"After Ten Years"

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Our Times

Victoria J. Barnett

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781506433387
• eBook ISBN: 9781506433394
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

How does one read the signs of the times? What does it mean to resist? How do we engage faithfully in struggle? Dietrich Bonhoeffer has achieved iconic status as one who epitomizes what it means to struggle and resist tyranny and fascism and how one acts in faithful witness as a religious and political commitment. Bonhoeffer's witness and example is more relevant than ever. A testimony to that is a crucial essay penned by Bonhoeffer in 1942; "After Ten Years" is a succinct and sober reflection, and remains one of the best descriptions ever written about what happened to the German people under National Socialism. This volume presents this timely and unique essay in a fresh translation and a penetrating introduction and analysis of the importance of this essay-in Bonhoeffer's time and now in our own.

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Reading Bonhoeffer’s “After Ten Years” in Our Times

Victoria J. Barnett

One must be cautious about drawing simplistic historical analogies. Nowhere is this truer than in the case of comparisons to Nazi Germany, its leaders, and the Holocaust. The period between 1933 and 1945 was characterized by a complex constellation of factors, many of them unique to Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. Nationalism, antisemitism, ethnocentrism, and populism have played a role in different historical periods and national contexts. Moreover, the language of grievance and resentment is usually homegrown, drawing upon the embedded prejudices and fears of a particular society as well as its hopes, which often are articulated in themes revived from the particular history of the host nation.

At such moments the responses of citizens and their institutions are crucial. Political culture is not just the product of how citizens engage in and create their society. It is also an expression of what we are willing to tolerate, what compromises we make and the reasons why we make them—and those are the factors that can undermine and even destroy a political culture.

The veneer of ethics and moral behavior in the public square can be surprisingly thin. Human beings are easily swayed and enraptured; peer pressure and crowd behavior are powerful forces. We are used to living by a particular set of rules, values, and expectations of behavior, individually and socially, and it is often easier for institutions like the civil service, universities, businesses, and religious bodies to conform than to resist. When the rules change it can be difficult to find our bearings, let alone chart a new course that can address and if necessary challenge what is happening around us.

These are the themes that Dietrich Bonhoeffer addressed in “After Ten Years.” His context was Nazi Germany, but his observations about what happens to human decency and courage when a political culture disintegrates continue to resonate around the world today.

The Historical Context for “After Ten Years”

“After Ten Years” is a powerful reflection about what happened to Germany, its people, and their political culture in the decade after the Nazis came to power. It was written in December 1942 by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Protestant theologian and pastor who fought against the nazification of his church and was executed in April 1945 for his ties to the conspiracy to overthrow the Nazi regime.

Bonhoeffer came from the Prussian upper middle class, a conservative and largely nationalist milieu from which the National Socialists drew significant support. In contrast, the Bonhoeffer family opposed National Socialism from the beginning, repulsed, as one of them later said, by its “petty nationalism” and sensing intuitively “that this tree would bear no good fruit.”^[1] Bonhoeffer and his seven siblings were raised in an atmosphere of enlightened humanism, with an emphasis on independent thinking, clear ethical standards, and a broader sense of their obligations as citizens. The Bonhoeffers were church members but not regular churchgoers, and his parents were surprised when Dietrich Bonhoeffer decided to study theology.

These family influences on Bonhoeffer are especially evident in “After Ten Years,” and they are reflected in his early critiques of the Nazi regime, its curtailment of civil liberties, and the persecution of the Jewish minority and political opponents. Only weeks after Adolf Hitler became chancellor, for example, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote to the U.S. theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, under whom he had studied in New York, about the “barbarization” of German culture, noting that “we will need to create a Civil Liberties Union in the coming period.”^[2]

Few in the German Protestant Church shared his views, and in late 1933 Bonhoeffer went to London, torn by the failings of his church, the growing pressures of the Nazi state, and the search for what his own path in the new Germany should be. He stayed in London for two years, serving two German-speaking churches and returning to Nazi Germany in 1935 to teach seminarians in the Confessing Church, a Protestant movement that had emerged to combat the more extreme pro-Nazi factions within the Protestant churches. He left briefly once again as war loomed in 1939, coming to the United States for what would have been a safe exile and a distinguished career. He arrived with his brother Karl Friedrich, a renowned physicist who had been invited to give a series of lectures. Both men returned to Germany in July 1939 at the family’s request. Dietrich Bonhoeffer told Reinhold Niebuhr that he was returning from a deep sense of obligation to shape the future of his country and his church. “Christians in Germany,” he wrote, “will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose, but I cannot make that choice in security. . . .”^[3]

In the early years of the war his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi, who held a high position in the Justice Ministry, helped Bonhoeffer avoid military service by getting him a post in the Office of Military Intelligence. Under the command of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, that office became the center of the conspiracy to overthrow the Nazi regime. Dohnanyi himself was regarded by many as the intellectual head of the conspiracy, and through him Bonhoeffer was already part of a network of Germans with knowledge of and some involvement in that conspiracy. In 1943 he and Dohnanyi were arrested and imprisoned. In April 1945 they were executed by the Nazi regime, as were two other Bonhoeffer family members engaged in the resistance, Bonhoeffer’s brother Klaus and another brother-in-law, Rüdiger Schleicher.

“After Ten Years” was written for Dohnanyi, Bonhoeffer’s close friend and colleague Eberhard Bethge, and Major General Hans Oster, a German military officer in intelligence work who had been involved in conversations about a possible overthrow of the Nazi regime since 1938 (Oster had secretly informed the Allies about the imminent invasions of Belgium and Holland). Bonhoeffer sent it to them at Christmas 1942; the essay was a retrospective analysis of what had happened to them, and more broadly, what had happened to his church, his country, and his compatriots in the decade that had passed since the Nazis came to power. He focused on the failures of Germans and their institutions to withstand and resist National Socialism, exploring the underlying reasons for these failures. One part of the essay was taken from a passage Bonhoeffer had written in his Ethics manuscripts one year before, and there are themes and even phrases that appear in letters to Dohnanyi and Bethge throughout this period. “After Ten Years” was written, then, as a synthesis of an ongoing and troubled conversation between these men as they wrestled with their consciences and the diminishing options open to those who sought the end of National Socialism.

December 1942 was an especially bleak moment. The resistance circle to which Bonhoeffer was connected was one of several networks informed about the plans to overthrow the regime. These networks included high-level diplomats, civil servants, professors, political officials, and career military officers, all of whom were critical of the regime and who had begun to think very concretely about what a post-Nazi Germany might look like. Some of these circles outlined the possible future of German social, political, and educational institutions; others coordinated communication between different localized resistance groups. Bonhoeffer’s assignment was to convey information and peace feelers from the higher levels of the resistance to his church contacts abroad. He was also visiting resistance groups throughout Germa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Reading Bonhoeffer’s “After Ten Years” in Our Times
• After Ten Years: An Account at the Turn of the Year 1942–1943
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• About the Authors