CHAPTER 14
BONHOEFFER IN LONDON
And I believe that the whole of Christendom should pray with us that it will be a “resistance unto death,” and that the people will be found to suffer it.
—DIETRICH BONHOEFFER
In the late summer and fall of 1933, after Heckel invited him to pastor the two German congregations in London, Bonhoeffer thought about what to do. There were two main reasons to go. First, there was the grounding experience of honest “parish work” or “church work,” as he sometimes called it. He had begun to see that the overemphasis on the cerebral and intellectual side of theological training had produced pastors who didn’t know how to live as Christians, but knew only how to think theologically. Integrating the two was increasingly important to him. Second, he wished to push away from the church struggle in Germany, to gain perspective on the bigger picture, which, as far as he was concerned, went far beyond mere church politics. In a letter to Erwin Sutz, he wrote:
Although I am working with all my might for the church opposition, it is perfectly clear to me that this opposition is only a very temporary transition to an opposition of a very different kind, and that very few of those engaged in this preliminary skirmish will be part of the next struggle. And I believe that the whole of Christendom should pray with us that it will be a “resistance unto death,” and that the people will be found to suffer it.
Even his closest allies, such as Franz Hildebrandt, could not see what he was seeing. He seemed to be operating on an impossibly high theological plane, seeing things in the distance that were invisible to those around him. It must have been frustrating for him and for them. Jean Lasserre’s influence upon him had given Bonhoeffer a deep love for the Sermon on the Mount, and that opened the door to the perspective he now had on what was happening and what lay ahead.
There were other levels of meaning and depth to what he was facing. While Hildebrandt, Niemöller, and Jacobi were thinking about how to defeat Müller, Bonhoeffer was thinking about God’s highest call, about the call of discipleship and its cost. He was thinking about Jeremiah and about God’s call to partake in suffering, even unto death. Bonhoeffer was working it out in his head at the same time that he was thinking about what the next move should be with Heckel and the church struggle. He was thinking about the deep call of Christ, which was not about winning, but about submission to God, wherever that might lead. In the letter to Sutz, he said,
Simply suffering—that is what will be needed then—not parries, blows or thrusts such as may still be possible or admissible in the preliminary fight; the real struggle that perhaps lies ahead must simply be to suffer faithfully. . . . [F]or sometime [the church struggle] hasn’t even been about what it appears to be about; the lines have been drawn somewhere else entirely.
It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Bonhoeffer was somehow thinking prophetically, that somehow he could see what was ahead of him, that at some point he would be able to do nothing more than “suffer faithfully” in his cell, praising God as he did so, thanking him for the high privilege of being counted worthy to do so.
On the other hand, on the much more mundane level of church politics—on the level of that “preliminary fight”—it seemed clear enough that he could be more effective from across the Channel. In London he would not be as directly under the authority of the Reich church, not as much under the watchful eye of the church or political authorities in Berlin. He would also be free to work with ecumenical contacts to tell the truth about what was happening inside Germany. This was important and would have been impossible while still in Germany.
It was during this period in London that he became close to the man who would become a dear friend as well as his most important ecumenical contact, George Bell, the bishop of Chichester.
There was one other man in the world whose influence and friendship meant as much as his relationship with Bishop Bell would mean to him. That man was Karl Barth. But Barth’s apparent rebuff—on whether the approval of the Aryan Paragraph at the Brown Synod constituted a status confessionis—had been difficult to digest. So Bonhoeffer hadn’t been inclined to tell Barth he was going to London. On October 24, a week or so after he arrived, he finally wrote Barth:
If one were going to discover quite definite reasons for such decisions after the event, one of the strongest, I believe, was that I simply did not any longer feel up to the questions and demands that came to me. I feel that, in some way I don’t understand, I find myself in radical opposition to all my friends; I became increasingly isolated with my views of things, even though I was and remain personally close to these people. All this has frightened me and shaken my confidence so that I began to fear that dogmatism might be leading me astray—since there seemed no particular reason why my own view in these matters should be any better, any more right, than the views of many really capable pastors whom I sincerely respect.
On November 20 came Barth’s reply:
Dear Colleague!
You can deduce from the very way in which I address you that I do not regard your departure for England as anything but a necessary personal interlude. Once you had this thing on your mind, you were quite right not to ask for my wise counsel first. I would have advised you against it absolutely, and probably by bringing up my heaviest artillery. And now, as you are mentioning the matter to me after the fact, I can honestly not tell you anything but “Hurry back to your post in Berlin!” . . . With your splendid theological armor and your upright German figure, should you not perhaps be almost a little ashamed at a man like Heinrich Vogel, who, wizened and worked up as he is, is just always there, waving his arms like a windmill and shouting “Confession! Confession!” in his own way—in power or in weakness, that doesn’t matter so much—actually giving his testimony? . . . Be glad that I do not have you here in person, for I would let go at you urgently in quite a different way, with the demand that you must not let go of all these intellectual flourishes and special considerations, however interesting they may be, and think of only one thing—that you are a German, that the house of your church is on fire, that you know enough and can say what you know well enough to be able to help, and that you must return to your post by the next ship. Given the situation, shall we say the ship after next? . . . Please take it [this letter] in the friendly spirit in which it is intended. If I were not so attached to you, I would not let fly at you in this way.
With sincere greetings,
Karl Barth
Bishop George Bell
In London that fall, Bonhoeffer met Bishop George Bell, who would figure prominently in his life from that point forward. Bell was also the man to whom Bonhoeffer would direct his final words, just hours before he was executed. Bell and Bonhoeffer shared a February 4 birthday, although Bell was born in 1883. Bell and Karl Barth were two decades older than Bonhoeffer, and were the only men who ever functioned as anything like mentors. To his friends such as Franz Hildebrandt, Bonhoeffer would soon affectionately refer to Bell as Uncle George, though never to his face.
Bell was an impressive character. While a student at Christ Church, Oxford, he had won a major poetry award there, and after his appointment as chaplain to the famous Archbishop Randall Davidson, he went on to write Davidson’s biography, a monumental, definitive work of 1,400 pages. Bell got involved in the ecumenical movement after the First War and became one of its major figures. It was the ecumenical movement that brought him together with Bonhoeffer, who became his chief connection to the horrors unfolding in Germany. While dean of Canterbury, Bell had invited Dorothy Sayers and Christopher Fry as guest artists, but his most important invitation would be in 1935, when he commissioned T. S. Eliot to write the play Murder in the Cathedral, which dramatized the murder of Thomas à Becket that had taken place there in 1170. The play was an obvious criticism of the Nazi regime and premiered in the eponymous cathedral on June 15, 1935. Bell had also invited Gandhi to Canterbury and later provided the principal connection between him and Bonhoeffer.
Germany’s relations with England at this time were complicated. Hitler desperately wanted to put forward an image of himself as someone the international community could trust, and throughout the thirties, he had many friends and allies in English aristocratic circles. Bishop Bell was not among them. In late 1933, the Nazis desperately hoped to curry favor with the Anglicans over the impending consecration of Ludwig Müller as Reich bishop. Two leading German Christians, Joachim Hossenfelder and Professor Karl Fezer, were deputized to travel to England, there to spread the manure of Hitler’s propaganda. Though not one of its witting consumers, Frank Buchman of the Oxford Movement had been the one to extend the invitation.
Buchman was an important evangelical Christian of the early twentieth century. He typified many well-meaning persons in being blind enough to Hitler’s true nature to reach out to him when he might better have spoken out against him. But when Germany was reeling from the Weimar years, the man who unfailingly presented himself as an enemy of the godless Bolsheviks, and as a friend of the churches, was difficult to dismiss. In this, and in his desire to convert leaders to the Christian faith, Buchman seemed to have overlooked the biblical injunction to possess the wisdom of serpents. He naively hoped to convert Hitler and reached out to him and the German Christians.
But Hossenfelder and Fezer’s fertilization campaign did not produce the growth they had hoped. The British papers were properly suspicious of Hitler’s clerical envoys. Other than modest success with the pro-Hitler bishop of Gloucester, Arthur Cayley Headlam, they were generally rebuffed.
Bonhoeffer, however, had great success. His first meeting with George Bell was on November 21 in Chichester at the bishop’s residence, and the two quickly became friends. Because Bell had been in Berlin the previous April, when the German Christians held their conference, he knew more of the situation in Germany than Bonhoeffer expected. In fact, on returning from his trip that April, Bell publicly alerted the international community about the anti-Semitism he had witnessed, and that September he had put forward a motion protesting the Aryan Paragraph and the German church’s acceptance of it. In future years, Bonhoeffer would be Bell’s principal source of information on what was happening in Germany, and Bell—who was a member of the House of Lords—would take this information to the British public, often through letters to the London Times. There can be little question that for the next decade, Bell and Bonhoeffer were vital to galvanizing British sentiment against Hitler and the Third Reich.
The London Pastorate
The London church where Bonhoeffer lived was in the southern suburb of Forest Hill. His flat consisted of two large rooms on the second floor of the parsonage, a rambling Victorian house on a hill surrounded by trees and gardens. Most of the other rooms were used by a private German school. The flat was drafty and always cold, and Bonhoeffer was perpetually getting, suffering, and recovering from the flu or some other ailment. The fireplaces were jerry-rigged with small coin-operated gas heaters that helped very little. There was also a problem with mice. Eventually Bonhoeffer and Hildebrandt gave up on keeping the mice out and simply stored their food in tins.
Paula Bonhoeffer tried to help her twenty-seven-year-old bachelor son set up housekeeping from a distance. She shipped several large pieces of furniture to him, including their Bechstein piano, which he played a great deal. She also hired a housekeeper for him.
Although he was physically removed from Berlin, Bonhoeffer managed to keep closely involved in the Sturm und Drang of the church struggle. For one thing, he traveled to Berlin every few weeks. And when he wasn’t visiting Berlin, he was on the phone with someone there, whether Gerhard Jacobi, Martin Niemöller, or his mother, who was as immersed in the church struggle as anyone else. She fed her son every tidbit of information she gathered. Bonhoeffer telephoned Germany so much that the local post office once actually lowered his monumental monthly phone bill, either out of disbelief that it could be accurate or out of pity.
Hildebrandt arrived in London on November 10. Bonhoeffer had said he would meet him at Victoria Station, but was nowhere to be seen. Hildebrandt thought he’d better call the parsonage, but didn’t have the number and knew very little English. He was in the process of struggling to communicate his problem to the telephone operator when Bonhoeffer tapped on the kiosk window, having just arrived. Thereafter Bonhoeffer took it upon himself to teach Hildebrandt English and always sent him shopping, believing that “shopping will always teach the essentials.”
That Christmas, Dietrich gave Hildebrandt an English Bible as a present; it was another way to speed up learning the language. But he also sent Hildebrandt out to buy the Christmas tree, having never changed his mind about shopping as the best method. Wolf-Dieter Zimmermann surprised them by arriving on Christmas Day, bearing a Strasbourg liver pâté. He stayed two weeks and would never forget how Bonhoeffer and Hildebrandt never stopped arguing, though he knew it was never personal:
Usually we had a sumptuous breakfast about 11 a.m. One of us had to fetch The Times from which we learned, during breakfast, of the latest developments in the German Church struggle. Then each of us went about his own task. At 2 p.m. we met again for a light snack. Then there were conversations, interspersed with music, for both played the piano to perfection, solo or together. . . . Many evenings we spent together at home, only occasionally going to see a film or a play, or to other engagements. Such evenings at home were typical of our life in London: theological discussions, music, debates, story-telling, all following one another, passing into one another—till 2 or 3 a.m. Everything broke forth with an enormous vitality.
A friend from the church said there “was always an abundance of humour when Bonhoeffer was around.” Bonhoeffer was constantly joking, whether verbally or in other ways. Sometimes he would start a piano duet in the wrong key until his partner figured out that he had done it on purpose.
Hildebrandt lived with Bonhoeffer in the parsonage for three months. People were constantly visiting. While Zimmermann was there, another Berlin student arrived. Everyone marveled at how Bonhoeffer and Hildebrandt lived “in a state of permanent dispute” that was somehow never acrimonious. They obviously enjoyed the constant theological bickering. It constituted entertainment for them, allowing them to exercise their incredible wit, much of which went over the heads of anyone listening. Hildebrandt’s biographers write that sometimes “when they were both involved in an argument Franz would produce his trump card, his clinching point. At this moment Dietrich would look up and say ‘What was that? I’m sorry I didn’t hear a word.’” Of course he had heard everything. And then the two of them would “dissolve into laughter.”
There were plenty of other visitors. Bonhoeffer’s sister Christel came to visit with her husband, Hans von Dohnanyi; and his sister Susanne came to visit with her husband, Walter Dress, who had been Bonhoeffer’s friend for years and would be a member of the Confessing Church. According to Sabine, sometime during his stay in London, Bonhoeffer took in a St. Bernard dog. When the dog was killed by a car, Bonhoeffer was quite affected by it.
Bonhoeffer was responsible for two congregations, neither of which was large enough to support its own pastor. The Sydenham congregation numbered between thirty and forty, many of whom worked at the German embassy; and the St. Paul’s congregation numbered about fifty, mostly tradesmen. Despite the small numbers, Bonhoeffer prepared his sermons as if he were preaching to thousands. Each sermon was written out by hand, and he mailed them to his friends in Germany, including Elizabeth Zinn.
These expatriate congregations in London were similar to the expatriate congregation he served in Barcelona. As with most ethnic churches abroad, they were the main cultural connection to the homeland. Consequently the theological side of things was less important. As in Barcelona, Bonhoeffer ambitiously introduced new activities to the congregation, including a Sunday school and youth group. He also supervised a nativity play at Christmas and a passion play at Easter.
Also as in Barcelona, his sermons were strong meat for parishioners used to much lighter fare. In fact, they were now more demanding and severe than those he had preached five years earlier. Bonhoeffer had changed much from the twenty-two-year-old in Barcelona; the circumstances of life had obviously grown darker. In some ways it was as if decades had passed. One sign of a deepening seriousness in him was his penchant for eschatological themes and a palpable longing for the “kingdom of heaven,” which he communicated in his sermons. In a letter to Gerhard Leibholz, he wrote that “one feels such a tremendous longing for real peace, in which all the misery and injustice, the lying and cowardice will come to an end.” He had believed these things five years earlier, but now he could feel them too.