The Plot to Kill Hitler Page 3

His mother was Jewish, so even though he had converted to Christianity—and had even become a Lutheran seminarian—he would still be considered Jewish when Hitler came to power. This would carry serious consequences for both men in the not-so-distant future.

  But in the meantime, Bonhoeffer was working on another dissertation, one that sought to answer the question he’d been grappling with since he was a boy: How do we know that God exists? If we can’t see him, what proof do we have?

  It was an idea that great minds had struggled with for centuries. Is God a concept that human beings created? Is he the bearded figure on a throne of clouds? Or is God a spirit, present in each of us?

  Bonhoeffer wrote about the proof of God’s existence in the birth of a baby as a “whisper ‘between eternity and eternity,’” and as evidence of a divine hand in “the power of what ‘future things’ will bring.”1 While other scholars debated lofty theories, Bonhoeffer always insisted that God was real and present, not some kind of otherworldly phenomenon.

  In his dissertation entitled “Act and Being,” Bonhoeffer was critical of religious thinkers who believed that constant thought and reflection was a way to be closer to God; that sort of cerebral approach was what killed faith, he said. To be faithful, he wrote, a person had to be concerned less about himself and more about caring for his neighbor.

  Again, his professors disagreed with Bonhoeffer’s unorthodox thinking, but they had to agree: his writing was brilliant.

  Even with two dissertations to his credit, at twenty-three, Bonhoeffer still was not old enough to have a congregation of his own. And so when he received an invitation to study at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, he took it. Not because he thought the best theological minds in America had anything to teach him. If anything, he thought they were a cut below the theologians of Germany. But ever since his experience in Rome, he was interested in connecting with members of other religions in other countries to test his idea of the universal church.

  His older brothers had already been abroad, and they were lukewarm about Dietrich’s plan to visit the United States. The first-class minds in science and philosophy were in Europe, they said, not in that upstart country across the Atlantic. Klaus was especially unenthusiastic about the idea of his little brother going to the United States, writing that he didn’t think it would be a “decisive”2 experience.

  By now, the rest of Dietrich’s siblings had settled down. Klaus had married a childhood friend, Emmi Delbrück. Earlier that year, his baby sister, Suzanne, had married a friend of Dietrich’s, a fellow philosopher, Walter Dress. And Karl-Friedrich had married one of the Dohnanyi girls, Grete. Now, all of Dietrich’s siblings were married. He was alone again as he set sail for the United States.

  TEN

  A DECISIVE EXPERIENCE: VISITING THE UNITED STATES

  1930

  When he crossed the gangplank to board the Columbus, Bonhoeffer was met by a crisply outfitted crew who showed him the lavish appointments of the ship. Crystal chandeliers, a library with cedar bookcases and leather chairs, a ballroom, and an outdoor pool. Columbus was the height of luxury.

  On the first night of his trans-Atlantic voyage, Bonhoeffer settled into the elegant writing salon and opened his notebook. He reviewed all the American slang he’d collected before leaving—and he went over all the arguments he’d written down about why Germany wasn’t solely to blame for the Great War. He might not have thought much of American intellectuals, but he did want to be prepared to debate with them.

  One afternoon during the Atlantic crossing, while Bonhoeffer was playing chess by himself, a little boy about ten years old came up to watch. After a few minutes the boy asked if he could play, too. Bonhoeffer struck up a conversation with the boy, Richard Ernst, and the two became fast friends for the rest of the voyage. Once again, it seemed that Bonhoeffer was more at ease in the company of a young person than with the more elite travelers.

  When the ship passed through New York Harbor, Bonhoeffer was impressed—overwhelmed, actually—by the soaring buildings. Richard Ernst, who lived with his mother in the New York suburbs, pointed out the landmarks and made Bonhoeffer promise to come visit once he was settled at Union Theological.

  Members of the Union Theological Seminary, New York, 1930 (from left to right: Bonhoeffer, unknown, Marion Lehmann, Paul Lehmann, Erwin Sutz)

  New York in 1930 was a dizzying, dazzling city—with many of its monumental buildings still under construction. The spire of the Empire State Building was reaching for the sky and crews worked day and night to finish the glistening new George Washington Bridge. Bonhoeffer had never seen a city so big and brawny.

  He quickly dove into the hurly-burly of the city, visiting Times Square, Broadway, Carnegie Hall, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Occasionally, he took the train up to Scarsdale to see Richard Ernst and his mother, often bringing Richard a book or a toy.

  Living in a dormitory was a completely new experience for Bonhoeffer—and he didn’t like it much at first. The doors were always left open—intentionally, so the students would get to know one another—but Bonhoeffer was unaccustomed to and uncomfortable with this lack of privacy. He couldn’t imagine how this noisy, chummy environment was conducive to serious scholarly thought and writing.

  He studied with the best American theologians, including Reinhold Niebuhr—a firebrand who seemed to Bonhoeffer to lecture more about current events than about God. Coming from a strict German tradition of philosophy as a cerebral and spiritual discipline, Bonhoeffer was bewildered.

  Americans, he wrote home, talked “a blue streak,” often “completely clueless” about the topic at hand. Everyone “just blabs away so frightfully.”1 Dietrich felt that his American counterparts were too interested in fairness to be really rigorous thinkers. He was, to say the least, unimpressed.

  Then he met Frank Fisher, an African American student at Union Theological. It was the first time Bonhoeffer had ever had a conversation with a person of color.

  Fisher would become a good friend, and he would open the door to the most formative experience Bonhoeffer would have in the United States. He took Dietrich a few blocks from campus to the heart of Harlem, the Abyssinian Baptist Church.

  FRANK FISHER AND MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

  Frank Fisher would go on to become a pastor in Atlanta, Georgia, and a civil rights activist. In 1957, he was arrested for sitting in the whites-only section of an Atlanta bus. Alongside him was a young Baptist preacher who had come from Montgomery, Alabama, to study how Fisher and his fellow ministers led their peaceful protests: Martin Luther King, Jr. The two men campaigned together in the civil rights movement and helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an important social justice organization. Both Bonhoeffer and King would seek out the chance to work with poor people. Both would lecture on the importance of faith in social activism. And both pastors would be killed when they were thirty-nine years old.

  JIM CROW

  In the United States, Jim Crow laws, state and federal statutes mandated racial segregation in public facilities such as schools, libraries, buses, restaurants, restrooms, and drinking fountains. “Separate but equal” facilities for African Americans were consistently inferior and underfunded compared to those available to white Americans.

  The segregation Bonhoeffer witnessed in America caused him to write this letter home:

  The separation of whites from blacks in the southern states really does make a rather shameful impression. In railways that separation extends to even the tiniest details. I found that the cars of the negroes generally look cleaner than the others. It also pleased me when the whites had to crowd into their railway cars while often only a single person was sitting in the entire railway car for negroes. The way the southerners talk about the negroes is simply repugnant, and in this regard the pastors are no better than the others. I still believe that the spiritual songs of the southern negroes represent some of the greatest artistic achievements in America. It is a bit unne
rving that in a country with so inordinately many slogans about brotherhood, peace and so on, such things still continue completely uncorrected.5

  Founded in 1808 by Ethiopian immigrants who severed their ties with the First Baptist Church in lower Manhattan when that congregation refused to seat blacks among the whites in their pews, the Abyssinian Baptist Church was now housed in a stately Gothic building in Harlem. As soon as the proper, bookish young German stepped inside, he was swept up into the singing and the dancing, the swaying and the foot stomping. The entire church, he would write home, exploded in “eruptive joy.”2

  The rafter-shaking music of the Abyssinian Baptist Church was a far cry from the subdued, ethereal chanting of the German Lutheran church. The pastor, Adam Clayton Powell, the son of former slaves, preached with the intensity that Bonhoeffer had been looking for at Union Theological Seminary. And the people in the pews cried out “Amen!” and “Hallelujah!” in reply. It was here that the mannerly, aristocratic Bonhoeffer found a spiritual home. Worshiping shoulder to shoulder with the congregation in Harlem, he would later say, was the only time “he had experienced true religion in the United States.”3

  He fell in love with Negro spirituals and began scouring the record stores of Harlem for folk songs, jazz, gospel, and blues. He spent hours at the New York Public Library to study up on the African American experience in America. He volunteered to teach Sunday school at the Abyssinian Baptist Church—and the congregation returned his affection. His students’ families often invited the young German with his silk ties and tailored suits to their homes for dinner. And just like his experience with the poor families of Barcelona, he was distressed by the poverty in which they lived, but moved by the importance of their faith.

  When Frank Fisher took Bonhoeffer south to visit his family at Thanksgiving, Bonhoeffer also got a firsthand look at the “separate but equal” conditions of enforced segregation. “The conditions are really rather unbelievable,” he wrote home. “Not just separate railway cars, tramways, and buses . . . but also, for example, when I wanted to eat in a small restaurant with a Negro, I was refused service.”4

  Meanwhile, Bonhoeffer had another searing experience in the United States. One cold winter night, he and fellow seminarian Jean Lasserre went to see a film everyone was talking about. All Quiet on the Western Front, now considered an antiwar classic, tells the story of battle from the point of view of a young soldier. Horrified at having killed another human being, the young soldier holds the dying man in his arms and begs forgiveness. Bonhoeffer was moved to tears.

  According to Lasserre, the boy who once loved play guns, toy soldiers, and war games became a pacifist that day.

  Now Reinhold Niebuhr’s lectures blending current events with spiritual themes made sense to Bonhoeffer. The more Niebuhr talked about a church that takes action—and doesn’t just preach—on behalf of the underdogs, the more Bonhoeffer agreed. Bonhoeffer also had a chance to meet Rabbi Stephen Wise, an influential Jewish leader in New York. Although they couldn’t have imagined it, Niebuhr and Wise would play key roles in Bonhoeffer’s life as time went on. He would accept a lifeline from one—and commit his first act of treason with the other.

  Newspaper reports of the Nazis’ rise to power were already beginning to sow concern among Bonhoeffer’s friends at the seminary. They urged him to stay on in the United States or travel abroad, but they begged him not to go back to Germany. One of them, Paul Lehmann, took Bonhoeffer to the docks to find a freighter captain who would take him to India, where he could study with Gandhi, but even with Bonhoeffer’s savings, the trip was too expensive. Eventually, Bonhoeffer sailed back to Germany with an armful of jazz and gospel records. His friend Frank Fisher had one request. “Make our sufferings known in Germany,” he said. “Tell them what is happening to us and show them what we are really like.”6

  Contrary to what his brother Klaus had predicted, Bonhoeffer’s time in the United States was a turning point. He would say later that his experiences with the poor taught him to see life “from below from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled—in short, from the perspective of those who suffer.”7 “I turned from phraseology to reality,”8 he said.

  A RIGHTEOUS GENTILE

  Bonhoeffer happened to meet Rabbi Stephen Wise because he hadn’t known that tickets were required to attend Easter services at Abyssinian Baptist. But Wise had posted a sign outside his synagogue: “No dues for our pews.” So Bonhoeffer went in and heard him preach.

  Bonhoeffer has long been considered a candidate for the designation of Righteous Gentile, an honor given to those who risked their lives to save Jews from extermination. Stephen Wise, Jr., the rabbi’s son, fought for Bonhoeffer to receive this award posthumously.

  ELEVEN

  HEIL, HITLER!

  1931–33

  His father’s chauffeur-driven car was waiting when Dietrich arrived at the yellow-brick train station in Berlin in the fall of 1931. He was home from the United States and excited to be starting a new job as a lecturer and chaplain at the university, where he would introduce German students to the exhilarating music and worship style he’d come to love in New York.

  But when he put up posters inviting students to a discussion about the role of the church in a country where the Nazis were coming to power, they were torn down. He printed new flyers and pasted them up. They, too, were ripped down. The night of the first meeting, no one showed up. While Bonhoeffer had been away in the United States, anti-Jewish fervor had crept through the campus. Students chanting “Death to the Jews” had assaulted Jewish students in one of the classroom buildings and had even thrown some of them out the window into the courtyard.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer with students from Berlin, 1932

  By then, Hitler’s National Socialist Party, or the Nazi Party, had solidified its power. Preying on the bitterness that many Germans still felt as a result of the Treaty of Versailles and the punishing penalties the country had to pay, Hitler promised a return to Germany’s former glory—and blamed the nation’s problems on the Jews. The short man with the mustache and the bombastic speeches portrayed himself as the salvation that Germans had been waiting for.

  Adolf Hitler at Braunschweig, Germany, 1931

  In his theology lectures, Bonhoeffer gently reminded his students that the only real salvation would come from faith. And when he saw students greeting one another by shouting “Heil, Hitler,” he spoke out against the idea of saying “Heil!” (Hail!) to anyone but God.

  Still, he was happy to be back in the intellectual environment of university life. His students said he spoke so quickly and passionately that he could see them perspiring as they took notes. Soon, he became one of the most popular lecturers on campus; on any given evening more than two hundred students would be sitting at rapt attention, with others listening in the hallway. He posed deep questions to his students—and refused to let them off with “cheap and easy answers.”1

  Bonhoeffer pointed out that theology students would often ask if people still needed God. Bonhoeffer said this was the wrong way to look at faith. We shouldn’t question God, one student recalled him saying. “We are the ones who are questioned . . . we are [being] asked whether we are willing to be of service, for God needs us.”2

  Even though he was a popular and charismatic teacher, Bonhoeffer felt a yearning to get away from lectures with privileged young people like himself. He thought back to his time in the homes of poor families in Harlem and knew what he needed was direct contact with those most in need. And so he decided to teach a confirmation class for teenage boys in a rough, seedy section of Berlin.

  The first day of Sunday school class in the Berlin neighborhood of Wedding, Bonhoeffer climbed the open staircase to his classroom. He was dressed as usual, in a tailored suit and silk tie. A wad of paper hit him on the head. The remains of someone’s lunch landed on his shoulder. Within minutes, garbage rained down on him. The boys hung over the balcony a
bove, mocking him with a chant, as they repeated his name over and over again.

  He walked into the classroom without saying a word. The boys followed him, still heckling the young minister.

  Bonhoeffer went to the front of the room, leaned against the wall, his hands in his pockets. He didn’t say a word. Minutes passed. The catcalls subsided. Finally, he started speaking—so quietly that only the boys in the front row could hear. The room fell silent, as the others leaned forward to hear him.

  He told them they had put on quite a show. Then he told them a story about his time in Harlem, about boys like themselves, poor and overlooked by society. They were riveted. Bonhoeffer told them that if they listened he would tell them more next time. Then he told them they could go. He never had a problem with his students after that.

  The boys of the Wedding neighborhood came to love and respect the young teacher with the patrician background—and Bonhoeffer, in turn, moved from his parents’ wealthy home in Berlin to the boys’ neighborhood so he could better understand their lives. He took a room above a bakery, and his hungry students often showed up just in time for supper. Finally, when the time came for their confirmation, Bonhoeffer realized that none of them owned a proper suit. And so he bought a huge bolt of wool and had suits made for each one.

  He also wrote to Richard Ernst back in New York. He told Richard he wouldn’t be sending him a Christmas sweater this year. Instead, he asked Richard to imagine the smile on the face of one of the poor boys of Wedding to whom he’d be giving it and to think of that smile as a far better present.

  The Sunday of the boys’ confirmation, Bonhoeffer took to the pulpit of the shabby little church. He praised the boys for their progress and told them that their faith now gave them courage that “no one can take from you.”3 It was, it turned out, the same day as a national election. As the boys and their parents sat in the pews, they had to strain to hear Bonhoeffer; outside, Nazi party officials drove up and down the street in trucks shouting campaign slogans through megaphones.