Hans raised his hand. “Please. I can’t say any more, but perhaps in a few months, if this appointment goes through, I’ll know where we all stand.”
“We all?”
“The family will stand together. Won’t we?”
Dietrich swallowed hard. “Of course,” he said.
“Good.” Hans went back inside.
No unnecessary risks, Dohnanyi had said. And what of necessary risks? Dietrich pondered the question as he finished writing the book he had so hesitantly begun in England. It was a study of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, written with Elisabeth’s final accusations ringing in his ears. On his visits to Berlin he walked the streets with Jews casting frightened glances about them as they hurried along. He would go straight to his desk and write, and even as he set pen to paper he knew himself as one whose only response to the call of Jesus was this solitary act. It was not enough, not nearly enough, and as he wrote he accused himself. Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our church. We are fighting today for costly grace. Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjacks’ wares. The sacraments, the forgiveness of sin, and the consolations of religion are thrown away at cut prices…. In such a church the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no contrition is required, still less any real desire to be delivered from sin…. Cheap grace is not the kind of forgiveness of sin which frees us from the toils of sin. Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, absolution without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross….
To endure the cross is not a tragedy; it is the suffering which is the fruit of an exclusive allegiance to Jesus Christ. When it comes, it is not an accident, but a necessity…. The cross is there, right from the beginning, one has only got to pick it up; there is no need to go out and look for a cross, no need to run deliberately after suffering…. Thus it begins; the cross is not the terrible end to another wise God-fearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.
These words materialized, it seemed, without thought or plan, and he was frightened to have penned them. When he had read them over he stood and went to his shaving mirror, stared at himself for a very long time. “Now I must do something,” he said aloud, “to make myself an honest man.”
As the director of the Finkenwalde seminary he was often summoned to Berlin for meetings of the Confessing movement, meetings which were more and more discouraging. Martin Niemöller’s expulsion from the pulpit had both frightened and awed many of the other pastors. “When in fact there should be only contempt and defiance,” Dietrich complained to Niemöller.
Niemöller, who since his banishment was thought by many to have become as unreasonably intransigent as Dietrich, said, “It won’t happen. Most of the laypeople and clergy, even those supportive of the Confessing movement, are desperate for a compromise with the Reich Church.”
“Like children caught in an act of rebellion against their parents,” Dietrich said, “who retain a facade of defiance even as they prepare to break into tears and beg for pardon.”
At church meetings he found himself speaking out despite Dohnanyi’s plea for caution. As the government was extending its discriminatory measures against Jews, he stood before a convocation of clergy in a church hall in Wilmersdorf. His audience waited his words with dread, now and then casting sidelong glances at one another. A few took notes.
“Now we are offered compromises,” Dietrich declared. “We shall be allowed to go our own way in what is called peace if we recognize the Reich Church and drop our opposition to it. There must be no such compromise. The national church has cut itself off from the Christian church. The national church has embraced heresy. It has done so by its treatment of the Jews. And if we refuse to concern ourselves with any Jews other than baptized Jews, then we too shall have fallen into heresy. Only those who cry out for the Jews may sing Gregorian chant.”
There were gasps at this statement, and one or two of those scribbling notes did so carefully. Not long after, the state church announced that Dietrich Bonhoeffer had been banned from teaching in German universities.
In the summer his study of the Sermon on the Mount was published. He had titled it Discipleship, and the dedication page read
For Pastor Martin Niemöller
He would have written this book much better
He set out for the Dahlem parsonage with a copy, signed and wrapped, and wished he could boast of what he carried to other passengers on the train. But as he walked past the Annenkirche and turned in the gate a weeping Frau Niemöller threw open the door and waved for him to hurry inside.
“They’ve come for Martin again! The Gestapo!”
“Again?”
“The children are out hiking in the Grunewald with the dog. They don’t even know.” She dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. “I’m so frightened. The men who came this time were very rude. Not like before when the officers were respectful, even if they weren’t particularly friendly. These men shoved Martin several times, and when I tried to kiss him goodbye, one of them pushed me so hard I nearly fell.”
“How long ago?”
“They only just left, not ten minutes ago. I haven’t had time to think what to do.”
Dietrich went instinctively to a phone before he remembered it was not wise. He set down the receiver and put his hat back on. “Look here, I’d best go to see Hans at once. Maybe he can find out something.”
“It’s so good of you, Dietrich,” Else Niemöller was saying, and threw open the door just as a black saloon car pulled up. She blocked the way and grabbed Dietrich’s arm. “Quick! Out the back before they come in!”
But Dietrich had been seen, and even as he sprinted through the house and out the back door a Gestapo agent with drawn pistol turned the corner into the garden.
“I wouldn’t be leaving just yet,” the man said pleasantly. He noticed the package still under Dietrich’s arm, put his gun in his pocket, and held out his hand. “May I?” He ripped off the wrapping paper and dropped it on the ground, studied the book’s jacket, opened it and read the inscription. He looked up. “You are the author?”
Dietrich nodded.
“Congratulations. Now—” with a jerk of his head—“back inside.”
In the house a team of six Gestapo agents emptied the contents of drawers onto the floors, slit cushions and rummaged inside trailing stuffing like spoiled entrails, held books upside down to see what might fall out, then tossed them into piles. Else Niemöller stood by, her face a mourner’s mask, but she no longer wept. Dietrich went to her and held her in his arms.
“Might as well make yourselves comfortable,” said the man who’d detained Dietrich. “We’ll be a while. It’s a big house, after all.”
“Where are we supposed to sit,” Dietrich said, “if you’re destroying the furniture?”
“What’s wrong with the chairs in the kitchen?” the man asked impatiently, then, “Fritz, go upstairs with Albrecht. Anton and Erwin can handle the papers down here.” He took a slip of paper from his jacket pocket and smiled at Dietrich. “Before you retire to the kitchen for a nice cup of coffee, Pastor Bonhoeffer, I must thank you for saving us from tracking you down to give you this message. You’ve been banished from Berlin. Since you’re here just now, we’ll hold you until we’re done and then send you on your way back to whatever woodsman’s cottage you’re holed up in. Unless, of course, we find something incriminating here in the house or—” He tapped the book.
Dietrich led Frau Niemöller to the kitchen, where a maid and cook waited nervously. A pot of coffee was soon brewing, and the cook, a woman so thin she seemed not to have taken a bite of her own food, set out plates of sliced ham and cheese, hard-boiled eggs and herring and onions in sour cream, thick slices of black bread and butter. The Gestapo ransacked the house for eight hours, sending m
en in teams to sort and haul away books and papers, tapping walls and chopping through plaster with pickaxes at suspiciously hollow places. (And pausing now and then to invade the kitchen and eat large helpings of the food without a word of thanks.) The Niemöller children came home from their outing with their pet schnauzer, Max, and were shepherded, frightened and distraught, into the kitchen, dragging the yapping dog with them. When the youngest boy was allowed upstairs to the toilet he returned in tears to report the family goldfish and hamsters had been flushed. Everyone feared for Max and he was shoved beneath the table and tied to a post so tightly he couldn’t move, but the Gestapo ignored him. “There, there, they’ll not hurt the little dog,” the cook reassured the children. “The Führer wouldn’t allow it. He loves dogs.”
At last Dietrich was told to leave. When he protested that someone must remain to help Frau Niemöller, he was manhandled and shoved toward the door.
“Never mind, Dietrich,” said Frau Niemöller, “we shall go tonight to my sister in Zehlendorf.”
“You, Bonhoeffer,” said the officer in charge, who’d since identified himself as Hauptsturmführer Sonderegger, “have forty-eight hours in Berlin. Then get out, or else you’ll find yourself in Sachsenhausen.”
And Dietrich was in the street, picking up his hat where they’d tossed it into a puddle.
Dr. Karl Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi sipped brandy and smoked pipes in the study in the Marienburger Allee house, while Dietrich went through an entire pack of cigarettes.
“I doubt it will matter what they found or didn’t find,” Dohnanyi was saying. “It looks like they mean to hold him this time, no matter what.” For he had learned that Niemöller was already lodged in the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen.
“It matters to Dietrich,” Karl Bonhoeffer said, as though his son were not in the room, were not pacing back and forth across the Persian rug. “If there’s anything incriminating I may not be able to help further.”
Dietrich stopped short. “There won’t be anything. Martin was very discreet after that run-in with Goering and Hitler. As for helping me, you’ve done quite enough, thank you.”
Dr. Bonhoeffer and Dohnanyi looked surprised at the tone of his voice. They’d just told him that his banishment from Berlin had been lifted after only a few hours. The ban on teaching and preaching remained in place, but he could otherwise come and go unmolested.
“I would have thought gratitude a more appropriate response,” Karl Bonhoeffer said, “since I have worn myself out and used a great deal of political capital to get this banishment rescinded. I would be hurt, except that I know you’ve had a stressful day.”
“I? It is Else Niemöller and her children who’ve had a stressful day. Not to mention Martin himself. I’ve suffered nothing. After all, my father is the renowned Dr. Karl Bonhoeffer, who has great influence with our government.”
Karl Bonhoeffer said nothing, for it was his policy to hold back his words until his anger had passed.
Hans said, “Actually, Uncle Rudi made most of the contacts.”
Dietrich threw up his hands. “Fine! Uncle Rudi! I suppose now I must throw myself at his feet in gratitude and pledge to be a good boy.”
“You talk as though you’d prefer to be in Sachsenhausen with Niemöller,” said Karl Bonhoeffer. He tapped the bowl of his pipe on the edge of an ashtray and reached for a pipe cleaner. “This is childish, Dietrich.”
“It’s not what I wish,” Dietrich said, “it’s what I fear. I doubt I would have the courage to face what Martin is about to face. But pardon me if I feel guilt that he is bearing this burden without me.”
He went to stand at the open window. It was a pitch-black night with no moon, and a light breeze that smelled of rain. Dohnanyi went to Dietrich’s side and pulled the window shut.
“Isn’t it a bit warm for that?” Dietrich said grumpily.
“Someone might be within earshot.”
“And what is it they mustn’t hear?”
“Dietrich,” Hans said, “there is a plot to overthrow the government. Your father and I are both involved.”
Dietrich stared from one to the other. He sagged onto a chair. There was no need to ask what the consequences would be if they were caught. “Who else?” he managed to ask.
“Mostly people in the Foreign Office, and military men. The army is the only institution in the country that could really carry this off, you know.”
“And why would they want to?” Dietrich asked. “Weren’t they ecstatic when Hitler moved into the Rhineland? With all this sword-rattling about Austria and the Sudetenland, I’d think the army would be thrilled.”
“Some of the generals are pleased. But many of them believe Hitler is reckless enough to take us into war with France and Britain. They don’t believe we could win, and the result would be worse than the Great War. With the blame falling on them, they fear. So they want rid of him.”
Dietrich shook his head in disbelief. “Can you trust them? Hans, you’ve never cared for the military.”
“I despise the military,” Dohnanyi agreed. He pulled a chair close and said in a low voice, “I hate the regimentation and the arrogance. But they’re afraid, the bastards, and we need them. Besides, General Oster—Oster is different. A renegade, but a respected one. He’s the real force behind this. He’s been recruiting the other generals.”
“Recruiting them? And what if someone reports him?”
“He doesn’t believe they will, if he’s careful who he approaches. It’s a matter of honor, esprit de corps. Something these people are very good at, I will admit.”
Dietrich looked at his father questioningly.
“My own part is small,” Dr. Bonhoeffer said. “Using evidence Hans has provided, I’m drawing up a psychological profile of Hitler. As evidence to be used in court, to show the man is mentally unfit to govern, if such justification is needed.”
“You’ll arrest him then?”
Dohnanyi looked away.
“Arrest him,” Dr. Bonhoeffer said, “and either lock him away for crimes against the state, or commit him for insanity.”
“Of course, the evidence for insanity must be medically sound,” Dietrich said bitterly, recalling the wretched Marinus van der Lubbe.
Dr. Bonhoeffer ignored him and said loftily to Dohnanyi, “I wonder if we were right to tell Dietrich? This is a bit beyond his scope.” Then he stood slowly, and the two younger men hastened to their feet. “It’s been a long day. Paula will wonder what is keeping me.”
They bowed stiffly, and stared at the closed door after Dr. Bonhoeffer had gone.
“There’ll be no arresting Hitler,” Hans von Dohnanyi said softly. “We’ll have to kill him.”
“Good God,” Dietrich whispered.
“It’s the only way. He’s too popular to leave alive.” Hans waited, then asked, “Do you want to know more?”
Dietrich took a deep breath and shut his eyes. He shook his head. “No,” he said.
Pomerania beyond the Oder was a land of marsh and forest, of dense woods choked with blackthorn and hawthorn. A treacherous place whose paths might lead the unwary into bogs impassable save in the dead of frozen winter. A land of bittern and stork and nightingale and turtle, whose people—at least those who were wealthy—lived in the saddle and hunted wild boar.
Dietrich preferred the city. Or if he must be in the country, he would choose the gentle Harz Mountains where the Bonhoeffers had their summer home of Friedrichsbrunn. He loved to climb in the Harz, to hike a stony path up onto an ancient crag, or down into a secluded cove. The flank of a mountain could be drenched in sunlight at one moment and covered by a dark cloak the next as clouds walked across the surface of the earth. In Pomerania one was either enveloped in smothering woods or stranded in a vast open field smelling of manure. For a long time Dietrich could not imagine wandering there, could not understand how people got their bearings.
But after two years of exploring in his free time, he had begun to make his pe
ace with this landscape. Like the Harz Mountains, the old forest of the East was a place where the practice of magic was still recalled. In his solitary walks beyond Finkenwalde, Dietrich discovered a small lake which he visited with knapsack stuffed with book, bread and cheese, bottle of wine. And there were other times, not so solitary. For Dietrich had been “adopted” by some local gentry, the von Wedemeyers.
They were an old family, Prussian and conservative but down on their luck, which went a long way to curb haughtiness. The once-grand estate at Pätzig, Kreis Königsberg, was a trifle shabby, with peeling wallpaper, plumbing that clanged and banged, and here and there a leaking roof. The west wing was closed off entirely in winter, because the von Wedemeyers could not afford to heat it. But Wedemeyer was reckoned by his tenants a fair man as landlords go, not mean and gouging as others might be in his straitened circumstances. When a peasant fell ill, Frau von Wedemeyer visited the sickbed with a jar of chicken stew and a bottle of homemade plum brandy, as von Wedemeyer women had always done. Each Christmas she directed the church Nativity play and distributed packages of toys and nuts to the village children. Her own children, seven in all, carried themselves with the well-mannered assurance of aristocrats. They were usually to be found in riding habits and jodhpurs, whips in hand, clambering onto the back of a horse with a hand up from a groom. For Dietrich, visiting Pätzig was like escaping into a nineteenth-century novel.
He did not like everything about Pätzig. He was often reminded how country people, even the most aristocratic, could be unsophisticated in their outlook. When he sat before the hearth with Herr von Wedemeyer in the great hall, trying to ignore the antlered head of a stag glowering over them, he often grew bored with hearing how everything would be set right in Germany if only the monarchy were restored and government turned over to the ancient nobility. He could recite by heart how Wedemeyer got the news of Kaiser Wilhelm’s abdication on his wedding day and wept so fiercely his bride-to-be tried to call off the ceremony. (“But she went through with it. Thought if the Reds actually won they’d have more sympathy for a newlywed couple and leave us be, eh?”) And the stories of how two years earlier Herr von Wedemeyer defied the local Nazis who accused him of “antisocial behavior.” (“They wanted Pätzig, you see,” Herr von Wedemeyer explained. “I mean, that must have been it, because what had I done to antagonize them? I don’t drink with them, or invite them to my house. Why should I? Bunch of shopkeepers. None of them from good families, not a one can sit a horse or bring down a deer. Except Goering, I hear, but he’s titled. No, it was the land they wanted, clear it and make some money. Might have got it too, if your Uncle Rudi hadn’t come through. One of the best lawyers in Berlin, von der Goltz, that’s what everyone round here said. And he did the job. Told me he had a relative moved hereabouts, and when we heard you preach in Stettin I said to my wife, ‘That’s the very fellow, old Rudi’s nephew.’” Dietrich sighed and reminded himself that his own dear mother did indeed hail from these Prussian gentry.)
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