CHAPTER 26
BONHOEFFER IN LOVE

Why am I suddenly so cheerful these days? . . . The incredible fact remains, he actually wants to marry me. I still fail to grasp how that can be.

—MARIA VON WEDEMEYER

Just after his trip to Sweden, Bonhoeffer went to Klein-Krössin to visit his dear friend Ruth von Kleist-Retzow on June 8, 1942. Her granddaughter Maria happened to be there. She had just graduated from high school, and before embarking on a year of national service, she decided to spend some time visiting family. “Foremost among these visits,” she recalled,

was one to my grandmother, to whom I had always been close. The feeling was mutual, because she thought I resembled her as a young girl. I had been there a week when the celebrated Pastor Bonhoeffer came to stay. I was a bit put out at first, to be honest, but it very soon emerged that the three of us got on extremely well together. The other two conversed in such a way that I not only felt I understood what they were talking about but was cordially encouraged to join in. Which I did.

I’m afraid I used to take a cocky tone with my grandmother, which amused her, and which I maintained even when Dietrich turned up. We talked about future plans. Grandmother pronounced my plan to study mathematics a silly whim, but Dietrich, perhaps for that very reason, took it seriously.

We went for a stroll in the garden. He said he’d been to America, and we noted with surprise that I’d never before met anyone who had been there.

Maria left the next morning, so they didn’t have much time together, but Bonhoeffer was smitten. As ever, he needed time to process what he was feeling and thinking. But he was taken aback at how affected he had been by the short time spent with this beautiful, intelligent, and confident young woman. She was eighteen.

Until that June, Bonhoeffer thought of her as the twelve-year-old girl too young to take on as a confirmand in 1936 when he agreed to teach her elder brother and two cousins. He had seen her a few times since then in Klein-Krössin and in Kieckow, but perhaps he had not really seen her at all. She was a beautiful and vivacious young woman, and she hoped to study mathematics. Bonhoeffer deeply admired the Pomeranian aristocratic class, but he was surprised to find such an ambition among its women. It would have been typical among the Grunewald set, but here it was a revelation.

Bonhoeffer knew Maria’s family well. Besides his abiding friendship with her grandmother, he had spent much time with her brother Max, who was two years her senior and whom she adored. Max was then a lieutenant serving on the eastern front. Bonhoeffer knew her parents, too, Hans and Ruth von Wedemeyer; a couple more devoutly Christian—and anti-Hitler—did not exist.

Hans von Wedemeyer had been close to Franz von Papen, the Reich chancellor before Hitler. Von Papen was one of the principal figures deluded into thinking he might somehow control Hitler. Hans von Wedemeyer was under no such illusions. His wife recalled his reaction the night Hitler became chancellor: “I had never seen him in a mood of such utter despair, nor did I ever do so again.” Von Papen became Hitler’s vice chancellor, and von Wedemeyer stayed on his staff, but after three months, he could no longer be party to any of it, and quit. It was well he did. One year later, during the Night of the Long Knives, his successor was murdered at his desk.

In 1936 the Nazis came after Wedemeyer for his staunchly anti-Nazi political stance. They launched a press campaign against him and tried to legally bar him from managing his Pätzig estate. In the denouement to the kangaroo court procedures, the Nazi judge forced him to stand for forty-five minutes as he ranted against him, citing his “reprehensible attitude and debased character.” Most of his friends strongly counseled him not to appeal the verdict, but he appealed nonetheless. He prepared his case for a year with help from his cousin Fabian von Schlabrendorff, who became a central figure in the plot against Hitler. Wedemeyer was ultimately cleared of all charges.

Wedemeyer and his wife were also the leaders of the Berneuchen movement, an evangelical movement that aimed to breathe life into the staid Lutheran churches. They hosted a gathering at Pätzig each year.

Hans was now the leader of an infantry battalion near Stalingrad. Like so many of his era, he was caught between his hatred of Hitler and his love of country. The Prussian military class did not shrink from duty, but as with so many others, it disturbed Hans that the man commanding Germany’s armies was so fundamentally unworthy of his position and so intrinsically opposed to all that Hans knew to be right and true.

That week, in the charmed surroundings of Klein-Krössin, Bonhoeffer worked on his book. Whether he and Ruth spoke about Maria as a potential wife is unknown. It’s likely the thought crossed her mind, since she was the most ardent supporter of the union once the couple publicly discussed its possibility. She was also outspoken and strong-willed, and that she suggested the idea to Bonhoeffer cannot be ruled out.

The thirty-six-year-old Bonhoeffer knew that Maria was probably too young or that he was probably too old. He had long ago decided against marriage. When his relationship with Elizabeth Zinn ended six years earlier, he ruled out marriage as incompatible with the life to which he felt called.

Two weeks after leaving Klein-Krössin, Bonhoeffer wrote one of the Finkenwalde ordinands, Gustav Seydel, who had announced his own engagement. Bonhoeffer’s response gives us a glimpse into his thoughts on this issue:

I would like to tell you how greatly I rejoice with you. What always delights me in news like this is the self-assured glimpse into the future and the confidence that there is a reason to look forward to the next day or the next year, the joyful grasping hold of happiness where God still gives it to us. This is—don’t misunderstand me—a protest against all false, inauthentic apocalypticism that is becoming so widespread today, and I hail it as a sign of authentic and healthy faith. As earthly human beings we have to take account of an earthly future. For the sake of this future we must accept tasks, responsibilities, and joys and sorrows. We need not despise happiness simply because there is so much unhappiness. We should not arrogantly push away the kind hand of God because God’s hand is otherwise so hard. I think it is more important to remind one another of this in these days than of many other things, and I received your wedding announcement gratefully as a fine testimony to this very thing. . . . May God also prepare you through this divine kindness to bear again the divine hardship if necessary. ^*

We know these thoughts did not arise simply because of meeting Maria since Bonhoeffer wrote something similar to Erwin Sutz the previous September:

Over the years I have written many a letter for the wedding of one of the brothers and preached many a wedding sermon. The chief characteristic of such occasions essentially rested in the fact that, in the face of the “last” times (I do not mean this to sound quite so apocalyptic), someone dares to take a step of such affirmation of the earth and its future. It was then always very clear to me that a person could take this step as a Christian truly only from within a very strong faith and on the basis of grace. For here in the midst of the final destruction of all things, one desires to build; in the midst of a life lived from hour to hour and from day to day, one desires a future; in the midst of being driven out from the earth, one desires a bit of space; in the midst of widespread misery, one desires some happiness. And the overwhelming thing is that God says yes to this strange longing, that here God consents to our will, whereas it is usually meant to be just the opposite.

Weeks later, Bonhoeffer spoke to Eberhard Bethge about Maria. As with anything, he was trying to work out what he thought God was saying to him. On June 25, he wrote Bethge:

I have not written to Maria. It is truly not time for that yet. If no further meetings are possible, the pleasant thought of a few highly charged minutes will surely eventually dissolve into the realm of unfulfilled fantasies, a realm that in any case is already well populated. On the other side, I do not see how a meeting could be brought off that would be inconspicuous and not painful for her. Even Mrs. von Kleist cannot be expected to arrange this, at least not at my initiation; for I am in fact still not at all clear and decided about this.

On the twenty-seventh, Bonhoeffer flew to Venice with Dohnanyi on Abwehr business. A week later he was in Rome, and on July 10 he was back in Berlin. He planned to be back at Klein-Krössin ten days later, but could not return until August 18. He had no contact with Maria since their meeting. But now, while he was again in Klein-Krössin, tragedy struck. Maria’s father was killed at Stalingrad. He was fifty-four.

Hans von Wedemeyer had been commanding a regiment that, like most at that time, was fatigued and depleted. On the night of August 21, the Russians launched a shell attack, and he was hit. In Hanover, Maria heard of her father’s death and immediately traveled home to Pätzig. On hearing the news her brother Max wrote his mother: “When my thoughts turn to you, Mother, I’m not worried about you. It’s only when I think of dear Maria, with her passionate temperament and extreme sensitivity, that I wonder how she’ll fare.”

Bonhoeffer stayed with Ruth von Kleist-Retzow until the twenty-sixth. On August 21, he wrote Max:

Dear Max,
You have lost your father. I believe I can sense what that means for you and am thinking of you very much. You are still very young to be without a father. But you have learned from him to honor the will of God in everything God gives and in everything God takes away. You have learned from him that a person’s strength comes solely from being united with the will of God. You know that God loved your father and that God loves you and that it was your father’s wish and prayer that you continue to love God, no matter what God sends you and requires of you. Dear Max, as heavy as your heart must be now, let that which your father by God’s goodness planted in you now grow strong. Pray to God with your whole heart to help you preserve and prove what has been given you. You have your mother, your grandmother, your siblings, who will help you; but help them as well. How greatly they will need it. In such times one must struggle through a great deal for oneself alone. You will have to learn out there how one sometimes must come to terms with something alone before God. It is often very difficult, but these are the most important hours of life.

The following day he wrote Frau von Wedemeyer:

My dear lady,
It was around seven years ago that your spouse sat in my Finkenwalde room to speak about the confirmation instruction that Max was to receive at that time. I have never forgotten that meeting. It accompanied me throughout the period of instruction. I knew that Max had already received and would continue to receive what was decisive from his parents’ home. It was also clear to me what it means for a boy today to have a godly father who at the same time stands in the thick of life. When in the course of those years I then came to know almost all your children, I was often extremely impressed by the power of the blessing that emanates from a father who believes in Christ. This is essentially one and the same impression that has become so important to me in my encounters with your entire extended family. . . . This blessing is, of course, not something purely spiritual, but something that works its way deep into earthly life. Under the right blessing, life becomes healthy, secure, expectant, active, precisely because it is lived out of the source of life, strength, joy, activity. . . . If human beings have passed on to loved ones and to many the blessing they have themselves received, then they have surely fulfilled the most important thing in life; then they have surely themselves become persons happy in God and have made others happy in God.

Bonhoeffer returned to Klein-Krössin on September 1 for two days, and again for two days on September 22. Neither time did he see Maria. But he saw her on October 2 in Berlin. It was their first meeting since early June.

Ruth von Kleist-Retzow was in Berlin for an eye operation at the Franciscan hospital, and she had asked Maria to nurse her there. At the sickbed of Maria’s grandmother, the two bumped into each other again. Her thoughts toward him had not been along the lines of his toward her, nor had Bonhoeffer allowed his thoughts to get very far anyway. In any case, he was at the hospital in the role of pastor, and Maria had just lost her father.

Years later, Maria recalled, “Dietrich’s frequent visits [at the hospital] surprised me, and I was impressed by his devotion. We often had long talks together at this time. It was a reunion under different circumstances than in June. Being still deeply affected by my father’s death, I needed Dietrich’s help.” They spent more time together than would have been possible under other circumstances. As a native Berliner, Bonhoeffer played the role of host. One day he invited Maria to lunch, suggesting they go to a small restaurant near the hospital. He said because of the ownership, it was actually the safest place for them to talk freely. It was owned by Hitler’s brother.

On October 15 Bonhoeffer invited Maria to a Bonhoeffer family gathering at his sister Ursula’s home. It was a farewell celebration for his nephew Hans-Walter Schleicher, who was headed off to war the next day. Bonhoeffer thought he would be traveling then and had written Hans-Walter a few days earlier. Given what he knew was happening in Hitler’s war, it is natural that he would feel protective toward his nephew. The letter offers a glimpse of his attitude toward those with whom he would soon be mixing in prison:

Hans-Walter,
You are, of course, entering into your life as a soldier differently from most of your contemporaries. You have a foundation of values. You have received certain fundamental concepts of life. You know—perhaps partly still unconsciously, but that doesn’t matter here—what treasures a good family life, good parents, right and truth, humanity and education, and tradition are. You yourself have been making music for years and in recent years have read many books, all of which has not simply washed over you without any effect. And finally, you also somehow know what the Bible, the Lord’s Prayer, and church music are. Out of this, however, you have received an image of Germany that can never be entirely lost to you, that will accompany you into the war, and for which you will stand up wherever you are and no matter who might confront you. Perhaps as a soldier you are freer for this than we others. But it is clear, and you yourself know it as well, that because of this you will face conflicts, not only with those who are coarse by nature, whose power will shock you in the next few weeks, but simply because you, precisely because you come from a family of this kind, are different from most other people, different even into the smallest externals. The important thing is thus only that one conceive the ways one has an edge on others (and you definitely do!) not as your due but as a gift, and that you place yourself entirely at others’ disposal and truly like them, despite their different way of being.

That evening Maria met Bonhoeffer’s parents and siblings. Bethge was likely there too. That evening, after returning to her aunt’s home, where she was staying, Maria wrote in her diary:

I had a very interesting talk with Pastor Bonhoeffer. He said it was a tradition with us that young men should volunteer for military service and lay down their lives for a cause of which they mightn’t approve at all. But there must also be people able to fight from conviction alone. If they approved of the grounds for war, well and good. If not, they could best serve the Fatherland by operating on the internal front, perhaps even by working against the regime. It would thus be their task to avoid serving in the armed forces for as long as possible—and even, under certain circumstances, if they wouldn’t reconcile it with their conscience, to be conscientious objectors.

Oh, it’s all so logically clear and obvious. But isn’t it terrible, when I think of my father?

Her diary from the next day showed Bonhoeffer was not shy in sharing something of his role in the conspiracy. Of course Maria’s uncle Henning von Tresckow was a major figure in the conspiracy, and she was related to many of the others, including von Schlabrendorff.

Oct. 16. I now know that a man like Dietrich, who truly feels he has an inner mission to help his country and is a personality capable of forming an objective opinion, is right to be useful to Germany in another way and avoiding military service for as long as possible. And it’s very responsible of him to seek out the genuinely right course of action. It’s so easy to become a grumbler, a person who condemns and carps at everything on principle and sees an ulterior motive behind it.

Two days later, a Sunday, Bonhoeffer was at the hospital to visit Ruth von Kleist-Retzow. He performed morning devotions there, taking as his text Ephesians 5:15-21. Maria recalled:

Oct. 18th. “Make the most of your time!” Pastor Bonhoeffer took morning service today. “Time belongs to death, or, still more so, to the devil. We must buy it from him and return it to God, to whom it must really belong.”—“If we inquire the will of God, free from all doubt and all mistrust, we shall discover it.”—“Always give thanks for all things.”— “Everything we cannot thank God for, we reproach him for.”

Bonhoeffer’s sense of propriety and his desire to be a pastoral comfort to Maria must have made it easier to avoid thinking too much about a future with her. Neither seemed to have breathed a word indicating this was more than a family pastor ministering to an older woman and her granddaughter who had just lost her father. And yet they enjoyed each other’s company; perhaps the constraints of the situation made it easier to relax with each other.

Then on October 26, fresh tragedy struck. Maria’s brother Max was killed. On the thirty-first, Bonhoeffer wrote her:

Dear Miss von Wedemeyer,
If I might be allowed to say only this to you, I believe I have an inkling of what Max’s death means for you.

It can scarcely help to tell you I too share in this pain.

At such times it can only help us to cast ourselves upon the heart of God, not with words but truly and entirely. This requires many difficult hours, day and night, but when we have let go entirely into God—or better, when God has received us—then we are helped. “Weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes in the morning” (Psalm 30:5). There really is joy with God, with Christ! Do believe it.

But each person must walk this way alone—or rather, God draws each person onto it individually. Only prayers and the encouragement of others can accompany us along this way.

If ever there was a time to put aside thoughts of a romantic relationship, this was it. Other than his conversations with Bethge, it’s doubtful Bonhoeffer mentioned his feelings to anyone. Maria had no such feelings to speak of, and therefore cannot have seen him as more than a friendly and devout pastor friend. It was in that context that Bonhoeffer expected to travel to Pomerania to be at Max’s memorial service.

But somehow, Maria’s grandmother, who had been watching them from her hospital bed for weeks—and had doubtless noticed their chemistry in June—had other ideas. She foolishly mentioned them to her daughter. Maria’s mother now sent Bonhoeffer a letter asking him not to come to the funeral. He was stunned. Frau von Wedemeyer felt her daughter was too young to be engaged to Pastor Bonhoeffer and thought any discussion of it inappropriate at such a time. Bonhoeffer was shocked to think any of this could be in the open. That anyone was discussing these things when he himself had not discussed them was a horror. On the eleventh, after getting the letter from Maria’s mother, Bonhoeffer called Ruth von Kleist-Retzow immediately, knowing she had started the trouble.

Maria was blindsided by the whole thing. She wrote Bonhoeffer a letter saying that she had learned that her mother “had asked you not to come for the memorial service, just because of some stupid family gossip which Grandmother has rather encouraged.” As far as Maria was concerned, there was nothing to it, except that she was embarrassed.

Bonhoeffer responded:

November 13, 1942
Dear Miss von Wedemeyer,
Your letter has brought a salutary clarity into an unnecessarily confused situation. With my whole heart I thank you for this, as well as for the courage with which you have taken the bull by the horns. You will surely understand that I was unable to find your mother’s request entirely comprehensible; what I did understand readily—because it corresponds to my own feelings—was simply the wish not to be worried and burdened by something else altogether in these difficult days and weeks. Whatever else may have spurred her request was not spelled out in the letter, and I had no right to inquire about it. . . .

You, as much as or perhaps even more than I, will perceive as a painful inner burden that things not suitable for discussion were brought out into the open. Let me say openly that I cannot easily quite come to terms with your grandmother’s behavior; I told her countless times that I did not wish to discuss such things, in fact that this would do violence to all parties. I believed that it was because of her illness and age that she could not cherish silently in her heart what she believed she was witnessing. My conversations with her were often difficult to endure; she did not heed my request. I then interpreted your premature departure from Berlin within that context and was grieved by it. . . . We must make great effort to bear no hard feelings toward her.

But in this letter, in a sidewise, ever-so-gentle way, Bonhoeffer took the opportunity of this opening up of things, however unintended, to hint his way forward:

 . . . only from a peaceful, free, healed heart can anything good and right take place; I have experienced that repeatedly in life, and I pray (forgive me for speaking thus) that God may grant us this, soon and very soon.

Can you understand all this? Might you experience it just as I do? I hope so, in fact, I cannot conceive of anything else. But how difficult this is for you too!

 . . . Please forgive me this letter, which says so clumsily what I am feeling. I realize that words intended to say personal things come only with tremendous difficulty to me; this is a great burden for those around me. Your grandmother has often enough reproached me severely for my aloofness; she herself is so completely different, but people must of course accept and bear one another as they are. . . . I am writing your grandmother very briefly, urging her to silence and patience. I will write to your mother tomorrow, that she not get upset at whatever your grandmother may be writing; the thought of it horrifies me.

What Maria really thought after reading his letter is unknown, but this might have been her first inkling that he had feelings for her. He wrote her again two days later, on November 15. Between what was happening in the Wedemeyer family and all else in the world around them, it was a tumultuous and confusing time. Bonhoeffer mentioned the suicide of a prominent composer of church music, Hugo Distler, in despair at the deportation of Jewish friends: “Now I hear that he took his own life in his office at the cathedral, Bible and cross in hand. . . . He was thirty years old. I am quite shaken by this. Why was no one able to help him?”

Frau von Wedemeyer was displeased about the spate of letters and must have had unpleasant conversations with her mother and daughter. On the nineteenth she called Bonhoeffer at his parents’ home. She said Maria did not wish to receive any more letters, although it’s as likely that Frau von Wedemeyer herself made this decision on her daughter’s behalf. Bonhoeffer wrote Maria later that day:

Dear Miss von Wedemeyer,
Your mother called me this morning and told me of your wish. The telephone is a very inadequate means of communication, not least because I was unable to be alone during the conversation. Please forgive me if I have burdened you too greatly with my letters. I had not wished this but desired your peace of mind. It appears—this was how I was obliged to understand your mother—that at the moment we are unable to give this to each other. So I ask it of God for you and for us and will wait until God shows us our way. Only in peace with God, with others, and with ourselves will we hear and do God’s will. In this we may have great confidence and need not become impatient or act rashly.

Do not think I failed to understand that you do not want to respond and cannot and most likely also did not wish to receive this letter. But if the timing proves feasible for me to come again to Klein-Krössin at some point in the not too distant future, your wishes would not forbid this? This is what I understand, in any case.

Please forget every word that hurt you and burdened you further beyond what has already been laid on you by God.

I have written to your mother that I needed to write you briefly once more.—

God protect you and us all.

Sincerely yours,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer Proposes

What happened next is anyone’s guess, but the well-meaning grandmother’s big mouth had flushed the bird from its hiding place. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way; suddenly everything was out in the open. On November 24, Bonhoeffer traveled to Pätzig to visit with Frau von Wedemeyer. Somehow, in a thunderclap of time, Bonhoeffer had decided he wanted to marry Maria von Wedemeyer. He was going to ask her mother’s permission to propose.

Bonhoeffer respected Frau von Wedemeyer, but feared she might be overly pious. He wrote Bethge three days later: “Contrary to my fears that the house would have an excessive spiritual tone, its style made a very pleasant impression.” Frau von Wedemeyer was “calm, friendly, and not overwrought, as I had feared.” She was not unalterably opposed to the match, but “given the enormity of the decision,” she proposed a yearlong separation. Bonhoeffer responded that “these days a year could just as well become five or ten and thus represented a postponement into the incalculable.” Nonetheless he told Frau von Wedemeyer that he “understood and recognized her maternal authority over her daughter.” Bonhoeffer didn’t expect it would really be a year, but didn’t want to force the issue, especially since Frau von Wedemeyer had been recently widowed.

When they finished their conversation, Frau von Wedemeyer asked Bonhoeffer to talk to her mother, to let her know where things stood. Maria’s grandmother promptly blew up on hearing that her daughter would take such a severe stand, and Bonhoeffer realized the feisty Ruth would probably cause more trouble. Bonhoeffer didn’t see Maria during his visit, but gathered from her mother that she was generally amenable to the separation, although she obviously had little say in the matter.

During this very same time, Eberhard Bethge proposed marriage to Bonhoeffer’s sixteen-year-old niece, Renate Schleicher. Her parents, Ursula and Rüdiger, were concerned about the match for similar reasons, Bethge then being thirty-three. Bonhoeffer wrote Bethge with the details of his visit to Klein-Krössin and then turned to Bethge’s situation. The Schleichers had also suggested a lengthy separation. “If it begins to look ominous for you,” Bonhoeffer said, “. . . I shall in that case say something about my own situation; then for once they will consider your situation not only from Renate’s perspective but also from your own. But for now I shall hold my peace.”

Maria’s diary three days, a month, and six weeks later show us the progress of her feelings:

Nov. 27th. Why am I suddenly so cheerful these days? I feel safe, for one thing, because I can now postpone all my musings, deliberations and worries till later. But shelving them surely can’t be responsible for this sense of relief. Ever since Mother told me on the phone about her meeting with Dietrich, I feel I can breathe freely again. He made a considerable impression on Mother, that’s obvious—he couldn’t fail to.

The incredible fact remains, he actually wants to marry me. I still fail to grasp how that can be.

19 December 1942. Pätzig.

I thought coming home might be the one thing that could shake my resolve. I still believed I was under the influence of Grandmother, or rather, of her own exaggerated and unrealistic idea, but it isn’t true. The innermost reality still stands, even though I don’t love him. But I know that I will love him.

Oh, there are so many superficial arguments against it. He’s old and wise for his age—a thoroughgoing academic, I suppose. How will I, with my love of dancing, riding, sport, pleasure, be able to forgo all those things? . . . Mother says he’s an idealist and hasn’t given it careful thought. I don’t believe that.

10 Jan 1943. On the way here I had the talk with Mother, the one I had longed for so eagerly but feared so greatly. It caused tears—hot, heavy tears—“and yet, what happiness to be loved. . . .” Was it good and productive? I pray so, because I feel that it was, and is, crucial to my life. I pray, too, that I didn’t just talk Mother round but convinced her—that she isn’t just giving in to me but can look upon it as the proper course.

“Today I Can Say Yes to You”

Bonhoeffer had no communication with Maria since November, but on January 10 Maria spoke with her mother and uncle Hans Jürgen von Kleist-Retzow, who was her guardian, and persuaded them to allow her to write Bonhoeffer. She wrote on the thirteenth:

Dear Pastor Bonhoeffer,

I’ve known, ever since arriving home, that I must write to you, and I’ve looked forward to doing so.

I recently spoke with my mother and my uncle from Kieckow. I’m now able to write to you, and to ask you to answer this letter.

It is so difficult for me to have to put in writing what even in person can scarcely be spoken. I wish to rebut every word that wants to be spoken here, because words are so clumsy and forceful with things that want to be said gently. But because I have experienced that you understand me so well, I now have the courage to write you, although I actually have no right at all to reply to a question you have not even asked me. Today I can say Yes to you from my entire, joyful heart.

Please understand my mother’s reluctance to waive the delay she imposed on us. She still can’t believe, from past experience, that our decision will hold good. And I myself am always saddened to think that Grandmother has told you only nice things about me, so you form a false picture of me. Perhaps I should tell you a lot of bad things about myself, because it makes me unhappy to think that you could love me for what I’m not.

But I can’t believe that anyone can like me so much for what I really am. I certainly have no wish to hurt you, but I must say this anyway:

If you’ve realized that I’m not good enough, or that you no longer want to come to me, I beg you to say so. I can still ask you that now; and how infinitely harder it will be if I’m forced to recognize it later on. I myself am quite convinced that I need some more time in which to put my decision to the test, and because I know my time in the Red Cross will be hard, it’s essential to me.

This is our business alone, isn’t it, not anyone else’s. I’m so scared of what other people say, even Grandmother. Can you grant this request?

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for all you’ve done for me recently. I can only guess how difficult it must have been, because I myself have often found it hard to endure.

Yours, Maria

Bonhoeffer wrote back immediately. For the first time he addressed her by her Christian name, and early in the second paragraph, in the phrase “dear Maria, I thank you for your word,” switched to the informal du:

Dear Maria,
The letter was under way for four days before just now—an hour ago— arriving here! In an hour the mail is being picked up again, so at least an initial greeting and thanks must go with it—even if the words I wish to say now have not yet emerged. May I simply say what is in my heart? I sense and am overwhelmed by the awareness that a gift without equal has been given me—after all the confusion of the past weeks I had no longer dared to hope—and now the unimaginably great and blissful thing is simply here, and my heart opens up and becomes quite wide and overflowing with thankfulness and shame and still cannot grasp it at all—this “Yes” that is to be decisive for our entire life. If we were now able to talk in person with each other, there would be so infinitely much—yet fundamentally only always one and the same thing—to say! Is it possible that we will see each other soon? And where? Without having to be afraid of others’ words again? Or for one reason or another shall this still not happen? I think now it must happen.

And now I cannot speak any differently than I have often done in my own heart—I want to speak to you as a man speaks to the girl with whom he wants to go through life and who has given him her Yes—dear Maria, I thank you for your word, for all that you have endured for me and for what you are and will be for me. Let us now be and become happy in each other. Whatever time and calm you need to compose yourself, as you write, you must have, in whatever form is good for you. You alone can know that. With your “Yes” I can now also wait peacefully; without the Yes it was difficult and would have become increasingly difficult; now it is easy since I know that you want this and need it. I wish in no way to push or frighten you. I want to care for you and allow the dawning joy of our life to make you light and happy. I understand well that you wish to be entirely alone for a time yet—I have been alone long enough in my life to know the blessing (though, to be sure, also the dangers) of solitude. I understand and understood also throughout these past weeks—if not entirely without pain—that for you it cannot be easy to say Yes to me, and I will never forget that. And it is this, your Yes, which alone can give me the courage as well no longer to say only No to myself. Say no more about the “false image” I could have of you. I want no “image,” I want you, just as I beg you with my whole heart to want not an image of me but me myself; and you must know those are two different things. But let us not dwell now on the bad that lurks and has power in every person, but let us encounter each other in great, free forgiveness and love, let us take each other as we are—with thanks and boundless trust in God, who has led us to this point and now loves us.

This letter must be off immediately so that you will receive it tomorrow. God protect you and us both.

Your faithful Dietrich

With that, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was engaged. They would look back on January 17 as the official date. It would be an engagement like few in the world. Of course, had either known what was ahead, they would have arranged things quite differently. But no one knew what was ahead, nor could know. But Bonhoeffer had cast his cares and expectations upon God. He knew that he and his engagement to Maria were in God’s hands.

They were still obliged to wait. But now it was a different kind of waiting. In a sense they already belonged to each other and could enjoy belonging to each other, even as they were apart. Bonhoeffer had much to occupy him. Though he wasn’t quite sure of it yet, the Gestapo was on his tail, and the conspiracy was racing forward with yet another plan to kill Hitler.

When six days passed and Bonhoeffer had not heard from her, he wrote again, even if it was only to tell Maria that all was well and that she should not feel rushed. “At the moment,” he said, “it seems to me as if it were in fact God commanding us to wait until we are shown the way.”

The next day, Sunday the twenty-fourth, he received her letter. She asked him whether they might wait six months before they corresponded. Whether her mother had persuaded her to ask this is not known, and it seemed to surprise Bonhoeffer, but he was too happy to be bothered by much. He was in love.

My dear Maria,
Now the letter is here, your kind letter—I thank you for it and thank you anew each new time I read it, indeed to me it is almost as if I were experiencing now for the first time in my life what it means to be thankful to another person, what a profoundly transforming power gratitude can be—it is the Yes—this word so difficult and so marvelous, appearing so seldom among mortals—from which all this springs—may God from whom every Yes comes grant that we may speak this Yes always thus and always more and more to one another throughout our entire life.

From every word of your letter I have sensed with joyful certainty that it will be good between us. The life together, toward which through God’s goodness we hope to move, is like a tree that must grow from deep roots silent and hidden, strong and free.

He also asked Maria to inform her grandmother of their new situation and to keep from having any further misunderstandings with the strong-willed woman.

The day after Bonhoeffer’s thirty-seventh birthday, he heard from Ruth von Kleist-Restow. Maria had told her the news.

You know utterly without saying how I desire to receive you fully as a son, when the time comes. That it should still take so long is probably the decision of [her] mother and Hans-Jürgen, I am presuming. Perhaps this is the right thing for M., so that she remains quite clear. And if it appears too long for her and you, then there will be means and ways to shorten it. What does time mean today anyway? . . . Oh, I am happy.

Grandmother

* . Seydel was killed in action in the Ukraine in October 1943.