Who am I?: Bonhoeffer's theology through his poetry

Who Am I?

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Who Am I?
Bonhoeffer’s Theology through His Poetry

Edited by Bernd Wannenwetsch

Published by T&T Clark A Continuum imprint The Tower Building, 11 York Road, 80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704, London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Copyright © Bernd Wannenwetsch and contributors, 2009 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group ISBN-10: HB: 0–567–03222–1 ISBN-13: HB: 978–0–567–03222–5

Contents


Acknowledgements

vii

Abbreviations

viii

Contributors

xi

1. Introduction: Who is Dietrich Bonhoeffer for Us Today? Bernd Wannenwetsch 2. ‘Who Am I?’: Human Identity and the Spiritual Disciplines in the Witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Michael Northcott 3. ‘Past’: Bonhoeffer’s ‘Past’ Oliver O’Donovan

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31

4. ‘Success and Failure’: Public Disasters, Works of Love, and the Inwardness of Faithfulness Brian Brock

47

5. ‘By Powers of Good’: Bonhoeffer’s Last Poem: Texts and Contexts Nancy Lukens and Renate Bethge

71

6. ‘The Friend’: Reflections on Friendship and Freedom Stanley Hauerwas

91

7. ‘Voices in the Night’: Human Solidarity and Eschatological Hope Philip G. Ziegler

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Contents

8. ‘Stations on the Way to Freedom’: The Presence of God – The Freedom of Disciples Hans G. Ulrich

147

9. ‘Christians and Pagans’: Towards a Trans-Religious Second Naïveté or How to Be a Christological Creature Bernd Wannenwetsch

175

10. ‘Jonah’: Guilt and Promise Stephen Plant

197

11. ‘The Death of Moses’: Why Moses? Craig J. Slane

213

Bibliography

243

Index of Biblical References

251

Subject Index

253

Name Index

257

Acknowledgements


Translations taken from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s poetry are from — Letters and Papers from Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 8 (ed. John W. de Gruchy; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, in preparation); copyright © Fortress Press. Used by permission of Augsburg Fortress Publishers. — Letters and Papers from Prison (ed. Eberhard Bethge; London: SCM Press, enlarged edn, 1971); copyright © SCM Press and Simon & Schuster Press. Used by permission of SCM Press and Simon & Schuster Press. — The Prison Poems of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (ed. and trans. Edwin Robertson; Guildford, Surrey: Eagle Press, 1998); copyright © Eagle Publishing Ltd. Used by permission of Eagle Publishing Ltd. — Widerstand und Ergebung (eds Christian Gremmels, Eberhard Bethge, Renate Bethge, with Ilse Tödt; Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser/Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1998); copyright © Chr. Kaiser/Gütersloher Verlagshaus. Used by permission of Gütersloher Verlagshaus.

Other quotations from Letters and Papers from Prison (ed. Eberhard Bethge; London: SCM Press, enlarged edn, 1971); copyright © SCM Press and Simon & Schuster Press. Used by permission of SCM Press and Simon & Schuster Press.

Abbreviations


Primary Sources DBWE 1 Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church (ed. Clifford J. Green; trans. Reinhard Krauss and Nancy Lukens; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998). DBWE 2 Act and Being: Transcendental Philosophy and Ontology in Systematic Theology (ed. Wayne Whitson Floyd Jr.; trans. Martin Rumscheidt; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996). DBWE 3 Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1–3 (ed. John de Gruchy; trans. Douglas Stephen Bax; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996). DBWE 4 Discipleship (eds Geffrey B. Kelly and John D. Godsey; trans. Barbara Green and Reinhard Krauss; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001). DBW 5 Gemeinsames Leben. Das Gebetbuch der Bibel (eds Gerhard Ludwig Müller, Albrecht Schönherr; Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1987). DBWE 5 Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible (ed. Geffrey B. Kelly; trans. Daniel W. Bloesch and James H. Burtness; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996). DBW 6 Ethik (eds Ilse Tödt, Heinz Eduard Tödt, Ernst Feil, and Clifford Green; Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1992; Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser/Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2nd ed, 1998). DBWE 6 Ethics (ed. Clifford J. Green; trans. Reinhard Krauss, Charles C. West and Douglas W. Scott; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005). DBWE 7 Fiction from Tegel Prison (ed. Clifford J. Green; trans. Nancy Lukens; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000). DBW 8 Widerstand und Ergebung (eds Christian Gremmels, Eberhard Bethge and Renate Bethge, with Ilse Tödt; Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser/Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1998).

Abbreviations DBWE 8

DBW 9

DBWE 9

DBW 10

DBWE 13

DBW 14

DBW 15

DBWE 16

DBW 17

CD GG LLC 92

LPP MW

ix

Letters and Papers from Prison (ed. John de Gruchy; trans. Isabel Best, Lisa Dahill, Reinhard Krauss and Nancy Lukens; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009). Jugend und Studium 1918–1927 (ed. Hans Pfeifer with Clifford Green and Carl-Jürgen Kaltenborn; Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1986). The Young Bonhoeffer: 1918–1927 (eds Paul Matheny, Clifford J. Green and Marshall Johnson; trans. Mary Nebelsick, with the assistance of Douglas W. Scott; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001). Barcelona, Berlin, Amerika 1928–1931 (eds Reinhard Staats and Hans-Christoph von Hase, with Holger Roggelin and Matthias Wünsche; Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1991). London 1933–1935 (ed. Keith Clements; trans. Isabel Best and Douglas W. Scott; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007). Illegale Theologenausbildung: Finkenwalde 1935–1937 (eds Otto Dudzus and Jürgen Henkys with Sabine BobertStützel, Dirk Schulz and Ilse Tödt; Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser/ Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1996). Illegale Theologenausbildung: Sammelvikariate 1937–1940 (ed. Dirk Schulz; Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser/Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1998). Conspiracy and Imprisonment 1940–1945 (ed. Mark Brocker; trans. Lisa Dahill; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006). Register und Ergänzungen (eds Herbert Anzinger and Hans Pfeiffer; Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser/Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1999). The Cost of Discipleship (London: SCM Press, revised and unabridged edition, 1959). Von guten Mächten: Gebete und Gedichte (ed. J.C. Hampe; Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1976). Love Letters from Cell 92: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Maria von Wedemeyer, 1943–1945 (eds Ruth-Alice von Bismarck and Ulrich Kabitz; trans. John Brownjohn; London: HarperCollins, 1994). Letters and Papers from Prison (ed. Eberhard Bethge; London: SCM Press, enlarged edn, 1971). Meditating on the Word (trans. and ed. David McI. Gracie; Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1986).

x NRS

PPDB PP

SPC TF

WF WFE

ZE

Abbreviations No Rusty Swords: Letters, Lectures, and Notes, 1928–1936, from the Collected Works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Volume 1 (ed. Edwin Robertson; trans. Edwin Robertson and John Bowden; London: Collins, 1965). The Prison Poems of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (ed. and trans. Edwin Robertson; Guildford, Surrey: Eagle, 1998). Prayers from Prison: Prayers and Poems (interpreted by Johann Christoph Hampe; trans. John Bowden; London: Collins, 1978). Spiritual Care (trans. Jay C. Rochelle; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985). A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (eds Geffrey B. Kelly and F. Burton Nelson; San Francisco: Harper, 1990). Auf dem Wege zur Freiheit: Gedichte aus Tegel (ed. Eberhard Bethge; Berlin: Verlag Haus und Schule, 1946). The Way to Freedom: Letters, Lectures, and Notes, 1935–1939, from the Collected Works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Volume 2 (ed. Edwin Robertson; trans. Edwin Robertson and John Bowden; London: Collins, 1972). Zettelnotizen für eine ‘Ethik’ (ed. Ilse Tödt; Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser, 1993).

Other Works Bonhoeffer Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theologian, Christian, Man for his Times. A Biography (ed. Victoria J. Barnett; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, rev. edn, 2000). ChD Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I–IV (eds Geoffrey William Bromiley, Thomas Forsyth Torrance; trans. George Thomas Thomson, Harold Knight; Edinburgh: T&T Clark 1936–1977). DBG Jürgen Henkys, Dietrich Bonhoeffers Gefängnisgedichte: Beiträge zu ihrer Interpretation (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1986). ER Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans (trans. E.C. Hoskyns; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933). GF Jürgen Henkys, Geheimnis der Freiheit: Die Gedichte Dietrich Bonhoeffers aus der Haft. Biographie, Poesie, Theologie (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2005). LW Martin Luther, Luther’s Works 1–55 (ed. Jaroslav Pelikan et al.; St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1955–1986).

Contributors


Renate Bethge: Author and editor, niece of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and widow of Bonhoeffer’s close friend Eberhard Bethge, who initiated the widespread publication of Bonhoeffer’s writings after his death and authored the definitive biography. Her most recent publications include: Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Brief Life (Minneapolis: Fortress Publishers, 2004). Brian Brock: Lecturer in Moral and Practical Theology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. He was a visiting scholar in the theological faculty of Friedrich-Alexander University, Erlangen-Nuremberg in 2003–2004, and is author of Singing the Ethos of God: On the Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007). Stanley Hauerwas: Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School, with a joint appointment at the Duke University School of Law. His numerous book publications include: Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Non-Violence (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2004), and The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007). Nancy Lukens: Professor of German and Women’s Studies, Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, University of New Hampshire, USA. She is co-translator of Bonhoeffer’s Sanctorum Communio (DBWE 1) and Letters and Papers from Prison (DBWE 8), and translator of Fiction from Tegel Prison (DBWE 7). Michael Northcott: Professor of Ethics in the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. His recent publications include A Moral Climate: The Ethics of Global Warming (London: Darton Longman and Todd, 2007), and (ed. with Kyle Vanhoutan) Dominion, Diversity and Destruction: Religion and Science in the Struggle to Save Nature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).

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Contributors

Oliver O’Donovan: Professor of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology at the School of Divinity, New College, University of Edinburgh; previously Regius Professor of Moral & Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford. His numerous publications include: (with Joan Lockwood O’Donovan) Bonds of Imperfection: Christian Politics Past and Present (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004) and The Ways of Judgment. The Bampton Lectures 2003 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005). Stephen Plant: Lecturer in Theology at the University of Durham. Former Director of Studies at Wesley House in the Cambridge Theological Federation and affiliated lecturer in the University of Cambridge. His publications include Bonhoeffer (London: Continuum, 2004) and Forming Character, Commanding Obedience: Uses of the Bible in Bonhoeffer’s ‘Ethics’ (Frankfurt /M., New York: Peter Lang, 2009). Craig J. Slane: Owen Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology, Department of Bible and Theology, Simpson University, Redding, California. In 2002, he was the Eberhard Bethge scholar in residence in Berlin-Charlottenburg, working daily in the Bonhoeffer House. Recent publications include: Bonhoeffer as Martyr (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2004). Hans G. Ulrich: Professor emeritus for Systematic Theology and Ethics at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, and former president of the European Ethics Society (Societas Ethica). His numerous publications include Wie Geschöpfe leben. Konturen evangelischer Ethik (Münster, Hamburg, Berlin, Wien, London: LIT Verlag, 2005). Bernd Wannenwetsch: University Lecturer in Ethics, Oxford University; formerly taught Systematic Theology and Ethics at the Universities of Erlangen-Nuremberg and Mainz. His publications include: Political Worship. Ethics for Christian Citizens (Oxford: OUP, 2004) and Members of One Another. Political Theology in Biblical Perspective (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009). Philip G. Ziegler: Lecturer in Systematic Theology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. He is author of Doing Theology When God Is Forgotten: The Theological Achievement of Wolf Krötke (Frankfurt /M., New York: Peter Lang, 2007) and Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theologian of the Word of God (Aldershot: Ashgate, forthcoming).

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Introduction Who is Dietrich Bonhoeffer for Us Today? Bernd Wannenwetsch

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Who Am I?

I. Which Bonhoeffer, whose Bonhoeffer?
The majority of contributions in this volume were first presented at the international conference, ‘Bonhoeffer’s Theology through the Lens of his Poetry’, that was held at Harris Manchester College, Oxford, during 4–6 January 2006. This gathering was part of a worldwide series of events at the centenary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s birth and the sixtieth anniversary of his martyrdom. As the purpose of this conference was not primarily to learn more about Bonhoeffer’s theology, but to become itself an exercise in theologizing with Bonhoeffer, to continue the living Bonhoeffer tradition, it was of special importance to invite as much participation from, and interaction between, the participants as possible. The spread of participants was notably wide, ranging from theology graduate students and their academic teachers, pastors representing the generation of British Bonhoeffer renaissance in the 1960s, up to some in their eighties who could have been candidates for confirmation during Bonhoeffer’s pastorate in London in the 1930s. One of the highlights of the conference was a theatrical experiment with philosopher and playwright Douglas Huff ’s play about Bonhoeffer’s last days, entitled ‘Emil’s Enemies’. Conference members engaged in small group, ad hoc performances of the play, followed by a staged performance of the last scene for the whole ‘audience’ to watch – a dramatic spiritual dispute between Bonhoeffer and his prison guard. A particularly exciting moment occurred in one such theatre group when Renate Bethge, Bonhoeffer’s niece, the widow of his best friend, and one of the conference’s keynote speakers, actually played herself – and quite convincingly! However, following the performance, and after admitting how much she liked the play as a whole, she made the thoughtprovoking qualification, ‘except that Dietrich was really very different’. When the eyewitness felt that the ‘real’ Bonhoeffer was different from the one portrayed in the play, the question arose: who actually ‘owns’ the man? Could there be an authority to tell us who Bonhoeffer really was, and what his life, theology, and death were really about? This question could not be settled simply by establishing which perspective or approach afforded the best view of the historical facts. While we might expect his niece and then wife of his best friend to have a different – private – perception of the man than a public perspective of the historical Bonhoeffer would assume, the question that ultimately interests us is not who Bonhoeffer was, but who he is – who he is for us today. This is the sort of question appropriately aimed at such figures as the

Introduction

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Church Fathers, as we inquire into the meaning of the cloud of witness in a particular instance. The former question must be subservient to the latter: historical knowledge of context and events, research into biographical, ecclesiastical, and political circumstances, are meaningful to us not because they explain Bonhoeffer as a phenomenon, but insofar as they actually help us understand what he communicated back then and what he has to say to us today. As with any Church Fathers who speak to subsequent generations, each generation needs to ask those same questions in its own way and seek answers according to their own unique historical vocation. As it was aptly demonstrated in the Oxford conference, and its unusual spread of participants, there are indeed a number of (rather different) ‘Bonhoeffers’ – the hero of political resistance, the stimulator of a new spiritual this-worldliness, the political theologian, the post-liberal prophet, and more. This variety is nothing to worry about per se, but only as long as the various claims to ‘own’ Bonhoeffer are willing to engage with others and learn from each other. Typically, ‘camps’ in Bonhoeffer interpretation are bound to a particular selection of his work (for example: Discipleship or Letters and Papers from Prison) and aligned to specific topics such as the criticism of ‘cheap grace’ or the suggestion of a ‘non-religious interpretation’ of the Bible. It is certainly true that Dietrich Bonhoeffer has been claimed in ideological fashion like few other authors have, and although nobody would intentionally wish to be one-sided or narrow, the choice of an entry point into the author’s theology by identifying a focal vision or naming one or another core concepts has often resulted in this kind of one-sided perception or ideological partisanship.

II. Poetry and theology – illumination and horizon
The contributions in this book aim to offer an alternative by approaching Bonhoeffer’s theology through fresh interpretations of the ten poems he wrote in Tegel prison. Although limited in number and in terms of the time-span of production (from June to December 1944), these poems cover a wide range of topics, and taken together provide the sort of comprehensiveness that promises to counter-balance conceptual hypertrophy. Although we have to take into account Bonhoeffer’s own verdict: ‘I am certainly no poet!’,1 and although the activity of writing poetry came to him only late in his life during his imprisonment,

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Who Am I?

Bonhoeffer’s poems have shown themselves to merit intensive engagement much more than, say, his ventures into drama or novel writing. While the latter were short-lived attempts that resulted in abandoned fragments, his poetry writing turned out a lasting activity that was taken up over and over again from the first attempt in 1944 until his death. All the poems that we have are Bonhoeffer’s own approved and finished work, most of which have gone through several traceable revisions. Due to their relative shortness, these poems can be comfortably brought into conversation with each other as well as with Bonhoeffer’s theological prose. Although their difference from the Germanic, heavyladen, and conceptual language of his prose is stark, the poems prove a useful lens through which the concepts can be visualized in sharper contours. This is particularly valid for theological concepts, since poetic language is of a somewhat apophatic nature, suited to express the thought that can hardly be thought, the insight that is only just within reach. Poetic language is capable of capturing the coincidence of opposites, of expressing harmonious tensions as well as demarcating rapture and fracture; it withstands any interpretative unilateralism, enables risk of imagination while at the same time protecting it from being trivialized. While all this is true of poetry in general, and especially applicable to theological poetry, there is much in Bonhoeffer’s case that suggests a peculiar suitability. The orchestrated nature of poetic language seems a particularly appropriate medium to capture the complexity of Bonhoeffer’s theological thought whose richness in overtones is more reminiscent of musical cohesion than that of architecture. Whereas Barth’s theology amounts to an impressive architectonic system in the Church Dogmatics, where every brick is accurately positioned to stabilize a precise number of surrounding bricks, Bonhoeffer’s theologizing follows a deliberate non-system-building rationale that is marked by an inner sense of the dramatic instead of the static. ‘As usual, I’m being led on more by an instinctive feeling for questions that will arise later than by any conclusion that I’ve reached about them.’2 In an instructive way, this openness to divine illumination is reflected both in the actual composing of poetic material as well as in Bonhoeffer’s reminiscing about the production process in his correspondence with Bethge. In the letter dated 5 June 1944 that came with the first poem (‘The Past’), Bonhoeffer remarks about the ‘crucial part’ in the last few lines: ‘Strangely enough they came out in rhyme of their own accord. The whole thing was composed in a few hours, and I didn’t try to polish it.’3 The poietic process of thinking and writing poetry is by nature open to illumination as ‘being led’ in one’s thinking, and hence

Introduction

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particularly suited to theology – as long as God is not reduced to the mere ‘subject matter’ of theology but allowed His own initiative in the poietic moment. That the author experienced lines as ‘coming out in rhyme of their own accord’ is not to be misunderstood, though, as immediately theological. The sort of illumination that a rhyme scheme invites results often enough in ‘enforced’ harmonics that are as predicable as profane. Rhyming does invite illumination, but it cannot command or direct it. Illumination does not intrude from anywhere or rise like a phoenix from the ashes, but rather it emerges from a background of images and ideas that shape the author’s imaginative horizon, from which the illumination, as it were, ‘chooses’. In the poem ‘Christians and Pagans’, Bonhoeffer characterizes Christians as those who ‘stand by God in his suffering’.4 In a lost letter by Eberhard Bethge, in which he commented on the poem, the friend appears to have questioned the notion of ‘standing by’ as potentially too static. Bonhoeffer’s reply dated 10 August alerts Bethge to the following: ‘ “Stand by God” probably arose from thinking about the cross.’5 This throw-away comment is instructive about the way in which poetry works with ideas, as these are not construed, but ‘arise’. In the process of thinking or writing in lines, verses, stanzas, etc., ideas ‘emerge’ from the rich horizon that familiar (in Bonhoeffer’s case, biblical) images or concepts (of the theological tradition) provide for the author’s mind and imagination. An idea, a concept, a word may come to mind as ‘fitting’ at first only in a formal respect (as an alliteration or perhaps completing a rhyme), but is revealed afterwards as fitting in a deeper, pneumatological sense – as a matter of the illuminatio Spiritu Sancti: ‘It probably arose from the cross.’

III. Poetry as ecclesiastical communication
Another characteristic of his poetry writing reflects upon the connection between biography and theology that has fuelled enthusiasm in Bonhoeffer studies from the first. Composing poems was more than engaging in auto-therapeutic exercises for the inmate theologian. Instead of resulting from lonely soliloquy, these poems were a matter of communicating with friends, lover, and family. Although perhaps at first attempted as a sort of substitute for the impossible actual conversation with those who mattered most to him or had proven to be stimulating interlocutors,6 writing poetry became Bonhoeffer’s mode of conversing

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Who Am I?

with those who had contributed to his horizon up to this point: friends and family, but also hymn writers, biblical authors, and eventually God Himself: ‘whoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am thine’.7 Bethge, in response to receiving the poem ‘Stations on the Road to Freedom’, perceptively expressed his gratitude for the gift of the friend making himself vulnerable and exposed in the way that concurs with poetic production: You can’t give anything more personal than a poem. And you could hardly give me greater joy. There is no greater self-sacrifice, no better way of signifying an otherwise unattainable nearness than in a poem. And it is probably the form, because it makes visible the inwardness that is bound up and held in check within it. Unlimited surrender of the spirit awakens anxiety in the receiver. But this restrained surrender seems to me to be the highest degree of friendship and understanding. And as a result there is something very cheering and stimulating about it. Its touch is steadier and more far-reaching than that of a letter. Many thanks.8

Brian Brock, in his contribution to this volume, puts the communication of Bonhoeffer’s poetry in the wider context of the poetic make-up of his life as a theologian: He [Bonhoeffer] undoubtedly harboured understandable reservations about exposing himself, both artistically and personally. He may well have had an aptitude for poetry never before recognized, having been stifled under cultural and temperamental reserve. Yet he ventured such writing because he had been taught by a tradition of scriptural interpretation to venture a very specific sort of intimacy with God. Having learned from Luther and the Psalms what mattered in one’s converse with God, and how actually to go about it, he came both to understand the importance of the inner, affective relationship with God, and what builds and sustains the affective side of communication with God. Having learned to converse with God through poetry, it is not fanciful to suggest that he was emboldened to write poetry as a form of love for humans. He wrote poetry to those he loved, who shaped him, and who he was shaped by: his family, his friends, his fiancée, and in and with them all, his church.9

Brock seems to me just right in expanding the list of addressees of Bonhoeffer’s poetry beyond those who were marked as their first recipients to include ‘in and with them all, his church’. The point here, as I see it, is not so much that his inner circle was made up of fellow believers (which would not necessarily be true, at least not in regards to some

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family members and fellow-conspirators). The point of including the Church in the addressees of Bonhoeffer’s prison poems is that they represent from the start a mode of ecclesiastical communication, shaped by the conversational circles that Bonhoeffer had available in his cell: from the biblical authors and hymn books (the Psalter) by way of the hymn writers of his church tradition (notably Paul Gerhardt) up to the theological interlocutors and authors of the books on his small prison desk. The fact that Bonhoeffer’s poems are only fully intelligible when being read as an instance of immersing himself into the stream of conversation that is the Christian theological tradition allows us and even compels us to read these poems as being addressed to us today. Hence the purpose of this volume is to explore the poems as a way of understanding Bonhoeffer, the man and his theology, as a way of understanding our own vocation in our own day that is both similar and dissimilar to Bonhoeffer’s day.

IV. Precursors – translations – order of presentation
The idea to make Bonhoeffer’s poems the subject matter of a publication in their own right is not new. Already shortly after the end of the war, Eberhard Bethge published some of them in a booklet entitled, Auf dem Wege zur Freiheit: Gedichte aus Tegel (1946),10 even before the poems were incorporated in the famous collection Letters and Papers from Prison (1952). Other German publications by Johann Christoph Hampe (1976),11 and Jürgen Henkys (1986, 2005),12 presented the collection of poems together with interpretive attempts by the editors. For the English-speaking world, Edwin Robertson provided a similar service by publishing new translations of the poems together with short commentaries under the title The Prison Poems of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1998).13 The authors of this book are indebted to those earlier attempts, and in particular to Henkys’ detailed research on the genesis and background of every poem, which proved a valuable source and inspiration for many of the contributions presented here. The difference that we hope this book will make is in the deliberate emphasis on interpreting Bonhoeffer’s poems in a way that helps us better understand his theology as a way of better understanding our world and vocation today. This purpose is also reflected in the range of authors in this volume, which brings into collaboration Bonhoeffer experts with others more well-known for their work in other fields such as moral theology.

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Who Am I?

A word on the translation of the poems: As there is no such thing as a ‘perfect’ translation, especially not of poetic material, the decision was taken to make the German originals available alongside the respective English version (either by John Bowden from LPP or Edwin Robertson) that was deemed most useful by each contributing author. It would have been ideal in many cases to use the new translations by Nancy Lukens as they will appear in the forthcoming volume of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works edition (DBWE 8). Due to the timing of the latter’s publication this proved impossible, but the authors of this volume are grateful to the translator and publishers (Fortress Press) for the permission to access the new translations and make reference to them whenever it seemed appropriate for interpretative purposes. Nancy Lukens, in her own contribution to this volume (with Renate Bethge), of course, uses her new translation. Unlike earlier publications of Bonhoeffer’s poems, this volume does not present them in the order of production,14 but in the order that seemed to promise the best dramatic reading experience, according to the actual interpretations offered in the chapters of this book. Needless to say, the contributions can be read in whatever sequence suggests itself to the reader. Yet, the order chosen is appealing in particular as it ‘groups’ poems together that either have a common subject matter or converge in a particular approach or emphasis. So, for example, ‘Powers of Good’, ‘Sorrow and Joy’, and ‘The Friend’ all emphasize the significance of ‘fidelity’; ‘Stations on the Road to Freedom’ and ‘Christians and Pagans’ reflect on suffering as a hallmark of the Christian vocation; ‘Jonah’ and ‘The Death of Moses’ both use Biblical archetypes for the sake of testing and clarifying Bonhoeffer’s mission in regards to the concept of vicarious representative action; ‘Who Am I?’ and ‘The Past’ coincide in dealing with the author’s painful self-inspection and troubled questioning. Furthermore, while ‘Who am I?’ and ‘The Past’ (which have been placed here first) each present their own sort of ‘solution’ to these questions, so it can be argued that ‘Jonah’ and ‘The Death of Moses’ (placed at the end) act as a perfect frame by providing an even clearer answer: instead of answering the question, ‘Who am I’?, in the immediacy and urgency demanded by the quest for the modern self, through the typological interpretation of the Biblical narratives, the author has been set free to understand his vocation, and hence real identity, in being a Jonah, a Moses, or a Christ to his neighbours. The biographical, political, and theological impact of the chosen order can be explored in many other ways. However, perhaps most important is the way in which an order invites exploration of the individual poems in the light of the others and the surrounding theological

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prose. As with the best seating order at a banquet, it is always only as good as the conversations that actually ensue.

V. Thanks
I would like to thank the following institutions and individuals who made the conference itself possible and assisted with the works that lead to the publication of this book. For supporting the 2006 conference financially, logistically or morally: the Anglican-Lutheran Meissen Commission, the British Academy, the Higher Education Academy’s Subject Centre for Philosophical and Theological Studies, Harris Manchester College, and the Theology Faculty, Oxford. For their help with organizing the conference: Dr. Robert Bates and my doctoral students Michael Black and Guido de Graaff. For permission to use and stage the play ‘Emil’s Enemies’: Professor Douglas Huff. For permission to use choral music based on Bonhoeffer’s prayers, and for performing it during the course of the conference: composer Philip Moore and Christ Church Cathedral Singers. For editorial help with this volume: Matthew D. Kirkpatrick and Casey Cep; T&T Clark and Thomas Kraft for their patience and collaboration.

Notes
1. LPP, p. 372, commenting on the imperfections of the poem ‘Stations on the Road to Freedom’ that nevertheless went out in its unpolished form with the accompanying letter to Bethge ‘as something of a birthday present’. 2. LPP, p. 325, talking about the early stages of his thinking that led to his famous ‘novel’ questions such as ‘religions-less Christianity’. 3. LPP, p. 319. 4. LPP, p. 349. 5. LPP, p. 383. 6. As Bonhoeffer wrote to Bethge on 5 June 1944, ‘No one can interpret my thoughts better than you can’ (LPP, p. 320). 7. ‘Who Am I?’, LPP, p. 348. 8. LPP, p. 395. 9. Brian Brock, ‘Sorrow and Joy’: Public Disasters, Works of Love, and the Inwardness of Faithfulness; in this volume, p. 66. 10. WF (‘On the Way to Freedom: Poems from Tegel’).

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Who Am I?

11. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Von guten Mächten: Gebete und Gedichte (interpretiert von J. C. Hampe; München: Kaiser, 1976). 12. DBG, GF. 13. PPDB. 14. The poems’ original order reads as follows: (1) ‘The Past’, (2) ‘Sorrow and Joy’, (3) ‘Who Am I?’, (4) ‘Christians and Pagans’, (5) ‘Voices in the Night’, (6) ‘Stations on the Road to Freedom’, (7) ‘The Friend’, (8) ‘The Death of Moses’, (9) ‘Jonah’, (10) ‘By Powers of Good’.

2


‘Who Am I?’ Human Identity and the Spiritual Disciplines in the Witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Michael Northcott*

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‘Wer Bin Ich?’ Wer bin ich? Sie sagen mir oft, ich träte aus meiner Zelle gelassen und heiter und fest, wie ein Gutsherr aus seinem Schloß. Wer bin ich? Sie sagen mir oft, ich spräche mit meinen Bewachern frei und freundlich und klar, als hätte ich zu gebieten. Wer bin ich? Sie sagen mir auch, ich trüge die Tage des Unglücks gleichmütig, lächelnd und stolz, wie einer, der Siegen gewohnt ist. Bin ich das wirklich, was andere von mir sagen? Oder bin ich nur das, was ich selbst von mir weiß? unruhig, sehnsüchtig, krank, wie ein Vogel im Käfig, ringend nach Lebensatem, als würgte mir einer die Kehle, hungernd nach Farben, nach Blumen, nach Vogelstimmen, dürstend nach guten Worten, nach menschlicher Nähe, zitternd vor Zorn über Willkür und kleinlichste Kränkung, umgetrieben vom Warten auf große Dinge, ohnmächtig bangend um Freunde in endloser Ferne, müde und zu leer zum Beten, zum Denken, zum Schaffen, matt und bereit, von allem Abschied zu nehmen? Wer bin ich? Der oder jener? Bin ich denn heute dieser und morgen ein anderer? Bin ich beides zugleich? Vor Menschen ein Heuchler und vor mir selbst ein verächtlich wehleidiger Schwächling? Oder gleicht, was in mir noch ist, dem geschlagenen Heer, das in Unordnung weicht vor schon gewonnenem Sieg? Wer bin ich? Einsames Fragen treibt mit mir Spott. Wer ich auch bin, Du kennst mich, Dein bin ich, o Gott!

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Who am I? Who am I? They often tell me I would step from my cell’s confinement calmly, cheerfully, firmly, like a squire from his country-house. Who am I? They often tell me I would talk to my warders freely and friendly and clearly, as though it were mine to command. Who am I? They also tell me I would bear the days of misfortune equably, smilingly, proudly, like one accustomed to win. Am I then really all that which other men tell of? Or am I only what I know of myself, restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage, struggling for breath, as though hands were compressing my throat, yearning for colours, for flowers, for the voices of birds, thirsting for words of kindness, for neighbourliness, trembling with anger at despotisms and petty humiliation, tossing in expectation of great events, powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance, weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making, faint, and ready to say farewell to it all? Who am I? This or the other? Am I one person today and tomorrow another? Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others, and before myself a contemptible woebegone weakling? Or is something within me still like a beaten army, Fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved? Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine. Whoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am thine. (Translation: John Bowden)

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The survival of the poems we engage with in this volume is testament to the character and courage of the man who has become Protestantism’s greatest twentieth century saint. Dietrich Bonhoeffer displayed such calmness and inner strength in Tegel prison, and later at the Gestapo prison at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, that he won the admiration of his captors who offered to smuggle his papers and poems out to his friends.1 In response to a letter from his mother praising how he and his brother were coping with their trials, Bonhoeffer suggests that this capacity to suffer with equanimity and without self-pity ‘is probably something we have inherited’ since she herself had so often displayed complete calm and refused to show emotion at times of serious illness in the family.2 Not only was he calm but in the midst of his long interrogation, and strenuous efforts to hide the activities and names of his co-conspirators, he also continued an extensive correspondence and writing programme, and engaged often in conversation and counsel with his fellow prisoners and some of his captors.3 Those whom he met in Tegel spoke of the extraordinary practical assistance, friendship, and spiritual solace he gave to those around him, and of his powerful witness to the Gospel of Christ.4 In the second and third stanzas Bonhoeffer notes how those around him observed his power to command, and his apparent calmness in the face of great trials. But in the following stanzas we are given a glimpse behind this calm and commanding public face, which can create order and respect even in the midst of interrogation and incarceration. He describes a conflict between the public face of one emboldened by his identity as redeemed by Christ – ‘O God, I am thine’ – and that ‘other’ identity, the one he describes as ‘a contemptible woebegone weakling . . . Fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved’. But, this inner struggle does not reduce him to bouts of depression like those he had earlier experienced. As Eberhard Bethge suggests, he was buoyed up and sustained by the moral struggle of the plot against Hitler, and subsequent efforts to conceal it, and this saved him from melancholy.5 In the letter to Bethge that precedes this poem, Bonhoeffer disavows introspection, and criticizes accounts of the ‘inner life’ that posit an internal domain, hidden from outward view, in which God rules the individual.6 He observes how most of those who are confined in Tegel prison manifest a deep mistrust of others, both their jailors and their fellow prisoners, and suspect that even good acts are done for inscrutable but essentially selfish ends. Interestingly, he compares this suspicious tendency with the publication by gutter journalists – the English phrase these days is ‘tabloid newspapers’ – of intimate and scandalous aspects of public figures. It is ‘the displacement of God from the world,

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and from the public part of human life’ that leads to the modern attempt to secure self-identity in some private part of the self. It also generates the modern suspicion of all exterior good acts and the effort to subvert them by delving behind public goods to some more truly personal private sinfulness; all of this manifests ‘a basic antisocial attitude of mistrust and suspicion’ that is ‘the revolt of inferiority’.7 Commenting on the poem and the preceding letter, Bernd Wannenwetsch, our good friend who has brought these papers together, suggests along with Rowan Williams that this apparent dismissal of the inward dimension represents a critique of the modern hermeneutics of suspicion. The hermeneutics of suspicion arises from Descartes’ recovery of the early Christian heresy of mind/body dualism, and especially the Gnostic idea of the body as the prison of the soul.8 Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud mediate this recovered dualism in their respective metaphysics of society, morality, and the psyche. All three assumed an intrinsic conflict between external acts and interior states in the human condition. Hidden or suppressed drives – class conflict, weakness, the id – become the principal agencies of the social, the moral and the soul, and only social or psychotherapeutic analysts, or ‘supermen’, can see through appearances to the true inner condition of each. Wannenwetsch enlists Bonhoeffer, and this poem, in the post-liberal attempt to recover the moral self through the public worship and the politics of the body of Christ. He suggests that Bonhoeffer’s rejection of inwardness, and the pattern the poem evidences of lament and praise, reflects his ‘hearing’ of the Word in public worship. The claim is that Bonhoeffer sees Christian identity as intrinsically social and as arising from the invocation of God in the public life of the worshipping community. On this account Bonhoeffer anticipates the suspicion of Rowan Williams and Stanley Hauerwas of modern accounts of interiority and inwardness. They critique such accounts as evidence of the distorted effects of a mass society and modern individualism on the human person, and of the arrogance of those who wish to claim their lives as their own creations rather than as belonging to, and constituted by God or God’s story. The post-liberal approach argues for the central and constitutive importance of the narratives of scripture, their reading (and being heard) in public worship, and the way in which this reading and hearing shapes communities of Christians in those moral excellences that characterize true discipleship. On this account, disposition depends above all on synergy between inner and outer. Whereas piety leads to an unhealthy dependence on religious experience divorced from the outer realm of communities, roles and relationships, the public reading and proclamation of the

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Word trains individuals to narrate their lives in association with the narratives of God’s way with God’s people. There is much in Wannenwetsch’s account of this poem I would wish to affirm. The poem is indeed much like an individual Psalm of Lament in form. For Bonhoeffer, resolution of the putative conflict between inner and outer, desire and agency, intention and act, public and private, is found by analogy with the Psalmist who when he dwells on the desires of the heart apart from God is driven to despair. The Psalmist recalls the joy of God’s presence in the Temple (Psalm 40), and that God’s knowledge of him is greater even than his own (Psalm 139), his tendency to despair is replaced with praise and wonder at the glory of God. Like the Psalmist, Bonhoeffer acknowledges his own inner sense of division and of struggle and like the Psalmist also he sets this struggle in the context of his relations, or deprivation of relations, with other creatures: Am I then really all that which other men tell of? Or am I only what I know of myself, restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage, struggling for breath, as though hands were compressing my throat, yearning for colours, for flowers, for the voices of birds, thirsting for words of kindness, for neighbourliness . . .

Bonhoeffer first acknowledges the outward face of respect and dignity that he, like the Davidic Psalmist, shows to the public world. And he then laments the inward sense of abandonment and desolation, of unworthiness and weakness that contrasts with this outer face: Am I one person today and tomorrow another? Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others, and before myself a contemptible woebegone weakling?

And this lament is resolved, as it is for the Psalmist, by the acknowledgement that in the end it is God’s knowledge of him that is superior to his own knowledge of himself or to the public face that others claim to see: Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine. Whoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am thine.

However, the account of the poem as critiquing the modern quest for the authentic self is hard to sustain given that this poem could only

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have been written by someone who had a deep sense of the importance of human interiority for personal identity, and who engaged in selfanalysis, as Edwin Robertson suggests.9 What I take to be the misreading of the poem manifests a crucial failing in post-liberal narratives of the self and this is that instead of repairing the public-private division they simply move this division into the life of the Church so that the publicity of the Church’s reading of liturgy and proclamation of scripture is overemphasized while the equally important dimension of the formative spiritual disciplines of individual confession, meditation, and private prayer is missing. Far from dismissing accounts of the authentic self and interiority, when we read this poem in the context of Bonhoeffer’s writing on the self, especially Sanctorum Communio, his works of spiritual counsel, including Life Together and Discipleship, as well as LPP, we find that Bonhoeffer is very interested indeed in recovering the authenticity of the self – ‘who I really am’ – and hence a true individualism, as opposed to the fictional selves fostered by the will to power and the technological and bureaucratic age. Bonhoeffer makes no sharp division between public worship and private piety because he retains a spiritual and societal account of the self that is at variance with the account of the political self offered by Wannenwetsch and Williams. Bonhoeffer’s distinctive accounts of the self in community and of spiritual discipline, and his practices of communal and private devotion, all of them reflected in this poem, present us with a portrait of the authentic self that is by no means dismissive of the language of the heart and narratives of inwardness.10 In his theological writing from his first dissertation Sanctorum Communio Bonhoeffer develops an account of the individual before God and in community. But against the reliance of modern narratives of the self on autonomous reason and inner feeling, Bonhoeffer argues that moral responsibility is the mark of true personhood. He proposes that the truly authentic person is one who is ‘in the situation of responsibility, passionate ethical struggle, confrontation by an overwhelming claim’.11 The moral struggle produces a spiritual encounter with an insurmountable ‘barrier’, which is ‘the absolute duality of God and humanity’.12 Against the German Church’s baptism of the collective struggle to ‘defend the fatherland’, Bonhoeffer suggests that the end of humanity’s moral striving is the revelation of humanity’s rebellion against God. Only when a person has encountered the reality of sin, which manifests itself in the break between God and humanity, and between persons, will he come to see that he is not an unencumbered individual but part of a species that is marked indelibly, and unavoidably, by sin. The divine correlate of this revelation of the mark of sin is the presence of Christ in

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the Church, which is realized in the historical communion of saints. Apart from God, the self lacks truthful foundations and so is in some sense a fiction. The fictional self only acquires a true narrative when the self is incorporated into the body of Christ, which is the true social. The body of Christ is the only true community and it is only as part of this community that individuals are reconciled to God. Hence in the poem there is clearly a balance between the account of the self as ‘that which other men tell of ’ and ‘what I know of myself’, and any lack of fit between these two is not so much resolved as set in perspective by the concluding recognition ‘O God, I am thine’. The project Bonhoeffer set himself in Sanctorum Communio was to repair Hegel’s account of the self and in particular Hegel’s overidentification of the individual with society, an over-identification in the realm of ideas that mapped onto the growing submersion of the individual in the mass society that is so much a feature of modern totalitarian societies, including Germany under the Third Reich, and more recently of modern consumer societies. For Bonhoeffer, the reconciled self is located within the social world of the Church, and not of society as a whole, thus repairing the Hegelian error. It is in the form of the restored image of God, latent in the dignity of the human person, that the individual in the world becomes a responsible agent. And it is precisely the substantive nature of the restored self in Bonhoeffer that provides the continuity between the Church and those other creation mandates – work, family, state – where the grace of God is also at work. Instead of Hegel’s parable of Lord and Bondsman, Bonhoeffer recalls the Psalmist’s celebration of the solidarity of community for ‘How very good it is when kindred live together in unity’.13 This emphasis on the mutual submission of Christians in community had a particular and personal significance for Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was a charismatic teacher and a natural born leader of aristocratic bearing and upbringing, and even as a young man he came to realize that his gifts enabled him to dominate others and to order the world around him. These earthly powers, which he had in abundance, had the effect of isolating him from those around him and they prevented him from identifying with other people. As he put it in Act and Being, the dominating individual whose projects shape a world is torn out of ‘community with God and, therefore, also from that with other human beings’: by making his own life and the world around him his own project, both neighbour and God are reduced to objects for him to possess as projections of his own ego.14 Against this temptation of the masterful self, with its echoes of Kant and Nietzsche, Bonhoeffer asserts, with Hegel, the sociality of the

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self. The authentic self is not born or formed in isolation but shaped by relationships with God, creation, and other people. Bonhoeffer, like St Paul, sets the self in the Spirit-sanctified community in which the true self, the reconciled self in which ‘Christ lives’, is restored.15 In community the moral encounter with other selves becomes redemptive rather than alienating.16 This spiritual breakthrough, through community, to the true self is part of what Bethge describes as Bonhoeffer’s ‘conversion to Jesus Christ’ in the 1930s and is evidenced in the poem ‘Who Am I?’. Private prayer on its own is burdensome: the inmate longs for community, companionship and for the voices of creation. Reconciliation is not then for Bonhoeffer an ideal in history or a possibility of human consciousness realized by the principle of Incarnation. Rather the possibility of the reconciled self is tied to the empirical reality of the sanctified community.17 There is here no ideal community or Church, of the kind Barth often relies upon, which can offer an extraempirical, and hence extra-scientific, guarantee of the reign of Christ. Indeed, Bonhoeffer inveighs against ideas of Christian community that turn into idolatrous wish dreams and provide an excuse for removing the self from the messy realities and necessary negotiations of the real empirical Church.18 In the reconciled community, which is the essence of the Church, the alienation of person from person and persons from God are both overcome, and persons recover their true sociality in life together. The individual apart from the Church is unthinkable. Neither the experience of the Holy nor his powers of reason can overcome the break between humanity and God. Only his enfolding in the prayer, renunciation, and reconciliation that are the marks of restored community can restore human identity from the curse of Adam. Recognition of the central role of Church as devotional community in Bonhoeffer’s account of Christian identity is crucial for understanding his stance with respect to the Nazi emergency and its threat to the true Church. If the empirical Church denies the truth of the sovereign rule of Christ, then the self-identity of the Christian is itself at risk. There is no escape for Bonhoeffer into the idealized physicalism of apostolic succession in Petrine Rome, nor into a Lutheran Volkskirche: if the German Church submits to alien power, then the Church is no longer the place where German people experience the truth of their reconciliation to and incorporation in Christ. More than anything else, it is this that can explain how it was that German Christians could celebrate word and sacrament in a Church located just across the road from the gates of Auschwitz.19 If the true self is restored in community, then this makes the poem we have before us all the more poignant. Bonhoeffer’s account of the self

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finding its true being in solidarity with Christ through Christ’s presence in the Church is not without its ambiguities for an isolated prisoner, cut off from his brothers and sisters in Christ, and from his family. As he acknowledges in Life Together, prisoners who are cut off from the blessing of Christian community may remember, as the Psalmist did, how they ‘ “went with the throng, and let them in procession to the house of God, with glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving, a multitude keeping festival” (Ps. 42.5). But they remain alone in distant lands, a scattered seed according to God’s will’.20 Thirsting for kind words, for human company, the prisoner ‘need not feel any shame when yearning for the physical presence of other Christians’.21 And yet it is also important for the individual to be able to be alone, for it is only as alone that the individual can answer the call of God, struggle and pray, and, as Bonhoeffer does in this poem, face death and give a final account before God.22 In Life Together Bonhoeffer describes the spiritual journey of the individual who seeks to plumb the ‘unfathomable depths’ of God’s Word and by meditating on a particular text to discern ‘that it has something quite personal to say to us for this day and for our standing as Christians’ so that the individual may discover that ‘it is not only God’s Word for the community of faith, but also God’s Word for me personally. We expose ourselves to the particular sentence and word until we personally are affected by it’.23 In his cell at Tegel, we know that Bonhoeffer continued with this practice of meditation and indeed he does not lament the near absence of public worship at Tegel. It is rather companionship than true prayer for which he yearns precisely because at Finkenwalde he learned the spiritual discipline of the heart. Contemplative meditation was central to Bonhoeffer’s individual spiritual discipline, because, as Bonhoeffer himself put it, only by standing alone before the Word and in contemplating the image of the Word in Christ crucified, is it possible for the Christian to be ‘drawn into Christ’s image’ and identified with the form of the crucified One and so be empowered to display the glory of the risen Christ before a watching world.24 Only because he was as we are can we be as he was. Only because we already are made like him can we be ‘like Christ’. Since we have been formed in the image of Christ, we can live following his example. On this basis, we are now actually able to do those deeds, and in the simplicity of discipleship, to live life in the likeness of Christ. Here simple obedience to the word takes place. I no longer cast even a single glance on my own life, on the new image I bear. For in the same moment that I would desire to

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see it, I would lose it. For it is, of course, merely the mirror reflection of the image of Jesus Christ upon which I look without ceasing. The followers look only to the one whom they follow.25

For Bonhoeffer, moral responsibility and spiritual formation are intricately connected. Only the one who is formed by meditating on the crucified Christ in the silence of his own heart is enabled in the rest of the day to take responsibility with Christ and so be ‘the seed of the kingdom of God’ in the world.26 Written just five years before his decision to engage in the plot to kill Hitler we find here a mystic key, in addition to genetic and theological ones, to the character he displays even in the darkest hours of the path to his own Calvary. Some, including those who taught me theology in the 1970s, misread Bonhoeffer, and not least in some of his comments about a new ‘religionless Christianity’, in LPP, as advocating the abandonment of traditional Christian spirituality. But on the contrary Bonhoeffer’s concern is not to eschew the ‘arcane discipline’ of the spiritual life, which is the work of prayer and meditation, but rather to critique the cheap grace of Christendom religiosity that reached its zenith in the sacralization of Nazi paganism. The legacy of a Christendom Church was that it had dispensed a ‘cheap grace’, giving away ‘preaching and sacraments cheaply’ and having ‘absolved an entire people, unquestioned and unconditionally’.27 Bonhoeffer’s ecclesial conception of Christian self-identity represents a powerful rejection of Hegelian idealism, the ideological face of Christendom religion in Germany, and of liberal pietism; he rejects both the language of social progress towards the principle of the Incarnation, and the liberal pietist account of god-consciousness. Bonhoeffer’s critique of religion is focused on the privileged position of the Church in the public life of Germany, its efforts to preserve those privileges even under the Third Reich, and on extra-ecclesial accounts of godconsciousness as a psychic capacity. While Bonhoeffer anticipates postliberal suspicion of liberal apologetic attempts to resist the autonomy of the world from the authority of Christ and the Church, he nonetheless retains the mystical language of ‘inner detachment’,28 and devotes much of his energy in leadership at the seminary at Finkenwalde to the recovery of traditional practices of private confession, meditation, and prayer. It was in the practice of private meditation that Bonhoeffer first discerned the particular form of his own calling, to participate in the plot against Hitler, and it was from this same practice that he drew strength to endure courageously his imprisonment and eventual execution. As his actions demonstrate, it was not that he thought that a

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religionless, post-liberal Christianity would eschew either the traditional spiritual disciplines or responsible public action in the world. Rather the ‘discipline of the secret’ would preserve Christians from merging their identity in Jesus Christ with their actions in the world or its prevailing ideologies and untruths.29 In a letter in which he commends inner detachment, Bonhoeffer speaks of how the loneliness and privation of life in prison threatened and fragmented the selfhood of many prisoners who were fearful when bombs fell, greedy when good food appeared, and despairing when disappointed: They miss the fullness of life and the wholeness of an independent existence; everything objective and subjective is dissolved for them into fragments. By contrast Christianity puts us into many different dimensions of life at the same time; we make room in ourselves, to some extent, for God and the whole world. We rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep.30

Later in the same letter Bonhoeffer suggests that this holding together of the different facets of life is made possible when Christians stop treating God as a deus ex machina who merely answers the questions that in a scientific age remain unanswered and instead recognize God ‘at the centre of life, not when we are at the end of our resources’. Christ is at the centre of the discipline of the heart just as he is at the centre of life, and this is why faithfulness and perseverance in these disciplines are prerequisite for responsible action in a world come of age.31 The world apart from God stands more than ever under the wrath, as well as the grace, of God. Life in the world and its cities is full of ‘all imaginable horrors’ and the plots of individual lives have ‘become fragmentary’. Christians consequently should not invest, as their grandparents did, in projects to shape their own lives or plan for the future. Instead, as Bonhoeffer suggests in ‘Thoughts on the Day of Baptism of Dietrich Wilhelm Rüdiger Bethge’: ‘if we can save ourselves from the wreckage of our material possessions, let us be satisfied with that’. ‘Keep your heart with all vigilance; for from it flows the spring of life’ (Prov. 4.23). We shall have to keep our lives rather than shape them, to hope rather than plan.32

The Church in this context is to stop struggling for its self-preservation and better realize that ‘our being Christians today will be limited to two things: prayer and righteous action among men. All Christian thinking,

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speaking and organizing must be born anew out of this prayer and action’. Only renewal of the Church’s form will enable men and women after much delay to again utter the word of God and proclaim ‘God’s peace with men and the coming of his kingdom’.33 Rowan Williams’ reading of Bonhoeffer’s poem ‘Who Am I?’ suggests that it involves a rejection of the modern claim that the interior self is hidden from view, and only becomes available with the ministrations of a psychoanalyst. Williams and Wannenwetsch enlist Bonhoeffer in their critique of modern accounts of interiority and of the ‘therapeutic self ’.34 Against these accounts Williams posits that the self finds its true being in the non-competitive space opened up by the non-coercive acts of God in Jesus who sits at the head of a banqueting table and invites all to join him. For Williams, the quest for personal authenticity is a false one, a delusion fostered amidst the turn of the self into an economic subject in the consumer society and further advanced by the loss of the icons of the Christian past.35 It is perhaps surprising to find an Anglican Archbishop closer to Hegel than a Lutheran theologian, and yet it is because of the care with which he critiques and repairs Hegel that Bonhoeffer’s account of the reconciled and responsible self does not submerge but rather restores the substantial self as the unique site of the image of God in human beings. Bonhoeffer struggled with the sense of an interior self that threatened to obliterate meaning from politics and cosmos. He saw how the loss of sacred meaning in the cosmos had prepared the way for a technological age in which the idolization of human control over nature threatened to obliterate the good of creation both in nature and politics.36 And he was all too familiar with the Romantic and idealist response to the dying of the divine light in the cosmos where, instead of the soul being the microcosm of the cosmos, the soul through God-consciousness becomes cosmos, in the sense of orienting power. Bonhoeffer responds to these problems not by rejecting the substantial self, or the sacred cosmos, but by recovering those spiritual disciplines that train heart and mind to live at peace with creator and cosmos, and so with other men and women. Confession, the recitation of Psalms, and the reading of Scripture, private meditation, the prayer of the heart: these are the therapies prescribed by the Christian tradition for the reorientation of the disordered self to the original order of creation. It is no accident that Bonhoeffer engaged this therapy as he sought to build a counter-politics and a counter-Church in the heart of Nazi Germany at Finkenwalde, and later even in Tegel itself as he drew his fellow prisoners and some of his captors into the hospitable ambience of his spiritual practices. The error made by some of his interpreters is to

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exclude his doctrine of creation – whose importance we glimpse in the ‘voices of birds’ in this poem – from his account of the social self. Bonhoeffer is no Barthian. He does not so overstate the Christological principle that he cannot account (except through Mozart) for the workings of God in the heart. Indeed, Bonhoeffer criticizes Barth for having no place for the gradual unfolding of the ‘mysteries of the Christian faith in the life of the Christian’ in which the arcane disciplines train Christians.37 As Bethge reminds us, at the very beginning of the fragmentary essay in which he poses his ringing question ‘who is Christ for us today’, Bonhoeffer mentions prayer.38 He does not respond to liberal pietism or to the threatening Übermensch, by rejecting the traditional account of the journey of the soul towards the mystery of God. In his account of the intrinsic relation between self and society, prayer and action, spirituality and justice, he recalls the Augustinian claim that the pursuit of holiness, the education of desire, the quest to love what is truly loveable, involve paideia through those moral and spiritual practices that distinguish the citizens of the City of God from the earthly city. In sum, we cannot understand Bonhoeffer’s theological account of human identity – and the difference of his account from Barth’s – without seeing it in the context of his recovery of what Foucault, I think rather misleadingly, calls the ‘technologies of the self’.39 These ‘technologies’ do not begin with Christianity but the Christian claim is that Christ enlivens the practices of contemplation, confession, meditation on the Word and Psalm singing with the creator Spirit and thus sets these classical and Jewish disciplines of the soul within the divine plan of the salvation of the world. And this is why it is not accurate to speak of them as ‘technologies of the self’, for they are the practices by which Christians for two thousand years have trained themselves together and in solitude for the holy life, so that the microcosm that is the self – body and soul – is brought into peaceable harmony with the macrocosm of cosmos and Church that are the theatres of the glory of God, even as each individual self bears the divine image.40 Foucault, of course, sees confession as the invention of medieval Catholicism. But the systematisation of the practice of confession really began when the holy men of the fourth century took to the desert to escape the dulling moral and spiritual effects of the turning of Christianity into an imperial cult. Bonhoeffer’s recovery of confession and his proposal, first resisted but gradually adopted, that the seminarians at Finkenwalde confessed their sins regularly with peers of their own choosing, is not then a restoration of a Catholic and priestly practice – the sacrament of penance – but of an earlier tradition in which indi-

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viduals confess their sins to one another as those who stand equally before God as redeemed sinners. It is one of the ironies of Christian spiritual history that the desert fathers – who first went to the desert to live a solitary life – present a narrative of the substantiality of human interiority, which is more intrinsically communal and societal than that offered in modern therapeutic culture and yet more faithful to the reality of the inner mystical quest than much recent post-liberal theology. These fathers went to the desert as hermits and dwelt severally in caves and huts in order to engage in the spiritual struggle against the world, the flesh and the devil. They went the way of the cross, often leaving a former life as robber or idle pedant, in order to purify their desires and recover the true self, restored by the Spirit, through askesis, prayer and solitude. And, as Benedicta Ward reminds us, this way of the cross is not all of suffering and mortification: the fruit of their spiritual struggle with self and with sin is resurrection.41 Ironically many of these desert fathers actually came to live longer than their contemporaries in the city. And people often testified, as in the case of Anthony, that after years in the desert their faces were shining with a new glow of inner sanctity and external physical wholeness. However, not all of the desert fathers were as strong as Anthony. Many found that as they continued in solitude and attracted visitors from the city looking for counsel, they encountered the dangers of acidie, pride and self-delusion. To preserve themselves from these dangers they began to develop communal practices that are the root of monasticism in Christian history and which, in Derwas Chitty’s memorable phrase, turned the desert into a city.42 Central to these practices was the recognition that in the struggle between the self and the Spirit-illuminated true self there lies the danger of a new kind of pride – pride in spiritual achievement. Confession, written and oral, one to another was the device that the desert fathers developed to preserve themselves from just such temptation. But confession and repentance are only the beginning of the restoration of the holy man. Their duty, as Benedicta Ward explains in her luminous Lives of the Desert Fathers, was to gloriously live as those who have been redeemed by Christ. Despair, if it continued, was to be used in their relationship with God, but in their outward life they obliged to be cheerful and hospitable. And it were precisely these qualities that visitors to the desert would comment on afterwards: What can I say that would do justice to their humanity, their courtesy, and their love. . . . Nowhere have I seen love flourish so greatly, nowhere such quick, such eager hospitality.43

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Who Am I?

In his poem ‘Who Am I?’, Bonhoeffer exemplifies the distinctive relation between the inner life of spiritual struggle and the outer life of cheerfulness, charity and hospitality – outward charm, hopefulness, warmth, inward anger, despair, and worry that we also find in the desert fathers. The one who restores integrity, who makes it so that the outer is not a lie and the inner is not depression but a holy despair, is God: Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine. Whoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am thine.

But this resolution does not evacuate the significance of the difference between the inner and the outer: it heals the rift, bridges the gap, and restores wholeness. Of Bonhoeffer, an English prisoner Captain Payne Best, just before his execution, said that ‘his soul really shone in the dark desperation of our prison. He was one of the very few men I have ever met to whom God was real and ever close to him.’44 The common witness of those who encountered the hospitality of the brothers in the desert, like Bonhoeffer playing host in his cell, was that these encounters surpassed all their experiences of the fruits of holy life. The interpreter of Bonhoeffer who is most in sympathy with the view I have argued for in my reading of this poem is the great twentieth century exponent of desert spirituality Thomas Merton. Like Bonhoeffer, Merton sees the dangers of the submission of so much of humanity to the dominant powers of statist ideology and the technological collective. Like Bonhoeffer, Merton rejects the Christendom synthesis of Church and world while calling for a new and more critical sense of responsibility for the world among Christians. And like Bonhoeffer, Merton suggests that ‘the way to find the real “world” is not merely to measure and observe what is outside us, but to discover our own inner ground. For that is where the world is first of all: in my deepest self ’.45 There is no false choice between choosing Christ and choosing the world as though we need to choose ‘between two conflicting realities’. Instead, ‘we choose Christ by choosing the world as it really is in him, that is to say created and redeemed by him, and encountered in the ground of our own personal freedom and of our love’.46 Merton, like Bonhoeffer, celebrates the autonomy of the modern world, and of modern individuals, from the enforced tutelage of Christendom. And, like Bonhoeffer, Merton affirms the moral space and agency that this new autonomy of the world confers on the modern individual. This places a new requirement on the individual who would be morally responsible to engage in the spiritual disciplines that were traditionally reserved for the cloister for ‘a certain depth of disciplined

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existence is a necessary ground for fruitful action’. This is because the contemplative life produces not only ‘a realization of the immensity and majesty of God “out there” as King and Ruler of the universe (which He is) but also a more intimate and more wonderful perception of Him as directly and personally present in our own being’.47 As we encounter God in our innermost depths we also discover the opposition between our deepest self and God, and hence it is only through renunciation of self and the way of the desert that it is possible to reach a true awareness of God and of ourselves. And for Merton the repair of the drives of the self through contemplation forms the heart of the Christian response to the great crisis of the modern world and modern America. America has more power at its disposal than any previous civilization and has ‘made a fetish out of action’.48 But Americans have lost, or perhaps never had, the sense of contemplation, and this makes it hard for them to witness consistently to the power and meaning of love and its superiority as a principle of action to that of violence. At the time of the Vietnam War Merton through his vast correspondence and his poems and prose writings provided a distinctive spiritual orientation for those Christians who made common cause with the anti-war movement. For Merton, the Cold War and its outgrowth in Southeast Asia were the consequence of ‘a corrupt idea of peace based on a policy of “every man for himself ” in ethics, economics and political life’. And so he suggests that instead of loving what people think is peace and hating those whom people imagine are warmakers, the Christian call is to ‘hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed – but hate these things in yourself, not in another’.49 Reading Bonhoeffer and Merton side by side, the parallels in their respective witness against the German Third Reich and the American military machine are remarkable. They both reject the uncritical conformity of Church to the world that the Carolingian era first produced in Christendom. They both propose that responsible action in the world requires a new post-institutional Christian spirituality that engages in contemplative prayer and witness to peace and justice at the same time. They both affirm the intrinsic relation of public and private, of prayer and action, of interior and exterior of which the prayer ‘Who Am I?’ is a poignant and powerful exemplar. We can say of Bonhoeffer, as of Merton, that he was a witness to the love of Christ for a world at war, and that this witness was rooted in his encounter with the love of Christ in Christian community and endured in the personal askesis of the ‘arcane discipline’.

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Notes
* I am grateful to Nicholas Adams, Jolyon Mitchell, and Bernd Wannenwetsch for insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. 1. G. Leibholz, ‘Memoir’, in CD, pp. 9–27 (14). 2. Bonhoeffer, p. 834; cf. LPP, p. 127. 3. Bonhoeffer, p. 838. 4. Leibholz, ‘Memoir’, p. 14. 5. Bonhoeffer, p. 833. 6. LPP, p. 344. 7. LPP, p. 345. 8. Bernd Wannenwetsch, Political Worship: Ethics for Christian Citizens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 290–91; Rowan Williams, ‘The Suspicion of Suspicion in Wittgenstein and Bonhoeffer’, in R. H. Bell (ed.), The Grammar of the Heart: New Essays in Moral Philosophy and Theology (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), pp. 36–53. 9. Edwin Robertson, ‘Commentary on “Wer Bin Ich?” ’, in PPDB, p. 39. 10. Charles Marsh, ‘In Defence of a Self: the Theological Search for a Post-Modern Identity’, in SJT 55 (2002), pp. 253–82. 11. DBWE 1, p. 49. 12. DBWE 1, p. 49. 13. DBWE 5, p. 47. 14. DBWE 2, p. 137. 15. Charles Marsh, ‘Human Community and Divine Presence: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Critique of Hegel’, in SJT 45 (1992), pp. 427–48. 16. DBWE 1, pp. 66–73. 17. See also L. Gregory Jones, Embodying Forgiveness: A Theological Analysis (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), pp. 16–23. 18. DBWE 5, p. 36. 19. Duncan B. Forrester, ‘The Church and the Concentration Camp: Some Reflections on Moral Community’, in Samuel Wells and Mark Thiessen Nation (eds), Faithfulness and Fortitude: In Conversation with the Theological Ethics of Stanley Hauerwas (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), p. 205. 20. DBWE 5, p. 28. 21. DBWE 5, p. 29. 22. DBWE 5, p. 81. 23. DBWE 5, p. 87. 24. DBWE 4, p. 286. 25. DBWE 4, p. 287. 26. DBWE 5, p. 28. 27. DBWE 4, p. 53. 28. LPP, p. 310. 29. Geffrey B. Kelly, ‘Prayer and Action for Justice: Bonhoeffer’s Spirituality’, in John W. de Gruchy (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 246–68 (252). 30. LPP, p. 312. 31. Kelly, ‘Prayer and Action’, p. 251; cf. LPP, pp. 281–82.

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32. LPP, p. 297. 33. LPP, pp. 298–300. 34. Williams, ‘Suspicion of Suspicion’; cf. Rowan Williams, ‘Interiority and Epiphany: A Reading in New Testament Ethics’, in Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 239–64. See also Charles Marsh’s detailed exposition and critique of Williams on the self in his ‘In Defense of a Self’, pp. 262–73. 35. Rowan Williams, Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), pp. 23–24. 36. cf. DBWE 3, pp, 48, 67. 37. LPP, p. 286. 38. Bonhoeffer, pp. 865–66. 39. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, The History of Sexuality 2 (London: Viking, 1986). 40. On the understanding of the soul as microcosm see further Rémi Brague, The Wisdom of the World: The Human Experience of the Universe in Western Thought (trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan; Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003). 41. Benedicta Ward, The Lives of the Desert Fathers: The Historia Monachorum in Aegypto (London: Mowbray, 1980), p. 35. 42. Derwas Chitty, The Desert a City: Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism Under the Christian Empire (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1977). 43. Rufinus, cited in Ward, Desert Fathers, p. 35. 44. Geoffrey B. Kelly and F. Burton Nelson, The Cost of Moral Leadership: The Spirituality of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), p. 33. 45. Thomas Merton, ‘Is the world a problem?’ in Thomas Merton, Contemplation in a World of Action (London: Unwin, 1968), pp. 154–55. 46. Merton, ‘Is the world a problem?’, p. 155. 47. Thomas Merton, ‘Contemplation in a World of Action’, in Thomas Merton, Contemplation in a World of Action (London: Unwin, 1968), pp. 160–61. 48. Merton, ‘Contemplation’, p. 162. 49. Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation (Herts: Anthony Clarke Books, 1961), pp. 93–94.

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‘Past’ Bonhoeffer’s ‘Past’ Oliver O’Donovan

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Who Am I?

‘Vergangenheit’ Du gingst, geliebtes Glück und schwer geliebter Schmerz, wie nenn’ ich dich? Not, Leben, Seligkeit, Teil meiner selbst, mein Herz, – Vergangenheit? Es fiel die Tür ins Schloß, ich höre langsam Schritte sich entfernen und verhallen. Was bleibt mir? Freude? Qual? Verlangen? Ich weiß nur dies: du gingst – und alles ist vergangen. Spürst du, wie ich jetzt nach dir greife, mich an dir festklammere, daß es dir wehtun muss? wie ich dir Wunden reiße, daß dein Blut quillt, nur um deiner Nähe gewiß zu bleiben, du leibliches irdisches, volles Leben? Ahnst du, daß ich jetzt ein Verlangen habe nach eigenen Schmerzen, daß ich mein eigenes Blut zu sehen begehre, nur damit nicht alles versinke – im Vergangenen. Leben, was hast du mir angetan? warum kamst du? warum vergingst du? Vergangenheit, wenn du mich fliehst, bleibst du nicht doch meine Vergangenheit, meine? Wie die Sonne über dem Meer immer rascher sich senkt, als zöge es sie in die Finsternis, so sinkt und sinkt und sinkt ohne Aufhalten dein Bild ins Meer des Vergangenen und ein paar Wellen begraben es. Wie der Hauch des warmen Atems sich in kühler Morgenluft auflöst, so zerrinnt dein Bild, daß ich dein Angesicht, deine Hände, deine Gestalt nicht mehr weiß, ein Lächeln, ein Blick, ein Gruß erscheint mir, doch es zerfällt, löst sich auf, ist ohne Trost, ohne Nähe, ist zerstört, ist nur noch vergangen.

Past

‘Past’ You walk away – love’s happiness and sore pain. What name shall I give you? Distress, life, bliss, part of myself, my heart – times past? All gone? The door slams shut, I hear your footsteps slowly die away. What is left when you are gone? Joy, anguish, longing? I know only this: you go away – and all is gone. Can you feel now, how I clutch at you, how I hold you so tight that it must hurt you? How I open the wounds, that your blood may flow, only to be sure that you keep close to me, you, so full of real and earthly life? Can you sense that I have now a terrible longing for my own suffering? That I yearn to see my own blood flow, only that all may not sink into times that are gone? Life, what have you done to me? Why did you come? Why do you pass away? Times past, if you flee from me, are you not still my past, mine? As the sun sets ever more quickly over the ocean, sucked into the darkness, so sinks and sinks and sinks, relentlessly, your image into the sea of forgetfulness, engulfed in a few waves. As a puff of warm breath dissolves in the cool air of morning, so fades your image, until your face, your hands, your figure I no longer know. A laugh, a glance, a gesture appears to me, then it fades, disappears, without comfort, without your nearness, it is destroyed, an illusion from the past.

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Who Am I? Ich möchte den Duft deines Wesens atmen ihn einsaugen, in ihm bleiben wie an einem heißen Sommertag schwere Blüten die Bienen zu Gast laden und sie berauschen, wie Nachtschwärmer vom Liguster trunken werden, aber ein rauher Windstoß zerstört Duft und Blüten und ich stehe wie ein Narr vor dem Entschwundenen, Vergangenen. Mir ist als wurden mit feurigen Zangen Stücke aus meinem Fleisch gerissen, wenn Du, mein vergangenes Leben, davoneilst. Trotz und Zorn befällt mich, ich stelle wilde, unnütze Fragen. Warum? warum? warum? sage ich immer. Wenn meine Sinne dich nicht halten können, vergehendes, vergangenes Leben, so will ich denken und wieder denken, bis ich finde, was ich verlor. Aber ich spüre, wie das, was über mir, neben mir, unter mir ist, rätselhaft und ungerührt über mich lächelt, über mein hoffnungslosestes Mühn, Wind zu haschen, Vergangenes zurück zu gewinnen. Auge und Seele wird böse, ich hasse, was ich sehe, hasse, was mich bewegt, hasse alles Lebendige und Schöne, was mir Entgelt des Verlorenen sein will. Mein Leben will ich, mein eignes Leben fordr’ ich zurück, meine Vergangenheit, Dich! Dich – eine Träne schießt mir ins Auge, vielleicht, daß ich unter Schleiern der Tränen dein ganzes Bild, dich ganz, wiedergewinne? Aber ich will nicht weinen.

Past I want to breathe the air of your being, absorb it, lose myself in it, as on a hot summer’s day, the heavy blossom invites the bees, and intoxicates them; as the mohawk becomes drunk from the privet; but a rough wind destroys the fragrance and the blossom, and I stand like a fool, as all vanishes and is gone. To me, it is as though red-hot pincers tear pieces from my flesh, when you, my past life, rush away from me. Mad defiance and raging anger seize me, I fling wild and meaningless questions into the air. Why and why and why? Always the same question. If my senses cannot hold you, my vanishing passing life, I will think and think again until I find what I have lost. But something tells me that all around me, within and without, laughs at me, unmoved and puzzled, by my useless labours, snaring the wind, to win back what is past and gone. Eye and soul become evil, I hate what I see, I hate what moves me, I hate all that is alive and beautiful, all that should console me for my loss. I want my life, I demand my own life back, my past life, You! You! Tears fill my eyes; perhaps through the veil of tears I will win you back, the total vision, the whole of you. No! I will not weep.

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Who Am I? Tränen helfen nur Starken, Schwache machen sie krank. Müde erreich’ ich den Abend, willkommen ist mir das Lager, das mir Vergessen verheißt, wenn mir Besitzen versagt ist. Nacht, lösche aus, was brennt, schenk mir volles Vergessen, sei mir wohltätig, Nacht, übe dein mildes Amt, dir vertrau’ ich mich an. Aber die Nacht ist weise und mächtig, weiser als ich und mächtiger als der Tag. Was keine irdische Kraft vermag, woran Gedanken und Sinne, Trotz und Tränen verzagen müssen das schüttet die Nacht aus reicher Fülle über mich aus. Unversehrt von feindseliger Zeit, rein, frei und ganz, bringt der Traum dich zu mir, dich, Vergangenes, dich, mein Leben, dich, den gestrigen Tag, die gestrige Stunde. Über deiner Nähe erwach ich mitten in tiefer Nacht und erschrecke – bist du mir wieder verloren? Such’ ich dich ewig vergeblich, dich, meine Vergangenheit, meine? Ich strecke die Hände aus und bete – und ich erfahre das Neue: Vergangenes kehrt dir zurück als deines Lebens lebendigstes Stück durch Dank und durch Reue. Faß’ im Vergangenen Gottes Vergebung und Güte bete, daß Gott dich heute und morgen behüte.

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Only the strong are helped by tears, the weak are made weaker. I am tired as evening comes, welcome is my cell, which promises forgetfulness when possession is denied me. Night, quench the fire that burns, send to me full forgetfulness, be kind to me, night, and perform your gentle art, to you I entrust myself. But the night is strong and wise, stronger than the day and wiser than me. What no earthly power can do, where thinking and feeling, defiance and tears must fail, the night showers its full riches upon me. Undefiled by hostile time, pure, free and whole, the dream brings you to me, you, from the past, you, my life, you, from past days and past hours. By your presence, I am awakened in deepest night, and cry out – are you again lost to me? Do I seek you ever in vain, my beloved of past days? I stretch out my hands and pray – and I learn something new: That which is past will return to you again as your life’s most living strain, through thanks and through repentance. Lay hold on God’s forgiveness in the past, pray that he will care for you this day and to the last. (Translation: Edwin Robertson, except for title)

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A visitor to the prison has come to the end of her visit and walks out, the door locked behind her as the sound of retreating steps reaches the prisoner. Or is it two visitors, ‘bliss’ and ‘pain’? That is a possibility that we should keep in mind, because we shall encounter these two again, in another form. But like those duplicate persons we encounter in dreams, one with the face towards us, the other turned away, these two turn out to be one and the same. The poet, like a dreamer on the edge of waking, fumbles for the name of his visitor and finds it: Vergangenheit, which means ‘the past’, but with more finality than our word ‘past’ conveys. The departing guest is the ‘past-and-gone’. And with that departure alles ist vergangen, ‘all is gone’. ‘Past’ is the name borne by the life the poet has led, a ‘bodily, earthly fullness’ of life, now disembodied and insubstantial. The emotions left behind by the passing of the past are indeterminate, a confusion of joy, pain, and longing. Only those for whom the past is a secure possession can reflect on happiness and pain distinctly, greeting the one or the other with the appropriate joy or sorrow. For someone whose past is past-and-gone the emotional reaction is simply ‘reaching’ and ‘clutching’. And here the paradox emerges. Because the past is past-and-gone, we are left with a constant struggle to make sure it is still there, to prevent its ‘sinking’ into the pastand-gone. This paradox generates the dialectical contradictions of the poem, expressed in a sequence of vivid images, and finally holds the key to its conclusion. The one who suffers the loss of his past is not simply and objectively without that past. He is perpetually in loss of it – neither possessing it as an object of discriminating reflection, nor free of it. In one of the poem’s great images the past is a perpetual sunset, forever sinking down on the horizon into the waves of the sea. Another image is that of warm air: the secure warmth that enfolds us in sleep suddenly dissipates on waking as the intimacy of the dream gives way to cold daylight; the warm fragrance that hangs on the air of a summer’s day is suddenly blown away by a breeze. Nur noch vergangen: the English translators have had understandable difficulty with that simple phrase. It is gone, simply gone, and goes on being simply gone. This is not the kind of going that clears space for something else to happen. It is a going that perpetuates itself. The poet refers elsewhere to a vergehendes-vergangenes Leben, his ‘going-going-gone’ life. The poet is forever affected by the life that is past-and-gone. He is caught in a negative relation to it, an enchanted fool, standing gaping on the spot where there was something a moment ago which has now blown away. From an objective point of view the relation between the

Past

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poet and his own life can seem quite contingent. Life came at him from somewhere, it picked him up, it employed him for some indecipherable purpose of its own, and it put him down again. Thus the great evolutionary stream appears to treat us all. Yet it does not leave him detached, free as an observer to ironize about it all. For this arbitrary series of happenings is his own past; it is all that he is. The mystery is that these contingent happenings could leave him behind as their outcome, a subjectivity with no relation to anything objective. And at this the tone of the poem becomes more intense, evoking the rage into which the poet is plunged. Questions arise, which are declared from the outset to be ‘wild’ and ‘useless’: ‘Why? why? why?’ Why what? If he knew what he was asking the reason for, his questions would be neither wild nor useless. They would tend to interpret the life that was lost, and by interpreting it would give it back to the poet as a reflective possession. Even in the absence of answers an ability to focus questions can give one the purchase one needs on the past. But, the poet’s questions are not about the content of the past, the reasons things happened, the reasons he did things. They are more like the relentless self-interrogation that springs from severe memory-loss, as one tries to recover what is not accessible any more, an incessant search for something that has slipped out of one’s mind. The ‘why?’ that should be focused on the past keeps wheeling round and coming back to the present moment and its loss of purchase ‘when my senses cannot hold you’. Rage and defiance turn to hate. And as the defiant questioning was unfocused and unfocusable, so is the hatred; it is directed at the world around, at all that lives and all that is lovely. At this point loss of the past opens up a perspective on the roots of evil itself. Hatred of the world is a reality for those who have lost themselves; there is no compensation for that loss, it is too fundamental. And so the search for the self builds up to the near-hysterical climax: ‘I demand my own life back, my past, you.’ And only at this point in the poem, as has been observed, do the three names by which the object of the poet’s search is known, ‘life’, ‘past’, and ‘you’, come together. That marks the significance of the crisis reached at this point, as does the use of a one-word line to close the stanza: ‘Dich!’, immediately repeated to open the next stanza. Why you? It is, after all, the poet’s self that is addressed. Throughout the poem the poet has spoken to his past in the second person singular. Now, in this highly emphatic line, this innocent poetic device based on the image of the departing visitor suddenly assumes a suspect appearance. We are forced to ask what it means to speak to oneself in this way. In the loss of the past there is loss of self. The ‘I’, the point of Cartesian

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Who Am I?

certainty, cannot be counted on any more. It is as though the sufferer begins chatting to his absent self, like Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. But when the self starts usurping the place of the neighbour in this way, no real neighbour, no objective being can take on the role of a ‘You’ to my ‘I’. And from this substitution of You for I there comes the moment of peripeteia, lightly treated by the poet and easy to pass over, yet of great significance in preparing for the conclusion. The poet begins to weep, and faces a choice as to whether to go on weeping. Tears, he reflects, may offer a suitable veil through which to trace the whole form of the missing past – we note the repetition of the word ganz, ‘whole’. ‘But I shall not weep’, he says, with a new tone of philosophical deliberation. ‘Only the strong are helped by tears, the weak are made weaker’. And in the decision not to weep he has chosen not to pursue his irrecoverable past further into illusion and frustration. There is no hope of achieving what he really wants; to indulge that hope would be to prefer the hope to the fulfilment, to embrace an illusion as the best substitute for a lost reality. And that is the sickness he fears: no longer to be clear about what he has lost and the fact that he has lost it. If he were strong (i.e. with his relation to his past intact), he could weep because there would be something definite to weep over. Weeping would then adjust his relation to that thing. But with no object weeping can create its own surrogate object. So the poet will be loyal to the only thing he can be clear about, which is the lostness of the lost. And with that moral choice made, the poem moves quietly towards its resolution. Suddenly, we notice, there is a time-coordinate to which we can relate ourselves: it is ‘evening’, and although the evening is a weary one and there is nothing to hope from it but forgetfulness in bed – note the contrast with all those distressed images about waking up – we have a sense of restoration to a world with a worldly rhythm. Furthermore, ‘night is wise and mighty’. There is a kind of recovery of the past that can be hoped for in sleep, though the details of this suggestion are rather difficult to make out. Dream will give back the past; but this past is not those past years of life and experience that he has struggled to recover in the daytime, but ‘yesterday’s day and yesterday’s hour’ – we should take that literally – the latest moments ‘given back’ in a kind of reflection and acceptance. And in this anticipation we recognize that even the struggle we have witnessed has been a kind of labour, a kind of worldliness, and that the moral peripeteia reached has been a kind of achievement, a building up of the self. Out of that work the night can, as it were, process and secure the poet’s self for him in his dream.

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But sleep is interrupted by another fearful wakening, and it looks initially as though we are beginning the whole cycle over again: ‘are you lost to me once more?’ But this waking – the first concrete event of waking we have heard of after several allusions to waking – is the beginning of something new. A prayer is uttered, and the poet ‘discovers’ a calming reflection that concludes the poem in a style quite different from the stormy free-verse that has gone before. It is a sestet with a rhyming scheme and lines that fall, though of irregular length, into recognizable feet; and it concludes with a rhyming couplet in pentameters, the traditional cadence recognized throughout European literature as bringing finality and conclusion. In this reflection three things are said: (1) the past will be restored through thanks and through repentance ; (2) these are achieved by holding in mind God’s forgiveness and kindness shown in the past; and also (3) by anticipating God’s protection each day in prayer. On first reading the contrast between this and what has gone before may seem too great. Has the poet, after a vivid, searing account of his spiritual pathology, contented himself in the end with a pious exhortation? That would be a deadly conclusion indeed, given the weight Bonhoeffer laid upon the final lines: ‘In this attempt of mine the crucial part is the last few lines.’1 The stylistic change of manner may, however, have its own weight of meaning. It reminds us, perhaps, of the conclusion of a Bach cantata, the simply harmonized chorale-verse taking over from the florid baroque stile moderno, and offering the simplest reflection that sets it all to rest. These concluding lines reflect back in important ways on the experience the poet has charted. First, there is the antithesis, Dank and Reue, thanks and regret, which immediately recall the Glück and Schmerz, happiness and pain, of the opening line. The clear distinction between these two emotional tones of experience was lost in the turbulence of the loss of the past. But the undistinguishable experience is precisely the ungraspable experience. How is distinction to be restored? Only by converting happiness and pain into thanks and repentance; that is to say, in bringing them into the context of responsibility before God. Moral discernment of our past restores the point of reference that was lost, allows us to distinguish experiences and to judge of them. But moral discernment is only possible under the gaze of the one to whom we owe it, in liturgical form, as thanks and penitence. In some ways the concluding reflection is like an oracle. It is never clear who is speaking – it is merely das Neue, the new thing that the poet ‘discovers’. God is mentioned only in the third person. Yet, strikingly, the poet finds himself spoken to as Du. Du, constantly addressed by the poet

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Who Am I?

to his own past, became a problem, an invitation to fantasy, an escape from reality. But up to this point there has been no other I in the poem who could address the poet as Du, so he has relapsed into addressing himself that way. Now he is addressed as Du from outside. And in the last line of the poem there is, for the first time, mention of a future to balance the lost past. We are led to conclude, in fact, that the problem of the lost past was all the time tied up with problem of a lost future. The poet can grasp his past horizon only together with his future horizon, but that future horizon has proved horribly vulnerable to calamity; it has been snatched from him. How can it be given back again? By prayer for God’s protection ‘today and tomorrow’. Or ‘this day and to the last’, as the new DBWE translation has it? It is a delicate point of interpretation. I suppose that, as with the past offered back in the night, the future horizon must be the very nearest one, an immediate, not a distant future – but enough, nevertheless, to recapture the sense of past and future on which everything else depends. The close connection of Bonhoeffer’s first prison-poem with his fiancée Maria von Wedemeyer lends its account of loss and recovery of the past great dramatic pathos. Yet as commentators have seen, the setting can distract us from the theme of the poem, which is simply the past. Coming to terms with the past, as the poet said in his letter to Bethge, ‘is the almost daily accompaniment of my life here’, and then adds, ‘especially after brief visits, which are always followed by long partings’.2 The occasional experience of parting from the visitor has fused with the constant task of coming to terms with the past, and this fusion of experiences has driven the theologian-author to his first adventure as a poet. The occasional experience is highly personal, but the constant experience, that of coming to terms with the past, is shared with his fellow-prisoners at least, and perhaps with all mankind. So, the poem presents Maria with all the particularity of Dietrich’s condition, so that he may appear in his universality as a human being like other human beings. Three levels of interpreting the lost past suggest themselves. They cannot be disentangled neatly, and their interaction contributes to the poem’s rich suggestiveness; but for analytical purposes to distinguish them may be helpful all the same. Each of the three levels looks in two directions: lost time has an existential meaning, on the one hand, and a social or political meaning on the other. First, we may observe the specifically historical aspect of the loss of the past. There is the loss of a relationship that has constituted our past. Here a reference to Dietrich and Maria is to the point. To love is to know that relationships that have built us up and formed us must end, in death

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if not before. Death is the unmentioned figure in Bonhoeffer’s desperate search for his past. These are the reflections of a man who knows that his life is over. But as such they simply focus with painful sharpness the meaning of the mortality in which we all stand. To lose relationship is to lose our past, which is to lose ourselves. We may usefully recall that chronic loss of memory is a standard affliction among the old, and may afflict others too, always accompanied by intense distress. But, and more immediately relevant to Bonhoeffer’s own context, there is the phenomenon of depression which deprives us of our past as it deprives us of our future. We do not know what to make of what we have been; we are left unable to appraise it. We lack the confidence born of faith that God was at work in it. There is also a social dimension to this loss, and again the circumstances of the poem invite further reflection on a peculiarly social loss of the sense of the reality of the past, typical of times of turbulence and social disturbance, the cultural loss of memory that accompanies revolutions and wars. Bonhoeffer in prison bears in his self-aware amnesia the fate of Germany, violently disrupted from its historic roots and character, unable to tap the sources of its spiritual power and confidence. Secondly, there is a moral aspect to the loss of the past. It may be read specifically as an account of human sin, the loss of that responsibility to which the closing lines draw us back, and with it the loss of self which has precisely to do with no longer being answerable. And here, too, the political reference is not far away. The poem unfolds as a descent into Hell and a return, beginning with an initial sense of loss and proceeding through meaninglessness, despair, paranoia, world-hatred and wild self-assertion. On this reading we are forced to ask what brings about the peripateia. The ‘new experience’, the moment of grace that comes in the night is not unprepared for. Three steps have led to it, the third of them and the only explicitly religious one being prayer, about which nothing is said except that it happened. The second, the most mysterious, is the provisional reconciliation achieved with the past in sleep. And the first is the refusal to weep, which is the hinge on which the poem hangs. We may see in this, perhaps, a certain order of creation, a force of sheer reality, taking over the poet’s disrupted experience. He has performed that act of will which Augustine sees as the trace of fallen mankind’s persistent orientation to God, the will not to be deceived. This initial step is far from being an act of moral substance or weight; it is, in itself, merely a continuation of the despair. He refuses false promises of comfort associated with self-pity not because they are selfpitying but simply because they are unreal. Yet it was always possible that

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he might have taken the other turn and fled further from reality than he has actually done. Upon this basis of his decision for the truth there ensues exhaustion, with the possibility for created rhythms of restoration to assert themselves in sleep. God as reality, God as creator, has made himself anonymously known before He makes himself known in the word of prophecy that finally restores hope and life. Thirdly it may be read at an anthropological level, as an account of the constitution of the human condition, which is that of passing through time. One thing we cannot hesitate to conclude after reading Bonhoeffer’s poem is that he believed in a certain kind of self-possession as an indispensable anthropological minimum, a basis for human loves and actions, for confidence and responsible action. There is no hint of the virtuous self-annihilation of the mystic before God. To hold on to oneself is a necessary moral struggle, the basis of all other moral struggles. Yet this elemental reference to self can go wrong. It is not a simple anthropological datum but a precarious existential balance, which, when it tilts, can bring every other exercise of humanitas to an end. And its going wrong can take a peculiar form, the absence of the self from the self which is at the same time an objectification of the self to the self. That problematic Du, which the poet addressed to his past casting the self-relation in the mould of an ever-searching erotic yearning, is not that of good self-relationship, but of one in which the self has gone missing. It represents a split that has destroyed inner harmony and unity. For the past self is the self that we need to move out from, confidently and securely. To be involved in searching for one’s past is ipso facto to have a wrong relationship with it, for one’s past needs to be behind one – not in a forgotten, abandoned distance, but right behind one, giving constant support, like an armour-bearer in a Homeric battle. Here one may make an interesting comparison between this poem and Psalm 42/3. The Psalmist speaks of his unsatisfied longing for God, and reflects on the lost past in which satisfaction seemed much easier to attain. God is addressed in the second person from the very first verse of this Psalm, but only when the Psalmist comes to the consoling refrain, which it is possible that the last line of Bonhoeffer’s poem echoes, ‘Hope still in God, for he will yet be the hope of your countenance and your God’ – only then does he address himself, as my soul. Here the fundamental relational structure is in place from the beginning; the result of calling on God is to be consoled in a secure self-relation. These are the tears, as Bonhoeffer would say, that help the strong. In his poem things are the other way round: the self is addressed from the very

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beginning, and only in the consoling refrain does that persistent, obsessive self-address let up. The difference between the two texts turns on an additional complication that Bonhoeffer’s anthropology introduces, that of temporality. The word ‘tense’ in English speaks of a certain ‘tension’ fundamental to human existence. Once the tension of the tenses is lost, all the tenses are lost. Alles ist vergangen, which means, of course, not only ‘all is lost’, but ‘all is past’. There is no present or future while we have to hunt for our past, for we are temporal existents for whom past, present, and future are constituted in an active disposition towards the world. Putting the past behind us (which is not the same as losing it) and grasping the future is, one might say, the business of the ontological engine-room of our lives, that leibliches, irdisches, volles Leben, which seems to offer us so much solidity and presence, and yet is actually passing away, so that, as philosophers and theologians continually reflect, it has no presence at all, but slips unperceived from the future into the past. How can we appropriate this ever-flowing stream that bears all its sons away? How can we call any life my life? How can the experience of time be other than that of having one’s flesh torn off bit by bit? We can relate to our temporality only as we learn to judge our past under God, to distribute its doings and sufferings into those that merit our thanks and those that merit our penitence. Without the knowledge of God’s grace, the ontological task is impossible.

Notes
1. PP, p. 319. 2. LPP, p. 319.

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4


‘Success and Failure’ Public Disasters, Works of Love, and the Inwardness of Faithfulness Brian Brock

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‘Glück und Unglück’ Glück und Unglück, die rasch uns und überwältigend treffen, sind sich im Anfang, wie Hitze und Frost bei jäher Berührung, kaum unterscheidbar nah. Wie Meteore aus überirdischer Ferne geschleudert, ziehen sie leuchtend und drohend die Bahn über unseren Häuptern. Heimgesuchte stehen betroffen vor den Trümmern ihres alltäglichen, glanzlosen Daseins. Groß und erhaben, zerstörend, bezwingend, hält Glück und Unglück, erbeten und unerbeten, festlichen Einzug bei den erschütterten Menschen, schmückt und umkleidet die Heimgesuchten mit Ernst und mit Weihe. Glück ist voll Schauer, Unglück voll Süße. Ungeschieden scheint aus dem Ewigen eins und das andre zu kommen. Groß und schrecklich ist beides. Menschen, ferne und nahe, laufen herbei und schauen und gaffen halb neidisch, halb schaudernd, ins Ungeheure, wo das Überirdische, segnend zugleich und vernichtend, zum verwirrenden, unentrinnbaren, irdischen Schauspiel sich stellt. Was ist Glück? Was ist Unglück?

Success and Failure

‘Success and Failure’ Success and failure suddenly strike and overpower us, both the same at first, like the touch of burning heat and freezing cold, indistinguishable. Like meteors flung from distant heavens, blazing and threatening, over our heads. Those visited stand bemused amidst the ruins of their dull, daily lives. Proud and exalted, destroying, subduing, success and failure, invited or uninvited, hold festival with these shattered people. Dressed and decorated, the visited prepare for the sacrificial feast. Success is full of foreboding, failure has its sweetness. Without distinction they appear to come, the one or the other, from the unknown. Both are proud and terrible. People come from far and wide, walk by and look, pausing to stare, half envious, half afraid, at the outrage, where the supernatural, blessing and cursing at the same time, entangling and disentangling, sets forth the drama of human life. What is success and what is failure?

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50

Who Am I? Erst die Zeit teilt beide. Wenn das unfaßbar erregende, jähe Ereignis sich zu ermüdend quälender Dauer wandelt, wenn die langsam schleichende Stunde des Tages erst des Unglücks wahre Gestalt uns enthüllt, dann wenden die Meisten, überdrüssig der Eintönigkeit des altgewordenen Unglücks, enttäuscht und gelangweilt sich ab. Das ist die Stunde der Treue, die Stunde der Mutter und der Geliebten, die Stunde des Freundes und Bruders. Treue verklärt alles Unglück und hüllt es leise in milden, überirdischen Glanz.

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Time alone distinguishes. When the incomprehensible, exciting, sudden event lapses into wearisome waiting, when the creeping hours of the day first reveal the true outlines of failure, then most give up, weary of the monotony of oft-repeated failure, disappointed and bored with themselves. That is the hour of steadfast love, the hour of the mother and the beloved, the hour of the friend and the brother. Steadfast love transforms all failure, and gently cradles it in the soft radiance of heavenly light. (Translation: Edwin Robertson)

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I. Introduction
Bonhoeffer’s poem ‘Glück und Unglück’ has received only passing attention in the literature, and this despite its obvious timeliness and theological density. In this chapter I will unpack the poem in three movements. A first section discusses the reasons for Bonhoeffer’s decision to narrate public disasters and humiliations (such as his own failed plot and subsequent imprisonment) in terms of the ambiguity and dumbness of historical events. In a second section, I will indicate how this ambiguity is the setting into which God speaks in a new and intimate way through the mouths of friends and family. A final section will develop Bonhoeffer’s explicit theological thought to pursue a more speculative, theological probing of the reasons why Bonhoeffer might have begun to write poetry for the first time only in the last months of his life. My suggestion is that his venture into intimacy with others through poetic writing was a reflection on, and shaped by, a prior journey into intimacy with God learned in the school of the Psalter.

II. Translation and ambiguity
It is necessary to begin discussion of this poem with a word about the English translations, which will introduce us to the theological questions raised by the poem. Unfortunately, the translation of this poem in LPP is quite poor, to the point of obscuring the poem’s theology.1 Edwin Robertson’s translation ‘Success and Failure’2 is much better, though he makes some translation decisions that we will revisit. The problem with the LPP translation begins with the title, in which ‘Glück und Unglück’ becomes ‘Sorrow and Joy’. A woodenly literal translation of the German would be ‘Happiness and Unhappiness’, which would have been preferable to ‘Sorrow and Joy’ for two theological reasons (leaving aside aesthetic judgements, and the reversal of order). First, the use of ‘joy’ locates the poem much closer to theological language, as ‘joy’ is rarely used in English without some religious associations. ‘Happiness’ has a more general, even secular, feel, which I believe was one of Bonhoeffer’s aims. Here the new forthcoming DBWE translation (Fortune and Calamity) gets the nuance right, with its ‘fortune’. Second, ‘sorrow’ and ‘joy’ are more intense and less ambiguous terms

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than ‘happiness’ and ‘unhappiness’, and it is precisely this ambiguity that takes us into the heart of the poem. Inflating the affective resonance of the main terms thus obscures Bonhoeffer’s linguistic, and ultimately theological, point. Put negatively, he had the perfectly acceptable ‘Freude und Leiden’ available, had he wanted the more emotionally forceful formulation ‘Sorrow and Joy’. The unhappy results of this affective inflation are most evident in the fourth stanza. ‘Glück is voll Schauer’ properly flags the tenor of ‘happiness’ as being ‘full of “shocking realizations” ’ rather than, as LPP has it, ‘Joy is rich in fears’. The tonality of the translation obscures the sense in the German that rather mundane ‘happy moments’ are full of ‘chilling realizations’. The same analysis applies to ‘sorrow has its sweetness’ for ‘Unglück voll Süße’. In what follows I have translated critical passages in more literal terms in order to give better access to the colouring of the German, but my translations ought to be read alongside the other translations and the new DBWE, in particular, which is very well done, if slanted in the direction of smooth English. Bonhoeffer was always a fastidious wordsmith, admiring and emulating writers of ‘clear and simple German’.3 He was also steeped in the phraseology of the Luther-Bibel, which often provides us with hints about the biblical passages on which he is commenting. Availing ourselves of this sort of interpretative clue in the case of this poem is complicated by the fact that the terms ‘Glück’ and ‘Unglück’ nowhere appear in the Luther-Bibel as a pair, or at least not in passages that would have been likely objects of study, such as Sir. 11.14 and Mal. 14.14.4 Despite this, there are good historical reasons to conclude that a Losungen reading stimulated the reflections on which the poem is built. Edwin Robertson writes: ‘The text for May 30 [around the time of the poem’s composition, thought to be early June] was Genesis 39.23: “The LORD was with Joseph and whatever he did, The Lord Made it prosper.” Luther’s translation of that last phrase is, “dazu gab der Herr Glück”.’5 This biblical phrase is particularly interesting because it occurs twice in Chapter 39, opening and closing the chapter, each time functioning as a word of comfort to Joseph in his imprisonment. No doubt this story and the promise of deliverance within it would have been particularly moving to the imprisoned Bonhoeffer. Joseph, like Bonhoeffer, simply did not know if his being sold into slavery was just bad luck, leading to grinding servitude and finally obliteration, or rather would be the place where God would meet his servant. Bonhoeffer is well aware that the resolution of his own predicament would have to unfold over time, and it is the dynamics of this unfolding that are the central concern of the poem.

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During this period Bonhoeffer was also reflecting on the meaning of God’s blessing. What might it mean to be one of God’s ‘blessed’ in his imprisoned state? He was increasingly convinced that one must not spiritualize difficult life situations. I have elsewhere traced the evidence that during this period Bonhoeffer was deeply immersed in the Psalms, especially Psalm 119,6 where the blessedness of the righteous has a particularly high profile. As he comments on Ps. 119:1 (‘How blessed are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the Law of the LORD!’) Bonhoeffer becomes more certain that, correctly understood, the blessedness of God’s children is a very concrete, earthly flourishing. It is a point elucidated during this period in a letter to Eberhard Bethge: ‘It would be natural to suppose that, as usual, the New Testament spiritualizes the teaching of the Old Testament here, and therefore to regard the Old Testament blessing as superseded in the New.’ But this supersessionist reading of the two testaments, continues Bonhoeffer, is mistaken: ‘the only difference between the Old and New Testaments in this respect is that in the Old the blessing includes the cross, and in the New the cross includes the blessing.’7 In a poignant reflection on his own approaching death, Bonhoeffer does not take martyrdom to be the vocation of every Christian, but a special task for which God will provide special preparation and ensure its witness.8 Here he both agrees with and questions Christian interpretations of ‘bearing the cross’ as exemplified on the one hand by claims such as Calvin’s, for whom ‘the cross’ is interpreted as the idea that happiness is best known in the circumstance of utter earthly loss, and on the other, by claims such as Yoder’s, for whom the only part of Jesus’ life that Christians are to imitate is his cross.9 Observing these linkages of the poem with scriptural themes seems to validate Robertson’s conclusion that the title of the poem means to draw attention to a special sort of ambiguity in human experience. ‘The poem keeps us pondering the inexplicable nature of “Glück und Unglück” – fortune and misfortune, joy and sorrow, happiness and unhappiness, building up and tearing down, luckiness and unluckiness, good and evil, success and failure – all are enigmatic.’10 Bonhoeffer’s studied linguistic ambiguity is intended to reflect the theological and existential ambiguity that is the poem’s subject. Something has happened to shake one out of everyday, unglamorous existence (Dasein), stirring up ambiguous and fluid emotions that lack a point of orientation. Bonhoeffer carefully protects the ambiguous nature of such events by saying they come from somewhere ‘higher’ but not necessarily from God. Descending from ‘heaven’, or ‘eternity’, which might be the hand of fate, this event ‘consecrates’ those it touches.11 In one of his unfinished prison plays, this ambivalence is expressed by one character’s

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inability to immediately and precisely put a finger on the origin of the terrible event.12 Given these observations, I propose the following translation of Bonhoeffer’s second stanza. Great and sublime, destructive, compelling, happiness and unhappiness, solemnly enter welcomed or unwelcomed with those shaken people, the bejewelled and dressed the afflicted with solemnity and consecration.

This is an impressive phenomenology of the public gaze, picking out with the acuity of a participant the ways the spotlight descends, all eyes turn and, as Andy Warhol famously put it, one is summarily delivered up to fifteen minutes of fame or infamy. Bonhoeffer is acutely aware of the way modern society raises to visibility those who are suffering a destructive event, and suggests that we too are made spectators of this event, we also are the public, our hearts too race at the massing of cameras and social spectacle. But Bonhoeffer’s concern is with the inner dynamic of this elevation. Given that modern society burns people with the spotlight, the believer must ask: ‘What is God doing with those caught up in such moments?’ More specifically, ‘How ought faith to comport itself within such terrible circumstances?’

III. Living in the bomb crater
It is in the last two stanzas (which the LPP translation breaks into three) that Bonhoeffer gets to the heart of his inquiry, and it is here that his theological thinking becomes more visible. The critical fourth (penultimate) stanza should read: Only time makes the division. When the unfathomably exciting, the abrupt event [Ereignis] is transformed into wearyingly excruciating duration, when the slowly creeping boredom of the day’s hours

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Who Am I? discloses to us the true form of unhappiness, then most turn away, wearied of the tedium of the slowly aging unhappiness crestfallen and bored.

Bonhoeffer is directing our attention to a specific experience in the individual life, the transition period when the shock of an ‘event’ gives way to a post-event normality. Here, he says, the tedium of picking up pieces causes most to turn away. The ‘meteor from heaven’, a phrase echoing the ubiquitous use of crater and meteor images by the early Barth,13 does no work to bring people to God: it may just as well have been fate, changing nothing, and so they settle, jaded but basically unchanged, into new routines. Bonhoeffer thus denies that historical occurrence has any inherent revelatory power.14 The protagonists, irresistibly swept into the public drama, are just as inexorably discarded, having been rendered boring by the inevitable collapse of narrative suspense. Having had their rounded and complex lives turned into the caricature of a news story and consumed, they are dropped unceremoniously into the ruins of the initial disaster. Here Bonhoeffer’s portrait parallels the prophetic critique of modern publicity Nietzsche portrayed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: ‘Does not this city steam with the fumes of slaughtered spirit? . . . Do you not see souls hanging there like limp and filthy rags? – and they even make newspapers from these rags.’15 But as the flash of a nuclear bomb leaves all things transfigured, all reality having a new aspect, something new is revealed to those ‘afflicted with solemnity and consecration’. They discover that, like ghosts amongst the rubble, people remain standing around them. Always there yet hidden by the distractions of daily life, those whose love is not affected by the event slowly become visible in a new way for the first time. Jean-Dominique Bauby echoes Bonhoeffer’s preference for the metaphor of the explosion when recounting how he awoke to find himself a victim of locked-in syndrome. There he discovered himself as beneficiary of an unexpected ‘personal bodyguard that spontaneously sprung up around me immediately after the disaster.’16 Bonhoeffer’s suggestion is that their arising was neither spontaneous, nor did friendship begin because of the disaster – it is the sufferer who has changed in the appearing, changed from outside. It is here in the fifth and final stanza that Bonhoeffer names this love ‘die Treue’ (italicized below).

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This is the hour for the faithful (one), the hour of the mother and the lover, the hour of friends and brothers. Faithfulness transfigures all unhappiness and wraps it quietly in soothing, supernatural radiance.

The literal meaning of Treue is faithfulness, or constancy, and in this stanza is presented as the sufferer’s only bridge into a more meaningful reality that is forsaken by those who ‘turn away’. ‘Faithfulness’ names the transfiguration of unhappiness through which the divine is mediated. Two implications are worthy of note. First, this faithfulness comes through family, lovers, friends, and brothers. The sequence of the pairings suggests first a domestic sphere and then a sphere of friendship and ecclesial relationship. During his imprisonment, Bonhoeffer was increasingly thinking about the ways family and friends mediated Christ’s love as illustrated in his letters to Maria von Wedemeyer, and Eberhard Bethge, and the high profile given to family and friends in his prison fiction. He found the phrase ‘Glück und Unglück’ helpful for gathering together the instances when the acts of love of those closest to him had illumined God’s working. In the last letter he wrote to Maria von Wedemeyer, at Christmas 1944, the phrase appears weaved into a pastiche of the main themes of his poetry. I have had the experience over and over again that the quieter it is around me, the clearer do I feel the connection to you. It is as though in solitude the soul develops senses which we hardly know in everyday life. Therefore I have not felt lonely or abandoned for one moment. You, the parents, all of you, the friends and students of mine at the front, all are constantly present to me . . . It is a great invisible sphere in which one lives and in whose reality there is no doubt . . . Therefore you must not think that I am unhappy. What is happiness and unhappiness [‘Glück und Unglück’]? It depends so little on the circumstances; it depends really only on that which happens inside a person.17

In this poem Bonhoeffer is struggling to put into words how such human faithfulness functions. It does not make God directly present, but mediates this presence in the form of a ‘soothing, supernatural radiance’. The loving acts (good works) of family have the immediate effect of calming and comforting, but only further prayerful reflection reveals this as not a mere psychological effect, but God’s blessing.

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As the focus of the next line is on friendship and brotherhood, the ecclesial context of these reflections comes into view.18 It is easy to see how Bonhoeffer, deprived of access to formal worship services, is forced to think further about the implications of the Lutheran conception of the worship service as the divine provision of a place where God may speak words of comfort to humans through the mouths of other humans. Though the space of worship orientates our hearing of the divine voice in other spheres, Bonhoeffer has a growing appreciation of the ways that God speaks bodily in other social spheres that he also has created. Here family and friendship receive special notice. In asking in real time how God is present to him, Bonhoeffer rediscovers simple things that bring him pleasure in prison. In his early letters from prison we can see Bonhoeffer ruminating on the relationship between food parcels and the soothing presence of loved ones. It’s Whit Monday, and I was just sitting down to a dinner of turnips and potatoes when your parcel that Renate brought as a Whitsuntide present arrived quite unexpectedly. I really cannot tell you what happiness such things give one. However certain I am of the spiritual bond between all of you and myself, the spirit always seems to want some visible token of this union of love and remembrance, and then material things become the vehicles of spiritual realities. I think this is analogous to the need felt in all religions for the visible appearance of the Spirit in the sacrament.19

Eventually he comes to associate the essence of this soothing effect with speech, as he considered the relation of acts of kindness with words of kindness and even rebuke. Again he appears to be following out the logic of the Lutheran conception of worship in which divine comfort comes supremely through the speaking of divine promises. This realization is the conceptual background for the climactic scene, ‘Christoph Argues with the Major’, in Bonhoeffer’s unfinished play, ‘The Major’s Story’, where the theme of happiness and unhappiness is central. The Bonhoeffer character is portrayed as a young, aristocratic, and overly arduous (but ultimately insightful) radical who speaks rather too flippantly of the happiness he is willing to forego for the sake of leading the people out of bondage to oppressors. His overheated rhetoric is met, calmed, and focused on the importance of happiness as divine blessing, and the harshness of unhappiness, by a succession of wise pieces of advice from a friend, an elder statesman, and a fiancée in turn; these are transparent narrative reflections by Bonhoeffer on the roles of those closest to him in shaping his life and theology.20 The central theological question raised in this stanza is why

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Bonhoeffer chooses to name this soothing presence as ‘Treue’. Jürgen Henkys somewhat tendentiously proposes that the background of the term is the monologue in Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris. In my opinion this is an unnecessarily speculative connection, given that there are less contentious connections to be made, such as Ilse Tödt’s suggestion that in working on his Ethics Bonhoeffer had been reading the Berlin Philosopher Nicolai Hartman in which the ‘Glück und Unglück’ pairing does play an important role.21 As mentioned above, during this period Bonhoeffer was deeply immersed in the Psalms, particularly Psalm 119, a preoccupation that again sheds light on the questions at hand. There are two terms for ‘faithfulness’ that play central roles in Psalm 119. The first is ‘emunah’ which appears in vv. 75, 86, 90, 138, and 160. These are translated by Luther as ‘deine Treue’, ‘Wahrheit’, ‘Wahrheit’, ‘große Treue’, and ‘Wahrheit’ respectively. English translations catch this confluence of objectivity and divine precedence, on which I believe Bonhoeffer was drawing, in two verses: v. 90, ‘Your faithfulness endures to all generations; you have established the earth, and it stands fast’, and v. 160 (from the New Jerusalem Bible) ‘Faithfulness is the essence of your word, your upright judgements hold good forever’. A second Hebrew word for faithfulness is the heavily theologically freighted term, which appears five times in Psalm 119, ‘hesed’, which Luther almost exclusively translates with ‘deine Gnade’, ‘thy grace’. Here each of the references sheds light on Bonhoeffer’s use of ‘Treue’. 41 Let your steadfast [faithful] love [Luther-Bibel: ‘Gnade’] come to me, O LORD, your salvation according to your promise. 64 The earth, O LORD, is full of your steadfast love [Luther-Bibel: ‘deiner Güte’]; teach me your statutes. 88 In your steadfast love [Luther-Bibel: ‘deiner Gnade’] spare my life, so that I may keep the decrees of your mouth. 149 In your steadfast love [Luther-Bibel: ‘deiner Gnade’] hear my voice; O LORD, in your justice preserve my life. 159 Consider how I love your precepts; preserve my life according to your steadfast love [Luther-Bibel: ‘deiner Gnade’].

Though Bonhoeffer’s use of ‘Treue’ is clearly taking its references from Luther’s translations of ‘emunah’, his theological exploration of the term works within the semantic field Luther sets up in which God’s love and presence are conceived as conveyed through embodied forms. Luther often also refers to this as ‘Bund der Treue’, ‘covenant of faithfulness’.

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God’s presence remains wholly God’s love, and yet is spoken to us in and through material forms of human action. My suggestion is that Bonhoeffer is naming the presence, acts, and words of love by those around him as the agents through which ‘salvation according to God’s promise’ is effected. I take the poem’s final emphasis on ‘quietly enveloping’ as referring to the fact that this salvation is not so immediately visible as the initial event, or even the works of love which it brings forth from others. The modality of God’s steadfast love does not effect an immediate and complete physical restoration, nor is it marked by the audible presence of God’s voice apart from or beyond human voices. Nevertheless, this faithfulness and salvation is real and a real comfort, even if hidden to us. But it is salvation, and as such, beyond the search for happiness, rendering it uninteresting. In worldly unhappiness the futility of the search for happiness becomes manifest as the superiority of faithfulness eclipses it. In his Lutheran terminology, to need comfort is to need God’s presence: Bonhoeffer suggests that the presence of others’ faithfulness has the aspect of presence in hiddenness, a different topography of sensation than a direct divine intervention (as the initial event may have been), but still real and wholly concrete, to be thankfully appreciated in faith. It is others who rebuild us, or rather, it is God who rebuilds us through them, through a love that before we did not know as God’s love, but of which we have become aware. It is through such human love that God reminds us to seek him alone by attacking our tendency to turn to ‘religion’ as a mechanism for soothing our disorientation.22 I suspect that for us, terrorism and medical emergencies will be the sorts of contemporary events to which Bonhoeffer’s reflections provide the most obvious analogue. He provides a suggestive way of thinking about dilemmas in medical ethics such as the diagnosis of a fatal disease, mental illness, a disabled foetus, or terminal disease, where we are all too easily unhinged by bad news, driven into self-protective modes of reality avoidance. In such cases, Bonhoeffer provides the resources to say that the presence of an other’s love may be a divine confrontation of our temptation to descend into self-centred disillusionment, opening ways of dealing with these blows not visible from the vantage point of the sufferer, and suggesting the vertical source and reference of this love. Thus far we have concentrated on how Bonhoeffer’s reflections on God’s presence with him through others is interpreted as a divine work of transformation through them. This is a question that is fruitful for us to reverse. In what ways do we serve God’s love for others? With this question we are given new purchase for a theological exploration of Bonhoeffer’s authorial activity. That he is constantly writing, I will

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suggest, is not an attempt to ‘keep himself busy’ in the isolation of prison, but an expression of his love for others, his attempt to serve God’s faithful presence to others in need. This is part of why Bonhoeffer writes incessantly from his cell – as a servant of God’s love for others, and how he writes – what forms he takes up. Each letter both expresses and further catalyses the transfiguration of writer and recipient by events, allowing brute history to become revelation. His writing is his tangible effort to give himself as God’s love to others and, as such, serves as a lesson in what it means to be a Christian theologian. Just as the visits of his loved ones and the reception of their packages sustain him, so his writing sustains them: in each interchange, God is sustaining both human parties by way of the other.

IV. Poetry, intimacy, and the unexpected
Here we uncover a deeper connection between the Psalter and Bonhoeffer’s poetry. Why, we might ask, did he write poetry at all? And why did he begin so very late in his career, after it was almost over? This is a question that we cannot objectively answer, alongside the question why Bonhoeffer joined the plot against Hitler. Even an understanding of his life’s story provides little knowledge of the whys and wherefores of the decisions that most deeply shaped him. This is not to imply that moral ‘decisions’ are the essential concern of Christian ethics, but simply to point out that retelling the story of Bonhoeffer does not straightforwardly tell us what his example might mean for our own practice. Happily, Bonhoeffer has left us with some clues about the inner genesis of his decisions, in this case, the unexpected development in his writing style. In a well deserved retort to individualist versions of Christianity, recent strands in moral theology have strongly stressed the communal nature of Christian faith. Here we learn and embrace the Christian life as a craft skill, by watching and being taught by others. Such an approach assumes, but rarely investigates, the inner dynamics of this learning; its methodology bars it from asking what happens when no saints are physically available to teach and sustain faith. Put more pointedly, how can the Christian performance of faith ever have grown in richness if everything we learn is picked up from those around us? The standard response to these questions is that liturgy prepares Christians to ‘improvise, to balance individual inventiveness with adherence to a tradition

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of prescribed conventions – which means that elements of risk and unpredictable achievement are inescapable features.’23 While we might wish to affirm some objectively grounded definition of improvisation, Bonhoeffer’s life, and especially his venture in poetry, allows us to test its sufficiency as an account of transformation in the Christian life. Locked in a cell, and with only minimal contact with others, Bonhoeffer put on a form of relating, a persona, ‘the poet’, he had never before inhabited. Investigating why he might have made this attempt may help us to better understand why and how any believer might take up an unfamiliar social role or persona such as spouse, parent, minister, or ruler. Much thought has been devoted to the outward political witness of Bonhoeffer’s last years: my interest is in the inner features of Bonhoeffer’s lonely years, understanding that it was precisely their loneliness which make Bonhoeffer stand out as a witness to God’s work. I will suggest that Bonhoeffer is an example of how the Psalter trains Christians to put on a persona before God which is not theirs, an ‘alien self’, to embolden them to live before and for others in novel ways. Bonhoeffer himself gives us licence to make such an inquiry with his reference to Joseph. From what sanctorum communio could a young Israelite in Egypt have learned to live with integrity before his God? In the case of Joseph, which raises the question to a new height, it is plausible to presume that years of liturgical formation took place before his brutal betrayal. But surely this would not have prepared him for the ethical and spiritual challenges he would face in the house of Pharaoh in Egypt. If it is true that he would have to ‘improvise, to balance individual inventiveness with adherence to a tradition of prescribed conventions’, it is also true that ‘elements of risk and unpredictable achievement’ would have been the primary location of his life of faith, rather than any regular contact with collective worship. For Joseph to remain a faithful Israelite, he would have to take on roles far beyond any role models the community of faith could offer him. Joseph would have to live a long stretch of his life cut off from what some theological ethics, such as that of Joel Shuman, designates the only resource for Christian moral renewal: ‘some kind of habituation’.24 Shuman suggests this habituation is grounded in liturgical practice: ‘Through their regular participation in the liturgy, which is first of all (but not only) the ritual public worship of the gathered community, Christians enter into those relationships that train and enable them to live well as the body of Christ.’25 Thus, ‘when God acts to form the character of a person through the infusion of theological and moral virtue, God’s agency is mediated by the church: that community whose practices have been responsible for the transmission and re-enactment of God’s story.’26

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One can only agree with Shuman’s stress on the importance of gathered worship in forming Christian ideas and practices. It is a message that the muscular Christianity of individualistic heroism and supererogation must ever again hear. Yet the story of Joseph, and Bonhoeffer, forces us to go beyond the polarization of individual and collective, of word and deed. We must go beyond general assertions that Christians are formed by traditions to ask whether, when we investigate the way Christians are formed by their traditions, this emphasis on liturgical formation accurately reflects the witness of scripture. Such a question is also an inquiry into the substance of pneumatology and eschatology, which, if they are to mean anything at all in Christian ethics, must name the hope of human action that goes beyond (though not disconnected from) what we may have learned from our parents and teachers. Theology ought to readily affirm the outer, bodily, brute physicality of ‘traditioning’ through liturgical practices and habit formation, but not at the expense of ignoring the inner dynamics of that process, which are not reducible to our bodily formation. The legitimate worry about reducing Christian faith to ‘my private time with God’ tends to illegitimately obscure the forms God can and has provided to remain with us in any state we might find ourselves, including isolation from the Christian community. God has been gracious to form our converse with him through Scripture, ‘softly suffusing us’ with the presence of acts of love in the form of the Psalter. Not accidentally does the form of the Psalter, poetry, relate to its content, converse with God. There is ample evidence that Bonhoeffer’s approach to the Psalter was deeply influenced by Luther, who thought of the Psalter as a divinely given form for addressing God. Bonhoeffer follows Luther in understanding the book as a ‘children’s primer’ for learning to talk to God, in assuming that only one book in the Bible is devoted to training our speech and affections towards God, and in his Christological approach to the Psalms.27 There are striking parallels between Bonhoeffer’s exegesis of Psalm 119 and Luther’s treatment of it in his first lecture series, especially regarding the central place of the undivided heart, the primacy of the petition for grace, and the centrality of relying on God’s Word rather than our own interpretations of Scripture.28 In Luther’s eyes, in all other biblical books the narrator, as narrator, must assume a God’s eye view of events in order to tell us about the deeds of the saints. But Christians do not learn to become saints by mimicking the saints’ deeds, but by being given a renewed heart, the affective dimension of human life. Luther’s stress is not on how we learn faith from first joining others’ liturgical actions, but as in the context of this ongoing activity we discover the ways their actions are animated by

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an inner life characterized by a shaped and oriented desire. He concludes, ‘I would rather hear what a saint says than see the deeds he does, [and] would far rather see his heart, and the treasure in his soul, than hear his words. And this, the Psalter gives us most abundantly concerning the saints . . . There you look into the hearts of all the saints, as into fair and pleasant gardens, yes, as into heaven itself.’29 What Luther finds in the Psalter, then, is that the saints are shaped by collective performance of worship, but that worship has an inner side, a training of the subject as hearer of God that is facilitated in a unique way by the Psalter: In the other books we are taught by both precept and example what we ought to do. This book not only teaches but also gives the means and method by which we may keep the precept and follow the example. For it is not by our striving that we fulfil the Law of God or imitate Christ. But we are to pray and wish that we may fulfil it and imitate Him; when we do, we are to praise and give thanks. And what is the Psalter but prayer and praise to God, that is, a book of hymns?30

The Psalms embody the love of God whose Spirit is the ‘Father of orphans and the Teacher of the ignorant’ (Rom. 8.26), who helps us to pray, to enjoy God, despite our weakness, our lack of desire for God, for good works, and our broken imagination. ‘As a teacher will compose letters or little speeches for his pupils to write to their parents, so by this book He prepares both the language and the mood in which we should address the Heavenly Father and pray for that which the other books have taught us to do and to imitate.’31 Luther’s suggestion is that God has provided humans with poems that make intimate conversation with Him possible in the dark and confined places as well as the green pastures and liturgical heartlands of this life. The poetic form expresses an immediacy that is uncritical at root. This is similar to the understanding of poetry for which Paul Ricoeur is well known. ‘My deepest conviction is that poetic language alone restores to us that participation-in or belonging-to an order of things which precedes our capacity to oppose ourselves to things taken as objects opposed to a subject.’32 We have already noted that it is only in the last stages of his imprisonment, when death was immanent, that Bonhoeffer began writing poetry. His early prison letters can make quite pedestrian reading, being devoted to rather familiar topics: thanks for letters, requests for books, medicines, tobacco, and news of various friends and students. But the tone markedly changes as the situation drags on and

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the possibility of release becomes increasingly unlikely. Only at the very end do the letters begin to be sprinkled with poems. This development is susceptible to a range of interpretations. The sociological account no doubt appeals to many. As a well educated Prussian, Bonhoeffer was familiar with the techniques of poetry, and reserved enough to know he was no poet, a reserve broken down under the increased pressure to maintain emotional contact with loved ones. The psychological account is also no doubt persuasive, that the movement from more pedestrian letter writing into more revealing forms of writing is an artifact of a human craving for the deeper levels of contact which keep human souls alive. It is harder to take seriously a proposal that the eruption of poetry represented an unstoppable upwelling of a latent artistic gift, which would allow us to explain the poetry as the natural expression of an artistic genius. Each account probably contains certain elements of truth, indicating real immanent forces feeding the genesis of his poetry. Yet Bonhoeffer’s own theology forces us beyond these immanent patterns to ask after the working of God. I think Eberhard Bethge was right in believing that only poetry allowed Bonhoeffer to combine the intimacy and decorum demanded by their relationship with the terrible demands being placed on it. In his response to Bonhoeffer’s poem ‘The Friend’, Bethge writes to Bonhoeffer, You can’t give anything more personal than a poem. And you could hardly give me greater joy. There is no greater self-sacrifice, no better way of signifying an otherwise unattainable nearness than in a poem. And it is probably the form, because it makes visible the inwardness that is bound up and held in check within it. Unlimited surrender of the spirit awakens anxiety in the receiver. But this restrained surrender seems to me to be the highest degree of friendship and understanding. And as a result there is something very cheering and stimulating about it. Its touch is steadier and more far-reaching than that of a letter. Many thanks.33

Here we begin to glimpse the inner reasons for Bonhoeffer’s poetic venture. He writes a poem to his friend about friendship as a desperate but controlled act of friendship, a work of love. And as Bethge’s response shows us, it was more effective, by an order of magnitude, than any of his previous efforts. The connection and enjoyment that have been drained out of their relationship in being unable to make music together, by being unable to hear the other’s voice inflection and see one another’s body language has been restored, at least in part, by Bonhoeffer’s risky and improvised poetic act. Bonhoeffer’s heart for Bethge flows out into poetry; only in this good work do we have an

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evidence of the inner side of good works to which Luther has drawn our attention. Bonhoeffer grasps that poetry is a genre ideally suited to intimacy, to intensity of relation, and of affective connection, and says as much in a letter written only weeks before Bethge’s expression of thanks. There is hardly anything that can make one happier than to feel that one counts for something with other people. What matters here is not numbers, but intensity. In the long run, human relationships are the most important thing in life; the modern ‘efficient’ man can do nothing to change this, nor can the demigods and lunatics who know nothing about human relationships. Everything else is close to hubris. Of course, one can cultivate human relationships all too consciously in an attempt to mean something to other people . . . But what is the finest book, or picture, or house, or estate, to me, compared to my wife, my parents, or my friend? One can, of course, speak like that if one has found others in one’s life. For many today man is just a part of the world of things, because the experience of the human simply eludes them, we must be very glad that this experience has been amply bestowed on us in our lives.34

In the case of such a theological and existential thinker as Bonhoeffer, we ought, I think, to tie all these threads together. He undoubtedly harboured understandable reservations about exposing himself, both artistically and personally. He may well have had an aptitude for poetry never before recognized, having been stifled under cultural and temperamental reserve. Yet he ventured such writing because he had been taught by a tradition of scriptural interpretation to venture a very specific sort of intimacy with God. Having learned from Luther and the Psalms what mattered in one’s converse with God, and how actually to go about it, he came both to understand the importance of the inner, affective relationship with God, and what builds and sustains the affective side of communication with God. Having learned to converse with God through poetry, it is not fanciful to suggest that he was emboldened to write poetry as a form of love for humans. He wrote poetry to those he loved, who shaped him, and who he was shaped by: his family, his friends, his fiancée, and in and with them all, his church. Having learned intimacy with God in vibrant conversation with him, he discovered the strength, insight, and skill to venture intimacy with others. Finally, our exploration of Bonhoeffer’s use of ‘Treue’ indicated how such a venture of intimacy might be an attempt to serve God’s venture of intimacy towards those we love. Again the form of the Psalter comes into view in a special way, as the venture of God to speak to humans and of humans to express their desire to continue with God.

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Poetry was the deepest and most intimate way Bonhoeffer could find to ‘stay with’ his loved ones, glimpsed for the first time in the realization that their lives together were effectively over. In this context his poetic act was not only a grasp at one last moment of human intimacy, but was self-consciously to serve God’s own faithfulness to his loved ones in their mourning, even in the mourning of his own death.

Notes
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

LPP, pp. 334–35. PPDB, pp. 30–31. LPP, p. 78. GF, p. 113. PPDB, p. 32. Versions of this argument can be found in Brian Brock, ‘Bonhoeffer and the Bible in Christian Ethics: Psalm 119, the Mandates, and Ethics as a “Way” ’, SCE 18:3 (December 2005), pp. 7–29; and Singing the Ethos of God: On the Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), chapter 5. LPP, p. 374. ‘Should God require this of any, he will certainly so prepare their hearts beforehand that they will be the very ones who by their strong faith testify anew and with authority: “Happy are they who walk in the law of the Lord” ’ (MW, p. 112). John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Bk III. II; John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus: Behold the Man! Our Victorious Lamb (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2nd edn, 1994), pp. 127–33. PPDB, p. 35. LPP’s ‘worship’ is a particularly bad translation, in the last line of the third stanza. ‘Unhappiness comes by itself, or better, from God’ (DBWE 7, p. 175). ‘Ereignis’ was an important term for Barth and Bultman at this time and also for existentialist culture in general. It denoted all that was not static, the non-bourgeoisie. It plays an essential role in ER where it is most often translated ‘moment’. The recurring image of lightning and the crater are sometimes linked to clarify how in the moment all temporal things are illumined and declared to be wholly forbidden and excluded. See ER, p. 227, cf. pp. 110, 116, 124, 137, 202, 366. It is the negative force of this imagery that Bonhoeffer is trying simultaneously to retain and go beyond. Barth’s use of ‘Ereignis’ is refined and becomes more defined in his Ethics where it is translated ‘concrete event’ or ‘moment’ and becomes the basis for his central ethical concept of ‘command’. See Karl Barth, Ethics (trans. G.W. Bromily; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1981), pp. 63, 71, 74, 76. In any event, Bonhoeffer is rejecting any suggestion of the punctualism or occasionalism with which Barth’s concept of ‘command’ is often labelled. Barth again, indicating that Kant’s view of the sublime is no substitute for God’s command: ‘A thunderstorm or earthquake may shake and startle a man and become part of his experience. To be addressed is something different, and it is with this something different that we have to do in the real command. But there is more to it than this’ (Barth, Ethics, p. 86).

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15. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (trans. Graham Parkes; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 152; cf. Bernd Wannenwetsch, ‘Representing the Absent in the City: Prolegomena to a Negative Political Theology according to Revelation 21’, in God, Truth, and Witness: Engaging Stanley Hauerwas (eds L. Gregory Jones, Reinhard Hütter, and C. Rosalee Velloso Ewell; Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2005), esp. pp. 183–89. 16. Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (trans. Jeremy Leggatt; London: Harper Perennial, 2004), p. 120. ‘I had graduated from being a patient whose prognosis was uncertain to an official quadriplegic. They didn’t quite applaud, but they came close. My caretakers made me travel the length and breadth of the hospital floor to make certain that the seated position did not trigger uncontrollable spasms, but I was too devastated by this brutal downgrading of my future hopes to take much notice. They had to place a special cushion behind my head: it was wobbling about like the head of one of those African women upon removal of the stack of rings that has been stretching her neck for years. “You can handle the wheelchair,” said the occupational therapist with a smile intended to make the remark sound like good news, whereas to my ears it had the ring of a life-sentence. In one flash I saw the frightening truth. It was as blinding as an atomic explosion and keener than a guillotine blade’ (Bauby, Diving Bell, pp. 16–17). ‘[B]y a curious reversal, the people who focus most closely on these fundamental questions tend to be people I had known only superficially. Their small talk had masked hidden depths. Had I been blind and deaf, or does it take the glare of disaster to show a person’s true nature? Other letters simply relate the small events that punctuate the passage of time: roses picked at dusk, the laziness of a rainy Sunday, a child crying himself to sleep. Capturing the moment, these small slices of life, these small gusts of happiness, move me more deeply than all the rest’ (Bauby, Diving Bell, p. 91). 17. LPP, p. 419. 18. A more remote possibility is suggested by the editors of DBWE 6 that ‘brothers’ also may be being alluded to. See DBWE 6, pp. 139–40, n. 25. 19. LPP, pp. 54–55. 20. As the Major argues, ‘If you must despise life in order to gain it, then don’t forget to love it once you have gained it. But, above all, beware of speaking lightly of happiness, as if it were dispensable, and flirting with unhappiness! That goes against nature, against life, against human nature as we are created, for we must eke out our existence as poor sinners longing for happiness as a small token of God’s kindness. It’s not as easy being unhappy as you might think, and those who are truly unhappy do not despise or scorn those who are happy. I beg you, Christoph, do not be accustomed to this wild and frivolous talk about unhappy human beings and happy pets. ‘What purpose have you in taking charge, why do you want to lead, why do you want to prepare to bear unhappiness, if not in order to be able to make others happy? Unhappiness comes by itself, or better, from God. We don’t need to chase after it! Becoming unhappy is a stroke of fate, but to want to be unhappy – that is blasphemy and a serious illness of the soul. People have gorged themselves on happiness; now, out of curiosity they hanker after unhappiness for a change. I can think of nothing more jaded, and – although I don’t like to see the word misused – more bourgeois, if you will, than flirting with unhappiness’ (DBWE 7, p. 175). 21. GF, p. 113. 22. See the chapter by Bernd Wannenwetsch in this volume. 23. James Fodor and Stanley Hauerwas, ‘Performing Faith: The Peaceable Rhetoric of

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27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

34.

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God’s Church’, in Stanley Hauerwas, Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), pp. 79–109 (80). Joel James Shuman, The Body of Compassion: Ethics, Medicine, and the Church (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999), p. 118. Shuman, The Body of Compassion, p. 122. Shuman, The Body of Compassion, p. 121. These claims are put more systematically by Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells: ‘Protestants and many Catholics have assumed that they can think their way out of the challenges that face being Christian in modernity. Thus there has been the creation of the discipline of Christian ethics. Yet no ethics, philosophical or theological, can ever be a substitute for what only communal habits can provide. To be sure, some people trained in ethics may help communities see the connections between the habits that constitute their lives (though more likely help will come from people we now call artists). But such connections cannot be made if the habits are no longer in place’ (Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells, ‘How the Church Managed Before There Was Ethics’, in The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics (eds Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells; Oxford: Blackwell, new edn, 2006), pp. 39–50 (48–49)). See DBWE 5, p. 156. See LW 11, pp. 417–19. Martin Luther, ‘Preface to the Psalter’ 1545 (1528), in LW 35, p. 255. Martin Luther, ‘Works on the First Twenty-two Psalms, 1519 to 1521: A Composite Translation’, in LW 14, Selected Psalms III (ed. Jaroslav Pelikan; St. Louis: Concordia, 1958), p. 286. The structure of Luther’s insight here is explored more systematically in Günter Bader, Psalterium affectuum palaestra: Prolegomena zu einer Theologie des Psalters (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1996). Luther, Works on the First Twenty-two Psalms, p. 286. Paul Ricoeur, ‘Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation’, in Essays on Biblical Interpretation (ed. Lewis S. Mudge; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980), p. 101. LPP, p. 395. It was a theme to which Bethge was to occasionally return; cf. Eberhard Bethge, Friendship and Resistance: Essays on Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), pp. 98–103. LPP, p. 386.

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5


‘By Powers of Good’ 1 Bonhoeffer’s Last Poem: Texts and Contexts Nancy Lukens and Renate Bethge

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‘Von Guten Mächten’ 1.

Von guten Mächten treu und still umgeben, behütet und getröstet wunderbar,– so will ich diese Tage mit euch leben und mit euch gehen in ein neues Jahr.

2.

Noch will das alte unsre Herzen quälen, noch drückt uns böser Tage schwere Last. Ach, Herr, gib unsern aufgescheuchten Seelen das Heil, für das Du uns bereitet hast.

3.

Und reichst Du uns den schweren Kelch, den bittern, des Leids, gefüllt bis an den höchsten Rand, so nehmen wir ihn dankbar ohne Zittern aus Deiner guten und geliebten Hand.

4.

Doch willst Du uns noch einmal Freude schenken an dieser Welt und ihrer Sonne Glanz, dann woll’n wir des Vergangenen gedenken, und dann gehört Dir unser Leben ganz.

5.

Laß warm und still die Kerzen heute flammen, die Du in unsre Dunkelheit gebracht, führ, wenn es sein kann, wieder uns zusammen! Wir wissen es, Dein Licht scheint in der Nacht.

6.

Wenn sich die Stille nun tief um uns breitet, so laß uns hören jenen vollen Klang der Welt, die unsichtbar sich um uns weitet, all Deiner Kinder hohen Lobgesang.

7.

Von guten Mächten wunderbar geborgen erwarten wir getrost, was kommen mag. Gott ist mit uns am Abend und am Morgen, und ganz gewiß an jedem neuen Tag.

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‘By Powers of Good’ 1.

By faithful, quiet powers of good surrounded, so wondrously consoled and sheltered here– I wish to live these days with you in spirit and with you enter into a new year.

2.

The old year still would try our hearts to torment, of evil times we still do bear the weight; O Lord, do grant our souls, now terror-stricken, salvation for which you did us create.

3.

And should you offer us the cup of suffering, though heavy, brimming full and bitter brand, we’ll thankfully accept it, never flinching, from your good heart and your beloved hand.

4.

But should you wish now once again to give us the joys of this world and its glorious sun, then we’ll recall anew what past times brought us and then our life belongs to you alone.

5.

The candles you have brought into our darkness, let them today be burning warm and bright, and if it’s possible, do reunite us! We know your light is shining through the night.

6.

When now the quiet deepens all around us, O, let our ears that fullest sound amaze of this, your world, invisibly expanding as all your children sing high hymns of praise.

7.

By powers of good so wondrously protected, we wait with confidence, befall what may. God is with us at night and in the morning and oh, most certainly on each new day. (Translation: Nancy Lukens)

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I. The context2
This poem, though very well translated, is not the same in English as in its original German.3 It touched us deeply when it arrived. It reached us in a time of deep depression. Marie von Wedemeyer, Dietrich’s fiancée,4 had brought it in December 1944 from the Gestapo prison where Dietrich had been since the beginning of October and where no personal contact was possible as it had been before to a limited extent in Tegel. We had the good luck that Dietrich’s prosecutor was fond of Maria. So we rightly hoped that if she would come to the prison he would give her things that Dietrich wanted her and us to have.5 First I will tell you of whom Dietrich thought when he wrote this poem: of Maria, his fiancée, his parents,6 living in Berlin next door to their daughter Ursula, whose husband Rüdiger Schleicher7 was also in prison, as was Dietrich’s brother Klaus;8 and Hans von Dohnanyi,9 husband of his sister Christine, and their respective children. It is easiest to see it from the perspective of Dietrich’s parents: two sons and two sonsin-law were in prison as well as now Eberhard Bethge, husband of a granddaughter (myself, i.e. Dietrich’s niece). The prison where Dietrich was held now was the Gestapo headquarters in the Prinz-Albrecht-Straße, formerly a palace. The few important prisoners held there were kept in the cellar. Some were tortured there, but we don’t know that about Dietrich. In any case all were interrogated there. This is also the place where ‘our’ prisoners, like others, were brought for questioning, from the beginning of the arrests until this time. During some of the time Dietrich was held in this cellar prison. Hans von Dohnanyi was also detained briefly there. Once Dietrich managed to go into Dohnanyi’s cell and confer with him, as we heard from a man who was later released. Hans had been very ill, paralyzed after a case of diphtheria. But now he went on pretending to be paralyzed, practising at night to walk, since he hoped somehow to escape one day. Dietrich’s brother Klaus and my father, Rüdiger Schleicher, were in another prison, Lehrter Straße, waiting for their trial, which took place on 2 February 1945, with eventual death sentences for both. But when Dietrich wrote this poem, the trial had not yet taken place. Dietrich’s closest friend, my husband Eberhard Bethge, was also in the Lehrter Straße prison. He was the only one of the five imprisoned men from our families who was released at the end of the war. He later published the

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illegal prison letters to him from Dietrich that had survived, and after that he wrote the big Bonhoeffer biography. In addition to worrying about the men in prison there was also the worry about the air raids. The Dohnanyis lived outside Berlin in Sakrow, so Dietrich’s parents now and then spent some nights there because one would not expect as much bombing there as in the Marienburger Allee, where they and their daughter Ursula lived with her family. At the very end of the war my parents’ house there was hit. But this news did not reach either Dietrich or my father in prison. Yet you always had to expect news of this kind and worse. My brother Walter Schleicher was in the air force and had been shot down, without being hurt. Dietrich often asked about him in his letters. We knew that all our men didn’t get enough to eat. Prisoners in Tegel were allowed to receive a parcel every ten days. When Maria came to Berlin she always brought Dietrich something to eat from her family estate in Pomerania. My mother managed to cook hot food for the three men in Lehrter Straße prison every day though we ourselves didn’t have much, but it was easier to cook for the three than to bring them items such as butter, cheese or meat. Friends and relatives helped us sometimes with food stamps. My aunt Emmi, wife of Klaus Bonhoeffer, and I would carry the three portions, wrapped in newspaper and woolen shawls and blankets, to the prison: one portion in the middle between us and one for both of us in the other hand. There were two guards who usually took the things and brought them to the three men. And, of course, for the guards there were always some of the few cigarettes we got from our ration cards. Most went to the prisoners, but it was just as important to keep the guards in good spirits. After a fairly long time one could apply for a ‘Sprecherlaubnis’, i.e. a date when one would be given permission to visit the prisoner. Parents, wives, sons and daughters would get it from time to time. I, for instance, could not get one to visit Dietrich in spite of my applications, though of course I did later get to visit my father and my husband. In summer 1944, however, Dietrich had arranged for Eberhard and me to visit him without official permission. Now only one guard had to be won over for that risky enterprise, but Dietrich had enough good friends among the guards at Tegel prison that apparently he was able to risk this, and they dared to do this for him. Dietrich was in astonishingly good spirits, because he must have heard about the planned plot against Hitler, which then occurred on 20 July 1944. When we saw him in Tegel we sometimes wondered how he seemed to know more than we did through our regular listening to the BBC (which was, of course, strictly forbidden). Our visit with Dietrich was

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cut short because of an air raid; we had to get to a large shelter outside the prison district. But after the coup attempt failed everything was different, and now Dietrich was transferred to the Prinz-Albrecht-Straße prison.10 They have now re-named the street and the rubble of the bombed building has been removed to expose the cellar.11 After that we had very little contact. But of course we had in common the knowledge how Christmas and New Years’ Eve were celebrated in our family. And Dietrich was sure that this year, too, things would be as every year in spite of the great distress: on Christmas Eve the reading of the Christmas story by my grandmother, and then the Christmas carols sung by everybody; on New Year’s Eve the reading of Psalm 90, and with all the family, believers and non-believers alike, joining in the singing of all 15 verses of Paul Gerhardt’s ‘Nun laßt uns gehn und treten mit Singen und mit Beten zum Herrn, der unserm Leben bis hierher Kraft gegeben’ . . . (literally: ‘Now let us go with singing and praying to the Lord, who has granted us strength for living until now.’)12 The knowledge that the whole extended family would stick to that custom gave Dietrich the strength ‘to live these days with you in spirit’. These are the ‘powers of good’, which he knew would be strong even, and especially, in that very dark time.

II. Publication history and reception of ‘By Powers of Good’
This poem was very soon fairly well known. It was published by Willem A. Vissert’t Hooft13 in Geneva for the ecumenical council and by my husband in 1946 at the first anniversary of Dietrich’s death in a booklet for schools in Berlin.14 In the same year there appeared two different English translations and soon different settings to music. Today there are innumerable musical versions of that poem, even though at first, knowledgeable musicians had said that this poem was unsuited to being set to music. They said that because the poem is written in pentameter, with five metric ‘feet’, and none of our hymns have that rhythm, Dietrich could not have thought of a hymn in writing the poem. Now, later than in other countries, there are two versions in our German protestant hymnbook. The one had won over the ‘Kirchentag’ (the biennial all-church assembly), without the blessing of the official church authorities, when groups of young people sang it to the guitar.

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This is now the most popular version, but we are not so fond of it because it has the rhythm of a dance, which does not correspond to the situation when the poem was written. The other tune in our hymn book is more suitable; it’s more in the manner of other hymns, but it’s not very striking. It took a very long time before the church decided to accept ‘Von guten Mächten’ into our hymnbook. There are several possible explanations for this hesitancy. First, there were certain reservations about Bonhoeffer in Germany. He was seen as someone who had perhaps become guilty by joining the conspiracy to kill Hitler. Others argued: If he had been right, most of us other Germans would have been wrong. Even a very good man from the Confessing Church told me shortly after the war that he could not have taken the step that Dietrich took. But later on, when people had read more of what Bonhoeffer had written and what was written about him, the mood changed. Also, people in the meantime had become more fully aware of the terrible harm deliberately brought to Jews and other people during the ‘Third Reich’. Also a new generation that had not been so involved with National Socialism had now grown up. So they understood when Bonhoeffer wrote, for instance, that it is ‘God who demands responsible action in a bold venture of faith, and promises forgiveness and consolation to the man who becomes a sinner in that venture’.15

III. To be or not to be a poem: the genre of ‘By Powers of Good’
As Renate Bethge indicated, ‘Von guten Mächten’ has had a life of its own through its reception as a hymn, quite apart from its relevance to his prison theology or, indeed, equally importantly, the shifting views in Germany and elsewhere of Bonhoeffer’s political witness. This is not the place to elaborate on the important and understandable reasons for the decades it has taken for the churches and civil society in Germany as well as elsewhere to begin to sort out the implications of Bonhoeffer’s political witness. I would argue that a careful rereading of the ten poems as texts, especially in the new, complete versions with editorial apparatus and references to events and writings of the same time period, would shed important light on these questions.16 My purpose in looking at ‘By Powers of Good’ as one of Bonhoeffer’s last known utterances before his deportation from Berlin, is to make a modest beginning towards that

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end, but focusing primarily on the text itself, its addressees, and its contextual references. But this poem more than many others raises the question of its genre as a prerequisite to interpretation. In the more than six decades since Visser t’Hooft’s first little publication of ‘Von guten Mächten’ on the first anniversary of Bonhoeffer’s death, parts of the poem have travelled the globe in numerous translations and musical settings.17 It is not my purpose to trace that history here. Jürgen Henkys, professor of theology with expertise in German literary criticism, hymnology, and Bonhoeffer studies, author of a 2005 monograph on the prison poetry,18 documented published listings of musical settings of ‘Von guten Mächten’ in his first book-length study of Bonhoeffer’s poems in 1986. Here he cited a 1976 documentation of five musical settings, already then asserting that his own updated list of seventeen composers was certainly incomplete.19 I find it striking, given the familiarity to many Western German and English speaking Bonhoeffer aficionados of the seven-verse hymn or the published poem, that the best known melody of ‘Von guten Mächten’20 was, as Henkys reports, composed after the fact of repeated use in the context of East German Church youth group gatherings in the 1950s. There, the last verse of the poem would be recited out of context as a prayer or meditation, from memory, without anyone necessarily knowing there were other verses, or perhaps even its author’s name or the circumstances of its writing. Precisely because of its popularity, Theophil Rothenberg then asked Otto Abel to compose a melody for this last verse to be included in his youth hymnal.21 Henkys asks: ‘What happens to a work when it is “used” (gebraucht) [i.e. as a hymn or prayer]? What is attributed to it or added to it in the process? What do people get from it, what is taken away from it?’22 Specifically in this case, what does the final verse of ‘By Powers of Good’ mean in a context when Church youth, say in 1950s Soviet-controlled East Berlin, find that it speaks to their situation? ‘By powers of good so wondrously protected / we wait with confidence, befall what may/God is with us at night and in the morning / and oh, most certainly on each new day.’ Considering the dramatic progression of the seven-verse sequence in ‘By Powers of Good’ – entering the new year together in spirit with absent loved ones, bearing the weight of evil times that still try to torment the heart, terror-stricken souls seeking the salvation for which human beings were created, gratefully and unflinchingly accepting the possibility of drinking the cup of suffering, but then confessing the desire for earthly joys, for reunion, for the sound of all God’s children singing hymns of praise in an invisibly expanding universe – it may seem ‘cheap grace’ to leap straight to the comforting lines of the final verse, or

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perhaps worse, to consciously lift it out of context. In another setting, participants at the 2000 Dietrich Bonhoeffer Congress in Berlin sang with inmates in Tegel Prison chapel the more dance-like melody of ‘Von guten Mächten’ referred to by Renate Bethge above. This version included only vv. 1–4, with v. 7 as the refrain.23 Given that, as far as the written record indicates, Bonhoeffer had no intention of his poem being read by others outside his extended family and his fiancée, the question remains: Who are we to decide in this next millennium how it should be ‘used’, what should it ‘mean’ in contexts beyond late December 1944? Perhaps these two examples may serve to suggest how the interpretation of texts, including both prayer and song, is conditioned by their reception and vice versa. Thus ‘Von guten Mächten’ is widely known as a hymn, in many diverse translations and musical versions. Some versions omit certain verses or use only the final verse; some re-arrange the order of the verses, which are numbered by Bonhoeffer in the recently published original version in his own hand. The text uses forms of address typical of prayer in all but the opening and closing stanzas of the poem, i.e. in stanzas 2–6, after the intimate circle of addressees have been brought into the shared moment in v. 1. Thus one might be tempted to read the text, in fact, as a hymn. But is this its poetic genre? As Renate Bethge remarked,24 it appears unlikely that Bonhoeffer had in mind a hymn tune when writing the seven verses of ‘By Powers of Good’. Bonhoeffer’s intended audience, well read in German classical literature, would immediately feel at home reading these seven strophes, more so than they would read or sing an unfamiliar hymn text. His extended family were not churchgoers or particularly religious; they belonged to the secular Bildungsbürgertum, the classically educated upper-middle class. The seven original German verses of ‘By Powers of Good’ are composed in strict iambic pentameter, the basic form adopted for classical German sonnets, terzines, and stanzas by German poets from J. W. von Goethe, Gottfried August Bürger, Theodor Storm, Theodor Fontane, and C. F. Meyer, to Stephan George and R.M. Rilke, based originally on the Italian eleven-syllable stanza form.25 The verses consist of five metric feet per line, each line beginning with an unstressed syllable, alternating lines ending with an unstressed or stressed syllable, with a consistent ABBA rhyme scheme. It would appear that Bonhoeffer can hardly have had a hymn melody in mind when composing these verses, as Henkys asserts, for nowhere in German hymnody is there a hymn in iambic pentameter!26 As much as Bonhoeffer is known to have made a practice of reciting familiar hymns on a daily basis in prison,27 this poem does not appear to be conceived as such.

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But as Henkys has recently discovered, appearances can deceive. He concedes that his view has shifted on this point since discovering that the melody, metric pattern, and final verse of the Gottfried Arnold hymn, ‘So führst du doch recht selig, Herr, die Deinen’ (‘Thus you lead your people, Lord, to blessing’),28 are strikingly similar to those of the final verse of ‘Von guten Mächten’.29 On 9 September 1943, Bonhoeffer urged Maria to read the hymn, one of his favourites, despite its unfamiliarity and difficulty, saying ‘it grows on one’;30 on 29 September she replies that she often read it and was grateful for it.31 I shall return to Paul Gerhardt shortly. But first let us consider the poem as a poem. Until Henkys’ 1986 monograph, Bonhoeffer’s ten poems attracted little critical attention as poetry per se – much less as ‘prison poetry’, a genre in its own right. Eberhard Bethge devotes no more than several sentences of his biography to the poetry, describing these ‘literary experiments’ as ‘efforts to overcome his isolation’, ‘so densely packed that they burst the forms of the poem.’32 Bethge devotes four lines to ‘Von guten Mächten’, calling it ‘the last theological and developed witness from Bonhoeffer’s hand’, and ‘a prayer’.33 As suggested by the title, the first separate German publication of the poems by Johann Christoph Hampe, Gebete und Gedichte (Prayers and Poems), gives the three prayers and ten poems equal weight, omitting mention of their genesis in prison. Its English equivalent ignores the texts’ genre with the title Prayers from Prison. Not until the 1990s has there been greater attention to the prison poems as poetry, as exemplified by Henkys’ critical study Geheimnis der Freiheit, or Edwin Robertson’s adaptation of the 10 poems in English, appearing in the U.K. in 1998 and the U.S. a year later. So how and why does Bonhoeffer, who had written poetry as a youth and now returned to the genre in prison, go about communicating in this form? Bethge and others have justifiably asserted that Bonhoeffer’s stylistic forte is the essay and the letter. Why, then, would he choose the classical Italian stanza form and pack such important material into it in order to communicate these end-of-year thoughts to an intimate circle of extended family and friends? The distinctly personal tone is set by Bonhoeffer’s lyrical first person in v. 1 by creating an ‘I-you’ relationship: ‘I want to live these days with you in spirit’. Amidst terror and bombardment, imprisoned family members and a most uncertain future, there is an abyss to be crossed to affirm the connection between separated loved ones. How does Bonhoeffer do this? One answer to this question is: He does not do it merely by sending a poem. The poem is embedded in a letter.34 So, technically, we are

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looking at a more complex genre, as it turns out a kind of epistolary last testament with an embedded poetic jewel. Secondly, there are two separate letters and two slightly different surviving versions of the poem. In early editions of LPP, ‘By Powers of Good’ is placed after Bonhoeffer’s letter of 28 December 1944 to his mother, with wishes for her birthday.35 The updated English version of Eberhard Bethge’s biography, as well as DBW 8, describe the poem as having been sent for his mother’s 70th birthday on 30 December, ‘through [his fiancée] Maria [von Wedemeyer]’.36 If we can assume Paula Bonhoeffer had already read the poem or received it about the time of the letter at New Years Eve, the following sentences will have struck a chord (cf. especially vv. 1, 2, and 5): I think these difficult years have brought us even closer together than we ever were before . . . I wish you and Papa and Maria and all of us that the new year might at least bring us a glimmer of light here and there and that we might be able to have the joy of being together again after all.37

As we know since the publication of LLC 92, the original manuscript of the poem comprised the conclusion of Bonhoeffer’s Christmas letter of 19 December to Maria, delivered to her by Commissar Sonderegger for the holidays.38 The original was kept by her under lock and key until her death, with only the typed copy she gave the family circulating among them and then finding publication in the forms we knew until recently. In the lines of the letter immediately preceding the poem, Bonhoeffer describes it to Maria as, ‘my Christmas greeting to you, my parents, and my brothers and sisters.’39 Thus we know that Bonhoeffer intended multiple addressees for the poem, as implied by Renate Bethge’s remarks. The fact that Bonhoeffer’s last poem is embedded within the last letter to his fiancée arouses the interest of textual critics who look at intertextual resonances. The echoes here are striking: ‘My dearest Maria . . . Our homes will be very quiet at this time [cf. vv. 1 and 6 of “By Powers of Good”: “By faithful, quiet powers . . .”, and “When now the quiet deepens all around us . . .”]. But I have often found that the quieter my surroundings, the more vividly I sense my connection with you all.’40 The world that read ‘By Powers of Good’ in LPP without reference to the original would not have noticed the certainly conscious reference by Bonhoeffer in his letter to the poem that followed, because the LPP translation omitted the German word for ‘quiet’ in the first line. Knowing the custom of the family gathering, the correspondent and poet affirms his presence with them by alluding to the quiet and the ritual gathering. Quiet is a dominant motif in the poem, yet Bonhoeffer immediately re-defines it in v. 1: it is not the sentimental quiet of

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undisturbed middle-class life, but the quiet force of ‘faithful powers of good’ amidst the ‘evil times’ and ‘terror-stricken’ souls of v. 2. Bonhoeffer uses his final letter of 19 December to his fiancée, which again was only published after her death, and his letter of 28 December to his mother, to introduce the prayer-like poem in secular language. Maria once broke her oath of silence by reading aloud during a talk at Union Seminary in New York City the following passage from this letter. It, too, is alive with resonances with the poem, as if in writing the letter Bonhoeffer is finding his way towards the wording of the poem: It is as if, in solitude, the soul develops organs of which we’re hardly aware in everyday life. So I haven’t for an instant felt lonely and forlorn. You yourself, my parents – all of you including my friends and students on active service – are my constant companions. Your prayers and kind thoughts, passages from the Bible, long-forgotten conversations, pieces of music, books – all are invested with life and reality as never before. It is a great, invisible realm in which one lives and of whose real existence there can be no doubt. The old children’s song about the angels says ‘two to cover me, two to wake me’41 – and today we grown-ups are no less in need than children of preservation, night and morning, by kindly, unseen powers. So you mustn’t think I’m unhappy.42

Motifs that reverberate through the poem cannot have been lost on the readers of the letter. The ‘great, invisible realm . . . of whose real existence there can be no doubt’, echoes in v. 6: ‘your world, invisibly expanding’. In this sense one could arguably consider this a coded piece. The language of the code specifically bridged the secular world of his readers and his own discovery of new theological dimensions. Jürgen Henkys’ recent work on Paul Gerhardt has thrown new light on this possibility. Permit me a closer look at one thread that may have contributed to a code I believe Bonhoeffer thought might unite him, consciously or unconsciously, with his fiancée and extended family at the close of 1944. Renate Bethge told us that Paul Gerhardt’s hymn ‘Nun laßt uns gehn und treten’ was sung every New Year’s Eve by believers and unbelievers alike in the Bonhoeffer household, all fifteen verses. Unfortunately, the English version available to me in a current Lutheran hymnal43 does not at all reflect the original Paul Gerhardt text,44 which echoes ‘By Powers of Good’ in striking ways. My literal, unrhymed translation of ‘Nun laßt uns gehn und treten’ follows here:

By Powers of Good 1. Now let us go with singing and praying before the Lord, who has given us strength up till now. 2. We journey along and wander from one year to the next; we live and thrive from the old year into the new 3. through so much fear and suffering, through trembling and faintheartedness, through war and great horrors that cover the whole world. 4. For just as the little children in heavy storms here on earth are conscientiously protected by faithful mothers, 5. thus also and no less faithfully God keeps us, his children, safe in his bosom when dire need and tribulation strike. 6. Oh, Protector of our life, in truth, all we do is in vain unless your eye watches over us. 7. Praised be your faithfulness, which is new each morning, Praise be to the strong hands that turn all heart’s sorrows. 8. May we also ask of you, O Father, that you remain in the midst of our sufferings a fount of our joys. 9. Give me and all those whose hearts long for you and your favor, a heart that knows patience. 10. Close the gates of wailing and let everywhere the streams of joy flow over so much bloodshed. 11. Give your kind blessing on all our paths, let the sun of your grace shine on the great and the small. 12. Be the Father of the abandoned, counselor of the Lost, Gift for those not taken care of, Provision for the Poor. 13. Help graciously all who are ill, give glad thoughts to the sorely grieved souls that torment themselves with melancholy. 14. And finally, most importantly, fill us with your Spirit, that it might adorn us here and lead us heavenward.

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15. May you grant all this, O Life of my Life, to me and to the host of Christians at this blessed New Year.

Like Bonhoeffer, Paul Gerhardt creates a ‘we’ position in relation to the war and terror all are experiencing as the old year ends (vv. 2–3). Bonhoeffer’s letter to his mother is direct in its gratitude to her for her loving care; the faithful attention of loved ones is among the powers of good he mentions in both letters. The poem’s emphasis on faithfulness (Treue) links it to Gerhardt’s v. 7, which creates a feminine image of God caring ‘no less faithfully’ for ‘us, his children’ in times of dire need, than little children are protected in storms ‘by faithful mothers’. To all the poem’s recipients familiar with the Gerhardt hymn, other links would surely have been sensed: ‘your faithfulness, new each morning’ (v. 7, as in v. 7 of the poem: ‘God is with us each night and in the morning’); the motif of tormented souls in v. 2 of ‘By Powers of Good’ and v. 13 of Gerhardt’s hymn. A striking contrast in ‘By Powers of Good’ in contrast to the 17th century model, despite a close parallel in theme and language about joy and suffering, is found in the transition from v. 3 to v. 4 of the poem as compared to v. 8 of ‘Nun laßt uns gehn’. Where Gerhardt, poet of the Thirty Years’ War, pleads for God to be the fount of joy amidst suffering, Bonhoeffer lays the full weight of v. 3 on the act of unflinching acceptance of the ‘cup of suffering’, only then beginning v. 4 with a stressed ‘But’: ‘But should you wish . . . to give us / the joys of this world . . .’ Surely both the theological and the personal meaning of this allusion to Gethsemane and the cross – especially with its significant reversal of conventional piety45 – ‘let us have just this one human request and then we’ll accept the suffering that comes with doing your will’ – will not have been lost on Maria or the family as they continued to the ‘befall what may’ of v. 7. Yet the poem’s voice is distinctly familiar and nonreligious. In my view the poet chose a classical, secular lyrical form that his audience would know, at the same time infusing his lines with allusions to a beloved ritual that held deep meaning for them. As the Paul Gerhardt hymns had unexpectedly proven eye-opening to him once he began to study them in prison, this one, Bonhoeffer may have thought, could provide for his extended family and fiancée some links between the themes of his New Year’s poem and the key nuggets of his new theology. It remains for us to wonder whether he thought beyond that audience.

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IV. Interpreting the text
Beyond the links between the poem, his cover letters to his mother and to Maria and to hymn texts, ‘By Powers of Good’ contains numerous motifs that refer to the core ideas in Bonhoeffer’s concurrent late prison writings. This is not the place to elaborate in detail on these. I shall focus on just three motifs of both poetic and theological significance in the poem and briefly illustrate how they work between several prison writings to help us understand the breadth and depth of Bonhoeffer’s reach as a creative writer and thinker. First, Bonhoeffer refers in his Ethics, as in almost every volume of his writings, to ‘Mächte’ as earthly, historical ‘powers’.46 In this poem, as in the letters, ‘gute (kindly, goodly, generous, magnanimous) Mächte’ are defined not in religious or spiritual terms, but as kind deeds of faithful loved ones, beloved pieces of music, letters, remembered conversations.47 But in this poem, as in the cover letter to Maria, the powers are associated with a guiding, protecting presence akin to that of angels. Secondly, there is a striking connection between ‘By Powers of Good’, the letter of 19 December to Maria and ‘The “Ethical” and the “Christian” as a Topic’ in Ethics where Bonhoeffer speaks of God’s commandment as allowing human beings to be human before God, to be without inner conflict, to be confident (cf. v. 7 of the poem) because their action is preceded by the decision to obey God’s call, and ‘to be guided, accompanied and guarded on their way by the commandment as by a good angel.’48 Thus the affirmation voiced in the poem, concluding with the confidence of God’s presence ‘befall what may’, can be seen as the fruit of a new understanding of the connection between God’s commandment and the freedom of responsible action, shared in this lyrical form to be appreciated and loved for its beauty by his family who were not privy to his theological writings. Code, yes, but also Dichtung, condensed matter for thought and reflection – perhaps, I would argue, even for his own clarification in the absence of conversation partners such as Bethge who had served that function. That brings us to the third motif, that of ‘Geborgenheit’ (safety, comfort, protection). ‘Von guten Mächten wunderbar geborgen’ (literally ‘wonderfully sheltered by powers of goodness’), the opening line of the final stanza of the original poem, states the condition for confidence, now extending the ‘I’ of verse 1 to the ‘we’ whose experience has been drawn into the sequence of seven verses. The cadence and melody of ‘By Powers of Good’ with its iambic lines express it more simply, but one

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cannot help but hear the poem when contemplating Bonhoeffer’s reflection on responsible action from ‘History and the Good’: Responsible action . . . gains its unity, and ultimately also its certainty, from this very limitation by God and neighbor . . . [I]t is creaturely and humble. This is precisely why it can be sustained by an ultimate joy and confidence, knowing that in its origin, essence and goal it is sheltered in Christ.49

‘Von guten Mächten’ is an affirmation of human and spiritual ‘Geborgenheit’ amidst the terror of evil times. It features a Gethsemane perikope without naming Christ. The motif of ‘sheltering’ here is a final expression of confidence in God’s presence. The word is surely not chosen arbitrarily by the poet of ‘Night Voices’, written perhaps six months earlier, which uses the same rhyming pairs and the same motifs from Humperdinck’s familiar children’s lullaby from Hänsel und Gretel, but in consciously harsh juxtaposition to create a dissonant image of isolation: Twelve cold, thin clangs from the clock tower awaken (wecken) me. No resonance or warmth in them to cover (decken) me. Howling, vicious dogs at midnight terrify (schrecken) me.50

Instead of the protection and comfort associated with the words and rhymes of the lullaby, Bonhoeffer uses them here in negation to describe the isolation of confinement. In ‘By Powers of Good’, by contrast, the images and allusions all serve to comfort the addressees, even while affirming the call to share in God’s suffering in the world, and at the same time desiring to enjoy once more the abundance of earth’s joys. ‘By Powers of Good’ works as a hymn, a poem, a prayer or meditation. Its context as an embedded text within significant smuggled, uncensored messages from prison complicates the task of interpretation. Bonhoeffer’s literary experiments with poetry may have helped him not only overcome his isolation but also, as Bethge put it, to find his way through the discipline of reading and writing poetry through the ‘stations on the way to freedom’. In exploring each poetic text and the wider contexts from which the poems arose we may better understand why Bonhoeffer’s prison theology continues to expand our vision of that ‘invisible realm . . . of whose real existence there can be no doubt.’51

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Notes
1. This and Bonhoeffer’s other nine prison poems have been re-translated in their entirety by Nancy Lukens for the new DBWE 8. The translator acknowledges valuable suggestions from the DBWE 8 team, as well as Ilse Tödt and Jürgen Henkys. 2. Sections I and II of this essay are based on comments by Renate Bethge, niece of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and widow of Bonhoeffer’s biographer Eberhard Bethge, at the conference, Bonhoeffer’s Theology through the Lens of His Poetry, January 2006, edited and annotated by Nancy Lukens. 3. cf. DBW 8, p. 607. 4. Maria von Wedemeyer (1924–77) and Bonhoeffer became engaged in January 1943. By her wish, their correspondence was only published in German in 1992 and into English in 1995 (cf. LLC 92). 5. Commissar Franz Xaver Sonderegger, one of Bonhoeffer’s interrogators at the Gestapo prison, occasionally passed on a greeting to Bonhoeffer when he delivered Maria’s food parcels to him every Wednesday, or even allowed a note to accompany it. cf. Bonhoeffer, p. 909. It is also reported that Maria was able to gain access to SS Colonel Walter Huppenkothen, Bonhoeffer’s chief inquisitor, but failed to obtain permission to see her fiancé. cf. LLC 92, p. 268. 6. Karl Bonhoeffer (1868–1948): Professor of Psychiatry in Königsberg, Heidelberg and Breslau; from 1912 Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology and Director of the Charité Psychiatric Hospital of the University of Berlin. Paula Bonhoeffer, née von Hase (1876–1951), native of Königsberg, East Prussia, daughter of Karl and Klara von Hase. 7. Rüdiger Schleicher (1895–1945): husband of Ursula Schleicher, née Bonhoeffer (1902–83), sister of Dietrich Bonhoeffer; headed the legal department of the Reich Air Travel Ministry until demoted in August 1939 before the invasion of Poland for his positions with respect to international law and the Hague conventions; sentenced to death on 2 February 1945 for involvement in the conspiracy to remove Hitler from power; shot by firing squad together with his brother-in-law Klaus Bonhoeffer on 22 April. 8. Klaus Bonhoeffer (1901–45): Attorney; husband of Emilie (‘Emmi’) Bonhoeffer, née Delbrück; studied international law in Geneva, Amsterdam and Great Britain; chief attorney for Lufthansa; early involvement in the conspiracy against Hitler; arrested 1 October 1944, murdered 23 April 1945. 9. Hans von Dohnanyi (1902–45): husband of Dietrich’s sister Christine; a central figure in the conspiracy to overthrow the Nazi regime through his position under Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr; arrested together with his wife Christine and with Dietrich Bonhoeffer on 5 April 1943, murdered in Sachsenhausen 9 April 1945. 10. On 8 October 1944. cf. Bonhoeffer, p. 893. Bonhoeffer was moved on 7 February 1945 from Berlin to the Buchenwald concentration camp, and from there to Flossenbürg where he was executed on 9 April, days before it was liberated by Allied troops. 11. The former Gestapo prison is now a museum with an exhibit called ‘The Topography of Terror’. cf. www.topographie.de; cf. also Topographie des Terrors. Gestapo, SS und Reichssicherheitshauptamt auf dem Prinz-Albrecht-Gelände. Eine Dokumentation (ed. R. Rürup; Berlin: Willmuth Arenhovel, 1987).

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12. Evangelisches Gesangbuch (EG) 58, Hymns for the New Year. This hymn has appeared in many different English translations. A version by J. Kelly, 1867, ‘Now let us come before him’ appears as Hymn 184 in Lutheran Worship, 1982. For comparison to ‘By Powers of Good’ see below. 13. Willem A. Visser t’Hooft (1900–85): Dutch-born General Secretary of the provisional World Council of Churches in Geneva during WWII, appointed WCC General Secretary in 1948. His position in neutral Geneva during the war, his close ties with ecumenical leaders from Allied countries, and with German resistance figures, made him a key go-between in conveying messages and memoranda. cf. W.A. Visser t’Hooft, Memoirs (London, 1973). 14. This first published version of the poem (in WF) was based on a typewritten copy later titled ‘Neujahr 1945’ brought to Dietrich’s parents by Maria von Wedemeyer and circulated in the family. Paula Bonhoeffer, Dietrich’s mother, had given this version to Eberhard Bethge in the summer of 1945 and it served as the basis for all the early German editions and translations of the poem. For discussion of the later discovered variant of 9 December 1944, see below. 15. LPP, p. 6. 16. cf. Nancy Lukens, ‘The Language of Non-Religious Interpretation in Bonhoeffer’s Prison Writings: An Intertextual Reflection’, delivered at the American Academy of Religion, San Diego, November 2007; available through Burke Library, Union Seminary (www.columbia.edu/cu/web/indiv/burke). 17. See the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Bibliography at the Burke Library website for a listing of published translations of ‘Von guten Mächten’. John Conway discusses some issues in translating ‘Von guten Mächten’, as well as some history of English hymn versions, in ‘Translators’ Travails’, Association of Contemporary Church Historians Newsletter 10:2 (February 2004). 18. GF, p. 302. 19. DBG, p. 82. 20. By Otto Abel (1959), now no.65 in the Evangelisches Kirchengesangbuch. 21. DBG, p. 83. 22. Henkys, ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffers letztes Gedicht auf dem Wege in das Gesangbuch’, in DBG, p. 7; cf. an earlier version of the same study in Vom Amt des Laien in Kirche und Theologie (ed. H. Schröer and G. Müller; Festschrift for Gerhard Krause; Berlin: deGruyter, 1982). All citations from German sources are translated by the author unless otherwise indicated. 23. Program of the 8th International Bonhoeffer Congress, Worship Service of 18 August 2000 in the Berlin-Tegel Prison Church. 24. cf. DBG, p. 69. 25. DBG, p. 69. 26. DBG, p. 69: ‘Of 124 hymn meters listed in the German protestant hymnal not a single one is in iambic pentameter.’ 27. Bonhoeffer writes in his first letter from Tegel to his parents following his arrest on 14 April 1943 (censored): ‘. . . it is good to read Paul Gerhardt’s hymns and learn them by heart’ (LPP 22); cf. DBW 8, p. 44; cf. his first letter to Bethge, November 1943 (uncensored), describing his first 12 days in Tegel when held alongside hardened criminals: ‘I was protected from difficult tests during those days . . . – Paul Gerhardt proved true in unexpected ways’ (LPP, p. 128, translated by the author); cf. DBW 8, p. 187. 28. No. 230 in the 1931 edition of the Evangelisches Gesangbuch für Brandenburg und Pommern used by Bonhoeffer (also Evangelisches Kirchengesangbuch, p. 472).

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29. Jürgen Henkys, ‘Paul Gerhardt, Gottfried Arnold und die “guten Mächte” ’, in Arbeitsstelle Gottesdienst 3 (2006), pp. 52–66. 30. LLC 92, p. 82. 31. LLC 92, p. 93. 32. Bonhoeffer, p. 841. 33. Bonhoeffer, p. 910. 34. Clifford Green and Hans Pfeiffer, ‘Texte von Dietrich Bonhoeffer in der Houghton Library, Harvard University, Boston’, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Jahrbuch 2003, p. 194, n. 5. 35. LPP, p. 400. 36. Bonhoeffer, p. 909; DBW 8, p. 609. Sonderegger also delivered this letter to Paula Bonhoeffer. The poem was not enclosed but delivered by Maria in the typed copy she had made from the original. 37. DBW 8, p. 609; cf. LPP, p. 399. Translated by the author. 38. Eberhard Bethge, Von guten Mächten – Eine Predigt (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1989), p. 13. 39. LLC 92, p. 269. 40. All translations are from the forthcoming DBWE 8; cf. LPP, p. 400. 41. From the song ‘Abends, wenn ich schlafen geh’ / vierzehn Englein um mich stehn . . .’ [When at night I go to sleep, fourteen angels watch will keep . . .] (LLC 92, p. 271). 42. First published in Union Seminary Quarterly Review 23:1 (Fall, 1967), p. 29, cited by Eberhard Bethge, Eine Predigt, p. 13. cf. LLC 92, pp. 268–69. 43. ‘Now let us come before him’, English text by John Kelly, 1867, adapted as Hymn 184 in Lutheran Worship (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1982). Thanks to Lisa Dahill of Trinity Lutheran Seminary, Columbus, Ohio, and to Victor Gebauer for help locating this current version of the hymn. Its wording (6 verses) distorts the content of Paul Gerhardt’s text in astounding ways, making it more sentimental and otherworldly; it does not resonate thematically or in its images with Bonhoeffer’s ‘Von guten Mächten’ as does Gerhardt’s original text. 44. Evangelisches Kirchengesangbuch 58, Paul Gerhardt, 1653. 45. cf. GF, p. 274–75; cf. also Bonhoeffer’s letter of 18 July, 2 days before the attempted coup (DBW 8, p. 535; LPP, p. 361). 46. cf. DBW 17, p. 704–05. The Index lacks entries under ‘Mächte’ for DBW 6; this is an oversight. 47. Surviving fellow Tegel prisoner Fabian von Schlabrendorff testified that Bonhoeffer’s ‘eyes shone whenever he told me of the letters he received from his fiancée and his parents. He felt surrounded and cherished by their love, even in a Gestapo prison’ (LLC 92, p. 268). 48. DBWE 6, p. 385, n. 75. The note refers to Bonhoeffer’s Ethics working note 107 containing the term ‘sleep-angel’ (ZE, p. 134). 49. DBWE 6, p. 269; emphasis added. 50. DBWE 8, forthcoming; cf. LPP, p. 351. 51. First published in Union Seminary Quarterly Review 23:1 (Fall, 1967), p. 29, cited by Eberhard Bethge, Eine Predigt; cf. LLC 92, pp. 268–69.

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6


‘The Friend’ Reflections on Friendship and Freedom Stanley Hauerwas

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Who Am I?

‘Der Freund’ Nicht aus dem schweren Boden der Erde, wo Blut und Geschlecht und Schwur mächtig und heilig sind, wo die Erde selbst gegen Wahnsinn und Frevel die geweihten uralten Ordnungen hütet und schützt und rächt – nicht aus dem schweren Boden der Erde, sondern aus freiem Gefallen und freiem Verlangen des Geistes, der nicht des Eides noch des Gesetzes bedarf, wird der Freund dem Freunde geschenkt. Neben dem nährenden Weizenfeld, welches die Menschen ehrfürchtig bauen und pflegen, dem sie den Schweiß ihrer Arbeit und, wenn es sein muß, das Blut ihrer Leiber zum Opfer bringen, neben dem Acker des täglichen Brotes lassen die Menschen doch auch die schöne Kornblume blühn. Keiner hat sie gepflanzt, keiner begossen, schutzlos wächst sie in Freiheit und in heiterer Zuversicht, daß man das Leben unter dem weiten Himmel ihr gönne. Neben dem Nötigen, aus gewichtigem, irdischem Stoffe Geformten, neben der Ehe, der Arbeit, dem Schwert, will auch das Freie leben und der Sonne entgegenwachsen. Nicht nur die reife Frucht, auch die Blüten sind schön. Ob die Blüte der Frucht, ob die Frucht der Blüte nur diene – wer weiß es?

The Friend

‘The Friend’ Not from the hard ground, where blood and race and binding oath are sacred and powerful; where the very earth itself keeps guard and defends the consecrated orders of creation against the madness and frenzy of disorder; not from the hard ground of the earth, but freely chosen and desired, the longing of the spirit, which neither duty nor law requires, the friend will offer to the friend. Beside the nourishing field of corn, which men faithfully plant and tend, labouring and sweating in the field, and, if needs be, sacrifice their life’s blood; beside the field of daily bread, those same men also leave the lovely cornflower to bloom. No one planted, nor watered it, defenseless it grows in freedom and supremely confident that it will be allowed to live under the open sky and undisturbed. Beside the necessary growth produced from heavy, earthy work, beside marriage, work and the sword, the unplanned will also flourish, and grow towards the sun. Not only the ripening fruit, but also flowers are beautiful. Whether the fruit serves the flower or the flower the fruit only – who knows?

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94

Who Am I? Doch sind uns beide gegeben. Kostbarste, seltenste Blüte – der Freiheit des spielenden, wagenden und vertrauenden Geistes in glücklicher Stunde entsprungen – ist dem Freunde der Freund. Spielgefährten zuerst auf den weiten Fahrten des Geistes in wunderbare, entfernte Reiche, die im Schleier der Morgensonne wie Gold erglänzen, denen am heißen Mittag die leichten Wolken des blauen Himmels entgegenziehen, die in erregender Nacht beim Schein der Lampe wie verborgene, heimliche Schätze den Suchenden locken. Wenn dann der Geist dem Menschen mit großen, heiteren, kühnen Gedanken Herz und Stirne berührt, daß er mit klaren Augen und freier Gebärde der Welt ins Gesicht schaut, wenn dann dem Geiste die Tat entspringt, – der jeder allein steht und fällt – wenn aus der Tat stark und gesund das Werk erwächst, das dem Leben des Mannes Inhalt und Sinn gibt, dann verlangt es den handelnden, wirkenden, einsamen Menschen nach dem befreundeten und verstehenden Geist. Wie ein klares, frisches Gewässer, darin der Geist sich vom Staube des Tages reinigt, darin er von glühender Hitze sich kühlet und in der Stunde der Müdigkeit stählt – wie eine Burg, in die nach Gefahr und Verwirrung der Geist zurückkehrt,

The Friend Yet both are given to us. Costly, rare blooms – sprung from the freedom of the playful, brave and trusting spirit in a happy hour – such is the friend to the friend. Playful, at first, on the far journeys of the spirit, into wonderful, distant realms, which in the haze of the morning sun glitter like gold; but in the heat of the day are by thin clouds in a blue sky encompassed; while in the stirrings of the night, lit only by the lamp, like hidden private treasures, they beckon the seeker. Then when the spirit moves a man to great, serene, audacious thoughts of heart and mind, he may look the world in the face with clear eyes and open countenance; then, if action is joined to the spirit – by which alone it stands or falls – from this action, sound and strong, the work grows, giving content to thought and meaning to the life of the man; then the active, lonely man longs for the befriending, understanding spirit of another. Like a clear, fresh flow of water, in which the spirit cleanses itself from the dust of the day, cooled from the burning heat, strengthened in the hour of tiredness – like a fortress, to which after the dangers of battle the spirit retires

95

96

Who Am I? in der er Zuflucht, Zuspruch und Stärkung findet, ist dem Freunde der Freund. Und der Geist will vertrauen, ohne Grenzen vertrauen. Angeekelt von dem Gewürm, das im Schatten des Guten von Neid und Argwohn und Neugier sich nährt, von dem Schlangengezisch vergifteter Zungen, die das Geheimnis des freien Gedankens, des aufrichtigen Herzens fürchten, hassen und schmäh’n, verlangt es den Geist alle Verstellung von sich zu werfen und sich vertrautem Geiste gänzlich zu offenbaren, ihm frei und treu zu verbünden. Neidlos will er bejahen, will anerkennen, will danken, will sich freuen und stärken am anderen Geist. Doch auch strengem Maß und strengem Vorwurf beugt er sich willig. Nicht Befehle, nicht zwingende fremde Gesetze und Lehren, aber den Rat, den guten und ernsten, der frei macht, sucht der gereifte Mann von der Treue des Freundes. Fern oder nah in Glück oder Unglück erkennt der eine im andern den treuen Helfer zur Freiheit und Menschlichkeit.

The Friend to find safety, comfort and strength – such is the friend to the friend. And the spirit wants to trust, trust unconditionally. Disgusted by the worm, hidden in the shadows of the good, nourishing itself on envy, scandal and suspicion, and the poisonous tongues of a nest of vipers, who fear and hate and vilify the secret of the free mind, and of the sincere heart. The spirit longs to cleanse itself from all hypocrisy and trust itself to the other spirit totally open, bound to that spirit, freely and in truth. Then, ungrudgingly, he will respond, will praise, will give thanks, will find joy and strength in the other spirit. Even under severe pressure and strong rebuke he willingly submits. Not by command, nor by alien laws and doctrines, but by good and earnest counsel, which liberates, the mature man seeks from the true friend. Far or near in success and in failure, the one recognizes in the other the true helper towards freedom and humanity.

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Who Am I? Am 28.8. Morgens4 Als die Sirenen heulten um Mitternacht, habe ich still und lange an dich gedacht, wie es dir gehen mag und wie es einst war und daß dir Heimkehr wünsche im neuen Jahr. Nach langem Schweigen höre ich um halb zwei die Signale, daß die Gefahr vorüber sei. Ich habe darin ein freundliches Zeichen gesehen, daß alle Gefahren leise an dir vorübergehen.

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Addendum written on the morning of 28 August 1944: At the midnight hour, the hideous siren’s song, I thought of you in silence and for long, how you fare now and how once you were and that I wish you home for the New Year. At half past one, the silence ended at last, I heard the siren’s cry, all danger past. In that I have seen a kindly omen thereby, that all danger will surely pass you by. (Translation: Edwin Robertson)

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I. Bonhoeffer and Bethge
Edwin Robertson reports that when LPP was published in 1953 it was not known that Bethge was the friend who received the letters. Nor was it known who was the subject of the poem ‘The Friend’. However, in 1957 Bethge was speaking at a student conference in New Hampshire where one of the participants asked him who the recipient of letters and poem might be, because ‘it must be a homosexual partnership’. As Robertson reports: ‘Bethge replied immediately, “No, we were fairly normal!”, and he went on to show that there was no such sexual relationship.’1 I suppose we should not be surprised that an American assumed a poem as intense and intimate as ‘The Friend’ must indicate a sexual relation. Such an assumption betrays the impoverished understanding of friendship characteristic of America in the 1950s and even more prevalent in our current context. However, it is certainly true that the friendship between Bonhoeffer and Bethge was, as any real friendship must be, unusual depending as it did on their ability to negotiate their very different backgrounds and personalities. ‘The Friend’ not only witnesses the intensity of Bonhoeffer’s friendship with Bethge, but Bonhoeffer’s friendship obviously was equally important for Bethge. Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography is surely a testimony to this extraordinary friendship. In his lovely book, Daring, Trusting Spirit: Bonhoeffer’s Friend Eberhard Bethge, John de Gruchy observes that Bonhoeffer and Bethge seldom expressed in public their deep feelings about anything much less than their friendship.2 Indeed, Bethge says he refrained from becoming involved in debates surrounding Bonhoeffer’s theology because his ‘friendship (with Bonhoeffer) was of an intimacy that makes it impossible for me to enter the debate about him. I have quite deliberately kept out of that.’3 Bonhoeffer’s poem, therefore, at once celebrates without betraying their friendship. For Bethge’s birthday of 1944, Bonhoeffer wrote ‘Stations on the Road to Freedom’, but quickly followed this up a month later with ‘The Friend’. Upon receiving the first, Bethge wrote to Bonhoeffer observing, You can’t give anything more personal than a poem. And you could hardly give me greater joy. There is no greater self-sacrifice, no better way of signifying an otherwise unattainable nearness than in a poem. And it is probably the form, because it makes visible the inwardness that is bound

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up and held in check within it. Unlimited surrender of the spirit awakens anxiety in the receiver. But this restrained surrender seems to me to be the highest degree of friendship and understanding. And as a result there is something very cheering and stimulating about it. Its touch is steadier and more far-reaching than that of a letter. Many thanks.4

The poetry Bonhoeffer wrote in the last year of his life, as Kelly and Nelson suggest, no doubt reflects Bonhoeffer’s sense of loss at being separated from those he so desperately loved.5 In his letter to Bethge of 5 June 1944, Bonhoeffer says he would be behaving like ‘a shy boy’ if he hid from Bethge that he has begun to write poetry.6 Bonhoeffer would soon acknowledge that ‘I’m certainly no poet!’, but I do not think it was his lack of talent for poetry that made him hesitant to reveal he was writing poetry.7 Rather it was his sense that poetry, as Bethge suggested, made visible an inwardness that Bonhoeffer found difficult. Indeed, Bonhoeffer notes he has not even told Maria he is writing poetry because he was unsure whether it ‘wouldn’t frighten her more than please her’.8 It means, I believe, that the intimacy his poem ‘The Friend’ displays is a commentary on all his poems. ‘The Friend’ is not only the poem that illumines Bonhoeffer’s other poems, but that which cannot be read well separate from LPP. Indeed, LPP is better read in its light. LPP was made possible by Bonhoeffer and Bethge’s friendship, but the book is also a testimony to, and constitution of, that friendship. Therefore, to appreciate the poem it helps to catch glimpses into how Bonhoeffer and Bethge understood their friendship. I do not, however, want to give the impression that the poem is an explanation of their friendship. For I assume that one of the tasks of poetry is to teach why ‘explanations’ are not all that interesting. However, a few initial remarks about Bonhoeffer and Bethge as people are in order. From an external perspective, Bethge and Bonhoeffer were unlikely friends. Bethge described himself as a ‘country boy’ in contrast to the cultured world from which Bonhoeffer came.9 Bethge had not had Bonhoeffer’s education nor did Bethge understand himself to be an intellectual; at least, Bethge did not pretend he ever desired to be a German professor. Bethge was first and foremost a pastor, which no doubt was one of the reasons Bonhoeffer admired him. Bethge’s commitment to the church must have been one of the reasons Bonhoeffer found him such a kindred spirit at Finkenwalde, but also important was their common love of music. Bonhoeffer captures the sheer enjoyment they seem to have taken in their early relationship in the lines of the poem:

102

Who Am I? Playful, at first, on the far journeys of the spirit, into wonderful, distant realms, which in the haze of the morning sun glitter like gold; but in the heat of the day encompassed; while in the stirrings of the night, lit only by the lamp, like hidden private treasures, they beckon the seeker.

Yet it would be a mistake to assume that Bonhoeffer and Bethge’s friendship was always easy. Bethge admired Bonhoeffer, but he did not stand in awe of him. In one of his letters to Bethge, Bonhoeffer reports that the soldier who supervised Bethge’s visits to Bonhoeffer in prison, was amazed that Bethge did not flatter Bonhoeffer.10 Neither Bethge nor Bonhoeffer would have befriended anyone who only told them what they wanted to hear. For example, Bethge, though he liked the poem ‘The Friend’ very much, suggested that ‘lovely’ in the line, ‘the lovely cornflower to bloom’ could be omitted because ‘at that point you suddenly move from a continuous view point into a value judgment.’11 It is not, therefore, surprising that in a letter dated 18 November 1943, Bonhoeffer writes to Bethge concerning his wish to discuss a story he is writing about a middle-class family. Bonhoeffer observes this is a subject that he and Bethge had often talked about, which makes him feel how much he misses their conversations. Bonhoeffer says, ‘I may often have originated our ideas, but the clarification of them was completely on your side. I only learnt in conversation with you whether an idea was any good or not . . . Your comments on details are so much better than mine.’12 In a later letter Bonhoeffer even tells Bethge that he lives in a daily spiritual exchange with him. ‘I can’t read a book or write a paragraph without talking to you about it or write a paragraph without talking with you about it.’13 Bonhoeffer quite simply trusted and depended on Bethge in a manner different to anyone else in his life, including Maria. The kind of doubts Bonhoeffer explores in the poem, ‘Who Am I?’, he hopes some day to share with Maria, but he cannot expect her to yet be ready for him to speak so directly.14 According to Bonhoeffer, Bethge was the only person who knew ‘how often accidie, tristitia, with all its menacing con-

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sequences, has lain in wait for me.’15 Bonhoeffer knew that Bethge was in many ways a much more attractive person than he was. Bonhoeffer, for example, observed that he did not know anyone who did not like Bethge, but many people did not like him. He acknowledged that he was not particularly concerned about this, because ‘where ever I find enemies I also find friends, and that satisfies me. But the reason is probably that you are by nature open and modest, whereas I am reticent and rather demanding.’16

II. The poem
The inspiration and language for writing ‘The Friend’ came directly from Bethge. Bonhoeffer had written to Bethge on 18 November 1943, observing that it was not easy to resolve the conflict between marriage and friendship. However, the marriage of Eberhard and Renate, a marriage he himself celebrated and for which he wrote a wedding sermon,17 Bonhoeffer implied would be spared this problem because of Bonhoeffer’s imprisonment.18 Bethge, however, responds challenging Bonhoeffer’s claim that friendship, next to marriage, should be considered one of the stable aspects of life. Bethge observes, But that is not the case, at least as far as the recognition and consideration of others is concerned. Marriage is recognized outwardly – regardless of whether the relationship between the couple is stable or not – each person, in this case the whole family, must take into account and finds it the right thing that much should and must be undertaken for it. Friendship – no matter how exclusive and how all-embracing it may be – has no necessitas . . . Friendship is completely determined by its content and only in this way does it have its existence.19

Bonhoeffer responded agreeing, in contrast to marriage and kinship, that friendship depends entirely on its own inherent quality, making friendship hard to classify sociologically. He speculates that perhaps friendship can be regarded as a sub-heading of culture and education, but that may not be much help, because in contrast to work, state, and the church, each of which has a divine mandate, it is not clear where culture and education are to be classified. Culture and education do not belong to the sphere of obedience, but to freedom, which surrounds the three spheres of the mandates. But it is freedom that makes a good father, citizen, or worker a Christian. Therefore,

104

Who Am I? Just because friendship belongs to this sphere of freedom (‘of the Christian man’?!), it must be confidently defended against all the disapproving frowns of ‘ethical’ existences, though without claiming for it the necessitas of a divine decree, but only the necessitas of freedom. I believe that within the sphere of this freedom friendship is by far the rarest and most priceless treasure, for where else does it survive in this world of ours, dominated as it is by the three other mandates? It cannot be compared with the treasures of the mandates, for in relation to them it is sui generis; it belongs to them as the cornflower belongs to the cornfield.20

‘Cornflower belongs to the cornfield’ becomes the major image Bonhoeffer uses in his poem, ‘The Friend’. Although the poem is written to celebrate his friendship with Bethge, it becomes the occasion to explore the relation of friendship and the mandates. As early as 1932 Bonhoeffer had challenged the assumption that the ‘orders of creation’ could be considered revelations of the divine commandments. But, as a good Lutheran, for him the mandates remained givens – givens that are to be Christologically disciplined, that give form to our life together.21 In Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Non-Violence, I suggested that Bonhoeffer’s attempt to rethink the mandates remained incomplete, but that he never quite made up his mind about the status of the mandates is exactly what makes his poem, ‘The Friend’ so interesting.22 Bonhoeffer begins the poem reminding us that the mandates are literally grounded in the ground. Not from the hard ground, where blood and race and binding oath are sacred and powerful; where the very earth itself keeps guard and defends the consecrated orders of creation against the madness and frenzy of disorder; not from the hard ground of the earth, but freely chosen and desired, the longing of the spirit, which neither duty nor law requires, the friend will offer to the friend.

The mandates are not arbitrary, but rather constitutive of our very ability to live life together. The state and work are rooted in the

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ground, but so is marriage. In a letter to Maria dated 12 August 1943, Bonhoeffer says, When I think about the situation of the world, the complete darkness over our personal fate and my present imprisonment, then I believe that our union can only be a sign of God’s grace and kindness, which calls us to faith. We would be blind if we did not see it. Jeremiah says at the moment of his people’s great need ‘still one shall buy houses and acres in this land’ as a sign of trust in the future. This is where faith belongs. May God give it to us daily. And I do not mean that faith which flees the world, but the one that endures the world and which loves and remains true to the world in spite of all the suffering which it contains for us. Our marriage shall be a yes to God’s earth; it shall strengthen our courage to act and accomplish something on earth. I fear Christians who stand with only one leg upon earth also stand with only one leg in heaven.23

I have no doubt that Maria loved Bonhoeffer, but it is nonetheless remarkable that she was not offended by his suggestion that their marriage was equivalent to Jeremiah’s purchase of land in the face of the exile. That purchase, as well as Bonhoeffer’s engagement, was of course a gesture of hope against hopelessness, but even Maria would have wanted Bonhoeffer to regard her as something more than the occasion of a prophetic sign-act. Maria makes clear that she knew well Bonhoeffer’s love observing that he ‘had the ability to convert his annoyance at the limitations of our relationship, and the misunderstandings that resulted from them, into a hopeful and eager expectation and challenge. He was able to transform the fumblings and erratic emotions of a young girl into the assured certainty that this was an addition and a source of strength to his own life.’24 Bonhoeffer’s understanding of marriage as a mandate is developed in his wedding sermon for Eberhard and Renate. ‘Marriage,’ he observed, ‘is more than your love for each other’, because marriage is a ‘post of responsibility’ towards the world and mankind. Accordingly, it is not love that will sustain their marriage, but marriage that sustains their love, making marriage indissoluble. There is a given relationship between husband and wife requiring that the wife be subject to the husband and the husband is to love the wife. By divine ordinance the wife honours the husband when he properly performs his office, representing to the world that as Christ was head of the church so the husband is head of his family.25 Bonhoeffer’s account of marriage and the family may betray his class presuppositions, but far more important is how his account of marriage and the family is grounded in the ground.26 Marriage, like the

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field of corn, is given life by the realm of freedom in which friendship flourishes making possible the transformation of the mandates by the gospel. No one planted or watered the ‘lovely cornflower’ but it comes to life bringing life to those that have sacrificed their life’s blood ‘beside the field of daily bread’. Such a growth by necessity is unplanned and defenceless trusting its very beauty to make its existence possible. The fruit and the flower are alike beautiful: Whether the fruit serves the flower or the flower the fruit only – who knows? Yet both are given to us. Costly, rare blooms – sprung from the freedom of the playful, brave, and trusting spirit in a happy hour – such is the friend to the friend.

So the mandates make friendship possible, but without friendship the mandates are divested of their life-giving potential. The spirit, Bonhoeffer tells us, will move a man to ‘great, serene, audacious thoughts of heart and mind’, making him look the world in the face, ‘with clear eyes and open countenance’. Then, in lines in which I think give expression to Bonhoeffer’s sense of isolation, he says, then action is joined to the spirit – by which it stands or falls – from this action, sound and strong, the work grows, giving content to thought and meaning to the life of the man; then the active, lonely man longs for the befriending, understanding spirit of another.

Loneliness was surely Bonhoeffer’s fate as he confronted and opposed the Nazis. Bethge befriended Bonhoeffer, but he seems to have done so in a manner that acknowledged the necessary loneliness that Bonhoeffer (and he) had to endure.27 Their loneliness, however, was bounded by the discovery of common judgements that made a history possible.

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Bonhoeffer, in a letter to Bethge dated 4 February 1944, his birthday, recalls that for eight years he had celebrated this day with Bethge. He reminisces: Eight years ago we were sitting at the fireside together. You had given me as a present the D major violin concerto, and we listened to it together; then I had to tell you a little about Harnack and past times; for some reason or other you enjoyed that very much, and afterwards we decided definitely to go to Sweden. A year later you gave me the September Bible and a lovely inscription and your name at the top. There followed Schlonwitz and Sigurdshof, and we had the company of a good many people who are no longer with us. The singing at the door, the prayer at the service that you undertook that day, the Claudius hymn, for which I’m indebted to Gerhard – all those things are delightful recollections that are proof against the horrible atmosphere of this place. I hope confidently that we shall be together again for you next birthday, and perhaps – who knows? – even for Easter. Then we shall get back to what is really our life’s work; we shall have ample work that we shall enjoy, and what we have experienced in the meantime will not have been in vain. We shall probably always be grateful to each other for having been able to go through this present time as we’re now doing. I know you’re thinking of me today, and if our thoughts include not only the past, but also the hope of a future lived with common purpose, even though in a changed circumstance, then indeed I’m very happy.28

A long passage, but one essential to understand the ‘befriending’ that Bonhoeffer’s poem describes. Bethge and Bonhoeffer’s friendship, as any significant friendship must be, was constituted by contingencies. That is why friendship, and in particular the friendship between Bonhoeffer and Bethge, can only be captured by a story to be told, retold, and revised. In the same letter to Bethge, Bonhoeffer wishes that Bethge might meet someone who has more in common with him, but observes, ‘I think that we, who have become more exacting than most people with regard to friendship, have more difficulty in finding what we miss and are looking for. In this respect, too, it isn’t a simple matter to find a “substitute”.’29 Of course a substitute is not possible, because no one else has shared their history. What can be hoped for rather is that such a friendship opens the friends to new friendships that their history requires. The next lines of the poem might suggest that Bonhoeffer understood his friendship with Bethge as an escape from the political struggle: Like a clear, fresh flow of water, in which the spirit cleanses itself from the dust of day,

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Who Am I? cooled from the burning heat, strengthened in the hour of tiredness – like a fortress, to which after the dangers of battle the spirit retires to find safety and, comfort and strength – such is the friend to the friend.

No doubt Bonhoeffer and Bethge’s friendship was a zone of safety, comfort, and strength, but I think it would be a mistake to read Bonhoeffer’s understanding of friendship as an escape from the political. Rather, as the first lines of the poem suggest, friendship is that which saves the mandates from their potential to be repressive. Such an interpretation I believe is justified by the stanza of the poem in which friendship becomes the necessary condition for the trust that saves us from cynicism and despair. In ‘After Ten Years’, placed at the beginning to LPP, Bonhoeffer observed that one of the characteristics of their time was the experience of betrayal. ‘The air that we breathe is so polluted by mistrust that it almost chokes us.’30 Yet where mistrust has been broken through, Bonhoeffer notes that a confidence is discovered otherwise unimagined. Without trust life is impoverished.31 Indeed, without trust life is impossible. To trust requires that we put our lives, our very understanding of ourselves, into the hands of others. Accordingly our duty is to foster and strengthen trust whenever possible because trust is ‘one of the greatest, rarest and happiest blessings of our life in community, though it can emerge only on the dark background of a necessary mistrust. We have learnt never to trust a scoundrel an inch, but to give ourselves to the trustworthy without reserve.’32 It is not surprising, therefore, in his ‘Thoughts on the Day of the Baptism of Dietrich Wilhelm Rüdiger Bethge’, that Bonhoeffer observed that the presumption of modernity, that is, that people could make their way in life with reason and justice, has failed. Believing that no enemies existed, those who prided themselves on their ability to be rational found themselves in a war they did not want but for which they must now risk losing all they hold dear. Consequently, they learned that the world is controlled by forces against which reason can do nothing. In contrast, Bonhoeffer declares to baby Dietrich, his namesake: ‘You know that you have enemies and friends, and you know what they can mean in your life. You are learning very early in life ways (which we did not know) of fighting an enemy, and also the value of unreserved trust in a friend.’33 Trust, the trust made possible by friendship, is for Bonhoeffer not a retreat into the private, but rather an alternative politics to the

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privatization of the self and of friendship that is the natural breeding ground for totalitarian politics. Friendship is not a safe-haven from the struggle, but rather the source of the truthfulness necessary to challenge the despair produced by the betrayal of trust. And the spirit wants to trust, trust unconditionally. Disgusted by the worm, hidden in the shadows of the good, nourishing itself on envy, scandal and suspicion, and the poisonous tongues of a nest of vipers, who fear and hate and vilify the secret of the free mind, and of the sincere heart. The spirit longs to cleanse itself from all hypocrisy and trust itself to the other spirit totally open, bound to that spirit, freely and in truth.

Bonhoeffer’s love of the Psalms clearly shapes these lines of the poem. We were made to trust in God, but the very trust in which we were created becomes the source of distrust creating a world that flourishes on envy and scandal. Such a world cannot escape violence, because ‘there can only be a community of peace when it does not rest on lies and on injustice.’34 ‘The Friend’ is certainly a celebration of Bonhoeffer and Bethge’s friendship, but the poem also provides Bonhoeffer with the opportunity to claim the significance of friendship, and the trust friendship requires, as well as makes possible, for a political alternative to the terror that was Germany. Bonhoeffer refuses to hide, however, the difficulty friendship can create. The friend befriended gives praise and thanks, finds, joy and strength in the other spirit. Even under severe pressure and strong rebuke he willingly submits. Not by command, nor by alien laws and doctrines, but by good and earnest counsel, which liberates, the mature man seeks

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Who Am I? from the true friend. Far or near in success and in failure, the one recognizes in the other the true helper towards freedom and humanity.

This is the necessitas of freedom Bonhoeffer had named in response to Bethge’s suggestion that friendship has no necessitas. This is the sui generis character of friendship that makes the ‘cornflower belong to the cornfield’. Bonhoeffer had learned to trust Bethge to tell him the truth, but he knew he was not one that always received the truth gladly. We should not, therefore, read it as an empty gesture that Bonhoeffer writes to Bethge on 18 November 1943, to express his gratitude that Bethge ‘bore with such patience and tolerance all the things with which I have sometimes made life hard for you. I ask you for forgiveness, and yet I know that we have shared spiritually, although not physically, in the gift of confession, absolution, and communion, and that we may be quite happy and easy in our minds about it. But I did just want to tell you this.’35

III. Poetry is the political
Does Bonhoeffer, the poet, say in his poetry what he was not able to say more directly? I see no reason to ask or to answer such a question. I have, however, tried to suggest that in this poem, ‘The Friend’, Bonhoeffer explored how friendship, as Aristotle suggested, is the test case for any politic. In his reply to Bethge’s claim that friendship has its own necessitas, Bonhoeffer observed, Our ‘Protestant’ (not Lutheran) Prussian world has been so dominated by the four mandates that the sphere of freedom has receded into the background. I wonder whether it is possible (it almost seems so today) to regain the idea of the church as providing an understanding of freedom (art, education, friendship, play), so that Kierkegaard’s ‘aesthetic existence’ would be re-established within it? I really think that is so, and it would mean that we should recover a link with the Middle Ages. Who is there, for instance, in our times, who can devote himself with an easy mind to

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music, friendship, games, or happiness? Surely not the ‘ethical’ man, but only the Christian.36

‘The Friend’ is Bonhoeffer’s attempt not only to say, but to enact in a world of terror, that God’s church exists making friendship possible. ‘The Friend’ is Bonhoeffer’s prayer thanking God for Bethge’s friendship, but the poem is also his alternative politic.

Notes
1. PPDB, p. 78. 2. John de Gruchy, Daring, Trusting Spirit: Bonhoeffer’s Friend Eberhard Bethge (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), p. 63. 3. As quoted in de Gruchy, Daring, Trusting Spirit, p. 114. 4. LPP, p. 395. The relation between ‘Stations’ and ‘The Friend’ is a subject in itself. Particularly important, given Bonhoeffer’s stress on the relation between freedom and friendship in ‘The Friend’, is his understanding of the relation of freedom and death in ‘Stations’. If, as he suggests in ‘Stations’, only ‘through discipline may a man learn to be free’, the discipline necessary to freedom is dying. Later in ‘Miscellaneous Thoughts’ Bonhoeffer will observe, ‘Death is the supreme festival on the road to freedom’ (LPP, p. 376). The freedom that makes friendship possible as well as friendship being the necessary form freedom takes is that gained through learning to die. 5. Geffrey B. Kelly and F. Burton Nelson, The Cost of Moral Leadership: The Spirituality of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), p. 236. As I will suggest below, Bonhoeffer’s turn to poetry also involved his increasing conviction that he would be killed. That is why the poems often reflect his understanding of the relation of freedom and death. 6. LPP, p. 319. 7. LPP, p. 372. 8. LPP, p. 319. 9. cf. de Gruchy, Daring, Trusting Spirit, p. 5. 10. LPP, p. 315. 11. LPP, p. 396. 12. LPP, p. 130. 13. LPP, p. 223. 14. LPP, p. 370. 15. LPP, p. 129. 16. LPP, p. 189. Bonhoeffer could not only be demanding, he was quite capable of jealousy. De Gruchy reports a tension that developed concerning a trip that Bonhoeffer had planned with Bethge to Switzerland. Bethge invited Gerhard Vibrans and Bethge’s brother to come with them, which irritated Bonhoeffer. Bethge clearly confronted Bonhoeffer leading Bonhoeffer to apologize to Vibrans (de Gruchy, Daring, Trusting Spirit, pp. 30–35). 17. LPP, pp. 41–47.

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18. LPP, p. 131. In a Christmas Eve letter he wrote to Renate and Eberhard just prior to Eberhard being sent to Italy, Bonhoeffer tried to prepare them for their separation. Bonhoeffer addresses Renate observing that ‘so far, Eberhard and I have exchanged all the experiences that have been important to us, and this has been a great help to us; now you, Renate, will have some part in this. You must try to forget your “uncle” and think more of your husband’s friend’ (LPP, p. 176). We do not know what Renate must have thought about her uncle’s offer to share Eberhard with her. Bonhoeffer does continue noting that nothing can make up for the absence of someone we love and we should not try to find a substitute. Moreover, it is nonsense to say God can fill the gap separation creates. God wants us to keep it empty because the emptiness helps keep alive the communion we have enjoyed with one another. 19. LPP, p. 181. 20. LPP, p. 193. 21. The use of Bonhoeffer’s attack on the ‘orders of creation’ to justify war can be found in his address of 26 July 1932, to the Youth Peace Conference in Czechoslovakia (cf. TF, pp. 103–07). 22. Stanley Hauerwas, Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2004), pp. 48–54. I find it odd that Bonhoeffer, at least as far as I know, never explored the relationship between the mandates and the powers. I am tempted to say he did not because, as Yoder suggests in The Politics of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), the church in the age of Constantine looked to other resources to construct a social ethic (Yoder, Politics of Jesus, pp. 134–36). Yet to ask how the mandates express God’s fallen but good creation could have provided Bonhoeffer with a way to think through the perversions of the mandates as well as their Christological telos. For a critique of my critique of Bonhoeffer on the mandates see, Brian Brock, ‘Bonhoeffer and the Bible in Christian Ethics: Psalm 119, the Mandates, and Ethics as a “Way” ’, SCE 18:3 (2005), pp. 28–29. 23. LPP, p. 415. Earthly beauty was extremely important to Bonhoeffer. For example in a letter dated 24 March 1944, to Bethge, Bonhoeffer comments on Bethge’s observation about the ‘rarity of landscape painting in the South’. Bonhoeffer calls attention to Brueghel, Velasquez, and the French impressionists noting, ‘There we have a beauty that is neither classical nor demonic, but simply earthly, though it has its own proper place. For myself, I must say that it’s the only kind of beauty that really appeals to me. I would include the Magdeburg virgins and the Naumburg sculptures’ (LPP, p. 239). The attraction of the beauty of the ‘natural’ is clearly present in ‘Who Am I?’ in the line, ‘yearning for colours, for flowers, for the voices of birds’. 24. Maria von Wedemeyer-Weller, ‘The Other Letters from Prison’, LPP, pp. 412–19 (412). 25. LPP, pp. 43–46. 26. Bonhoeffer could be quite insightful about his family. For example, in the same letter to Bethge on 14 August 1944, in which he observed that ‘in the long run human relationships are the most important thing in life’ he reflected on his family. He notes that Bethge strives to live up to the highest demands, noting how much depends on the demands we make on ourselves. He then observes, ‘I’ve found it one of the most potent educative factors in our family that we had so many hindrances to overcome (in connection with relevance, clarity, naturalness, tact, simplicity, etc.) before we could express ourselves properly. I think you found it so with us at first. It often takes a long time to clear such hurdles, and one is apt to feel that one could have achieved success with greater ease and at less cost if these obstacles could have been avoided . . . But one can never go back behind what one has worked out for oneself. That may be inconvenient for others and even for oneself sometimes, but those are the inconveni-

The Friend

27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

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ences of education’ (LPP, pp. 386–87). Yet Bonhoeffer also regrets that Maria and he are not on the same ‘wavelength’ about literary matters, regretting her reading habits. He observes, ‘I would very much like my wife to be as much of the same mind as possible in such questions. But I think it’s only a matter of time. I don’t like it when husbands and wives have different opinions. They must stand together like an impregnable bulwark. Don’t you think so? Or is that another aspect of my ‘tyrannical’ nature that you know so well?’ (LPP, p. 148). An analysis of Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the relation between shame, solitude, and loneliness needs to be made. In Sanctorum Communio he distinguished solitude from loneliness, associating the former with ‘divine wrath’. Accordingly, he observed that ‘Solitude is an ethical category, and being under God’s wrath is worse than the misery of loneliness’ (DBWE 1, p. 285). He continues to explore these relations in Creation and Fall, in his profound meditations on Adam’s loneliness. He observes, ‘The first person is alone. Christ was alone; we also are alone. But everyone is alone in his own way. Adam is alone in anticipation of the other person, of community. Christ is alone because he alone loves the other person, because Christ is the way by which the human race has returned to its Creator’ (DBWE 3, p. 96). Bonhoeffer saw quite well that we are only alone with another, which means every relation necessarily creates a form of loneliness. This leads him in the Ethics to say, ‘Even the most intimate community must not obliterate the secret of the disunited human being’ (DBWE 6, p. 305). He notes that shame is produced by having one’s most personal joys and pains expressed in words – feelings we usually keep from being revealed in words, as they remind us of our disunity as fallen creatures. Accordingly, shame can only be overcome ‘by being put to shame through the forgiveness of sin, which means through the restoration of community with God and human beings. This takes place in confession before God and before another human being’ (DBWE 6, p. 306). LPP, pp. 207–08. LPP, p. 208. LPP, p. 11. LPP, p. 29. LPP, p. 12. LPP, p. 298. NRS, p. 168. For an account of Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the political significance of truthfulness see Hauerwas, Performing the Faith, pp. 55–72. LPP, p. 129. LPP, p. 193.

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7


‘Voices in the Night’ Human Solidarity and Eschatological Hope Philip G. Ziegler

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‘Nächtliche Stimmen’ Langgestreckt auf meiner Pritsche starre ich auf die graue Wand. Draußen geht ein Sommerabend, der mich nicht kennt, singend ins Land. Leise verebben die Fluten des Tages an ewigem Strand. Schlafe ein wenig! Stärk’ Leib und Seele, Kopf und Hand! Draußen stehen Völker, Häuser, Geister und Herzen in Brand. Bis nach blutroter Nacht dein Tag anbricht – halte stand! Nacht und Stille. Ich horche. Nur Schritte und Rufe der Wachen, eines Liebespaares fernes, verstecktes Lachen. Hörst Du sonst nichts, fauler Schläfer? Ich höre der eigenen Seele Zittern und Schwanken. Sonst nichts? Ich höre, ich höre, wie Stimmen, wie Rufe, wie Schreie nach rettenden Planken, der wachenden, träumenden Leidensgefährten nächtlich stumme Gedanken. Ich höre unruhiges Knarren der Betten, ich höre Ketten. Ich höre, wie Männer sich schlaflos werfen und dehnen, die sich nach Freiheit und zornigen Taten sehnen. Wenn der Schlaf sie heimsucht im Morgengrauen, murmeln sie träumend von Kindern und Frauen. Ich höre glückliches Lispeln halbwüchsiger Knaben, die sich an kindlichen Träumen laben, Ich höre sie zerren an ihren Decken und sich vor gräßlichem Albtraum verstecken.

Voices in the Night

‘Voices in the Night’ Stretched out upon my prison bed, I stare at the empty wall. Outside, a summer evening, regardless of me, goes singing into the country. Softly ebbs the tide of the day on the eternal shore. Sleep awhile! Refresh body and soul, head and hand! Outside, people, houses; hearts and spirits are aflame. Until the blood-red night dawns upon your day – hold your ground! In the stillness of the night, I listen. Only footsteps and shouts of the guards, a loving couple in the distance, stifled laughter. Can you hear nothing else, you sluggish sleeper? I hear my own soul totter and tremble. Nothing else? I hear, I hear, like voices, like shouts, like cries for help, the waking dreams of fellow-sufferers, dumb thoughts in the night. I hear the restless creaking of the beds, I hear chains. I hear men toss and turn in sleeplessness, longing for freedom and vengeful action. When sleep overcomes them in the morning hours, they murmur in their dreams of wife and children. I hear the lisping pleasure of half-grown boys, enjoying their childish dreams. I hear them pull up their blankets and hide themselves from the horrible nightmares.

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Who Am I? Ich höre Seufzen und schwaches Atmen der Greise, die sich im Stillen bereiten zur großen Reise. Sie sah’n Recht und Unrecht kommen und gehen, nun wollen sie Unvergängliches, Ewiges sehn. Nacht und Stille. Nur Schritte und Rufe der Wachen. Hörst du’s im schweigenden Hause beben, bersten und krachen, wenn Hunderte die geschürte Glut ihrer Herzen entfachen? Stumm ist ihr Chor, weit geöffnet mein Ohr: ‘Wir Alten, wir Jungen, wir Söhne aller Zungen, wir Starken, wir Schwachen, wir Schläfer, wir Wachen, wir Armen, wir Reichen, im Unglück gleichen, wir Guten, wir Bösen, was je wir gewesen, wir Männer vieler Narben, wir Zeugen derer, die starben, wir Trotzigen und wir Verzagten, wir Unschuldigen und wir schwer Verklagten, von langem Alleinsein tief Geplagten, Bruder, wir suchen, wir rufen dich! Bruder, hörst du mich?’ Zwölf kalte, dünne Schläge der Turmuhr wecken mich. Kein Klang, keine Wärme in ihnen bergen und decken mich. Bellende böse Hunde um Mitternacht schrecken mich. Armseliges Geläute trennt ein armes Gestern vom armen Heute. Ob ein Tag sich zum andern wende, der nichts Neues, nichts Besseres fände, als daß er in Kurzem wie dieser ende – was kann mir’s bedeuten?

Voices in the Night I hear the sighs and light breathing of the old, who prepare themselves quietly for the great journey. They have seen right and wrong come and go, now they wish to see the imperishable and eternal. Night and silence. Only footsteps and shouts of the guards. Do you not hear it in this silenced house, shaking, breaking and collapsing, as hundreds kindle the glowing ember of their hearts? Their songs they hide, my ears are open wide. ‘We who are old, and we who are young, we children of every tongue, we who are strong, and we who find it hard, we who sleep, and we who guard, we who are poor, and we who have all, together into failure fall, we who are good and we who are unclean, whatever we have been, we men with scars we cannot hide, we witnesses of those who died, we who are defiant and we who are bemused, we who are innocent and we who are accused, by long isolation, sorely abused. Brother, we seek and call for thee! Brother do you hear me?’ Twelve cold, thin strokes of the tower clock awaken me. There is in them no music, no warmth, to shelter and comfort me. Angry, barking dogs at midnight startle me. Cold, joyless strokes, divide a poor yesterday from a poor today. Can one day change to another, finding nothing new, nothing better, and in a short time end like this – what can it mean to me?

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Who Am I? Ich will die Wende der Zeiten sehen, wenn leuchtende Zeichen am Nachthimmel stehen, neue Glocken über die Völker gehen und läuten und läuten. Ich warte auf jene Mitternacht, in deren schrecklich strahlender Pracht die Bösen vor Angst vergehen, die Guten in Freude bestehen. Bösewicht, tritt ins Licht vor Gericht. Trug und Verrat, arge Tat, Sühne naht. Mensch, o merke, heilige Stärke ist richtend am Werke. Jauchzt und sprecht: Treue und Recht einem neuen Geschlecht! Himmel, versöhne zu Frieden und Schöne die Erdensöhne. Erde, gedeih’, Mensch, werde frei, sei frei! Ich habe mich plötzlich aufgerichtet, als hätt’ ich von sinkendem Schiffe Festland gesichtet, als gäbe es etwas zu fassen, zu greifen, als sähe ich goldene Früchte reifen. Aber wohin ich auch blicke, greife und fasse, ist nur der Finsternis undurchdringliche Masse.

Voices in the Night I will see the times change, when signs light up the heavens, new bells ring over the people, growing louder and louder. I wait for that midnight, in which the shining splendour dazzles and destroys the evil in our fear, to establish with joy that which is right. Evil concealed is revealed at the bar. Betrayal and tricks, intolerable conflicts, will find atonement soon. Let people confess, the power of goodness works righteousness. Rejoice and declare: justice and care to a new generation. Heaven, give birth to peace and worth for the sons of earth. Earth will see, people, become free, be free! Suddenly, I wake up, as though, from a sinking ship, I sighted land, as though there was something firm to grasp, as though fruit was ripening to gold. But when I look, grasp or hold, there is only an impenetrable mass of darkness.

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Who Am I? Ich versinke in Grübeln. Ich versenke mich in der Finsternis Grund. Du Nacht, voll Frevel und Übeln, to dich mir kund! Warum und wie lange zehrst du an meiner Geduld? Tiefes und langes Schweigen; dann hör’ ich die Nacht zu mir sich neigen: ich bin nicht finster, finster ist nur die Schuld! Die Schuld! Ich höre ein Zittern und Beben, ein Murmeln, ein Klagen sich erheben, ich höre Männer im Geiste ergrimmen. In wildem Gewirr unzähliger Stimmen, ein stummer Chor dringt zu Gottes Ohr: ‘Von Menschen gehetzt und gejagt, wehrlos gemacht und verklagt, unerträglicher Lasten Träger, sind wir doch die Verkläger. Wir verklagen, die uns in Sünde stießen, die uns mitschuldig werden ließen, die uns zu Zeugen des Unrechts machten – um den Mitschuldigen zu verachten. Unser Auge mußte Frevel erblicken, um uns in tiefe Schuld zu verstricken, dann verschlossen sie uns den Mund, wir wurden zum stummen Hund. Wir lernten es, billig zu lügen, dem offenen Unrecht uns zu fügen. Geschah dem Wehrlosen Gewalt, so blieb unser Auge kalt. Und was uns im Herzen gebrannt, blieb verschwiegen und ungenannt. Wir dämpften das hitzige Blut und zertraten die innere Glut.

Voices in the Night I sink into brooding, I lower myself into the heart of darkness. You, night, full of horror and evil, make yourself known to me! Why and how long will you gnaw at our patience? Silence, deep and long, then I hear the night, as it comes down to me: ‘I am not dark, the darkness is your guilt!’ Guilt! I hear a trembling and a shudder, a murmur and a cry, I hear men in angry mood. Innumerable voices in wild confusion, a dumb choir assaults the ear of God. ‘Hunted by men and maligned, defenseless and guilty to their mind, by intolerable burdens abused, yet we declare them the accused. We accuse those who drove us to the evil deed, who allowed us to share their guilty seed, who made us witnesses of the just abused, only to despise those they had used. Our eyes must see violence, entangling us in their guilty offence; then as they silence our voice, like dumb dogs we have no choice. We learnt to call lies just uniting ourselves with the unjust. When violence was done to the weak, our cold eyes did not speak. And what in sorrow our hearts had broken, remained hidden and unspoken. We quenched our burning ire and stamped out the inner fire.

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Who Am I? Was Menschen einst heilig gebunden, das wurde zerfetzt und geschunden, verraten Freundschaft und Treue, verlacht waren Tränen und Reue. Wir Söhne frommer Geschlechter, einst des Rechts und der Wahrheit Verfechter, wurden Gottes- und Menschenverächter unter der Hölle Gelächter. Doch wenn uns jetzt Freiheit und Ehre geraubt, vor Menschen erheben wir stolz unser Haupt. Und bringt man uns in böses Geschrei, vor Menschen sprechen wir selber uns frei! Ruhig und fest stehn wir Mann gegen Mann als die Verklagten klagen wir an. Nur vor Dir, alles Wesens Ergründer, vor Dir sind wir Sünder. Leidensscheu und arm an Taten haben wir Dich vor den Menschen verraten. Wir sahen die Lüge ihr Haupt erheben und haben der Wahrheit nicht die Ehre gegeben. Brüder sahen wir in größter Not und fürchteten nur den eigenen Tod. Wir treten vor Dich als Männer, als unsrer Sünde Bekenner. Herr, nach dieser Zeiten Gärung, schenk uns Zeiten der Bewährung. Laß’ nach so viel Irregehn uns des Tages Anbruch sehn! Laß’ soweit die Augen schauen, Deinem Wort uns Wege bauen.

Voices in the Night Sacred bonds by which we once were bound are now torn and fallen to the ground, friendship and truth betrayed, tears and remorse in ridicule displayed. We sons from upright men descended, who once rights and truth defended, have now become despisers of God and man, amidst the mocking laughter of hell’s plan.’ Though robbed of freedom and honor, we stand tall before men with pride. And when we are wrongly decried, before men we declare our innocence freely. At peace and firm, we stand man to man, as the accused, we accuse. Only before Thee, maker of all, before Thee alone are we sinners. Shrinking from pain and poor in deeds, we have betrayed Thee before men. Though we saw lies raise their head, we dishonoured the truth instead. We saw brothers dying while we had breath and feared only our own death. We come before Thee as men, confessing our sins. Lord, after the ferment of these days, send us times to prove us. After so much wrong, let us see the day dawn! As far as the eye can see, let thy word provide ways for us.

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Who Am I? Bis Du auslöschst unsre Schuld, halt uns stille in Geduld. Stille wolln wir uns bereiten; bis Du rufst zu neuen Zeiten, bis Du stillest Sturm und Flut und Dein Wille Wunder tut. Bruder, bis die Nacht entwich, bete fur mich!’ Erstes Morgenlicht schleicht durch mein Fenster bleich und grau. Leichter Wind fährt mir über die Stirn sommerlich lau. ‘Sommertag!’ sage ich nur, ‘schöner Sommertag!’ Was er mir bringen mag? Da hör’ ich draußen hastig verhaltene Schritte gehn. In meiner Nähe bleiben sie plötzlich stehn. Mit wird kalt und heiß, ich weiß, o, ich weiß! Eine leise Stimme verliest etwas schneidig und kalt. Fasse dich, Bruder, bald hast du’s vollbracht, bald, bald! Mutig und stolzen Schrittes hör’ ich dich schreiten. Nicht mehr den Augenblick siehst du, siehst künftige Zeiten. Ich gehe mit dir, Bruder, an jenen Ort, und ich höre dein letztes Wort: ‘Bruder, wenn mir die Sonne verblich, lebe du fur mich!’

Voices in the Night Until you have washed away our guilt hold us in quiet patience. We will prepare ourselves in quietness until you call us to new times. Until you still the storm and abate the flood, and your will works wonders. Brothers, until the night is passed, pray for me!’ The first light of morning steals through my window, pale and bleak. A light wind brushes my brow with the warmth of summer. ‘A summer’s day’, all I can say is, ‘lovely summer’s day’. What might it bring to me? Outside I hear hurried, hesitant steps go by. They suddenly stop by me. I go hot and cold, I know, O, I know! A soft voice reads something cuttingly and cold. Hold fast, brother, soon it will be all over, soon, soon. I hear you march with brave and proud steps. This moment you see no longer, your eyes are on future times. I go with you, brother, to that place, and I hear your last word: ‘Brother, when the sun shines no longer for me, you must live for me!’

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Who Am I? Langgestreckt auf meiner Pritsche starre ich auf die graue Wand. Draußen geht ein Sommermorgen, der noch nicht mein ist, jauchzend ins Land. Brüder, bis nach langer Nacht unser Tag anbricht, halten wir stand!

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Stretched out upon my prison bed, I stare at the empty wall. Outside a summer morning, regardless of me, goes rejoicing into the country. Brother, while the long night waits, until our day dawns, we shall hold our ground! (Translation: Edwin Robertson)

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‘Can we wish to be anything other and better than men of hope, or anything additional?’1

I. Introduction
In early July 1944, Bonhoeffer writes to Bethge enclosing two of his best known poems, ‘Who Am I?’ and ‘Christians and Pagans’. In that same letter however, he comments that he ‘would prefer to show [him] a long one (about this place here)’ which he did not think was ‘too bad’ and indeed hopes ‘one day . . . will get out’.2 This far longer poem, running to over two-hundred lines, was ‘Nächtliche Stimmen’, or ‘Voices in the Night’.3 Writing again later that summer and after the failure of the 20 July plot, Bonhoeffer asks whether Bethge has yet read his poems and insists that he only ‘read the very long one (in rhyme) . . . some time later’.4 The poem’s ultimate preservation testifies that Bethge did receive it and no doubt also read it, though no further mention of it is made in the remainder of their extant correspondence.5 Curiously, the poem also goes unmentioned in the whole course of Bethge’s monumental biography. ‘Voices in the Night’ is listed neither among those of Bonhoeffer’s literary works Bethge adjudges should endure because ‘they convey the particular situation in an original statement and in an appropriate form’, nor among those which he considers merely ‘ponderous’.6 Of course, Bethge’s silence may itself express a personal judgement on the merits and significance of the poem. We may wonder whether his reaction to Bonhoeffer’s other verse poem from the summer of 1944 – ‘The Death of Moses’ – could reasonably be extended to ‘Voices in the Night’: namely, that it suffers unhappily from ‘the fetters of rhyme’.7 Certainly, English translators have at times judged ‘Voices in the Night’ ‘strained’ by ‘a difficult rhyme and rhythm’.8 The commentary from one widely read edition of the prison poems considers it flawed and unpolished, noting ‘its forced rhyme and the recurring clichés’.9 Moreover, the poem is very lengthy and made rather unruly by its frequently changing voices, surprising shifts in perspective and irregular stanzas. Jürgen Henkys’ characterization of the piece as a ‘rhapsody’ is thus extremely apt.10 Perhaps the rather ungainly form of ‘Voices in the Night’ – including its strained pulse and rhyme, its length and shifting voices – itself communicates something of Bonhoeffer’s experience of existence within the walls of Tegel prison.

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Yet for all that, ‘Voices in the Night’ is far from being formless, either poetically or thematically. For instance, there is certainly something psalmic about the work.11 Like a psalm of lament, much of the text is given over to rehearsing aloud – and ultimately to God – the sufferings and despair of the prisoners, whether in the solitary voice of the imprisoned author or the corporate voice of the chorus. Like a psalm of lament, complaint is interlaced with expressions of hope, summons to patience, and petitions to God to act to set things right.12 And finally, again like the lamenting psalmist, the author and other prisoners are principally and desperately waiting – waiting for relief, for release or for final justice. Yet, comparison with such psalms, while instructive, does not provide the interpretative key to the poem’s form. Considering the shape of the work as a whole, one may be reminded of an oratorio, and rightly so.13 For at the level of literary structure, the poem’s diverse voices and elements are fitted within an overarching storyline wherein they are related to one another in illuminating ways. The concentrated setting of a single night frames a journey through a series of incidents, auditions and mediations, conversations and confessions – some actual, some imagined. The poem invites us to read it as a brief theological drama during the course of which the imprisoned author is schooled in the actualities of the humanity of his fellow prisoners, confronts the ultimate ground of all their hopes, and finally shares with them in a corporate act of confession and invocation; only then does he arrive at a new kind of solidarity with them, the character of which is made manifest in the poem’s closing lines. Whereas at first the author simply ‘heard’ his brethren, now in hearing he ‘goes with’ the condemned man ‘to that place’ of execution. Whereas the opening summer evening is indifferent to him, isolated in his cell (it ‘knows me not’), by the end the new summer morning is ‘not yet mine’ or, as the hand-corrected draft has it, ‘not yet ours’. Here two shifts are registered: that the new morning is ‘not yet ours’ and that it is ‘not yet ours’.14 The time of the present, initially cast as indifferent and alien, now belongs to the author in the mode of promise. And the solitude of the prisoner has given way to a solidarity in which the present is pregnant with promise for us. This newly won solidarity with his fellow prisoners receives a further and final emphasis at the poem’s close. Whereas, at the outset, the call to ‘stand fast!’ is declaimed as mere self-encouragement, at the poem’s close that same imperative is transformed into a pledge of commitment which the poet himself now shares: ‘We will stand fast!’ Whatever transpires during the night brings about a reconciliation, a new reality. Without undoing the fact of imprisonment, the night’s labour changes the character of the present and secures new and

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different relations with other human beings. But what exactly does transpire? Answering this question requires a more detailed consideration of the structure and movement of Bonhoeffer’s oratorio and its distinctive theological themes. The poem unfolds as a series of three monologues separated from one another by two choruses. Each of the monologues is itself interrupted by an act of hearing or listening introduced by the repeated use of ‘ich höre’. The auditions reach through the ‘night and silence’ and bring the wider world surrounding the imprisoned author into his enclosed cell. Indeed, the two choruses themselves break forth during such acts of hearing and represent moments when the prisoner is supremely laid open to the address of others. All three monologues climax with the prisoner hearing an explicit and personal address: the poet is beseeched in turn to hear, to pray for and to live for the others who call out to him: ‘Brother, we seek and call for thee! / Brother do you hear me?’ and again, ‘Brother, until the night is passed, / pray for me!’ and finally, ‘Brother, when the sun shines no longer for me, / you must live for me!’ Significantly, the poem also has another structure underlying it. For at the centre of the work lies this prophetic-eschatological outburst, which serves as an axis around which the poem as a whole turns: Evil concealed is revealed at the bar. Betrayal and tricks, intolerable conflicts, will find atonement soon. Let people confess, the power of goodness works righteousness. Rejoice and declare: justice and care to a new generation. Heaven, give birth to peace and worth for the sons of earth.

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Earth will see, people, become free, be free!

As Henkys notes, the voice of this proclamation is unclear – angels? saints? God? – though he adjudges it in any case to be an ‘audition’ rather than part of the author’s own interior monologue.15 More crucial than the identity of the preacher however is the proclamation itself, which is simply the very substance of the gospel interrupting the poet’s speech as a verbum externum: these words in short order set out a vision of divine judgement, atonement, righteousness, reconciliation, re-creation and so, finally of human freedom and flourishing. And though in good Lutheran fashion, the poet as an auditor of the gospel is immediately beset by Anfechtung – brought on by the ‘an impenetrable mass of darkness’ and the seeming fleetingness of the announcement. Something decisive has shifted. For, as indicated by the extended chorus, which follows hard upon this turning point, the remainder of the drama now goes forward self-consciously, coram Deo. The choir of prisoners, which previously had only the poet’s ear, now ‘assaults the ear of God ’; their earlier chorus of human despair now, before God, is transmuted into acknowledgement of guilt and sin: ‘Only before Thee, maker of all, / before Thee alone are we sinners’ they sing out.16 In short, the development of the poem’s central story and cardinal themes turns upon the inexplicable announcement of the eschatological gospel in the midst of the night’s reveries. With this firmly in view, we can now explicate more fully the key theological themes of the poem. While not merely ‘versified theology’,17 ‘Voices in the Night’ is shot through with many of the characteristic preoccupations of Bonhoeffer’s late thought. Like the other Tegel poems, this work keeps thematic company not only with the closely contemporary prison letters and papers, but also with Bonhoeffer’s wider corpus of wartime writings, including the fragmentary Ethics. Read with an eye to both the immediate and broader context of Bonhoeffer’s theology, the poem presents several motifs for comment, of which I shall treat only two, namely those of human fellowship and justice, and disconsolate time and Christian hope. Together, these themes tell of a perhaps under-appreciated eschatological dynamic at work in Bonhoeffer’s later thought.

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II. ‘About this place here . . .’ – human fellowship and justice
As already intimated, one of most notable elements of the poem is the dramatic role played by listening and hearing. Some interpreters consider ‘Voices in the Night’ an exercise in the kind of ‘clear, open and reverent seeing’ for which Bonhoeffer once praised Bethge.18 And there is clearly a sense in which the expanding capacity of the poet here to regard his fellow prisoners is an instance of that ‘view from below’ that Bonhoeffer felt he and others had acquired by virtue of their recent experiences.19 Yet, it is highly significant that the noetic burden of the poem’s drama falls upon hearing rather than sight. This is not only because the poet finds himself encompassed by ‘the grey wall’ of his cell. More than this, the privileging of hearing recalls the crucial role played by external address – by both the neighbour, and the Word of God as a verbum externum – in Bonhoeffer’s theological anthropology. It also recalls the central place afforded to listening and hearing in the life of the Christian community. Several years before, Bonhoeffer had noted that, The first service one owes to others in the community involves listening to them . . . Christians have forgotten that the ministry of listening has been entrusted to them by the one who is indeed the great listener and in whose work they are to participate. We should listen with the ears of God, so that we can speak the Word of God.20

The poet’s ever more attentive listening is an act of humanizing Christian obedience. It is an exercise of that ‘will to hold fellowship’ with others of which Bonhoeffer speaks elsewhere.21 It is by way of such attentive listening that the poet breaks free of his isolation and discovers his fellow prisoners. The ‘sluggish sleeper’ can at first only attend to himself, and hears only his ‘own soul totter and tremble’. But insistent questioning – ‘Is that all you hear . . . nothing more?’ – provokes a new listening, signalled by the repetition of ‘I hear, I hear’. What the listening prisoner now hears are the traces and indications of the lives of others; in these he meets his ‘companions in suffering’.22 The first monologue is given over to the poet’s discernment of these companions, as he imagines the variety of the circumstances and dreams of the ‘half-grown boys’ and ‘men grown grey’ with whom he

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shares his prison. But this sympathetic imagination of others is then surpassed when with ears now ‘wide open’ the poet hears the imprisoned chorus. Intimations of their identities inferred from mere noises – from sleepless ‘tossing and turning’, from the ‘restless creaking of cots’ and ‘chains’ – are overreached by the prisoners’ own voices. Imploring the poet to hear them, these prisoners ‘hunted by men and maligned / defenceless and guilty to their mind’ now speak to him of themselves: We who are old, and we who are young, we children of every tongue, we who are strong, and we who find it hard, we who sleep, and we who guard, we who are poor, and we who have all, together into failure fall, we who are good and we who are unclean, whatever we have been . . .

But the human fellowship cultivated by such hearing is not yet fulfilled; it is beset by the pretence of immediacy and suffers the ambiguities of life assailed by the unnatural. It has not yet broken through to the truly human fellowship whose shape is praying and then, finally living for others. For this to happen the society of the prisoners must be transformed by being brought coram Deo, disclosing the fact that their solidarity with one another is ultimately mediated by Jesus Christ.23 As noted already, it is the eschatological proclamation at the heart of the poem that makes possible and elicits the confession of sin in which the second chorus culminates. And, as Bonhoeffer once contended, ‘genuine community is not established before confession takes place . . . If anyone remains alone in his evil, he is completely alone despite camaraderie and friendship. If he has confessed, however, he will nevermore be alone. He is borne by Christ on whom he has laid his sin, and by the community which belongs to Christ . . .’24 So, it is only by way of their common confession of sin, that the prisoners – and the poet among them – can ultimately deepen their human community. Before that, however, Bonhoeffer gives a fuller, almost biographical, rendering of the identity of the other prisoners. For in their second chorus, they go on to tell the story of their own undoing and corruption. Here the focus shifts from the emerging, natural fellowship between the poet and his fellow inmates, to the question of natural justice:

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Who Am I? Hunted by men and maligned, defenseless and guilty to their mind, ... Our eyes must see violence, entangling us in their guilty offence; then as they silence our voice, like dumb dogs we have no choice. ... Though we saw lies raise their head, we dishonored the truth instead. We saw brothers dying while we had breath and feared only our own death. ... Sacred bonds by which we once were bound are now torn and fallen to the ground, friendship and truth betrayed, tears and remorse in ridicule displayed.

The close parallels between this self-description of the prisoner chorus as men ‘thrust into sin’ and Bonhoeffer’s own self-description of the conspirators in his 1942 Christmas letter are notable.25 The response of the prisoners’ chorus to their plight is a properly penultimate and natural one: they lament their abuse and accuse those who have brought it about; they assert their right in a struggle for what is humane and good, and demand a provisional measure of human justice. The horizon of this is a demand that the natural imperative of suum cuique to be honoured.26 The chorus of accusation and complaint in effect insists that ‘the relative differences within the human and the natural’ can and will be taken seriously.27 Thus, it culminates, Though robbed of freedom and honor, we stand tall before men with pride. And when we are wrongly decried, before men we declare our innocence freely. At peace and firm, we stand man to man, as the accused, we accuse.

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This struggle, as Bonhoeffer makes clear here, is ‘man against man’, a fight for natural justice on the human plane. The whole matter of justice and fellowship at this point is strictly coram hominibus. It is no less necessary for being so, but its limitations are made plain – for the solidarity of the prisoners threatens to collapse into merely shared grievance, into the corporate ressentiment that fuels the revolt of mistrust from below, just as the pursuit of justice threatens to degenerate into the intractable conflict of asserted rights.28 This juncture in the poem is thus the climatic expression of natural life; it is at once fraught with the natural promise of humane solidarity and provisional justice, and the natural peril of false intimacy and obstinate conflict. The voice of the chorus of the wronged is not the viva vox Dei. It is rather that utterly human voice to which the Word of God can and will give sovereign reply. Only the transposition of the prisoners’ fellowship and struggle coram Deo is able to make good on the hope for human solidarity and stave off the collapse of empathy and responsibility into ressentiment. And this is what takes place in the drastic transition – unexplained, unaided – that occurs within the second chorus from accusation to confession of sin: Only before Thee, maker of all, before Thee alone are we sinners. Shrinking from pain and poor in deeds, we have betrayed Thee before men. ... We come before Thee as men, confessing our sins.

The invocations, which follow this confession (and which are discussed more fully below), are all forward looking and take up matters of hope and time. They bespeak the new horizon which opens up when one knows the present is lived not only ‘before men’ but also ‘before Thee’, i.e., before God. They bespeak the difference ‘the ultimate’ makes when its formative pressure upon the present is acknowledged and confessed.

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III. ‘From a poor today’ – disconsolate time and Christian hope
Early in his imprisonment, Bonhoeffer wrote to his parents that he was ‘trying [his] hand at a little study on “The feeling of time,” a thing that is especially relevant to anyone who is being held for examination’. He explained, One of my predecessors here has scribbled over the cell door, ‘In 100 years it will all be over.’ That was his way of trying to counter the feeling that life spent here is a blank; but there is a great deal that might be said about that, and I should like to talk it over with father. ‘My time is in your hands’ (Ps 31[.15]) is the Bible’s answer. But in the Bible there is also the question that threatens to dominate everything here: ‘How long, O Lord?’ (Psalm 13).29

In another letter thereafter, thanking his father for the loan of his copy of Kant’s Anthropology, Bonhoeffer remarks in particular that ‘Kant’s exposition of “smoking” as a means of entertaining oneself is very nice’.30 Kant described tobacco as a stimulant by which we ‘always jerk our attention awake again’, recalling ourselves to attend to ‘the state of one’s own thoughts, which would otherwise be soporific or boring owning to uniformity and monotony’. He concluded that ‘this kind of conversation of the human being with himself takes the place of social gathering, because in place of conversation it fills the emptiness of time with continuous newly excited sensations and with stimuli that are quickly passing, but always renewed’.31 Bonhoeffer – himself a vigorous smoker – clearly appreciated Kant’s insight into the way smoking could help disrupt the sheer tedium of extended imprisonment. ‘Voices in the Night’ can be read in part as Bonhoeffer’s late poetic exploration of the feeling of time. The drama unfolds during the ‘long night’ that spans the ebbing of one day and the ‘pale and grey’ morning of the next. The night is an ordeal that ‘gnaws on’ human patience; and mere chronology brings no relief. Indeed, Bonhoeffer paints a picture in which the passage of time is utterly disconsolate, its experience an emptiness desperate to be filled. The cardinal expression of this comes at the beginning of the second monologue, where the poet, woken by ‘twelve cold, thin clangs from the clock tower’, finds no ‘shelter’ or ‘warmth’ in their sounding. He despairs:

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Cold, joyless strokes, divide a poor yesterday from a poor today. Can one day change to another, finding nothing new, nothing better, and in a short time end like this – what can it mean to me?

This is time as meaningless duration, time without advent, time as sheer temporariness.32 Such disconsolate time tempts one to be ‘consumed by the present moment’,33 to live ‘just for the moment, irresponsibly, frivolously, or resignedly’.34 In ‘After Ten Years’, Bonhoeffer had adjudged this to be an ‘impossible’ course in a famous remark: There remains for us only the very narrow way, often extremely difficult to find, of living every day as if it were our last, and yet living in faith and responsibility as though there were to be great future . . . Thinking and acting for the sake of the coming generation, but being ready to go any day without fear or anxiety – that, in practice, is the spirit in which we are forced to live.35

What makes this possible is not the innate capacity to realize human plans – events have stripped away precisely this power – but rather a ‘sign from God and pledge of a fresh start and a great future’.36 Talk of the future is properly subjunctive (‘as though there were to be’) not chiefly because it is uncertainly contingent upon the present, but rather and more profoundly, because it is given to the present by God in the mode of promise. Again, we find ‘Voices in the Night’ revisiting a central theme from ‘After Ten Years’. For here, the despair to which the imprisoned poet gives voice is met by an ‘eschatological credo’, and this provides the basis upon which the experience of the present is transformed.37 Neither present preoccupation, nor utopian longing, but rather only a pledge from God is able to obviate the disconsolate grind of the present. Only God makes the present penultimate by lending it an ultimate horizon and thus investing it with promise.38 Hence the desperate poet longs to see, . . . the times change, when signs light up the heavens, new bells ring over the people, growing louder and louder.

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Who Am I? I wait for that midnight, in which the shining splendor dazzles and destroys the evil in our fear, to establish with joy that which is right.

This hopeful plea is met with the declaration of the coming of a Kingdom that, as we have already noted, is the axis of the poem as a whole. Bonhoeffer’s tropes for this vision – ‘sighted land’ and ‘fruits ripening ’ – hold it in the future as promise. Though not in hand, its power as promise changes the very character of the night, i.e., of the present. In light of the vision, the inmate discovers the night does not ‘mean’ inert and empty darkness. Rather, the time of the night is time filled with the business of fellowship, the struggle for natural justice, the confession of sin, and finally, the invocation of God.39 The final prayer of the prisoners’ chorus is suffused with this new sense of the present time made penultimate. Their confession ended, they plead: Lord, after the ferment of these days, send us times to prove us. After so much wrong, let us see the day dawn! As far as the eye can see, let thy word provide ways for us. Until you have washed away our guilt hold us in quiet patience. We will prepare ourselves in quietness until you call us to new times.

By virtue of the ultimacy of the gospel, the present time now gestures towards the coming day; disconsolate, unnatural time is remade, becoming properly penultimate by the scourge of the ultimate. What can happen and what can be done in such renatured time? As the final stanzas of the poem describe, the actualities of the present are not overcome, for the ‘summer morning’ and ‘beautiful summer day’ are ‘not yet ours’; they remain outside the prison walls. Furthermore, as the poet overhears, the dawn brings the death sentence and execution to one of the prisoners. Yet in the penultimate present – that is, in a time remade by the apocalypse of the gospel, the confession of sin, and the invocation of God – new and unheard of things take place.

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In such a time, the condemned man strides forth ‘courageous and proud’ because he now looks firmly upon ‘future times coming clear’. And the poet-prisoner, himself in the depth of renewed fellowship, now goes ‘along with [him] . . . to that place’ and receives there a commission: ‘Brother, when the sun shines no longer for me, / you must live for me!’ Bonhoeffer indicates at the close of the poem that the community of prisoners as a whole takes up this commission: ‘Brother, while the long night waits, / until our day dawns, / we shall hold our ground!’ Not only the precise diction – the final recurrence of standhalten – but also the punctuation of the poem’s overarching themes makes this final stanza a warrant to read ‘Voices in the Night’ as a reply to the question Bonhoeffer raised in ‘After Ten Years’: ‘Who stands fast?’ There, he answered, 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 called to obedient and responsible action in fact 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.40

In this poem, the question and call of God are confronted in a more decidedly eschatological key, as Bonhoeffer asks in effect how obedient and responsible action is presently possible. The answer is that such action is possible on this day, near this midnight, and in this dawn, because – and finally, only because – of the effective presence of the reality of that day, that midnight and that dawn. Men and women may ‘redeem the time’ amidst such evil days because even in the present they stand ‘in the daylight’ that Christ sheds forth (Eph. 5.16, 8). As he had written previously to pastors in the Pomeranian Confessing Church, the Christian life is lived ‘between having and waiting’ because Jesus has ‘transposed us into the heavenly places (Eph. 2.6)’ such that the ‘future is present, and the present already past’.41 Central to the poem then is the distinctive eschatological vision of Bonhoeffer’s late writing. In this vision, all eschatological affirmations and the hope they secure send one back to one’s life on earth ‘in a wholly new way which is even more sharply defined than it is in the Old Testament. The Christian, unlike the devotees of the redemption myths, has no last line of escape available from earthly tasks and difficulties into the eternal, but, like Christ himself, he must drink the earthly cup to the dregs, and only in his doing so is the crucified and risen Lord with him, and he is crucified and risen with Christ’.42 This insight is confirmed in the letter of 25 July 1944, which I take

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as Bonhoeffer’s own definitive gloss upon the theme of ‘Voices in the Night’. He had been reading Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead, itself a meditation on the harrowing experiences of imprisoned life. Of this, he writes to Bethge, It contains a great deal that is wise and good. I’m still thinking about the assertion, which in his case is certainly not a mere conventional dictum, that man cannot live without hope, and that men who have really lost all hope often become wild and wicked. It may be an open question whether in this case hope = illusion. The importance of illusion to one’s life should certainly not be underestimated; but for a Christian there must be hope based on a firm foundation . . . how great a power there is in a hope that is based on certainty, and how invincible a life with such hope is. ‘Christ our hope’ – this Pauline formula is the strength of our lives.43

We know that Bonhoeffer wrote more on the theme of the future during the summer of 1944, expressing ideas that Bethge found ‘bold and even comforting’.44 As noted already, these are lost to us. As it stands, Bonhoeffer’s long and unruly verse poem from this final year of his life serves as our entrée into his latest thinking regarding the ultimate sources and nature of Christian hope. Bonhoeffer admits that hope based in mere progress of time, even if illusory (‘This day will see me set free . . .’) is not without its power. Yet, the hope that arises from the certainty of the advent of God – of the dawning of that day – is the fount of the humanizing strength of Christian life. In this strength the Christian can answer ‘yes and amen’ to the summons, ‘Brother, live for me!’ In this strength, the Christian, together with his or her comrades, can ‘stand fast!’ In an extraordinarily insightful essay, Marilynne Robinson observes that Bonhoeffer’s writing as a whole is pervaded by the language of hymns and by expressions ‘virtually creedal in their use of imagery’ whose effect is ‘beautiful, musical’. This ought not to surprise us since, she avers, ‘great theology is always a kind of giant and intricate poetry’. Yet, as she rightly notes, for Bonhoeffer the poetic ‘functions not as ornament but as ontology’, which is to say that even at its most stylized – as in the prison poems – his writing advances nothing less than decisive claims about reality.45 That this is so has been the underlying contention of this essay. Foremost among such claims poetically set forth in ‘Voices in the Night’, is that the eschatological reality of the gospel has the power simultaneously to qualify the present as intensely pertinent and utterly provisional, and to create and sustain Christian faithfulness therein. In this, it confirms what Bonhoeffer wrote in his Ethics manuscripts:

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Christian life is the dawn of the ultimate in me, the life of Jesus Christ in me. But it is also always life in the penultimate, waiting for the ultimate. The seriousness of Christian life lies only in the ultimate; but the penultimate also has its seriousness, which consists, to be sure, precisely in never confusing the penultimate with the ultimate and never making light of the penultimate over against the ultimate . . .46

Alongside ‘Voices in the Night’, both such remarks are late echoes of what Bonhoeffer, at the height of his eschatological forthrightness in the 1930s, had declaimed to students in Berlin: that the Christian community only receives the world ‘from Christ; or better, in the fallen, old world it believes in the world of the new creation, the new world of the beginning and the end, because it believes in Christ and in nothing else’.47 Thus, against any ‘abstract concept of the future’,48 Bonhoeffer himself was driven to testify that a concrete future – of forgiveness, judgement, and redemption in Christ – is already present making the present a time of ‘having and waiting’,49 and so a time in which both to act courageously and to pray, ‘After going far astray/may we see the break of day!’

Notes
1. ER, p. 314. 2. DBW 8, p. 512; LPP, p. 346. 3. DBW 8, pp. 516–23; LPP, pp. 349–56; PPDB, pp. 49–58. Another English translation is that by J. B. Leishman under the title, ‘Prison’, in Theology 49 (1946), pp. 74–78 (also reprinted in Union Seminary Quarterly Review 1:3 (1946), pp. 4–8). 4. DBW 8, p. 555; LPP, p. 378. 5. It is possible that ‘Voices in the Night’ is the poem Bethge mentions in a letter to Renate on August 4: ‘By the way, a poem came again yesterday, linguistically particularly well done, which I shall write out for you.’ (Eberhard Bethge, ‘How the Prison Letters Survived’, in Friendship and Resistance: Essays on Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1995), p. 46). However, Bethge himself speculates that the poem mentioned in that letter was likely ‘Stations on the Way to Freedom’ (Bethge, Friendship, p. 57). 6. Bonhoeffer, pp. 841–42. 7. DBW 8, p. 604; LPP, p. 398. 8. PPDB, p. 60. 9. Johann Christian Hampe in PP, p. 64. 10. DBG, pp. 32, 35. 11. See the short commentary on the poem offered by Marcia Houtman, ‘Making Visible Inwardness: A Brief Study of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Poem “Night Voices in Tegel” as a Psalm of Lament’, in Newsletter of the International Bonhoeffer Society (English Language Section) 47 (May 1991), pp. 5–7.

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12. See Bonhoeffer’s comments on the psalms of lament in DBWE 5, p. 169f. 13. GDB, p. 35; cf. Hampe in PP, p. 61, where the ‘choral composition’ of the poem is likened to an oratorio as well. 14. Though the typical rendering of this penultimate line reads ‘der noch nicht mein ist’, the MS itself has the marginal correction: ‘der wohl nicht unser ist’, cf. DBW 8, p. 523, n. 20. The Leishman translation uses the plural here (‘our dawn rises’), cf. Leishman, ‘Prison’, p. 78. 15. DBG, pp. 37–38. 16. This of course tracks Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death in which sin is defined as the manifold forms of human despair before God. See Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death (trans. H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 77–78. 17. The phrase is used in DBG, p. 13. 18. DBW 8, p. 565; LPP, p. 385; M. Houtman, ‘Making Visible the Inwardness’, p. 5. 19. Bonhoeffer records that by virtue of recent times, some ‘should have come to look with new eyes at matters great and small . . . that our perception . . . should have become clearer, freer, less corruptible’ (DBW 8, pp. 38–39; LPP, p. 17). 20. DBWE 5, pp. 98–99. Bonhoeffer continues, remarking that many people ‘can be helped only by having someone who will seriously listen to them’ (DBWE 5, p. 99). 21. DBW 8, p. 29; LPP, p. 10. 22. cf. Bonhoeffer’s ‘Report on Prison Life after One Year in Tegel Prison’ (LPP, pp. 247–49), for a sketch of his experiences, especially of the lives and treatment of others; cf. ‘We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer’ (LPP, p. 10). 23. DBWE 5, pp. 32–33, and esp. pp. 40–41. 24. SPC, p. 63. 25. There he wrote, ‘We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; we have been drenched by many storms; we have learned the arts of equivocation and pretence; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical’ (DBW 8, p. 38; LPP, p. 16). 26. DBWE 6, pp. 181–85. He speaks here of having to preserve this principle ‘in its proper meaning as penultimate, determined by the ultimate’ (DBWE 6, p. 183). 27. DBWE 6, p. 172. 28. See LPP, p. 346. 29. DBW 8, p. 70; LPP, p. 39. The notes dated 8 May 1943 are clearly related to this study, DBW 8, pp. 60–64; LPP, pp. 33–35. 30. DBW 8, p. 92; LPP, p. 50. 31. I. Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (ed. and trans. R.B. Louden; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 52–53. 32. This is redolent of the sentiment expressed in the quip attributed to Lord Stratford, that history is merely ‘a patternless succession of one damn thing after another’. 33. In the letter of 10 August 1944, Bonhoeffer remarks, ‘Above all, we should never allow ourselves to be consumed by the present moment, but should foster that calmness that comes from great thoughts and measure everything by them. The fact that most people can’t do this is what makes it so difficult to bear with them. It is weakness rather than wickedness that perverts a man and drags him down, and it needs profound sympathy to put up with that. But all the time God still reigns in heaven’ (DBW 8, p. 563; LPP, p. 384). 34. DBW 8, p. 8; LPP, p. 15.

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35. DBW 8, p. 35; LPP, p. 15. 36. DBW 8, p. 35; LPP, p. 15. Bonhoeffer refers to Jer. 32.15 in this regard. He rehearses this same theme and invokes this same passage in a letter to his fiancée dated 12 August 1943: ‘I don’t mean a 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’ (LLC 92, p. 64). 37. The phrase ‘eschatological credo’ is taken from DBG, p. 35. 38. ‘We live in the penultimate and believe in the ultimate, don’t we?’ (DBW 8, p. 226; LPP, p. 157). 39. It is significant that, as he later says, the ‘unbiblical idea of “meaning” is indeed only a translation of what the Bible calls “promise” ’ (DBW 8, p. 573; LPP, p. 391). 40. DBW 8, p. 23; LPP, p. 5. 41. DBWE 16, p. 481. 42. DBW 8, pp. 500–01; LPP, pp. 336–37. 43. DBW 8, p. 544; LPP, pp. 372–73, citing 1 Tim. 1.1. 44. DBW 8, pp. 604–05; LPP, p. 398. The letter to which Bethge is responding here on 30 September 1944, is lost. 45. Marilynne Robinson, ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer’, in The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (New York: Picador, 2005), pp. 116–18. 46. DBWE 6, p. 168. 47. DBWE 3, p. 22. 48. DBW 8, pp. 604–05; LPP, p. 398. The letter to which Bethge is responding here on 30 September 1944, is lost. 49. These words from the notes on Christ’s ascension already cited find an echo in Bonhoeffer’s claim in the letter on the baptism of Bethge’s son, that Christians in the present age must ‘pray and do right and wait for God’s own time’ (DBW 8, p. 436; LPP, p. 300).

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‘Stations on the Way to Freedom’ The Presence of God – The Freedom of Disciples Hans G. Ulrich

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‘Stationen auf dem Wege zur Freiheit’ Zucht Ziehst du aus, die Freiheit zu suchen, so lerne vor allem Zucht der Sinne und deiner Seele, daß die Begierden und deine Glieder dich nicht bald hierhin, bald dorthin führen. Keusch sei dein Geist und dein Leib, gänzlich dir selbst unterworfen, und gehorsam, das Ziel zu suchen, das ihm gesetzt ist. Niemand erfährt das Geheimnis der Freiheit, es sei denn durch Zucht. Tat Nicht das Beliebige, sondern das Rechte tun und wagen, nicht im Möglichen schweben, das Wirkliche tapfer ergreifen, nicht in der Flucht der Gedanken, allein in der Tat ist die Freiheit. Tritt aus ängstlichem Zögern heraus in den Sturm des Geschehens, nur von Gottes Gebot und deinem Glauben getragen, und die Freiheit wird deinen Geist jauchzend umfangen. Leiden Wunderbare Verwandlung. Die starken, tätigen Hände sind dir gebunden. Ohnmächtig und einsam siehst du das Ende deiner Tat. Doch atmest du auf und legst das Rechte still und getrost in stärkere Hand und gibst dich zufrieden. Nur einen Augenblick berührtest du selig die Freiheit, dann übergabst du sie Gott, damit er sie herrlich vollende. Tod Komm nun, höchstes Fest auf dem Wege zur ewigen Freiheit, Tod, leg nieder beschwerliche Ketten und Mauern unsres vergänglichen Leibes und unsrer verblendeten Seele, daß wir endlich erblicken, was hier uns zu sehen mißgönnt ist. Freiheit, dich suchten wir lange in Zucht und in Tat und in Leiden. Sterbend erkennen wir nun im Angesicht Gottes dich selbst.

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‘Stations on the Road to Freedom’ Discipline If you set out to seek freedom, then learn above all things to govern your soul and your senses, for fear that your passions and longings may lead you away from the path you should follow. Chaste be your mind and your body, and both in subjection, obediently, steadfastly seeking the aim set before them; only through discipline may a man learn to be free. Action Daring to do what is right, not what fancy may tell you, valiantly grasping occasions, not cravenly doubting – freedom comes only through deeds, not through thoughts taking wing. Faint not nor fear, but go out to the storm and the action, trusting in God whose commandment you faithfully follow; freedom, exultant, will welcome your spirit with joy. Suffering A change has come indeed. Your hands, so strong and active, are bound; in helplessness now you see your action is ended; you sigh in relief, your cause committing to stronger hands; so now you may rest contented. Only for one blissful moment could you draw near to touch freedom; then, that it might be perfected in glory, you gave it to God. Death Come now, thou greatest of feasts on the journey to freedom eternal; death, cast aside all the burdensome chains, and demolish the walls of our temporal body, the walls of our souls that are blinded, so that at last we may see that which here remains hidden. Freedom, how long we have sought thee is discipline, action, and suffering; Dying, we now may behold thee revealed in the Lord. (Translation: John Bowden)

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I. Some preliminaries
a. The Bonhoeffer phenomenon and the grammar of his theology Our generation participates in the ‘Bonhoeffer phenomenon’ (as Stephen R. Haynes has described it).1 This phenomenon is manifold, with various ‘Bonhoeffers’ living within the same discourse. But to be part of this phenomenon – like me as a German theologian of a specific generation – means something different from simply receiving an influential, theological concept. We live in a world of theology and, therefore, are not able to look at Bonhoeffer directly. Our task is rather to mark the contours from within this world in order to learn from him, instead of simply being part of it. In particular, Bonhoeffer’s poetry, and especially ‘Stations on the Way to Freedom’, invites us to ask if this way is adequate for doing and living theology – or, to use a different metaphor, if there is a grammar of theological work. b. How to read the poems? In this way, I am already asking how to read Bonhoeffer’s poetry. Is it possible to read Bonhoeffer’s letters, poems, and manuscripts seeking insights and theological knowledge in the way we do, for instance, with the letters of St. Paul? Might we compare his poems with the Psalms? Bonhoeffer’s texts have certainly been treated as a sort of scripture by some. It is clear that Bonhoeffer’s writings cannot be separated from his life, especially his letters from prison to which some of the poems belong.2 Yet, Stanley Hauerwas is right when he argues that Bonhoeffer was a political theologian quite independent of his situation under the Nazi Regime.3 In Bonhoeffer’s case, we are confronted not only with a biographical story but with a life-story, which is the genuine subject of his writing, as it is the case with many biblical texts and authors. What Bonhoeffer articulates in his writings is the life of a human being in patient and attentive expectation of God’s action, ready to surrender to God’s will and plan – which makes him a disciple. In this way, Bonhoeffer’s teaching is close to that of Jesus, and as such, we may ask whether we can study it as a source for theological insights or knowledge. Jesus teaches primarily through his life – his living with God – as does Bonhoeffer. It was Bonhoeffer himself who saw this parallel and suggested reflecting in this way.4 But Bonhoeffer’s own particular ‘way of life’ is not an abstract template for Christian living. His life was an historic event, a story of discipleship, not as a pattern for Christian life but as a particular story

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of living with God. And this must be reflected in how we read this poem. ‘Stations on the Way to Freedom’ is the witness of a ‘disciple’ – defined as a human being sanctified by God, because God is allowed to work on him. This is the parallel to Jesus – with the difference that our human discipleship is already a ‘following’. I would like to argue along this reading – as has been done by such commentators as Larry Rasmussen.5 If we read ‘Stations’ in Robertson’s biographical manner (taking the stations as periods in Bonhoeffer’s life: from discipline to death),6 we have already changed this perspective. The poem no longer presents itself as Bonhoeffer’s summary or reflection on the Christological logic of the life he had to live, but becomes a sequential biography, describing ‘steps’ (as some translations suggest for the German ‘Stationen’), or chapters of his life on a way to a certain goal – perhaps to the goal to become a saint. Such a reading suggests that the poem is a teaching on what the Christian life should be like, making it into a sort of catechetical teaching. But discipleship, in the sense of being delivered into God’s will and plan, is something altogether different. Discipleship cannot be taught in a catechetical fashion, or described in a catechetical manner – it is a way of living with God, who is present in this life in a way that cannot be foreseen or transformed into a pattern: we can only be ready for God’s will and plan, experiencing complete submission. Faith, then, means this kind of readiness. Catechetical teaching can only point to this readiness and attentiveness to God’s presence; it cannot describe a way of life that is in itself sufficient. Rather, such a life is an empty space, a stage upon which God can act. And this is the life of a saint. Therefore there can be saints everywhere, at all places where people pray: veniat regnum tuum fiat voluntas tua.7 Whether a saint exists does not depend on the saint himself, but on whether God’s will is fulfilled and whether God involves him in His will, as He involved His own son.8 Bonhoeffer’s witness would cease to exist if rendered a catechetical form, independent of the particular story (which is more than ‘the biographical context’) in which he was involved, shorn from his unconditional dedication to God’s will. Bonhoeffer’s witness is not found in his death but in his desire to fulfil the will of God in His plan for the world. God’s will could have unfolded in a totally different way, yielding a different story. But the decisive question is whether it is God’s story or not. And this does not depend on our interpretation, for it is the message addressed directly to us; it requires only that we, the listeners, pray with the speaker: ‘Thy will be done’. This prayer includes the story the speaker has to tell, a story with a specific message and a particular teaching.9

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‘Thy will be done’: the realization of this prayer is the subject of Bonhoeffer’s poem as it is of his writings. Bonhoeffer is describing a way of life for us that in the end is dedicated to God’s will, not because we have made a method of it,10 but because it is God’s way with those who follow him. Otherwise Christians would turn out to be religious people instead of human beings dedicated to God’s story with them. To have a religion means to have something that represents the ‘real thing’, something that can really be taken as if it were the real thing.11 I have started with this remark because it touches the very content and Christological grammar of the poem. The point is neither to read the poem biographically in the context of Bonhoeffer’s life, nor as a blueprint for the Christian life. The point is to read the poem as a schedule for God’s presence.12 In ‘Stations’, therefore, Bonhoeffer is not teaching how Christians should live. Rather he is examining God’s overwhelming presence in a human life. Bonhoeffer considers the places where God’s presence is felt, if and only if one comes to these places rather than roaming elsewhere or looking for substitutes in a religious way. The poem indicates the places of God’s acting, of God’s presence: He is present where discipline is lived, He is present where we really do what is right, He is present where we suffer because of our dedication to Him, and He is present where all earthly bounds and blindness dissolve to reveal his will.

These are the stations where we find Jesus – in discipline, in action, in suffering, and finally in death. So our first question has to be: What is the subject matter of the poem? And the answer: the stations of God’s presence in our life. Bonhoeffer calls this presence freedom – freedom in living with God. But, this living with God is not to be understood as a way of life distinct from its everyday forms. Living with God means submission, dedicating oneself to God’s will and action in any walk of life. It is the same dedication about which Paul wrote in Rom. 12.1; a submission to God’s will and action that is distinct from any other way of living. Here we have not only a method for understanding but also the poem’s very subject. This submission to God’s will and action is not a general submission as in fatalism, nor a deist submission because God has set in motion all natural occurrences; nor is it a submission to a God who is the author of a history that we understand and follow. Rather, Bonhoeffer is like

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Job, who refused the abstract submission of his friends’ advice and insisted on gaining knowledge of God’s judgement and will directly, face to face. In this sense, Bonhoeffer is talking about a life coram Deo, a life ‘before the face of God’, a life within the drama, in which God is involved with us.13 Bonhoeffer suggests, through the sections of this poem, that there are specific places for submission: discipline, action and suffering. But in considering these places, we must consider carefully the word ‘stations’ that Bonhoeffer chose for his title. The German word ‘Stationen’ has many meanings, not all of which are captured by the English word, ‘stage’.14 I would like to argue that ‘stations’ are places of submission to God’s will, where we expect and experience God’s presence. These ‘stations’ are places where discipleship happens, coming close to the traditional concept of ‘orders’, ‘estates’, or ‘institutions’, which Bonhoeffer came to refer to as ‘mandates’.15 This reading of the poem connects it with a Lutheran understanding of discipleship, a connection that has been unfolded by other Lutheran theologians like Hans Joachim Iwand and Ernst Wolf. This understanding of discipleship is what makes Bonhoeffer a Lutheran theologian, not potential relics in his political ethics or adoption of the concept of orders. c. A literal message During his imprisonment, Bonhoeffer included his poems within letters to his friend Eberhard Bethge. This shows again that these poems carry a message – to the Church. This poem, in particular, is addressed to the Church community as it contains an open message about the secret, in which the Church is involved. The poems in general were Bonhoeffer’s preferred means of encapsulating the core of his message, and therefore every single word has its specific importance. For this reason, Bonhoeffer had many editorial discussions with Bethge about their wording, debating individual words, and asking him how the poems could be improved. And yet even after these debates and revisions, Bonhoeffer was not always fully satisfied. Just as the form of a poem suggests the reader must cling to its very wording and shape, so Bonhoeffer argues, concerning the attention to God’s activity within our lives, that we must not follow our own thoughts and fantasies but rather God’s will. The various English versions of our poem indicate problems of understanding. Taking into account that translations always reformulate what they suggest they ‘translate’, the translations of Bonhoeffer’s poem present quite different interpretations. The German version is strongly marked by biblical language, sometimes echoing Luther’s translation

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of the Bible. These considerations demand at least some philological comments. Thus far not nearly enough attention has been paid at this philological level – even though it is well known that Bonhoeffer, like Luther, was keenly attentive to philological details and specific keywords or phrases, all of which served to articulate a specific part of the message. There are many phrases within this poem that have such a resonance, for instance, ‘flight of thoughts’ highlighting the escape by, and momentariness of, thoughts. Thus Bonhoeffer’s poems remain open for a re-reading in order to adhere more firmly to the literal form of their message. Bonhoeffer’s poems are destined to be read in this way, not least because they functioned as a grammar for a whole theology that he wished to have smuggled out of prison. The poems are, as it were, messages in a bottle, sent out with a hopeful expectation that someone will eventually find them. Perhaps Paul had this expectation, too, when he wrote his letters. Bonhoeffer’s poems, too, are pastoral messages, designed to comfort and teach their readers. They are written for the others. In this sense they fulfil the criteria of the ‘form of biblical narratives’, as Franz Rosenzweig has described them. d. Stations – public places of submission to God’s will and places of expectation Bonhoeffer’s ‘stations’ are public places, places of public existence, visible to the world, presenting the secret of God’s guidance and action. They are not related to a specific sphere, not confined to any separated area, but located in the world, in the midst of the world that God has not given up. The ‘stations’ are the public places – the fora – of God’s presence, making Bonhoeffer’s a thoroughly political theology, a positive political theology revealing a specific way to freedom. Political theology is about how God’s will is present in the world we are involved in – according to the Lord’s prayer: ‘Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done’. Political ethics is about how we actually live and act in accordance to these places of God’s presence. ‘Stations’ are the places of God’s presence. There are no specific areas where we can find God in His presence other than in these ‘stations on the way’. Thus, there are no religious places, places of pilgrimage, spheres, or symbols etc. that are dedicated for or determined to reliably provide the experience of God’s presence. Freedom is, first of all, the freedom from any religion; and ‘religion’ means (as we have already mentioned) the representation of God in His action by human practices or institutions. Jesus Christ is the only representative, and this sets Christians free from religious representations.16

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e. Stations – the visible Church The ‘stations on the way to freedom’ are not the biographical stations of an individual, but rather places where God’s presence is to be expected, where God’s people meet and come together in order to meet God. As Stanley Hauerwas stresses, altogether we may call the Church the ‘visible Church’.17 It is the visible Church of people who hand themselves over to God and who are therefore free from any other occupation or condition. The Church is not a religious space where God is represented. The Church is the people who live this freedom and witness it – through discipline, action, and suffering – to the world and within the world. This Church therefore is visible, and this visible Church is the obvious presence of God’s hidden kingdom. But the Church only exists where and when we find people on the way to freedom in discipline, action, and suffering. It is an actual, particular Church, a Church of today and tomorrow, a Church of this actual worship. It does not represent something universal, something beyond these stations.18

II. First stanza – discipline
The structuring of the poem into blocks or sections is significant as a comment on the form of – political – discipleship. Bonhoeffer is rejecting the idea that we human beings must shape or design our life, rather than being conformed to a ‘reality’ that is already structured.19 This point is made explicit in the first stanza, and we can read the whole poem from this opening perspective. From there, we learn that our life is destined to receive a structure rather than being carried off in any direction by cupidity enchaining us. Bonhoeffer is making a fundamental point about ‘learning’. Learning is not something we have to initiate or manage. It is something passive that happens if we follow a certain path. Learning is connected with obedience, not in the sense of obeying a command, but rather in the sense of following our cues in the well-directed story, which God wants to live with us. The German word ‘Zucht’, which Luther used in his translation of Ps. 94.12, is close to ‘teaching’.20 This kind of education or learning keeps people free from obeying something else. Philological clues tell us that this stanza can be read as a meditation on Galatians 5, to which Bonhoeffer referred on numerous other occasions. In Gal. 5.16 Paul writes: ‘Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh.’ The Greek word for ‘desire’ or ‘cupidity’

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(‘desire’ is too easily open to other interpretations) indicates an endless hunt for any kind of fulfilment yielding an unformed, amorphous living. Paul does not demand a form of self-discipline or self-control programme, as some translations of Bonhoeffer’s poem suggest. There is no hint of the discipline through labour or other kinds of disciplining techniques whose history we have learned from Michel Foucault, among others.21 In Bonhoeffer’s stanzas and Pauline logic, the contrast and conflict are between an endless and aimless amorphous cupidity on the one hand, and a given, structured, formed life, on the other hand, not as an end in itself, that can be learned and experienced. In this sense, Bonhoeffer is talking in his Ethics about ‘gestaltetes Leben’ (‘Natural life is formed life’) – a life not shaped and designed by our disciplining (or spiritual) practices.22 Our ‘senses’ and our ‘soul’ learn to be structured only by following a goal (Phil. 3.14) not fixed by ourselves but rather given to us, ‘set’ for us, by God. The Hebrew word for ‘give’ includes the meaning of ‘set’ – e.g. Num. 6.26: ‘The Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give/set you peace.’ The Lord is the one who sets aims and realities. This is a non-Aristotelian reading insofar as Aristotle did not know of an externally given end. The German word for ‘chastity’ (or ‘continence’), ‘keusch’ – in similarity with ‘Zucht’ (which is used by Luther in his Bible translation) – means to be formed, to be shaped.23 It is therefore not only or primarily our body which has to receive a structure, but also – and more importantly – our mind.24 Our aimless thinking and endless reflecting do not lead anywhere and cut us off from freedom. Freedom is not lost when we submit ourselves to somebody or to our desires, but because of the insatiable aspiring of human desires. Freedom must not be equated with openness or a plurality of options; freedom is something experienced at those places (stations) where we can expect God’s guidance and action. It is the freedom of disciples who expect God. In summary, this first stanza rejects any ethics that assumes a dichotomy between liberty (or liberation) and discipline. Instead, it points to the interconnection of freedom and dedication – with the caveat that this freedom cannot be generalized into a method we can learn. Any kind of self-control again would be arbitrary. The disciple’s freedom remains the expectation of the continuation of God’s particular story with each person, a freedom that will be felt where we experience God’s concrete guidance toward the goal he has set for us. To this end, we must always ask: What will this goal be? (Phil. 3.14). a. The secret Freedom has to be experienced. But, it can only be experienced at

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the stations of God’s presence and guidance. Consequently, freedom remains secret, a secret of God. Freedom is not the result of processes of liberation. As described in stanza four, freedom is beyond our human condition, beyond the chains and walls of our body and mind, beyond the blindness of our soul, and beyond the (religious) practices that attempt to overcome such boundaries. Freedom is the secret of a new life with God – face-to-face with Him. This is the goal of God’s will and not the fulfilment of our own. Freedom is alien to us, libertas aliena. Where God is present, there is freedom. Consequently, freedom is found at these stations, where God is present in various ways. Bonhoeffer’s whole theology is permeated by a quest for God’s presence in our world. God has not – as Bonhoeffer constantly stresses – given up the world, which is still his very own, in which he wants to reign through Jesus Christ in all times and places. This is the secret of freedom, which is promised to us – found in the stations on the way to the eternal freedom. Yet the freedom of God remains enclosed in a secret. We cannot have a firm ‘knowledge’ of it, but must simply have faith in both its existence and creation through the stations. The secret of freedom cannot be disclosed by any kind of liberating reflection, pronouncement of conscience, or enlightenment. This stanza contradicts any concept of human freedom that can be grasped, whether as the freedom of conscience and its (metaphysically reasonable) certainty, or the freedom of the human spirit, or any other mask. Freedom is something for God’s designated children (Rom. 8.21) who have become acquainted with God’s presence: because freedom belongs to God. That freedom is ‘secret’ does not mean that it is beyond our horizon or that it is a closed reality we cannot reach. Rather, it is the present secret of a kingdom to which we are called, along whose way we journey. As declared in the fourth stanza, our souls are blinded. To be able to see is not a question of a better or deeper knowledge that may overcome the limits or boundaries of our human condition. Bonhoeffer often criticized theology that concentrates on the limits of the human condition instead of reflecting on what can be experienced from God in the midst of our life. As ‘Stations’ declares, the first station is about this fundamental experience and focuses our attention on life’s only goal: the presence of God. This concentration yields a discipline. However, this discipline is not an aim in its own right – some sort of intrinsically necessary antidote to uncontrollable desires or passions. Rather, discipline necessarily develops on the way to freedom because it deals with a twofold fatal danger: of becoming lost in the endless force of our cupidities, on the one hand, and of becoming enchained to the ‘project’ of disciplining ourselves, on the other hand.

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b. ‘Stations’ and institutions If we read stations parallel to the traditional ethical concept of ‘orders’ or ‘institutions’ (or ‘mandates’, as Bonhoeffer came to refer to them), they represent the fundamental locus of God’s presence. The first stanza reminds us of God’s oeconomia, of God’s all-embracing economy in contradiction to the wastefulness of our endless wishes and cupidities. As we will see, the second stanza reminds us of God’s politia or political work, and the third stanza of the ecclesia, the place of suffering in God’s will and plan.

III. Second stanza – action
The focus of the second stanza, as in the first, is the contrast between our diffusion by our own thoughts and the possibilities we see ahead of us, and an active assertiveness in obedience to God’s will. a. Thoughts – reality In various remarks Bonhoeffer criticized ‘thinking’ as endangering our grasp of the reality in which we are involved.25 What he has in mind is not a distinction between ‘theory’ and ‘praxis’, but rather a distinction between a reality that engages our whole life and another ‘reality’ that we have both created and manipulated. Bonhoeffer is directing our attention to a theological understanding of ‘reality’ (‘Wirklichkeit’) or – we have to say – to the only theologically reasonable understanding of reality.26 ‘Das Wirkliche ergreifen’ (‘grasping what is the real’) is not a positivistic realism that pretends to know or recognize what is real, but an attentiveness to the given reality in which we have to be involved, to the reality addressed to us, because it is the reality within God’s will. In Ethics, Bonhoeffer stressed that this reality includes the events of the presence of Jesus Christ and his cross, and God’s involvement in that reality. God’s plan and story have, before our arrival, been imbedded in reality; otherwise we would be able to make it what we, whoever we pretend to be, intend or think should be real. Bonhoeffer’s theological point is not unlike Luther’s, in his Heidelberg disputation, which pointed to a theology of the cross that refers to what is ‘res’: theologia crucis dicit quod res est (‘a theology of the cross names / points out what is real’).27 Reality is God’s reality, and we are involved in that reality as he is. ‘Thinking’ misses this reality insofar it does not aim at God’s acting but

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on possibilities that we have in mind or fantasize about. This point is reflected in Gen. 8.21: ‘I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth’. Today, we often talk about ‘having a vision’ etc. instead of asking for God’s will. The poem stresses the point that freedom is not where thoughts escape from reality. Freedom is to be found only by staying involved with the reality in which God is already involved. And that ‘staying’ must be focused in certain deeds.28 There is no activism implied here. Freedom crystallizes in specific deeds, and these deeds become part of the reality according to God’s will, in which we are involved. Deeds are rooted in our dedication to God’s will, to His beginning and to His reality – they cannot be deduced from antecedent conditions, nor are they to be judged in terms of consequences or necessities. They are independent of that kind of reflection and that kind of ‘responsibility’ or thoughtfulness, which we call in a specific sense ‘responsibility’. ‘Responsibility’, according to Max Weber, means taking into account the reaction of other people, being ready to respond to them and to justify what you have done. Unlike this kind of responsibility, deeds in the very meaning of political deeds are free, free from our own burden of ‘responsibilities’.29 Actions are ‘supported only by God’s commandments and your faith’, manifest in a disciple’s worldly vocation. This is their political vocation. b. Political vocation – living within the politia It is a political existence that consists of just such deeds. This is close to Hannah Arendt’s definition of political power: in contrast to violence as the opposite to any ‘action’, political power is the power to act together, to enact a common deed, and this means to do something independent, something new, something beyond what can be accounted for by cause and effect.30 Such acts are political and not administrative or governmental; they are related to real (political) power – i.e. the possibility to truly act rather than to rely upon particular technical abilities or competences. Actions are political in this sense. ‘Pray and do what is just’ – these were the only possible actions Bonhoeffer could see for Christians in the future.31 Ethical significant action is to do something specific that has no other aim than to do the just thing in the here and now, whatever it may be. This has nothing to do with a ‘situation ethic’ that claims all actions according to necessity. Rather, it is the core of a political ethic in being related to God’s freedom. God will choose, we hope, this specific deed for his plan. God will decide what is right. For every moment, for a particular, single occasion, our action is the fulfilling and enacting of

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God’s will – and so participates in His freedom. It is ‘supported’ by God’s commandment, and our faith. c. Faith Faith is trust in God’s plan. Therefore, the opposite of faith is ‘Anfechtung’, temptation in both directions: to be chained into a false certainty about what is right and wrong, and to be chained into doubts about whether it is really God’s will or not. To be faithful means not to surrender to temptation.32 For this single, and perhaps short, moment, freedom will ‘embrace your spirit with rejoicing’. This is the opposite of a ‘spiritual freedom’ where our human spirit enjoys its independence from any ‘reality’ or earthly existence. In doing God’s will our spirit will be embraced by God’s freedom. In fulfilling God’s will, guided by his commandments and by all we are invited to believe, we participate in God’s own freedom – not by saying, ‘God with us’, but rather praying, ‘Thy will be done’ – God’s will as it is articulated in His commandments. Bonhoeffer has shown that this belongs to a political existence. Nowhere more than here are we at the core of Bonhoeffer’s ethics. It is an expression of Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane: ‘Again he went away for the second time and prayed, “My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done” ’ (Mt. 26.42). The Greek reads more literally, ‘your will should be realized’ – but the question is, by whose power? This points to the whole story, which must be fulfilled.33

IV. Third stanza – suffering
We have already anticipated the point that actions are confined to a single moment – the ‘blissful moment’ of freedom. But actions are soon followed by powerlessness and loneliness. As described in Mk. 15.34: ‘And at the ninth hour, Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?”, which means, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” ’34 a. Suffering The third stanza is entitled ‘suffering’. To suffer means to be unable to change or transform things, but rather to be transformed (‘Verwandlung’) by losing the power to act. Yet this station, too, this bounding of our power, is the place of transformation, is one further place for

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experiencing God’s freedom – it is the place where we hand our ‘right doing’ over to God. This handing over of our deeds and ends to God will become for us a new place for the presence of God’s freedom. Bonhoeffer is again talking about things happening to us from God in His presence. Wherever we do the right and wherever we are in that way involved in reality, we experience comfort in God’s power of fulfilling it. This means suffering – what Reinhard Hütter refers to as ‘suffering divine things’ – and must include earthly suffering, because God does not fulfil what is right beyond reality, its conflicts, and contradictions.35 He himself is involved in that reality. This understanding allows Bonhoeffer to talk about a history guided by God where we are His instruments. This is of course different from theologies of history, which show history as the ongoing revelation of God’s triumph and not the revealed story of His secret. The cross belongs to that story of God’s secret, which should not be deciphered by theological interpretation – which is not part of doing the just. This is not a ‘negative’ theology or a negative theology of history, because it is the story of a real, positive contradiction and resistance. It is a theology of a positive, broken history, in which God is present, not of a negative, dark side of history, which leads into the abyss.36 Through faith,37 we can find comfort in this – but not through ‘knowledge’ as it remains the secret of freedom.38 Here again we find the Lutheran grammar in Bonhoeffer’s theology.39 In this sense we are justified only by faith, by this kind of trust in God’s justice, i.e. his trustworthiness to his people. This faith includes comfort for our human life – it is not about something beyond, it is about a human life, reliant on God’s comforting justice. This ‘comfort’ is ‘Trost’ in German, which Luther used in his translations of the Bible, akin to the English word ‘trust’. However, the action must be given back to God. God has to fulfil our human plans (Psalm 127). In this way, the plot on Hitler’s life in which Bonhoeffer was involved could not be justified; God’s justice includes justice not only for the individual, but for the whole of the politia. ‘Aren’t righteousness and the kingdom of God on earth the focus of everything’, Bonhoeffer wrote on 5 May 1944, ‘and isn’t it true that Rom. 3.2ff. is not an individualistic doctrine of salvation, but the culmination of the view that God alone is righteous?’40 In doing what is right, we must hand ourselves over to God’s righteousness, to God’s political justice. Paradoxically, in a literally fatal mistake, one of the conspirators of the 20 July plot, General Oster, refused to destroy the files containing all the information about the conspiracy because he wanted to have material after the war to justify the plotters against the possible

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accusation of having acted too late. Oster’s desire for justification meant that the files were hidden carelessly in a garden, only to be discovered later by the authorities. This, of course, can only be said as an aside, and not in order to judge anyone. The fact is, however, that this is how things happened, in direct contrast to what Bonhoeffer has been urging about the form of responsibility. Again, there was a Judas working in the context of God’s plan – paralleled from the other side by the courageous action of the soldier who delivered Bonhoeffer’s letters, including the poems, at the risk of his life. Because of this one soldier, Knobloch, because of his deeds, we are able to study the poems and listen to their messages. They are messages that needed a human being, who was unconstrained by human claims, free enough to deliver them. b. Standing in our place Freedom will only be fulfilled by God.41 God himself acts with us, instead of us, in our place. In Jesus Christ, God stands in our place in our deeds, sufferings and guilt. We do not stand in for Him or even serve as representatives for Him. We are not Christ – however much we share God’s sufferings.42 This is our faith – faith in God’s presence, as it was the faith of those who stood under the cross at Jesus’ death. We are disciples that way. No one and no thing can represent God or divine things. The logic of religion is to offer representatives, a logic that also generates political theologies and ecclesiologies, on the assumption that there is something on earth representing God’s action or gifts. But representation of God is different from God’s presence: the presence of God includes that He stands in our place – and there happens our suffering, because we cannot act any more. We stop acting, we stop fighting, and we hand over to God. However, God does not work as a deus ex machina, as religious thinking may expect. Rather, He fulfils His story, in which He and we are involved. And this includes suffering – suffering in God’s presence in the reality in which He is involved. God’s will is enacted that way in the midst of reality, directly relevant to our living with God. c. The Church – and the logic of responsibility When Bonhoeffer refers to God’s presence in the Church, he does not mean His representation in any form or action of the Church, but rather how the Church is part of God’s present action through his disciples. Just as God fulfilled His will with Jesus, He does it continually with His disciples who follow him. He is not a God who avoids reality. He is still

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the God who let His son suffer. He stands in our place in His son – and His disciples again stand in the place of others. In Ethics, Bonhoeffer calls this ‘responsibility’: to be responsible means to stand in for somebody in order that God’s will might be fulfilled.43 Such a position cannot fit within any political theology interested in representing God’s achievement or even – ‘religious’ – triumph on earth beyond or outside reality, which is relevant for our living with God. Religion is always about triumphant representation.44 And any such political theology is religious because it sets up a positive representative, so causing rivalries about what or who can provide proper representation. Does peaceful behaviour of the Church represent God’s peace? Does doing right represent God’s righteousness? In contradiction to this logic of representation, God himself overcomes our ways with his own. Jesus therefore is not the last triumphant representative of God – he is the one in whom God himself suffers, stepping into our human powerlessness and loneliness. Standing in for the other and not representation is described as the logic of responsibility in Bonhoeffer’s Ethics: to be responsible means to do something instead of the other, standing in for him, even taking on the guilt that the other cannot evade.45 This was the logic behind Bonhoeffer’s involvement in the plot against Hitler.46 In his eyes, this involvement was a stepping in for the other – not a kind of ultima ratio or even a justifiable way of revolution. It was no longer possible for ‘right’ to be done, for this action to manifest both responsibility for the other and the experience of freedom, to begin something new (as we have learnt from stanza 2). Someone had to kill the tyrant. This was ‘the end of your action’ (stanza 3), handing everything over to God, remaining powerless, casting aside the ‘powerful deed’, and, in this case, embracing the ethically ‘wrong’. The point was never to use violence in order to achieve power. Rather, the plot was the admission of powerlessness, submission to God, and suffering whatever the consequences might be. Consequently, the plot belongs to this third station rather than the second – the station of suffering on the way to freedom. Bonhoeffer could accept himself becoming a victim, but he could not accept that the other should have to become a victim. This is a thoroughly Lutheran logic: you may abstain from your rights, but you cannot expect the same abstinence from the other – and this includes also the willingness to take on guilt. To resist the evil means to do good works (Romans 12), to do what is right. However, this can also mean ‘the end of your action’ and hence suffering. To suffer means to give oneself over to God and his story,

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which through Jesus has already been revealed to be precisely that suffering. One’s suffering must be part of that story if it is not the making of our own story. This stands in opposition to a political theology which points to a politically significant representation of God, which is beyond His presence in bearing us on the way to freedom. It stands, of course, also against any church that pretends to be beyond suffering for God’s presence. The consequence of this would be not an invisible church, but a church that is visible in the wrong way. There is a sharply delineated uniqueness about political theologies and political ethics, which are embedded in God’s economy and rule. God’s ruling in freedom is to be experienced beyond any political theology that claims to administer the representation of God. God’s presence is something different. His political presence takes over reality and transforms it for us. When we give up all that we do to him, his rule occurs.

V. Three stations – three ‘orders’
At this point we start to touch on Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the Church within the Lutheran scheme of the three stations. As the oeconomia is the place where we are involved in God’s all-embracing work, and as the politia is the place of action in its fragmented freedom and involvement in God’s will, so the ecclesia is the place of transformation by God’s action and involvement in His story. Bonhoeffer is talking about a visible Church, which is at the same time political by its praying and doing justice.47 The Church does not replace the politia, as would be the case in ‘religious’ political theology, because God’s kingdom is present in different ways, including those deeds that belong to the politia. God’s kingdom belongs to the secret of freedom.48 The Church suffers in place of the world, stepping in for the world, which God has not given up. Bonhoeffer always stressed that God has – because of Jesus Christ – not given up this world, rather, he ‘was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself’ (2 Corinthians 5). The Church steps in for the world, living the redemption in Christ and participating in his sufferings. In the Church’s suffering, God’s will for his world appears, and in the powerlessness of the Church God’s power becomes visible. The Church steps in for the world by being involved in its affairs, which are transformed into God’s affairs through the Church’s involvement. However, by stand-

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ing as the place holder for God’s acting in the world, the Church does not become the new polis.49 The Church is the place of transformation, the place of change, the place of giving oneself over to God: a station on the way to freedom, on the way to God’s heavenly kingdom. This ‘living in transformation’ has to be witnessed to the world as it is (aion) – as Paul described it in Rom. 12.2: ‘Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.’ To prove what is the will of God is not an intellectual task. It is our experience of God’s will taking the place of our own will. And the Church is the place of that reversal. With the fragmentary presence of God’s freedom within the stations God’s Kingdom is also present. It is beyond a political theology that pretends to show or know what represents God. God himself will remain within the secret and be visible in discipline, action, and suffering. This is a Lutheran grammar of theology, which follows the grammar of a theologia crucis, not a theologia gloriae – it has to articulate what is ‘real’. Bonhoeffer argues that the kingdom of God ‘assumes form in the Church’ and – at the same time – in the ‘state’: The kingdom of God exists in our world exclusively in the duality of Church and state. Each is necessarily related to the other; neither exists for itself. Every attempt of one to take control of the other disregards this relationship of the kingdom of God on earth. Every prayer for the coming of the kingdom to us that does not have in mind both Church and state is either otherworldliness or secularism. It is, in any case, disbelief in the kingdom of God. . . . The kingdom of God assumes form in the Church insofar as here the loneliness of being human is overcome through the miracle of confession and forgiveness. This is because in the Church . . . one person can and should bear the guilt of another . . . . . . The kingdom of God assumes form in the state insofar as here the orders of existing communities are maintained with authority and responsibility. Lest humankind fall apart through the desires of individuals who want simply to go their own way, the state takes the responsibility in a world under the curse for the preservation of the orders of communities, such as marriage, family, and nation . . . The kingdom of Christ is God’s kingdom, but God’s kingdom in the form appointed for us. It does not appear as one, visible, powerful empire, nor yet as the ‘new’ kingdom of the word; on the contrary, it manifests itself as the kingdom of the other world that has entered completely into the discord and contradiction to this world. It appears as the powerless,

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We can read the poem in this context – it is about the form the kingdom of God assumes within the oeconomia, the politia, and the ecclesia – in discipline, action, and suffering. The witness of the Church of the kingdom is different from the witness of the politia; it is the witness of practices like forgiveness, not powerful deeds – as it is for the politia. Here something can be done for the other, for the right of the other. The kingdom is not beyond this world – but there remains a mystery – and this will be understood in a last and final station where we meet God face to face. The point is not ‘beyond’ the world, but the immediate presence of God. Thus we arrive at the fourth stanza of the poem.

VI. Fourth stanza – death
Death is not a further station analogous to the previous three. Death is the final end not only of our doing and experience, but of our very way: a feast of transition. From this point we do not act or suffer anymore, but go to meet God, going now to the sphere of knowledge and understanding: ‘Dying we recognize it now in the face of God – freedom’. a. Death Bonhoeffer considered death and resurrection in many contexts.51 In this poem, death becomes a specific theological place – it is the feast of transition (not transformation) to God himself. The decisive element –

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which is seldom sufficiently reflected on by theology – is that Christian hope is not about expecting another world, but rather an encounter with God himself in this world. It is not the religious expectation of a new life that is to be sought, but the encounter and understanding of God himself, and the embracing of His freedom. Here again, Bonhoeffer follows strictly the grammar of this theology of God’s presence: 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 . . . Nor do we try to romanticize death, for life is too great and too precious . . . We still love life, but I do not think that death can take us by surprise now . . . It is we ourselves, and not outward circumstances, who make death what it can be, a death freely and voluntarily accepted.52

How can death be freely and voluntarily accepted? ‘Stations’ answers that difficult question – that is not at least its particular message. Death appears as the feast at the end of our way along the secret of freedom. b. The secret and the understanding Death unburdens us from our chains and destroys the walls of our blinded souls. Plato’s parable of the cave comes to mind, in which blinded souls – human beings in chains – are sitting in the cave and have no understanding of what is outside the cave. Bonhoeffer sometimes maintained that all of life is about gaining cognition of all that God has prepared for us – it is about the secret and its understanding. As long as we – like Job or Jesus – do not fully see God’s plan and will, we are experiencing the secret of freedom. Therefore, Bonhoeffer talked about a ‘discipline of the arcane’, a theology that explores God’s secret will and plans rather than our religious conscience, language, and thoughts, that explores God’s secret plan rather than what represents God and what we pretend to understand or not to understand about God. It is the discipline of God’s secret – about whose existence we are certain. It is revealed to us as a secret; the secret of freedom that we know already through discipline, action, and suffering. We can have insight into God’s secret only when we are face to face with God. Only here, beyond our temporal cave, can we gain understanding, and only then can we gain an understanding of freedom. To know what God’s will is, brings us knowledge of freedom. This is the situation of Jesus who freely conformed to God, and it will happen to us beyond the chains and walls of our bodies and souls.

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After transformation (stanza 3), there is transition into this new existence. Death is the feast of transition to God’s kingdom. As Bonhoeffer writes in his booklet on the Psalms about ‘the end’: Life in community with the God of revelation, the final victory of God in the world, and the establishing of the messianic kingdom are all subjects of prayer in the Psalms. Death is indeed the irreversible bitter end for body and soul. It is the wages of sin, and this must not be forgotten (Pss. 30, 90). But on the other side of death is the eternal God (Pss. 90, 102). Therefore death will not triumph, but life will triumph in the power of God (Pss. 16.9ff., 56.14 [13], 49.16 [15], 73.24, 118.15ff.). The Psalms of the final victory of God and of God’s Messiah (2, 96, 97, 98, 110, 148–150) lead us in praise, thanksgiving, and petition to the end of all things when all the world will give honor to God, when the redeemed community will reign with God eternally, and when the powers of evil will fall and God alone will retain power.53

It is here that we are in transition into a realm of an unbroken political theology – beyond death – in the eternal kingdom. This, then, is the place of eternal freedom because it is the place of a full understanding of God’s will. Stanza 4 can be read as a meditation on 1 Corinthians 2: But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glorification. None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But, as it is written, ‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him,’ God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For what person knows a man’s thoughts except the spirit of the man which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit, which is from God, that we might understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who possess the Spirit. The unspiritual man does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual man judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. ‘For who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?’ But we have the mind of Christ.54

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Knowledge, face to face with God, is the final goal on the way to freedom, because this is the only way to gain knowledge of what happens to us, of what reality is about. Such understanding is not generated by interpreting history – as theologians often have – pretending to know God’s will, or pretending not to be able to know and looking for a cognition beyond reality.55 We can find understanding only through our submission to God’s own reality, which is not separated from our human reality – finally through death. Therefore, Bonhoeffer criticizes theological reflections that seek God at the borders or limits of our human horizon. The ‘beyond’ is the other and his story in which we are involved. ‘God is beyond in the midst of our life.’56 As Bonhoeffer writes about knowledge, ‘There are degrees of knowledge and degrees of significance; that means that a secret discipline must be restored whereby the mysteries of the Christian faith are protected against profanation. The positivism of revelation makes it too easy for itself.’57 Theology, on the one hand, has to preserve the secret instead of transforming it into the religious, and on the other, it must follow God’s reality – again refusing to transform it into a particular religious reality. At the very least, the Church must learn not to replace God’s reality in a religious way, but seek instead to be involved with God’s presence wherever and whenever it appears in our reality. This needs attention to God’s presence – and will finally lead to understanding.

VII. Final remarks – in the light of God’s presence in his secret freedom
The ‘stations’ on the way to freedom can be read as stations of theological engagement concerning the message of freedom, which Bonhoeffer put into a poem, expecting and hoping that it might reach the world. Bonhoeffer described in his poem human life as it passes through these three places of God’s presence and the feast of death, the last station on the way to freedom. Has this message reached the world? Has it forged how Bonhoeffer has been received? Is this reception on the way to freedom – with a message for an oeconomia in discipline, a politia in action, and an ecclesia in suffering? The theology that follows these stations follows God’s will, follows the prayer of Jesus in Gethsemane, and prays together with him,

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‘My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt’ (Mt. 26.39). This is the place of a Church for others (no other ground), and a theology for others.58 It must keep the secret without pretending to know ‘God’. There is no representation – there is no religion. Bonhoeffer has been criticized because he failed to foresee that religion did not disappear but, on the contrary, once again has become more and more present on various sceneries. However, this criticism misunderstands the concept of ‘religion’ in Bonhoeffer’s argument. For Bonhoeffer, what is bound to disappear is the possibility of trust (a faith) in religious representations. The globalized world today may or may not preserve a multitude of religions, but the question is: will there be a grounded trust in religion, religious people and their ‘religious a priori’?59 Some may argue that religious fundamentals are still maintained, such as security, moral responsibility, values, identity, and spirituality. Religious representations change or disappear, and this is true – according to Bonhoeffer – especially for the Christian religion. Therefore, the secret, as God himself, remains and has to be experienced as the secret of freedom. We should not go into a religious economy, looking for what we need for our desires, but rather look for the goal that is set: to meet God in His freedom. And on the way to this freedom, there are these three: discipline, action and suffering. Without religious substitutes, without this kind of comfort – which is destined to be a thing of the past – we are confronted with God who is involved in our human reality. There is no trustworthy new religious behaviour. There is only discipline (not to get lost in our desires), action (not to get lost in our thoughts), and suffering (not to get lost in our human activities). If we are to learn what God promises, and what God fulfills, we must persevere in quiet meditation on the life, sayings, deeds, sufferings, and death of Jesus. It is certain that we may always live close to God and in the light of God’s presence, and that such living is an entirely new life for us; that nothing is then impossible for us, because all things are possible with God; that no earthly power can touch us without God’s will, and that danger and distress can only drive us closer to God. Christians are called to compassion (‘Mit-leiden’: to share suffering) and action, not in the first place by their own sufferings, but by the sufferings of their brothers and sisters, for whose sake Christ suffered.60

This Church of shared suffering is visible although its case, as the visible secret of freedom, remains hidden. In its living for others, the

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Church is not a religious representation, but rather expects God’s presence wherever we are involved in reality. This Church may be difficult to identify for those who expect a religious appearance. The Church is present where God’s people stand in for others in the experience of freedom in discipline, action, suffering and death for God’s world, which he has not given up. This happens in any sphere of our human life where God’s presence is expected: in the oeconomia of life, in the politia of action, and in the ecclesia of being transformed.

Notes
1. Stephen R. Haynes, The Bonhoeffer Phenomenon: Portraits of a Protestant Saint (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004). 2. LPP, p. ix. 3. See the contribution of Hauerwas in this volume. 4. cf. Larry Rasmussen and Renate Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: His Significance for North Americans (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990). 5. Rasmussen and Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. 6. cf. Edwin Robertson, ‘Introduction’, in PPDB. 7. ‘Your kingdom come, your will be done’ (Mt. 6.10). The Vulgate reads: ‘veniat regnum tuum fiat voluntas tua sicut in caelo et in terra’. 8. Not that the Nazis produced a Saint – for more on this, see Haynes, The Bonhoeffer Phenomenon. 9. For a description of the form of biblical narratives, see Franz Rosenzweig, ‘Das Formgeheimnis der biblischen Erzählung’, in Franz Rosenzweig and Karl Thieme, Die Schrift: Aufsätze, Übertragungen und Briefe (Königstein: Jüdischer Verlag Athenäum, 1984). 10. See Ernst Feil, Die Theologie Dietrich Bonhoeffers: Hermeneutik – Christologie – Weltverständnis (Berlin: Lit-Verlag, 2006), p. 302. 11. The only representation in our Christian worship is found in the bread and the wine, which is why Luther insisted on the real presence of Christ in bread and wine, rejecting a religious representation. For Bonhoeffer’s critique of religion, see Ralf K. Wüstenberg, ‘Religionless Christianity’, in John W. de Gruchy (ed.): Bonhoeffer, pp. 57–71, and Bernd Wannenwetsch’s contribution to this volume. 12. See Larry Rasmussen, ‘Divine Presence and Human Power’, in Rasmussen and Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, pp. 111–43. 13. TF, p. 348. 14. As it appears in Robertson’s translation. 15. See for that topic: Brian Brock, ‘Why the Estates? Hans Ulrich’s Recovery of an Unpopular Notion’, in SCE 20:2 (2007), pp. 179–202, and Bernd Wannenwetsch, ‘Luther’s Moral Theology’, in The Cambridge Companion to Martin Luther (ed. Donald K. McKim; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 120–35. 16. For the consequences of this liberation within political ethics, see: Oliver O’Donovan, The Ways of Judgment (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans), pp. 157–63. 17. Stanley Hauerwas, Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2004).

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18. This account is close to Luther’s description of the notae ecclesiae, the defining marks of the Church: of Councils and Churches, LW 42, pp. 3–178. 19. DBWE 6, pp 171–81. 20. ‘Blessed is the man whom thou dost chasten, O Lord, and whom thou dost teach out of thy law.’ 21. See especially Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). 22. DBWE 6, p. 171. 23. German: ‘keusch’, ‘Keuschheit’ – according to Luther’s Bible translation. Roberston’s ‘pure and chaste’ is misleading. 24. The German word ‘Geist’ in Bonhoeffer’s poem is here closer to ‘mind’, which is like the Greek ‘nous’ as it is used in Rom. 12.2. 25. We are reminded of Martin Heidegger’s 1951/1952 lectures What is Called Thinking? (New York: Perennial Library, 1968) and Hannah Arendt’s Thinking. Life of the Mind, vol. 1 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978). 26. See DBWE 6, pp. 47–75 (DBW 6, pp. 31–61). 27. Heidelberg Disputation, Thesis 21. 28. cf. Luther’s ethics of good works. 29. The significance of Jesus’ commandments is rather to say to the people: ‘You stand before the face of God, God’s grace rules over you; you are at the disposal of someone else in the world and you must act and work for God. So be mindful in your actions that you are acting under God’s eyes, and that God’s will needs be done.’ The nature of this will of God can only be clear in the moment of action; it is important to be clear that every person’s own will must be brought to be God’s will, that our own will must be surrendered if God’s will is to be realized . . .’ (TF, p. 348). Insofar as the Christian’s ethical action is God’s will, it can be described as love. But this is not a new principle; it derives from our place before God. For Christians, there are no ethical principles by means of which they could perhaps civilize themselves. For more on the meaning of ‘responsibility’, see also ‘After Ten Years’, in LPP, pp. 1–17. 30. ‘Rather must a direct relationship to God’s will be ever sought afresh’ (TF, p. 348). 31. LPP translates ‘prayer and righteous action’ (p. 300). The German text reads, ‘Beten und Tun des Gerechten’ (WE, p. 435). It is justice that should be done. 32. cf. The Lord’s Prayer as presented in the Book of Common Prayer: ‘And lead us not into temptation’. 33. See DBWE, p. 166 (DBW 5, p. 125) where Bonhoeffer refers to Psalm 22. 34. DBWE, 166 (DBW 5, p. 125) – Christ prays with us and vicariously in our place. 35. Reinhard Hütter, Suffering Divine Things: Theology as Church Practice (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000). 36. cf. ‘After Ten Years’. 37. In referring to the people who stood under the cross, Bonhoeffer writes, ‘The eunuch (Acts 8) and Cornelius (Acts 10) are not standing at the edge of an abyss. Nathaniel is “an Israelite indeed, in whom there is not guile” (Jn 1.47). Finally, Joseph of Arimathea and the women at the tomb. The only thing that is common to all these is their sharing in the suffering of God in Christ. That is their “faith”. There is nothing of religious method here. The “religious act” is always something partial; “faith” is something whole, involving the whole of one’s life. Jesus calls people, not to a new religion, but to life’ (LPP, p. 362). 38. Bonhoeffer writes, ‘We have to learn that personal suffering is a more effective key, a more rewarding principle for exploring the world in thought and action than personal good fortune. This perspective from below must not become the partisan

Stations on the Way to Freedom

39. 40. 41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

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possession of those who are eternally dissatisfied; rather we must do justice to life in all its dimensions from a higher satisfaction, whose foundation is beyond any talk of “from below” or “from above”. This is the way in which we may affirm it’ (LPP, p. 17). Bonhoeffer refers to the ‘this-worldliness’ of Luther’s theology, cf. LPP, p. 369. In his final letters from prison, Bonhoeffer argues that the ‘religious interpretation’ is ‘metaphysical’ and ‘individualistic’ but not, in a biblical sense, political, cf. LPP, p. 286. ‘In view of what is coming, I’m almost inclined to quote the biblical dei, and I feel that I “long to look”, like the angels in 1 Pt. 1.12, to see how God is going to solve the apparently insoluble. I think God is about to accomplish something that, even if we take part in it either outwardly or inwardly, we can only receive with the greatest wonder and awe’ (LPP, p. 279). cf. ‘After Ten Years’, in which Bonhoeffer talks about the connection between freedom and free will: ‘Christ kept himself from suffering till his hour had come, but when it did come he met it as a free man, seized it, and mastered it. Christ, so the Scriptures tell us, bore the sufferings of all humanity in his own body as if they were his own – a thought beyond our comprehension – accepting them of his own free will. We are certainly not Christ; we are not called on to redeem the world by our own deeds and suffering, and we need not try to assume such an impossible burden. We are not lords, but instruments in the hand of the Lord of history; and we can share in other people’s sufferings only to a very limited degree. We are not Christ, but 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 compassion 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. Christians are called to compassion and action, not in the first place by their own sufferings, but by the sufferings of their brothers and sisters’ (LPP, pp. 13–14). And again, writing almost two years later he comments, ‘we are summoned to share in God’s sufferings at the hands of a godless world. We must therefore really live in the godless word, without attempting to gloss over or explain its ungodliness in some religious way or other. We must live a “secular” life, and thereby share in God’s sufferings . . . It is not the religious act that makes the Christian, but participation in the sufferings of God in the secular life’ . . . ‘But what does this life look like, this participation in the powerlessness of God in the world?’ (LPP, pp. 361–62). For the theological logic of responsibility, see Bernd Wannenwetsch, ‘ “Responsible Living” or “Responsible Self”? Bonhoefferian Reflections on a Vexed Moral Notion’, in SCE 18:3 (2005), pp. 125–40. cf. Niklas Luhmann’s definition of religion as ‘Kontingenzbewältigung’ (‘coping with contingence’) in Niklas Luhmann, Funktion der Religion (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp 1977). ‘Whatever . . . 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’ (LPP, p. 191). ‘As long as we ourselves are trying to help shape someone else’s destiny, we are never quite free of the question whether what we’re doing is really for the other person’s benefit – at least in any matter of great importance. But when all possibility of cooperating in anything is suddenly cut off, then behind any anxiety about him is the consciousness that his life has now been placed wholly in better and stronger hands.

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48.

49.

50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

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For you, and for us, the greatest task during the coming weeks, and perhaps months, may be to entrust each other to those hands’ (LPP p. 190). See Stanley Hauerwas, ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer – Ekklesiologie als Politik’, in Kirche – Ethik – Öffentlichkeit. Christliche Ethik in der Herausforderung (Ethik im Theologischen Diskurs – Ethics in Theological Discourse, Bd. 5; Münster et al.: Lit-Verlag, 2002), pp. 99–130. ‘In what way are we “religionless-secular” Christians, in what way are we the ek-klesia, those who are called forth, not regarding ourselves from a religious point of view as specially favored, 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? What is the place of worship and prayer in a religionless situation? Does the secret discipline, or alternatively the difference (which I have suggested to you before) between penultimate and ultimate, take on a new importance here?’ (LPP, pp. 280f). It can possibly be understood in the logic of a ‘negative’ political theology, as Bernd Wannenwetsch has suggested: ‘Representing the Absent in the City’, in God, Truth, and Witness: Engaging Stanley Hauerwas (ed. L. Gregory Jones et al.; Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2005), pp. 167–92. Yet, the problem with a ‘negative’ political theology might be that while it remains in a dialectical way within the logic of a political theology by refusing any ‘representation’, it may still not fully overcome this ‘religious’ logic. TF, pp. 90–92. ‘The Christian, unlike the devotees of the redemption myths, has no last line of escape available from earthly tasks and difficulties into the eternal, but, like Christ himself (“My God, why hast you forsaken me?”), he must drink the earthly cup to the dregs, and only in his doing so is the crucified and risen Lord with him, and he crucified and risen with Christ. This world must not be prematurely written off; in this the Old and New Testament are one’ (LPP, p. 337). TF, p. 485. DBWE 5, p. 176 (DBW 5, p. 131). Vv. 6–16, NRSV. ‘God’s beyond is not the beyond of our cognitive faculties. The transcendence of epistemological theory has nothing to do with the transcendence of God. God is beyond in the midst of our life’ (LPP, p. 282). LPP, p. 282. LPP, p. 286. See Bonhoeffer on compassion and the existence of the church, in LPP, p. 382–83. cf. LPP, p. 280. Taken from ‘After Ten Years’, in TF, p. 484.

9


‘Christians and Pagans’ Towards a Trans-Religious Second Naïveté or How to be a Christological Creature Bernd Wannenwetsch

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‘Christen und Heiden’ 1.

Menschen gehen zu Gott in ihrer Not, flehen um Hilfe, bitten um Glück und Brot, um Errettung aus Krankheit, Schuld und Tod. So tun sie alle, alle, Christen und Heiden.

2.

Menschen gehen zu Gott in Seiner Not, finden ihn arm, geschmäht, ohne Obdach und Brot, sehn ihn verschlungen von Sünde, Schwachheit und Tod. Christen stehen bei Gott in Seinen Leiden.

3.

Gott geht zu allen Menschen in ihrer Not, sättigt den Leib und die Seele mit Seinem Brot, stirbt für Christen und Heiden den Kreuzestod, und vergibt ihnen beiden.

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‘Christians and Pagans’ 1.

Men go to God when they are sore bestead, Pray to him for succour, for his peace, for bread, For mercy for them sick, sinning, or dead; All men do so, Christian and unbelieving.

2.

Men go to God when he is sore bestead, Find him poor and scorned, without shelter or bread, Whelmed under weight of the wicked, the weak, the dead; Christians stand by God in his hour of grieving.

3.

God goes to every man when sore bestead, Feeds body and spirit with his bread; For Christians, pagans alike he hangs dead, And both alike forgiving. (Translation: John Bowden)

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I. What Christianity really is?
‘Christians and Pagans’ is the shortest prison poem we have from Bonhoeffer and at the same time the most formally structured. It comes in numbered stanzas, with a regular meter, and rhymed. Both the pencilled draft version and the edited final version are preserved. The poem’s inception can be traced back to a piece of scrap paper from July 1944 where Bonhoeffer put down two simple lines: Men go to God in their distress. Men go to God in his distress.1

The poem accompanied a letter to Eberhard Bethge from 8 July. Ten days later, in another letter to his friend, Bonhoeffer summarized the core idea of the poem as follows: The poem about Christians and pagans contains an idea that you will recognize: ‘Christians stand by God in his hour of grieving’; that is what distinguishes Christians from pagans. Jesus asked in Gethsemane, ‘Could you not watch with me one hour?’ That is a reversal of what the religious man expects from God.2

In his previous correspondence with Bethge, Bonhoeffer had begun to use key notions such as ‘Christianity’ or ‘religion’ in inverted commas. These familiar terms he no longer considered to be safe – it dawned on Bonhoeffer that he witnessed a time of transition that rendered ambiguous any previous meaning these terms may have had. As opposed to the mental and spiritual draught that Bonhoeffer admits to have gone through during his first period in prison, we begin to see the fruits of a concern that set his mind in unfamiliar territory: ‘What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today.’3 Bonhoeffer sought to unpack this question along various routes, the most obvious of which concerned the relationship of Christianity and religion. Is Christianity a religion at all? The one and true religion? Or is it rather an anti-religion? Although the title pairs Christians and pagans (‘Christen und Heiden’), it would perhaps have been more aptly titled ‘Christians and Other Religious People’,4 as it does not address the problem of the relationship of Christianity to any concrete non-Christian religion but rather how Christianity relates to

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the homo religious – humankind in their notorious transcendental striving. On the backdrop of some of Bonhoeffer’s paragraphs in the surrounding letters of theological prose, we might be tempted to read the poem from the vantage point of the theological verdict on religion that Karl Barth had famously issued in his Church Dogmatics where he spoke of ‘The Revelation of God as the Abolition of Religion’,5 characterizing religion as a human attempt to justify oneself in front of the self-made image of God, or even more bluntly as ‘unbelief ’.6 Bonhoeffer was clearly impressed by Barth’s uncompromised characterization of the Christian faith as essentially revealed anti-religion.7 Bonhoeffer, too, describes the ‘reversal’ that the gospel brings about in the attitude of the religious man. In the aforementioned letter of 18 July, he characterizes the Christian faith’s difference from religion in terms of metanoia, conversion: To be a Christian does not mean to be religious in a particular way, to make something of oneself (a sinner, a penitent, or a saint) on the basis of some method or other, but to be a man – not a type of man, but the man that Christ creates in us. It is not the religious act that makes the Christian, but participation in the sufferings of God in the secular life. That is metanoia: not in the first place thinking about one’s own needs, problems, sins, and fears, but allowing oneself to be caught up into the way of Jesus Christ, into the messianic event.8

Bonhoeffer, no less than Barth, is aware of the critical difference in which the Christian faith stands from religion. And this perception is only enhanced by the disturbing and novel ideas in his Tegel correspondence where Bonhoeffer famously envisions a ‘religion-less Christianity’ and inaugurates a quest for a ‘non-religious interpretation of the Bible’. If, however, we were to read this tendency straight into the poem ‘Christians and Pagans’, we would miss precisely the most interesting twist that Bonhoeffer’s thoughts take here. Approaching the poem without a prefigured interpretative foil, we can hardly suppress a sense of surprise. Given the tendency in the movement referred to as ‘Dialectical Theology’ to stress to distance of Christianity from religion, we notice a significantly different take in the poem: Here, Bonhoeffer first emphasizes what Christians and pagans – religious people outside of Christianity – have in common.9 Although the second stanza moves on to emphasize the uniqueness of the Christian faith, and the third stanza eventually performs the move we might expect in turning the man-to-God approach around, the poem as a whole is framed by

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expressions that stress the commonalities of Christians and other religious people. For example, the German original repeats the ‘all’ in the last line of the fist stanza: ‘all men do so, all’. The importance that Bonhoeffer put on this emphasis is evidenced in that the second ‘all’ was added by him in the revised version over against the pencilled draft. Likewise, in the third stanza, he added another ‘all’ to ‘men’ in the revision of the draft, so that it now reads: ‘God goes to all men’. And much in the same vein, he ended the poem with the word ‘both’ (‘beiden’), by which the final rhyme (to ‘Heiden’) and accent is found and placed.10 Is Bonhoeffer less radical than Barth in his criticism of religion, when the antithesis of Christianity to religion appears to be eventually absorbed into a dialectical move towards a sort of both-and, yes-andno? We can certainly reckon with Bonhoeffer’s Lutheran sensitivities in emphasizing the finitum capax over against Barth’s Reformed tendencies of non-capax and the corresponding contrasting of God’s sovereignty with the natural world. But we can understand the difference of Bonhoeffer’s account from Barth’s only if we allow for a sort of dramatic reading of Bonhoeffer’s account of ‘religion’. Bonhoeffer’s understanding of Christianity and religion is not unlike Luther’s teaching of the law that has proved to be prone to many misunderstandings when read as a fixed system. Just as Luther’s doctrine of the law must be understood according to the dramatic narrative of its institution by God in the Garden of Eden, its subsequent distortion through the fall, and the process of its restoration to its original purpose as God’s loving and love-worthy rule,11 so it is also with Bonhoeffer’s account of religion. Rather than being cast into one all-encompassing theory, religion must be narrated as a plot featured within God’s salvific story, in which the meaning of individual concepts change as they relate to each respective act within that divine play. My suggestion is that within Bonhoeffer we find a three-staged dramatic notion of ‘religion’ as ‘cry’, ‘try’, and ‘sigh’.

II. A dramatic account of religion
As ‘cry’, religion echoes humankind’s primal scream, and is understood as a matter of the original state of creatureliness. As ‘try’, religion represents the domain of the fallen man who seeks to domesticate the divine for his own benefit. As ‘sigh’, religion is turned on his head, when

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the new evangelical creature willingly partakes in the eager longing and groaning of creation (Rom. 8.18–22) or in the ‘loud cries and tears’ (Heb. 5.8) of Christ’s distressed prayers in the garden of Gethsemane (Mt. 26.36–46). It is to this third notion that this essay’s subtitle refers: religion as the second naïveté of a restored, christologically mediated creatureliness. These three modes of understanding religion according to the drama of creation, fall, and redemption are not completely parallel to the three stanzas of our poem, but I think that something like this typology is required if we are to make sense of the three stanzas and Bonhoeffer’s further musings on the matter in his theological prose. Although the poem, unlike Bonhoeffer’s theological prose, does not explicitly dwell on the second mode – religion as strategy – it may be said to be implicitly and tacitly represented in the way in which the second stanza characterizes the Christian way as a formal reversal of the first. We must now look at the three modes in further detail. a. Religion as ‘cry’: calling on God According to the first stanza, religion deals with elemental human needs as they are characterized by the polarity of fear and hope, the pursuit of happiness and avoidance of suffering: those who go to God ‘pray for help, happiness and bread.’ In this light, Bonhoeffer shows no concern in acknowledging that humankind is religious from the outset. The need, desire, and liberty to cry to God for help are simply characteristics of being a creature. It is worth mentioning that Luther, on whose theology Bonhoeffer depends a great deal in this case, speaks in his Genesis Lectures of such an original religion when he envisages an original ‘church in the garden’, a church sine muris (without walls) that is brought into being by God’s giving of his first command, ‘Eat, do not eat’, which offers his creatures a concrete way of responding to the divine address in obedient worship.12 Yet this religion of the original state in its primal naïveté is no longer present among God’s creatures after the fall. Religion, too, has now become a matter of what Bonhoeffer calls ‘the natural’ as distinct from ‘creation’. ‘Through the fall, “creation” became “nature” . . . The natural is that form of life preserved by God for the fallen world that is directed towards justification, salvation, and renewal through Christ.’13 In this sense, it is ‘natural’ for humans to be religious as a matter of corresponding to God’s providential caring for his creatures. But the way in which religion is enacted in the concrete of the post-lapsarian state, precisely reveals the need for ‘renewal’. In his letter to Bethge, Bonhoeffer captures this ambiguity in the image of ‘religion as a

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garment of Christianity’.14 A garment is a useful and healthy thing, as it warms and protects the skin of those who wear it. Yet, as the very image of ‘covering’ conveys, it contains a potentially dark side: a garment also covers up, conceals, and potentially deceives. b. Religion as ‘try’: domesticating God This dark side resides in the prefix of the word re-ligio: the ‘re’-ligare (binding oneself back onto something) becomes problematic when humans do not merely cry out to the divine in their need but make arrangements to secure the desired divine help, or even advise a distinct and ‘safe’ sphere to God (as in the temple principle), thus eventually rendering him a functionary of their interests and identity politics; seeking protection for the sake of self-enclosure, guidance for the sake of the constitution of a ‘moral self’,15 and so on. The perversion of the religion of the original state eventually amounts to the domestication of God. Bonhoeffer senses this when he compares religion to circumcision as a symbol of a self-assuring identity politics: ‘Freedom from peritome is also freedom from religion.’16 In the letters that surround the poem, Bonhoeffer identifies a number of problems that are typically associated with the homo religious, in particular the problems of religious inwardness, individualism, and metaphysics.17 In regards to the problem of individualism, Bonhoeffer refers to the ‘soteriological egotism’ of the religious person – save my soul and may perish the world – which he finds so refreshingly absent from the Old Testament in particular, where salvation is conceived as a social and communal event.18 Yet, there is more to this problem of individualism than the salvation egotism described. I’d like to suggest an intermediary interpretative step that, although not explicitly taken by Bonhoeffer, allows us to see how two of his lines of thought are conceptually interwoven. Bonhoeffer’s criticism of religious individualism is, as I will attempt to demonstrate, in an interesting way related to his persistent emphasis on undivided wholeness as the hallmark of the Christian calling for a life responsible to God.19 To understand how religious individualism and the failure to live an unsegregated life (as a di-psychos: a man with two souls in his chest20) are connected is to understand the way in which the call to wholeness and perfection is mirrored by, and rooted in, God’s own being: ‘You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect’ (Mt. 5.28). As Luther famously put it: man is a rational animal, who possesses a ‘fabricating heart’. Anticipating by centuries Feuerbach’s idea of religion as ‘projection’, Luther’s notion of the human heart as a fabrication plant of gods21 can be understood as a critical theological reading of

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the classical pantheon where the individual gods appear at first as simple names for human passions: Irene, Eris, Eros, and so forth. Religion is bound to serve human needs and affections, because the venerated gods arise from these in the first instance.22 Accordingly, the religious way of ‘coming to God in hours of need’, as Bonhoeffer’s poem expresses it, comes with a natural (i.e. inherent) tendency to eventually reduce God to small capitals. Religion tends towards individualism precisely to the degree in which it treats God as a functionary, like any one god of the pantheon of gods that were all neatly assigned their respective and limited spheres of competence. In contrast to such an individualizing account, the Biblical God is characterized by an all-embracing perfection and singularity: God is a giver of daily bread, but not reducible to a bread-god; God is granting procreative blessing, but he is still not a fertility god; God may at times fight for Israel, but he is far from being a war-mongering god. The complexity, comprehensiveness, and perfection of the Biblical God is, then, mirrored in the calling of his people to be whole and perfect: tamim (Hebrew), teleios (Greek) – a concept that Bonhoeffer never tired of stressing. The followers of the Biblical God are called to be ‘perfect’ in that they refuse to separate their lives into individual self-enclosed spheres – as though they had to satisfy the demands of various deities who each rule over just one respective sphere with their own demand and autonomous rationality. ‘The “religious act” is’, as Bonhoeffer puts it, ‘always something partial; “faith” is something whole, involving the whole of one’s life.’23 This wholeness of human life that comes as a gift of the gospel, restoring human beings to their created un-dividedness, at the same time rules out ‘inwardness’ as a special anthropological faculty or sphere in which religion is at home ‘within’ the human being. ‘The Bible does not recognize our distinction between the outward and the inward . . . It is always concerned with anthropos teleios, the whole man . . . The discovery of the so-called inner life dates from the Renaissance, probably from Petrarch. The ‘heart’ in the biblical sense is not the inner life, but the whole man in relation to God.’24 As regards to the ‘metaphysical’ problem associated with religion, we are reminded of Bonhoeffer’s distinction between a ‘knowing of God’ (‘Wissen um Gott’) and ‘knowing God’ (‘Gott kennen’). This he had borrowed from Luther’s exegesis of a distinctive Hebrew term for knowing, yada, as an intimate form of loving-knowing that could even be used to describe the sexual act (Adam ‘knew’ his wife, Gen. 4.1).25 It is precisely because the former ‘metaphysical’ type of knowledge can never reach beyond the deus absconditus, the anonymous God whose presence is perceived as ambiguous – where threat and promise are never

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disentangled, never certain, never clear – that this type of knowledge yields religion as a means of constant and recurrent appeasement. A third characteristic of the theological predicament of the religious person is that he or she notoriously misses out on God the question and interrogator, by stylizing him merely as answer and answerer. Here, Bonhoeffer speaks out against the existentialist credo that regards ‘religion a precondition of faith’,26 against the claim that the ‘addressability’ needs to precede the address, and that the question must be prior to the answer. In a move characteristic already of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer reverses the existentialist order. For him, Christ’s calling is authoritative in that it generates the need, wish, and will to follow the command – while at times explicitly rejecting the human need, wish and will to follow him as insufficient.27 Thus Christ becomes the one whose question becomes more determinative for his followers than the answers they receive from him to their own questions: ‘Can you not stay and watch with me for one hour?’ We need not go far today to appreciate the force of this reversal in the light of the contemporary tendency of Western churches to sell themselves as ‘experts in religion’, quality providers of ‘spirituality’, and to organize and present themselves like service-agencies whose efficiency and quality depend on the prior analysis of the wants and needs of their clientele. We may find it easy to despise the sometimes outrageous forms the commodification of religion takes on today.28 But in order to resist it, we may need an understanding and practice of Christianity as deep and challenging as Bonhoeffer’s. c. Religion as ‘sigh’: suffering with God Given Bonhoeffer’s analysis of the temptations of any religious life in the domain of the ‘natural’, i.e. this side of the fall, we are well advised to pay attention to the fact that just like the first stanza of the poem, the second begins with ‘men’: ‘Men go to God . . .’ Only in the last line are they then identified as ‘Christians’, but not so from the start. We are again reminded of a passage in Ethics, where Bonhoeffer stresses that what counts as Christian or worldly, cannot be decided in advance – it is only ever revealed in the moment of a concrete situation and therefore bears the corresponding challenge to be faithful to the gospel in the unpredictable and underivable newness that characterizes the life of discipleship.29 What is ‘Christian’ cannot be put in timelessly valid conceptual distinctions that can be known ex ante, but must emerge from responsible action in response to Christ’s own life. Even if the determining of the genuinely Christian remains a matter of active recognition and

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actual judgement, rather than a matter of pre-stabilized knowledge, it is, on the other hand, far from being opaque and mysterious. In fact, the poem states it with unambiguous clarity: it is the ‘standing by God in his suffering’ that characterizes Christians over any other potential denominator. In a lost letter by Eberhard Bethge in which he commented on the poem, the friend must have questioned the notion of ‘standing by’ as potentially too static. Bonhoeffer’s reply from 10 August alerts the friend to the following: ‘ “Stand by God” probably arose from thinking about the cross.’30 Jürgen Henkys points to the rich traditional background of this concept of ‘standing by God’ that must have triggered Bonhoeffer’s imagination here: starting from the Johannine portrayal of the scene under the cross,31 by way of the medieval sequence stabat mater dolorosa iuxta crucem lacrimosa, up to the influence of Bonhoeffer’s favourite hymn writer, Paul Gerhardt. The latter’s work became ever the dearer to Bonhoeffer during his imprisonment, and whose passion hymn, ‘O Sacred Head, now Wounded’,32 refers to Mary and John under the cross in his passion. ‘I wish to stand by you here, do not despise me’ (‘Ich will hier bei dir stehen, verachte mich doch nicht’).33 In his letter of 18 July, Bonhoeffer summarizes the uniqueness of the Christian life with the following definition: ‘Here is the decisive difference between Christianity and all religions: Man’s religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world: God is the deus ex machina. The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help.’34 In directing the attention to the suffering God, the second stanza hints at a crisis. In their turning to God, people eventually find – or shall we say, hit upon – a God who suffers. In spite of the quiet tone suggested by the parallelism with the first stanza, ‘Men go to God’, crisis looms large here. The God they eventually face is strangely different from the one they sought in the first place, a mighty provider of bread, shelter, meaning, and redemption. Instead, women and men find God ‘tormented by sin, weakness, and death’. In contrast to the first stanza’s emphasis on universality, ‘all do so, all’, this discovery must entail a discrimination; those among the multitude of religious beings reaching for the divine who are not put off by what they find in the suffering God and do not turn away, are eventually named ‘Christians’. These are marked as the ones who ‘stand by’ God in his hour of grieving. In characterizing Christians in this way, Bonhoeffer reveals his epistemological principle. ‘It is not the religious act that makes the Christian, but participation in the sufferings of God in the secular life’.35 What brings women and men to acknowledge the

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suffering God whom they encounter as their God is precisely their existential sharing in his very life, not finding a satisfactory answer to the philosophical question: can God suffer? Without the willingness to know the suffering God by sharing in his suffering, however, women and men are thrown back to an endlessly repetitive religious quest that never gets beyond the anonymous God that ‘exists’ rather than reveals himself.

III. The commonality of forgiveness
The most interesting move, however, is found at the end of the third stanza as the climax of the whole poem: ‘. . . both alike forgiving’. Just as in the German original, the English translation rhymes the last words of the respective stanzas – ‘unbelieving’, ‘grieving’, and ‘forgiving’. However, in the German, the final rhyme is not with ‘vergibt’ (‘forgiving’) but rather ‘beiden’ (‘alike’), rhyming with ‘Heiden’ (‘heathen’), and ‘Leiden’ (‘suffering’). In this climactic ending, Bonhoeffer stresses both the need for and the reality of forgiveness as a further commonality between Christians and others. As others share the religious quest, so too are they united in receiving the divine gift of forgiveness. To end with a need for forgiveness that frames both previous stanzas indicates an understanding of forgiveness not exhausted by reference to the atoning effect of Christ’s death for the individual. The striking and potentially perturbing point I believe Bonhoeffer is making here is this: Christians need to be forgiven not merely or primarily because of their involvement in human religion, but precisely as Christians, as those who are willing to suffer with God and perhaps do amazingly unselfish things along this way. To understand this point, we must briefly turn to Bonhoeffer’s biography. Bonhoeffer could not help but find the poor, despised, and homeless God (according to Matthew 25) in the fate of the victims of an evil regime. He realized that for him, as a German Christian under Hitler, standing by God would have to mean sharing in God’s suffering in and through the suffering of his covenantal people. As Bonhoeffer declared in 1935, following the propagation of the Nuremberg laws, ‘Only those who shout for the Jews are permitted to sing Gregorian chants!’36 Bonhoeffer was keenly aware that ‘shouting for the Jews’ would eventually lead to his own suffering and he was willing to take this on. But he also came to realize that standing by the suffering God, and

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coming to the aid of those in whom God suffers, would inevitably lead to a further, more outrageous and demanding calling: the calling to ‘take on guilt’ on behalf of others.37 For example, ‘Operation Seven’, in which Bonhoeffer smuggled Jewish individuals out of Germany as an undercover agent of the Secret Service, would have been unthinkable without the willingness to fake documents, deceive and lie to frontier guards, and so forth. Belonging to Christ under Hitler pushed Bonhoeffer far beyond his comfort zone as a dutiful theologian and Christian. Yet he understood this was the only way in which he could actually remain a Christian, ‘standing by God in his hour of grieving’. Anything else would have been a flight from responsibility and eventually from God. My suggestion is that these observations help us understand the emphasis on God’s forgiving mercy in the final line of the poem – although this is not to imply that Bonhoeffer was simply organizing the poem according to his own personal experiences or longings. The weight given to the last line is wholly in keeping with his more principled considerations elsewhere. In his Ethics, for example, Bonhoeffer repeatedly notes how vital it is for Christians to leave all judgement to God and his mercy, instead of anticipating it by attempt to establish in advance that a particular course of action must be deemed sound, right, and justified.38 Christian existence is, therefore, marked by a distinctive risk, according to Bonhoeffer: not merely the risk of suffering, but also to need forgiveness in a more unsettling way than those who are primarily concerned about their own integrity, purity and untroubled identity.

IV. Religious super-sessionism or theology of the cross?
When I first approached this poem, admittedly, I thought Bonhoeffer had the order of the stanzas not quite right. At first sight, a reversed order of stanzas two and three would seem closer to theological common sense, resulting in a far more familiar argument: 1. Humans are hopelessly religious, Christians and non-Christians alike. They naturally pray to God as creatures, but also as sinners who tend to manipulate God or even ‘fabricate gods’ according to their own desires and wishful imagination.

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2. Hence the need for the great reversal: Instead of men-to-God, the movement must be from God to men – as God’s own response to the shortcoming of human religion. Christianity then, in acknowledging this reversal, is established as a thing beyond and above religion, if not as anti-religion. 3. From this would then neatly follow what the second stanza describes as a final climax: Those who have learned to overcome religion are thereby ‘empowered’ to aid God in helping to overcome the suffering in the world.

If a reordering of stanzas two and three would seem to make theological common sense and would, in addition, lend itself nicely to a Trinitarian scheme of Creator, Redeemer, and Transformer of mankind, why does Bonhoeffer resist this obvious ordering? From the numerous corrections made to the draft version, we have ample evidence that he had been indeed tempted by a more conventional rationale at first, and that the final form of the poem was rather wrought from him. In the draft version, the last line of the second stanza read: ‘Christians grasp their salvation in God’s suffering’39 – much closer to the conventional account of ‘accepting’ the efficacy of Christ’s atoning death for one’s own individual salvation. What led Bonhoeffer eventually to abandon the conventional scheme is, I believe, owed to his commitment to the theologia crucis tradition. The most obvious ordering of the poem’s dramatic unfolding would have resulted in a triumphalist account of Christianity. Not only would it have exalted Christians over non-Christians, but also suggested Christianity’s super-session of religion per se: on this reading, Christians may start out as religious beings, but having been converted through God’s own initiative, they would eventually leave behind religion as a premature form of dealing with the divine. In this scheme, forgiveness, then, would be less a constant mark of the Christian life and more a way station, tied and confined to a shrunken moment of justification that is then ‘put in effect’ in practice to enable a noble self-sacrificial attitude. However, as Bonhoeffer understood, such a supersessionist account of religion would not only compromise the need for forgiveness or foster arrogance towards others who are deemed ‘still’ religious, it would also compromise what Bonhoeffer emphasized as the need to be faithful to the earth. The idea of a transcending religion as the elemental man-to-God movement eventually would compromise human creatureliness itself. It would make us forget that women and men are created nepheschim, throaty animals whose bodily and spiritual needs are not to be transcended in a quest towards autonomy and self-sustenance, but are precisely there to be satisfied by the Creator and Redeemer of all things. Creatures have no business in

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superseding the petition of the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Give us today our daily bread’. Even the Eucharistic consummation of the bread of life remains, after all, a bodily, sensual, ‘throaty’ experience.

V. Restored creatureliness: neither super-religion nor anti-religion
To sum it up to this point: according to Bonhoeffer, we encounter religion in the ambiguity of being both a genuine reflection of our creatureliness and an expression of the human drive to secure one’s own life. While the heathens are seen as religious in a total sense, ‘lost in religion’ as it were, in terms of a complete immersion into it, Christians are to take and are given to take a stand both inside and outside religion: when Bonhoeffer calls this stance outside religion ‘metanoia’ – away from the organizing of oneself as sinner, penitent or saint – he is not speaking out against religion or proclaiming Christianity as antireligion. The Christians’ staying by God in his suffering is rather transreligious: neither religious nor anti-religious; it is a form of existence sui generis that does not result from a criticism of religion or the abandoning of it, but from the listing to Christ’s call to stay with him in the garden as something that is simply beyond anything a religious mind could possibly think up. Yet, for Bonhoeffer, the trans-religious standing by God opens up a renewed appreciation of the natural, earthly, thisworldly. It even opens up a new practice of religion – a practice of religion that is incorporating the two other motions in its own life. We can take an illustration of this point from two of Bonhoeffer’s other poems. In ‘The Powers of Good’, the third stanza reads: ‘Should it be ours to drain the cup of grieving . . . we will not falter, thankfully receiving all that is given by thy loving hand.’ And the fourth stanza reads: ‘But should it be thy will once more to release us to life’s enjoyment and its good sunshine, that which we learned from sorrow shall increase us, and all our life be dedicated as thine.’ While the third stanza envisions Bonhoeffer’s own faithful ‘standing by God’, not shying away from partaking in God’s suffering, the subsequent stanza is surprising as it speaks out in hope of a resumed enjoyable life, although not as a superseding of the former suffering, but as a ripe fruit of the former. ‘All our life as thine’ – this we may take a shortcut depiction of the new, restored, and converted religion of Christianity that does ‘go to God’ without rendering him ‘one of the

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gods: as problem solver, sunshine maker, and health restorer. The line seems to envision a sort of converted religion in that it takes the creaturely goods that humans may and should desire, pray and hope for, not as occasions to eventually forget about God once these are received, but precisely as occasions to dedicate ‘all our life as thine’. To put the same idea in traditional Augustinian terms, the new, restored religion of the Christian faith alerts human beings to the beauty of the created goods whose using (uti ) will be itself a matter of enjoying (frui ) God – the very same thing that the trans-religious act of staying by God in His suffering is teaching and instilling in those who partake in it. A similar thrust can be observed in the poem that accompanied the same letter as ‘Christians and Pagans’ on 8 July 1944: ‘Who am I?’ Read from the perspective of the homo religiosus, we would have expected the last line of the poem to offer a solution to the author’s nagging question: when the God who truly knows us is to finally reveal to us our true identity. But, oddly, Bonhoeffer contents himself with a mere address of trust: ‘Thou knowest, O God, I am thine’. To know that God knows is enough. God-knowledge need not become self-knowledge in order to be validated in the here and now. It is enough to be ‘in God’, in his hands, embedded in his zachar, his divine remembering: there, humans can live in the midst of their unrest, nagging questions, and unresolved tensions. Such life means to assume the place assigned to us as creatures – as it was symbolized in the religion of the original state of righteousness under the tree of knowledge. In this eon, though, we will have to bear in mind that genuine creatureliness is itself a miracle, a form of existence made possible in and through Christ as the one that restores the creaturely naïveté to those who live a ‘natural life’. This is literally a second naïveté that comes second in the order of reception – it is adopted by our being adopted by Christ first – but is also secondary in the sense of being a necessary corollary of the former. Without such christologically mediated this-worldliness, any appreciation of the natural love of the earth, and passion for the neighbour, would remain pagan, while the focus on Christ would remain Gnostic, oblivious of incarnation, cross, resurrection, and ascension. We see Bonhoeffer’s diagnosis in his prison correspondence that we are heading towards a ‘religion-less’ age,40 and his commending of ‘non-religious’ modes of proclamation41 need to be carefully related to the threefold account of religion that we suggested. Within this threefold account, it is obvious that Bonhoeffer’s critical emphasis targets the second mode: religion as strategy, and in particular the form it adopted in the history of Christianity since the time of the Renaissance. Only

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the deus ex machina as a working hypothesis has worn off,42 and only the domesticating form of religion is to be abandoned in a religion-less Christianity, while the first type of religion will remain a factor, as long as human beings are sojourners on this earth: crying for God’s help in need is, of course, not alien even to those who have long abandoned God as a working hypothesis for their explaining the world. Bonhoeffer’s caveat for the Church in regards to its proclamation or pastoral strategies remains pressing in both cases: whether or not the religious a priori is in the process of withering or can, indeed, ever wither, it will be decisive for the Church not to rely on this religious a priori anyway: not to exploit an artificially nourished ‘sense of ultimate dependency’ or the weak hours that befall every human being, but rather to proclaim Christ as the one who confronts human pride, calls on whatever human gifts are there, and transforms them into the likeness of his image. The idea of a non-religious Christianity relates precisely to this strategic chastity that Bonhoeffer prescribes to the Church, and which our churches have found so hard to keep. The exciting turn in Bonhoeffer’s theology of religion, as it is represented in our poem is, however, that trusting in Christ, living in Christ, and suffering with Christ will eventually also restore religion to us creatures, and us creatures to religion. It will initiate us into ways of crying for help without reducing God to a problem solver, into ways of asking for bread without succumbing to greed, and ways of observing the laws of nature and history without divinizing them, celebrating their autonomy or our own sensus historicus.

VI. The paradigm of liturgy in a ‘religion-less’ world
Indicative of this hopeful turn is the third stanza of the poem. We first notice how the grammatical subject changes: from men to God, who was part of the predicate in the first two stanzas. The third stanza relates the characterizing of God’s activities to both previous stanzas and their respective domains: the God that ‘goes to men in their distress’ serves them with his atoning death at the cross and forgiveness, but he also ‘feeds them’ with bread. God is, in other words, not alien to the human needs that the homo religiosus articulates, when she ‘prays for bread’. Yet God chooses to answer this prayer by feeding the spirit alongside the body; he feeds the spirit, too, with his bread – that is, with Jesus himself and his Word (Jn. 6.32-58). Feeding humans with his word, God does

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not merely respond to their spiritual need and hunger, but challenges them together with the articulation of their needs. In this sense, we can say that in responding to human religion, God is at the same time overcoming it. Yet he overcomes religion not in a way that legitimizes any sort of Christian supersessionism, but rather by laying bare religion’s genuine domain: learning to live as creatures. By this, we are lead back to the first stanza which is to be read anew in the light of the third: by the power of the third stanza – the power of the Holy Spirit – religion as a ‘cry’ will be transformed into a restored creatureliness or a converted religion. This harks back to Luther’s image of the primal church in and of the garden, where the giving of the law was meant to provide Adam with a means of concrete worship in obedience, and where he would gather with his family under the tree of knowledge to have their liturgy there. Just as Luther imagined liturgy as the core enactment of the (primal) religion in the state of original righteousness, so Bonhoeffer reckons with the practice of liturgy in a religion-less time: ‘What do a church, a community, a sermon, a Christian life mean in a religion-less world?’43 In fact, it is in liturgy that we can see the double-coded nature of ‘religion’ as through a prism: on the one hand, liturgy is religion, as it represents the organized, concrete, external, physical, social side of Christianity; on the other hand, it is also anti-religion, as the very content of the preaching of divine grace and its reception by the congregation depends on God’s own activity. However, this latter fact does not demand the dissolution of the former either gradually or by revolutionary force (as the spiritualist movement in the Reformation era misunderstood). The very form of the liturgy, its rhythm, intervals, and so forth, we may call trans-religious as it goes beyond the sheer antinomy of pure religion and radical anti-religion. The very form of the liturgy, while in a sense being religious in itself (a ‘made’ ritual or ‘organized’ God encounter) takes the encounter eventually out of the hands of humans: a liturgical ‘agenda’ says what ‘is to be done’ as opposed to a pastor’s or congregation’s wilful fancy. This regularity and its shaping of time are structurally critical of human organizing and domesticating of the encounter with the divine. While we may think it is on us to ‘schedule’ worship, it is actually rather the liturgy that shapes our time – literally in the praying of the hours, but also in terms of structuring the day, the week, and the church year. This dialectic finds an echo in the Lord’s Prayer, where the petitions are not only framed and preceded by the plea for the coming of the kingdom, but are prescribed, in a sense, independently of the actual state of affairs: a Christian is required and used to pray for bread,

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even when not hungry, and perhaps fitted with a full storage room at home; she is used to pray for forgiveness even when not currently haunted by guilt or not even being aware of any recent trespasses; the petition on temptation does not have to be validated through a particular occasion on hand that might turn into a temptation. The Lord’s Prayer as the grammar of any Christian addressing and approaching of God contains religious petitions, but it is not a religious prayer. The individual petitions address individual human needs and predicaments, but they are united in their overall service to the coming of God’s Kingdom that is not a religious idea. The Lord’s Prayer trains disciples of the one who told them to pray like this in the second naïveté of a ‘converted’ religion or christologically mediated creatureliness.

VII. Nothing more and nothing less
The position and content of the third stanza reminds us again that what the second stanza emphasizes as distinctively Christian is not an achievement, although it is certainly a form of action; it is no claim to superiority, although certainly responsive to a calling from on high. The notion of ‘standing by God’ is itself indicative here. There is, as Bonhoeffer stresses, a certain passive aspect to it: ‘to let oneself be drawn into Jesus’ way’. ‘To be a Christian does not mean to be religious in a particular way, to make something of oneself (a sinner, a penitent, or a saint) on the basis of some method or other, but to be a man – not a type of man, but the man that Christ creates in us. It is not the religious act that makes the Christian but participation in the sufferings of God in the secular life.’44 Participating in the sufferings of God in the world, however, does not make one a bystander. It is active persevering in the face of potentially infinite impulses to flee. What Bonhoeffer recalls as having had in mind when composing this line, is the fraught abiding of Mary, the women, and John as recounted in Jn. 19.24f, who are described as ‘standing by the cross’. At one point in Bonhoeffer’s life, ‘standing by God’ actually took the shape of an action that he explicitly contrasted to fleeing: when his American friends invited him back to New York in 1939 for an extended lecture visit in order to protect him from likely threats in Germany, Bonhoeffer, after wrestling with himself for days, eventually came to a decision to return. In a farewell letter to Reinhold Niebuhr, he etched his thoughts: ‘I have made a mistake in coming to

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America. I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.’45 While the twists and turns of his own life helped Bonhoeffer understand that ‘standing by God in his trials’ can be daringly active, resulting perhaps in the most difficult, demanding, or even heroic deeds on behalf of ‘the least of these brothers and sisters of his’ (Matthew 25), his theological insights also compelled him to emphasize the same claim the other way round: no matter how outrageous, heroic, and praiseworthy the deeds that emerge from the Christian calling, their very essence is no more than simply standing by Christ, sharing in his life, his suffering, and the trials of his people. If this is the understanding of the Christian life, then there is nothing in it that claims merit or honour or favour with God or at least in one’s self-estimation. Nor is there anything to suggest that the idea of ‘making the world a better place’ could ever be the driving force of Christian action in the world.46 Such an idea would, for example, have rendered Operation Seven a futile if not ridiculous undertaking, as some of Bonhoeffer’s secular friends in the resistance movement actually saw it: why risk your life and potentially the future success of the attempts to end the nightmare for the sake of only a handful of Jewish lives? Bonhoeffer knew very well that the 14 people he managed to smuggle over the Swiss border would appear as nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands of Jews tortured and killed in the concentration camps. Yet, it needed to be done, as fleeing their request for help would have meant fleeing from Christ’s suffering and hence from his own identity as a Christian. For it is not by success,47 or any other scale that the Christian is measured: no more and no less is asked from a Christian than standing by God in his suffering – which is Bonhoeffer’s version of ‘faith active in love’ (Gal. 5.6). ‘I discovered later and I’m still discovering right up to this moment that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith . . . By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely in the arms of God, taking seriously not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world – watching with Christ in Gethsemane.’48 As this was what he regarded the only ‘prerogative’ of Christians, Bonhoeffer understood that to want Christianity to be more, whether a ‘superior’ religion or an ‘anti-religion’, would, in effect, be less.

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Notes
1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

DBW 8, p. 399. LPP, p. 361. LPP, p. 279. Robertson’s translation opted for ‘Christians and Others’ – a title that underplays the emphasis on the religious characterization of those ‘others’; Nancy Lukens’ new translation in DBWE 8 sensitively suggests ‘Christians and Heathens’ as the more inclusive alternative to the more pejorative ‘Pagans’ or the underdetermined notion of ‘Non-Christians’. Karl Barth, ChD I/2 §17, pp. 280–361. Barth, ChD I/2, p. 297. It must be said, though, that Barth qualifies his negative attitude to religion as a specifically theological point as opposed to a general value judgement. He eventually even allows for a way in which the Christian faith can be called ‘the true religion’, precisely as it means to ‘listen to the divine revelation’ over against one’s own natural religious assumptions and strivings. Barth arrives at the following dialectical statement: ‘The abolishing of religion by revelation need not mean only its negation: the judgement that religion is unbelief. Religion can just as well be exalted in revelation, even though the judgement still stands’ (Barth, ChD I/2, p. 326). LPP, pp. 361–62. We notice another commonality with Barth at this point, which at the same time highlights the difference of the two authors’ approaches. Like Bonhoeffer, Barth stresses the way in which what is said theologically about religion must ‘similarly’ be applied to the Christian religion (Barth, ChD I/2, p. 326). Yet, what Barth has in mind here is precisely the critical judgement on religion that affects Christians like any other religious people when they lapse back into manipulative attempts of assuring themselves of divine aid or even of organizing their own salvation. In contrast, as will be discussed later, Bonhoeffer understands the commonality of religion not only or primarily in a negative sense but in a twofold way that acknowledges the critical side but also appreciates the creaturely aspect in this universal phenomenon. GF, p. 142. Bernd Wannenwetsch, ‘Luther’s Moral Theology’, in The Cambridge Companion to Luther (ed. D. McKim; Cambridge: CUP, 2002) pp. 120–35. cf. Wannenwetsch, ‘Luther’s Moral Theology’, pp. 124–26. DBWE 6, pp. 173–74. LPP, p. 280. Bernd Wannenwetsch, ‘Responsible Living or Responsible Self? Bonhoefferian Reflections on a Vexed Moral Topic’, in Studies in Christian Ethics 18:3 (2005), pp. 125–40. LPP, p. 281. LPP, pp. 285–86. LPP, pp. 286, 336–37. ‘This concept of responsibility denotes the complete wholeness and unity of the answer to the reality that is given to us in Jesus Christ, as opposed to the partial answers that we might be able to give for example, from considerations of usefulness, or with reference to certain principles’ (DBWE 6, p. 254). James 1.8, referred to in DBWE 6, p. 81.

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21. ‘To have a god is nothing else than to trust and believe him with our whole heart. As I have often said, the trust and faith of the heart alone make both God and an idol’ (Martin Luther, ‘Large Catechism’, in The Book of Concord. The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (ed. T. G. Tappert; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1959), p. 365). 22. Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth (trans. Susanne K. Langer; New York: Harper and Row, 1946). 23. LPP, p. 362. 24. LPP, p. 346. 25. Bonhoeffer articulates his own version of this difference in his Ethics when he characterizes the difference that the fall makes as a way of falling from ‘knowing God’ as knowing nothing but God – including knowing oneself and the world ‘in God’ – to the usurpation of the knowledge of good and evil. ‘The original comprehending [Begreifen] of God, human beings, and things has now become a sacrilegious grasping [Sichvergreifen] of God, human beings, and things.’ DBWE 6, pp. 308, cf. pp. 301–38. 26. LPP, p. 329. 27. DBWE 4, 57–83. 28. cf. Bernd Wannenwetsch, ‘Inwardness and Commodification: How Romantic Hermeneutics Prepared the Way for the Culture of Managerialism’, in Studies in Christian Ethics 21:1 (2008), pp. 28–46. 29. DBWE 6, pp. 266–69. 30. LPP, p. 383. 31. ‘But standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary, the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to this mother: Woman, behold, your son.’ Jn. 19.25ff, RSV. 32. ‘O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden’, Evangelisches Gesangbuch, no. 85, v. 6. 33. GF, p. 141. 34. LPP, p. 361. 35. LPP, p. 361. 36. Burton Nelson, ‘The Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’, in The Cambridge Companion to Dietrich Bonhoeffer (ed. John W. de Gruchy; Cambridge: CUP 1999), p. 35. 37. DBWE 6, pp. 275–76. 38. DBWE 6, p. 284. 39. GF, p. 140. 40. LPP, p. 279. 41. LPP, pp. 280–81, 285–86. 42. LPP, p. 360. 43. LPP, p. 280. 44. LPP, p. 361. 45. Bonhoeffer, p. 655. 46. cf. Bonhoeffer’s allergy against Christian ‘campaigning’, DBWE 6, pp. 164, 355–56. 47. cf. Bonhoeffer’s ruminations on ‘success and failure’ as unsuitable criteria to judge (the moral quality of) a human life, DBWE 6, pp. 89–90. 48. LPP, p. 370.

10


‘Jonah’ Guilt and Promise 1 Stephen Plant

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‘Jona’ Sie schrieen vor dem Tod, und ihre Leiber krallten sich an den nassen, sturmgepeitschten Tauen, und irre Blicke schauten voller Grauen das Meer im Aufruhr jäh entfesselter Gewalten. ‘Ihr ewigen, ihr guten, ihr erzürnten Götter, helft oder gebt ein Zeichen, das uns künde den, der Euch kränkte mit geheimer Sünde, den Mörder oder Eidvergess’nen oder Spötter, der uns zum Unheil seine Missetat verbirgt um seines Stolzes ärmlichen Gewinnes!’ So flehten sie. Und Jona sprach: ‘Ich bin es! Ich sündigte vor Gott. Mein Leben ist verwirkt. Tut mich von Euch! Mein ist die Schuld. Gott zürnt mir sehr. Der Fromme soll nicht mit dem Sünder enden!’ Sie zitterten. Doch dann mit starken Händen verstießen sie den Schuldigen. Da stand das Meer.

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‘Jonah’ In fear of death they cried aloud and, clinging fast to wet ropes straining on the battered deck, they gazed in stricken terror at the sea that now, unchained in sudden fury, lashed the ship. ‘O gods eternal, excellent, provoked to anger, help us, or give a sign, that we may know who has offended you by secret sin, by breach of oath, or heedless blasphemy, or murder, who brings us to disaster by misdeed still hidden, to make a paltry profit for his pride.’ Thus they besought. And Jonah said, ‘Behold, I sinned before the Lord of hosts. My life is forfeit. Cast me away! My guilt must bear the wrath of God; the righteous shall not perish with the sinner!’ They trembled. But with hands that knew no weakness they cast the offender from their midst. The sea stood still. (Translation: John Bowden)

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I. Introduction
b. Megillah 31a – On the Day of Atonement we read ‘After the death’ [Lev. 16] and for haftarah, ‘For thus said the high and lofty one’ [Isa. 57.15]. At minchah we read the section of forbidden marriages [Lev. 18] and for haftarah the book of Jonah. (Directions in the Talmud for texts to be read at Yom Kippur).

Guilt and promise are at odds: guilt pulls life into the past, promise pushes life into the future. Guilt draws a life back to things that have been and that cannot be changed; promise directs a life forward to things that are not, but which can yet be. Yet though guilt and promise appear opposing forces, in God they are eventually reconciled. In the atonement effected by Jesus Christ, God leads human beings from sin to the promise of new life; in Him, guilt is transformed into promise. Bonhoeffer’s ‘Jonah’ is a poem in which the transformation of guilt into promise is transfixed in a moment of its happening; a moment in which a life configured by Jonah’s past sin is reconfigured towards its future by God’s promise. Bonhoeffer’s ‘Jonah’ imagines a crisis in which a past act which cannot be changed is placed humbly into the hands of God, who alone stills storms and calms seas. In confessing his guilt, Jonah confesses God.2 In this poetic renarration of an episode in the biblical book of Jonah – at a point in time when Bonhoeffer himself was about to be cast into the malevolent sea of fin de règne Germany under National-Socialist tyranny – we sense Bonhoeffer entrusting his life to the judgement and promise of God. It is tempting, in reading Bonhoeffer’s ‘Jonah’, to be drawn into a quest for meaning; but whose quest, and which meaning? The quest and the meaning of the author/s of the biblical book of Jonah? . . . Bonhoeffer’s quest for meaning in the biblical book of Jonah? . . . Or our quest for meaning in Bonhoeffer’s poem? These are seductive questions: but if Bonhoeffer is to be believed, all quests for meaning – existential and hermeneutical – need to be understood in the light of what in the scriptures is called promise. Writing not long before he wrote ‘Jonah’, Bonhoeffer warned Bethge: In these turbulent times we repeatedly lose sight of what really makes life worth living. We think that, because this or that person is living, it really makes sense [Sinn] for us to live too. But the truth is that if this earth was

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good enough for the man Jesus Christ, if such a man as Jesus lived, then, and only then, has life a meaning [Sinn] for us . . . The unbiblical idea of ‘meaning’ [Sinnes] is indeed only a translation of what the Bible calls ‘promise’ [Verheißung].3

The search for meaning and the hearing of promise are related but not identical events. The point is amplified by Heinz Eduard Tödt, who explains that for Bonhoeffer, the term promise ‘points out that something, brought from God by the gospel, comes to meet the human being, whereas meaning is something that the human being looks for in human life and its surroundings, in the past, the present, and the future – often enough in vain.’4 A promise, then, is something given and received, while meaning is something one searches for oneself. Accepting this, we may decide that in reading Bonhoeffer’s ‘Jonah’, a distinction needs to be drawn between seeking meaning and being receptive to promise. Good textual exegetes come in many forms and may hold many convictions; but promise is something one only prepares for in a mind-frame of what Simone Weil called attente de Dieu. It is this sense of waiting on God that Bonhoeffer’s poem conveys, and which commentary on the poem should pray, if dimly, to reflect. The essay that follows proceeds in three stages. In the first stage, I want to turn attention away from Bonhoeffer’s poem towards the biblical book of Jonah. My intention here is to situate Bonhoeffer in a community of interpretation and to probe the question of why this particular book was the one that proved fit for purpose at this decisive moment in his life. Turning back to Bonhoeffer, I next want to situate the poem in time and place before, thirdly, reading the poem in light of the themes of guilt and promise adumbrated above – themes brought into focus through Bonhoeffer’s understanding of vicarious representative action (Stellvertretung). These are not the only interesting or possibly fruitful directions one might take in reading the poem, but they are, I hope, ones that arise naturally from the text of the poem itself.

II. The Book of Jonah: a whistle-stop tour 5
Why Jonah? Of all the passages in all the books in all the Bible, Bonhoeffer walks in to this one: why? We can readily understand why a ‘profoundly biblical theologian’,6 at a key moment in his life, might use a biblical

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passage or a biblical book as a still to condense thoughts and feelings to their essence; but what was it about this book that drew Bonhoeffer to it? In early December 1943, Bonhoeffer wrote that for some months ‘[my] thoughts and feelings seem to be getting more and more like those of the Old Testament, and in recent months I have been reading the Old Testament much more than the New’.7 And yet there is no indication that Bonhoeffer had the book of Jonah in mind. Prior to writing the poem, Jonah’s story left scarcely any trace on Bonhoeffer’s theology. Bonhoeffer neither underlined nor made marginal notes on the text of Jonah in his ‘Lutherbibel’; he mentions Jonah in an undergraduate essay in connection with repentance;8 in 1937 he again mentions Jonah, this time as God’s witness, in a circular letter to the Finkenwalde brethren;9 and a year later we once again find a passing mention in a lecture on theology in the Confessing Church.10 But compared to his engagement with the book of Genesis, or with the Psalms, or with the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, or in his sermons with other Major and Minor Prophets, Bonhoeffer’s engagement with the book of Jonah prior to writing the poem appears, on the basis of what he wrote, to have been slight. At least once Bonhoeffer had unflatteringly been likened to Jonah – when Karl Barth instructed Bonhoeffer in London to stop ‘playing Elijah under the juniper tree or Jonah under the gourd’ and to return to Germany ‘with all guns blazing’11 – but this was more than a decade before the poem was written and refers to quite a different episode in the story of Jonah to that taken up by Bonhoeffer in 1944. Which still leaves the question ‘why Jonah?’ The biblical book of Jonah has several unusual features. The eponymous prophetic books of the Bible generally contain three elements, though typically not in equal proportions: they contain direct and indirect words given by God through the prophet to the people; words addressed by the prophet to God (for example in prayer or in lament); and material relating to the biographical experiences of the prophet. The book of Jonah has all three, but material detailing the biography of Jonah is proportionately its main focus. This makes it – by comparison with the other prophetic books – the only prophetic book to be primarily about the prophet. In his Ethics Bonhoeffer had argued that, for Christians, what matters is not to pattern one’s life on some biblical character – such as Abraham or Peter – but to be conformed to the ‘Gestalt’ – the form or character – of Jesus Christ.12 Does Bonhoeffer now identify himself with a moment in Jonah’s story, an aspect of his experience or a feature of his character? A second unusual feature of Jonah is that it is the only prophetic book in which the prophet is sent to proclaim his message in a foreign

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land. When Bonhoeffer arrived in America in 1939 it immediately became clear to him that he had made a mistake. One of the reasons he gave to Reinhold Niebuhr for his decision to return to Germany was that he felt the necessity of living through ‘this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany’.13 Is it possible that Bonhoeffer should see himself in the story of a prophet whose calling was to a nation other than his own?14 A third unusual aspect concerns what genre Jonah belongs to. The book can be broken down into several episodes: Jonah’s call and decision to run from it; the sea voyage and its stormy outcome; the fish that swallows Jonah and his prayer in the fish’s belly; Jonah’s prophesy to the Ninevites and their repentance; Jonah’s anger with God’s mercy; God’s dialogue with Jonah seated beneath a miraculous bush. But what sort of book is it? If it contains too much biographical material and too little oracular text to fit neatly with the other Minor Prophets, is it best classified as history, or legend, didactic story, parable or allegory? Or is it a ‘chowder’ of several genres?15 One intriguing possibility is that it takes the form – very loosely speaking – of a ‘midrash’ either on the miraculous exchanges between God and Elijah in the book of Kings or more likely, on Exod. 34.6–7a, cited in Jon. 4.2b as a summation of the book’s message: ‘The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin’. The body of biblical commentary termed ‘midrash’ arose, properly speaking, in the Rabbinic schools in the early centuries of the Christian era. They varied in form and content, but tended to be characterized by use of story to convey meaning and by the use of questions that, by interrogating characters in the story, serve as a literary device to put the hearer in the place of the character questioned. Is this method foreshadowed in Jonah? There are fourteen questions in the book of Jonah: seven addressed to Jonah, and seven addressed by Jonah to God – a symmetry that can hardly be unintended. This suggests that the book was developed as an interactive story to be spoken and heard with a view to instructing listeners willing to participate in its narrative twists and turns. Finally, the book of Jonah is unusual because of the extent of uncertainty about its setting. Other prophetic books, to be sure, lack an explicit social and political context, but their contents usually lead commentators to agree about their likely Sitz im Leben. The text of Jonah, however, leads to no such consensus about when, where or why it was written. Though it is clear from Jon. 1.1, and from the reference to Jonah the prophet in 2 Kgs 14.23–7 that it is intended to be set in the 8th

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century BCE, the book itself is adrift from a historical context. It is likely to have been written towards the end or soon after the end of the exile. But – even for the shrewdest commentator – fixing its date can only be a matter of guesswork. Which leaves us still with the question why did this book draw Bonhoeffer in?

III. Jonah: a biblical text and its afterlives
If Bonhoeffer himself won’t give us a direct answer to that question, perhaps an answer is suggested by the history of the book’s interpretation. Fortuitously, just such a history exists: in colourful imagery invited by the fabulous qualities of the book of Jonah itself, Sherwood’s A Biblical Text and its Afterlives: The Survival of Jonah in Western Culture gives us a glimpse ‘into the Taylor’s shop and gourmet restaurant that is the interpretive history of the book of Jonah’.16 Sherwood’s analysis helps us to see Bonhoeffer within the community of readers stretching from the Patriarchs, through Rabbis and Reformers, and on into the 19th century, when the plausibility or implausibility of a sea creature that could swallow a man became a battleground for those slugging out the factual truth of the biblical record. What is often true in the history of biblical interpretation is particularly true in the case of Jonah: ‘knowledge and meaning are agglutinative . . . new products can be made by bringing together existing traditions and recombining them’.17 Readers of Jonah, even new readers interpreting the story in new situations, stand on the shoulders of readers before them. For the Patriarchs, Jonah and Jesus were typological twins.18 This was not only because, as Augustine observed, ‘[t]o the healthy and pure internal eye [Christ] is everywhere’,19 but also because the gospels themselves warranted typological comparisons between Jonah and Jesus. For Luke the correlation has to do with judgement and repentance: ‘just as Jonah became a sign to the people of Nineveh, so the Son of Man will be to this generation’ (Lk. 11.30). Matthew shares with Luke an emphasis on judgement but adds, ‘just as Jonah was for three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth’ (Mt. 12.40),20 drawing an analogy between Jonah in the whale and Jesus in the tomb. From the loam of these typologies, elaborate analogies bloomed for both Patriarchs and Rabbis in which ship, sailors,

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waves, and fish became symbolically employed: the ship became the Church, humanity, or the synagogue; the sailors became the apostles, Romans, or Jews opposed to Christ; the storm became humankind’s affliction, the storms that shipwrecked Peter or Paul, or the work of the devil; the fish came to symbolize the devil, its jaws representing the jaws of hell, or even the concept of time, consuming all things; the Ninevites then represented either the gentiles or (for Bede) the splendid Church. However, above all, Jonah proved a wonderfully malleable symbol. For most of the Patriarchs, Jonah represented Christ (the exception was Augustine, who saw in him both Christ and fleshly Israel); for some Rabbis, and for later Christian interpreters, Jonah was the Torahbound Jew, a personification of cruel law, clinging to the letter while God goads him with mercy. For Jerome he was a nationalist, defending Israel against the widening of God’s mercy to mere gentiles; while for Luther, struck by the animistic reference of his Hebrew name, Jonah was the dove who pointed towards the Holy Spirit. It matters little how much or, as seems more likely, how little of this history of interpretation Bonhoeffer was conscious of or influenced by in his own appropriation of Jonah. What matters are the possible interpretations that this history invites. Sherwood’s conclusion is that: [m]eme-like, the book seems to cue in a whole range of survivals/mutations: with its chowder-like mixtures of death wishes and aqua-psalms and shivering ships, the book spawns comic riffs on prophets ‘snoring slobberingly’ and serious meditations on the alienation and powerlessness of the human protagonist; and by anticipating the alliterative, cartoonish, paranomastic, and associative linguistic effects through which the rabbis, Auster and the Gawain-poet will go on prolonging and stretching the life of the ‘Word’, it seems to inaugurate and legitimate an expansive approach to interpretation.21

Jonah is a questioning and non-conformist book that delights in questioning and non-conformist readings, a story begging to be remade and retold, a book richly empathetic to human beings and ‘lacking in reassurance of the comfort of the divine’.22 Why did Bonhoeffer fix his eye on the book of Jonah? Might the answer simply be that it presents an especially suitable surface for a palimpsest on which Bonhoeffer could enscribe his own meaning? That is part of the answer, but I do not think it is the whole answer. For that, we need to return to where we began, to the themes of guilt and promise in this episode in the book of Jonah and their resonance with Bonhoeffer’s own situation.

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IV. Bonhoeffer’s ‘Jonah’ in its Sitz im Leben
The catastrophic failure of the 20 July bomb plot set the scene for the events leading up to the composition of ‘Jonah’. Many whose involvement was immediately clear were unhesitatingly executed; others lasted only as long as their interrogation. The plotters were intelligent calculators of risk, and it was clear that it was only a matter of time before nooses tightened around all their necks. The Allied landings in Normandy and the inexorable advance of the Soviet army, however, meant that there was always a chance that the war would end before their execution. Bonhoeffer, aware of all the ramifications, worked on determinedly with his prison theology and waited to see what events would unfold. The answer came on 22 September 1944, when the Gestapo discovered records of the Abwehr conspiracy, which General Beck – against the advice of Hans von Dohnanyi that they should be destroyed – had ordered to be held in a branch of the Military Intelligence in Zossen. Probably acting on information yielded in the files, on 1 October the Gestapo arrested Bonhoeffer’s brother Klaus. A day later Corporal Knobloch, the guard with whom Bonhoeffer had planned to escape Tegel prison, called at the Schleicher home to say that Dietrich had called off escape plans to avoid making matters worse for Klaus and of placing his fiancée and family in further danger.23 The arrest of Dietrich’s brother in law, Rüdiger Schleicher, followed on 4 October and of his Confessing Church colleague Friedrich Justus Perels on 5 October. This was the date on which he wrote ‘Jonah’. Eberhard Bethge was arrested a few days later. Unaware that the snare was closing on Bethge himself, Bonhoeffer passed the poem to Maria von Wedemeyer with the instruction: ‘please type out the poem and send it to Eberhard. He’ll know who it’s from without being told’, adding ‘You may find it a trifle incomprehensible. Or will you?’24 On 8 October, as he had been expecting, Bonhoeffer was transferred to the Gestapo prison in the cellar of the Reich Central Security Headquarters at Prinz-Albrecht-Straße. He was able to send only one more poem beyond this before communication with his family ceased. The poem ‘Jonah’ can be placed, then, very precisely at the moment at which Bonhoeffer gave up his plans for escape and accepted the likelihood of death. It was written in the days in which he finally accepted what must for some weeks have been increasingly obvious, that his survival could only come about at the cost of unacceptable risk to others. But the urgency of this immediate context

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should not replace, but complement wider contextual cues. Bonhoeffer’s sense of responsibility extended beyond his immediate family and friends – to the conspiracy, to the Church, and to Germany. The essay for co-conspirators, ‘After Ten Years’ – which contained insights Bonhoeffer found important enough to incorporate into his Ethics – wrestled with the moral impact on the conspirators of a decade of secret opposition and dissimulation. And the Church, too, had failed, leading Bonhoeffer to draft a post-war confession of guilt. The likelihood of death acted as a lens focusing reflections on guilt and promise that had kept Bonhoeffer company since the early thirties.

V. Bonhoeffer’s ‘Jonah’
The poem is short – after ‘Christians and Pagans’, it is the next shortest of the prison poems. Its four stanzas, each of four lines, follow a disciplined ABBA rhyming pattern.25 Both the brevity of the poem and the tightness of its form help convey the tense mood of the poem’s subject matter, a tension emphasized by the staccato effect of some of the poem’s short phrases and sentences, e.g. in the last line of the third stanza, ‘Ich sündigte vor Gott. Mein Leben ist verwirkt’ (‘I sinned against God. My life is forfeit’). This is especially effective in the last line of the poem, in which Bonhoeffer uses a direct citation from the Lutherbibel: ‘Da stand das Meer’ – ‘the sea was still’. At key moments, such as the final line and in the preceding stanza when Jonah owns up to his responsibility for God’s anger saying ‘Ich bin es’ – ‘I am the one’ –, Bonhoeffer pares his language down to words of one syllable. If indeed Bonhoeffer is identifying with Jonah at this point, what is he guilty of? What is the sin to which Bonhoeffer owns up? In popular reception of the book (in medieval as well as modern times) Jonah and the whale have been as inseparable as Laurel and Hardy: the medieval scribes and modern children’s book illustrators had a whale of a time picturing one in particular of the book’s episodes. It is therefore striking that Bonhoeffer’s poem renarrates what is effectively seen in two of the drama-scenes of Jonah (Jon. 1.4-16), and concludes at the instant before the great fish rears its head. Possibly, in its title and leading character, Bonhoeffer’s poem evokes the whole drama of the book, but its focus is very narrowly on one aspect of Jonah’s story and its cut-off point – the storm stilled as Jonah sinks beneath the waves (v. 15) – seems quite deliberate in ignoring the book’s voracious co-star. Yet though Bonhoeffer decided to focus the

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action of the poem on vv. 4–15, it then follows the biblical account very faithfully. The biblical story is beautifully crafted in a symmetrical pattern: A. B. C. D. E. D. E. C. A.

The Lord hurls a storm The sailors pray The sailors act The sailors question Jonah Jonah speaks The sailors question Jonah Jonah speaks The sailors act The storm ceases

Bonhoeffer reduces the elements of the story somewhat, but retains the essential symmetry of the pericope: A. B. C. B. A.

The storm breaks The sailors pray Jonah speaks the sailors act The storm ceases

The first stanza describes, in compelling physical detail, a fearful storm that beats the ship in which Jonah is travelling. The second and the first two lines of the third stanzas are in direct speech reporting the prayer of the sailors asking that the guilty one be identified.26 In the following six lines, Jonah answers, first acknowledging his guilt, and then instructing the sailors to cast him overboard, since the pious shall not share the sinner’s fate. In the closing lines, trembling, the sailors cast Jonah overboard, and the sea is stilled. Bonhoeffer’s decision to end the poem before the prophet is saved from drowning focuses attention on Jonah’s willingness to sacrifice himself for his fellow travellers. The theme, in other words, is not so much Jonah’s salvation, but his willingness to die for the salvation of others, even though they are not fellow countrymen (since they have no knowledge of Yahweh until Jonah names Him). A natural supposition is that Bonhoeffer senses here an intimation of the conspirators’ willingness to sacrifice themselves for the German people. The fact that he cuts off the poem at v. 15 heightens the sense that this is what he intends to convey, since it means he does not attend to the sailors’ assertion of the sovereignty of Yahweh above all other gods in v. 16. Neither is this the only key theme excluded by the

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poem’s narrow focus: the narrator seems to draw everything towards the ‘punch-line’ in Jon. 4.2, which sums up the story with the mercy of Yahweh who may change his mind about punishing the sinful where there is true repentance.27 For Bonhoeffer, the penultimate note of guilt in the last line is followed not by the ultimate affirmation of God’s mercy, but with the more open end ‘the sea was still’. This is Jonah in close-up, with all attention focused on God’s judgement, a judgement expressed in the powerful imagery of the stilled sea. But the judgement Bonhoeffer is concerned with is not simply an event in which God and Jonah alone are involved: it is a judgement that impacts upon the sailors’ lives too. Jonah’s acknowledgement of guilt and his instruction to cast him overboard suggests both acknowledgement of guilt and a taking of responsibility for the lives of others. Described in this way, does Jonah appear to be an archetypal Stellvertreter – one who stands in place of others? Is Jonah’s action in telling the sailors to cast him overboard, an instance of Stellvertretung, of vicarious representative action?

VI. Guilt, promise and ‘the structure of responsible life’
‘Vicarious representative action’ was one of Bonhoeffer’s longest standing and most cherished theological and ethical ideas – one that he had been thinking through since writing Sanctorum Communio.28 The fullest expression of the theme, however, unfolds in the fragment ‘History and Good’ in Bonhoeffer’s Ethics. There, vicarious representative action is described as a form of responsible life, that is, of a life ‘lived in answer to the life of Jesus Christ’.29 Less complete forms of responsibility exist in other ethics, to be sure, but in the strict sense Bonhoeffer’s unfolding of ‘responsibility’ ‘denotes the complete wholeness and unity of the answer to the reality that is given to us in Jesus Christ’.30 Such responsibility is accountable not to criteria such as usefulness, or adherence to a principle (such as honour), or to an abstract ideal such as patriotism. It is accountable only to Jesus Christ in his ‘Yes and No to our life’. There are two aspects to this ‘representivity’. The first is that the vicarious representative represents Jesus Christ.31 This is because the Stellvertreter gives up any attempt to justify himself; ‘[r]ather’, continues Bonhoeffer, ‘I take responsibility and answer for Jesus Christ, and with that I naturally also take responsibility for the commission I have been charged with

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by him.’32 Yet, secondly, the vicarious representative also represents other people. Taking up responsibility is always something embedded in social structures – such as the family, government, or work place; responsibility is always responsibility for another person. Towards the end of the fragment,33 Bonhoeffer sums up his attempt to grasp the ‘structure of responsible life’ under the rubrics of ‘vicarious representative action, accordance with reality, [and] taking on guilt’34. Taking on guilt (‘Schuldübernahme’) rolls together a free acceptance of one’s own guilt and a taking on of the guilt of others (e.g., of church, or of nation).35 Bonhoeffer writes: Those who in acting responsibly take on guilt – which is inescapable for any responsible person – place this guilt on themselves, not on someone else; they stand up for it and take responsibility for it. They do so not out of a sacrilegious and reckless belief in their own power, but in the knowledge of being forced into this freedom and of their dependence on grace in its exercise.36

The poem ‘Jonah’ distils Bonhoeffer’s sense of what is involved in vicarious, representative action. In doing so, something of the flavour of Bonhoeffer’s action in taking responsibility transfers to his representation of Jonah, as an Islay malt whisky takes on the flavour of the sea beside which it is distilled and aged. If this is indeed what is going on in Bonhoeffer’s poem, then we have here a reading of the Jonah story in perfect harmony with the centuries-old Jewish tradition, prescribed by the Talmud, of reading Jonah on the festival of atonement.

Notes
1. This essay is a significantly revised version of a paper given on 6 January 2006, at the conference Bonhoeffer’s Theology through the Lens of His Poetry. I am grateful to all who commented on the paper, and in particular to Bernd Wannenwetsch for guidance in revising the text. 2. For a rich display of the profound interconnectedness of these two senses of ‘confession’, see Augustine, Confessions (trans. Henry Chadwick; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 3. DBW 8, p. 573; LPP, p. 391 – letter dated by Bethge 21 August 1944. 4. Heinz Eduard Tödt, Authentic Faith: Bonhoeffer’s Theological Ethics in Context (ed. Glen Harold Stassen; trans. David Stassen and Ilse Tödt; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), pp. 16–17.

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5. This section is indebted to several commentaries on the book of Jonah including: James Limburg, Jonah (London: SCM Press, 1993); R. B. Salters, Jonah & Lamentations (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1994); Jack M. Sasson, Jonah (New York: Doubleday, 1990); Jonathan Magonet, Form and Meaning: Studies in the Literary Techniques of the book of Jonah (Sheffield: Almond Press, 1983). 6. Gerhard Krause’s telling phrase in his entry on Bonhoeffer in the Theologische Realenzyklopädie, vol. 7, p. 57. 7. DBW 8, p. 226; LPP, pp. 156–57. For Bonhoeffer’s use of the Bible see Walter Harrelson, ‘Bonhoeffer and the Bible’, in The Place of Bonhoeffer (ed. Martin E. Marty; London: SCM, 1963), pp. 115–42; Stephen J. Plant, ‘Uses of the Bible in the Ethics of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Cambridge University, 1993; E.G. Wendel, Studien zur Homiletik Dietrich Bonhoeffers (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1985). For Bonhoeffer’s use of the Old Testament see Martin Kuske, The Old Testament as the Book of Christ (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976); and Martin Hohmann, Die Korrelation von Altem und Neuem Bund (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1979). 8. DBW 9, p. 263. 9. DBW 14, p. 286. 10. DBW 15, p. 424. 11. DBWE 13, pp. 31, 39; the instruction stung Bonhoeffer, who sent Barth’s letter to his father for an opinion. Franz Hildebrandt sometimes addressed Bonhoeffer as ‘my Dove’ (Jonah in Hebrew means ‘dove’), but this relates to their mutual pacifism. 12. See Plant, ‘Uses of the Bible’, pp. 79–154. 13. Bonhoeffer, p. 655. 14. The identification seems odder still if we recall that one of the explanations offered by some for why the book of Jonah was written is that its apparently universalist message was intended to counter the exclusivist outlook reflected in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. In a sermon of January 1936, and again at greater length in a Bible study given to students on 21 April 1936, Bonhoeffer drew from the story of Ezra and Nehemiah the theological conclusion that just as ‘the Jewish people must be pure because it is God’s own chosen people . . . God’s church-community may not be tainted through heathen elements’ (DBW 14, pp. 930–45). 15. Yvonne Sherwood, A Biblical Text and Its Afterlives: The Survival of Jonah in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 16. Sherwood, Biblical Text, p. 1. 17. Sherwood, Biblical Text, p. 5. 18. Sherwood, Biblical Text, pp. 11–21. 19. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine (trans. D.W. Robertson; New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), p. 13; cited in Sherwood, Biblical Text, p. 11. 20. Translations from the NRSV. 21. Sherwood, Biblical Text, p. 291. 22. Sherwood, Biblical Text, p. 291. 23. Bonhoeffer, pp. 826–28. The friendly guard, Knobloch is given the rank of ‘corporal’ by Bethge; in other accounts he is given the rank of ‘sergeant’. 24. LLC 92, p. 225. 25. This pattern is abandoned in LPP and replaced by an ABCB pattern in LLC 92, but retained in PPDB. 26. Sasson points out that Jonah here echoes the role played by storms in extra-biblical literature in the ancient world. The assumption that storms are called up by gods to punish evildoers was widespread (Sasson, Jonah, p. 90ff).

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27. Johann Christoph Hampe (PP), interprets the story in terms of the Church – recalling early Christian interpretation linking the story of Jonah to the sacrament of Baptism. Hampe even suggests equivalence between Jonah asleep in the ship’s hold while storms rage and the failure of the German Church to wake up to the storms of ideology and war. Edwin Robertson favours a more personal interpretation that connects Bonhoeffer’s intentions in the poem with his own role and that of his co-conspirators: ‘Bonhoeffer moves from punishment for his guilt, the sacrifice of his righteousness . . . to see that his death, like that of many others after the failure of the July bomb plot, is for the salvation of Germany.’ (PPDB, p. 99) 28. For this point, see DBWE 6, p. 257, n. 38. 29. DBWE 6, p. 254. 30. DBWE 6, p. 254. 31. DBWE 6, p. 255. 32. DBWE 6, pp. 255–56. 33. DBWE 6, p. 289. 34. DBWE 6, p. 289. 35. DBWE 6, p. 289 (see the footnote by the editor of the English translation, p. 288, n. 159). 36. DBWE 6, p. 282.

11


‘The Death of Moses’ Why Moses? Craig J. Slane

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‘Der Tod des Mose’ Auf dem Gipfel des Gebirges steht Mose, der Mann Gottes und Prophet. Seine Augen blicken unverwandt in das heilige, gelobte Land. Daß er auf das Sterben ihn bereite, tritt der Herr dem alten Knecht zur Seite, will auf Höhen, wo die Menschen schweigen selber ihm verheiß’ne Zukunft zeigen, breitet zu des Wandrers müden Füßen seine Heimat aus, ihn still zu grüßen, sie im letzten Atemzug zu segnen und dem Tod in Frieden zu begegnen. ‘Aus der Ferne sollst das Heil du sehen, doch dein Fuß soll nicht hinübergehen!’ Und die alten Augen schauen, schauen ferne Dinge wie im Morgengrauen. Staub von Gottes mächt’ger Hand geknetet Ihm zur Opferschale – Mose betet. ‘So erfüllst Du, Herr, was Du versprochen, niemals hast Du mir Dein Wort gebrochen. Ob es Deine Gnaden oder Strafen waren; immer kamen sie und trafen. Aus dem Frondienst hast Du uns gerettet, uns in Deinen Armen sanft gebettet, bist durch Wüste und durch Meereswogen wunderbar vor uns einhergezogen, hast des Volkes Murren, Schrein und Klagen überlange in Geduld getragen.

The Death of Moses

‘The Death of Moses’ On the summit of the mountain stands Moses, the prophet, in God’s hands. His eyes are steady and his vision clear, to see the holy, promised land appear. That he might for his death be ready, God held his aged servant steady. On the heights where no one goes, to him, the promised land God shows. Spread beneath the wanderer’s tired feet, lies the home he longs to greet, blessing it with his last breath, he is prepared in peace for death. ‘From afar, you see the saving work of my hand, but shall not enter, nor tread upon, the promised land.’ And the old eyes gazed upon the distant sight, appearing dimly in the morning light. Clay, moulded by God’s mighty hand, he was made a sacrificial vessel. Moses prayed: ‘Thus you fulfil what you have spoken, your word to me was never broken. Whether your grace or punishment was set, it always came and must be met. Out of the house of bondage have you set us free that we your belovéd children might be. Through raging waters and desert land wonderfully have you led us by the hand; the people’s grumbles, complaints and scorn, with patience you have graciously borne.

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Who Am I? Nicht durch Güte ließen sie sich leiten zu des Glaubensweges Herrlichkeiten, ließen Gier und Götzendienst gewähren statt vom Brot der Gnade sich zu nähren, bis Dein Zorn mit Pest und Schlangenbissen tiefe Lücken in Dein Volk gerissen. Des verheiß’nen Landes künft’ge Erben fielen als Empörer ins Verderben. In der Mitte ihrer Wanderschaft hast Du sie im Grimm hinweggerafft. Wolltest eins nur an den Deinen schauen Zuversicht und gläubiges Vertrauen. Aber alle, die Dir Treue schwuren, die am Schilfmeer Deine Macht erfuhren, von Dir haben sie ihr Herz gewandt; ihre Leiber deckt der Wüstensand. Die zu ihrem Heile Du geführt haben Aufruhr gegen Dich geschürt. Von dem einst begnadeten Geschlecht blieb Dir auch nicht einer treu und recht. Als die Väter Du dahingenommen, als ein neu Geschlecht heraufgekommen, und als nun die Jungen wie die Alten Deine Worte höhnten und Dich schalten, Herr, Du weißt, da ist in hohen Jahren mir ein Wort des Unmuts jäh entfahren. Ungeduld und zweifelnde Gedanken, meinen Glauben brachten sie ins Wanken.

The Death of Moses Not by kindness only have they learnt in those days the stubborn paths of faith and triumphant praise, when they lusted after idols to your face, instead of feeding upon the bread of your grace, until your anger with plague and deadly snake great gaps among your people make. The future heirs of the promised land fell like outcast rebels in the sand. In the midst of their wandering way, in your fury, you cast them away. You sought for one the multitude through; one that was faithful and true, but all those who swore to be true when the sea of reeds your power knew, departed from you in their hearts and left their bodies in desert parts. Those you led to their salvation have risen against you, a rebel nation. Of this generation, once your delight, not one remained true to you and right. When you rejected the elders with scorn, when a new generation was born, and now when the young like the old in their day scoff at your word and from you turn away, Lord you know, in the course of the years, a careless word from me reached your ears. Doubting and impatient thought almost brought my faith to nought.

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Who Am I? Du vergabst; doch ist’s ein brennend Feuer, vor der Treue stehn als Ungetreuer. Deine Nähe und Dein Angesicht sind dem Reuigen ein schmerzend Licht. Deine Trauer und Dein großer Zorn gräbt sich in mein Fleisch als Todesdorn. Vor dem heil’gen Wort – von Dir entflammt, daß ich’s predige – bin ich verdammt. Wer des Zweifels schale Frucht genossen, bleibt vom Tische Gottes ausgeschlossen. Von des heil’gen Landes voller Traube trinkt allein der unversehrte Glaube. Du läßt mich, Herr, der Strafe nicht entrinnen, doch gönnst Du mir den Tod auf hohen Zinnen, Du einst auf bebendem Vulkan Erschauter, ich war ja Dein Erwählter, nah Vertrauter, Dein Mund, die Quelle aller Heiligkeit, Dein Auge für der Ärmsten Qual und Leid, Dein Ohr für Deines Volkes Schrein und Schmach, Dein Arm, an dem der Feinde Macht zerbrach, der Rücken, der die Schwachgewordnen trug, und den der Zorn von Freund und Feinden schlug, der Mittler Deines Volkes im Gebet, Dein Werkzeug, Herr, Dein Freund und Dein Prophet. Drum schenkst Du mir den Tod auf steilem Berge, nicht in der Niederung der Menschenzwerge, Den Tod des freien Blickes in die Weite, des Feldherrn, der sein Volk geführt im Streite,

The Death of Moses You forgive; but ’tis a blazing fire to stand before the Truth, a liar. Your nearness and of your face the sight are to the penitent, a wounding light. Your sadness and your great scorn bury into my flesh, a deadly thorn. Before your holy word, which you inflamed, that which I preached, I am ashamed. He who has tasted the fruit of doubt, from God’s table is shut out. From the holy land’s fruitful vine, untarnished faith alone can drink the wine. You allow me no escape Lord, from your punishment, but favour me with death on this high battlement. Once you did in trembling fire ascend. I was then your chosen and your friend. Your mouth the source of holiness, your eyes to see the poorest in lowliness, Your ear to hear your people’s cry and plight, your arm to break the enemy’s might, the back, carrying the weak who could no further go, and destroying the anger of friend and foe, the mediator of your people as their prayers ascend I was your instrument, Lord, your prophet and your friend. Therefore you send me death on this steep mountain side, not in the depths where lesser men have died, the death with clear vision and distant sight, of the commander, who led his people in the fight,

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Who Am I? das Sterben, über dessen ernsten Grenzen schon die Fanale neuer Zeiten glänzen. Wenn mich die Nacht des Todes nun umhüllt, seh’ ich von ferne doch Dein Heil erfüllt. Heil’ges Land, ich habe dich geschaut, schön und herrlich als geschmückte Braut, jungfräulich im lichten Hochzeitskleide, teure Gnade ist dein Brautgeschmeide. Laß’ die alten, vielenttäuschten Augen Deine Lieblichkeit und Süße saugen, laß’ dies Leben, eh’ die Kräfte sinken, ach, noch einmal Freudenströme trinken. Gottes Land, vor Deinen weiten Toren steh’n wir selig wie im Traum verloren. Schon weht uns der frommen Väter Segen kräftig und verheißungsvoll entgegen. Gottes Weinberg, frisch vom Tau befeuchtet, schwere Trauben, sonnenglanzumleuchtet, Gottes Garten, Deine Früchte schwellen, klares Wasser sprudeln Deine Quellen. Gottes Gnade über freier Erde, daß ein heilig neues Volk hier werde. Gottes Recht bei Starken und bei Schwachen wird vor Willkür und Gewalt bewachen. Gottes Wahrheit wird von Menschenlehren ein verirrtes Volk zum Glauben kehren. Gottes Friede wird gleich starken Türmen Herzen, Häuser, Städte treu beschirmen.

The Death of Moses beyond the gloomy limits of the dying already the signs of new times espying. When now the shades of death o’ercome me your salvation fulfilled from afar I see. Holy Land, to me you have appeared, like a bejewelled bride, lovely and endeared, the bridal dress lights up your virgin face, your bridal jewels are of costly grace. Let these old eyes so oft betrayed, drink in your sweet loveliness displayed. Let this life, before its powers shrink, once more from the streams of joy drink. God’s Land, before your doors open wide we stand, lost in a dream, no joy denied. The blessing of the patriarchs we feel already blowing towards us, full of promise and steady. God’s vineyard, moistened by the dew in the early hour, bunches of grapes, nourished and cradled by the sun’s power, God’s Garden, where your fruits swell and clear water gushes from your well, God’s Grace, flowing over a free earth, to a holy and new people will give birth. God’s Law will protect both strong and weak from those who by tyranny and force the mastery seek. God’s Truth will guide from human learning an erring people, to faith returning. God’s Peace will, like strong towers, hearts, houses, cities protect with its powers.

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Who Am I? Gottes Ruhe wird auf alle Frommen als ein großer Feierabend kommen. Und stilles Volk in einfachem Genügen wird Reben pflanzen und den Acker pflügen, und einer wird den andern Bruder nennen, nicht Stolz noch Neid wird in den Herzen brennen, und Väter werden ihre Knaben lehren das Alter achten und das Heil’ge ehren, und Mädchen werden, schön und fromm und rein, des Volkes Glück und Zier und Ehre sein. Die selber einst das Brot der Fremde aßen, den Fremdling werden sie nicht darben lassen. Der Waisen und der Witwen und der Armen wird der Gerechte willig sich erbarmen. Gott, der Du wohntest unter unsern Vätern, laß unsre Söhne sein ein Volk von Betern. In hohen Festen soll zu Deinem Ruhme das Volk hinaufziehn zu dem Heiligtume. Dir werden sie sich, Herr, zum Opfer bringen und Dir die Lieder der Erlösten singen. In Dank und Jauchzen tut mit einem Mund Dein Volk den Völkern Deinen Namen kund. Groß ist die Welt; es weitet sich der Himmel, schaut auf der Menschen tätiges Getümmel. In Deinen Worten, die du uns gegeben, zeigst allen Völkern Du den Weg zum Leben. Stets wird die Welt in ihren schweren Tagen nach Deinen heil’gen zehn Geboten fragen.

The Death of Moses God’s Rest will on his faithful people fall like a great celebration at his call. And a peaceful people on simple lines will plough the earth and plant the vines, and each will call the other brother, proud hearts burn not with envy of another, and boys by their fathers will be told to honour the sacred and respect the old, and girls will be beautiful and dutiful and pure, the people’s joy and honour and adornment to endure. Those who once ate the strangers’ bread will not therefore leave the stranger dead. On the orphan, the poor and the widow, the righteous man will freely his care bestow. God who dwelt among our fathers in the past, let our sons be prayerful people to the last! In high festival, may this to thy glory lead the people up to holiness by sacred story. To you, Lord, we will the offering bring, and to you the songs of salvation sing. In thanks and rejoicing with one voice, may your people proclaim they are your choice. The world is great; it stretches to the sky, people behold, as they in deep confusion lie. In your Word, which you to us make known, to all peoples you have the way to life now shown. Always, the world will in days of heavy task, of your holy ten commandments ask.

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Who Am I? Stets wird ein Volk, wie schuldig es gewesen, allein an Deinem Heiligtum genesen. So zieh denn hin, mein Volk, es lockt und ruft die freie Erde und die freie Luft. Nehmt in Besitz die Berge und die Fluren, gesegnet von der frommen Väter Spuren. Wischt von der Stirn den heißen Wüstensand und atmet Freiheit im gelobten Land. Wacht auf, greift zu, es ist nicht Traum noch Wahn, Gott hat den müden Herzen wohlgetan. Schaut des gelobten Landes Herrlichkeit, alles ist euer und ihr seid befreit!’ Auf dem Gipfel des Gebirges steht Mose, der Mann Gottes und Prophet. Seine Augen schauen unverwandt in das heilige gelobte Land. ‘So erfüllst Du, Herr, was Du versprochen, niemals hast Du mir Dein Wort gebrochen. Deine Gnade rettet und erlöst und Dein Zürnen züchtigt und verstößt. Treuer Herr, Dein ungetreuer Knecht weiß es wohl: Du bist allzeit gerecht. So vollstrecke heute Deine Strafe, nimm mich hin zum langen Todesschlafe. Von des heil’gen Landes voller Traube trinkt allein der unversehrte Glaube. Reich’ dem Zweifler drum den bittern Trank, und der Glaube sagt Dir Lob und Dank.

The Death of Moses Always, a people, however guilty they be, alone in your holiness will healing see. And thus my people are called with attractions fair, to the free land and the free air. Possess the mountains and the fertile lands, blessed by your fathers’ godly hands, wipe from their brows the hot desert sand and breathe freedom in the promised land. Awake, take hold, it is no mirage you have dreamed, God has the tired hearts redeemed. Look at the glory of the promised land and see all is yours and you are set free.’ On the summit of the mountain stands Moses, the prophet, in God’s hands. His eyes are steady and his vision clear to see the holy, promised land appear. ‘Thus you fulfil what you have spoken, your word to me you have never broken. Your grace saves and delights, but your anger disowns and smites. Faithful Lord, your servant faithless in distrust, but knowing well: you are forever just. So enforce your punishment today, take me in the long sleep of death away. Of the holy land’s fruitful vine, untarnished faith alone may drink the wine. Pour for the doubter the bitter draft of his ways, and let faith alone speak thanks and praise.

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Who Am I? Wunderbar hast Du an mir gehandelt, Bitterkeit in Süße mir verwandelt, Läßt mich durch des Todes Schleier sehn dies, mein Volk, zur höchsten Feier gehn. Sinkend, Gott, in Deine Ewigkeiten seh’ mein Volk ich in die Freiheit schreiten. Der die Sünde straft und gern vergibt, Gott, – ich habe dieses Volk geliebt Daß ich seine Schmach und Lasten trug und sein Heil geschaut – das ist genug. Halte, fasse mich! mir sinkt der Stab, treuer Gott, bereite mir mein Grab.’

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Wonderfully have you dealt with me, blends of bitterness and sweet to see, let me through the veil of death behold, my people at their festival bold. God, into your eternities going, I see my people march with freedom glowing. You who punish sin and forgive readily, God, you know I have loved this people steadily. That I have borne their shame and sacrifice and seen their salvation – will suffice. Hold, support me, I lose my stave, faithful God, prepare me for my grave.’ (Translation: Edwin Robertson)

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I. Introduction
‘Tell all the truth, but tell it slant’, said the American poet Emily Dickinson. As I was contemplating the writing of this essay, one of my colleagues in the English department reminded me that poetry is a genre of the soul. In poetry, the soul finds freedom in the dialectic of concealment and revelation. It is hardly surprising that a theologian attracted to dialecticians such as Martin Luther and Søren Kierkegaard would express himself in poetry, especially in the prison period when he began to catch in waves the scent of his own death. It will be remembered that this theologian was also an aesthete, a musician, who could on occasion lose himself improvising at the piano. His aesthetic sense was intensified in the confines of a prison cell and served to distinguish his final year as one of heightened creativity and personal expression. In this essay, I will explore the meaning of Bonhoeffer’s selfidentification with the biblical prophet Moses. It will become apparent that the theologian-poet did not make his choice of Moses on a whim. To the contrary, it was a choice clearly anticipated in career-long reflections on theological motifs which Bonhoeffer found Moses to exhibit, and motifs which Bonhoeffer thought himself to embody in important ways – important enough, at least, to warrant joining his voice with that of the ancient prophet. I will not deal directly with the poem. Nor will I be able to ignore it completely. It hovers just above my reflections. My intent is to assist the reader by enriching the context in which the poem is read and interpreted. To help guide my exploration, I will argue the following proposition: ‘The Death of Moses’ (‘Der Tod des Mose’) is a literary testament to Bonhoeffer’s protracted quest to understand theologically and to live personally the so-called responsible life. As such, it is a fitting dénouement to a set of ideas that occupied him beginning with Sanctorum Communio and continuing all the way through the prison period. Among the most important of these concepts are vicarious representative action (Stellvertretung) and taking on guilt (Schuldübernahme), each of which appears strikingly in the poem. Since the tension-filled concept of penultimate-ultimate is in Bonhoeffer’s theology an important design element in the contemplation of responsible life, unsurprisingly it too plays an important role in our discussion. The poem’s meaning ranges beyond these themes just as surely as Bonhoeffer’s self-understanding ranges beyond Moses. But one fact the

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interpreters of this poem can never evade is its uncanny timing. On 20 or 22 September 1944, Gestapo commissar Sonderegger discovered files in the Abwehr bunker in Zossen, which fully exposed Bonhoeffer as a conspirator. This irrefutable evidence prompted the Bonhoeffer family to devise an escape plan. But when his brother Klaus and brother-in-law Rüdiger Schleicher were arrested, Bonhoeffer resolutely abandoned the plan for fear of reprisals on his family and friends. At this moment, Bonhoeffer’s hopes of surviving the war – and with it the hope that he might survive to share in a new German order – dimmed considerably. Under stress, pressed by thoughts of impending death, theological instinct drew him to Moses.1 I surmise that Bonhoeffer located in Moses’ final ordeal atop Mount Nebo a meaningful representation of his life and theological work. He had for a long time been fascinated by Moses’ solidarity with his people. Not knowing how his life would unfold, however, I suspect he continued to think of himself as a possible participant in post-war Germany and, therefore, did not until this pivotal moment join himself existentially with Moses. And when he finally did so, the interpretive prospects were so explosive, compelling, and revealing, that he chose to veil them in poetry.

II. Bonhoeffer and Moses
At the end of his life, Moses was caught between grace and judgement. He was a man of faith who saw the bright future of his people in the land of God’s promise, but he would not experience that future on account of his own sin. Aged and tired, Moses climbed Mount Nebo. And in a single bittersweet episode he absorbed both the fulfilment of the patriarchs’ dream for a homeland and God’s severe wound. The Italian reserve officer Gaetano Latmiral recalled a conversation with Bonhoeffer during their incarceration at Tegel prison. He explained to me that he was writing a poem on the death of Moses, when Moses climbed Mount Nebo and God showed him, before he died, the land that would one day belong to his people, but that he would never enter. He loved this theme . . .2

Officer Latmiral likely didn’t know how steadfastly Bonhoeffer had occupied himself with the theme of Moses’ death. In Sanctorum

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Communio (1927) Bonhoeffer tried to articulate the possible lengths to which the intercession of one person for others could go. In reference to Exod. 32.32, Bonhoeffer described Moses as one ‘who wants to be blotted out from the book of life together with his people’.3 Moses is adduced as one of two biblical examples of ‘the love that voluntarily seeks to submit itself to God’s wrath on behalf of the other members of the community, which wishes God’s wrath for itself in order that they may have community with God, which takes their place, as Christ took our place.’4 Moses is further described as ‘heroic’, for he asks God either to accept or condemn him together with his people. In this brief but important early reference, we catch already the prevailing wind that blows through ‘The Death of Moses’, that is, the cost of the bond forged between Moses and those for whom he had become responsible. During his Stipendiat at Union Theological Seminary, Bonhoeffer made a trip to Havana (Cuba) along with his friend Erwin Sutz. There he preached to a German-speaking congregation on Deut. 32.48–52. It was the final Sunday of Advent, 1930. In this sermon, we find him further exploring the analogy between Moses and Christ: as God judges Moses in death while on the very precipice of the promise, so Advent in its classic meaning thrusts us into penitence in view of the arriving promise. Why Bonhoeffer preached from this text at Christmas is often considered something of a riddle. Bethge indicates that Bonhoeffer, after an interval of not preaching, selected it himself rather than had it assigned to him.5 Shortly before leaving for Cuba, Bonhoeffer communicated to Helmut Rössler that he was finding it difficult to capture Christmas rightly since everything in the world seemed so depressing to him.6 Bonhoeffer seemed to be caught in something of a personal crisis at this time, though I suspect it was a crisis quite connected to desperate conditions for many human beings around the world. We should also remember that this was precisely the time when Bonhoeffer earnestly read black writers, met black leaders, and experienced first hand the ugly realities of segregation. As we know, the spiritual Go Down, Moses had became a personal favourite to him, and one wonders whether his text selection might have related to some new reflections on the significance of Moses for oppressed peoples. Whether inspired by the spiritual or not, he nevertheless took its climactic stanza7 as if his own by following Moses onward to Christ as the one who generates hope for those who must live day-to-day in the harsh terrain just shy of the promisemade-good. Towards the end of the sermon (the actual end has been lost), he mentioned the unemployed we see all around us, the millions of children who live in hunger and misery throughout the world, those starving in China, those being oppressed in India, and that despairing

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helplessness seen in so many people in countries across the world. For them, Christ, the saviour, is born.8 Bethge includes in his biography an important line supposedly delivered by Bonhoeffer just after his mention of oppression throughout the world: ‘Who with all this in mind would want to enter the promised land, unsuspecting and unbiased?’9 Earlier in the sermon, Bonhoeffer had stressed that Moses was a man whose entire life was oriented toward God’s promise to the patriarchs. Moses was the instrument of God whereby God’s people would move from slavery to freedom. From his experience of God’s mystery and glory while protected in the cleft of the rock, to his descent from Sinai with the tablets, through all kinds of troubles and setbacks, God was deepening Moses’ hunger for the promise until at last he became completely seasoned in hope. Just then, only one step away from fulfilment, God led him up the mountain by his word to an abrupt end. Why does Moses have to die precisely at this point, asks Bonhoeffer, when the promise is so near? He answers: because as a sinner, Moses belongs to his people.10 The sinner dies before the promise is fulfilled. On 28 May 1933, struggling to adjust in the difficult first months of Hitler’s government, Bonhoeffer again turned to Moses, this time as the prophet standing over and against Aaron, the priest. From the pulpit of the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin, Bonhoeffer said that while the prophet waits for and receives God’s Word atop Mount Sinai, the priest below grows impatient and succumbs to idolatry in the face of national pressure. Moses represents the church that remains close to God while Aaron represents the church that drifts toward nationalism. In the context of the church struggle, Bonhoeffer’s skilful work with Moses and Aaron is a rather remarkable achievement. It so captivates our attention, in fact, that we, as readers, are prone to stop short of its conclusion. ‘The rupture [between the church of the word and the church of the world] is not the end’, says Bonhoeffer. Moses’ work is not finished. In a heroic and vicarious act, he shoulders responsibility for Aaron and the people as once again he trudges up the mountain to plead their case before God. As a harbinger of his own fate, Bonhoeffer renders Moses’ prayer with these provocative words: ‘Reject me with my people, for we are still one. Lord, I love my brother.’11 Glancing at the Exodus text, it becomes clear that Bonhoeffer made a decision here to emphasize not the prospect of God’s forgiveness, but rather – anticipating a major theme of our poem – the special bond between Moses and his people. This implies in turn a kind of solidarity between the faithful and the faithless and suggests the possibility that the one might stand before God under the burden of the other’s guilt. Consistent with Bonhoeffer’s treatment of Moses in Sanctorum Communio,

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the earlier Havana sermon, and even the lines from Go Down, Moses, the Berlin sermon once more pulls the Christological dimension to the foreground. Bonhoeffer proclaims Christ as that prophet and priest who will make of faithful and faithless a single people through his cross.12 Curiously, Eberhard Bethge cautioned readers of this poem against Christological interpretations of two key stanzas, insisting that ‘its shame’ did not refer to Christ and ‘this people’ must refer to Germany, not the church.13 You who punish sin and forgive readily, God, you know I have loved this people steadily. That I have borne their shame and sacrifice and seen their salvation – will suffice.

Bethge may be correct to put us on the trail of Bonhoeffer’s patriotism at this particular point, though I certainly do not think we should extend Bethge’s caution to the entire ninety stanzas of the poem, at least not in rigorous fashion. First, it is somewhat awkward in light of prevailing interpretations of Bonhoeffer as an advocate for Jews to throw all the weight back upon the German Volk. If these lines also belong credibly to Moses, which I think they do, then Jewish victims may also be included in ‘this people’. Second, in light of obvious Christological connections in the two sermons we have been considering, it would be strange to preclude Christological interpretations. Granted, Bonhoeffer’s wellpublicized attraction to the earthly significance of the Old Testament in the prison period may indicate that he is less willing openly to construe biblical figures as types of Christ, which would provide justification for Bethge’s caution. But Bonhoeffer never surrenders his conviction that Christ is present in the world’s ontology. It is reasonable to suppose that throughout the poem Christ forms a subtext for interpreting Moses, and by implication, Bonhoeffer. We should note that the author of Hebrews explicitly links Moses’ suffering to Christ, saying rather audaciously that Moses suffered for Christ. Furthermore, we ought to remain open to Christological dimensions especially if we harbour sympathies with Bonhoeffer as a Christian martyr (as opposed to merely a political resistor), for the poem anticipates the death of a theologian who forged his bonds with the world on a reasoned Christological foundation. The themes of representative action and accepting guilt cannot finally be rendered as Christian themes without linking them to Christ’s incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection.

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When Eberhard Bethge received the poem by post on 29 September 1944, he wrote back quickly to his friend, Many thanks for Moses. I got it yesterday evening before going on guard and read it afterwards. It moved me very much, but I’m not sure what to make of it. The language is fine, but with the fetters of the rhyme it didn’t seem quite like your other things . . . I find your thoughts about the future bold and perhaps even comforting.14

Bethge’s first impression obviously betrays his interpretive uncertainty. Perhaps his exclusion of this poem from the original publication of LPP under the German title Widerstand und Ergebung testifies to his conviction that it would require a special and delicate interpretation, as Jürgen Henkys suggests.15 I do not pretend to know confidently why Bonhoeffer returned to Moses for a final time in late 1944. The poet’s choices belong to the poet in a special sense. To be fair, we must acknowledge that he was in those days thinking of other biblical figures, too, as the soon-to-follow poem ‘Jonah’ reveals. It would be both worthwhile and useful to try to read ‘Jonah’ alongside ‘The Death of Moses’ to see what that exercise might evince concerning what I have called Bonhoeffer’s search for a biblical pericope, though that would take me beyond my assignment. But in support of my thesis, I will offer four plausible reasons why Bonhoeffer may have continued to think about himself in relation to Moses to the very end. Each of these reasons touches upon the narrative flow of Bonhoeffer’s life in important ways, and adheres structurally to his theology, especially in its most mature form as represented in the Ethics. a. ‘Your eyes to see the poorest in lowliness . . .’ First, as intimated in our discussion so far, Bonhoeffer found in Moses a theme that proved crucial to his developing theology: Moses learned to see the events of history from below and suffered with his people.16 Though living in the privilege of Pharaoh’s court, Moses devoted himself to his people, at first in their slavery and oppression and later in their circuitous wanderings en route to a new land and identity. That identification cost Moses a great deal. He became a target of his people’s complaints. He shouldered their sin and died under its burden. But he could not finally decouple himself from the community of those in need. Hebrews portrays Moses as one who suffered in solidarity with Israel for the sake of Christ. Moses ‘refused to be called a son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to share ill-treatment with the people of God . . . He considered abuse suffered for the Christ to be greater wealth than all of Egypt’ (Heb.

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11.24–26). Though born into privilege, Bonhoeffer grew somewhat uncomfortable in his bourgeois status because it represented security and safety instead of authentic discipleship as he had come to understand it. Standing with Jewish and German victims against the brutalities of Nazism, Bonhoeffer’s life can be read as a descent from power and privilege and a deepening attachment to those who suffer.17 Unlike Moses, there was no old man in Bonhoeffer. But his death by hanging at Flossenbürg epitomizes the human being who chose to stand with a suffering generation, rather than exercise the freedoms of his social class. b. ‘Your arm to break the enemy’s might . . .’ Second, Moses stood against the oppressor. As a young man, Moses witnessed first-hand the abuse of his people. Observing an Egyptian guard abusing one of the Jewish slaves, Moses became angry, killed the guard, and then attempted to hide his crime by burying the body in the sand (Exodus 2). Though his actions were rash, the concrete experience of injustice against his kin moved Moses to action. After fleeing to Midian for refuge, God called him to return to the oppressor’s land, despite his inadequacies, and immerse himself in the excruciating work of confronting earthly powers with God’s message of justice and liberation. Bonhoeffer fled to America in the summer of 1939 as Germany hovered on the brink of war. But as the victims’ cries arose from Egypt, so the plight of Hitler’s victims (Jews and Germans) weighed upon him in his Bible reading and meditation, driving him to the conclusion that remaining in a place of refuge while his country needed him was a mistake. God was calling him to return to a dangerous situation. The eighty-seventh stanza of the poem reveals Bonhoeffer’s sacrificial identification with the German people and all those victimized by Nazism in the words ‘God you know I have loved this people’. c. ‘He who tasted the fruit of doubt, from God’s table is shut out . . .’ Third, under the stress of fulfilling his responsibility to others, Moses sinned. Caught without water in the wilderness of Zin, Moses’ followers began to turn against him and against the word of God’s promise. In response, God told Moses to speak to a rock in full view of the congregation. In this way, God would provide water for people and livestock. Moses’ anger got the best of him, however. After assembling the people, he twice slammed the rock with his staff. God provided the water, but Moses’ lack of trust in God’s word became an offence for which he would be excluded from the company of those who would enter the land (Num. 20.12). Rather than express his confidence in the word of God, he took matters into his own hand. Bonhoeffer’s conspiratorial activities

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were very difficult for him to reconcile inwardly, and at the end he understood himself as a sinner in need of grace. So he found comfort in the fact that Moses’ doubt, though judged, could neither remove him from God’s grace nor subvert faith. Faith could sustain a break and yet survive, for God transacts grace even in judgement. When Bonhoeffer examined the death of Moses, he saw grace in the fact that God had arranged for him a special end on the heights of the mountain instead of the valley below where others had died: ‘You allow me no escape, Lord, from your punishment / but favor me with death here on this high battlement.’ d. ‘Clay, moulded by God’s mighty hand . . . a sacrificial vessel’ Fourth, in the hands of God, Moses’ death could be construed as a vicarious though guilty sacrifice. As we have said, Moses stood in solidarity with his people and against the oppressor as a sinner before God. But Moses’ sin is not the extraordinary thing here. In itself it shows only the human predicament as such before God. The extraordinary thing is that Moses, the aged prophet who has outlived the faithless ones of his generation, will now die as a representative of that entire generation and bear its guilt collectively by his own death. His death will become the sacrificial altar on which God enacts his gracious promise to others. This ancient Eucharistic prototype of Christ – though we must preserve the uniqueness of Christ’s guilt as a condition resting on the foundation of his personal innocence – establishes the most convincing bond between Bonhoeffer, Moses, and Christ. For whatever asymmetries may be present between them in respect to guilt, in each case guilt is tangled up with the choice to immerse oneself in the plight of others. In sum, Moses lived within the structure of responsible life as Bonhoeffer understood it. He devoted himself to others, got tangled up in their problems, absorbed their guilt, represented them in life and in death, and held them in the delicate tension of God’s judgement and grace. We cannot fail to note here the martyrological implications of this threefold bond. It is a thin tradition that renders Moses as a martyr,18 and it would overstep good sense to suggest that in ‘The Death of Moses’ Bonhoeffer is pleading for personal consideration as a Christian martyr. True, Bonhoeffer had predicted that his age would require guilty martyrs, and he thereby cut a channel for such an interpretation. Martyrs do not exercise control over their cases, which eventually must pass to the communities that survive them. Bonhoeffer would have understood this point very well. Yet it does not overstep good sense to suggest that Bonhoeffer is struggling at this time to understand his death along the lines of guilt-bearing and representation by associating with Moses, who

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opaquely ‘suffers for Christ’. By linking himself to Christ precisely by way of a third party – whose sin had become a salient feature in the circumstances of his death – Bonhoeffer cordons off a complex literarytheological space in which his problematic status as a martyr can be deliberated free of manipulation and coercion. At the very least, I think Bonhoeffer wants us to be generous enough to consider those ways in which his controversial path of discipleship nevertheless adds up to a life of faith which, like Moses’, points to Christ. The indirectness of poetry here creates the condition necessary for a true relation. For the responsible human being is the one devoted to others, not the one who perseverates about his posthumous reputation. By pointing to Moses, Bonhoeffer can indirectly raise interesting prospects for interpreting his own life at the same time that he deflects attention to God and his word.

III. Moses as exhibitor of penultimate care
To those acquainted with Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, it will be apparent that in the foregoing section, I have been speaking generally in the language of ‘responsible life’.19 In this final section, I will continue with the provocative language of the Ethics by situating what has been said so far within the tension of ultimate and penultimate things (Die letzten und die vorletzten Dinge). I hope to show how Moses became (albeit anachronistically) a skilful exhibitor of this tension – a tension which, as Bonhoeffer saw it, characterizes Christian existence as such and the skilful navigation of which is a vital matter in a ‘world come of age’. Bonhoeffer begins his description of ultimate and penultimate things by linking it to the Reformation teaching on justification, that determination of God wherein by faith alone, the self is grounded extra se in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In this event, God’s gracious decision regarding a human being is considered ultimate and supersedes all human calculation.20 By linking the ultimate with justification, Bonhoeffer asserts the primacy of God’s reality over and against the reality of the world. As sinners, our access to the ultimate – in our attempts at self-justification, naturally, but also in our selfunderstanding and personal agendas – is limited and condemned. Just as justification never passes into the hands of human beings but remains a free act of God, so the ultimate word of God never yields itself completely to human beings.21

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In this sense justification entails a qualitative ultimacy. God’s word cannot be superseded, and it thereby lends to every other word a penultimate status. But justification also means temporal ultimacy. God’s word arrives as the final word in time, the last in a sequence that configures every other word as something that precedes it. Of this dimension Bonhoeffer says, ‘The only thing that can be justified is something that has already come under indictment in time. Justification presupposes that the creature became guilty.’22 Bonhoeffer’s elaboration cannot be improved upon, so I will simply cite it: In order to hear the ultimate word, Luther had to go through the monastery; Paul had to go through his piety toward the law; even the thief ‘had to’ go through the conviction and the cross. They had to travel a road, to walk the full length of the way through penultimate things; they had to sink their knees under the burden of these things . . . We must travel a road, even though there is no road to this goal, and we must travel this road to the end, that is, the place where God puts an end to it. The penultimate remains in existence, even though it is completely superseded by the ultimate and is no longer in force.23

Clearly, the ultimate is for human beings. It meets us as a gracious, redeeming, and liberating word. But God does not immediately fulfil his promises. God remains patient – often painfully so – and thus holds open a space that allows human history to unfold in its own integrity. For this reason, people of faith cannot live solely in the ultimate. Instead, they must navigate through the time of God’s patience with fear and trembling, with suffering and pleading, and with hoping and longing. The difficulty for people of faith can be described as follows: on the one hand, since it is God’s word, the ultimate requires that significant adjustments be made in the realm of the world, and thus it places God’s followers in a place of sober responsibility. On the other hand, the realm of the world is stubbornly penultimate and offers resistance to God’s ultimate word. Such is the predicament for one who wishes to live a responsible life. To shun the penultimate for the sake of the ultimate amounts to a hatred of the world (Bonhoeffer’s so-called radical solution) and a desire for its destruction; to flee the ultimate for the sake of penultimate amounts to a hatred of God’s word (the so-called compromise solution). So how does one navigate? Like Moses the prophet, one prepares the way. Moses – the man who hears God speak from the bush aflame, who becomes the very presence of God to Pharaoh (Exod. 7.1) and his own people, who later stands face to face with God on Sinai, countenance glowing – has heard

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the word of God once given to the patriarchs and now becomes the instrument by which it can ripen towards fulfilment. But the way from Egypt to shalôm is challenging to say the least. Though he functions as God to Pharaoh and to Israel, he is emphatically not God. His humility towards and very incapacity for the ultimate, necessary preconditions for faithful representation of it, will in the course of time drive him deep into the conditions of penultimacy. Moses tended to the ultimate by becoming a willing participant in God’s work of justice for an oppressed people and caring for that people along the way of the penultimate. Bonhoeffer reminds us that certain conditions make it quite impossible for God’s ultimate word to be heard. That is why ‘[t]he hungry person needs bread, and the homeless person needs shelter, the one deprived of rights needs justice, the lonely person needs community, the undisciplined one needs order, and the slave needs freedom.’24 It is precisely by tending to the penultimate needs of his people that Moses prepares the way for the ultimate. All along, of course, it is God who is preparing the way, as it always must be. In his relationship to Israel, it is the weighty responsibility of Moses to make clear the difference between the ultimate and the penultimate, between God’s word and human words. For it is all too easy to co-opt the ultimate for the sake of human agendas. Moses’ sin can be seen as the refusal to allow the ultimate its place. Striking the rock was a capitulation to the penultimate, a way of managing by means other than God’s word. Moses’ death symbolizes his complete immersion in the penultimate realm by putting the spotlight on his temporal location – ‘almost there’ – at the very edge of the ultimate. Standing so near the promise, Moses’ experience of exclusion intensifies together with his faith in God’s future. At the moment of death, then, the ultimate comes into view as that which truly lies outside the reaches of human power, but has all along been exerting a pressure upon the penultimate. And the penultimate is revealed as the realm of human life and work which had all along received its meaning from the ultimate. By tending to God’s people and sticking with them through the thick and thin of the penultimate, Moses was tending to the ultimate and preparing the way. In a certain sense, Moses was the way, his death the necessary occasion upon which shalôm would have a chance.

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IV. Conclusion
Drawing to a close, I would like to direct our attention to an interesting observation made about Bonhoeffer as a young pianist by his twin sister Sabine. Dietrich was a most sensitive accompanist, and here, too, his good character showed – he was always eager to cover the mistakes of the other players and save them any embarrassment. He was most patient and often kept up his accompaniment for hours, so that sometimes he did not have enough time for his own piano practice.25

Though Bonhoeffer went to the trouble and expense of shipping his Bechstein to his London parsonage, Julius Rieger remembered that ‘he never used his abilities as a pianist to give recitals to others.’26 These memories and many more like them hit upon a certain theme: Bonhoeffer did not promote himself, but attended splendidly to the activities of others. ‘Sensitive accompanist’ strikes me as a fitting epigram for this piece on Moses. Certainly we are not dealing with a recital here. In this artistic rendition, Bonhoeffer does not jump to centre stage and clamour for our attention. Using his skills as an accompanist, he plays behind the figure of Moses and allows Moses’ voice to dominate. But like any accompanist, Bonhoeffer can be heard. And his choice to accompany Moses is among the clearest and most vulnerable self-disclosures Bonhoeffer ever made. To summarize, in the Moses narrative Bonhoeffer found his own life and thought illuminated. But as we have seen, that is surely in part because the Moses narrative had already done its work on Bonhoeffer’s thinking and living. He found the theme of solidarity with others most compelling, and in ‘The Death of Moses’ he finally risked the suggestion that he himself lived out the complexities of Christian discipleship in the topography of the Moses narrative. This may seem like an odd conclusion. One might ask why Bonhoeffer wouldn’t make Christ more obvious in this poem, especially since he had already set a precedent of dealing with Moses and Christ together in the two sermons we examined. In those writings, the momentum of the Moses narrative was pushing Bonhoeffer toward Christ. We remember an earlier time when Bonhoeffer, the theologian, was drawn to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and ‘became a Christian’. Here, Bonhoeffer’s personal narrative pushed him towards Christ. But much transpired between the early 1930s and

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1944 in the life and thought of Bonhoeffer. He had gradually become fastened to the world, to creation, to the Old Testament, and to the penultimate. Now in a striking reversal of momentum, he is drawn back to the Hebrew prophet. The Christ narrative now pushes Bonhoeffer toward Moses. This is not a departure from Christ, but rather an everdeepening awareness that Christ binds himself to Moses and all those who act responsibly in view of the ultimate. Christ is the bond between Bonhoeffer and Moses, such that when they become guilty and falter at faith in the messiness of responsible living they are not abandoned. Christ carries them even while they carry others. Bonhoeffer’s reflections on responsible life and the ultimate– penultimate provided him the necessary structure for a more comprehensive theological interpretation of Moses. Outside the poem there is, so far as I am aware, not a shred of evidence that he actually carried out such an interpretation. Certainly, the poem does not constitute evidence in the ordinary sense. Nevertheless, I think it stands as cryptic indication that Bonhoeffer had theologized the Moses narrative along these lines. At the very least, Ethics theologically undergirds his choice for Moses and renders it more intelligible.

Notes
1. Under similar pressure and wearied by death threats, Martin Luther King, Jr., also identified himself with Moses in the now-famous words delivered on a stormy Memphis night: ‘We’ve some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountain top. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will.’ That King and Bonhoeffer, two of the twentieth century’s most noted and controversial martyrs, would each in their own way identify with Moses as death approached, reveals something important about the disposition of martyrs, especially when they are conscious of their sin, as King, too, certainly was. See Stewart Burns, To the Mountaintop: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Mission to Save America, 1955–1968 (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), p. 442f. 2. Bonhoeffer, p. 851. 3. DBWE 1, pp. 184–85. 4. DBWE 1, pp. 184–85. The other example is Paul the apostle, who wants to be separated from Christ in order to win community for others (Rom. 9.1ff). 5. DBWE 1, p. 152. 6. DBW 10, p. 216. 7. I am referring especially to these lines: Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt’s land / Tell ol’ Pharaoh, Let my people go / O let us all from bondage flee / Let my people go / And let us all in Christ be free / Let my people go.

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8. An allusion to the sixth stanza of ‘Stille Nacht’, i.e., ‘Jesus der Retter ist da’. 9. Bonhoeffer, p. 152. I cannot find this line in DBW. The end of the sermon has been lost. But the question is compelling for its suggestion that, facing the choice of either reaching the promised land with a bad conscience or remaining outside it with suffering others, Bonhoeffer might prefer the latter. 10. DBW 10, p. 584. Emphasis added. 11. TF, p. 212. 12. TF, p. 212. 13. Bonhoeffer, p. 851. 14. LPP, p. 398. 15. See DBG, p. 42f. 16. I am making a deliberate allusion to Bonhoeffer’s words in ‘After Ten Years’, a piece written to fellow conspirators after ten years of Hitler’s rule. See TF, p. 486. 17. See Craig J. Slane, Bonhoeffer as Martyr: Social Responsibility and Modern Christian Commitment (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), pp. 17–25. 18. As an example, see Mary Rose D’Angelo, Moses in the Letter to the Hebrews (Missoula, Montana; Scholars Press, 1979). 19. This passage forms a fitting précis: ‘The structure of responsible life is determined in a twofold manner, namely by life’s bond to human beings and to God, and by the freedom of one’s own life. It is this bond of life to human beings and to God that constitutes the freedom of our life. Without this bond and without this freedom there can be no responsibility. Only the life that, within this bond, has become selfless has the freedom of my very own life and action. The bond has the form of vicarious representative action . . .’ (DBWE 6, p. 257). 20. DBWE 6, p. 148. 21. DBWE 6, p. 150. 22. DBWE 6, p. 151. 23. DBWE 6, p. 151. 24. DBWE 6, p. 163. 25. Sabine Leibholz-Bonhoeffer, The Bonhoeffers: Portrait of a Family (Chicago: Covenant Publications, 1994), p. 34. 26. Leibholz-Bonhoeffer, Portrait, p. 41.

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Index of Biblical References


OLD TESTAMENT Genesis 4.1 8.21 39.23 Exodus 2 7.1 32.32 34.6–7a Numbers 6.26 20.12

173 159 53

234 237 230 203

156 234

94.12 119 119.1 127 139

155 59, 63, 112 54 161 16

Jonah 1.1 1.4–16 4.2

203 207 203, 208

Malachi 14.14

53

Sirach 11.14

53

Deuteronomy 32.48–52 230 2 Kings 14.23–7

203

NEW TESTAMENT

Psalms 22 31.15 40 42 42.5 43 90

172 138 16 44 20 44 76

Matthew 5.28 12.40 15.34 25 26.36–46 26.39 26.42

182 204 160 186, 194 181 170 160

252 Luke 11.30 John 6.32–58 19.24f Acts 8 10 Romans 3.2 8.18–22 8.21 8.26 12 12.1 12.2

Index of Biblical references

204

Galatians 5

155

191 193, 196

Ephesians 2.6 5.16

141 141

Philemon 3.14

156

James 1.8

195

Hebrews 5.8 11.24–26

181 233

1 Peter 1.12

173

172 172

161 181 157 64 163 152 165

Subject Index


Abwehr 206, 228, 87 ‘After Ten Years’ 108, 139, 141, 172–4, 206, 241 air raids 22, 75, 76, 80 America 27, 100, 193, 194, 202, 234 ‘arcane discipline’ 21, 23, 27, 167 assassination plot 14, 21, 61, 75, 77, 161, 163, 205–6 Auschwitz 19 BBC 75 Berlin 74–9, 143, 231, 232 Buchenwald 87 Burke Library 88 Catholic, Catholicism 24, 69 ‘cheap grace’ 3, 21, 78 China 230 Christendom 21, 26, 27 Church Fathers see patriarchs Cold War 27 community 17, 18, 19, 20, 25, 27, 62, 63, 108, 109, 113, 134, 135, 143, 153, 168, 230, 238 Confessing Church 77, 141, 202, 206 confession 17, 21, 23, 24, 25, 110, 113, 131, 135, 137, 140, 165, 207, 210 conscience 141, 157, 167, 241

contemplation 24, 27, 228 ‘costly grace’ 217 creation 19, 23, 24, 143, 181, 240 Creation and Fall 113 Cuba 230, 231 Dasein 54 desert fathers 25, 26 ‘deus ex machina’ 22, 162, 185, 191 Dialectical Theology 179 Discipleship 3, 17, 184 discipline 17, 20, 22, 86, 111, 165–74 ‘discipline of the secret’ see ‘arcane discipline’ earthly powers 18, 234 ego, egotism 18, 182 Egypt 62 Ethics 113, 133, 142, 156, 158, 163, 184, 187, 202, 206, 209, 233, 236, 240 Eucharist 189, 235 faithfulness 57, 59, 60, 67, 83, 84, 142, 202 fatherland 17 fellowship 133–41 Finkenwalde 20, 21, 23, 24, 101, 202

254

Subject Index

Flossenbürg 87, 234 forgiveness 37, 41, 77, 110, 113, 143, 165, 166, 186–8, 191, 193, 231 freedom 26, 85, 93, 95, 103, 104, 106, 110, 111, 117, 125, 133, 136, 141, 149, 152, 153, 154, 156, 157, 159, 161, 164, 166, 167, 168, 182, 230, 238 friendship 6, 14, 56–8, 65, 100–11, 125, 135, 136 Garden of Eden 180 Geneva 76 German Christians 19, 186 German Church 17, 19 Gestapo 206, 229 Gethsemane 84, 86, 160, 169, 178, 181, 194 Gnosticism 15 grace 18, 22, 43, 45, 59, 63, 83, 105, 172, 192, 210, 215, 219, 221, 223, 229, 235 guilt 162, 200, 235 Harris Manchester College, Oxford 2 Hell 43, 125, 204 ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ 15 holiness 24, 26, 215, 219, 233 ‘homo religious’ 179, 182, 190, 191 imitation 54, 64 individual, individualism 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 24, 26, 63, 161, 173, 182, 183 inwardness 6, 15, 17, 55, 100, 101, 182, 183 Jews, Jewish 24, 77, 186, 187, 194, 204, 205, 210, 211, 232, 234

judgement 143, 153, 229, 235 justice 24, 27, 108, 121, 131, 131–7, 140, 161, 164, 172, 173, 234, 238 Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church 231 knowledge 16, 45, 150, 161, 169, 183, 184, 185, 190, 192, 204 Lehrter Straße Prison 74, 75 Letters and Papers from Prison 3, 7, 8, 17, 21, 52, 53, 55, 81, 100, 101, 108, 237 Life Together 17, 20 liturgy 17, 61, 62, 191–3 London 2, 202, 239 love 6, 24, 25, 26, 27, 42, 51, 56–66, 68, 89, 105, 112, 167, 168, 172, 173, 180, 190, 194, 203, 230, 231 Love Letters from Cell 92 81 mandates 18, 103–6, 108, 110, 112, 153, 158 Marienburger Allee 75 martyr, martyrdom 2, 54, 232, 235, 236, 240 mediator, mediation 17, 20, 21, 23, 24, 78, 86, 217, 234 ‘metanoia’ 179, 189 metaphysics 15, 173, 182, 183 Middle Ages 100 Mount Sinai 231 National Socialism 19, 21, 23, 77, 106, 200 Nature, Natural 23, 68, 101, 112, 136, 137, 156, 180, 181, 184, 189–91, 94, 232, 234, 237, 241 Nazis see National Socialism neighbour 18, 40, 134, 190

Subject Index New Testament 54 ‘non-religious interpretation’ 3, 21, 22, 179, 190, 192 Nuremberg Laws 186 obedience 20, 103, 134, 155, 158, 166, 192 Old Testament 54, 141, 182, 201, 232, 240 Operation 7 186, 194 orders of creation 23, 43, 93, 104, 112 patriarchs 2–3, 204, 205, 217, 229, 231, 238 patriotism 209, 232 peace 23, 27, 109, 121, 125, 132, 136, 156, 163, 177, 219 penultimate 136, 139, 140, 143, 144, 145, 174, 208, 228, 236–40 piety, pious 15, 17, 41, 208, 237 Pomerania 75, 141 prayer 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 41, 42, 78, 79, 86, 174, 193, 202 Prinz-Albrecht-Straße Prison 14, 74, 76 promise 58, 59, 131, 139, 140, 157, 166, 170, 184, 197–212 psychology 17 reality 40, 42–4, 57, 60, 131, 141, 142, 155, 157, 158–64, 166, 169, 171 redemption 143, 164, 181, 185 Reformation 192, 236 ‘religious a priori’ 170, 191 religious, religion 60, 152, 154, 157, 162, 163, 164, 170, 171, 174, 178, 179, 181, 182, 183, 184

255

repentance 23, 37, 41, 202, 203, 204, 208 responsibility 17, 159, 163, 170, 184, 187, 209 Romanticism 23 Rome 19 Sakrow 75 salvation 24, 60, 73, 78, 161, 181, 182, 188, 195, 208, 211, 217, 219, 225, 227, 232 Sanctorum Communio 17, 18, 113, 209, 228, 229, 231 Scripture 15, 17, 23, 63, 150 self 8, 15–27, 39–45, 60, 62, 109, 182, 236 sin, sinfulness 15, 17, 24, 25, 43, 133, 135, 136, 144, 168, 185, 200, 203, 207, 229, 232, 236 society 15, 18, 24, 55, 77 Southeast Asia 27 spirituality 21, 24, 26, 27, 170, 184 suffering 5, 8, 25, 33, 55, 73, 78, 83–6, 105, 134, 149, 152, 153, 155, 1158, 160–73, 181, 184 Sweden 107 Talmud 199, 210 Tegel Prison 3, 14, 20, 23, 74, 75, 79, 88, 89, 130, 206, 229 Temple 16 ‘theologia crucis’ 158, 165, 188 Third Reich 18, 21, 27, 77 ‘this-worldliness’ 3, 40, 173, 190, 194 Übermensch 24 ultimate 137, 139, 140, 143, 144, 145, 174, 228, 236, 237, 238, 240

256

Subject Index

Union Theological Seminary 82, 193 ‘vicarious representative action’ 8, 201, 209, 210, 228, 232, 241 Vietnam War 27 visible Church 155, 164

Volkskirche 19 ‘world come of age’ 22, 236 worship 15, 17, 20, 58, 62–4, 67, 155, 171, 174, 181, 192 Zossen 206, 229

Name Index


Aaron 231 Abel, Otto 78, 88 Abraham 202 Adam 19, 113, 183, 192 D’Angelo, Mary Rose 241 Anthony the Great 25 Arendt, Hannah 159 Aristotle 110, 156 Arnold, Gottfried 80 Augustine 24, 43, 204, 205, 210, 211 Barth, Karl 4, 19, 23, 24, 56, 67, 179, 180, 195, 202 Bauby, Jean-Dominique 66, 68 Beck, Ludwig August Theodor (General) 206 Bede 204 Best, Payne (Captain) 25 Bethge, Dietrich 108 Bethge, Eberhard 4, 5, 7, 14, 23, 42, 54, 57, 65, 66, 74, 75, 80, 86, 87, 88, 89, 100–11, 130, 139, 142, 143, 150, 178, 181, 185, 206, 230, 231, 232, 233 Bethge, Renate 2, 8, 77, 79, 81, 82, 87, 103, 105, 143, 171 Bonhoeffer, Christine (von Dohnanyi) 74, 87 Bonhoeffer, Emmilie 75, 87

Bonhoeffer, Karl 74, 81, 87, 138, 211 Bonhoeffer, Klaus 74, 87, 206, 228 Bonhoeffer, Paula 14, 74, 81, 84, 87, 88, 89 Bonhoeffer, Sabine (LeibholzBonhoeffer) 239, 241 Bonhoeffer, Ursula (Schleicher) 74, 75, 87 Bowden, John 8, 13, 149, 177, 199 Brague, Rémi 29 Brock, Brian 6, 9, 67, 171 Brueghel, Pieter 112 Bürgher, Gottfried August 79 Burns, Stewart 240 Calvin, John 54, 67 Cassirer, Ernst 196 Chitty, Dervas 25, 29 Conway, John 88 Descartes, René 15 Dickinson, Emily 228 von Dohnanyi, Hans 74, 87, 208 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 142 Elijah 202, 203 Ezra 202, 190, 211 Feil, Ernst 171

258

Name Index

Fodor, James 68 Fontane, Theodor 79 Forrester, Duncan B. 28 Foucault, Michel 24, 29, 156 Freud, Sigmund 15 George, Stephen 79 Gerhardt, Paul 7, 76, 80, 82, 84, 88, 89, 185 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 59, 79 Green, Clifford 89 de Gruchy, John 100, 111 Hampe, Johann Christoph 7, 10, 80, 143, 141, 211 von Harnack, Adolf 107 Harrelson, Walter 210 Hartman, Nicolai 59 Hauerwas, Stanley 15, 68, 112, 113, 150, 155, 171, 174 Haynes, Stephen R. 150, 171 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 18, 21, 23 Heidegger, Martin 172 Henkys, Jürgen 7, 59, 78, 79, 80, 82, 87, 88, 89, 130, 185, 233 Hildebrandt, Franz 211 Hirschman, Albert O. 172 Hitler, Adolf 14, 21, 61, 75, 77, 161, 163, 186, 187, 231, 234 Hohmann, Martin 211 Homer 44 Houtman, Marcia 143 Huff, Douglas 2 Huppenkothen, Walter (Colonel) 87 Hütter, Reinhard 161, 172, 238 Iwand, Hans Joachim 153

Jeremiah 105 Jerome 204 Job 152, 167 Jones, L. Gregory 28 Joseph 53, 62 Judas 162 Kant, Immanuel 18, 138, 144 Kelly, Geffrey B. 28, 29, 101, 111 Kierkegaard, Søren 110, 144, 228 King Jr., Martin Luther 240 Knobloch (Corporal) 211, 162, 206 Krause, Gerhard 210 Kuske, Martin 211 Latmiral, Gaetano (Reserve Officer) 229 Leibholz, Gerhard 28 Leishman, J. B. 143 Limburg, James 210 Luhmann, Nikolas 173 Lukens, Nancy 8, 73, 87, 88, 195, 206 Luther, Martin 6, 23, 53, 58, 59, 60, 63, 64, 66, 69, 153, 155, 158, 172, 173, 180, 181, 182, 183, 192, 196, 228, 137 Marsh, Charles 28, 29 Marx, Karl 15 Merton, Thomas 26, 27 Meyer, F. C. 79 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 23 Nehemiah 190, 202, 211 Nelson, F. Burton 101, 111, 196 Niebuhr, Reinhold 193, 202 Nietzsche, Friedrich 15, 18, 56, 68 O’Donovan, Oliver 171

Name Index Oster, Hans Paul (General) 161, 162 Paul 19, 150, 152, 154, 155, 156, 165, 204, 237, 240 Perels, Friedrich Justus 206 Peter 202, 204 Pfeiffer, Hans 89 Plant, Stephen J. 211 Rasmussen, Larry 151, 171 Ricoeur, Paul 64, 69 Rieger, Julius 239 Rilke, R. M. 79 Robertson, Edwin 7, 8, 17, 28, 37, 51, 52, 54, 80, 99, 100, 129, 171, 195, 227 Robinson, Marilynne 142, 145 Rosenzweig, Franz 154, 171 Rössler, Helmut 230 Rothenberg, Theophil 78 Sasson, Jack M. 210, 211 von Schlabrendorff, Fabian 89 Schleicher, Rüdiger 74, 75, 87, 206, 228 Schleicher, Walter 75 Sherwood, Yvonne 204, 211 Shuman, Joel 62, 63, 69

259

Slane, Craig J. 241 Sonderegger, Franz Xaver (Commissar) 81, 87, 89 Storm, Theodor 79 Stratford (Lord) 144 Sutz, Erwin 230 Tödt, Heinz Eduard 200, 210 Tödt, Ilse 59, 87 Velásquez, Diego 112 Vissert’t Hooft, Willem A. 76, 78, 88 Wannenwetsch, Bernd 15, 16, 17, 23, 28, 68, 173, 174, 195, 196 Ward, Benedicta 25, 29 Warhol, Andy 55 Weber, Max 159 von Wedemeyer, Maria 42, 57, 74, 75, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89, 101, 102, 105, 112, 206 Weil, Simone 201 Williams, Rowan 15, 17, 23, 28, 29 Wolf, Ernst 153 Wüstenberg, Ralf K. 171 Yoder, John Howard 54, 67, 112