hitler directly gave orders in matters affecting the churches. The other came later, when Wurm and von Galen caught him off base in authorizing the euthanasia program against the hopelessly handicapped and other lebensunwertes Leben. On that occasion he had to beat a retreat, blaming subordinates for the program of medical killings. In the Church Struggle, as the intact churches remained unmastered, and at Barmen (May, 1934) a remnant organized resistance to Gleichschaltung of the religious sector, while the DCs rather quickly discredited themselves, Hitler suffered another defeat - his first in the church sector. When his puppet, Army Chaplain Ludwig Mueller, attempted to save himself by claiming to implement the Fiihrer's wishes to create a single German church, he was brutally corrected and tossed aside in a press release41 from the Hitler's office: "The Chancellor belongs to the Catholic Church and has no intention of leaving it."

21 Thereafter, Hitler stayed out of church controversies and struggles. He practiced the cunning of "the Leader from the Outside" - a wellknown totalitarian role, allowing others to step forward and claim to interpret his wishes. Even in accomplishing his long-standing intention to destroy "the Jew," who in Hitler's semi-literate Weltanschauung was the cosmological Adversary, Hitler never again signed an incriminating paper. David Irving's hypocritical argument of Holocaust denial, i.e., that no signature of Hitler exists on "the Final Solution," is based on a fundamental misinterpretation of the totalitarian system. In the smoothly running totalitarian order the Leader never appears in a group to discuss his ideas: some secondary figure appears, deputized to state what the Leader - the Leader from the Outside - wants done.

At this distance we can see the outlines clearly, but to those present the Church Struggle was a chaotic time, a time of intrigue, duplicity, double-dealing, bribery, abuse of position, seizure of bank accounts, expulsion from pulpits - and other forms of violence coming to dominate ecclesiastical politics. Only with a sound sense of the chaos and violence that had penetrated the churches can we rightly assess Bonhoeffer's spiritual agonies (Anfechtungen) in the formative years of his testing as a theologian and a patriot.

Like most intellectuals, Bonhoeffer did not expect much of politicians anyhow, although as a patriot he felt the shame of his country's ineptitude in self-government. The swelling violence in

22 the universities affected him more directly, since it defaced and eventually destroyed one of his two major communities. The betrayal in the church, his other major community, was worst of all to bear. • Barmen. In the meantime, however, at Barmen (29, 30, 31 May 1934) the confessing remnant took their stand42 against the Gleichschaltung that was also planned to coordinate the universities, the schools, the labor organizations, the farmers' groups, - the organizations of women, youth, students. The blending and homogenization of all sub-political sectors of society within the Volk (people, nation, race) was enthusiastically endorsed by the Deutsch Christen and defiantly rejected by the gathering in the Gemarke Kirche - the gathering of 13 7 men plus Stephanie von Mackenson.

They saw clearly the challenge of violence in the church, but they were silent on what was commonly called "die Judenf rage. " But for Bonhoeffer that had come to be the test case. He was critical when even those closest to him seemed to fall back into a defensive stance. Looking back later, from Tegel, he concluded that the church had been fighting for her own self-preservation "as though it were an end in itself, " and had thereby lost its chance "to speak a word of reconcliation to mankind and the world at large."43 As Heinz Zahrnt wrote in Sonntagsblatt on the 10th anniversary of his death, "There have been martyrs who called the world to the church. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a martyr who called the church to the world. "44

23 The plight of the helpless and defenseless Jews was properly at the center of the church's attention; but the church was seeking only to save its own institutional life. Bonhoeffer was deeply disturbed at the time, for even those churchmen he most respected seemed to miss the Christian theological meaning of the violence against the Jews. Most of them - even among the confessors of the Bekennende Kirche - were indeed repelled by the quiet violence in which German Jews were step by step deprived of their citizenship; for them, the question was humanity and common decency. For Bonhoeffer the measure of the issue was salvation itself: his response was both theological and political. For him, the regime's treatment of the Jews was the high sign of the dictatorship's devotion to violence. It was not the only sign, certainly, but it epitomized the Third Reich's illegitimacy and submission to a pseudo-religion. The men - and one woman - of Barmen were confronted by idolatry, by a belief-system in which a man was being metamorphosized into a god; for Bonhoeffer, who was not there to sign the Declaration, the key event was when God became man.

Starting with the conventional view of "the Jew" in Christian apologetic, during the intense years of confrontation with Nazi violence - in the political forum, in the university, and finally in the church - he shifted from pacifism to conspiracy, from conventional civility to active concern for the Jews. On this matter, he stated vividly, the church was in danger of losing its faith and the whole Bible...

24 The maturing of his response to violence inevitably drew him closer to those who were bearing the brunt of it. The empathy he had felt for the suffering and powerless Negroes of Harlem brought him inexorably to concern for the powerless Jews - who were being turned into the black outcastes of the Reich. The assault became totally murderous when after 1 September 1939 the dictator's power as political Fiihrer was augmented by his total command of military violence. A few months later, as rumors of the genocide we now call "the Holocaust" began to trickle through from the East, Bonhoeffer came to see the assault on the Jews as the justification for tyrannicide. In that summer of 1939 he had already told a friend that Hitler was the Anti-Christ and must be destroyed45.

Two Different Cultures of Decision-making In terms of theological confrontation with the Nazi program of violent Gleichschaltung of the church sector, Barmen said it all - except for the unpublished "Seventh Article." But there was also a basic difference in culture, in Ethos, between the Deutsche Christen and the Bekennende Kirche. The Deutsche Christen were desperately determined to maintain a political orthodoxy, to deliver the churches into the hands of an ideological State that was homogenizing the Volk and determined to bring all sectors of the society under control by the dictator. They were serving an idol that brought violence into every corner and fastness of German society.

The way in which a terrorist movement, potentially genocidal in its very beginnings, develops its conquest of power is now a

25 defined field of study46. Before taking power, the Nazi Party had already developed parallel structures - its own military units, its own police, its own taxation system, its own courts, its own religious rites and liturgies, its own professional guilds which - unlike those in the bourgeois society - maintained a certain discipline... In the end, the debate as to whether the Nazi "take over" was legal or illegal is senseless. The NSDAP did not "take over" the State: it swallowed it. In constructing a virtual government of a new kind, Hitler began with the Volk (nation, people, race). The structures that appeared to be a regime came later. His general approach to political power, like his contemptuous brushing aside all traditional channels of authority, was a clear manifestation of pseudo-democracy, of "populism."47 Behind the facade of deference to "the will of the people," featuring inter alia a constant series of plebiscites, a ruthless cabal maintained itself by violence with a hundred faces.

The basic difference between the two church parties was deeper than the propositional differences between the Deutsche Christen Platform of 193248 and the Confessing Church Declaration of 193449. The DC platform, in its use of words and in its setting, reveals a culture of violence. The "Leader from the Outside," characteristic of the totalitarian system, will soon become the Fiihrer of the whole Volk - in every dimension of its life. The Party is soon to take over the State in a structure of command. The Party's culture brooks no questions, no dissent - neither of mind nor of action.

26 The function of religion is to bless this violent unitary culture. The culture of the Christian resistance, on the other hand, was shaped by dialogue, by a search for answers of which it could be said, "It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us." (Acts 15:28) Karl Barth, powerful and primary theological mentor of the Christian resistance, struck heavy blows as a controversialist; he was also able to yield when shown to be wrong and on occasion openly to confess an error of critical importance. A command structure, enforcing an unyielding propositional orthodoxy, is a different culture from one that looks earnestly for guidance from God the Holy Spirit - to make the right decision, on this day, in this place. This style of decision-making cultivates an interaction between persons that sustains Agape, and it has nothing in common with the culture of violence that features a few of the arrogant and muffles a multitude of the servile. The "psychology of the pawn" - like "the Leader from the Outside" a standard factor in totalitarian systems - can never have a proper place in the culture of Christians.

Bonhoeffer's initial Anfechtungen (miseries, trials, temptations) came as a patriot, through his reflections on what it meant to be a German. Then came his confrontation with violence in the university. He had grown up in the intellectual give and take of a great university; he suffered to see the penetration of the higher learning by the apostles of violence, to see the shift of final authority to the Party agent (Dozentenfiihrer) representing "the Leader from the Outside." Then, having made his choice of a

27 vocation in the church, he discovered that here too the champions of violence and ideological rigidity were in the saddle. He was tempted to go abroad, to get away from the tension and struggle, to find a work he could do apart from the conflicts between parties and caucuses that ignored any listening to the Spirit, any quiet deference to consensus. He went abroad, - and his love of Christ and His church, and his love of his country, pulled him back. It is indeed fitting that in the same season a German high court should cancel his sentence and restore his citizenship, a great Christian Abbey should honor him as a model Christian of this age of "the Lamb's war" against "the princes and powers of this world's darkness." (Eph. 6:12)

Bonhoeffer's Message

What is the message of Bonhoeffer to the Christians, on the matters now joined - one, the fate of the Jews; two, the control of violence in human relations? • On the fate of the Jews. Those who honor Bonhoeffer' s memory and keep his message alive have been at the center of the change in Christian preaching and teaching...

• On the control of violence. Decision-making in the church, in the presence of God the Holy Spirit, is expressed and enabled overtly by the dialogue. The command style, however useful in military formations, has no place in the True Church. His martyrdom, like the death of his Lord, is a testimony to the energy injected into human affairs by the weak, the defenceless, the

28 powerless - that is, those outside the circle of what the world knows as "power."

Concluding Reflections

Over sixty years I have thought again and again of Bonhoeffer's brief second stay at Union Seminary, which came at the end of my Middler year. He met a few times with some of Niebuhr's students, a little circle of those following most avidly the developments in Europe. This time, he was often alone. I remember him sitting alone at a side table in the refectory. Unlike the good times of 1930-31, with the visits to Harlem and the trip to Mexico with friends, he was bound by Anfechtungen, wrestling desperately to make a faithful disposition of his life. Unlike his former year at Union, as social and congenial as a young German of his culture and class was capable of, his few weeks in the late spring of 1939 were days of solitary spiritual struggle.

I trust that everyone here has written on his heart, if not dependably memorized, the simple and yet splendid words in which he on June 22nd expressed to his sponsor his Christian and patriotic decision to return to Germany50:

"I have made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period in our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people... Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose; but I cannot make that choice in security."

29 In his homeland, the path of faithful Christian behavior and the path of normal political activity had become widely separated: a violent fissure had opened between them. In his person, Dietrich Bonhoeffer closed the dichotomy between Christian faithfulness and true patriotism51, as he returned to re-enter the final faithful pilgrimage which was consummated in his martyrdom.

30 ENDNOTES

1. News report by Alan Cowell in the International Section of The New York Times, 16 August 19 96

2. Cochrane, Arthur C, The Church's Confession under Hitler (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1962), p. 19 3. Friessler, Manfred, "Die Tat der freien Verantwortung. Zur Friihgeschichte der Bonhoeffer darstellung Eberhard Bethges," Bonhoeffer Rundbrief (April, 1990), #32, pp. 3f. Bethge's early concern for our theme is shown in his memoirs: Im Zitz gab es keine Juden (Munich: Christian Kaiser Verlag, 1989) .

4. On the beginning of the ensuing controversy, see Christian Gremmels' article in Bonhoeffer Rundbrief (November, 1998), #57, pp. 9-11. 5. Gruchy, John de, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Witness to Jesus Christ (London: Collins, 1987), pp 124-30 6. Zerner, Ruth, "Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Jews: Thoughts and Actions, 1933-1945," Jewish Social Studies (1974, XXXVII, 3-4 7. See also the section on Bonhoeffer in Marijke Smid's Deutscher Protestantismus und Judentum, 1932/1933 (Munich: Christian Kaiser Verlag, 1990) . 8. "The church of Christ has never lost sight of the thought that the 'chosen people', who nailed the redeemer of the world to the cross, must bear the curse for its action through a long history of suffering." DB: No Rusty Swords, transl. Edwin H. Robertson (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 226 9. Quoted in Bethge, Eberhard, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 512 10. Zimmermann, Wolf-Dieter and R. G. Smith, eds. , I Knew Bonhoeffer (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 150

11. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Christ the Center, transl. John Bowden, intr. Edwin H. Robertson (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 79 12. Western thought since the Enlightenment assumes that • all real questions can have only one true answer; • for an answer to be true, it must be true at all times, everywhere, and for everyone; • true answers hang together to make a whole, are compatible with each other, cohere. DB, although devoted to the earthy and specific and unfailingly anti-speculative, was a child of the Enlightenment in his view of Truth; i.e., he was not a pluralist.

31 13. DB: Christ the Center, p. 83

14. Van Leer, Pauli, The Visions (Jerusalem: Reubeni Foundation, 1950), pp. 8-9, 10

15. DB: No Rusty Swords, ed. Edwin H. Robertson (New York: Harper 8c Row, 1965), pp. 161-62

16. Ibid., p. 283

17. Jeffrey Pugh in Newsletter of the Bonhoeffer Society (May 1991), #47, pp 1-2

18. Karl Barth, from correspondence quoted by Bethge in XXVIII Evangelische Theologie (1968) 10:555

19. Niemoeller, Wilhelm, "1st die Judenfrage 'bewaltigt'?," Junge Kirche (May, 1968), suppl. 2, page 2

20. Cited in Eberhard Bethge's "Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Jews," in Godsey, John D. and Geffrey B. Kelly, eds., Ethical Responsibility: Bonhoeffer's Legacy to the Churches (New York: Edw. Mellen Press, 1981), p. 63

21. DB: Gesammelte Schriften, II, ed. Eberhard Bethge (Munich: Christian Kaiser Verlag, 1959), p. 126

22. "Bearing Faithful Witness: United Church-Jewish Relations Today," authorized for study in the United Church of Canada by the 36th General Council

23 . From the report published by the Kirchentag office in Fulda/Hessen; in FHL archives.

24. Translation by F.H.L. in XVII Journal of Ecumenical Studies (Winter, 1980) 1:211-12. See also my discussion, "A Milestone in Post-Holocaust Church Thinking," XXVII Christian News from Israel (1980) 3:113-16.

25. Baden (1984), Berlin-Brandenburg West (1984), Greifswald (1985) , Wiirttemberg (1988) , Westfalen (1988) , Berlin-Brandenburg East (1990), Pfalz (1990), Oldenburg (1993), Hannover (1995), Kurhessen-Waldeck (1997); also the Reformed Church (1984), the Reformed Union (1990), and the Council of German Protestant Free Churches (1997).

26. Published in VI Freiburger Rundbrief (1999) 3:191-97

27. He had been forbidden to appear in Berlin; officially lodged in Pommerania, he traveled constantly throughout Germany for BK interests. He was picked up 5 April 1943 and charged 11 September 1943 .

28. Discussed in Eberhard Bethge's biography: Dietrich Bonhoeffer (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 20f

32 29. Littell: Wild Tongues (New York: Macmillan Co., 1969), page 129; my translation from the German text in Unterwegs (1954) 4:196-205. 30. On DB's fundamental understanding of resistance see Pangritz, Andreas, "Dietrich Bonhoeffers theologische Begriindung der Beteiligung am Widerstand," Bonhoeffer Rundbrief (July, 1995), #47, pp. 16ff.

31. On Bonhoeffer's high concept of Amt: "The Leader has authority from below, from those whom he leads, while the office has authority from above; the authority of the Leader depends on his person, the authority of an office is supra-personal; authority from below is the self-justification of the people; authority of an office is a recognition of the appointed limits; authority from below is borrowed authority, authority of an office is original authority." "The true leader must always be able to disillusion. ... He serves the order of the state, of the community, and his service can be of incomparable value. But only so long as he keeps strictly in his place." DB: No Rusty Swords, pp. 2 00, 2 02 32. Eberhard Bethge on the two forms of resistance, in Bonhoeffer Rundbrief (June, 1999), #59, pp. 5-6 33. Speer, Robert E., The Church and Missions (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1926), pp. 121-22. 34. This continuing accent in his thinking and acting has since his death provided considerable encouragement to those bearing witness in apartheid South Africa, in the plantation economies of South America ("Liberation Theology" had help from DB' s theology that never came from the Vatican!), and in the Communist D.D.R. ("Christianity in Socialism"). 35. DB: Gesammelte Schriften, I, 94-95 36. Eberhard Bethge in the Introduction to DB: Letters and Papers from Prison, transl. Reginald Fuller (New York: Macmillan Co., 1962), p. 9 37. Bethge: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 110. Visser't Hooft considered his initiative at Fano (1934), although an apparent failure, to be "a turning point in ecumenical history;" "Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Self-Understanding of the Ecumenical Movement," XVII The Ecumenical Review (1970) 2:200. 38. George Bell's Foreword to DB: (London: SCM Press, 1948), p. 11 39. Zimmermann, Wolf-Dieter, Gerechtigkeit fur die Vater (Berlin: CVZ-Verlag, 1983), passim

33 40. Cornwell, John, Hitler's : The Secret History of Pius XII (New York: Viking, 1999); Cornwell is a Roman Catholic layman. See the perceptive review by James Carroll in 284 The Atlantic Monthly (October, 1999) 4:107-12. According to the Roman Catholic reviewer, the concordat was "the supreme act of two authoritarians, while the supposed beneficiaries were correspondingly weakened, undermined, and neutralized." 41. Press release cited in a report in The New York Times (2 July 1933) . 42. Cochrane, Arthur C, The Church's Confession Under Hitler (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1962), passim 43. DB: Letters and Papers, p. 18 7 44. Sonntagsblatt #15 (10 April 1955) 45. DB: Gesammelte Schriften, I, 398. "Hitler is the Anti- Christ. Therefore we must go on with our work and eliminate him whether he is successful or not." 46. See Littell, Franklin H., Wild Tongues (New York: Macmillan Co., 1969), passim, and "Essay: Early Warning," III Holocaust and Genocide Studies (1988) 4:483-90. 47. Hitler, Adolf, Me in Kampf (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941), pp. 579-80 48. See Appendix A in Littell: The German Phoenix (Lanham MD: University Press of America, 1992), reprint of 1960 original. 49. Ibid., Appendix B 50. DB: Gesammelte Schriften I, 320. See the discussion of his decision to return to Germany in Pangritz, Andreas, loc. cit.

51. Paul Gerhard Schoenborn has a creative comparison of the way Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Franz Jagerstatter closed the fissure between belief and political responsibility; Bonhoeffer Rundbrief (March, 1998), #55, pp. 28ff, 34-35.

34