Letters and Papers From Prison (45 page)

I’m thinking of you a great deal.

Your Dietrich

Maetz has gone away for the moment and has been replaced by a man with whom I get on less well. Both from the standpoint of security from alerts and for other reasons an afternoon visit is more opportune; Sunday afternoon (3 June) would be best. But I don’t want to suggest the long journey here to you
immediately
before your departure. In the afternoon you must ask straight away to speak to the OvD (not the UvD) - he is an officer or a sergeant. If permission still hasn’t come by Saturday, perhaps Maass
³⁶
could be asked to allow a continuation of the visit broken off by the alarm, because you have to go back to the front. It’s only a purely technical question. Maass would have to be rung on Friday or Saturday early, so that things were still all right for Saturday afternoon.

To Hans- Walter Schleicher

[Tegel] 2 June [1944]

Dear Hans-Walter,

I heard of your unexpected leave through Eberhard; I’m very pleased for you yourself and for all of you that you can now be together for a week as in the old days. So we do still keep having pleasant surprises! It’s really a very nice thought of yours to want to visit me, despite the short time that you have here. Of course I would be especially pleased to see you. But you know that without express permission the most that is possible is a very short greeting without the chance of being able to tell each other anything. I quite definitely don’t want you to make the journey here just for that, specially as it isn’t even completely certain that we should be able to see each other. Unfortunately they’re very mean with the permissions.

If I could have seen you and talked with you I would have had a great deal to ask you, above all what your views now are, after your experiences, about the generation of young people about the same age as you. Do you feel very isolated and strange among them? On what basis do you get together with them? Do your conversations ever go beyond the usual soldier’s themes - which have probably always been the same in every corner of the earth -and if so, in what respect? What are they interested in - or if this word sounds too high-flown and intellectual, what do they depend on? What do they want and what do they wish for themselves? What do they believe and by what points of view do they arrange their lives? It has probably always been the minority to whom these questions apply at all. But on the other hand they are the only ones who count for the future. Do you have the feeling that the way of life that you’ve brought with you from home gives you any advantage in living together with other people, or does it have the opposite effect, that it chiefly causes you difficulties? Do you have the feeling that perhaps either too little or too much importance has been attached to certain things in our homes? In short, I would like to discuss all such questions, which I’m sure that you keep putting to yourself, with you. The most important question for the future is how we can find a basis for human life together, what spiritual realities and laws we accept as the foundations of a meaningful human life. If (after your leave!) you have a quiet hour and the inclination to do so, do write to me; I would like it very much. Renate can give you the right address. If you give me your field post number, I will write to you again. That’s enough for today. Enjoy the free days as much as you can! I often think of you and wish you all the very, very best for the time to come. Love to parents and family, and warmest greetings from your

Uncle Dietrich

To Eberhard Bethge

[Tegel, presumably 2 June 1944]

Dear Eberhard,

The enclosed meditations
³⁷
are only meant for the two of you. But if at present you don’t want to hear any ‘strange’ voice, just put them on one side. Your own thoughts will be more help to Renate in these days. You wrote that time before your last departure that you were still reading the daily texts in the train. I was very glad about that then, and now I’ve had to think about it again.

I’m delighted at the enthusiasm with which Herr Linke
³⁸
keeps speaking of you; he was particularly amazed that you ‘hadn’t flattered me at all’, which is what he says other people usually do in such situations. I told him that that sort of thing wasn’t necessary, and that was the good thing about it. He was evidently also very impressed in other respects. This sort of conversation is a new world to him, and I myself believe that quite objectively it is something unique…

While you’re in Italy I shall write to you about the Song of Songs. I must say I should prefer to read it as an ordinary love song, and that is probably the best ‘Christological’ exposition. I must think again about Eph. 5. I hope that by now you have found something about Bultmann, if it has not been lost. Do you get on well enough with your colleague Rainalter there that you can talk to him about the miracle of the correspondence?
³⁹
I’m quite amazed at it. Thank you very much for all your help in my personal questions.
⁴⁰
Even when you simply say ‘That’s not so’, it means a great deal to me. But the proof will only come at a moment when everything will depend on whether what you said is right. That’s the difficulty. Quite apart from this purely personal problem, which was originally quite unexpected, there are also the objective problems of the child and the possibility of feeding his family … It makes a difference whether the facts are already accomplished or whether one can begin to have some responsibility over shaping them. That things simply ‘fall back on me’ is certainly the greatest comfort in everything and a support for faith - quite apart from the fact that I couldn’t conceive of them
not
falling back on me!! - but in the end I am the one who is
responsible, and I’m no longer twenty-five years old, so that I simply might and could stagger into something. Delay over the present status is in many respects a very questionable matter. But perhaps one day it will turn out to have been the right thing. I don’t want to bother you any longer with these questions now. You have plenty of other things to think about. I will only have something else to say when I’ve heard from you again.

All the best for the last days; please keep me up to date with developments in your concern. With all my heart,

your faithful Dietrich

The baptism sermon follows tomorrow. Once again, many thanks!

[On the page with the manuscript interpretations of the daily texts for the 7 and 8 June 1944, added to the letter of 2 June]

Dear Eberhard and Renate,

These words flowed from my pen when I was meditating on the texts for the days before you with you in mind. They’ve only been thrown off in haste and not worked out beforehand; they are simply meant to accompany your own reading of the texts and if possible to be a little help. I’ve plucked up courage to send them to you from the fact that you, Eberhard, said that you liked the Whitsun meditations. Now good-bye, be of good confidence, and hope with me for a happy reunion soon.

Your Dietrich

From Eberhard Bethge

[Sakrow] 3 June 1944

Dear Dietrich,

Delight over that unique visit has remained with me for a long time. Questions and observations struck me afterwards in an electrifying way, and now I have the earlier letter and a new one. All that is missing now is the discussion of Bultmann. You were really very much in order, on the mark and stimulating; the whole situation had something refreshing and cheering about it in every
respect. But it’s good if one attaches importance to technical details and feels experienced in them. When I got home, I first had a meal with Justus,
⁴¹
his wife and Renate, and then we all sat for a while with the grandparents (i.e. your parents) and Karl-Friedrich, who is very warm-hearted and always extremely interested in you. There was a message of congratulation from Sabine, ‘Congratulations to the great grandmother’,
⁴²
and also the even older greeting from Gert: ‘Can I do anything?’ The grandparents have now gone off to Pätzig. I hope they have fine warm weather.

… many thanks for your parting words. You always speak to me instead of vice versa. These three weeks have been incomparably splendid, and I’m glad to have found you so well despite all my fears to the contrary. Then I’m glad that we’ve baptized the boy. And that you were able to say so much at it.

When I was telling Justus in passing that evening that you were preoccupied with the problem of Bultmann, he immediately said that he thought that it had been settled and that Bultmann was a man who would have to be ‘excommunicated’. He might be a philosopher, but not a theological teacher. It’s remarkable that the problem doesn’t trouble him; people want to have fixed conceptions - despite everything. I’m eager to see what you’ve written to me. How do we Protestants avoid the actual surrender of ‘ground’ from generation to generation or along the line (to put it crudely) Barth-Bultmann-Bonhoeffer, which
in fact
has made tremendous progress in contrast to the liberal period, despite all new beginnings and restitutions? What has attracted people to Barth and to the Confessing Church? The feeling that they can find a certain hoard of truth here, ‘Old Testament, prophetic’, the perception of a certain support for the oppressed? The reasons for all this were left undiscussed; they were not understood any more than at an earlier time or were tacitly rejected, indeed they were lamented as a retrogression into dogma; and anyone who ventured to leap into them soon became sterile …

So, what are we to do about making particular claims on ‘ground’ in the world? What is the role of the cult and the prophet? Finally, what is the significance of the Christian tradition in which we stand? Of the ‘conceptions’ of people with which they
are to be nourished and in which they have been nourished? But I expect that you’re thinking about all this.

In Italy, things seem to have developed to the point that I expect it will no longer be possible to reach the area in the north.
⁴³
In that case I shall have to investigate where to find my people again …

Won’t anyone give you the Dostoievski? I think that you would very much like to read it. An essential part of the liberation to think and so to share in a multiplicity of dimensions is that one knows of a meaning, of tasks, of goals; otherwise it is the one who doesn’t think who has to be envied. What do you mean when you say that only faith truly makes life in many dimensions possible? And you ought to explain a bit more how the basis for ‘God in health, power and action’ lies in the ‘revelation in Jesus Christ’; what does the ‘midst of life’ mean?
⁴⁴
…

[Note by Bonhoeffer on the other side of the page:]

Without God - Cath. Protest. united in rejection! God not there. ‘Crisis! Exist, philos. psychother., Barth, Bultmann; lib. theology; Schlatter; Althaus; Tillich ‘sinner’ not the righteous Aristocratic Christianity?

To Eberhard Bethge
⁴⁵

[Tegel, 5 June 1944]

Dear Eberhard,

That really was something special,
⁴⁶
didn’t you think? I was sorry to have been so abrupt in the morning and that you had to get everything ready so quickly; but you can understand that I didn’t want to let this opportunity slip past …

One question … On the other hand keep … to Ps. 37.3b … will also to Justus …

Warmest greetings and again many, many thanks for everything!

Your Dietrich

To Eberhard Bethge

[Tegel] 5 June [1944]

Dear Eberhard,

I should be behaving like a shy boy if I concealed from you the fact that I’m making some attempts here to write poetry. Up to now I’ve been keeping it dark from everyone, even Maria, who would be most concerned with it - simply because it was somehow painful to me and because I didn’t know whether it wouldn’t frighten her more than please her. You are the … to whom I can talk with a certain matter-of-factness; I hope that if need be you will tick me off and tell me clearly not to meddle with it. So today I’m sending you a sample,
⁴⁷
first, because I think it would be silly to have any secrets from you, secondly, so that you can have something you didn’t expect to read on your journey, and thirdly, because the subject of it is a good deal in your mind at the moment, and what I’ve written may be on the lines of what you’re already thinking as you part from Renate. This dialogue with the past, the attempt to hold on to it and recover it, and above all, the fear of losing it, is the almost daily accompaniment of my life here; and sometimes, especially after brief visits, which are always followed by long partings, it becomes a theme with variations. To take leave of others, and to live on past memories, whether it was yesterday or last year (they soon melt into one), is my ever-recurring duty, and you yourself once wrote that saying good-bye goes very much against the grain. In this attempt of mine the crucial part is the last few lines. I’m inclined to think they are too brief - what do you think? Strangely enough, they came out in rhyme of their own accord. The whole thing was composed in a few hours, and I didn’t try to polish it.

Now that I’ve talked about it to someone for the first time, I see that I can and must also send it to Maria. If some of the things in it frighten her, she must work out what is meant. I would be glad to hear a word from you about it. Perhaps I shall suppress these impulses in future, and use my time to better advantage; but that might well depend on your opinion. If you like, I’ll send you some more to look at.

Is the Dohrmann affair
⁴⁸
now quite excluded? Of course I’m
very preoccupied with it and yet I can’t say that it oppresses me particularly; I’ve too strong a feeling that your ways are being directed from above and that this is better than everything that we undertake. Certainly one must try everything, but only to become more certain what God’s way is and to be able to pray Psalm 91 with great confidence. But if there’s anything else that I can do, let me know.