CHAPTER 28
CELL 92 AT TEGEL PRISON

I can’t go on like this. I have to know—are you really in danger?

—MARIA VON WEDEM EYER

Who stands fast? Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God—the responsible man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God.  

—DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

The isolated use and handing down of the famous term ‘religionless Christianity’ has made Bonhoeffer the champion of an undialectical shallow modernism which obscures all that he wanted to tell us about the living God.

—EB ERHARD BETHGE

On April 5, Bonhoeffer was at home. Around noon, he called the Dohnanyis. Their phone was answered by an unfamiliar man’s voice. Bonhoeffer hung up. He knew what was happening: the Gestapo had finally made their move. They were at the Dohnanyis, searching the house. Bonhoeffer calmly went next door to see Ursula and told her what had happened and what would likely happen next: the Gestapo would arrive and arrest him too. She prepared a large meal for him, and then Bonhoeffer went back home to put his papers in order, since the Gestapo would be having a good look around, as was their habit. He had prepared for this moment for a long time and even left a few notes specifically for their benefit.

Then he returned to the Schleichers and waited. At four o’clock Bonhoeffer’s father came over and told him that two men wished to speak with him. They were upstairs in his room. It was Judge Advocate Manfred Roeder and a Gestapo official named Sonderegger. Bonhoeffer met them, and taking his Bible with him, he was escorted to their black Mercedes and taken away. He would never return.

The Engagement to Maria

In the three months between his engagement and his arrest, Bonhoeffer had been in the midst of a moratorium on communication with Maria. The agreement was that they would wait a year before marrying. Maria had asked that they not write each other for six months, presumably beginning in late January, after their engagement. It was a long time to wait, but Bonhoeffer was willing to do so with joy, as he said in his letter. Maria had another way of dealing with it. She would write Dietrich, but would not mail the letters. She wrote her letters in her diary. Perhaps the idea was that Dietrich could read them once the separation was over.

And so in February and March, while the Gestapo was closing in on Bonhoeffer and Dohnanyi, Maria wrote to him in her diary a few times. She often expressed concern that he hardly knew what he was getting in her, that her youth and free-spirited personality made her somehow unworthy of him. He went to great pains to assure her she was mistaken. Nonetheless, in her “letter” to him on February 3, she wrote him from Pätzig:

If you could see me here like this, I think there are times when you wouldn’t care for me at all. For instance when I ride like a maniac and talk dialect to the farmhands. I sometimes give a start and think you’d be sorry to see me that way. When I play the gramophone and hop across the room on one foot, pulling on a stocking with a huge great hole in it, I flop down on the bed in horror at the thought that you might see me like that. I also do far worse things. I smoke a cigar because I’ve never smoked one but simply have to know what it’s like, and then I feel so ghastly that I can’t eat any lunch or supper. Or I get up in the night, put on a long dress, and dance wildly around the drawing-room, or go for a walk with Harro [the dog] and sleep all next morning.

I can understand you’d find that awful, and I’ll certainly try not to do it when you’re here, but it happens of its own accord sometimes, and I have to let off steam somehow. Still, I’m sure the Red Cross will improve my behavior a bit and save you the job. ^*

Maria didn’t seem to know of the danger facing her fiancé in the months before his arrest—until her overly talkative grandmother gave her reason to worry in a letter on February 16. The letter hinted at Bonhoeffer’s danger enough to upset Maria significantly. She “wrote” him again in her diary:

I can’t go on like this. I have to know—are you really in danger? What am I doing, Dietrich? Forgive my weakness. I must call you. I must hear from your own lips what is going on. Why don’t you keep me posted?

I don’t understand you. Perhaps you don’t realize what you’re doing to me. I find the thought that something might happen to you unbearable, don’t you realize that? Don’t you sense that, ever since I’ve known, I haven’t been able to shake off my fears for your safety?

I did say you could call me or write to me! Tell me you’re all right, Dietrich, and that you aren’t getting impatient, because all I’ve heard comes from Grandmother, not from you. Oh, Dietrich, just tell me that, I beg you.

For three weeks she kept her worries between herself and her diary, but on March 9, she broke the rules of engagement and telephoned him in Berlin. Whether her mother knew of the phone call is unclear. The next day, Maria even wrote an actual letter and mailed it:

I’ve spoken to you and heard your voice. Dietrich, dearest, can you still remember every word we exchanged? “Hey,” you said, “what’s the matter?” And oh, how the tears rolled down my cheeks although I’d tried so hard not to cry and certainly hadn’t done so since the lunch break. And at first you didn’t understand what I was driving at. I put it so stupidly, didn’t I? But then you laughed. It was so lovely, that laugh. To think you could laugh like that! I’m grateful to you for that most of all. When you laughed and told me not to worry, I knew all at once that it wasn’t true, what Grandmother had said, and that all my worrying and weeping had been quite unnecessary and that you were all right and glad that I’d called you. That was why you laughed, wasn’t it, because you were glad. Afterwards, I laughed too.

That same day, Bonhoeffer wrote Maria. What they had decided about communicating going forward is unknown, but it appears both had had enough of the noncommunication. They were madly in love and wanted to be together, and if they could not be together, they must at least write each other.

Dear Maria,
My heart is still pounding audibly, and everything inside me has undergone a kind of transformation—from joy and surprise, but also from dismay that you were worried. I’m always doing silly things like this. If you were here and we could talk to each other I’d have told you what I stupidly told your grandmother. No, you needn’t have a moment’s worry—I’m not worried either. You do, of course, know from the little we’ve said to each other that danger exists not only out there [on the battlefronts] but here at home as well, sometimes rather less so, sometimes rather more. What man of today has the right to shun it and shrink from it? And what woman of today should not share it, however gladly the man would relieve her of that burden? And how indescribably happy it makes the man if the woman he loves stands by him with courage, patience, and above all—prayer. Dear, good Maria, I’m not being fanciful—something to which I’m far from prone—when I tell you that your presence-in-spirit has been a manifest help to me in recent weeks. That I should have caused you distress, however, genuinely saddens me a great deal. So now please be calm and confident and happy again, and think of me as you have hitherto and as I so constantly think of you.

Two weeks later Bonhoeffer wrote again, telling her about his hospital visit with her grandmother. She didn’t seem to be doing well, and Bonhoeffer knew she continued to be troubled over the “memories of last winter’s difficulties—which we, of course, have put far behind us.” He thought a letter from Maria would put her at ease. In fact, she had been planning to visit her grandmother, and wrote Bonhoeffer on March 26, telling him so. She also had good news. She had been “temporarily exempted” from the Reicharbeitsdienst, a national program that put unmarried young women into a kind of military service. Maria had dreaded this and was happy to work as a nurse instead. When a year later the threat again reared its head, Bonhoeffer’s father hired Maria to work for him as his secretary at the Bonhoeffer home. Renate’s marriage to Bethge was also sped up so she could avoid the odious military service.

Just ten days after this letter, Maria sensed something was wrong. In her diary on April 5, she wrote Dietrich again. “Has something bad happened?” she asked. “I’m afraid it’s something very bad.” She had no idea that he had been arrested that day, but she felt a deep foreboding and recorded it in her diary. She had no communication with Bonhoeffer or his family during this time.

On April 18 she was in Pätzig for the confirmation of her younger brother Hans-Werner. By then her feelings about her situation had boiled over, and she had resolved to defy her mother’s insistence that she and Bonhoeffer not see each other. She said as much to her brother-in-law Klaus von Bismarck that day. But a short time after she had done so, she and the Bismarcks returned to the manor house where they spoke with her uncle Hans-Jürgen von Kleist. He knew about Bonhoeffer’s arrest and told them of it. It was the first Maria had heard.

Now it was too late to see Bonhoeffer. For the rest of her life, Maria regretted not having defied her mother’s wishes earlier. Her mother came to regret her actions on this score and reproached herself, and Maria took pains to forgive her.

First Days at Tegel

The Gestapo had been gathering information on their rivals in the Abwehr for a long time. They had wanted nothing more than to bring this rogue organization to heel. But Canaris was so canny, and Oster and Dohnanyi had been so careful, that it was nearly impossible to get to the bottom of what they were up to. Still, the Gestapo had a feeling the Abwehr was a bastion of intrigues and perhaps even conspiracy against the Reich, and in their thorough way, the Gestapo uncovered what they could until they had enough information to make their arrests. Then they would strike.

On the day Bonhoeffer was arrested, they also arrested Dohnanyi and Joseph Müller, who were taken to the Wehrmacht prison on the Lehrter Strasse for ranking officers. Bonhoeffer’s sister Christine was arrested, too, as was Müller’s wife. Both were taken to the women’s prison in Charlottenburg. Bonhoeffer alone had been taken to Tegel military prison.

Months later, Bonhoeffer wrote an account of his first days there:

The formalities of admission were correctly completed. For the first night I was locked up in an admission cell. The blankets on the camp bed had such a foul smell that in spite of the cold it was impossible to use them. Next morning a piece of bread was thrown into my cell; I had to pick it up from the floor. A quarter of the coffee consisted of grounds. The sound of the prison staff’s vile abuse of the prisoners who were held for investigation penetrated into my cell for the first time; since then I have heard it every day from morning till night. When I had to parade with the other new arrivals, we were addressed by one of the jailers as “scoundrels,” etc. etc. We were all asked why we had been arrested, and when I said I did not know the jailer answered with a scornful laugh, “You’ll find that out soon enough.” It was six months before I got a warrant for my arrest. As we went through the various offices, some NCOs, who had heard what my profession was, wanted now and then to have a few words with me. . . . I was taken to the most isolated cell on the top floor; a notice, prohibiting all access without special permission, was put outside it. I was told that all my correspondence would be stopped until further notice and that, unlike all the other prisoners, I should not be allowed half an hour a day in the open air, although, according to the prison rules, I was entitled to it. I received neither newspapers nor anything to smoke. After forty-eight hours my Bible was returned to me; it had been searched to see whether I had smuggled inside it a saw, razor blades, or the like. For the next twelve days the cell door was opened only for bringing food in and putting the bucket out. No one said a word to me. I was told nothing about the reason for my detention, or how long it would last. I gathered from various remarks—and it was confirmed later—that I was lodged in the section for the most serious cases, where the condemned prisoners lay shackled.

For the first twelve days Bonhoeffer was treated as a felon. The cells around him held men condemned to death, one of whom wept through Bonhoeffer’s first night, making sleep impossible. On the cell wall Bonhoeffer read the wry graffito of a previous occupant: “In a hundred years it’ll all be over.” But from this bleakest nadir things would improve over the weeks and months. The bulk of the eighteen months that Bonhoeffer would spend at Tegel were nothing like these first days.

But there was one way in which they were identical. From the beginning of his time until the end, Bonhoeffer maintained the daily discipline of scriptural meditation and prayer he had been practicing for more than a decade. Each morning he meditated for at least half an hour on a verse of Scripture. And he interceded for his friends and relatives, and for his brothers in the Confessing Church who were on the front lines or in concentration camps. Once he got his Bible back he read it for hours each day. By November he had read through the Old Testament two and a half times. He also drew strength from praying the Psalms, just as they had done at Zingst, Finkenwalde, Schlawe, Sigurdshof, and elsewhere. Bonhoeffer once told Bethge, who was about to embark on a trip, that it was all the more important to practice the daily disciplines when away, to give oneself a sense of grounding and continuity and clarity. And now, rudely thrust into an atmosphere intensely different from his parents’ home, he practiced these same disciplines.

He was at first on the prison’s uppermost floor, the fourth, but was soon transferred to the third, to “a cell looking south with a sweeping view across the prison yard to the pine forest.” This seven-by-ten cell, number ninety-two, was immortalized in the book Love Letters from Cell 92.^* It featured a plank bed, a bench along one wall, a stool, a necessary bucket, a wooden door with a tiny circular window through which the guards might observe him, and a not-so-small window above his head providing daylight and fresh air. It might have been worse. Bonhoeffer’s family lived seven miles south and visited often, providing him with food, clothing, books, and other things. In the postscript to his first letter home, nine days after arriving, Bonhoeffer asked for “slippers, bootlaces (black, long), shoe polish, writing paper and envelopes, ink, smoker’s card, shaving cream, sewing things and a suit I can change into.”

Bonhoeffer had lived simply before. For three months at Ettal he had lived in a monk’s cell, and he had been on the move over the last years. Even his room at 43 Marienburgerallee was furnished in a spartan way.

And his situation would improve on all counts. At first he had to adhere to the strict one-letter-every-ten-days rule, and these letters could be only one page. This chafed at him terribly. But Bonhoeffer quickly ingratiated himself with a number of the guards, who were able to sneak other letters out for him. The happy result was a gushing torrent of epistolary activity far beyond the few “official” letters he wrote on the ten-day cycle. Between November 1943 and August 1944, Bonhoeffer wrote two hundred very crowded pages to his friend Eberhard Bethge alone. He didn’t have his piano, but in time he would have many books and papers. His parents would send small gifts of all kinds, including flowers for his birthday, as would Maria. She even brought him a huge Christmas tree in December, though it was too large to put in his cell and remained in the guards’ room. She brought him an Advent wreath instead. He would post favorite works of art around, and would have his tobacco.

But Bonhoeffer’s outlook did not depend on these amenities. His first letter home painted a picture of his attitude:

Dear Parents! I do want you to be quite sure that I’m all right.^* I’m sorry that I was not allowed to write to you sooner, but I was all right during the first ten days too. Strangely enough, the discomforts that one generally associates with prison life, the physical hardships, hardly bother me at all. One can even have enough to eat in the mornings with dry bread (I get a variety of extras too). The hard prison bed does not worry me a bit, and one can get plenty of sleep between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. I have been particularly surprised that I have hardly felt any need at all for cigarettes since I came here; but I think that in all this the psychic factor has played the larger part. A violent mental upheaval such as is produced by a sudden arrest brings with it the need to take one’s mental bearings and come to terms with an entirely new situation—all this means that physical things take a back seat and lose their importance, and it is something that I find to be a real enrichment of my experience. I am not so unused to being alone as other people are, and it is certainly a good spiritual Turkish bath. The only thing that bothers me or would bother me is the thought that you are being tormented by anxiety about me, and are not sleeping or eating properly. Forgive me for causing you so much worry, but I think a hostile fate is more to blame than I am. To set off against that, it is good to read Paul Gerhardt’s hymns and learn them by heart, as I am doing now. Besides that, I have my Bible and some reading matter from the library here, and enough writing paper now.

You can imagine that I’m most particularly anxious about my fiancée at the moment. It’s a great deal for her to bear, especially when she has only recently lost her father and brother in the East. As the daughter of an officer, she will perhaps find my imprisonment especially hard to take. If only I could have a few words with her! Now you will have to do it. Perhaps she will come to you in Berlin. That would be fine.

The seventy-fifth birthday celebrations were a fortnight ago today. It was a splendid day. I can still hear the chorale that we sang in the morning and evening, with all the voices and instruments: “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of Creation. . . . Shelters thee under his wings, yea, and gently sustaineth.” That is true, and it is what we must always rely on.

Spring is really coming now. You will have plenty to do in the garden; I hope that Renate’s wedding preparations are going well. Here in the prison yard there is a thrush which sings beautifully in the morning, and now in the evening too. One is grateful for little things, and that is surely a gain. Good-bye for now.

I’m thinking of you and the rest of the family and my friends with gratitude and love,

your Dietrich.

Bonhoeffer’s upbringing made it certain that he would not allow himself self-pity; he was repulsed by it in others and would not tolerate it in himself. His parents knew that he would be brave and strong, which gave them great comfort. All their children were like that and would be so to the very end. This was on display in Walter’s final letter in 1918, downplaying his suffering and expressing concern for his fellow soldiers.^* So what Bonhoeffer wrote now was written to put them at ease. But this letter and many of the letters he wrote were read by Manfred Roeder, the man prosecuting him. Bonhoeffer was writing on two levels: on one level to his parents, but on another to the hostile set of eyes trolling for incriminating evidence. But he was not merely trying to avoid saying anything incriminating: he was also using this and other letters to paint a particular picture for Roeder. He wanted to give Roeder a general framework in which to interpret things Bonhoeffer said during his interrogations. Even in an innocuous and truthful letter such as this first one, Bonhoeffer simultaneously engaged in a larger deception.

Why exactly had he been arrested in the first place? Bonhoeffer would be executed for his involvement in the plot to kill Hitler, but he was not arrested for that reason. In April 1943 the Nazis didn’t have any inkling of Bonhoeffer’s involvement in the conspiracy, or that there was a conspiracy at all. The conspiracy would remain hidden until the failed Stauffenberg bomb plot more than a year later. For the next fifteen months, his imprisonment, and Dohnanyi’s, was for more innocuous reasons. One centered on Operation 7, which the Gestapo took for a money-laundering scheme. They couldn’t fathom that Bonhoeffer and the others were mostly concerned with the fate of the Jews. Another reason had to do with the Abwehr’s attempts to obtain military exceptions for the pastors of the Confessing Church. So Bonhoeffer was arrested for relatively minor reasons. In a way, he was arrested for his relationship with Dohnanyi more than anything else.

Because Bonhoeffer and the others knew the Nazis were ignorant of the conspiracy, they continued their multilevel game of deception. The conspiracy was ongoing while they were behind bars, and they knew that any moment Hitler would probably be assassinated and they would be set free. So they must do all they could to keep the conspiracy from being discovered. They must say nothing to tip off the Gestapo to anything besides what the Gestapo already knew, which was not much. They would pretend to be innocent of the charges leveled against them, and would pretend that there was nothing else worth looking into beyond those charges. And they would succeed.

Strategy

As part of their larger ruse, Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer wanted to preserve the fiction that Bonhoeffer was an innocent pastor who knew little or nothing of the larger issues. This way, all of the focus would be on Dohnanyi, whose brilliant legal mind and greater knowledge of intricate details could better parry Roeder’s attacks. To that end, Dohnanyi wrote a letter to Bonhoeffer at Easter, instead of to his parents, because he knew the letter would be read by Roeder, and he wished to shape things in Roeder’s eyes. That letter, written on Good Friday, April 23, reads:

My dear Dietrich, I don’t know if I’ll be allowed to send you this greeting, but I’ll try. The bells are ringing outside for the service. . . . You can’t imagine how unhappy I am to be the reason why you, Christel, the children, and my parents should have to suffer like this, and that my dear wife and you should have your freedom taken away. Socios habuisse malorum^* may be a comfort, but the habere^** is a terribly heavy burden. . . . If I knew that you all—and you personally—did not think hardly of me, I’d feel so relieved. What wouldn’t I give to know that you were all free again; what wouldn’t I take on myself if you could be spared this affliction.

One reason the Bonhoeffer family could function as such a hotbed of sedition was their formidable intelligence, and their ability to comfortably communicate on several levels at once, with the confidence of being understood as they did so. Now, Bonhoeffer could write letters home and Dohnanyi could write the above letter to Bonhoeffer knowing that what they wrote would be read and understood on two levels. Bonhoeffer knew his parents would know what he wrote to them was written, in part, to fool Roeder—and he trusted them to be able to tease out what was meant for them and what was meant for Roeder. To some extent they had been functioning like this for years, since anything one said in the Third Reich might be overheard by the wrong party, but now they would hone it to a sharpness that allowed them to run circles around those who opposed them.

They had also worked out ahead of time how to communicate if any of them was imprisoned, and they now used these methods. One involved putting coded messages in the books they were allowed to receive. Bonhoeffer got many books from his parents and would send them back when he was finished with them. To indicate there was a coded message in the book, they underlined the name of the book’s owner on the flyleaf or inside cover. If D. Bonhoeffer was underlined, the receiver knew there was a message. The message itself was communicated through a series of the tiniest pencil marks under letters on pages in the book. Every three or every ten pages—the number seemed to vary—a barely visible pencil dot would be put under a letter on that page. Ten pages later another letter would be marked with a dot. These marks would begin at the back of the book and proceed toward the front, so in the course of a three-hundred-page book one might have room for a thirty-letter communication. These were usually extremely important and dangerous messages, such as what Dohnanyi had communicated to his interrogator, so that Bonhoeffer could corroborate that information and not get tripped up or caught contradicting something Dohnanyi said. One message was “O. now officially acknowledges the Rome coding card.” In this case, “O” referred to Oster. The prosecutor, Roeder, thought that the coding card indicated a greater crime, but eventually it was shown to be part of the standard Abwehr secrecy for official purposes. Another one of the coded book messages was: “I’m not certain that the letter with Hans’s corrections has been found, but think so.” It could all get a bit baroque, but the Bonhoeffers were up to it.

Renate Bethge recalled that she and the other younger ones often had the task of looking for the barely visible pencil markings since younger eyes were much better at seeing them. They would even use a pencil eraser to see whether the marks had been made with a pencil or were merely tiny irregularities in the actual printing of the book. Christopher von Dohnanyi recalled another way they were able to slip messages past the Nazis: “You could take a glass for jam or marmalade . . . there was a double lid. The lid had a double cardboard. Between this cardboard and the metal, my mother and we would cut little rounds, and there we would write the most dangerous things!” Hans von Dohnanyi wrote entire letters in miniature script on this secret circular stationery.

Throughout his eighteen months at Tegel, Bonhoeffer’s basic pose of the simple and idealistic pastor unconcerned with political issues worked well. He played dumb brilliantly, both in the interrogations and in the often long letters that he wrote to Roeder: “I am the last person to deny that I might have made mistakes in work so strange, so new and so complicated as that of the Abwehr. I often find it hard to follow the speed of your questions, probably because I am not used to them.” He acted the archetypical Lutheran pastor of that time, an unworldly ecclesiastical naïf who knew little of high-level intrigue; the sophisticated jurisprudential supergenius Dohnanyi knew everything important: “It was my brother-in-law who suggested to me that with my church connections, I should enter the service of the Abwehr. Despite considerable inner scruples, I took advantage of his offer because it provided me with the war work that I had wanted ever since the beginning of hostilities, even making use of my ability as a theologian.”

He danced out on a limb, pretending that working for the Abwehr assuaged his hurt over the Gestapo’s accusations, which had led to his being banned from preaching and writing:

This had meant a great inner release, since I saw it as a welcome opportunity of rehabilitating myself in the eyes of the state authorities, which I was anxious to do in view of the offensive and, to me, completely unjustified charge against me. The knowledge that I was being used by a military department was, therefore, to me personally of great importance. I made a great sacrifice for this chance of rehabilitation and for my work in the service of the Reich, namely the offering of all my ecumenical connections for military use.

Bonhoeffer always pretended to have the typical Lutheran attitude toward state authorities, which came from a simplistic understanding of Romans 13. He feigned disbelief and umbrage at the very insinuation that he would question the state:

I cannot believe that this is the charge that is really leveled against me. Would I, in that case, have turned to an old officers’ family, all of whose fathers and sons have been in the field since the beginning of the war, many of them winning the highest decorations and making the greatest sacrifice of life and limb, to find my future wife, who has herself lost both her father and her brother at the front? Would I, in that case, have abandoned all the commitments that I had undertaken in America and returned to Germany before the outbreak of war, where I naturally would expect to be called up at once? Would I, in that case, have volunteered as an army chaplain immediately after the war broke out?

Little did these theologically ignorant Nazis know that the man with whom they were dealing had worked out a theological defense of deception against the likes of them. In some ways he was their worst nightmare. He was not a “worldly” or “compromised” pastor, but a pastor whose very devotion to God depended on his deceiving the evil powers ranged against him. He was serving God by taking them all for a long ride.

“After Ten Years”

Bonhoeffer had written an essay a few months before his arrest, titled “After Ten Years: A Reckoning Made at New Year 1943.” At Christmas 1942, he gave copies to Bethge, Dohnanyi, and Hans Oster, and he hid a fourth copy in the ceiling of his attic room. The essay is an assessment of what they had been through and learned in the extraordinary experiences of the ten years since Hitler’s ascension, and it helps us see more of the thinking that led him and all of them to the extraordinary measures they had been taking and would continue to take against the Nazi regime. And it confirms Bonhoeffer’s crucial role in the conspiracy, that of its theologian and moral compass. He helped them see precisely why they had to do what they were doing; why it was not expedient, but right; why it was God’s will.

He opened by framing things:

One may ask whether there have ever before in human history been people with so little ground under their feet—people to whom every available alternative seemed equally intolerable, repugnant, and futile, who looked beyond all these existing alternatives for the source of their strength so entirely in the past or in the future, and who yet, without being dreamers, were able to await the success of their cause so quietly and confidently. . . .

The great masquerade of evil has played havoc with all our ethical concepts. For evil to appear disguised as light, charity, historical necessity, or social justice is quite bewildering to anyone brought up on our traditional ethical concepts, while for the Christian who bases his life on the Bible it merely confirms the fundamental wickedness of evil.

Then he dismissed the standard responses to what they were up against and showed why each would fail. “Who stands fast?” he asked. “Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God—the responsible man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God.”

This was how Bonhoeffer saw what he was doing. He had theologically redefined the Christian life as something active, not reactive. It had nothing to do with avoiding sin or with merely talking or teaching or believing theological notions or principles or rules or tenets. It had everything to do with living one’s whole life in obedience to God’s call through action. It did not merely require a mind, but a body too. It was God’s call to be fully human, to live as human beings obedient to the one who had made us, which was the fulfillment of our destiny. It was not a cramped, compromised, circumspect life, but a life lived in a kind of wild, joyful, full-throated freedom—that was what it was to obey God. Whether Dohnanyi or Oster understood all of this as Bethge would have is doubtful, but they were brilliant men who surely understood enough of it to seek Bonhoeffer’s counsel and participation in what they were doing.

Bonhoeffer talked about how the German penchant for self-sacrifice and submission to authority had been used for evil ends by the Nazis; only a deep understanding of and commitment to the God of the Bible could stand up to such wickedness. “It depends on a God who demands responsible action in a bold venture of faith,” he wrote, “and who promises forgiveness and consolation to the man who becomes a sinner in that venture.” Here was the rub: one must be more zealous to please God than to avoid sin. One must sacrifice oneself utterly to God’s purposes, even to the point of possibly making moral mistakes. One’s obedience to God must be forward-oriented and zealous and free, and to be a mere moralist or pietist would make such a life impossible:

If we want to be Christians, we must have some share in Christ’s large-heartedness by acting with responsibility and in freedom when the hour of danger comes, and by showing a real sympathy that springs, not from fear, but from the liberating and redeeming love of Christ for all who suffer. Mere waiting and looking on is not Christian behaviour. The Christian is called to sympathy and action, not in the first place by his own sufferings, but by the sufferings of his brethren, for whose sake Christ suffered.

Bonhoeffer spoke of death too:

In recent years we have become increasingly familiar with the thought of death. We surprise ourselves by the calmness with which we hear of the death of one of our contemporaries. We cannot hate it as we used to for we have discovered some good in it, and have almost come to terms with it. Fundamentally we feel that we really belong to death already, and that every new day is a miracle. It would probably not be true to say that we welcome death (although we all know that weariness which we ought to avoid like the plague); we are too inquisitive for that—or, to put it more seriously, we should like to see something more of the meaning of our life’s broken fragments. . . . We still love life, but I do not think that death can take us by surprise now. After what we have been through during the war, we hardly dare admit that we should like death to come to us, not accidentally and suddenly through some trivial cause, but in the fullness of life and with everything at stake. It is we ourselves, and not outward circumstances, who make death what it can be, a death freely and voluntarily accepted.

Life at Tegel

As the head of the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris did all he could to provide cover for Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer. This would change in February 1944 when he was finally bested by the Gestapo and Himmler and ousted. But during the first ten months at Tegel, Bonhoeffer and Donhanyi were confident of Canaris’s protection.

Bonhoeffer had a further advantage at Tegel, and a very significant one. His uncle Paul von Hase was the military commandant of Berlin and therefore was the big boss, high above the top warden at Tegel prison. When the guards at Tegel learned of this, everything changed. It can hardly have been imagined. Von Hase’s nephew was a prisoner! It was as if they had a celebrity in their midst. And not only because of his uncle, but because of the great mystery that attended Bonhoeffer’s imprisonment. He was a pastor and quite clearly an enemy of the Nazi state. Many of them were quietly against the Nazis, too, so there grew an undeniable fascination with Bonhoeffer. And as they got to know him, they found him genuinely kind and generous— quite shockingly so, for many of them—even to those guards whom others despised. He was a genuinely good man, a living rebuke to the forces that oppressed them and over which they had little power.

Bonhoeffer was soon given privileges in the prison, sometimes because of who his uncle was, but more often because others in the unpleasant environment found him to be a source of comfort to them and wanted him around. They wished to speak with him, to tell him their problems, to confess things to him, and simply to be near him. He counseled some condemned prisoners and some guards too. One of them, Knoblauch, became so enamored of Bonhoeffer that he eventually went to great lengths to help him escape, as we shall see. Bonhoeffer was also allowed time alone in his cell with others, contrary to explicit orders. And he was allowed to spend a time in the sick bay where he functioned much like a prison pastor instead of a prisoner. In general, Bonhoeffer spent quite a bit of time working pastorally at Tegel, so much so that he sometimes even felt he was taking too much time away from his own writing and reading.

The only Christmas that Bonhoeffer spent at Tegel was in 1943. Harald Poelchau, one of the official prison pastors, asked him to help write a sheet that would be distributed to the prisoners. On it Bonhoeffer wrote a number of prayers, including the following:

O God,

Early in the morning do I cry unto thee.

Help me to pray,

And to think only of thee.

I cannot pray alone.

In me there is darkness,

But with thee there is light.

I am lonely, but thou leavest me not.

I am feeble in heart, but thou leavest me not.

I am restless, but with thee there is peace.

In me there is bitterness, but with thee there is patience;

Thy ways are past understanding, but

Thou knowest the way for me.

Poelchau remembered Bonhoeffer’s courtliness, even in prison:

One day he asked me to have a cup of coffee with him. . . . [H]e told me of his neighbour in the next door cell, an English officer, who had invited both of us if I could risk locking him in the other cell. We slipped across at a propitious moment, and had a little party, with a primus stove propped up in the heap of sand which was in a corner of each cell for use during air raids. We had coffee, white bread which had been saved for the occasion, and we had talk, both serious and gay, which helped us to forget the war.

Bonhoeffer’s noble bearing and generosity were noted by many, even up until his last day. At Tegel he used his own money to pay for legal help for a young prisoner who couldn’t afford it; another time he imposed upon his own defense lawyer by asking him to take the case of a fellow prisoner.

When in the summer of 1943 he was offered a cooler cell on the second floor of the prison, he refused it, knowing that his own cell would only be given to someone else. And he knew that much of his better treatment was because of who his uncle was. He wrote that when the prison authorities found out who his uncle was, “it was most embarrassing to see how everything changed from that moment.” He was immediately offered larger food portions, but refused them, knowing it would have been at the expense of other prisoners. Bonhoeffer was sometimes grateful for the small mercies of the preferential treatment and sometimes disgusted by it. Some of the prison staff actually apologized to him after they found out who his uncle was. “It was painful,” he wrote.

Bonhoeffer was outraged by injustice, and the way many of the senior guards abused prisoners infuriated him, but he used his position to speak out for those who had no power. At one point he even wrote a report on prison life, intending to draw the authorities’ attention to those things that needed improving. He knew his position as von Hase’s nephew would bring some attention to these problems, so he gave chapter and verse of the injustices he observed, being the voice for the voiceless just as he had always preached those in the church must do.

Maria von Wedemeyer

Bonhoeffer’s relationship with Maria was a source of strength and hope for him now. When she learned of his arrest, Bonhoeffer’s future mother-in-law was moved to allow the engagement to be made public. He was very grateful for this kindness. It gave him and Maria more hope that their future together was a reality, soon to come. They had been expecting to have to keep mum about it, even to the family, until the official “year” was up, which meant November. Everyone was convinced Bonhoeffer would be released quite soon, once Roeder got his questions answered and things generally cleared up, and so the marriage would take place soon too. Bonhoeffer could not write Maria during his first two months at Tegel, so he wrote her through his parents, who passed along the salient parts of his letters.

In the meantime, on May 23, she visited his parents in Berlin, where she was received as Dietrich’s fiancée. Maria even spent a long time alone in Bonhoeffer’s room. She wrote him the next day from Hanover:

My dear, dear Dietrich,
You thought of me yesterday, didn’t you? I sense how constantly you were at my side, how you went with me through all those unfamiliar rooms to meet all those people, and how everything suddenly seemed familiar, homely, and very dear. I’m so happy about that day in Berlin, Dietrich—so inexpressibly happy and grateful to you and your parents. I think my happiness is so deeply, firmly rooted that sorrow simply can’t reach that far, however immense it may sometimes seem.

I like your parents. The moment your mother greeted me I knew I couldn’t fail to, and that you’re giving me infinitely more than I ever dreamed. Oh, I fell in love with everything. Your house, the garden, and—most of all—your room. I don’t know what I wouldn’t give to be able to sit there again, if only to look at the ink-blots on your desk pad. Everything has become so real and clear to me since I met you at your parents’ home yesterday. The desk where you wrote your books and your letters to me, your armchair and the ashtray, your shoes on the shelf and your favorite pictures. . . . I never thought I could miss you and long for you more than I do, but I’ve done so twice as much since yesterday.

My dearest Dietrich, every morning at six, when we both fold our hands in prayer, we know that we can have great faith, not only in each other but far, far above and beyond that. And then you can’t be sad any more either, can you? I’ll write again soon.

Whatever I think or do, I’m always

Your Maria

In her next letter, on May 30, she marveled that it was a year since their fateful meeting at Klein-Krössin: “So it’s really a year ago already. Just imagine, I find it almost incomprehensible that you should be the gentleman who I met at that time, and with who I discussed first names, Lili-Marlen,^* daisies, and other matters. Grandmother told me what you remembered about it, and I blushed with retrospective horror at all the silly things I said.”

At the beginning of June, Roeder granted Bonhoeffer permission to write Maria. After his first letter, she wrote the following:

June 9, 1943
Dearest Dietrich,
You wrote such a lovely letter . . . the very fact that I can expect another one like it in ten days’ time puts me in an incredibly good mood. But when I read it I become almost too happy, and I suddenly think I’ll have to awaken from this dream and realize that none of it is true, and laugh at myself for ever having dared to presume such happiness. So you see, my happiness is still so much greater than my sadness—you really must believe that. It won’t be long before we see each other again, I’m quite certain, and I say that to you and myself night and morning. . . .

You say you want to hear some wedding plans? I’ve got more than enough. We must become officially engaged as soon as we’re together again. Very few of my family are in the know yet. . . . You won’t get away without an engagement party, but we’ll marry soon after that. I’d like it to be in summer, when Pätzig looks its best. I’ve always looked forward so much to showing you Pätzig in August especially. What you’ve seen of it up to now doesn’t count. I’d pictured that August in every detail. How I would meet your train, how I would go for walks with you and show you all my favorite places, views, trees and animals, and how much you would like them too, and then we would have a common home there. Don’t be depressed and miserable. Think how happy we’ll be later on, and tell yourself that perhaps all this had to happen for us to realize how lovely our life will be and how grateful for it we must be. . . . You must start choosing the hymns and texts right away. I’d like “Sollt ich meinem Gott nicht singen”^* and the 103rd Psalm. . . . Please fit them in. As for the rest I’m open to persuasion and suggestion. You know Pätzig church, of course. . . .

We’ll have a honeymoon, too! Where? And what then? Then, what matters most is that we’re happy, the two of us. Nothing else will count for much, will it?

I’ve requested a transfer to the Augusta Hospital in Berlin, and am now waiting to be posted there. It could happen with the next few days. Being near you would be so much nicer, and I look forward to being able to visit your parents more often. Think how wonderful it will be when you’re free again.

My dear Dietrich, if only I could relieve you of even a little of your burden. There’s nothing I wouldn’t give for a chance to do so. I’m with you every moment, yet so terribly far away, and I long so inexpressibly much to be with you in reality. You know, don’t you, that I’m always

Your Maria

Maria obtained a visitor’s permit for June 24, although Bonhoeffer did not know she would be coming. It would be the first of seventeen visits. Sixteen of them were between that date and June 27 of the following year, 1944.^* The last visit was on August 23, 1944, one month after the July 20 assassination attempt. But on that June day in 1943, when Maria first came to see Dietrich, their hopes for an early trial and release were very much alive, and they were constantly thinking about their upcoming marriage.

The visits were always somewhat awkward since they were never alone but were chaperoned, as it were, by Roeder. In fact, in their first meeting on June 24, Roeder surprised Bonhoeffer by bringing Maria into the room. Bonhoeffer was quite nonplussed. What did it mean that she was there? It was a despicable tactic. “I found myself being used as a tool by the prosecutor, Roeder,” Maria wrote years later. “I was brought into the room with practically no forewarning, and Dietrich was visibly shaken. He first reacted with silence, but then carried on a normal conversation; his emotions showed only in the pressure with which he held my hand.”

When their time together was over, Roeder took Maria in one direction, while Bonhoeffer had to leave by another door. They hadn’t seen each other since November. Now they’d been given these precious moments, and suddenly the visit was over. But just as Maria was about to leave the room, she manifested the independent spirit and strong will for which she was famous: when she looked back and saw her beloved Dietrich leaving through the door across the room, she impetuously, and obviously against the wishes of Roeder, ran back across the room and hugged her fiancée one last time.

When Bonhoeffer returned to his cell, he continued the letter he had been writing to his parents:

I have just come back from seeing Maria—an indescribable surprise and joy! I had learned of it only a minute before. It’s still like a dream— really an almost unimaginable situation—what will we think of it one day? What one can say at such a time is so trivial, but that’s not the main thing. It was so brave of her to come; I wouldn’t have dared to suggest it to her. It’s so much more difficult for her than for me. I know where I am, but for her it is all unimaginable, mysterious, terrifying. Think how things will be when this nightmare is over!

Maria’s early letters were full of ideas and plans for their wedding. She wrote that she’d started work on her trousseau, and with one letter she included a picture she had drawn of all the furniture in her room so that they could figure out how to furnish their new home together. She also told him that her grandmother had decided to give them her “blue sofa from Stettin, plus armchairs and table.” She wondered which pastor should perform their wedding and confessed to Bonhoeffer that the previous September, before either of them knew what the next months would bring and she thought of him principally as a pastor, she had written in her diary that she’d like him to perform her wedding. “What a shame that’s impossible!!!” she said.

Maria continued the conceit of writing to Bonhoeffer in her diary. After their second meeting, on July 30, she wrote:

I was sitting on the red plush sofa when you came in. Seeing you like that, I very nearly called you “Sie.”^* A well-fitting dark suit, a formal bow to the Oberstgerichtsrat^**  . . . strangely unfamiliar.

But when I looked into your eyes I saw that dear, dark light in them, and when you kissed me, I knew I’d found you again—found you more completely than I’d ever possessed you before.

It was all so different from the first time. You were calmer and more relaxed. But more confident, too. I sensed that most of all, and it was that which descended on my sad, dispirited heart and made me cheerful and happy. The things one talks about at such times! . . . car-driving, the weather, the family.^*** And yet it meant so much and outweighed the intervening month of loneliness. You caught hold of me at one point. Although I was inwardly so calm, I was shivering. It felt so good, your warm hand, that I wished you would leave it there, although it transmitted a current that filled me up and left no room for thoughts.

About this time Bonhoeffer’s writing privileges were extended to a letter every four days instead of every ten. He decided he would alternate letters between his parents and Maria. Because all letters were censored, they sometimes took ten days to reach the recipient, even though, in the case of his parents, the letter had less than seven miles to travel from his cell to their home. Bonhoeffer and Maria often wrote to each other immediately after a visit. They didn’t want to write too close to an upcoming visit, since they then risked seeing each other before the letter arrived.

After this second visit, on July 30, Maria wrote Bonhoeffer that on the train back to Pätzig, she had run into her uncle Gerhard Tresckow. He was the brother of Henning von Tresckow, who was central to the two major assassination attempts on Hitler. Maria told Bonhoeffer that even though her uncle was “not in the know” about her engagement, he reminded her that when she was twelve, she had invited him to her wedding, and he said he was “determined not to miss it.”

She also continued planning their future together, saying that the blue sofa from her grandmother “will go better in your room,” since it would fit right in with theological discussions, bookshelves, and cigarette smoke. And the grand piano “will go in the living room.” Their letters to each other were playful and filled with declarations of love. That August, Bonhoeffer wrote, “You can’t possibly imagine what it means to me, in my present predicament, to have you. I’m under God’s special guidance here. I feel sure. To me, the way in which we found each other such a short time before my arrest seems a definite indication of that. Once again, things went ‘hominum confusione et dei providential.’”^*

In this letter Bonhoeffer wrote his famous line about their marriage being a “‘yes’ to God’s earth.” His very engagement was his way of living out what he believed. He did everything, including become engaged to Maria, “unto God.” It was not a calculation, but an act of faith:

When I consider the state of the world, the total obscurity enshrouding our personal destiny, and my present imprisonment, our union—if it wasn’t frivolity, which it certainly wasn’t—can only be a token of God’s grace and goodness, which summon us to believe in him. We would have to be blind not to see that. When Jeremiah said, in his people’s hour of direst need, that “houses and fields [and vineyards] shall again be bought in this land,”^* it was a token of confidence in the future. That requires faith, and may God grant it to us daily. I don’t mean the faith that flees the world, but the faith that endures in the world and loves and remains true to that world in spite of all the hardships it brings us. Our marriage must be a “yes” to God’s earth. It must strengthen our resolve to do and accomplish something on earth. I fear that Christians who venture to stand on earth on only one leg will stand in heaven on only one leg too.

A Wedding Sermon from a Prison Cell

Bonhoeffer was not the only member of the family engaged to be married. His sixteen-year-old niece, Renate, was on the verge of marrying his best friend, Eberhard. If they didn’t marry soon, she would be called up to serve in the Reicharbeitsdienst. The thought of military conscription under the Hitler regime was far more odious to the Schleichers than that their daughter should marry her beloved Eberhard a year or two too soon. The date was set for May 15. Bonhoeffer had hoped to preach at this wedding, but even the earliest hopes of release would not be soon enough. He wrote a sermon nonetheless. It did not get to them in time to be read at the wedding, but like so much else that he wrote, this sermon found an audience far greater than he could have hoped. It has become a small classic, read by many on their anniversaries.

As in his letter to Maria, in which he described their marriage as a “‘yes’ to God’s earth,” he affirmed God’s role in Bethge’s upcoming wedding by affirming the couple’s own role in it. He knew that to celebrate God aright, one must fully understand and celebrate humanity itself. Bonhoeffer was constantly trying to correct the idea of a false choice between God and humanity, or heaven and earth. God wanted to redeem humanity and to redeem this earth, not to abolish them. As he often did to be as clear as possible, he almost overstated his point:

We ought not to be in too much of a hurry here to speak piously of God’s will and guidance. It is obvious, and it should not be ignored, that it is your own very human wills that are at work here, celebrating their triumph; the course that you are taking at the outset is one that you have chosen for yourselves; what you have done and are doing is not, in the first place, something religious, but something quite secular. . . . Unless you can boldly say today: “This is our resolve, our love, our way,” you are taking refuge in a false piety. “Iron and steel may pass away, but our love shall abide for ever.” That desire for earthly bliss which you want to find in one another, and in which, to quote the medieval song, one is the comfort of the other both in today and in soul—that desire is justified before God and man.

Bonhoeffer was trying to reclaim everything for God, just as he had been doing for twenty years. He was saying that it’s not just some “religious” part of this marriage that is important, but the whole thing. The freedom to choose a mate is a gift from God, who created us in his image. And the “desire for earthly bliss” is not something we steal from behind God’s back, but is something he has desired that we should desire. We mustn’t separate that part of life and marriage from God, either by trying to hide it from him as belonging to us alone or by trying to destroy it altogether through a false piety that denies its existence.

Earthly bliss and humanity belong to God, not in any cramped “religious” sense, but in the fully human sense. Bonhoeffer was a champion of God’s idea of humanity, a humanity that he invented and, by participating in it through the incarnation, that he redeemed. But just as soon as Bonhoeffer tacked far enough in one direction and made his “fully human” point, he tacked back the other way, making the “fully God” point too:

You yourselves know that no one can create and assume such a life from his own strength, but that what is given to one is withheld from another; and that is what we call God’s guidance. So today, however much you rejoice that you have reached your goal, you will be just as thankful that God’s will and God’s way have brought you here; and however confidently you accept responsibility for your action today, you may and will put it today with equal confidence into God’s hands.

So it’s both, but to see each clearly is necessary before one puts them together. And then he brought the two things together:

As God today adds his “Yes” to your “Yes,” as he confirms your will with his will, and as he allows you, and approves of, your triumph and rejoicing and pride, he makes you at the same time instruments of his will and purpose both for yourselves and for others. In his unfathomable condescension God does add his “Yes” to yours; but by doing so, he creates out of your love something quite new—the holy estate of matrimony.

Bonhoeffer was trying with all his might to express the almost inexpressible paradox of a proper relation to God. He had a very high view of marriage: it is “more than your love for each other,” and it “has a higher dignity and power, for it is God’s holy ordinance, through which he wills to perpetuate the human race till the end of time.” Perhaps the sermon’s most memorable sentence is this: “It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.”

Reading

Bonhoeffer never expected to be imprisoned long. At first he simply wished to get as much information to the prosecutor as possible, with the hopes of getting a trial date. The charges were relatively minor, and he and Dohnanyi could put up a good defense and hoped to win. But Canaris and Sack, working behind the scenes on Dohnanyi’s and Bonhoeffer’s behalf, thought it better to drag things out. They wished to avoid the confrontation of a trial, especially since the plans to assassinate Hitler were going forward. When that happened, the trial would be moot. So the months passed and the legal battle raged. By October, Bonhoeffer marked six months at Tegel. It had all gone on far longer than he’d ever thought.

Between visits from his family and Maria, and the reading and writing and other things, he made the best of it. Karl and Paula Bonhoeffer visited on October 12, bringing dahlias from their garden. The next day he wrote them, saying that a verse from the poet Theodor Storm’s^* “Octoberlied” kept running through his head:

Und geht es draussen noch so toll,
unchristlich oder christlich,
ist doch die Welt, die schöne Welt
so gänzlich unverwüstlich. ^**

All that is needed to bring that home to one is a few gay autumn flowers, the view from the cell window, and half an hour’s “exercise” in the prison yard, where there are, in fact, a few beautiful chestnut and lime trees. But in the last resort, for me at any rate, the “world” consists of a few people whom I should like to see and to be with. The occasional appearances of you and Maria, for a brief hour as though from a great distance, are really the thing for which and from which I principally live. If, besides that, I could sometimes hear a good sermon on Sundays—I sometimes hear fragments of the chorales that are carried along the breeze—it would be still better. . . .

I’ve again been doing a good deal of writing lately, and for the work that I have set myself to do, the day is often too short, so that sometimes, comically enough, I even feel that I have “no time” here for this or that less important matter! After breakfast in the morning (about 7 o’clock) I read some theology, and then I write till midday; in the afternoon I read, then comes a chapter from Delbrück’s World History, some English grammar, about which I can still learn all kinds of things, and finally, as the mood takes me, I write or read again. Then in the evening I am tired enough to be glad to lie down, though that does not mean going to sleep at once.

The amount of reading and writing that Bonhoeffer did in his eighteen months at Tegel is decidedly impressive. In a letter to Eberhard Bethge in December, he wrote:

In a rather haphazard way I’ve recently been reading a history of Scotland Yard, a history of prostitution, finished the Delbrück—I find him really rather uninteresting in his problems—, Reinhold Schneider’s sonnets—very variable in quality, some very good; on the whole all the newest productions seem to me to be lacking the hilaritas—“cheerfulness”—which is to be found in any really great and free intellectual achievement. One has always the impression of a somewhat tortured and strained manufacture instead of creativity in the open air. . . . At the moment I’m reading a gigantic English novel which goes from 1500 to today, by Hugh Walpole, written in 1909. Dilthey is also interesting me very much and for an hour each day I’m studying the manual for medical staff, for any eventuality.

That was just the tip of the iceberg. Months before, he wanted to read Adalbert Stifter’s medieval epic Witiko and had been pestering his parents about finding a copy, but they could not. To his amazement, he found one in the prison library. He was thrilled. Goebbels’s purges of all “un-German” literature from every library had not touched the nineteenth century much. In a series of letters to his parents, Bonhoeffer spoke of his reading:

I read some Stifter almost every day. In this atmosphere, there’s something very comforting about the sheltered and sequestered world of his characters—he’s old-fashioned enough only to portray likeable people—and it focuses one’s thoughts on the things that really matter in life. Here in a prison cell I outwardly and inwardly revert to the simplest aspects of existence; Rilke, for instance, leaves me cold.

Most people would find its thousand pages, which can’t be skipped but have to be taken steadily, too much for them, so I’m not sure whether to recommend it to you. For me it’s one of the finest books I know. The purity of its style and character-drawing gives one a quite rare and peculiar feeling of happiness . . . its sui generis. . . . So far, the only historical novels that have made a comparable impression on me are Don Quixote and Gotthelf’s Berner Geist.

In my reading I’m now living entirely in the nineteenth century. During these months I’ve read Gotthelf, Stifter, Immermann, Fontane, and Keller with new admiration. A period in which people would write such clear and simple German must have had quite a healthy core. They treat the most delicate matters without sentimentality, the most serious without flippancy, and they express their convictions without pathos; there is no exaggerated simplifying or complicating of a language or subject matter; in short, it’s all very much to my liking, and seems to me very sound. But it must have meant plenty of hard work at expressing themselves in good German, and therefore plenty of opportunity for quiet.

Bonhoeffer’s cultural standards were obviously high. In a letter to Bethge, he said that his fiancée’s generation had

grown up with very bad contemporary literature, and they find it much more difficult to approach earlier writing than we do. The more we have known of the really good things, the more insipid the thin lemonade of later literature becomes, sometimes almost to the point of making us sick. Do you know a work of literature written in the last, say, fifteen years that you think has any lasting quality? I don’t. It is partly idle chatter, partly propaganda, partly self-pitying sentimentality, but there is no insight, no ideas, no clarity, no substance and almost always the language is bad and constrained. On this subject I am quite consciously a laudator temporis acti. ^*

Bonhoeffer was able to smuggle letters to Bethge starting in November 1943. Once this avenue was open to him, he poured out a torrent of writing to the one friend who had the theological, musical, and literary chops to keep up with him. “I can’t read a book or write a paragraph,” he said to Bethge, “without talking to you about it or at least asking myself what you would say about it.”

Bonhoeffer’s Innermost Thoughts

The letters to Bethge opened up far more than opportunities to discuss culture. That he could do with his parents and did. But with Bethge he could discuss things he couldn’t discuss with anyone else. Bethge was the one soul on earth to whom Bonhoeffer could show his weaknesses, with whom he could explore his innermost thoughts, whom he could trust not to misunderstandhim. With everyone else, Bonhoeffer seemed to feel an obligation to play the role of pastor, to be strong. But Bethge was the one person from whom Bonhoeffer could receive ministry. He had functioned as Bonhoeffer’s confessor and pastor since Finkenwalde and was no stranger to the darker side of his friend.

In his first letter to Bethge, Bonhoeffer let him know that the depression that sometimes plagued him was not an issue. He feared that Bethge must have been concerned about him on this score:

18 November 1943

 . . . after these long months without worship, penitence and eucharist and without the consolatio fratrum—once again be my pastor as you have so often been in the past, and listen to me. There is so infinitely much to report, that I would like to tell both of you, but today it can only be the essentials, so this letter is for you alone. . . . During this time I have been preserved from any serious spiritual trial. You are the only person who knows how often accidie, tristitia, with all its menacing consequences, has lain in wait for me; and I feared at the time that you must be worrying about me on that account. But I told myself from the beginning that I was not going to oblige either man or devil in any such way—they can do what they like about it for themselves; and I hope I shall always be able to stand firm on this.

At first I wondered a good deal whether it was really for the cause of Christ that I was causing you all such grief; but I soon put that out of my head as a temptation, as I became certain that the duty had been laid on me to hold out in this boundary situation with all its problems; I became quite content to do this, and have remained so ever since (1 Peter 2.20; 3:14). ^*

Bonhoeffer said the Psalms and Revelation were a great comfort to him during those days, as were the hymns of Paul Gerhardt, many of which he knew by heart. So Bonhoeffer was not “naturally” strong and courageous. His equanimity was the result of self-discipline, of deliberately turning to God. Two weeks later he told Bethge about the air raids: “Now there’s something I must tell you personally: the heavy air raids, especially the last one, when the windows of the sick-bay were blown out by the land mine, and bottles and medical supplies fell down from the cupboards and shelves, and I lay on the floor in the darkness with little hope of coming through the attack safely, led me back quite simply to prayer and the Bible.”

Again and again in various accounts, people write about how strong Bonhoeffer was during the air raids, how he was a comfort and bulwark to those around him when everyone believed death was at hand. But his strength was borrowed from God and lent to others. Because Bonhoeffer was not afraid to share his weaknesses and fears with Bethge, the courage he expressed can be seen as real. He seems genuinely to have entrusted himself to God and therefore had no regrets or real fears:

23 January 1944

 . . . when all possibility of co-operating in anything is suddenly cut off, then behind any anxiety about him there is the consciousness that his life has now been placed wholly in better and stronger hands. For you, and for us, the greatest task during the coming weeks and perhaps months, may be to entrust each other to those hands. . . . Whatever weaknesses, miscalculations, and guilt there is in what precedes the facts, God is in the facts themselves. If we survive during these coming weeks or months, we shall be able to see quite clearly that all has turned out for the best. The idea that we could have avoided many of life’s difficulties if we had taken things more cautiously is too foolish to be entertained for a moment. As I look back on your past I am so convinced that what has happened hitherto has been right, that I feel that what is happening now is right too. To renounce a full life and its real joys in order to avoid pain is neither Christian nor human.

9 March 1944

When people suggest in their letters . . . that I’m suffering here, I reject the thought. It seems to me a profanation. These things must not be dramatized. I doubt very much whether I am “suffering” any more than you or most people are suffering today. Of course, a great deal here is horrible, but where isn’t it? Perhaps we’ve made too much of this question of suffering, and been too solemn about it. . . . No, suffering must be something quite different, and have a quite different dimension, from what I have so far experienced.

11 April 1944

I heard someone say yesterday that the last years had been completely wasted as far as he was concerned. I’m very glad that I have never yet had that feeling, even for a moment. Nor have I ever regretted my decision in the summer of 1939, for I’m firmly convinced—however strange it may seem—that my life has followed a straight and unbroken course, at any rate in its outward conduct. It has been an uninterrupted enrichment of experience, for which I can only be thankful. If I were to end my life here in these conditions, that would have a meaning that I think I could understand; on the other hand, everything might be a thorough preparation for a new start and a new task when peace comes.

Bonhoeffer had been resigned to missing Eberhard and Renate’s wedding the previous May. But when he learned they were expecting a child, Bonhoeffer was sure he would be out in time to preach at the baptism. The child was even named after him, and he was the godfather. As the date drew near, however, he realized that he would not be out in time for this, either:

9 May 1944—It’s painful to me, to be sure, that the improbable has happened, and that I shall not be able to celebrate the day with you; but I’ve quite reconciled myself to it. I believe that nothing that happens to me is meaningless, and that it is good for us all that it should be so, even if it runs counter to our own wishes. As I see it, I’m here for some purpose, and I only hope I may fulfil it. In the light of the great purpose all our privations and disappointments are trivial. Nothing would be more unworthy and wrongheaded than to turn one of those rare occasions of joy, such as you’re now experiencing, into a calamity because of my present situation. That would go entirely against the grain, and would undermine my optimism with regard to my case. However thankful we may be for all our personal pleasures, we mustn’t for a moment lose sight of the great things that we’re living for, and they must shed light rather than gloom on your joy.

A week later he sent them “Thoughts on the Day of the Baptism of Dietrich Wilhelm Rüdiger Bethge.” Like his sermon for their wedding, it is a small masterpiece. In the letter with this essay he wrote, “Please harbor no regrets about me. Martin [Niemöller] has had nearly seven years of it, and that is a very different matter.”

“Religionless Christianity”

Sometime in April 1944, Bonhoeffer experienced a renewed surge in theological thinking, but because of his circumstances, he was able to communicate his ruminations only in the letters smuggled to Bethge. There would be no time to write another book, though he would try. He seemed to have been working on a book until the time that he was taken to the Gestapo prison that October, but the manuscript was never found. The sometimes inchoate thoughts in the letters to Bethge are all we have, and they have tangled his legacy. Many know Bonhoeffer only as the one who coined the dubious concept of religionless Christianity. And ironically many in the “God is dead” movement have regarded him as a kind of prophet.

Bonhoeffer felt free to share his deepest thoughts with his friend Eberhard Bethge, but he was an extremely guarded person otherwise, and it’s almost certain that if he had known that his private and ill-expressed theological thoughts would have found their way into seminary discussions of the future, he would have been not only embarrassed but deeply disturbed. When Bethge asked whether he could share the letters with some of the brethren from Finkenwalde—“Would you, I wonder, allow these sections to be given to people like Albrecht Schönherr, Winfried Maechler and Dieter Zimmermann?”—Bonhoeffer demurred. “I would not do it myself as yet,” he wrote, “because you are the only person with whom I venture to think aloud, as it were, in the hope of clarifying my thoughts.” Later, in the same letter, he wrote, “Incidentally, it would be very nice if you didn’t throw away my theological letters, but sent them from time to time to Renate, as they must surely be a burden for you there. I might like to read them again later for my work, perhaps. One can write some things in a more natural and lively way in a letter than in a book, and in letters I often have better ideas than when I’m writing for myself.”

It was on this basis that Bethge felt free after Bonhoeffer’s death to share some of these letters with other theologians. The strange theological climate after World War II and the interest in the martyred Bonhoeffer were such that the few bone fragments in these private letters were set upon as by famished kites and less noble birds, many of whose descendants gnaw them still. All of which has led to a terrific misunderstanding of Bonhoeffer’s theology and which lamentably washed backward over his earlier thinking and writing. Many outre theological fashions have subsequently tried to claim Bonhoeffer as their own^* and have ignored much of his ouevre to do so. Generally speaking, some theologians have made of these few skeletal fragments something like a theological Piltdown man, a jerry-built but sincerely believed hoax.

The most tortured interpretations have fixed on his reference to “religionless Christianity.” In a 1967 lecture at Coventry Cathedral in England, Eberhard Bethge said that the “isolated use and handing down of the famous term ‘religionless Christianity’ has made Bonhoeffer the champion of an undialectical shallow modernism which obscures all that he wanted to tell us about the living God.” A principal passage is this one from Bonhoeffer’s letter to Bethge on April 30, 1944:

What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today. The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience—and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious any more. Even those who honestly describe themselves as “religious” do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by “religious.”

In a nutshell, he saw a situation so bleak, by any historical measures, that he was rethinking some basic things and wondered whether modern man had moved beyond religion. What Bonhoeffer meant by “religion” was not true Christianity, but the ersatz and abbreviated Christianity that he spent his life working against. This “religious” Christianity had failed Germany and the West during this great time of crisis, for one thing, and he wondered whether it wasn’t finally time for the lordship of Jesus Christ to move past Sunday mornings and churches and into the whole world. But this was simply an extension of his previous theology, which was dedicatedly Bible centered and Christ centered.

Bonhoeffer never had time to work out much of his new thinking. But overeager theologians have built diminutive Ziggurats from these few scattered bricks. Bonhoeffer also wrote, “In what way are we [the church] . . . those who are called forth, not regarding ourselves from a religious point of view as specially favoured, but rather as belonging wholly to the world? In that case Christ is no longer an object of religion, but something quite different, really the Lord of the world. But what does that mean?”

Bonhoeffer was thinking in a new way about what he had been thinking and saying for two decades: God was bigger than everyone imagined, and he wanted more of his followers and more of the world than was given him. Bonhoeffer recognized that standard-issue “religion” had made God small, having dominion only over those things we could not explain. That “religious” God was merely the “God of the gaps,” the God who concerned himself with our “secret sins” and hidden thoughts. But Bonhoeffer rejected this abbreviated God. The God of the Bible was Lord over everything, over every scientific discovery. He was Lord over not just what we did not know, but over what we knew and were discovering through science. Bonhoeffer was wondering if it wasn’t time to bring God into the whole world and stop pretending he wanted only to live in those religious corners that we reserved for him:

It always seems to me that we are trying anxiously in this way to reserve some space for God; I should like to speak of God not on the boundaries but at the centre, not in weaknesses but in strength; and therefore not in death and guilt but in man’s life and goodness. . . . The church stands not at the boundaries where human powers give out, but in the middle of the village. That is how it is in the Old Testament, and in this sense we still read the New Testament far too little in the light of the Old. How this religionless Christianity looks, what form it takes is something that I’m thinking about a great deal and I shall be writing to you again about it soon.

Bonhoeffer’s theology had always leaned toward the incarnational view that did not eschew “the world,” but that saw it as God’s good creation to be enjoyed and celebrated, not merely transcended. According to this view, God had redeemed mankind through Jesus Christ, had re-created us as “good.” So we weren’t to dismiss our humanity as something “un-spiritual.” As Bonhoeffer had said before, God wanted our “yes” to him to be a “yes” to the world he had created. This was not the thin pseudohumanism of the liberal “God is dead” theologians who would claim Bonhoeffer’s mantle as their own in the decades to come, nor was it the antihumanism of the pious and “religious” theologians who would abdicate Bonhoeffer’s theology to the liberals. It was something else entirely: it was God’s humanism, redeemed in Jesus Christ.

Bonhoeffer’s Magnum Opus

Bonhoeffer thought of Ethics as his magnum opus. It is the book that he never quite finished. He had worked on it for years, at Ettal and at Klein-Krössin and at Friedrichsbrunn and in his attic bedroom in Berlin. And now he worked on it in his cell at Tegel. In 1943, to Bethge, he said, “I sometimes feel as if my life were more or less over, and as if all I had to do now were to finish my Ethics.” Although Bonhoeffer never finished it to his satisfaction, it can be seen, along with his Discipleship and Life Together, as essentially complete,^* and as indisputably important in forming a full understanding of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

The book opens with these lines: “Those who wish even to focus on the problem of a Christian ethic are faced with an outrageous demand—from the outset they must give up, as inappropriate to this topic, the very two questions that led them to deal with the ethical problem: ‘How can I be good?’ and ‘How can I do something good?’ Instead they must ask the wholly other, completely different question: ‘What is the will of God?’”

For Bonhoeffer, there is no reality apart from God and no goodness apart from him. All pretense to that effect is Barth’s pejorative notion of religion, a scheme to subvert God altogether and make a fallen humanistic path to heaven alone. It is Barth’s Tower of Babel, and it is the fig leaf that tries to fool God, but fails.

“All things appear as in a distorted mirror,” Bonhoeffer wrote, “if they are not seen and recognized in God.” So God is not merely a religious concept or religious reality. God is the one who invented reality, and reality can only be seen truly as it exists in God. Nothing that exists is outside his realm. So there are no ethics apart from doing God’s will, and God—indeed, Jesus Christ—is the nonnegotiable given in the equation of human ethics:

In Jesus Christ the reality of God has entered into the reality of this world. The place where the questions about the reality of God and about the reality of the world are answered at the same time is characterized solely by the name: Jesus Christ. God and the world are enclosed in this name . . . we cannot speak rightly of either God or the world without speaking of Jesus Christ. All concepts of reality that ignore Jesus Christ are abstractions.

As long as Christ and the world are conceived as two realms bumping against and repelling each other, we are left with only the following options. Giving up on reality as a whole, either we place ourselves in one of the two realms, wanting Christ without the world or the world without Christ—and in both cases we deceive ourselves.  . . . There are not two realities, but only one reality, and that is God’s reality revealed in Christ in the reality of the world. Partaking in Christ, we stand at the same time in the reality of God and in the reality of the world. The reality of Christ embraces the reality of the world in itself. The world has no reality of its own independent of God’s revelation in Christ. . . . [T]he theme of two realms, which has dominated the history of the church again and again, is foreign to the New Testament.

Bonhoeffer believed that, historically speaking, it was time for everyone to see these things. The evilness of the Nazis could not be defeated via old-fashioned “ethics,” “rules,” and “principles.” God alone could combat it. Under “normal” circumstances, he said, people are concerned with ideas of right and wrong. They try to do right, as they see it, and try to avoid doing what is wrong. This would never suffice, but at the time of the Nazis, the failure of such a “religious” approach had become more obvious. “Shakespeare’s characters are among us,” he wrote. “The villain and the saint have little or nothing to do with ethical programs.” Hitler had made the true reality of the human condition less avoidable; evil had stepped to the center of the world stage and removed its mask.

In the book, Bonhoeffer examined and dismissed a number of approaches to dealing with evil. “Reasonable people,” he said, think that “with a little reason, they can pull back together a structure that has come apart at the joints.” Then there are the ethical “fanatics” who “believe that they can face the power of evil with the purity of their will and their principles.” Men of “conscience” become overwhelmed because the “countless respectable and seductive disguises and masks in which evil approaches them make their conscience anxious and unsure until they finally content themselves with an assuaged conscience instead of a good conscience.” They must “deceive their own conscience in order not to despair.” Finally there are some who retreat to a “private virtuousness.” He added,

Such people neither steal, nor murder, nor commit adultery, but do good according to their abilities. But . . . they must close their eyes and ears to the injustice around them. Only at the cost of self-deception can they keep their private blamelessness clean from the stains of responsible action in the world. In all that they do, what they fail to do will not let them rest. They will either be destroyed by this unrest, or they will become the most hypocritical of all Pharisees.

Bonhoeffer was speaking about himself as much as about anyone. In light of the events in Germany at that time, everyone was trapped in a situation of ethical impossibilities. In light of the monstrous evils being committed all around, what could one do and what should one do? In letters from his ordinands, we read of how tortured they were in knowing when to protest and when to accede, when to go to war, even if they knew it was unjust, and when to take a stand. One of them wrote to Bonhoeffer about having to kill prisoners and was obviously torn up about it, knowing that if he didn’t comply, he would himself be killed. This sort of thing had become commonplace. Who could fathom the horrors of the concentration camps where Jews, hoping to preserve their own lives, were forced to do unspeakable things to other Jews? The utter evilness of evil now showed itself clearly, and it showed up the bankruptcy of man’s so-called ethical attempts to deal with it. The problem of evil is too much for us. We are all tainted by it and cannot escape being tainted by it.

But Bonhoeffer did not take a moralistic tone. He put himself in the mix of those perplexed by the problem of evil and likened all of us to the figure of Don Quixote. Don Quixote was for Bonhoeffer an important picture of the human condition. In his Ethics, he wrote that in our efforts to do good we, like that “knight of the doleful countenance,” are tilting at windmills. We think we are doing good and fighting evil, but in fact, we are living in an illusion. There was no moral condemnation in what Bonhoeffer said, however. “Only the mean-spirited can read the fate of Don Quixote,” he wrote, “without sharing in and being moved by it.” This is our universal predicament as human beings.

The solution is to do the will of God, to do it radically and courageously and joyfully. To try to explain “right” and “wrong”—to talk about ethics— outside of God and obedience to his will is impossible: “Principles are only tools in the hands of God; they will soon be thrown away when they are no longer useful.” We must look only at God, and in him we are reconciled to our situation in the world. If we look only to principles and rules, we are in a fallen realm where our reality is divided from God:

“Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves” is a saying of Jesus (Matt. 10:16). As with all of his sayings, it is he himself who interprets it. No one can look at God and at the reality of the world with undivided gaze as long as God and the world are torn apart. Despite all efforts to prevent it the eyes still wander from one to the other. Only because there is one place where God and the reality of the world are reconciled with each other, at which God and humanity have become one, is it possible there and there alone to fix one’s eyes on God and the world together at the same time. This place does not lie somewhere beyond reality in the realm of ideas. It lies in the midst of history as a divine miracle. It lies in Jesus Christ the reconciler of the world.

Bonhoeffer was saying that apart from Jesus Christ, we cannot know what is right or do right. We must look to him in every situation. Only in him can the fathomless evil of the world be dealt a death blow. To those for whom Bonhoeffer’s few words on religionless Christianity were the sine qua non of all he ever said, this uncompromising Christocentrism would be strong meat, as are his pronouncements in Ethics on a number of other issues, such as abortion:

Destruction of the embryo in the mother’s womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed upon this nascent life. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And that is nothing but murder.

But Bonhoeffer saw both sides of such issues. God’s grace must not be removed from the picture:

A great many different motives may lead to an action of this kind; indeed in cases where it is an act of despair, performed in circumstances of extreme human or economic destitution and misery, the guilt may often lie rather with the community than with the individual. Precisely in this connexion money may conceal many a wanton deed, while the poor man’s more reluctant lapse may far more easily be disclosed. All these considerations must no doubt have a quite decisive influence on our personal and pastoral attitude towards the person concerned, but they cannot in any way alter the fact of murder.

Visitors at Tegel

At the heart of Bonhoeffer’s theology was the mystery of the incarnation. In a circular letter he wrote, “No priest, no theologian stood at the cradle in Bethlehem. And yet, all Christian theology has its origin in the wonder of all wonders that God became man. Alongside the brilliance of holy night there burns the fire of the unfathomable mystery of Christian theology.” It was because of this that he embraced the humanity of Jesus Christ in a way that religious pietists could not, and it was because of this that he felt justified in embracing the good things of this world as gifts from the hand of God, rather than as temptations to be avoided. So even in prison, Bonhoeffer’s enjoyment of people and life was very much alive.

His favorite times during these eighteen months at Tegel were when he could entertain visitors, even under Roeder’s watchful eye, although as the months passed, guards sometimes allowed him time alone with visitors.

On November 26, 1943, Bonhoeffer was afforded the unique treat of a visit from the four people in the world he loved most: Maria, his parents, and Eberhard Bethge. They came together, and when Bonhoeffer returned to his cell, he was beside himself:

It will be with me for a long time now—the memory of having the four people who are nearest and dearest to me with me for a brief moment. When I got back to my cell afterwards, I paced up and down for a whole hour, while my dinner stood there and got cold, so that at last I couldn’t help laughing at myself when I found myself repeating over and over again, “That was really great!” I always hesitate to use the word “indescribable” about anything, because if you take enough trouble to make a thing clear, I think there is very little that is really “indescribable”— but at the moment that is just what this morning seems to be.

The good cheer of Bonhoeffer’s family under all circumstances can be seen in the way they turned even the prison visits into small celebrations. This time they brought a number of presents with them, including a cigar from Karl Barth. Maria had made an Advent garland for him, and Bethge gave him several remarkably large hard-boiled eggs.^* That Christmas, Maria gave him the wristwatch her father was wearing when he was killed. Bonhoeffer’s parents also gave him an heirloom: “great-grandfather’s goblet from 1845, which is now standing on my table with evergreen in it.” Just over a month later, on his birthday, Bonhoeffer’s mother gave him another heirloom, the Herzliebschränken, an exquisite little cupboard of carved rosewood that once belonged to Goethe, who had given it to his friend Minna Herzlieb. Like the goblet, it had come into the family through his great-grandfather, Karl August von Hase.

On his thirty-eighth birthday, Bonhoeffer received a visit from Maria, who unwittingly bore some hard news. One of the books she passed along to him that day contained a coded message from his parents: Admiral Canaris had been dismissed from office. The Gestapo and RSHA had achieved what they had always longed for. They had brought the renegade Abwehr under their jurisdiction. Canaris functioned effectively for a short time longer, but the most important development that came from this hard turn of events was a positive one. The leadership of the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler did not die but was placed in fresh hands. A new group of conspirators would emerge, headed by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg. And this group would succeed where the others had failed time and again.

* . She expected to begin a nursing job in Hanover soon.

* . The editor of these extraordinary letters is Maria’s sister, Ruth-Alice von Bismarck. Before her premature death from cancer in 1977, Maria gave her sister permission to publish the letters, which tell the story of her relationship with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and give context and background not found elsewhere.

* . The English translation in Letters & Papers from Prison is much less emphatic than what the German sentence indicates. The German “Vor allem . . . dir wissen und auch wirklich glauben, das es mir gut geht” is better translated, “Above all, I want you to know and also to really believe that I am doing well.”

* . See page 27.

* . “To have company in distress,” from the aphorism “Misery loves company.”

** . “Having (company).”

* . A popular song of the era, especially among the troops. The German military broadcasting station ended with it each night.

* . “Shall I not praise my God?”

* . In 1943, Maria visited Bonhoeffer on June 24, July 30, August 26, October 7, November 10 and 26, and December 10 and 22. In 1944, she visited him on January 1 and 24, February 4 (his birthday), March 30, April 18 and 25, May 22, June 27, and August 23.

* . In German, Sie is the formal and polite mode of address, and du is the informal mode, saved for close friends and family members.

** . Judge Advocate of colonel’s rank; in this case, Roeder.

*** . Most of their discussions were overheard by Roeder, who sat nearby.

* . According to man’s confusion and God’s providence.

* . Jeremiah 32:15.

* . Danish-German poet, 1817-88.

** . Although the storm is raging yet; / beneath each spire or minaret, / behold the world, the glorious world / has not been destroyed.

* . Praiser of times past,” taken from Horace’s Ars Poetica.

* . “For what credit is it if, when you are beaten for your faults, you take it patiently? But when you do good and suffer, if you take it patiently, this is commendable before God . . . But even if you should suffer for righteousness’ sake, you are blessed. ‘And do not be afraid of their threats, nor be troubled’” (NKJV).

* . It seems likely someone will eventually claim that Bonhoeffer’s relationship with Bethge partook of more than philos and storge.

* . Eberhard Bethge edited the surviving manuscript.

* . Some sources have mistaken them for actual ostrich eggs because Bonhoeffer jokingly referred to them that way in a letter to Bethge.