Saints and Villains

by Denise Giardina

  “Her idea altogether,” said Dr. Bonhoeffer as he and Dietrich sat smoking in the library. “You know I’ve never asked favors on behalf of my children. If I had, certainly Walter would not have—” He shut his eyes and leaned his head against the back of the chair.

  “I won’t tell them what they want to hear,” Dietrich said.

  “What would they want to hear?”

  “Nothing. They’ll want to digest their breakfast in peace.”

  Karl Bonhoeffer stared at the empty fireplace. “There’s a chill this evening,” he said. “I’ll have Elli light the fires. And what will you speak about?”

  “The church.”

  His father shrugged. “I don’t see how that could upset anyone.”

  He thought back on the only sermon he had preached at Abyssinian Baptist. He had been nervous then as well, for he knew he could never match the preaching style of the Powells, the scaling of emotional heights that caused people to call out from their pews.

  He therefore had started slowly, preaching on a text from the Gospel of Luke, concentrating on speaking clearly so his accent would not make his words incomprehensible. They had listened in polite silence until he quoted from his Gospel text

  The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor

  and he had no sooner uttered poor than a woman’s voice shouted

  AMEN!

  He was startled but continued more slowly and emphatically heal the brokenhearted

  AMEN BROTHER!

  deliverance to the captives

  PRAISE JESUS!

  to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord

  BLESSHISNAMEPRAISEJESUS!

  they cried out from all parts of the sanctuary, the call and response continuing through the rest of the sermon. He found himself anticipating his words, even in midsentence, leaving out arid phrases, even entire paragraphs, repeating everything that seemed full-blooded.

  It was nothing like a sermon by Pastor Powell, people would say as they filed out of the sanctuary, and the white man had seemed more moved than they, and yet they honored his effort. He had been trembling visibly when he sat down, and his face was wet with sweat though it was February. He wiped his eyeglasses on the sleeve of his cassock.

  Back in his room at Union he had gone over the sermon, striking out everything he hadn’t said with red ink, rewriting what remained.

  As the day of the sermon approached, Dietrich had difficulty sleeping. He would stay up late working, making painstaking notes in a small, neat script. Then he would be too keyed up to sleep and mentally review what he had written, trying to imagine how it would sound from the pulpit. Turtledoves settled on the eaves above his open window, muttering to themselves. From the Halensee came a distant squabbling of ducks, interrupted by a passing automobile, then silence. He switched on the bedside lamp and scanned his notes once more, then took a sleeping pill and lay back on the pillow. As he drifted off he heard a thin wailing of sirens, perhaps police rushing to a brawl between Communists and Nazis. The Nazis must be getting the worst of it, or the police would not be so anxious to intervene. He turned on his stomach, then back again, and in that borderland between waking and sleep Dietrich would be back in the boxcar hearing Fred Bishop say I hope you never get a call I wouldn’t wish it on you and Dietrich wouldn’t answer, would just try to listen.

  He had been writing a treatise on the nature of the church, and writing about the church he had felt himself falling in love with his subject in all her hideous corruption. As a man falls in love with a whore, as did the prophet Hosea, he told Elisabeth, who was the only person he could speak with of such things. The sermon he would deliver at the Kaiser Wilhelm Church must convey this somehow, along with his own awkward groping toward personal faith.

  He wanted to tell Elisabeth what had happened to him at the end of his stay in America but found he could not yet speak of it. He nursed these memories like a fresh wound. He had written once to West Virginia, the week after returning to Germany, and received no reply. He meant to write again, but he was held back by some sense that it was easier not to know what was happening to Fred, who was becoming somewhat unreal, a part of imagination rather than memory. The blurring of his face helped Dietrich sleep at last.

  Amid the faux-Gothic splendor of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, the trumpet voluntary sounded beneath nineteenth-century gargoyles who had never watched over bubonic plague or witch-burning. Dietrich surveyed the tightly packed rows of beribboned officers, women in autumn colors of brown, gold, and green, government ministers in frock coats and starched collars. President Hindenburg, corpulent and dyspeptic, sat in the front pew, his monocle glinting in the morning sun like a photographic flash.

  Dietrich ascended a pulpit of fantastically carved oak, enclosed like a small house and roofed with a crown of gold. From the middle of the church, where Elisabeth sat beside Sabine, he looked blond to the point of transparency, and very young.

  “He’s frightened to death,” Sabine whispered.

  Elisabeth nodded. She was grateful Sabine had spoken to her. Though not normally a shy person, she, an only child, had felt overwhelmed by the vast tribe of Bonhoeffers—and especially the beloved Sabine—at the break fast in honor of Dietrich’s sermon. She had thought, They know exactly who belongs to them and who does not, or will not be allowed to. Meeting them is like standing before a choir of angels while awaiting the disposition of one’s soul.

  Dietrich was reading a part of the appointed lesson, his voice low at first but gaining strength as he went.

  “From the second chapter of Revelation we hear these words: Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love.”

  He looked up, searching for the family. Halfway back he glimpsed his mother’s green hat.

  He took a deep breath and said, “The church has reached the eleventh hour of her life. Before long it will be decided whether a new day will dawn, or whether the church is done for. It is high time we realized this.”

  They sat as though transformed into pillars of salt.

  “The trumpets sound on this Reformation Sunday. We celebrate Martin Luther and the courageous stand he made. But a fanfare of trumpets is no comfort to a dying church, much less can it bring her back to life. A fanfare of trumpets is a shout down the cold silence of a still colder clamor, where funeral marches hide the stench of mortality. Such fanfares are known to all of us in the church, and they are a proclamation of death.”

  He did not want to see their faces. They were before him briefly, and then he saw them no longer. He was at Abyssinian Baptist. He leaned forward, beating the pulpit gently with his fist, trying to recover the cadence, to hear the ghostly call and response.

  “The church which celebrates Reformation Day cannot leave poor Luther in peace. He is called on to support all our fearful practices. We prop up this dead man, cause him to stretch out his hand, fingers bloated as over-ripe fruit, point to this church and cry, with religious fervor, over and over again: ‘Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise!’ And we do not see that this church is no longer the church of Luther. It was in fear and trembling, driven by Satan into his last stronghold, that Luther spoke in the fear of God his ‘here I stand.’

  “What has this to do with us today? No one here has stood in that place from which he can only say to God in prayer, ‘I cannot otherwise, so help me God!’ Thousands of times today it will be proclaimed from the pulpits: Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise!

  “But God answers, ‘I have somewhat against thee….’”

  He removed his glasses, wiped them and placed them in his pocket, looked over the congregation with blurred vision. He gripped the sides of the pulpit.

  “Leave the dead Luther in peace,” he said, “and hear the word of God.”

  Then he stepped down.

  The family left immediately after the service, so that they might prepare for the recept
ion at the house in Wangenheimstraße 14, supervise the handing out of nosegays, lay out the plates of smoked herring on ice, place the string quartet in an appropriate spot. Only Elisabeth stayed behind. She caught him as he left the church alone. He stopped, bowed his head, and she grabbed his hands.

  “What you did today,” she said, “was what you were put on earth to do.”

  He reached out and drew her close, squeezing the breath from her, then walked with her out the arched stone door.

  From Morn to Midnight

  1933

  THE BUILDING WAS one of the more nondescript in the Schloß Straße, four floors of peeling brown stucco and crumbling stone steps. A sign above the bell read

  CHARLOTTENBURG YOUTH CLUB

  Open 6:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m.

  Everyone under 25 WELCOME

  It had once been home to an expatriate Church of England congregation which had moved on to more ecclesiastical surroundings. The basement was kitchen and social hall. The ground floor had a large room—painted in drabgreen and dimly lit—with a stage. The Anglicans had used this room for Sunday worship. A gothic IHS was carved into the movable podium and embossed in frayed gold on the purple drapes above the stage. The ground-floor windows were streaked with grime, and the carcasses of flies littered the sills between iron bars and glass panes.

  The first and second floors had smaller rooms for classes and meetings. Falk Harnack taught acting and public speaking, Elisabeth art, Suse literacy, and Dietrich—in addition to a sparsely attended course in ethics—gave piano lessons. The piano was an upright that had once served a vaudeville hall, and three keys, including middle C, were missing their ivory. He developed a callus on the side of his right thumb.

  He had fallen into an agreeable routine, morning at the university, noon meal at home with his mother, afternoon study and writing in his room, and a light supper with Elisabeth before going together to the club. They sometimes held hands on the tram but were otherwise no more demonstrative in public than a couple married half a century. In the drawing room of Wangenheimstraße 14—he rarely allowed himself to be alone with her in her flat—they sat side by side on the sofa. The Bonhoeffer parents had never permitted their daughters to be alone with their young men until their engagement, and though Dietrich was a son and therefore allowed more freedom, he feared to act on it. He had only recently been ordained, and he was his parents’ child.

  One evening when he had accompanied Elisabeth to her flat, he allowed himself to stand in the doorway and kiss her briefly. It was the greatest pleasure he had ever experienced, placing the tip of his finger beneath her chin, shutting his eyes so that he might have been dreaming as he leaned forward, tasting her lips and then a fleeting touch of her tongue. Afterward he held her for a moment, his cheek resting against her hair, which smelled slightly of soap. Then he pulled away, looking at his watch and mumbling that he had nearly forgotten he must meet with a student in half an hour. He knew this abrupt withdrawal confused and hurt Elisabeth, but he had felt a surge of desire so fearfully strong he knew nothing to do except flee.

  At the club, Suse and Falk noted the budding romance with winks and nudges. They were themselves lovers, Suse having shared Falk’s bed in his Magdeburger Platz flat. No one in the family knew, of course, since the parents would have been scandalized. Suse and Falk both knew this would not be a lasting relationship. Falk would not settle down with one woman, not for years anyway. As for Suse, he often drove her wild with his politics, since she liked to laugh about everything and he would not be teased about his Communist sympathies.

  “If he’d talk like a human being instead of a bloody pamphlet,” she complained to Elisabeth, “he might be bearable.”

  She doubted the times or his personality lent themselves to such a transformation. Still he was good-humored otherwise, and an excellent lover. She would wait until they tired of sleeping together, and then decide if the time had come to tend a home and family.

  It was an unquiet New Year. Rumors flew that President Hindenburg was dying, that the chancellor, von Papen, was scheming to replace him with Hitler, that von Papen’s enemy Schleicher had suffered a nervous breakdown, that the Communists were plotting to murder businessmen in their beds and ravish their wives, that the Jews, wealthy to a man and stingy as packrats, would hoard the nation’s riches in foreign bank accounts until Germany was brought to her knees, that poor men who entered the green cast-iron public pissoirs at night were being castrated by Nazi gangs, that the poor women who waited in line for hours to buy a scrap of rancid meat were being poisoned by the fascists were being abducted from the line into white slavery were being sold the flesh of their own children instead of pork. Hitler and his followers were conspicuously present at Holy Day services across Germany, praying visibly and piously. In many churches, the crosses on Christmas altars were flanked by the national flag and the swastika, in thanksgiving for the gifts of Baby Jesus and Fatherland. On New Year’s Eve, torchlight parades wound through Nuremberg Munich Weimar Regensburg Cologne Heidelberg Düsseldorf Bremen Passau…

  At the Charlottenburg Youth Club, Falk Harnack posted a notice announcing auditions for the club play. He would be directing From Morn to Midnight, by the expressionist Georg Kaiser.

  Dietrich read the script and objected.

  “This,” he said, “is the most cynical piece of work imaginable.”

  “What would you suggest?” Falk said. “The man is brilliant. He even collaborates with Kurt Weill.”

  They sat in the basement kitchen sipping coffee and smoking after locking up for the night, surrounded by cheap wood cabinets that had once held heavy crockery, pots and pans, but now stood empty, their bottoms littered with old mouse droppings.

  “I had thought,” Dietrich said, “perhaps Hofmannstahl.”

  Falk blew smoke at the ceiling.

  “He’s good for young people,” Dietrich said. “We performed his plays when I was a schoolboy. His work has a moral center.”

  “As if a moral center exists. Hofmannstahl is crashingly old-fashioned. Worse than that. He’s positively medieval, a monk writing morality plays. And my God, the man was a librettist for Wagner! I’d rather die than do Hofmannstahl.”

  “Falk does want something up to date,” Suse said in what she hoped was a conciliatory tone.

  “To say the least,” Falk said. “If Georg Kaiser is cynical, he reflects our times.”

  “But it does no good,” said Dietrich, “to go on and on in a nihilistic way. That leads only to inaction.”

  “I have another objection,” said Elisabeth. “I don’t care for the scene in the velodrome with the identically dressed Jewish gentlemen. I think it’s anti-Semitic, and the Jewish young people won’t like it any better than I do.”

  “Why don’t we do Brecht instead?” Suse asked.

  “But you don’t like Brecht either, do you?” Falk said to Dietrich. “You don’t care for anyone who’s penned a play since fucking 1914.”

  “I won’t apologize for my taste,” said Dietrich.

  But it was Falk’s play, and after this initial protest they acquiesced. They agreed to help with the audition and handed out mimeographed copies of the script—at least with the reference to the gentlemen in the velodrome as Jewish scrupulously marked out with black ink—while Falk stood on the low stage. The young people—Dietrich and the others always thought of them as the young people even though they (Elisabeth was the oldest, at twenty-nine) were not much older—sat on the folding chairs or in cross-legged Red Indian style on the floor. They had narrow faces and eyes bright with cunning and hunger. The boys had only thin jackets despite the winter cold, the girls wore plain dresses with torn stockings and scuffed shoes.

  “Here’s the play in brief,” Falk said. “The central character is a Cashier in a bank. It’s the most difficult part, since it demands the mastery of several long speeches and soliloquies. The Cashier is a symbol of our times. He exists in a bourgeois society where life has absolutely no mean
ing. Only money counts.”

  The young people listened and hungered.

  “The Cashier,” Falk was saying, “is trapped in a capitalist world, literally behind the bars of his teller’s cage.”

  Dietrich and Elisabeth stood with Suse in the back. Suse sighed loudly. “He will work in his politics,” she whispered.

  “A beautiful woman enters the bank at the same time another character, the Stout Gentleman, is depositing a large sum of money. The Cashier, certain the woman is attracted to him, believes she will only run away with him if he is wealthy, so he steals the money. When he realizes he has misunderstood the lady’s attentions, he flees alone into a larger world just as devoid of meaning as the bank. He escapes his tiresome family, wanders for a time in a wilderness, throws away vast sums in a velodrome and a restaurant, pursues women in a hedonistic way. None of this satisfies his longings. Then he meets a girl from the Salvation Army who takes him to a meeting where he is urged to repent of his supposed sins. As if he, and not society, were the perpetrator of his misery. He trusts the girl, who seems to represent what is good and spiritual, but she betrays him to the police. He sees there is no place for him in this corrupt world. And so he shoots himself, gasping ‘Ecce homo’ as he dies—ah, that means ‘Behold the man’—a last declaration of his fleeting and futile existence.”

  The young people nudged one another, whispered among themselves, the low murmuring punctuated by titters.

  “What’s wrong with a nice love story?” one of the girls called out.

  “Yah,” a boy yelled at her, “just because you want to be the one who gets laid!”

  Laughter erupted, and Falk’s face reddened. He called for attention. When they had quieted, he said, “These are serious times. Love, sentimental love at least, is a luxury we cannot afford just now.”

  At the back of the hall Suse moaned, “Oh, God.”

  “In any event,” Falk continued, “you have the wrong idea about art. Art, true art, is a weapon. A play like this can open your eyes, open the eyes of your audience, to what is happening in the world.”