He told us of his colored friend with whom he had travelled through the States… he told of the piety of the negroes . . . At the end of the evening he said: “When I took leave of my black friend, he said to me: ‘Make our sufferings known in Germany. Tell them what is happening to us, and show them what we are like.’”
—WOLF-DIETER ZIMMMMERMANN
Among the public there spread the expectation that the salvation of the German people would now come from Hitler. But in the lectures we were told that salvation comes only from Jesus Christ.
—INGE KARDING
Bonhoeffer returned to Berlin from America at the end of June. But he was home only a few days before he again left the country. His parents had hoped to lure him to Friedrichsbrunn, but even that couldn’t compete with what awaited Bonhoeffer in Switzerland. Erwin Sutz had arranged to introduce him to Karl Barth.
Bonhoeffer left for Bonn on July 10. Not surprisingly his first impressions of the great theologian were favorable. He wrote his parents: “I have now met Barth and got to know him quite well at a discussion evening at his house. I like him very much indeed, and am also very impressed by his lectures. . . . I think I shall gain a great deal from the time spent here.”
In one of Barth’s seminars—perhaps at that first discussion evening—a student had quoted Luther’s famous maxim that “sometimes the curses of the godless sound better than the hallelujahs of the pious.” Barth, pleased with what he heard, asked who had said it. It was Bonhoeffer. This was likely the first time they met. They soon became friends.
On July 23, the forty-five-year-old Barth invited the twenty-five-year-old Bonhoeffer to dinner. Bonhoeffer was alone with Dr. Barth, able to ask questions he had had for years. “I have been impressed even more by discussions with him than by his writings and his lectures,” Bonhoeffer said. “For he is really all there. I have never seen anything like it before.” He added, “There is with him an openness, a readiness for any objection which should hit the mark, and along with this such concentration and impetuous insistence on the point, whether it is made arrogantly or modestly, dogmatically or completely uncertainly, and not only when it serves his own theology.”
In the next two years Bonhoeffer visited Barth often. In September 1932, just after Barth completed the first volume of his landmark Church Dogmatics, Bonhoeffer visited him on the Bergli in Switzerland. He also saw Sutz, who introduced him to the Swiss theologian Emil Brunner. In 1933, when a chair in theology opened at Berlin University, Bonhoeffer tried to leverage his family’s connections in the Prussian Ministry of Culture on Barth’s behalf. But Hitler had just taken power as Reich chancellor. Once that happened, everything was politicized, and no one who disdained Hitler’s views would get an important position in academia or anywhere else. The chair went to Georg Wobbermin, who was cut of the same brown cloth as the new Reich chancellor. Barth wrote to Bonhoeffer afterward: “In the era of Reich Chancellor Hitler, Wobbermin will certainly fill Schleiermacher’s chair in a fashion more true to type than I should have done. I hear that you have come out strongly on my behalf. . . . I should undoubtedly have accepted. . . . [T]he world is in bad shape, but we don’t want to let our pipe go out under any circumstances, do we?”
But at this point, Hitler’s ascent to the chancellorship was still two years in the unimaginable future. Bonhoeffer had been in New York a mere nine months, but in some ways it seemed a lifetime. When he left, the Nazis were a tiny gray cloud on the horizon of an otherwise clear sky. Now, black and crackling with electricity, they loomed nearly overhead.
Bonhoeffer wrote Sutz that the “outlook is really exceptionally grim.” He felt that they were “standing at a tremendous turning point in world history,” that something was about to happen. But what? In his prescient way, Bonhoeffer sensed that whatever lay ahead, the church would be threatened. He wondered if it would survive at all. “Then what’s the use of everyone’s theology?” he asked. There were now an urgency and a seriousness to Bonhoeffer that had not been there before. Somehow he sensed he must warn people of what lay ahead. It was as if he could see that a mighty oak tree, in whose shade families were picnicking, and from whose branches children were swinging, was rotten inside, was about to fall down and kill them all. Others observed the change in him. For one thing, his sermons became more severe.
The Great Change
What’s left of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church sits like Ozymandias in the midst of the bleak plastic-and-cement desert of Berlin’s commercial district. Most of the area was turned to rubble during an RAF raid in 1943, and what remains of this once awe-inspiring cathedral—the pitted, busted hulk of the bell tower—now serves as a heavy-handed modernistic reminder of the destructiveness of war. But before the war, as they say, it was one of the glories of Berlin.
Bonhoeffer was asked to preach there on Reformation Sunday in 1932. * This was the day Germany celebrated Luther and the great cultural heritage of the Reformation. The people in the pews that day expected about what an American might expect from a July 4 service in a mainstream Protestant church: an uplifting, patriotic sermon. The Germans expected to be movingly inflated with pride at the miracle of their German Lutheran heritage and to have their egos sensitively stroked for the part they played in keeping this grand tradition alive by sitting in the hard pews when they might have been doing so many other things. Hindenburg, that stout, burly national icon, might well have been in the congregation that day, as this was the very church the great man attended. What a wonderful service it would be! And so, with the congregation having settled itself into this warm and pleasant expectation, the sermon that Bonhoeffer delivered must have seemed like a nasty sucker punch followed by a wheeling roundhouse kick to the chops.
The Bible texts provided a clue of what lay ahead. The first was from Revelation 2:4-5: “Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love. Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent.” People familiar with Bonhoeffer’s preaching, upon hearing these verses, might well have slipped out the side exit. On the other hand, if they had been in the mood to be blasted backward by a bracing philippic and had chosen to stay, they would not have been disappointed.
Bonhoeffer opened with the bad news: the Protestant church was in its eleventh hour, he said, and it’s “high time we realized this.” The German church, he said, is dying or is already dead. Then he directed his thunder at the people in the pews. He condemned the grotesque inappropriateness of having a celebration when they were all, in fact, attending a funeral: “A fanfare of trumpets is no comfort to a dying man.” He then referred to the day’s hero, Martin Luther, as a “dead man” whom they were propping up for their selfish purposes. It was as if he’d thrown a bucket of water on the congregation and had then thrown his shoes at them. “We do not see that this Church is no longer the Church of Luther,” he said. He called it “unpardonable frivolity and arrogance” for them to blithely appropriate Luther’s famous words, “Here I stand, I can do no other,” for their own ends—as if these words applied to them and the Lutheran church of their day. So it went.
Nor was it the only sermon of its kind that he would preach that year. But what exactly did Bonhoeffer see, and whence this urgency to communicate what he saw? He seemed to want to warn everyone to wake up and stop playing church. They were all sleepwalking toward a terrible precipice! But few took him seriously. For many, Bonhoeffer was only one of those bespectacled and overserious academic types, with a good dose of religious fanaticism in the bargain. And he preached such depressing sermons!
One must wonder what Bonhoeffer meant to accomplish with these sermons. Did he really expect people in the pews to take what he was saying to heart? But what he said was indeed true, and he felt that God had chosen him to say what he was saying. He took the idea of preaching the Word of God extremely seriously and wouldn’t have dared to speak his mere opinions from the pulpit. He also knew that a word might be delivered that had come straight from heaven and be rejected, just as the messages of the Old Testament prophets had been rejected and just as Jesus had been rejected. The prophet’s role was simply and obediently to speak what God wished to say. Whether or not the message was received was between God and his people. And yet to preach such a burning message, and to know that it was God’s Word for the faithful, who rejected it, was painful. But this was the pain of the prophetic office, and to be chosen by God as his prophet always meant, in part, that the prophet would share in God’s sufferings.
Something had obviously happened to Bonhoeffer in the previous year and was happening still. Some have gone so far as to call it a conversion, which it can hardly have been. To Bonhoeffer and to others close to him, it was evident that his faith had somehow deepened in the previous year. And it was obvious that his sense of himself as called by God was becoming clearer.
A few years later, in January 1936, in the letter he wrote to Elizabeth Zinn, he described the change that had taken place in him during this time:
I plunged into work in a very unchristian way. An . . . ambition that many noticed in me made my life difficult. . . . Then something happened, something that has changed and transformed my life to the present day. For the first time I discovered the Bible . . . I had often preached. I had seen a great deal of the Church, and talked and preached about it—but I had not yet become a Christian. . . . I know that at that time I turned the doctrine of Jesus Christ into something of personal advantage for myself . . . I pray to God that that will never happen again. Also I had never prayed, or prayed only very little. For all my loneliness, I was quite pleased with myself. Then the Bible, and in particular the Sermon on the Mount, freed me from that. Since then everything has changed. I have felt this plainly, and so have other people about me. It was a great liberation. It became clear to me that the life of a servant of Jesus Christ must belong to the Church, and step by step it became plainer to me how far that must go. Then came the crisis of 1933. This strengthened me in it. Also I now found others who shared that aim with me. The revival of the Church and of the ministry became my supreme concern. . . . My calling is quite clear to me. What God will make of it I do not know . . . I must follow the path. Perhaps it will not be such a long one. (Phil 1:23). But it is a fine thing to have realized my calling . . . I believe its nobility will become plain to us only in coming times and events. If only we can hold out.
Somehow Bonhoeffer’s time in New York, especially his worship at the “negro churches,” played their part in all of this. He had heard the gospel preached there and had seen real piety among a suffering people. The fiery sermons and the joyous worship and singing had all opened his eyes to something and had changed him. Had he been “born again”?
What happened is unclear, but the results were obvious. For one thing, he now became a regular churchgoer for the first time in his life and took Communion as often as possible. When Paul and Marion Lehmann visited Berlin in 1933, they noticed a difference in their friend. Two years earlier, in New York, he hadn’t been interested in going to church. He loved working with the children in Harlem, and he loved going to concerts and movies and museums, and he loved traveling, and he loved the philosophical and academic give-and-take of theological ideas—but here was something new. What had happened that Bonhoeffer should suddenly take attending church so seriously?
Bonhoeffer the Teacher
Just before leaving for Union, Bonhoeffer had qualified as a university lecturer in theology at Berlin University, so on his return he immediately took up his post there, giving seminars and lectures. But his way of teaching theology would not be what most people expected. The change that had been occurring in him would be visible behind the lectern and in the seminars too.
Wolf-Dieter Zimmermann was one of Bonhoeffer’s students from those days and first encountered Bonhoeffer in the fall of 1932. There were only a handful of students in the lecture hall that first day, and Zimmermann was tempted to leave. But for some reason he was curious, and he stayed. He recalled the moment:
A young lecturer stepped to the rostrum with a light, quick step, a man with very fair, rather thin hair, a broad face, rimless glasses with a golden bridge. After a few words of welcome he explained the meaning and structure of the lecture, in a firm, slightly throaty way of speaking. Then he opened his manuscript and started on his lecture. He pointed out that nowadays we often ask ourselves whether we still need the Church, whether we still need God. But this question, he said, is wrong. We are the ones who are questioned. The Church exists and God exists, and we are asked whether we are willing to be of service, for God needs us.
Talk like this was rare from most German pulpits. From a university lectern it was simply unheard of. But Bonhoeffer had not suddenly become more emotional, or less rational. His style as a lecturer was “very concentrated, quite unsentimental, almost dispassionate, clear as a crystal, with a certain rational coldness, like a reporter.” It was this combination of an adamantine faith with a logician’s sparkling intellect that was so compelling. Ferenc Lehel, another student, said they “followed his words with such close attention that one could hear the flies humming. Sometimes, when we laid our pens down after a lecture, we were literally perspiring.” Yet Bonhoeffer was not always serious and intense. There was a winking playfulness to him, too, that many friends remarked on over the years. When Lehel visited him at his home and was invited to stay for dinner, Lehel politely declined, but Bonhoeffer pushed him to stay: “It isn’t just my bread, but our bread, and when we eat it together there will be twelve baskets left over.”
Bonhoeffer often invited students home. He was involved in their lives, just as he had been involved in the lives of the little children in his Grunewald Sunday school class and with the young men in his Thursday Circle. Lehel remembered that Bonhoeffer had encouraged him in his faith:
In my intellectual difficulties he stood by me, as a pastor, brotherly and friendly. When he recommended Karl Heim’s Glaube und Denken to me he pointed out how Heim was able to feel at one with the doubter; how he did not indulge in cheap apologetics which from their lofty base fire upon the battlements of natural science. We must think with the doubter, he said, even doubt with him.
Another student, Otto Dudzus, recalled that Bonhoeffer invited students to the musical evenings at his parents’ home:
Whatever he had and whatever he was, he made that accessible to others. The great treasure he possessed was the cultivated, elegant, educated, highly educated, open-minded home of his parents, which he introduced us to. The open evenings, which took place every week, or later every two weeks, had such an atmosphere that they became a piece of home for us, as well. Also, Bonhoeffer’s mother entertained in the best possible way.
Even when Bonhoeffer went to London in 1934, his parents continued to treat these students like family, including them in the larger circle of their society and home. Bonhoeffer did not separate his Christian life from his family life. His parents were exposed to other bright students of theology, and his students were exposed to the extraordinary Bonhoeffer family.
Inge Karding, one of the few women students in Bonhoeffer’s circle, remembered her first lecture with him:
My first impression of him was that he was so young! . . . He had a good face, and he had good posture. . . . He was very natural with us students . . . but there was, for such a young man, a certainty and dignity in him. . . . He always maintained a certain distance. . . . One wouldn’t have trusted oneself to make a joke around him.
Albert Schönherr was another Bonhoeffer student:
He was not like he appears in many photographs. The pictures sometimes make him look plump and fleshy, but he had an athletic build, rather big, with a big forehead, a Kant-like forehead. But his voice did not go with his body. It was a little high, so that you could never be seduced by his voice. It would never sound demagogical. He actually was very glad about that, because he would never under any circumstances want to be a demagogue—to convey something to people through his voice, his appearance, or his “flair,” rather than to speak to people through substance.
Bonhoeffer had always struggled with the “problem” of being charming. He mistrusted it and wanted the words and logic of what he said to be the only things to which others responded.
Nonetheless, a group of students formed around Bonhoeffer during this time. Their conversations overflowed the boundaries of the lecture halls and seminar rooms. They wanted to continue their conversations away from the strictures of the university. Some met once a week in Wolf-Dieter Zimmermann’s attic room near the Alexanderplatz. It was very crowded, but they would stay for hours, smoking and talking. Bonhoeffer imposed a certain discipline even on these gatherings, as he had with his Thursday Circle. It was no aimless gabfest, but a controlled, serious exploration of questions. It consisted of “pure, abstract theorizing, in the attempt to grasp a problem in its fullness.”
Bonhoeffer openly thought things through and taught his students to do the same. They followed lines of reasoning to their logical conclusions and considered every angle to have a sense of absolute thoroughness, so that nothing depended on mere emotion. He accorded theological ideas the same respect that his father or Karl-Friedrich accorded scientific ideas, or his brother Klaus accorded ideas of jurisprudence. Questions about the Bible and ethics and theology must be treated with the same rigorousness, and all cant and “phraseology” must be identified, exposed as such, and cut away and discarded. One wished to arrive at answers that could stand up to every scrutiny because one would have to live out those conclusions. They would have to become actions and would have to become the substance of one’s life. Once one saw clearly what the Word of God said, one would have to act on it and its implications, such as they were. And actions in Germany at that time had serious consequences.
Students found Bonhoeffer extremely open-minded and patient. Hellmut Traub noted that Bonhoeffer was “extraordinarily reserved, ready to consider every fresh problem put to him, taking even the remotest ideas into account.” The students learned how to take the time to think things through to the end. “His conservative nature, his scholarly education and his thoroughness prevented any quick result.”
Around ten thirty they repaired to a nearby Bierkeller for more informal conversation. Bonhoeffer always picked up the tab.
One evening, Zimmermann said that Bonhoeffer brought the records of “negro spirituals” he had bought in New York:
He told us of his colored friend with whom he had travelled through the States . . . he told of the piety of the negroes. . . . At the end of the evening he said: “When I took leave of my black friend, he said to me: ‘Make our sufferings known in Germany, tell them what is happening to us, and show them what we are like.’ I wanted to fulfill this obligation tonight.”
It is likely that he now began to think of the church as called by God to “stand with those who suffer.”
Many of Bonhoeffer’s students from this time became part of his life for years. Some would become involved in the ecumenical world with him, and many of them would later be part of the illegal seminaries at Zingst and Finkenwalde. Otto Dudzus, Albert Schönherr, Winfried Maechler, Joachim Kanitz, Jürgen Winterhager, Wolf-Dieter Zimmermann, Herbert Jehle, and Inge Karding were among them.
Bonhoeffer’s interest was not only in teaching them as a university lecturer. He wished to “disciple” them in the true life of the Christian. This ran the gamut, from understanding current events through a biblical lens to reading the Bible not just as a theology student but as a disciple of Jesus Christ. This approach was unique among German university theologians of that era.
Bonhoeffer was able to get away with it because of his patrician cultural background and his intellectual brilliance. He spoke in a highly academic way, but in a way that also spelled out the implications of what he saying to current events. In 1933, one student said, “Among the public, there spread the expectation that the salvation of the German people would now come from Hitler. But in the lectures we were told that salvation comes only from Jesus Christ.”
Inge Karding said that Bonhoeffer once spoke to her about the seriousness of saying, “Heil!” (Hail!) to anyone but God. He didn’t shrink from political commentary, and from the beginning he never felt what many others felt: that somehow politics was not related to Christian faith. She also recalled that Bonhoeffer unapologetically approached the Bible as the word of God. At a place like Berlin University, where the ghost of Schleiermacher still walked abroad in the night, and where Harnack’s chair was still warm, this was positively scandalous:
[He said] when you read the Bible, you must think that here and now God is speaking with me. . . . He wasn’t as abstract as the Greek teachers and all the others. Rather, from the very beginning, he taught us that we had to read the Bible as it was directed at us, as the word of God directly to us. Not something general, not something generally applicable, but rather with a personal relationship to us. He repeated this to us very early on, that the whole thing comes from that.
Bonhoeffer was not interested in intellectual abstraction. Theology must lead to the practical aspects of how to live as a Christian. Karding was surprised when Bonhoeffer asked his students whether they sang Christmas carols. Their answer was noncommittal, so he said, “If you want to be pastors, then you must sing Christmas carols!” For him, music was not an optional part of Christian ministry, but de rigeur. He decided to tackle this deficiency head-on. “On the first day of Advent,” he said to her, “we will meet each other at noon . . . and we will sing Christmas carols.” She remembered that he “played the flute wonderfully” and sang “magnificently.”
Joachim Kanitz remembered that once Bonhoeffer told them that they should not forget that “every word of Holy Scripture was a quite personal message of God’s love for us.” Bonhoeffer then “asked us whether we loved Jesus.”
Taking students on weekend trips into the country for retreats was another element of his practical instruction method. Sometimes they went to Prebelow, staying in the youth hostel there, and a number of times visited the cabin he bought in nearby Biesenthal. On one hiking trip, Bonhoeffer had them meditate on a Bible verse after breakfast. They had to find a place on the grass and sit quietly for an hour and meditate on that verse. Many of them found it difficult, as Bonhoeffer’s Finkenwalde ordinands would find it difficult. Inge Karding was among them: “He taught us that the Bible goes directly into your life, [to] where your problems are.”
Bonhoeffer was working out the ideas that would find their way into the illegal seminaries of the Confessing Church in a few years. For him, such things as meditating on Bible verses and the singing formed integral parts in a theological education. Bonhoeffer’s recurring theme of incarnation—that God did not create us to be disembodied spirits, but flesh-and-blood human beings—led him to the idea that the Christian life must be modeled. Jesus did not only communicate ideas and concepts and rules and principles for living. He lived. And by living with his disciples, he showed them what life was supposed to look like, what God had intended it to look like. It was not merely intellectual or merely spiritual. It was all these things together; it was something more. Bonhoeffer aimed to model the Christian life for his students. This led him to the idea that, to be a Christian, one must live with Christians.
One student said she learned about the concepts of guilt and grace from the way Bonhoeffer treated them. On one retreat in 1933, Bonhoeffer and a group of students were hiking in some woods when they came upon a hungry family obviously looking for food. Bonhoeffer approached them warmly and asked whether the children were getting any hot food. When the man replied, “Not so much,” Bonhoeffer asked if he could take two of them along. “We’re going home now to eat,” he said, “and they can get something to eat with us, and then we’ll bring them right back.”
A Confirmation Class in Wedding
Bonhoeffer’s ability to connect with people in difficult circumstances was remarkable, but perhaps never quite so remarkable as when he taught a confirmation class at the Zionskirche in Wedding, a notoriously tough neighborhood in the Prenzlauer Berg district of North Berlin. He was given the assignment shortly after his ordination in November 1931.* Around the same time his superintendent, Otto Dibelius, also assigned him to a chaplaincy at the Charlottenberg Technical College. That was not very satisfying to him, but his colorful experiences with the rowdy confirmation class were quite the opposite.
The old minister at the Zionskirche, Superintendent Müller, desperately needed help with a class of fifty boys. Their behavior was almost beyond description. Bonhoeffer described this area as “wild” and as having “difficult social and political circumstances.” Bonhoeffer had taught Sunday school to children in Harlem, but the difference was profound. The American separation of church and state made churchgoing private and voluntary, so if children were in church classes, it was likely because their parents wanted them there. If they misbehaved, they would answer to their parents. But in Germany most children went to confirmation classes as they went to school. It was effectively mandated by the state, and the parents of the children who would greet the young pastor likely thought about it as their children did. In any case, it kept their kids off the street for an hour or two. But if their children misbehaved, that was the teacher’s affair. As far as many of them were concerned, the church was a corrupt institution, and if their kids could ladle out a bit of grief to this soft, golden-haired cleric, perhaps he had it coming.
Quite unlike the cherubs Bonhoeffer had taught in Harlem, he now faced a veritable gang of sawed-off hoodlums. He had been duly warned, but nothing could have prepared him for what lay ahead. The fourteen-and fifteen-year-old miscreants were so famously misbehaved—and had so expertly harassed the minister Bonhoeffer was replacing—that no sooner had Bonhoeffer taken over the class than the exasperated old fellow died— skipped off to that great confirmation class in the sky. Bonhoeffer was seriously convinced that the frail man’s health failed chiefly as a result of this ungovernable class. Bethge described the initial meeting:
The elderly minister and Bonhoeffer slowly walked up the stairs of the school building, which was several stories high. The children looked down on them from over the banisters, making an indescribable din and dropping refuse on the two men ascending the stairs. When they reached the top, the minister tried to force the throng back into the classroom by shouting and using physical force. He tried to announce that he had brought them a new minister who was going to teach them in the future and that his name was Bonhoeffer, and when they heard the name they started shouting “Bon! Bon! Bon!” louder and louder. The old man left the scene in despair, leaving Bonhoeffer standing silently against the wall with his hands in his pockets. Minutes passed. His failure to react made the noise gradually less enjoyable, and he began speaking quietly, so that only the boys in the front row could catch a few words of what he said. Suddenly all were silent. Bonhoeffer merely remarked that they had put up a remarkable initial performance, and went on to tell them a story about Harlem. If they listened, he told them, he would tell them more next time. Then he told them they could go. After that, he never had a reason to complain about their lack of attentiveness.
Bonhoeffer described the situation to Erwin Sutz: “At first the boys behaved as though they were crazy, so that for the first time I had real difficulties with discipline. . . . But what helped the most was that I simply told them stories from the Bible with great emphasis, particularly the eschatological passages.”
His youth, athletic build, and aristocratic bearing helped Bonhoeffer earn their respect. But often he had a similarly extraordinary effect on people who were otherwise thought impossible. He would have such an effect on some of the prison guards near the end of his life too.
Years later, one of the boys recalled that, during class, a student pulled out a sandwich and began eating it: “This was nothing unusual in the north of Berlin. Pastor Bonhoeffer said nothing at first. Then he looked at him, calmly and kindly—but long and intensely, without saying a word. In embarrassment, the boy put his sandwich away. The attempt to annoy our pastor had come to nothing through his composure and kindness—and perhaps through his understanding for boyish tomfoolery.”
It also fell to the patrician young pastor to visit the homes and parents of every one of the fifty students. Wedding was a squalid, poverty-stricken district, and many of the parents allowed him into their homes only because they felt they must. The halting conversations could be agonizing. Bonhoeffer thought it the worst aspect of his duties. In a letter to Sutz he wrote:
I sometimes, indeed often, stand there and think that I would have been as well equipped to do such visits if I had studied chemistry. . . . To think of those excruciating hours or minutes when I or the other person try to begin a pastoral conversation, and how haltingly and lamely it goes on! And in the background there are always the ghastly home conditions, about which one really cannot say anything. Many people tell one about their most dubious way of life without any misgivings and in a free and easy way, and one feels that if one were to say something then they simply wouldn’t understand.
Yet Bonhoeffer did not shrink from the task. Indeed, to be closer to all of these families and spend more time with the boys, he moved into a furnished room in the neighborhood at 61 Oderbergstrasse. Then he took a page from his dormitory experiences at Union and adopted an open-door policy, such that his new charges could visit him unannounced at any time. It was a bold and decisive about-face for the once solipsistic Bonhoeffer. His landlord was the baker whose shop occupied the street level below. Bonhoeffer instructed the baker’s wife that the boys were to be allowed into his room in his absence. That Christmas he gave each boy a Christmas present.
Bonhoeffer told Sutz: “I’m looking forward to this time immensely. This is real work. Their home conditions are generally indescribable: poverty, disorder, immorality. And yet the children are still open; I am often amazed how a young person does not completely come to grief under such conditions; and of course one is always asking oneself how one would react to such surroundings.”
Two months later, he wrote Sutz again:
The second half of the term has been almost entirely given up to the candidates. Since New Year I have been living here in the north, so as to be able to have the boys here every evening, in turns of course. We have supper together and then we play something—I have taught them chess, which they now play with the greatest enthusiasm. . . . At the end of each evening I read something out of the Bible and after that a little catechizing, which often grows very serious. The experience of teaching them has been such that I can hardly tear myself away from it.
It was during this time that Bonhoeffer decided to rent a nine-acre parcel of land just north of Berlin and build a small cabin on it. The land was in Biesenthal, and the cabin was primitive, made of tar paper and wood. Inside were three bedsteads, a few stools, a table, and a paraffin stove. In a photo in front of this Thoreauvian hovel he strikes a heroic pose, wearing gaiters and smoking a pipe. He would retreat to this place often, sometimes with his students from the university, and sometimes with the boys from Wedding. As he had done with his flat in Berlin, he told them they were welcome anytime. As their confirmation approached, Bonhoeffer realized many of them didn’t have a proper suit for the occasion or money to buy material for one, so he purchased a huge bolt of woolen cloth and cut enough material for each boy.
When one of the boys fell ill, Bonhoeffer visited him in the hospital two or three times a week, and before the operation, he prayed with him. The doctors were convinced his leg would have to be amputated, but quite miraculously it was saved. The boy made a complete recovery and was confirmed with the others.
The Sunday of their confirmation was March 13, 1932. That same day a national election was being held to determine who would be president. Nazi rowdies rode around in the backs of trucks with megaphones, stirring things up. A month earlier Hitler was found ineligible to run since he was born and reared in Austria. But this problem was strenuously shoved through a loophole, and he would run after all. So that Sunday was not a quiet one in Wedding. But even with this Nazi hubbub, the service went off without a hitch. Bonhoeffer’s sermon to the boys was gentler than his other sermons of that time:
Dear Confirmation Candidates!
When in the last days before your confirmation I asked you many times what you hoped to hear in your confirmation address, I often received the answer: we want a serious warning which we shall remember all our lives. And I can assure you that whoever listens well today will receive a warning or two by the way; but look, life itself gives us enough and too many serious warnings today; and so today I must not make your prospect for the future seem harder and darker than it already is—and I know that many of you know a great many of the hard facts of life. Today you are not to be given fear of life but courage; and so today in the Church we shall speak more than ever of hope, the hope that we have and which no one can take from you.
He invited them to a service two days later so they could celebrate Communion together. That next weekend was Easter, and he took a large group of them to Friedrichsbrunn. His cousin Hans-Christoph came along to help manage them. Bonhoeffer wrote his parents:
I am delighted to be able to be up here with the confirmation boys; even though they do not show any special appreciation of the woods and nature, they are enthusiastic about climbing in the Bode valley and playing Füssball on the field. It is often by no means easy to keep these predominantly antisocial boys under control. . . . I think that afterwards you will not notice any ill-effects on the house as a result of these occupants. Apart from a broken windowpane, everything is as it was. . . . Only Frau S. [the housekeeper] is somewhat indignant at the proletarian invasion. . . . On Thursday it will all be over.
Five months later Bonhoeffer was at Friedrichsbrunn again, under different circumstances. Four generations of Bonhoeffers gathered to celebrate Julie Tafel Bonhoeffer’s ninetieth birthday. Christel and Hans von Dohnanyi’s son, Christoph, had not yet celebrated his second birthday. Nonetheless, in the well-worn family tradition, he memorized and recited a verse for his great-grandmother:
When you were once as small as me
One rode upon a steed;
When I am someday old as you
we’ll travel to the moon.
Although many of them were not Christians, they embodied the values that made it possible for Bonhoeffer to become a Christian in a world that was quickly turning in every other direction, whether toward unbridled materialism or nationalistic emotionalism. They maintained decorum and civility amidst madness and barbarism. Bonhoeffer was therefore skeptical of the pietistic branches of the Christian faith that would have had him push away from his family and “the world.”
Because he continued to remain in their midst as he did, the fullness of his life as a Christian pastor and theologian was not hidden from them. It was no small thing to become a theologian in a family whose father was one of the world’s leading doctors and whose eldest son was splitting atoms with Planck and Einstein. But it was another thing entirely to move away from the theology of his distinguished and respected great-grandfather, Karl August Hase, or his esteemed Grunewald neighbor Alfred von Harnack, to the theology that had him talking to his students about loving Jesus or talking about God to the lower classes in their tenement flats in Wedding.
Bonhoeffer’s family could not have helped noticing the change that had taken place in him between the time he had left for Manhattan and now, but the change was not an ungainly, embarrassing leap from which he would have to retreat slightly when he gained more maturity and perspective. It was by all accounts a deepening consistent with what had gone before. He never made any sharp turns that would give his family members cause for concern, nor did he attempt to “evangelize” them in any clumsy, desperate way. Rather, he continued to honor his mother and his father, was always respectful to his family members, and continued to uphold the values he had been raised with. His opposition to self-indulgent emotionalism and “phraseology” was the same as ever; his opposition to the National Socialists and all they represented was the same as ever. In light of all this, his faith, like the faith of his mother, Paula Bonhoeffer, was rather difficult to argue with, however one might have wished to do so.
A few years later, in 1936, Bonhoeffer wrote his brother-in-law Rüdiger Schleicher, who was as liberal theologically as Bonhoeffer was conservative. It says much about their relationship that he could write such things:
First of all I will confess quite simply—I believe that the Bible alone is the answer to all our questions, and that we need only to ask repeatedly and a little humbly, in order to receive this answer. One cannot simply read the Bible, like other books. One must be prepared really to enquire of it. Only thus will it reveal itself. Only if we expect from it the ultimate answer, shall we receive it. That is because in the Bible God speaks to us. And one cannot simply think about God in one’s own strength, one has to enquire of him. Only if we seek him, will he answer us. Of course it is also possible to read the Bible like any other book, that is to say from the point of view of textual criticism, etc.; there is nothing to be said against that. Only that that is not the method which will reveal to us the heart of the Bible, but only the surface, just as we do not grasp the words of someone we love by taking them to bits, but by simply receiving them, so that for days they go on lingering in our minds, simply because they are the words of a person we love; and just as these words reveal more and more of the person who said them as we go on, like Mary, “pondering them in our heart,” so it will be with the words of the Bible. Only if we will venture to enter into the words of the Bible, as though in them this God were speaking to us who loves us and does not will to leave us along with our questions, only so shall we learn to rejoice in the Bible. . . .
If it is I who determine where God is to be found, then I shall always find a God who corresponds to me in some way, who is obliging, who is connected with my own nature. But if God determines where he is to be found, then it will be in a place which is not immediately pleasing to my nature and which is not at all congenial to me. This place is the Cross of Christ. And whoever would find him must go to the foot of the Cross, as the Sermon on the Mount commands. This is not according to our nature at all, it is entirely contrary to it. But this is the message of the Bible, not only in the New but also in the Old Testament. . . .
And I would like to tell you now quite personally: since I have learnt to read the Bible in this way—and this has not been for so very long—it becomes every day more wonderful to me. I read it in the morning and the evening, often during the day as well, and every day I consider a text which I have chosen for the whole week, and try to sink deeply into it, so as really to hear what it is saying. I know that without this I could not live properly any longer.
* . He preached there a number of times during those years, filling in for his friend, the pastor Gerhard Jacobi, who became a close ally in the church struggles of the 1930s.
* . Bonhoeffer was ordained on November 15, 1931, at St. Matthew’s Church near Potsdam Palace.