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.

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.

Bonhoeffer Struggles

I attended the Bonhoeffer conference at Union Theological Seminary in
NYC in mid-November, which was a celebration of the near-completion of the
Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works translation. I had a fine time. I was
delighted to be at Union, which I had never visited before. (I am told
that all the college campus scenes for the TV show Law & Order are shot at Union.) A bit of drama ensued as Occupy Wall Street was shut down while I was there, a blow to the 46 Union Theological students who had been participating and an upsetting event to the school in general.

The Bonhoeffer talks were very interesting, ranging from Bonhoeffer's
reception in different countries to issues with translation and
theology. I learned that Fortress will be releasing a volume of
Bonhoeffer poems and a volume of his sermons in the next few years.

I was also interested to hear several times that the initial reception
to Bonhoeffer in Germany in the 1950s was mixed because he was seen as a traitor to
Germany by some. That certainly made my mind reel. How could that be?
Hitler was a horror. But then I realized that the Germans take law
and order seriously (although the rule of law certainly suffered under
Nazism) and that having one's country overrun by invading armies,
even in the interests of toppling of a genocidal madman,
is still a terrible experience. Yet I struggle. As a Quaker and a pacifist, I
struggle with Bonhoeffer's decision to get involved in an
assassination plot, though I certainly understand his anguished sense of responsibility to do something to combat the evil. On the other hand, as a part of the human race, I struggle with any defense of Hitler. I do struggle to find that of God in Hitler. As one speaker said, however, "It's easy for Americans to love Bonhoeffer." That I agree with.

As an aside, I listened for how the Germans at conference pronounced Bonhoeffer, suspecting it would not be our "Bon-hoff-ER." It was not--the Germans have a more melodious pronunciation that sounded to me more like "Bon [with a slight long-E to the Bon] -HEFF-a."

Bonhoeffer and Peace

Kevin writes: Diane, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed by the Nazis for attempting to bring peace through treachery and murder. In my opinion, the lesson he has to teach us is that even compassionate and deeply sensitive people can be led astray when they decide they know better than God what it is he wants from us.

Kevin,

I agree and am grieved that Bonhoeffer chose the path of violence in responding to Hitler, in essence becoming the mirror of the thing he hated.

I don't think Bonhoeffer ever truly became clear on pacifism. He was strongly influenced in that direction while at Union Theological Seminary, but when the crisis came, I don't think the small plant of peace growing in him was big enough to withstand his need to "do" something.

He makes a strong argument for "exceptionalism"--Hitler was an exception to the normal rules--but pacficism lives or dies on our ability to love all our enemies, even in exceptional circumstances (And aren't "our" circumstances always exceptional?) On the other hand, I believe the mature Bonhoeffer was groping away from blanket, universalist laws, maxims and principles in favor of a lived particularity centered on the reality of the suffering of Jesus. How this turned into killing Hitler--which I believe is not what Jesus would have done--is an interesting set of arguments. He wanted to stand with the suffering people--with Christ--which was right, but he couldn't quite bring himself to stand with the suffering in weakness and powerlessness--he felt compelled to try to act from a position of worldly power.

Bonhoeffer knew he was participating in activities that were less than pristine. He accepted that he would possibly be disowned by the church after the war when his role in the various plots and subterfuges were uncovered. He ultimately justified himself as willing to get his hands dirty --to look bad--to do the right thing. How much of this was self-deceptive romantic posturing? I don't know. Bonhoeffer had a strong sense of his own importance--but he WAS important. He was a privileged person from a privileged family with options unavailable to many desperate souls. If we had wanted to stay in the U.S., he was welcome with open arms and had several job options at a time when many U.S. citizens would have been thrilled beyond measure to have even one job offer. One doesn't even need to imagine how many German Jews would have given anything for the visa he was handed to come the U.S. Further, his sister, who married a man with some Jewish ancestry, was able to ride out the war with her husband and their children in England. Again, how many German Jews would have given anything--their right arms- to change places with his sister? Finally, in Germany, it seems fairly clear that the Nazis were, to some extent, trying to avoid entanglements with families like the Bonhoeffers, those upper and upper-middle class Aryans who were, after all, the people they courted. He was treated relatively gently, even in prison.

I think, however, all this privilege did weigh on Bonhoeffer, and that he believed "to whom much has been given, much is expected." A case can be made that his sense of Self and Destiny led him to know better than God what the answers were. On the other hand, he was aware of--and fought--his own self-aggrandizing tendencies as far as he could. Perhaps his mistake, if it was one, was his tortured desire to "do" something rather than "just" "be" something?

I can't help but think that if he had sidestepped the plot to assassinate Hitler and other overheated machinations to unseat the Nazis--which were actually not welcomed with open arms by Allied governments--he could have survived the war. Yet on the other hand, I am acutely aware of whom am I to judge--would I even had done an iota of what he did?

Thanks, Kevin ... I'm taking this opportunity to think aloud. Bonhoeffer is compelling and frustrating, a fully human person who was trying to live in obedience to Christ. Bonhoeffer's life makes us think. I can't help but be awed at him and yet wish he had followed a different path ... but I wasn't, thank goodness, in his shoes. As a Quaker, I'm impressed that he tried to enact his faith--that it wasn't divorced from his everyday life, that he took a stand.

I wonder, is it better to take the somewhat wrong stand, with passion, or no stand?