Letters and Papers From Prison (58 page)

Copyright © 1967 by Maria von Wedemeyer-Weller. All rights reserved.

This article originally appeared in the Fall 1967 issue of the Union Theological Seminary
Quarterly Review
(Vol. XXIII, No. 1).

I saw him again after I graduated from high school and the
rapport
was immediate. Dietrich had the great gift of putting a person utterly at ease by accepting the level of the other with sincerity and commitment. We talked about mathematics. Neither of us knew much about the subject, but we managed to fill an evening with animated discussion of it. During the next fall I was in Berlin taking care of my grandmother, and Dietrich had ample opportunity to visit and talk. It amused him to take me to lunch at a small restaurant close to the hospital which was owned by Hitler’s brother. He claimed there was no safer place to talk.

There was no urgency on his part, although he had great sensitivity to the changing levels of our friendship and to my willingness to receive his attention. When he wanted to present me to his family he had his niece, Renate Schleicher, later the wife of Eberhard Bethge, issue the invitation. It was a memorable evening of music-making and the only time I ever saw the entire family together. After our engagement Dietrich became less cautious. He had at first accepted a waiting period out of respect to my family, but soon he objected clearly, decisively, and repeatedly in letters and telephone calls to me. When we succeeded in changing the dictum, it was too late; he had been imprisoned.

Visiting the prisoner

Our first meeting thereafter took place in the
Reichskriegsgericht
and I found myself being used as a tool by the prosecutor Roeder. I was brought into the room with practically no forewarning, and Dietrich was visibly shaken. He first reacted with silence, but then
carried on a normal conversation; his emotions showed only in the pressure with which he held my hand. Thereafter I saw him fairly regularly, at least once a month. He was given permission to write a one-page letter every four days and alternated between his parents and me. There was no limitation on the number of letters I wrote other than the patience of the censor. Finally he found a friendly guard who smuggled letters in both directions. Most of Dietrich’s letters to me are now in the Houghton Library at Harvard.
²
A few were lost in the hurried flight from the Russian invasion.

Dietrich often mentioned his reluctance to express his feelings. He pondered the differences between our two families and his own feelings of propriety and privacy. Yet when he felt the need to express them in a smuggled letter (or on those few times during my visits when the attending officer would tactfully leave the room), he did so with an intensity that surprised him more than it did me. When I decided to live with his parents in order to be closer, he wrote:

It happens to be the case that certain things remain unsaid in my family, while they are expressed in yours. There is no point discussing what is the ‘right’ way. It involves different people who act as they inwardly must. I can imagine that at first it will be hard for you that many things, especially in religious matters, remain unexpressed at home. But I would be very glad if you could succeed in adjusting to the ways of my parents as I have tried through your grandmother to adjust to the ways of your family. I have become increasingly grateful for this (undated).

From my visits I recall that his reaction to imprisonment took one of two forms, either confident hope that the end was clearly in sight, or utter annoyance at the fact that not enough pressure was applied to drive his case ahead. In connection with the latter he wrote: ‘How many “scruples”
(Bedenklichkeiten)
repeatedly prevent our class from acting. I believe that the weakness of our class is based on its justified or unjustified scruples. Simple people are different. They make more mistakes, but they also do more good, because their road to action does not lead through scruple’ (undated).

After one of my early visits he wrote:

You cannot imagine what it means in my present situation to have you.

I am certain of God’s special guidance here. The way in which we found each other and the time, so shortly before my imprisonment, are a clear sign for this. Again, it was a case of
hominum confusione et dei providentia.
Everyday I am overcome anew at how undeservedly I received this happiness, and each day I am deeply moved at what a hard school God has led you through during the last year. And now it appears to be his will that I have to bring you sorrow and suffering … so that our love for each other may achieve the right foundation and the right endurance. When I also think about the situation of the world, the complete darkness over our personal fate and my present imprisonment, then I believe that our union can only be a sign of God’s grace and kindness, which calls us to faith. We would be blind if we did not see it. Jeremiah says at the moment of his people’s great need ‘still one shall buy houses and acres in this land’ as a sign of trust in the future. This is where faith belongs. May God give it to us daily. And I do not mean the faith which flees the world, but the one that endures the world and which loves and remains true to the world in spite of all the suffering which it contains for us. Our marriage shall be a yes to God’s earth; it shall strengthen our courage to act and accomplish something on the earth. I fear that Christians who stand with only one leg upon earth also stand with only one leg in heaven (12 August 1943).

Dietrich encouraged me to plan the practical aspects of our future together. It helped him to envision a specific piece of furniture in our future apartment, a particular walk through the fields, a familiar spot on the beach. He never tired of urging me to learn better English or to resume practising the violin, although both of these seemed irrelevant to me at the time. He was thoroughly and justifiably convinced that he was the better cook, but refused to think this important, or rather considered it just as unimportant as my interest in mathematics. But he enjoyed talking about details of our wedding; he had chosen the 103rd psalm as a text and claimed that he was working on the menu.

He advised me about what I should read and carefully indicated which of the books he had returned from prison were worth my reading. Yet he patiently read my favourites and commented on them with understanding. For example, he questioned my enthusiasm for Rilke. Discussing
Letters to a Young Poet
he wrote: ‘To me - and I trust also to you – Rilke would have written quite
differently (though I am quite certain he would not have bothered to write to me at all). To make a musical comparison: I have to transpose Rilke continually from d-sharp major to c-major, and his pianissimo I would disregard at times – so would you (8 October 1943). I did make a dutiful attempt to read his books, starting from the beginning with
Sanctorum Communio.
When I admitted my frustration, it amused him thoroughly. He claimed that the only one of concern to him at that moment was
Life Together,
and he preferred that I wait until he was around to read it.

At least once a week we delivered books, laundry, and food, and picked up what he chose to return. It was important to Dietrich that he knew the day and time in advance, and because of air raids and disrupted transportation this was not always easy. He especially asked to be informed of a visit as far in advance as possible. ‘You cheat me out of the joy of anticipation,’ he would say, ‘and that is a very necessary part of your visit.’ There were some happy times during these visits. The fact that I brought a sizable Christmas tree all the way from home created great hilarity with both the guards and Dietrich. He remarked that maybe if he moved his cot out of his cell and stood up for the Christmas season he could accommodate the tree comfortably. It ended up in the guards’ room where Dietrich was invited to enjoy it. He teased me about it often and complained that I had not brought an Easter bunny for Easter. But he also wrote: ‘Isn’t it so that even when we are laughing, we are a bit sad.’

Life in prison

He lived by church holidays and by seasons, rather than by the calendar month, and the dates on his letters were sometimes approximations at best. He voiced his disappointment that he had not received a letter from me or anyone else expressly for Whit Sunday. About Advent he wrote: ‘A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes, does various unessential things, and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened
from the outside,
is not a bad picture of Advent’ (21 November 1943).

Once, during the summer, he was permitted to sit in the prison yard while writing a letter to me:

The sun is a special favourite of mine and has reminded me often of the fact that man is created from earth and does not consist of air and thoughts. This went so far that once, when I was asked to preach in Cuba at Christmas time, coming from the ice of North America into the blooming vegetation, I almost succumbed to the sun cult and hardly knew what I should have preached. It was a real crisis, and something of this comes over me every summer when I feel the sun. To me the sun is not an astronomical entity, but something like a living power which I love and fear. I find it cowardly to look past these realities rationally…. So must patience, joy, gratitude and calm assert themselves against all sorts of resistance. It says in the psalm ‘God is sun and shield.’ To recognize and experience and believe this is a moment of great grace and by no means an everyday wisdom (20 August 1943).

He looked forward to being included in the life that was led at my home. We made a bet about whether I would be able to teach him to dance: he thought that I could, while I considered him a hopeless case. It would have been a private exercise anyway, because he did not think that a minister should dance in public. He also wanted to learn horseback riding, yet hunting was not to his taste. ‘Did you know that Friedrich Wilhelm the First would ask any minister he met if hunting was a sin – he was a passionate hunter – and I think all of them, including A. H. Franke, were reasonable enough to declare that it was not. Yet it is, like many other things, not everyone’s business’ (21 November 1943).

He also looked forward to big family events, albeit with a certain reluctance:

You can hardly imagine how I long for everyone: after these long months of solitude, I have a real hunger for people. I am afraid, however, that at first I shall have trouble enduring long gatherings of many people. Even in times past I could endure family festivities, which in fact I love dearly, only if I could escape into my room for half an hour from time to time. From now on I hope you will escape with me. Yet you must not think me unsociable. Unfortunately, I find people extremely exhausting. But of these social vices and virtues you will learn soon enough (1 December 1943).

As time went on there were, of course, moments of discouragement:

It would be better if I succeeded in writing to you only of my gratitude, my joy, and my happiness in having you and in keeping the pressure and the impatience of this long imprisonment out of sight. But that would not be truthful, and it would appear to me as an injustice to you. You must know how I really feel and must not take me for a pillar saint
(S
ä
ulenheiligen)
… I can’t very well imagine that you would want to marry one in the first place – and I would also advise against it from my knowledge of church history (20 August 1943).

Slowly it gets to be a waiting whose outward sense I cannot comprehend; the inward reason must be found daily. Both of us have lost infinitely much during the past months; time today is a costly commodity, for who knows how much more time is given to us? And yet I do not dare to think that it was or is lost time either for each of us individually or for both of us together. We have grown together in a different way than we have thought and wished, but these are unusual times and will remain so a while longer, and everything depends on our being one in the essential things and on our remaining with each other. Your life would have been quite different, easier, clearer, simpler had not our path crossed a year ago. But there are only short moments when this thought bothers me. I believe that not only I, but you too, had arrived at the moment in life when we had to meet, neither of us basically has any desire for an easy life, much as we may enjoy beautiful and happy hours in this life, and much as we may have a great longing for these hours today. I believe that happiness lies for both of us at a different and hidden place which is incomprehensible to many. Actually both of us look for challenges
(Aufgahen),
up to now each for himself, but from now on together. Only in this work will we grow completely together when God gives us the time for it (20 September 1943).

Stifter once said ‘pain is a holy angel, who shows treasures to men which otherwise remain forever hidden; through him men have become greater than through all joys of the world.’ It must be so and I tell this to myself in my present position over and over again – the pain of longing which often can be felt even physically, must be there, and we shall not and need not talk it away. But it needs to be overcome every time, and thus there is an even holier angel than the one of pain, that is the one of joy in God (21 November 1943).

The last letter

Dietrich was moved to the Gestapo prison in October, 1944. It
was then impossible to obtain visitation permits, and it is improbable that any of my letters reached him there. When the prison was badly damaged during an air raid in February he was moved out of Berlin and my attempts to find him in either Dachau, Buchen-wald, or Flossenbiirg failed. In his last letter to me at Christmas, 1944, he wrote:

These will be quiet days in our homes. But I have had the experience over and over again that the quieter it is around me, the clearer do I feel the connection to you. It is as though in solitude the soul develops senses which we hardly know in everyday life. Therefore I have not felt lonely or abandoned for one moment. You, the parents, all of you, the friends and students of mine at the front, all are constantly present to me. Your prayers and good thoughts, words from the Bible, discussions long past, pieces of music, and books, - [all these] gain life and reality as never before. It is a great invisible sphere in which one lives and in whose reality there is no doubt. If it says in the old children’s song about the angels: ‘Two, to cover me, two, to wake me,’ so is this guardianship
(Bewahrung),
by good invisible powers in the morning and at night, something which grown ups need today no less than children. Therefore you must not think that I am unhappy. What is happiness and un-happiness? It depends so little on the circumstances; it depends really only on that which happens inside a person. I am grateful every day that I have you, and that makes me happy (19 December 1944).