Magnus (13 page)

•
  1930: presents his
Habilitationsschrift
, allowing him to become a university teacher, entitled
Act and Being
.

•
  September 1930–June 1931: scholarship for post-graduate study in the United States (at Union Theological Seminary in New York).

•
  1931: chaplain to the students at the Technical School of Charlottenburg. In September, takes part in the ecumenical conference in Cambridge (elected youth secretary of the World Alliance for Promoting Friendship through the Churches). On 15 November is ordained at St Matthaus church in Berlin.

•
  1933: Hitler comes to power. D. Bonhoeffer immediately recognizes the fundamental evil of this Führer that Germany welcomes as a saviour, and publicly warns of the danger that ‘the image of the leader might slip into the image of the misleader … The leader and his office will be deified in a caricature of God’. He also condemns racial hatred and persecution of the Jews, extended to Christians of Jewish ancestry. ‘The exclusion of Jewish Christians from the community destroys the substance of Christ’s Church … The Church is not the community of those who are kindred, but the community of strangers who have been called by the Word. The people of God is a order that supersedes all others … “The Aryan Paragraph” [proclaimed 7 April 1933] is a heresy and destroys the substance of the Church.’ (Tract written in August 1933)

•
  October 1933–April 1935: serves as minister to a parish in London.

•
  1935–37: runs one of the pastoral seminaries set up by the Confessing Church (separated from the German Church, which is completely compromised by its collaboration with the Nazi regime) at Zingst, then at Finkenwalde in Pomerania. Authorization to teach in university is withdrawn from him in 1936.

•
  1937: publication of his work
Nachfolge
(
The Cost of Discipleship
). In October the Gestapo close down the pastoral seminaries; arrest of several former seminarists at Finkenwalde.

•
  1938: first contacts with the Abwehr resistance circle that forms round Ludwig Beck, which is joined by Hans Oster, Wilhelm Canaris, Karl Sack … His brother Klaus Bonhoeffer, his brothers-in-law Rüdiger Schleicher and Hans von Dohnanyi also join the German resistance. ‘There is a satanic truth. Its nature consists in denying, under the guise of truth, everything that is real. It lives on hatred of reality and of the world created and loved by God. If we call one who is obliged by war to deceive a liar, the lie acquires a moral sanction and justification totally contradictory to its nature.’

•
  1939: publication of the book inspired by his experience in the seminary at Finkenwalde –
Life Together
. Travels to London, then to the United States, but cuts short his stay and returns to Germany on the last ship to make the crossing, just before the declaration of war.

•
  1940: banned from expressing himself in public and obliged to inform the police of all his movements. He works on his magnum opus
Ethics
, not to be published until after his death, by his friend Eberhard Bethge. Plays an active role in the political resistance movement.

•
  1941–42: banned from publishing. As part of his resistance activities he makes several trips to Switzerland, Norway, and Sweden (within the context of ecumenical relations). In November 1942 he becomes engaged to be married to Maria von Wedemeyer.

•
  1943–45: on 5 April 1943 is arrested by the Gestapo, along with his sister Christine and brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi, and incarcerated at Tegel military prison. Until August 1944 he continues to read, study, write – letters, notes, outlines for projects … ‘Now I pray simply for freedom. There is moreover a false resignation, which is not at all Christian. We need not as Christians be ashamed of some impatience, yearning, opposition to what goes against nature, and of a strong craving for freedom and earthly happiness and the power to act.’ (Letter from prison, 18 November 1943)

•
  After the failure of the Von Stauffenberg plot against Hitler on 20 July 1944, the Gestapo find documents proving his involvement in the conspiracy. His brother Klaus and his brother-in-law Rüdiger Schleicher are also arrested. On 8 October 1944 he is transferred to the Gestapo’s underground prison on Prinz-Albrechtstrasse in Berlin. On 7 February 1945 he is sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, then to Regensburg, and finally to Flossenburg

•
  9 April 1945: he is executed along with General Hans Oster, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, lawyer Theodor Strünk, Judge Karl Sack and Captain Ludwig Gehre. Hans von Dohnanyi is killed at Sachsenhausen; Klaus Bonhoeffer, Rüdiger Schleicher and another accomplice, F.J. Perels, in Berlin.

‘The idea of death has become increasingly familiar to us in recent years … It would not be true to say we wish to die – although there is no one who has not experienced a certain weariness, to which on no account must we give way – we are too curious to give up or, to put it more seriously, we would like to have longer to see what meaning our broken life has. Nor do we sublimate death, life being too important and precious to us … We still love life, but I believe that death can no longer surprise us very much. After the experiences of war, we hardly dare confess our desire that it should not strike us down casually, suddenly, on the periphery of reality, but in the fullness of life and in the thick of the action. It is not outward circumstances but we ourselves who will make our death what it can be, a death that is freely accepted.’

One day he finally decides to take to the laundry the damask tablecloth he extracted from the dustbin that Peggy left outside her empty house. When he gets it home, he opens it out to see whether the cleaning has restored its satin-like smoothness and ivory colour. The wine- and sauce-stains have been washed out, but not completely; they have faded into faint rings of pale pink and amber superimposed on the patterns in the cloth. They are suggestive of some inchoate bloom, like faded flowers emerging from the morning mist.

Having studied at length these floral designs and traced their indistinct outline with his fingertip, he re-encounters them in his dreams the following night.

He sees Peggy as she was when they were last together: wearing her light flowing dress, spangled with tiny flowers and butterflies. And suddenly, as in his adolescent dreams when he burned with desire for Peggy, he sees her start to sway, to twirl round in circles – not increasing fast, but more widely expanding – and her dress begins to ripple gently, to rise and open up in a big corolla. And now this dress, dotted with little flowers and insects, is floating round the middle of her body, encompassing that white belly, those slender hips and bare buttocks with a halo of softly radiating light. Her sex is no longer the shape of a sun-like thistle, as in the past, but of a peony with its countless petals closed.

And now the flowers detach themselves from the fabric, the butterflies take flight and dance in slow motion; the dress evaporates, leaving only a milky nimbus, veined with streaks of orange-yellow, round the naked woman’s waist. Her breasts are beautiful, small and perfectly rounded, their areola the colour of fresh hazelnuts and the nipples themselves like the hazelnut kernel. Her skin is sprinkled with little freckles, unless they are the ocelli of butterfly wings. With a quivering of petals the peony opens up, a mere fraction. And there the dream ends, unfulfilled.

No, the dream does not end, it takes another turn, becomes transformed. Peggy has disappeared, or rather her body has faded to the verge of invisibility, rather as the washed-out stains on the damask have become misty hints of colour, floral intimations. Only the peony remains, like a clenched fist relaxing, then closing again. No, like a beating heart.

He cannot see Peggy any more, all he can make out is a heart palpitating in the emptiness, just surfacing out of the milky fog. And he can hear the dull monotonous pounding of this suspended heart. The more visually spare his dream becomes, the more it gains in resonance.

Is it enough to dream of someone for that person then to remember you and make contact after a long silence? The fact is that a week later Magnus receives a letter from Peggy. For all these months, she writes, she has remained devastated by what happened during that dinner at her house, already then no longer a home to her. But devastated by what exactly, she wonders. Her twofold shame, redoubled by having to confess to the shame she had felt since Tim’s death? Remorse for her own culpability for that death? Her inability to provide any explanation whatsoever for the tragedy? Or bewilderment at the strange phenomenon that occurred that evening in Magnus’s presence, which she still does not understand? She does not believe in ghosts or haunted houses, but she does believe in the strength of feelings, good or bad, when they rise to a pitch of intensity; in the power of emotions, especially if forcibly concealed; in the energy of certain ideas, especially if brutally silenced. The flesh then saturated with all this contained energy, and the heart too sore from things unspoken, from lies, fears, and regrets, gasping for breath eventually cry out all that could not, would not be said. Yes, for months she has lived in a daze of stupefaction, struggling to keep up appearances in front of her colleagues and students at the institute where she teaches. But three days ago all of a sudden the weight bearing down on her was lifted, she was released from the permanent grip of anxiety. She does not know how or why, and is not attempting to explain it. She is simply noting the change, the relief; this first step towards deliverance. But, for all that, without forgetting or denying or refusing to acknowledge anything of what happened – her responsibility for Tim’s death, her gradual aversion towards him that turned to repulsion, then cold deadly hatred. Have you ever experienced that slow distortion of love, she asks Magnus, and adds that it is something she hopes he has never had to live through, and never will.

And in these last three days, she continues in her letter, she has the impression of having covered more ground than in several decades. The impression of picking up again, moving forward, without trying to hide her guilt behind her back any more, but bearing it in her arms like some small animal certainly mortally wounded but that she does not despair of saving.

It is in order to tell him all this that she is writing to him today, and to thank him for having, knowingly or not, stoked the madness that was smouldering inside her, making it burst into flame, burn itself out. And never mind, she adds, if all this seems confused, it was something she had to tell him.

Finally, she writes, if he should ever have the desire to visit Vienna one day, she would be delighted to see him again. She even goes so far as to say she is renting an apartment big enough to accommodate guests.

Her letter ends with this invitation, both warm and vague. Magnus soon makes it definite: he decides to go to Vienna the following month.

‘A grey ox in China

lying in the stable

stretches its backbone

and at the same moment

an ox in Uruguay

looks round to see

if someone has stirred.

Flying over both of them

through day and night

is the bird that silently

circles the planet

and never touches it

and never comes to rest.’

Jules Supervielle, ‘A grey ox in China…’

The Innocent Convict

The first time they faced each other naked, Magnus felt the ground shift under his feet. All his dreams from the past suddenly gathered in a solid mass shattering the reality that had finally come into being. Peggy’s body was already so familiar to him this sudden revelation seemed like an absurdity, an assault. And his desire for her was panicked to the point of collapsing into impotence. His own body failed him.

Lying beside her on the bed, he hardly dared look at her, caress her. His vision was blurred, with images of Peggy’s nudity contemplated in his dreams overlaying the very real vision that presented itself to him; images that rippled over her skin, making it untouchable. Peggy took his hand and laid it on her breast, gently holding it there. She did not say anything. She smiled at him, waiting for the emotion that paralysed him and made him tremble to subside. But his emotion intensified. Magnus felt his hand grow heavier, practically weld itself to Peggy’s breast. And his sense of touch became confused with his hearing. His palm could hear her heartbeats and these pulsations spread through his whole body, all listening and resonance. He shivered as though in the grip of a high fever.

This heart beating beneath his palm, ringing in his blood, was not just that of Peggy now, it was a palimpsest of sound – in which May’s heart released indistinct echoes, calling to him, reminding him.

He had made love with other women since May’s death, but none had caused such a jolt to his memory. Women briefly desired, very fleetingly and casually loved; occasional mistresses, purveyors of pleasure and oblivion, no threat to his enduring love, the woman who had enchanted his life for ten years. May’s place as friend, lover and accomplice was left unoccupied. A place set very high, beyond reach: high up in the sky’s sheer blue of empty space, amid the dreadful quiet and ashes.

And now this vacant place was suddenly destabilized, and to the question that had tormented him for years – Did May love me? And did I love her? Have I ever loved anyone? – Magnus was given an answer: a calm and profound yes. He wept silently for a long while. And as they flowed his tears dampened the sheet, Peggy’s hair, they also dampened the noise that filled his palm and pulsed in his flesh, making it sound softer. Peggy brought her face right up close to his and kissed his eyes, then licked at his tears, like a kitten. And licking at him, she laughed, then hummed a song.

Then the palimpsest heart disclosed other resonances, yet fainter than the earlier ones. They unfurled in tiny waves, barely perceptible, as if originating from a long way off, from an earlier age. From even before his birth perhaps, from the time when his body was slowly forming in the liquid darkness of his mother’s body.