Taking Stock of Bonhoeffer

Studies in Biblical Interpretation and Ethics

Stephen J. Plant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317047018
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Theology

Bonhoeffer's theology continues to prove richly fruitful in the 21st century. This book gathers together Stephen Plant's scholarly engagement with Bonhoeffer's life and theology over two decades. This collection makes accessible Plant's distinctive perspective on Bonhoeffer's theology, in particular on the key themes of biblical exegesis, ethics and the intimate connections Bonhoeffer discerns between them.

PART I
Historical Context

Chapter 1
Bonhoeffer and Moltke: Politics and Faith in a Time of Crisis

Introduction: Letters from Tegel Prison

I fear this chapter will please no one. Historians will recognise it as the work of an amateur while theologians will find the doctrinal fruits meagrely distributed through the historical dough. Perhaps such dissatisfaction is inevitable when one engages with political theology from the perspective of its role in concrete historical events. This is certainly the case in connection with the role of theology in the two circles of opposition to Nazi misrule with which this chapter is concerned: the Canaris conspiracy and the Kreisau Circle.

On 29 September 1944 Helmuth James Graf von Moltke was moved from Ravensbrück concentration camp to the forbiddingly named Totenhaus wing of Tegel prison in Berlin. From here, Moltke wrote his first letter to his wife Freya Gräfin von Moltke, one of only two women members of the Kreisau Circle. The correspondence continued until the morning of 23 January 1945, the day on which Helmuth was hanged. Though the voluminous early correspondence between the Moltkes had been published in 1988,¹ the final letters remained unpublished until after Freya’s death in 2010, reflecting the clear historical importance of the former and the highly personal nature of the later letters. In his review of Abschiedsbriefe Gefängins Tegel² in the Times Literary Supplement³ Christophe Fricker fairly sums up the book’s contribution: ‘The couple’s letters offer insight into their thinking in the face of both imminent National Socialist defeat and the failure of their resistance group.’ Yet Fricker opens his review with a puzzling assessment of the letters’ value: ‘The collection is unique: no other member of the resistance was able to write such a substantial number of letters from prison.’

Fricker’s comment is odd because at least one other resister did write a substantial number of letters from prison, and both the letters⁴ and their author are well-known. By the time Moltke was being taken to his cell in Tegel prison Dietrich Bonhoeffer had already been held there for well over 19 months. Only a few days later however, on 8 October, Bonhoeffer was taken to the cells in the basement of Gestapo headquarters in Prinz Albrecht Strasse. But between April 1943 and October 1944 Bonhoeffer had sent a weekly letter via the prison censor and many more smuggled by a friendly guard; more than 100 of his letters from Tegel survive and we know a number were lost. After 8 October the Gestapo permitted Bonhoeffer only two further letters and there was no more chance for him to smuggle letters before he was taken from Berlin via several concentration camps en route to his execution at Flossenbürg on 9 April 1945 alongside his fellow conspirators Admiral Canaris and Brigadier Hans Oster.

In Tegel Bonhoeffer was held incommunicado. The prison chaplain, Harold Poelchau, a close friend and collaborator of Moltke’s who risked his life to smuggle letters between the Silesian count and countess, was in theory forbidden to visit Bonhoeffer, though in fact he did manage to do so once or twice, commissioning from him the morning and evening prayers Bonhoeffer wrote for fellow prisoners. Yet, though Bonhoeffer and Moltke did not meet during the brief period they both occupied Tegel cells, they had met before Bonhoeffer’s arrest. Moltke first reports meeting Dietrich and his brother Klaus in Berlin on 23 January 1942 when they discussed opposing Hitler; they began at 7.00 p.m. and did not part company until well after midnight. On 10 April 1942 Moltke and Bonhoeffer, at short notice, travelled together through neutral Sweden into German occupied Norway. The two men were officially emissaries of German Military Intelligence whose ostensible task was to report on the struggle that had flared up in February between the German army of occupation and the Lutheran Church in Norway. As members of overlapping circles of the resistance their real task, however, was to stiffen the backbone of the opposition, a task in which they were successful – indeed the very effective strike of Norwegian pastors was exactly what Bonhoeffer had unsuccessfully proposed in Germany in 1933. Moltke’s letters to Freya during his Scandinavian journey suggest he and Bonhoeffer worked efficiently in tandem, but convey no particular warmth between them. Eberhard Bethge, who met Bonhoeffer following his return to Germany on 18 April, recalls that Bonhoeffer’s ‘few days with Helmuth von Moltke had made quite an impression on him’. Bethge’s recollection is worth quoting as an introduction to the similarities and differences between the two men and the resistance groups of which they were members, which forms the substance of this chapter. Bethge continues that: ‘Moltke was a year younger and had founded the Kreisau group. I cannot remember in detail what Bonhoeffer told me about their conversations. We did not yet realize the group’s special potential.’ What Bethge did remember however, was that Bonhoeffer and Moltke:

‘were not of the same opinion’. They were united in the depth of their Christian convictions and in their judgment of Germany’s desperate position … But Moltke ‘rejected … for his own part the violent removal of Hitler’. And Bonhoeffer, who already knew that the judgment of God cannot be halted, was already pleading the need for assassination.⁵

In order to think theologically about the similarities and differences hinted at by Bethge, something further needs to be said about the two opposition groups of which Bonhoeffer and Moltke were members. This is, at least in German language historical literature, relatively well-travelled territory and we may gather what we need from published sources. The fresh elements in this chapter consist first, in comparing the respective political philosophies of the two groups – which has, surprisingly to me, scarcely been done – and in a brief theological commentary on the differences yielded by that comparison. The comparison affords an instructive illustration for contemporary political theologians of the distance that must be travelled between theological theory and political practice.

The Canaris Conspiracy⁶

Wilhelm Franz Canaris⁷ had become head of the Abwehr, German Military Intelligence, in 1933: it was a good appointment. A naval officer since 1905, he had shown a flare for intelligence work during the First World War while a lieutenant aboard SMS Dresden when he built up a network of informants in Latin America that kept his ship one step ahead of the British Royal Navy for several months. In 1915, after the Dresden was scuttled during a battle with the British, he was interned in Chile. His heroic and cunning efforts to escape and then to make his way back to Germany established the glamorous reputation that made him a favourite of Hitler’s until his arrest.

After the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm in 1918 Canaris wore the uniform of a republic very reluctantly. His experience of the Weimar Republic confirmed his opinion that democracy was, at least for Germany, bound to lead to weak government. As with many German officers of his generation, Canaris was drawn, rather, to strong government based on a restoration of the monarchy. Until 1940, when the former Kaiser’s grandson Prinz Wilhelm of Prussia was killed in action in France, a monarchist state remained a possibility; indeed when 50,000 mourners attended the Prince’s funeral, the Nazis banned members of former German royal families from serving in the military to prevent another royal candidate from potentially establishing rival military connections. Canaris was, therefore, a liberal of the right, profoundly opposed to socialism: a patriot but committed to the rule of law. To begin with, Canaris saw Adolf Hitler, as did a majority of Germans, as the saviour of the German people. Canaris was convinced of Hitler’s soldierly qualities of honour, duty, self-sacrifice and courage.⁸ It took some time before Canaris saw through the brutish, illegal and self-serving elements of Hitler and his party.

Very quickly after 1933 the army became the only force in Germany not fully infiltrated by Nazis, and therefore the only body capable of meaningful opposition. Yet within the army, senior officers with little instinctive sympathy for Hitler were bought off by the policy of rearmament, and with blandishments such as estates. Many took seriously their personal oath of loyalty to the Führer. After the astonishing German victories in Poland, Norway and France a coup became out of the question for an army reared on the myth of the stab in the back as an explanation for German defeat in 1918. Nonetheless, Canaris acted where he could in what he took to be the national interest. Evidence is strong that Canaris played an important role in persuading General Franco to keep Spain out of the war; he certainly found a way to warn France on the eve of German invasion. Canaris was playing a long game. He recruited to the ranks of the Abwehr a number of like-minded men, including Colonel (later Brigadier) Hans Oster, another patriotic monarchist. Canaris also employed Bonhoeffer’s brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi as a legal adviser. Dohnanyi had shown little interest in politics before the war but had been convinced of the hazards Nazism posed when an unpleasant investigation into his ancestry revealed a Jewish grandparent. As much as anything, he was driven by strong Christian convictions, and was consequently fearful of the prospect of the Bolshevisation of Europe should Germany lose the war which, after the invasion of Russia in 1941, he thought inevitable.

From the outbreak of war members of the Canaris group began systematically collecting evidence of war crimes with a view to mounting prosecutions after the end of hostilities. Yet assassinating Hitler was easier said than done, even with access to military intelligence, because Hitler did not allow armed men in his presence and changed his travel plans daily. In any case, killing Hitler had to be accompanied by an organised seizure of power. After several abortive or unsuccessful attempts, Oster recruited Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg on the principle that if the Generals would not act the Colonels would have to step up to the mark. After the failure of the July 1944 bomb plot vigorous investigation by the Gestapo eventually came across the files kept by Dohnanyi and Oster on war crimes for which there was no innocent explanation. Canaris and Oster were executed on the same gallows as Bonhoeffer at Flossenbürg concentration camp; Dohnanyi was hanged at Sachsenhausen on or around the same day. On 8 March Dohnanyi smuggled a letter to his wife, Bonhoeffer’s sister Christel, which gives a succinct account of his own motives and those of the Canaris group: ‘What you have been and are to me and the children could have made me one of the happiest men under God’s sun. Still, I believe we were right to worry about the fate of others, which makes one become political.’⁹

In contrast with the Kreisau Circle, which, as we will see, devoted its energies to planning a post-war German constitution, the Canaris group expended its energies, first, in recording war crimes and second, in planning a seizure of power. They envisaged a military takeover that would, over a period of several years, gradually release authority to a civilian administration. This military government would, in contrast with the Nazis, respect the rule of law. They hoped to negotiate a cessation of hostilities with the Allies and a restoration of pre-war German territorial boundaries. Even without the benefit of hindsight one may wonder how realistic this possibility was by July 1944. Only a few months later, at the Yalta conference in February 1945, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin would agree to partition Germany into the Allied Occupation Zones that would eventually become the two post-war German states. Even in 1944 that must have been the only solution to which the Allies would have agreed.

Bonhoeffer’s Contribution

In one sense, Bonhoeffer’s contribution to the Canaris group was limited, certainly so compared with that of Dohnanyi, the moral and intellectual backbone of the group. Bonhoeffer’s main practical role was to exploit his ecumenical contacts on behalf of the opposition. Much is made of this among Bonhoeffer scholars, but the reality is that the German pastor did not find a welcome for his viewpoint even amongst his friends. Two overseas trips made by Bonhoeffer in May 1942 illustrate the isolation of Bonhoeffer and the Canaris group. From around 12 to 26 May, Bonhoeffer was in Switzerland. There, several former contacts were curious about how a known opponent of the Na...