Saints and Villains

by Denise Giardina

  Dietrich was too moved to speak. He looked out the window. Snow had begun to fall from a gray sky. After a time he regained his composure and said, “It will be lovely in the Harz Mountains just now. My parents have a country house at Friedrichsbrunn, and the family often goes there after Christmas. There will be snow on the ground, and from the kitchen the smell of venison stew and plum cake. When you walk in the hills there, you expect to round a bend and come upon Rumpelstiltskin grumbling along his way, or Hansel and Gretel scattering their breadcrumbs. It’s so very German, so—”

  Bell seemed to shrink in his chair. He put a hand to his forehead, then stood and went to the window, his back to Dietrich. “Why don’t you go to Elisabeth?” he said.

  Dietrich found her in the close leaning against a wall, her red coat vivid against the gray stone. He leaned beside her and tilted his head back to take in Chichester Cathedral towering above them, rimed with new snow like a frosted cake.

  She said, “When you go back home to visit you’ll find that all the Jews you knew in Berlin, all the friends of your family, are gone. They are the ones with money enough to leave and be welcomed elsewhere. For the others, the ones you don’t know, it isn’t so easy. Few countries will give entrance visas to Jews, not unless they’re bringing money with them. I’ve learned quite a bit about emigration while trying to help my father. I’ve traveled and made contacts. I speak French and English. All that makes me a valuable person to Jews still trying to get out of Germany. How could I refuse to go back and help?”

  “You couldn’t refuse,” he said. “Nor can I. I never truly believed in India.”

  “I know.”

  He took her cold hand. “You’ve come without your gloves,” he said.

  She smiled. “So have you.”

  “Elisabeth, I want you to marry me. But only after everything has been sorted out. Only after we see how things are, and know there is a way for us to make a home together.”

  “Yes. It makes no sense to marry just now. But it isn’t fair, is it?”

  “No,” he agreed. “Not fair at all.”

  George Bell, still standing at his high window, watched them embrace. He turned away just as Hettie entered the room.

  “It looks as if we’re losing Dietrich,” he said in a rough voice.

  “I knew it the second I saw you,” she said, reaching for his handkerchief, “because your eyes are so bright.”

  IN THE SPRING Dietrich took the train to Canterbury. Tom Eliot’s new play was in rehearsal at the cathedral chapter house. Dietrich had a note from the poet, a special invitation to attend, along with an apology for the hurt feelings of the previous year. Elisabeth had been in Berlin for nearly two months, while Dietrich had been delayed, tying up loose ends at his churches. He was lonely, and apprehensive, he sometimes admitted to himself.

  At the train station he noticed the handbills.

  MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL

  A play in verse by

  T. S. Eliot

  featuring Robert Speaight

  as Archbishop Thomas à Becket

  June 3-24, 1935

  8:00 p.m.

  THE CHAPTER HOUSE

  Canterbury Cathedral

  Admission 1s.6d. free for the unemployed

  Before seeking out the chapter house, he entered the cathedral itself. Once he had told George Bell he was sensitive to atmosphere. He paused now inside the entrance. Before him, green light of spring dimmed by stained glass, the nave of Canterbury Cathedral stretched to a distance, choir and apse beyond, each higher than the next, up and up and up. He climbed to the lofty chapel which held the tombs of Becket, the Black Prince, and King Henry the Fourth, and looked back down along endless arches. Should he seek out the spot of Becket’s murder? Everyone who visited the cathedral was apparently required to stand upon the spot and imagine the deathcries of Becket, the grunts and hiccups of his murderers, the sword thrusts, the streams of blood.

  Dietrich was afraid of such specifics. He would not look. He hurried down the chapel steps and out of the cathedral.

  In the chapter house Eliot greeted him warmly (Bonhoeffer! Oh jolly good!—Eliot was more English than ever) but was soon distracted. “Sorry,” he explained, “it’s bitching time just now,” and went off to argue with the actor playing Becket, who complained that certain thumpings at the door were not happening at the right time.

  Dietrich slipped into a seat near the front and settled down. Eliot joined him. The actors disappeared as though waved away by a magic wand, the lights went down, and the chapter house dissolved in medieval gloom.

  The first act was much as Dietrich remembered. He cringed when the Fourth Tempter taunted Becket for his spiritual pride, and glanced at Eliot, who studied the actors intently, now and then whispering a line along with them.

  Then there was a sermon preached by Becket. The Archbishop shared his new understanding that martyrs do not choose their deaths but are chosen by God. Becket told his congregation, with a catch in his voice, that he would not likely preach to them again.

  “Very good,” Dietrich said during the break. “The sermon is quite moving.”

  Eliot nodded, pleased, and went off to share notes with the actors.

  Act Two.

  Eliot had not returned to his seat, and Dietrich sat alone in the dark. Four knights entered, threatened Becket and his priests. The Archbishop gave no ground and the knights left.

  Dietrich found himself drawn to Robert Speaight, the actor playing Becket. An intelligent, mobile face shining with self-awareness. When the Chorus of women appeared, lamenting the violence they feared was coming, Becket calmed them, his countenance alive with pity. Humans cannot bear too much reality, he said.

  Then there came a violent crash at the rear door and all fled save Becket. The door burst open and Dietrich, struck with fright, leaped from his seat and turned, expecting to face SS-Hauptsturmführer Alois Bauer and his blackshirts….

  Instead, armed knights baying for the blood of Becket, and Becket waits, in his face fear and resignation and expectation and courage and compassion and pride and pity as he faces his drunken accusers.

  Dietrich sank back onto his chair, feeling foolish and yet still unnerved. He could barely watch the inevitable murder, flinched when drawn swords flashed in candlelight and Becket was sent sprawling before the altar.

  Eliot was back beside him for the rest of the performance.

  The lights went up. Eliot watched Dietrich, who nodded and tried to smile. “Good, very good. Powerful.”

  “Something upset you,” Eliot said. “I assure you, it wasn’t intentional this time.”

  Dietrich shrugged. “It’s only that I was reminded of something that happened before I left Germany.”

  “George says you’re going back. And that you’ve become involved with a young woman. A Jewess, he says. Good Lord, Bonhoeffer! Your own temptress eh?”

  Dietrich who had begun to put on his coat, paused for a moment. “No,” he said. “My conscience.”

  Quoniam tu solus sanctus

  tu solus Dominus

  tu solus Altissimus

  For thou alone art holy

  thou alone art the Lord

  thou alone art the Most High

  Olympiad

  1936

  IN STORIES, people come together and are torn apart and come back together. Events double back on one another.

  Twins, a boy and a girl, hike through the Thuringian Forest and are lost in a snowstorm. Together they find their way home. Years later, they lose not only home, but each other. Will they live happily ever after?

  Sabine is not happy now. She has a Jewish husband who has been dismissed from his university position in Göttingen. She and Gerhard and their two daughters would not be able to survive if not for money sent from her family in Berlin. They are afraid to answer the doorbell. Sometimes the SS pass the house and hurl insults, sometimes they bump Sabine in the street and call her obscene names, and once the house was searched and
some books confiscated. But nothing else has happened. Yet.

  In the middle of the night when Gerhard and the children are asleep, Sabine creeps downstairs to the study at the rear of the house. She pulls back the curtain and looks across the veranda past the beds of white geraniums shimmering at the edge of the moonlit orchard. More than the Göttingen house she loves its orchard, a tangle of cherry, plum, apple, and pear trees. One summer night she opens the French doors and wanders out beneath a full moon. The silver-leafed trees have been shedding their fruit. Sabine drifts from tree to tree, swaying, drunk with the fragrance of fermenting fruit.

  Then the distant flailing of sirens, and perhaps (she is not certain) screams. She hurries back inside and locks the doors behind her.

  Dr. Karl Bonhoeffer is still the preeminent psychiatrist in Berlin, still conducts his medical practice at the Charité. He and his wife, Paula, have sold the house in Wangenheimstraße 14, the splendid house in which they raised their children. The new house, Marienburger Allee 43, is much smaller, only eleven rooms. Not enough space for servant quarters, but this is just as well, since it had become a strain to always worry about what the help might see or hear. Or report. Most of the staff has been let go, even Keppel the chauffeur (with an adequate pension for many years of service, of course), and the elder Bonhoeffers, despite their age, have taken driving lessons and obtained their licenses. A cook and housemaid still arrive each day to manage the chores, but return to their own flats in Wedding at night. In the evenings now, the family and their frequent visitors can talk freely, without peeping around corners or closing doors.

  The neighborhood is tucked away in a secluded corner north of the Grunewald, near the new Olympic stadium but far enough away to be spared the traffic and noise. Now and then, when a German athlete has made a spectacular throw or broken the tape at the finish line, a faint whoosh like the rush of a seashell held to the ear reaches Paula Bonhoeffer through the open windows of the sunroom. The house hides in a short cul-de-sac surrounded on three sides by woods so that Paula has taped black silhouettes of birds to the windows to keep the finches and swallows from crashing into them.

  Dietrich has his own room at the top of the new house, a spacious alcove with dormers which he uses whenever he can get away from his seminary duties. The other children are married with homes of their own. Christel and her husband, Hans von Dohnanyi, are still above the Havel in Sacrow. Karl-Friedrich and Grete are settled in Leipzig, where he has accepted a chair in physical chemistry. It is a new field for Karl-Friedrich, who has abandoned nuclear chemistry to avoid being drafted into atomic weapon research. Even Baby Suse is married, to a Confessing Church pastor named Walter Dress with a church in Dahlem. It is difficult to imagine Suse in a manse parlor, entertaining the women of the parish sewing circle over coffee and cake. But that is just what she does. Though she mildly scandalizes these same women with her comments in favor of degenerate music and art, and her habit of tooling around Berlin on her bicycle with her skirts hiked to her knees. Sometimes she thinks of Falk Harnack, but since her family moved from the Wangenheimstraße she no longer sees his aunt. She has heard Falk was one of the prisoners released from Dachau because of the Olympics, but she doesn’t know where he is.

  All the world is caught up in the pageantry of the most spectacular Olympic Games ever staged—the immensity of the stadium, the lavish opening ceremonies with their searchlights and orchestral arrangements of Wagner and splendid Teutonic costumes. There has been the threat of a boycott by the United States over Germany’s treatment of the Jews. But this is avoided after U.S. Olympic officials and business leaders visit the Reich before the Games and come away greatly impressed. One delegation headed by the publisher of the Los Angeles Times meets with U.S. journalists, including William Shirer, the friend of Pastor Martin Niemöller. They accuse the American foreign correspondents—known leftists, most of them, and probably anti-American or they wouldn’t be so anxious to live abroad—of exaggerating reports of German wrongdoing. Look how peaceful, they say. No labor troubles, no strikes, no agitators, no Reds. The Nazis are putting people back to work and making them stand on their own two feet instead of spoon-feeding them as Roosevelt is doing back home. No one is in trouble here who doesn’t deserve to be. As for the Jews, of course there’s prejudice. Maybe even discrimination, like that new law banning marriage between Jews and Aryans. And we hear some Jews have lost their jobs. That’s too bad.

  No one says it, but in the back of the visitors’ minds loom the American Negroes, who they will admit when pressed by their German hosts have even more cause for complaint than German Jews. Though the Negro is a special case, the American visitors argue uneasily, the Negro cannot handle equality, while the Jew has proved quite capable in the past…Nevertheless, the Germans reply, it is hypocrisy to fault us. And if you criticize us in public, why, should we not respond in kind? Finding no answer, the Americans shrug their shoulders and change the subject.

  Dr. Frank Buchman, the great American evangelist, is in Berlin for the Games. At the Adlon Hotel he attends lavish receptions, holds private meetings with Himmler (“a great lad”) and Goebbels, and even talks briefly with Hitler himself. The Führer assures Dr. Buchman his work is appreciated and no roadblocks will be placed in the way as he preaches the Gospel. Dr. Buchman glides along the marble floors of the Adlon ballroom, catches satisfying glimpses of himself in the gilt-edged mirrors before yet another Nazi official pumps his hand and praises him for his outspoken opposition to Communism.

  Dr. Buchman is interviewed by a reporter from the New York World-Telegram. He announces there is no persecution of the church in Germany. He suggests that the Nazis, like Franco in Spain, are making the world safe for true Christianity and protecting the West from godless Communism. “Compare Germany today to England, which is seething with Bolshevism,” he says. His rimless glasses glint in the pop of a flashbulb. “I thank God for a man like Adolf Hitler, who built a front line of defense against the Antichrist of Communism. My barber in London told me Hitler saved all Europe from the Red menace. That’s how he felt. Of course I don’t condone everything the Nazis do. Anti-Semitism? Bad, naturally. I suppose Hitler sees a Karl Marx in every Jew. But think what it would mean to the world if Hitler surrendered to the control of God. Or Mussolini. Or any dictator. Through such a man God could control a nation overnight and solve every last, bewildering problem.”

  What of Pastor Niemöller and the Confessing Church? the reporter asks. They claim the church is being persecuted.

  Dr. Buchman turns somber. He leans forward in his chair. “Is the spirit of God really at work there?” he asks. “Or is it the spirit of egoism and unrest and dissension?”

  During the Olympics, the Confessing Church is allowed to hold a series of worship services throughout Berlin. At first Dietrich refuses to participate.

  “It’s propaganda,” he says to Niemöller over coffee in the Dahlem parsonage, where the congregation has maintained its pastor despite his banning from the pulpit. “Window dressing. We’d never be allowed to speak so freely without the Olympiad. But visitors from abroad will think this is normal in Germany.”

  “Of course,” Niemöller says, his chronic exasperation with Dietrich flaring, “but who knows when we’ll have such an opportunity again to reach so many people? And if the public responds well, perhaps the regime will realize it has nothing to gain by interfering with the church. Wait until the Games are over, and then we’ll see. Perhaps it will be better.”

  Dietrich is asked to submit a photograph for the publicity posters. He refuses. He has no wish to see his face plastered at street corners as an advertisement for the new order. But he finally agrees to speak from the pulpit of the Pauluskirche. It is a sweltering summer evening. A few hours earlier, the American Negro Jesse Owens broke the tape in the hundred-yard dash. (So like the Americans to cheat by running a Negro, Eichmann complains that evening to SS-Hauptsturmführer Alois Bauer. Perhaps we Germans should have entered a racehorse.)
Under Dietrich’s black robe sweat stains half-moons at each armpit, trickles down his backbone, spreads beneath his leather belt, and pools at the top of his buttocks. As he surveys the crowded sanctuary the congregation settles back with a collective sigh, waving their programs in a vain attempt to cool themselves. Dietrich looks for Elisabeth but doesn’t see her.

  He glances at his notes and says, “When Judas came to betray Our Lord, Jesus asked him, ‘Friend, why are you here?’ Listen to the love in that question, consider that Jesus knows his hour is upon him and still he calls Judas ‘friend.’ Jesus will not part with Judas. He allows Judas to kiss him and does not turn away.”

  In the evening shadow their faces are turned up to him like flowers reaching for the light.

  “A final declaration of love, this kiss, and at the same time, a betrayal.

  In the end, Judas’s love for Jesus is not as strong as his hate. Yet both are present.”

  Dietrich leans over the edge of the pulpit.

  “Who is Judas? Does not Judas stand for the people? Who is the traitor? Is it you?” Points at the congregation. Slowly bends his arm and jabs his own breast with the accusing fingertip. “Is it I?”

  Outside the Pauluskirche, the foreign visitors stroll along the Grunewaldstraße, duck into the shops and cafés and bars, pause to buy sausages or Italian ices from vendors sheltered by bright yellow and green umbrellas, stop to talk or flirt, all the colors of humanity, all the languages, all the flags worn as patches on shirts or pins on lapels. Some expect Jews to approach furtively and complain of ill treatment. None does. So. Everything must be all right after all.