The Doubled Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Women, Sexuality, and Nazi Germany

Reynolds

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498206570
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Few twentieth-century theologians have had a bigger impact on theology than Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a man who lived his faith and died at the hands of the Nazis. For Bonhoeffer, the theological was the personal, life and faith deeply intertwined--and to this day the world is inspired by that witness. Yet the true story of the women in this remarkable man's life has until now been obscured by a conventional narrative that has distorted their role. Using primary source material by the women, and even including the first ever photo of alleged "first fiancee" Elisabeth Zinn, this book "sees" these women fully for the first time. A highly readable but scholarly work of narrative nonfiction, The Doubled Life places Bonhoeffer's theology of love and sexuality within the context of his struggles with women, friendship, and the evils of Nazi Germany.

part i

Pleasure and Pain (tob and ra)

1

“Sacred Space”

When Dietrich was born, along with twin sister Sabine, on February 4, 1906 in Breslau, the sixth and seventh of eight children in a seemingly idyllic family, few could imagine the upheavals that would later mark, scar, and form him.

Dietrich’s father, Karl, held a position as professor of psychiatry and director of the Breslau University Hospital of Nervous Diseases. In 1906, while servants and the prominent pediatrician A. Czerny14 fussed over the new Bonhoeffer twins, Adolf Hitler, a lackluster teenager with a drooping face, drifted around Vienna on an orphan’s pension, hoping to become a painter. Hitler was the last person anyone from Bonhoeffer’s cohort could have imagined gaining the power to wreak havoc on the Western world. World War I remained blissfully unanticipated, at least by the Bonhoeffers.

If Sabine had been able to revisit Breslau after her return to Germany in 1947, she would have seen the city of her early childhood virtually obliterated. As in Berlin, long blocks of bombed-out buildings stood still and ash white like crumbling bones against the sky, while great, desolate hills of rubble filled the empty lots. The Holocaust had hollowed out this Jewish cultural center, once numbering 5 percent of Breslau’s population in a country less than 1 percent Jewish. Now called Wroclaw, part of Poland, the city worked to eradicate any vestige of a German past. Most Germans had been forcibly expelled, and what had not been destroyed, either by the Nazis or the Russians, faced an uncertain future.

Sabine, who as a German would no longer have been allowed in the ghostly ruins of her birthplace, had with Dietrich spent her earliest childhood in a house there at Birkenwäldchen 7, among a sea of siblings and servants. The family lived near Scheitinger Park, where broad walkways circled a placid lake, and one could stroll amid Japanese-style gardens across humped bridges, seeing in the distance park buildings topped with pagoda-like towers. Birch trees surrounded their family home, while a balcony overlooked the vast backyard. Older family members played tennis on the court next door. In this household, Sabine would later write, she and her siblings grew up in “an order that seemed firmly enough established to last forever.”15

In 1909, the younger Bonhoeffer generation swelled to eight, with the birth of Dietrich’s sister, Susanne, called Susi, the final child in the family. His parents grouped Dietrich with the two youngest daughters as the “little ones,” though in reality Susi was the odd one out in this trio. One idyllic photo shows the family circled harmoniously around infant Susi. Sabine and Dietrich, on either side of the sleeping bundle, glare at their new rival with intense and deadly concentration.

Dietrich and Sabine, he flaxen-haired liked an angel, she with a thick brown mane, grew up closer than close. “We were always united,” Sabine remembered, with a “special unity” they did not share with their other siblings.16 In contrast, Dietrich would later refer to his three older brothers as of a different “generation.” They, in turn, dismissed him for having “no interests” because he did not share theirs.17

In 1910, Sabine sat by four-year-old Dietrich in his party frock, the white dress little boys wore, watching him stroke his blue silk underskirt with a small hand. Later, she remembered, he watched baby Susi as she sat on their grandfather’s knee, golden sunlight pouring in on them.

In quiet moments, their mother, Paula, told the tiny Sabine and Dietrich Bible stories. The children couldn’t yet read, so, to their delight, Paula, her hair wound in plaits, showed them illustrations from a big picture Bible.18 Dietrich addressed his first theological questions to his mother, early on showing his penchant for placing God in “this world,” asking her if the “good God” loved the chimney sweep, and if God ate lunch.19

Paula, though a countess’s daughter, had trained as a teacher and passed the state teaching exams, so she taught her children herself in their early years. She also made sure her children grew up in an intellectually rich environment: her homes had classrooms with desks, books, a zoology room with live snakes and lizards, a carpentry room for the boys and a doll’s room for the girls, musical instruments, and a box of costumes for performances.

In these early days, the twins played together in the sandbox behind their big brick house.20 They built castles and volcanoes, created marble courses and magic fountains and galloped together on hobbyhorses. Sabine remembered Dietrich playing intensely, heedless of thirst, “a mass of ash blond hair around his sunburnt face.”21 They visited with the animals in a carriage house converted to a ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Prelude
• Part 1: Pleasure and Pain (tob and ra)
• Part 2: Seeking Ground
• Part 3: The Incomparable Year
• Part 4: Reconfigurations
• Part 5: Decisions
• Part 6: War and Conspiracies
• Part 7: Cornered: 1942-43
• Part 8: Alone
• Epilogue
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Bibliography