The young people of the world praise their German hosts. The Olympic Village, the living quarter for the athletes, is pleasant and comfortable, the beds firm, the rooms quiet, the food bountiful and well prepared.
Nearby, though no one notices, the prison camp at Sachsenhausen is being enlarged. When the Games are over the Olympic Village becomes a barracks for the SS guards who work at the camp. The beds remain firm, the rooms quiet, and the food bountiful and well prepared, at least until the last year of the war.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer is back at his duties in Pomerania. He is in charge of a seminary for aspiring pastors who wish to serve Confessing Church congregations. They have taken over an old house in the village of Finkenwalde, a bare, drafty place with cracked plaster and leaking ceilings. It is seldom visited by outsiders and surrounded by woodland, secluded and private. Here twenty seminarians sleep in one large room. In the classroom, once the preserve of a governess and her charges, a faded portrait of Bismarck hangs above a chalkboard. The seminarians eat common meals, usually soup and potatoes or cabbage. Their only books come from Dietrich’s private library. It pains him to see his precious theological volumes with pages dog-eared and covers battered from constant passing back and forth. But he decides his fretting is sin, an unseemly worldly attachment. He is trying to set a spiritual example. He runs the seminary as strictly as a monastery, with regular hours for meditation and prayer and silence. The students grumble that their teacher is too strict, that he is an enthusiast, a Roman Catholic masquerading as a Protestant. But they must admit that he does not set himself above them, that he chops wood as they do, washes dishes and tends the vegetable garden as they do. He also takes them into the village and regularly beats each and every one at tennis.
Even here, surrounded by his students twenty-four hours a day, he is lonely. When there is talk of meetings between the Reich Church and the Confessing congregations to resolve differences, Dietrich declares, “There can be no communion between church and unchurch.” The students are amazed at his rigidity. Dietrich circulates a paper in church circles that proclaims, “There is no salvation outside the Confessing Church.” Of course, this raises a scandal. (In Berlin Niemöller hears complaint after complaint about Bonhoeffer’s narrow-mindedness.) Though the seminarians have grown fond of their teacher, they have concluded he is something of a fanatic. At night in their beds, though they are supposed to maintain silence, they wonder in whispers why their teacher is so obsessed with the Jewish Question. Did the Jews not crucify Christ? Did not Martin Luther himself chastise the self-proclaimed chosen people? Hadn’t the Jews in general been entirely too self-satisfied? And if privation and discipline are so beneficial for the students of the Finkenwalde seminary, might they not be beneficial for arrogant Jews as well? After all, one gets weary of hearing people complain about how they are mistreated.
In his own room—the one privilege he has allowed himself—Dietrich lies awake on a lumpy mattress listening to the creakings of the old house. Sometimes he thinks of Elisabeth, longs for her so painfully he is near tears. But this happens less and less often. In the past year, Dietrich and Elisabeth have spent thirteen days together. And just as well, perhaps, for thanks to the Nuremberg Laws, they can no longer make love without committing a capital offense.
Stille Nacht
WHEN THE FINKENWALDE SEMINARIANS dispersed for the Christmas holidays, Dietrich went home to Berlin. One morning he opened the Berliner Börsen Zeitung to a short notice at the bottom of page 4.
U.S. CONGRESS INVESTIGATES INDUSTRIAL DISASTER
Washington DC (Reuters)—The House Subcommittee on Labor will hold public hearings into allegations of an industrial disaster in Fayette Co., W.Va. Hundreds of workers are reported dead or seriously ill as a result of the construction of a hydroelectric facility and tunnel at Gauley Mountain. The workmen are said to have died from breathing pure silica dust while drilling the tunnel. If the reports are true, said subcommittee chairman Glenn Griswold (D-Ind.), it would be “the worst industrial disaster in the history of this nation.” Griswold said he expected the subcommittee to conduct “a thorough investigation.” He and Rep. Vito Marcantonio (R-NY) also plan to introduce legislation designed to improve workplace safety. Marcantonio has called for the establishment of a national agency for occupational safety and health.
Although work on the tunnel was completed by the end of 1931, the magnitude of the disaster is just becoming known. Rep. Marcantonio criticized “the neglect of worker safety under previous administrations.”
Dietrich’s hands trembled as he cut the story from the newspaper with his mother’s silver sewing scissors. He folded the clipping and slipped it into his wallet, then put on coat and hat and headed for the Scheunenviertel.
The sidewalks of the Oranienburger Straße were as crowded as a tram at rush hour. All the Jews of Berlin and the surrounding region seemed to have congregated beneath the shadow of the gold-domed New Synagogue. In the Oranienburger Straße they found safety in numbers. Not like the Ku-Damm or Friedrichstraße, where a Jew might be refused service in a shop by a surly clerk wearing a swastika armband, or spat upon by passersby, or accosted by a Gestapo patrol and dragged into an alley for a beating. In the Oranienburger Straße, the warming crush of fellow Jews was as comforting as a blazing hearth on that December day.
Dietrich made his way slowly, studied the faces around him, the worried, weary faces of people who had lost jobs, who had registered their property with the state, who had grown used to looking over their shoulders. Not like other Berliners in and out of shops bright with Christmas lights hugging packages wrapped in red and green and gold pausing at the corner butcher shop to inspect whitefeathered geese hanging by webbed feet dragging Christmas evergreens fresh from the country, treetips like tails tracing patterns on snowdusted sidewalks.
Elisabeth worked in an office two blocks from the New Synagogue, a large ground-floor room crammed with desks and chairs and people standing in lines between the desks and along the walls. Dietrich had to push his way to the center of the room before he could see her, rummaging through piles of paper at a desk in the far corner.
When he squeezed past the line of people waiting to see her, she said without looking up, “Wait your turn, please,” pulled two forms from the pile, then, “Dietrich!” while a pregnant woman with a little boy in tow watched anxiously. “You know I don’t have time to talk here.”
“Have lunch with me.”
“I scarcely have time to go to the toilet.” She shoved the forms toward the woman, handed her a fountain pen and bottle of ink.
“You must eat sometime,” he insisted.
“I ate a sandwich at my desk,” she mumbled and pointed to the middle of one form. “Write the names and ages of the children there, and the grandmother down here.”
“I’ll be at the Café Bauer when you get off work.” When she didn’t answer he said, “I’ll be there every night until you come.”
The woman across from Elisabeth pressed one arm against her large belly and leaned over the desk. Her dark hair fell across her face and she pushed it back impatiently, then began to write. Elisabeth sighed and shut her eyes. “I’m always so tired after work.”
“Please. I’ll buy you supper, and a good bottle of wine, and afterward I’ll rub your neck.”
“Here,” the woman pointed at the form, “should I mention the little one on the way?”
Elisabeth waved Dietrich away. He made his way out, stopped at the door, and put on his hat. He looked back. Above the slumped shoulders of the writing woman, Elisabeth was watching him. She smiled then and held up seven fingers.
She was not at the Café Bauer at seven. Dietrich called for a bottle of peach brandy. He sipped two tiny glasses and was about to leave at quarter to eight, but the door swung open and Elisabeth entered in a whirl of new snowflakes, pulled off her gloves, and looked around. He waved. She sat across from him, pulled off her black knit hat, and shook out her hair. Dietrich noticed the tight
dry skin across her cheekbones and nose, her pale lips.
“You do look tired,” he said. “Now I feel guilty for keeping you from your rest.”
“No,” she said, and placed her hand on his. “It’s good to see you.” She took her hand away and looked around. “This is the place we met,” she said. “Ages and ages ago.”
He handed her a glass of amber liquid. “Peach brandy. I’ve ordered a Riesling with dinner.” He raised his own glass. “To you and your work.”
She sipped the brandy with her eyes closed. “I hope it doesn’t put me to sleep.”
“You’ve lost weight,” he said.
“So have you.”
“I’m eating mostly potatoes and cabbage. I’ve become a regular peasant.”
“I’m too tired in the evenings to eat much,” she said.
He lit a cigarette and handed it to her, leaned close and touched his own to hers.
“We never see each other,” she said.
“No. I can’t get away. Even when we take our breaks, Niemöller keeps me busy. And when I do have some free time, you—”
She looked away. “You see how it is with me. People are desperate to get out of Germany. And we’ve nowhere to send them. No one wants Jews. So. Everything is worse and worse.”
“You don’t write as often,” he said.
“I go to work at seven and there are nights I don’t get home until eleven. There are nights I fall asleep on the tram and miss my stop.”
A waiter offered as tenderly as a newborn child the Riesling cradled in white linen. “Ja,” Dietrich said and accepted the bottle. “Never mind pouring. Just bring two orders of the goulash and leave us be.”
He filled Elisabeth’s wineglass. She said, “You don’t write so often either.”
“No,” he agreed. “You are very far away. Sometimes it’s difficult to believe you exist.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “It’s no good, is it?”
“I don’t know.” He laid his cigarette against the red ashtray, read worlds of possibility in the glowing ash. “Come home with me for Christmas. We’ll have Bach and Schubert on Christmas Eve, and then to the Annenkirche at midnight. A big dinner on Christmas Day, the entire family there—”
“Dietrich.” She placed her hand across his lips. “Dietrich. I’m not having Christmas this year.”
“Not having—You mean you have to work?”
“I mean I’m not a Christian anymore. Dear, dear Dietrich. Please try and understand. I can’t be a Christian in the Scheunenviertel.”
The waiter descended on them with steaming plates of goulash and a basket of bread.
The plates sat untouched.
“What does this mean for us?” Dietrich managed to say.
She shook her head. “I don’t know, I don’t know. Sabine married a Jew. Does it matter to you?”
“Of course not. But it’s going to be difficult whichever religion you observe. I’m afraid Gerhard and Sabine will have to leave soon. You’ll have to leave soon.”
“I won’t leave.”
“Elisabeth, you must be reasonable. You don’t know what will happen.”
“What don’t I know? What is there I don’t get a whiff of every day?”
“Hans says—Hans says it’s going to get worse. He’s seen the new laws they’re drawing up. Jews will be banned from theaters and concert halls and public schools. You’ll be treated the same as the Negroes in America.”
“I don’t see the Negroes leaving America.”
“It may get worse still.”
“Will it? And what do you plan to do about it? That’s your responsibility, isn’t it? You and all the other Christians? What will you do?”
“I don’t know. But I’ll do something. I promise I’ll do something.”
They picked at the food growing cold on their plates, finished off the bottle of wine, and went out into the winter night. In Unter den Linden they caught a tram to Weißensee, where Elisabeth had three rooms on the second floor of a house owned by a Jewish couple she’d helped emigrate to Hong Kong. Outside the house in the Charlottenburger Straße, they stopped and looked up at the dark windows. “Why did you come today in particular?” she asked.
He remembered the newspaper article and took out his wallet, handed her the clipping. She held it up to the light of the streetlamp.
“You were there,” she said.
“Yes. With Fred. I’ve often wondered if he went back to the tunnel.”
“Why did this bring you to me?”
“It reminded me how much you and I need each other.”
“Funny,” she said, “because this was a friend who had his own road to travel.”
He didn’t answer, could not find his voice.
She lingered a moment with her hand on his sleeve as though about to invite him upstairs, then seemed to think better of it, kissed him on the cheek, and went inside.
Two months later he sat at his window staring out at the spring-green woods of Finkenwalde. Paper and pen were spread out before him. He picked up Elisabeth’s latest letter, read, You seem so far away. In a different world. There is much I want to tell you but how can I begin? Are you doing anything besides writing your book and teaching your students? Dietrich! How long can we wait? Of course I cannot say more in a letter. But I’m tired of excuses. Some people find a way to do what they have to do.
He recalled their most recent conversation, a hasty meeting on a cold bench in the Tiergarten. They hadn’t even held hands.
“All I hear from Christians is excuses,” she’d said. “I’m tired of excuses. Hitler doesn’t have to be obeyed. He’s banned marriages between Aryans and Jews. Does that matter? People still make love. He’s banned abortions, but women still have them. Why must others hide behind their decency?”
He had been embarrassed by the baldness of her examples and hadn’t answered.
She’d said, “You’re uncomfortable, aren’t you? You don’t like to be reminded how most people have to survive. It doesn’t fit the clean world of the Wangenheimstraße.”
“We no longer live in the Wangenheimstraße,” he’d reminded her, aware of the lameness of his response.
She’d shaken her head in frustration, then said, “I have to go, there’s so much work waiting for me.”
He took up his pen and dipped it in a bottle of blue ink. He wrote, You know how I struggle with ambition. Spiritual ambition. I thought I learned something about that in America. But I continue to fail, as you like to point out. I am often quite pleased with myself and unhappy with others. If you look in your heart you will find you are not unfamiliar with such feelings.
I have a path I must follow, and so do you. All that is clear. You are responsible for the way you choose. I am also responsible for my decisions, though my way is not so clear to me just now. I cannot feel, as you seem to, that it is unimportant to train future pastors. And there are other matters about which I may not speak.
The government has made it illegal for us to marry each other. Even without that we seem to be moving apart. Perhaps the times are to blame. Perhaps we shall never know. In any event, I see no future for us as a couple.
I don’t want to lose touch with you. But it is clear we must both be free. I do still love you, dear Elisabeth. You must believe that. And you must promise that if you find yourself in any kind of trouble, you will come to me at once. In that, at least, you will find me faithful.
Yours,
Dietrich
He held the letter for three days—reading it over and over—before he posted it. There was no response.
Disappearances
1937–38
AFTER THE OLYMPIAD, PAINTINGS DISAPPEARED from museum galleries, leaving pale rectangular ghosts upon the walls. Books disappeared from library shelves. The works of Mendelssohn and other Jewish composers disappeared from concert halls. Bookstores and theaters closed. Writers and artists and musicians vanished, some into the camps, some abroad.
Pastor M
artin Niemöller also disappeared. Twice. Each time Frau Niemöller telephoned Dietrich in a panic and he left his post in Pomerania to return to Berlin and wait with her. A few days would pass and Niemöller would reappear, disheveled and tired and hungry but otherwise no worse for wear. Each time he had been taken to Gestapo headquarters in the Prinz-Albrecht-Straße, questioned about his activities on behalf of the Confessing Church, and then let go.
Dietrich wondered why he had himself not been detained. Of course, he would not enjoy being taken in by the Gestapo. But was he being ignored because he was in fact doing nothing important? He shared this fear with his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi when the family had gathered in the Marienburger Allee for Easter dinner. Hans looked at him oddly, then led him out onto the veranda.
“God knows I can’t tell you what to do,” Hans said, “but this is a very sensitive time for me just now.”
“Is it?”
“I’m being eased out of the Justice Ministry. It seems I’m not enthusiastic enough for the Nazis.”
“You expected that,” Dietrich pointed out.
“Yes. But now that it’s here, I’ve a decision to make. You know General Hans Oster?”
“Not personally. But I know he’s a member of Martin Niemöller’s parish in Dahlem, and Martin thinks highly of him.”
“Oster has just been made second in command of the Abwehr. Military intelligence. He wants me as his assistant.”
“Will you accept?”
“Yes. I can’t think of a better position for keeping an eye on what’s happening, perhaps even undermining the Nazis from the inside. I believe that’s Oster’s idea as well.”
“And what has this to do with my concern about my own work?”
Hans placed his hand on Dietrich’s arm. “Only this. Don’t take any unnecessary risks right now. Stay in Pomerania with your students. Please.”
“What do you mean? I’m just—”
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