Berlin, now and then

It rained and galed for about half my trip to Germany, and, after drought and temperatures that had topped 100 in Ohio, it sometimes felt bone chillingly cold in summery Europe. However, I decided not to be the kind of person who can't function if it's not 70 with clear skies, and so I plunged on, trying to enjoy rain and "cool breezes" after the roasting heat at home.

The afternoon I visited Bonhoeffer's childhood home in the Grunewald neighborhood of Berlin it poured rain in torrents, and I was soaked, a situation not helped by the tendency of wind gusts to flip my umbrella inside out into something resembling a large tulip that the wind tried to pull out of my hand. Then the rain stopped, and as I stood shivering at the bus stop under ominously gray skies, I decided I must find a heavier jacket than the lightweight hoodie I was wearing over a now soaked teeshirt. I happened to ask the elegantly dressed woman standing at the bus stop with me where I could buy a jacket, and she advised I get off at a certain stop on the Kurfurstendam, the grand shopping boulevard that runs east/west across the city.

I must have disembarked at the wrong place, for I found myself walking up the windy, on and off rainy Kurfurstendam looking into dress shops showing a few long wool coats, brocade cocktail dresses and silk blouses hanging in rooms decorated with Louis Quinze furniture, ornate crystal chandliers and plush Oriental carpets. How could I even dream of walking into such showrooms, for such they were, rain bedraggled, in jeans and a hoodie, carrying an oversized purse stuffed with now sodden city maps and a directionally confused umbrella? Instead, I decided to get back on the double decker bus and hop off when I saw an area of stores I could reasonably expect to afford. Soon enough, I found a sports store and in it a serviceable and warm violet jacket for 20 euros, on sale, amid all the 70, 80 and 100 euro and higher thinsulate hiking gear, most with American designer labels.

Later, I was told that the posh stores I eschewed on the Kurfurstendam are for the nouveau-rich wives of rich Russian industrialists and other wealthy foreigners, not ordinary Germans and such mere mortals. I thought of those shops as I read an account of an American, Katherine (Kay) Smith, the wife of an assistant military attache who came to Berlin after the first world war.

As recounted in Andrew Nagorski's Hitlerland, after arriving at the fashionable Adlon Hotel, Kay donned a beige coat with a beige fox collar, beige pumps, beige stockings and a dark blue hat in order to make a rakish entrance onto the streets of Berlin. However, Kay learned not to go out too stylishly dressed after a crowd of shabby Berliners gathered ominously around her and her new clothes, and only “made way for her” when they found out she was an American.

Kay had to deal with a flea-ridden apartment, a city problem, and was shocked when her maid wanted to eat the remains of her husband’s breakfast egg. The maid explained she had not tasted an egg since before the war. When Kay told her to eat all the eggs she wanted, the maid, in turn was shocked—in German households food would be kept under lock and key and the servants weren’t supposed to eat the same food as their employers. Foreigners lived well in Berlin; native Berliners not.

I wondered how the Bonhoeffer family fared in post-war Berlin. I know they suffered a hit during the inflation, though they were shielded from the worst effects by the fact that the father was paid by wealthy clients for psychological counseling in foreign currencies. None of the daughters, all married in the 1920s, set up housekeeping in their mother's prewar style, but at the same time, Dietrich Bonhoeffer would have been one of the fortunate few Germans traveling in the right circles and protected from the worst of the economic hardship facing many in his country. This was not lost on Bonhoeffer, who knew he was insulated from many of life's everyday problems by family money, but who knew too it was wise to finish his university degree and pursue the pastorate. Later, in the short period while he could before the Nazis took over, he worked with other rich Berliners to run programs for poor youth.

The well-heeled Grunewald I saw, row after row of stately houses in a quiet suburb, seemed not much different from what it must when the Bonhoeffers moved there in order to have yard space for a goat and chickens during the "starvation" times of World War I (the grounds surrounding the house were actually rather small). But what was it really like at a time when class divisions were so much sharper, the poor so much poorer, the rich so much richer? What of the threats on the street? I thought of the possible danger the crowd posed to the well-dressed Kay Smith and wondered if it a precursor to anger directed at the Jews. Did Bonhoeffer have to be careful venturing outdoors in his beloved Berlin?

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Pilgrimage to Germany: some Berlin and Bonhoeffer thoughts

I took this photo of a preserved remnant of the Berlin Wall.

As mentioned in the previous blog, I traveled to Germany this summer to visit Bonhoeffer sites and to try to come to terms with Germany's World War II legacy. I spent more of the trip in Berlin than any other place, and had begun to just barely know and fall in love with the city when it was time to leave.

Berlin presents a paradox for the Bonhoeffer researcher. The city Bonhoeffer knew was largely obliterated during World War II. At the same time, today's reunited Berlin, vibrant, thriving, cosmopolitan and in the process of recreating itself, is probably more like the city as Bonhoeffer experienced it than at any time in the first fifty years after his death

The most awkward part of Berlin is the center, the former no-man's land by the River Spree. The Soviets built the Berlin Wall along the Spree, maintaining a dead space behind it. Today, the German government is reclaiming that dead center space, having built, among other public buildings, a huge modernistic glass and metal government office space (in a style of architecture the Nazi's would have abhorred). All the new buildings sit stiffly, as yet unintegrated into their sites. The bridges over the Spree look artificial as well, too new, like bridges over fake waterways in a Disney World. They lack the classical charm of old stone bridges I have seen in old Berlin pictures. But in time, the structures will meld gracefully into the landscape ...

The River Spree in downtown Berlin today. Internet file photo.

The Tiergarten, the park in the center of the city, which is much like Central Park in New York City, was devastated after the war, but now is back. I was able to walk there, to my delight. Bonhoeffer must have spent time there, too, but we have no concrete record of it. The home his family first occupied in Berlin, where he lived from age six until he was 10, was near the Tiergarten. And almost surely, like many others in Berlin during the Nazi era, he must have taken long walks with friends on isolated paths in the Tiergarten in order to have conversations away from eavesdroppers and spies.

I took this photo of the Tiergarten. I wonder what Bonhoeffer would think of how it looks today?

What struck me most about Berlin was my sense that it has come to grips with its past--and that this has given it both humility (I want to say peace, but that word carries implications of complacency that are not there) and new energy. World War II is energetically present as living history, as if it happened yesterday, not more than half a century ago. My host family talked about it in an everyday way. Though most Berliners were born after the war, it's part of the fabric of their city. Perhaps this is only natural for the city that was the capitol of the country that started World War II and which suffered an almost unfathomable degree of destruction during and after it.

The destroyed Tiergarten after the war: ''I walked across the snowy plain of the Tiergarten--a smashed statue here, a newly planted sapling there ... and on the horizon, the great ribs of a gutted railway station, like the skeleton of a whale. In the morning light it was all as raw and frank as the voice of history which tells you not to fool yourself; this can happen to any city, to anyone, to you." Christopher Isherwood, Down There on a Visit, quoted from Eric Larson, In the Garden of Beasts

Two ways the war--always "the war"-- lives on are through stars scattered in the pavements throughout the city indicating where Jewish families once lived and where they perished, be it Auschwitz, Dachau or elsewhere. Another reminder, built against a preserved portion of the Berlin Wall, is an exhibit about Nazism spread along the ruins of the Gestapo's (always prefaced with "notorious") Prinz Albrechtstrasse prison, Bonhoeffer's last stop en route to a concentration camp. The city appears to have accepted its responsibility for the horrors its government unleashed and to have recoiled from its former embrace of militarism and exceptionalism.

It seems to me that we in this country began a similar process of self-exploration and soul-searching after Viet Nam, a process that perhaps reached its culmination in our own Viet Nam wall memorial in Washington, a place that always seems to me drenched in sadness. Then we stopped, and some people have criticized the Viet Nam memorial for not glorifying the conflict. I believe that we have not yet come to grips with how Viet Nam tore at us a nation, and that, as result, we are still living out that ideological conflict in strange ways, especially in our politics. I sometimes wonder if we will have to be brought to the brink of destruction ourselves before we can come to terms with who we are: a nation that wants to go back to the country as it was before that war or a nation that wants to embrace the changes that the Vietnamese war helped to bring? In many ways, these competing worldviews mirror those of Germans in Weimar Germany of the 1920s--some (many) bitterly hated and resisted the new society ushered in after World War I, while some embraced it. The Bonhoeffer family seems to have accepted their country's new direction.

We have two surviving letters Bonhoeffer wrote from the (notorious) Prinz Albrechtstrasse prison to his parents, where he was transferred on Oct. 8, 1944. The first is a birthday (hers) letter he was allowed to send to his mother on December 28, 1944. He says nothing of his own situation, writing only in general, if heartfelt, terms: "Dear mother, I want you to know that I am constantly thinking of you and father every day, and that I thank God for all that you are to me and the whole family." His guards allowed him to write again on January 17, because of the "People's Sacrifice," a last ditch propaganda effort to gather supplies and rally the people to defend Berlin against the Soviets. He instructs his mother to give away any clothing of his without "another thought," mentions his pleasure at receiving a Christmas letter from Maria, his fiancee, and asks for some supplies, such as books and toothpaste, indicating he was still able to receive packages from the outside. After that, silence and a series of increasingly poignant and distressed notes from his parents, obviously desperate for some word about his fate.

As I have begun reading about pilgrimage, I realized that Bonhoeffer spent much of his life as a pilgrim, roaming the world. I will write more about that in a future post.

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Guten Tag, Germany

On Monday, I head to Germany to do Bonhoeffer research. My research will be largely journalistic, putting my fingers in the nailholes of Bonhoeffer's life. I will be visiting places that were important to Bonhoeffer's development, including Berlin, Finkenwalde, the Harz Mountains and Tubingen.

Bonhoeffer moved to Berlin at age six. “The decisive influence,” wrote Bonhoeffer's biographer Eberhard Bethge “was Berlin and its complex diversity: the imperial and Republican city that slowly succumbed to Nazism, the liberal and ecclesiastical, the conservative and cosmopolitan Berlin, with its academic and working class sectors, its concert halls and museums; the Berlin of street brawls and political plots.”

In Berlin, the family first lived in Bruckenallee, near the Bellevue rail station, adjacent to Bellevue Park, a district north of the zoo. They had a view of Bellevue Castle.

In 1916, the family moved to Grunewald, living at 14 Wangenheimstrase from March 1916 to 1935. They moved there to grow food during WWII. This is the yellow house pictured to the left.

In 1935, the parents moved to Marienburger Allee 43, Charlottenburg.

Friedrichsbrunn in the Harz mountains, where the Bonhoeffer family had a summer home, will be another destination. In prison, Bonhoeffer wrote: "I live a good deal in nature, in the glades near Friedrichsbrunn, or on the slopes from which one can look beyond Treseberg to the Brocken. ..It is the Harz, the Thuringian forest, the Weser mountains, that to me represent nature, that belong to me and have fashioned me." Harz is as well the magical forestland of Grimm's fairytales.

Bonhoeffer studied for a year Tubingen, spending some of his time with his grandmother Julie Tafel at 38 Neckarhalde. Here Jukie had a balcony where she could lay in the sun.

As Director of the Finkenwalde Seminary, Bonhoeffer found his life's work. Finkenwalde is now part of Poland and called Zdroje. The seminary building, an old manor house, was destroyed at the end of World War II but a Bonhoeffer center now exists on the site.

As I planned the trip, the level of destruction wrought by World War II became more real. So many of the buildings where Bonhoeffer spent his time no longer exist. This makes Tubingen, which was spared bombing in World War II,, the Harz mountains and other natural terrain such as the Baltic Sea, all the more important.

Misuse of Religion

I recently read an article for my "Interfaith Dialogue" class that was simultaneously interesting and disturbing. Written by anthropologist Ian Hogbin in 1947, it was called “Pagan Religion in a New Guinea Village.” Among other things, it showed how cynically people can exploit religious fears to seize and maintain power.

The New Guinea men studied by Hogbin wanted separation from—and hence power over— the women in the tribe: They wished to exclude the women from their “cult.” Why? This detail Hogbin never explores--he apparently never raised the question. However, he explained that the men created a story of enormous crocodile spirit monsters that the women and children had to keep away from. He also explained how the men were able to make this utter fabrication credible.

A woman came home one day and freely shared with her husband her discovery of a whirring sound created by twirling a twisted piece of wood on a string. He told her to keep her discovery a secret and passed the information to his male cohorts. They decided to say it was the voice of a spirit that the women must stay away from. Of course, to carry out this fraud, they had to kill the woman who brought them the knowledge. As Hogbin puts it:

The husband was first reluctant but at length gave consent when promised a substitute. He sent a message to her to bring his supper and as soon as soon as she stepped on the ladder of the house the men”—in Hogbin’s polite term—“despatched her”—ie, murdered her—“with their spears.” The men told the rest of the women that “she had been eaten by a fearsome spirit monster which had come into the area”—a monster whose presence was heralded by the bullroarers. This falsehood in place, the men could easily keep the women intimidated.

For reasons he doesn’t explain, Hogbin rather quaintly makes the following inexplicable statement:

The story may perhaps give the impression that the hoaxing of the women was uppermost in the men’s mind when carrying out their ritual. … I am convinced that, although this aspect of the matter cannot be ignored, it would be a mistake to pay too much attention to it.

At this point, Hogbin dropped the subject and moved on.

I think Hogbin erred not to pay much more attention to why the women were hoaxed, why that was acceptable, why religion could be openly built on a fraud that used fear to exclude women from power and why the men feared sharing their power with women. Why was murdering an innocent woman acceptable? This is the kind of behavior we openly condemn when it’s practiced by Nazis. I am glad Hogbin did not suppress it, and hence romanticize “primitive” religion, but I also wish he'd spent more time exploring the issue.

The question I have is: Why did these men want to exclude the women? Why is that, across cultures, men seem to want to keep women out?

Hobbit houses for Olney?

Have I mentioned I love Olney Friends School?

Emma Churchman put a link on Facebook to this charming house a man built in Wales for about $4,700 (3,000 British pounds): http://gaia-health.com/gaia-blog/2011-12-21/man-builds-fairy-tale-home-for-his-family-for-only-3000/.

Isn't it lovely? And apparently green too. For some reason, it made me think of Olney.

I'm remembering all the land Olney has, its expertise in green building ... and perhaps a need for staff housing. Of course, too, there's always the question of where to put the student lounge. Wouldn't this be a wonderful, whimsical way to live? Or a good place to go to hang out with friends?

And it could offer Olney some extra publicity. Who wouldn't want to go to the Hobbit school? Now we just need to get the film class students to film the building going up ... Maybe we could even invite over the man who built the original ... What do you think?

Christmas thoughts from Maria von Wedemeyer

Maria von Wedemeyer was theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer's much younger fiancee--they became engaged shortly before he was imprisoned in April of 1943. She was a brilliant person in her own right and a good writer. In celebration of the Christmas season, here are some words of Maria's from a letter to Bonhoeffer in Tegel prison in 1943:

"Isn't there bound to be a rekindling of the desire for holy tranquility and universal peace? I couldn't help thinking so last night, while walking home through the dusk with my little tree. The snow glistened underfoot, and there were countless stars in the depths of the sky overhead. All that is Christmas originates in heaven and comes from there to us all, to you and me alike, and forms a stronger bond between us than we could ever forge by ourselves." Love Letters from Cell 92, p. 138.

Egg Nog and Quakerism

Almost every Christmas for as long as I can remember, I've had (non-alcoholic) egg nog, usually from a carton bought at the grocery store.

This year, however, I had a brilliant idea: let’s make homemade egg nog.

I looked up a recipe for non-alcoholic egg nog on the web. The ingredients were simple: eggs, whole milk, sugar, nutmeg, salt, vanilla.

I gathered six large eggs from the refrigerator and broke them in bottom of a heavy saucepan, then separated two more eggs and added the yolk. Half a cup of sugar and half a teaspoon of salt followed. I whisked this all together, then added four cup of whole milk, slowly letting it stream from the measuring cup as a I whisked it in with the eggs.

The hardest part, in these days when it is no longer safe to use raw eggs, was stirring the nog non-stop for 45-60 minutes on low heat until it thickened. Roger and I read Fanny Burney's Cecilia to each other as we stirred. When that was done, we added a teaspoon of vanilla and half a teaspoon of nutmeg and stirred.

What it tasted like was liquid custard. Our recipe called for topping it with whipped heavy cream, so we did, but that could easily be dispensed with.

The result was delicious. This is not a drink for the lactose intolerant nor the vegan, of course. Another year, perhaps, I'll tell the story of getting raw milk and free range eggs from my Amish neighbors, but this year all the ingredients came from the grocery store. With dioxides concentrated at the top of the food chain, we don’t want to be drinking non-organic whole milk on a regular basis, but once a year is probably fine.

To be honest, I had never really liked egg nog. I would drink it annually because it was part of the ritual of the holidays, but I never felt any regrets when it disappeared with the Christmas tree. It had always tasted a little weird. I now realize it's because I have been, all my life (with a few exceptions), been drinking a factory nog.

The point of this certainly is to celebrate homemade egg nog.

But it’s also for me to wonder: Why have I accepted a vaguely unsatisfying substitute for so long? I never even questioned why a drink so celebrated never tasted very good. And that leads to a broader question, which seem trite question to ask, a little bit of homey moralizing (which, of course, I would never do!) but I don't think it is. We perhaps need to keep revisiting this question in order to stay mindful, to keep from becoming complacent: Where else do we settle for a poor substitute because we never think to question what we’re doing? Do we do this with our Quaker faith? Where? How can we change?