Saints and Villains

by Denise Giardina

  “I told you, no one must know I have it.”

  “They needn’t be told the manuscript is original,” Dietrich says. “They’d never dream that.”

  Bauer considers. He likes the idea of others listening with pleasure while only he, Alois, possesses the sacred knowledge of the true nature of the object before them. Alois and his priest, Pastor Bonhoeffer.

  “All right,” he says. “Can any of them sing?”

  Dietrich has admired the voice of Kokorin, who has been teaching them Russian folk songs. “The Russian,” he says.

  Bauer nods his agreement.

  They decide to wait until evening. It is Saturday night, April 7. Dietrich sits on the piano bench and arranges the manuscript while Bauer lights candles for him to play by. Kokorin stands at Dietrich’s shoulder. He has noticed the age of the manuscript, noticed what sort of arrangement it is, and the cramped style of the handwriting. But when he has raised his eyebrows Dietrich has said, “Don’t ask.”

  The prisoners sit on folding chairs. Some villagers have come as well, crowding into the auditorium as they have always done for school recitals, a row of old men standing along the back wall and shifting uneasily from one foot to the other. Bauer goes to take a seat in the front row. He sits with his legs crossed and his hands clasped tightly and resting upon his knee.

  Dietrich sets his hands to the keyboard. For a moment he is a boy again at the Berlin Conservatory, hears the scraps of voices—no lust no passion—then he begins to play. There is no choir, only Kokorin, no orchestra, only Dietrich. Because of the difficulty of following the manuscript he keeps the accompaniment simple. Kokorin sings in a pure tenor kyrie eleison christe eleison kyrie eleison

  Behind them Bauer weeps openly. He has been half afraid that something will be wrong, that the scratches on the old parchment will not be the Mass at all but something else, something hideous. But it is true, the music and words are true and familiar and the most beautiful in all the world.

  Dietrich hears Bauer sob, and his own eyes fill. Kokorin squeezes Dietrich’s shoulder and reaches over to turn a page.

  The next morning, Sunday, a delegation of prisoners approaches Dietrich at breakfast and says, “Pastor Bonhoeffer, we’d like you to hold a service for us this morning.”

  He is filled with sudden joy, and a longing to lead them in prayer, to preach to them and sing with them and share with them the bread and wine. Then he hesitates. “Kokorin,” he says. “Kokorin is an atheist and I would not wish to offend him.”

  Kokorin, hearing this, says at once, “No no no, you must by all means have this service. And I should like to share in it if I may.”

  Dietrich smiles and nods. Then he remembers Bauer, who eats by himself in a room off the entrance hall. “Gruber,” he says, using the name that Bauer has given himself in front of the POWs.

  “Ask him.”

  And why should he mind asking permission of Bauer when he did not with Kokorin? He swallows his distaste and asks anyway, standing in the door of what was once the headmistress’s office. Bauer considers as though he has been told a mildly amusing joke.

  “By all means,” he agrees. “As long as you don’t expect me to attend.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Fine. Then hold your service, as thanks for the wonderful gift of last night.”

  “Thank you.”

  Bauer sits hunched over his plate. He waves his hand. “You would hold the service anyway, would you not? I have no power here anymore. Not, at least, until the Americans arrive.”

  “It is common courtesy that causes me to ask,” Dietrich says.

  “Ah.” Bauer wipes his mouth on his shirtsleeve. “Tell me, Pastor Bonhoeffer. I have been thinking long and hard about the Sanctus and Benedictus of our Mass, which have been missing for quite some time. Since the mid-nineteenth century, to be exact. Where do you think they might have got to? And how do we know that the Sanctus and Benedictus we hear today are as Mozart intended?”

  Dietrich says, “The Sanctus and Benedictus of that particular work are magnificent. If they are not what Mozart intended, they suffice.”

  “Yes,” Bauer says, somewhat mollified. “They suffice. But I cannot help but wish I had them safe and sound in my folder.”

  They are Protestant and Catholic and atheist, but none of that matters after what they have been through. Dietrich is painfully aware that no Jews are present. He reads from an English Bible, a present from Bishop Bell, a gift he has carried with him throughout his ordeal, standing near the grand piano in the auditorium while the men huddle in the patches of white sun that spatter the wood floor. Who hath believed our report? And to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief, and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows; yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray: we have turned every one to his own way, and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.

  Dietrich begins to speak in a quiet voice. “Everyone here will attest to the blessing of the last few days,” he says. “Yet as we have witnessed a renewal of hope and joy we must never forget those who have died.”

  The window is open and green curtains move on the spring breeze. A distant thickness of air resolves itself into the whine of an engine. Dietrich continues to speak.

  “We have all of us seen the horrors of this war, the depravity of the regime which has ruled this country and wrecked this continent. In these last few days as people of many countries come together under the most brutal circumstances, we have—”

  He has lost his train of thought. He stares as the window. A small truck pulls up outside the door. The others turn to look. Kokorin guesses first. “No no,” he says. He stands and goes toward Dietrich as if to shield him. Dietrich waves him away.

  “Go back to your quarters,” he says.

  There is a banging on the front door, then it is thrown open. Boots sound in the hall and then Sonderegger enters the room. His eyes light on Dietrich.

  “Bonhoeffer,” he says. “We’ve been looking for you. You will come with me.”

  Dietrich looks around wildly, trying to think of one last thing to say, to do. He sees Payne Best standing near the window. “For God’s sake,” Dietrich calls, “when you get to England, look up the Bishop of Chichester and tell him what has happened. Tell him.” Sonderegger takes Dietrich’s arm, and Dietrich shakes him off. “Tell him, ‘For me it is the beginning.’ Can you remember that?”

  “‘For me it is the beginning,’” Best repeats.

  Dietrich looks around the room once more and goes out. He does not see Bauer when he leaves, for the former judge advocate is hiding in a closet.

  ON THE ROAD they pass a caravan of Jews being driven on foot from Auschwitz and Treblinka to the Reich. Dietrich watches through a crack between the slats of the truck’s wooden sides as the scarecrow men, women, and children make their painful way, driven by armed guards like draft horses ready to die in the traces. The passing truck forces them from the road, and they do not look at it but stand with heads bowed taking what rest they can as they wait to be forced on.

  “The absent ones,” Dietrich says.

  And thinks he is better off on the road with them.

  On the road the truck stops at Weiden to take on fuel and then begins a painful twelve-mile climb into the mountains to KZ Flossenburg. They pass through a series of villages, then a wild rough terrain. The engine wheezes and protests. With each lurch Dietrich feels the muscles of his throat tighten. When it seems they can go no farther without climbing off the face of the earth, the truck passes between two granite pillars and drops down a narrow dirt road into a ravine. Trees abruptly disappear and a moonscape opens up of mud
and hovels like Buchenwald only smaller and tucked in a bowl between two hills.

  The truck draws to a halt outside a concrete cellblock. Sonderegger helps Dietrich out of the back. “Bonhoeffer, Bonhoeffer,” he says, shaking his head. “You’ve caused us quite a bit of trouble. Do you think we don’t keep lists? Did you think the Führer would not find you?”

  Oster is present, and Josef Müller, and the former head of the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris, along with several others of the conspirators who are not familiar to Dietrich. They stand before a judge, Otto Thorbeck, who has been brought from Nuremberg especially for their trial. Charges are read, guilt is pronounced, sentence passed, all within moments. All are to die except for Josef Müller, who has inexplicably been given life in prison. Canaris, who is old and frail, moans, then falls silent. The prisoners are returned to their cells.

  Dietrich lies on his cot and remembers people. His mother and father. Suse and Christel and Karl-Friedrich. George and Hettie Bell. Elisabeth Hildebrandt. Maria von Wedemeyer. Sabine. Sabine, his twin, whom he has not seen in so many years. He tries to conjure her, but when he reaches out for her, she is not there. So Sabine, he says, I must fly on alone.

  He cannot bear to keep his thoughts in his head. Cannot bear silence. He speaks softly to the wall. Of all those I have most loved, he says, only Fred Bishop has gone on ahead. So I shall look forward to seeing Fred. I shall tell Fred everything that has happened here. If Fred has faced this so can I.

  He lies still and tries to recall Fred’s voice. He can’t hear it. But sometime between black night and gray dawn he is riding in the back of a truck upon a bed of corpses and Fred is tracing a cross on Dietrich’s forehead with a dusty fingertip. Go on in, Fred says. Go on in.

  At dawn they are taken outside.

  The bowl of Flossenburg is filled with cold white fog.

  They are ordered to strip.

  Dietrich unbuttons his shirt and removes it, drops his trousers and steps out of them, thinks, This is one of the last things I shall feel on this earth, the tickle of cloth against cold flesh, and so it must be treasured.

  The chill causes him to suck in his stomach. His genitals shrivel and draw up in search of warmth. He wraps his arms around his chest and bows his head until someone comes and ties his hands behind his back.

  Tries to pray but can only whisper O God O God.

  He is the last to go. Does not watch the others, tries to block out the sound. They are being hung from a metal spike that protrudes from the concrete wall. Are hauled up from the ground for lack of a scaffold.

  On his turn he walks forward without stumbling. It is already difficult to breathe. The rope is thicker than he had imagined, and so coarse it cuts his flesh as Sonderegger slides the knot down. Dietrich squints along the length of the cellblock that falls away into white fog but the upward tug forces his eyes shut white and red streaks his head is bursting eternity eternity eternity eternity eternity

  Postscript

  THE BODIES of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and those executed with him were stacked near the cellblock and burned. Josef Müller sat alone in his cell as flakes of gray ash floated through his open window.

  At war’s end, Maria von Wedemeyer went to Buchenwald in search of Dietrich but could learn nothing of his fate. None of his family knew what had become of him until Payne Best was able to make his way to England and inform Bishop Bell. On July 27, 1945, two and a half months later, a memorial service was held at Holy Trinity Church, Brompton, London. The service was broadcast by the BBC.

  In Berlin, Karl and Paula Bonhoeffer turned on their radio in the middle of an Anglican hymn, “For All the Saints.” They listened with half an ear, Karl, whose health was failing, beginning to doze, when they heard Dietrich’s name. Then the voice of Bishop Bell—a voice which would have been at once recognized by their son—He was quite clear in his convictions, and for all that he was so young and unassuming, he saw the truth and spoke it out with absolute freedom and without fear. When he came to me all unexpectedly in 1942 at Stockholm as the emissary of the resistance to Hitler, he was, as always, absolutely open and quite untroubled about his own person, his safety. His death is a death for Germany, indeed, for all Europe…

  They listened without speaking, Paula Bonhoeffer weeping silently. When the last hymn was done and a staid British voice announced a program of light classical music to follow, Dr. Karl Bonhoeffer switched off the radio.

  Afterword

  IN A WORK OF FICTION whose characters are based on people who actually lived, the reader will naturally wonder, “What really happened?” The novelist comes to the task of writing with the full understanding that a collection of facts does not make an engaging story, and that fact and truth are not necessarily synonymous. Furthermore, the question “What really happened?” is impossible to answer, despite the claims to objectivity of some journalists and historians. This novel is a work of the imagination, first and foremost, and yet I hope it is also true. Some “facts” have been altered because of the demands of the story.

  However, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a real person and his character is based on extensive research, always, of course, filtered through the mind of the novelist. Likewise Dietrich’s parents and his fiancée Maria von Wedemeyer and her family, and such figures as Reinhold Niebuhr, Myles Horton, Jean Lasserre, Martin Niemöller, Frank Buchman, T. S. Eliot, the von Harnacks, the Scholls, Bishop George Bell, and even Earl Harvey.

  Other characters are either fictional versions of actual people in Bonhoeffer’s life, composites, or outright inventions. These include Alois Bauer, Fred Bishop, Elisabeth Hildebrandt, and Dietrich’s many siblings and in-laws, who have been reduced to a few for the sake of manageability (an important instance being the merging of Dietrich’s courageous brother Klaus and brother-in-law Rüdiger Schleicher with his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi. Klaus Bonhoeffer and Rüdiger Schleicher were also killed by the Nazis for their resistance activities and their memories should be honored.)

  I have also taken the liberty here and there of combining several historical personages into one, and rearranging dates to streamline the story and keep reader confusion at a minimum. For example, the first official bookburning in Unter den Linden occurred on May 10, 1933, and not immediately upon Hitler’s accession. T. S. Eliot began writing Murder in the Cathedral a few months later than he does here. The World Council of Churches was before and during World War II known as the World Alliance of Churches, but I have used the more familiar name throughout. Another military officer, not Oster, tried to recruit General Brauchitsch to overthrow Hitler. And I have combined details of Bonhoeffer’s journey to meet Bishop Bell in Sweden with a visit to Norway a few weeks earlier in the company of another resister, Helmut von Moltke.

  Perhaps the greatest departure from “fact” has been to leave Bonhoeffer’s great friend and biographer Eberhard Bethge out of this work. This is especially notable because many of the central missives in Bonhoeffer’s classic Letters and Papers from Prison were addressed to Bethge. I was privileged to meet Bethge personally a few years ago, and perhaps this encounter with the flesh-and-blood man made it more difficult to recreate him as a fictional character. In addition, Bethge entered Bonhoeffer’s life fairly late in the narrative, and I found it awkward to simply insert him into the story, as it were, at that point. I can only hope that the friendships of the fictional Bonhoeffer with Fred Bishop, Elisabeth Hildebrandt, and George Bell have captured some of the special nature of this relationship.

  For those wishing a “factual” account of the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, several excellent biographies are available, as well as Bonhoeffer’s own writings. And of course there are numerous histories of the Third Reich and the German resistance to draw upon as well.

  I am especially grateful for the work of Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors; Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland; Lynn Nicholas, The Rape of Europa; William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Berlin Diaries, and The Nightmare Years; Eberhard
Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer; Edwin Robertson, The Shame and the Sacrifice; Renate Wind, Dietrich Bonhoeffer; Geffrey B. Kelly and F. Burton Nelson, A Testament to Freedom; Anton Gill, An Honorable Defeat: A History of German Resistance to Hitler, 1933–1945; Richard Hanser, A Noble Treason; Inge Scholl, The White Rose; Annette E. Dumbach and Jud Newborn, Shattering the German Night; and Martin Cherniack, The Hawk’s Nest Incident: America’s Worst Industrial Disaster.

  This work was made possible with the financial support of West Virginia State College, the West Virginia Graduate College, Appalshop, the Kentucky Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

  For help with my research I would like to thank the archivists at the Charleston (W.V.) Gazette, the reference librarians at the Kanawha County (W.V.) Public Library, Steve Fesenmeier and the West Virginia Film Commission, and Taylor Books in Charleston, W.V. For advice and encouragement I would also like to thank the Rev. Arthur Holmes, the Rev. Bill Kirkland, the Rev. Karl Ruttan, the Rev. Claire Lofgren, Dr. Hazo Carter, Dr. Barbara Oden, Susan Harpold, Gordon Simmons, Topper and Katja Sherwood, Martin Japtok, Ann Saville, David Wohl, Sky Kershner, Bernice Hosey, Gigi Janeshek, Lavinia Carney, Ann Bird, Sue Harpold, Roy and Rosie Pfeiffer, Colleen Anderson, Arla Ralston, Tim Alderman, Arline Thorn, Ancella Bickley, and Kate Long. For a wonderful travel companion and translator in Germany, thanks to Kristin Layng Szakos. Also thanks to David Roberts and the Bonhoeffer House in Berlin; my Mississippi friends and theologians Chuck Lewis, Dave Bell, and Francis King; Barbara Towers and the Rev. Stephen Masters in Chichester, England; Leon Howell of the regrettably defunct Christianity and Crisis; Larry Rasmussen and the Union Theological Seminary; and the International Bonhoeffer Society. For inspiration, special gratitude goes to Frank Pisano, Rob Bennett, Pete Swartz, and the rest of the cast and crew of Murder in the Cathedral performed at St. John’s Episcopal Church, Charleston, W.V., in June 1995.