Bonhoeffer’s discipleship: Germany confronts its past

You bump into the past quite often in Berlin.  There’s the  curated remains of the Wall, the vast architectural hymn to militarism of the Soviet war memorial in Treptow, and the disorientating claustrophobia of Daniel Libeskind’s building housing the Jewish Museum.  To contemplate a full confession of the Nazi horrors and the sufferings of war, try spending time in the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, in the centre near the Zoological Garden.

Few tourists visit the Bonhoeffer-Haus in the western suburbs of the city.  Just a large, detached, ordinary house — but full of the memory of an extraordinary German Lutheran pastor. Dietrich Bonhoeffer struggled with Christian ethics and finally gave his life in their pursuit.  

Bonhoeffer encountered Black theology’s biblical themes of liberation while at Union Theological College in New York, 1930-1931, worshipping at the Abyssinian Baptist Church. He lived his own words: “silence in the face of evil is itself evil”. Two days after Hitler came to power in 1933, the pastor broadcast a warning against the idolatry of a Führer cult – and was cut off in mid-flow.  His condemnation of the Nazi euthanasia programme and persecution of the Jews was no less vocal.  He later wrote most of his  famous book The Cost of Discipleship, published in 1937, in an underground Lutheran seminary at Finkenwalde in North Germany.

In one of several attempts to assassinate Hitler, a group of German military officers in the German High Command Centre (by the Tiergarten) made a time-bomb and hid it in the cellar of Bonhoeffer Haus. An unsuspecting officer not party to the plot carried it on board a plane carrying Hitler back to Germany from his forward military headquarters in Smolensk on 13 March 1943.  The Bonhoeffer family had friends round celebrating their father’s 75^th birthday and were nervously awaiting the coded phone call indicating all was well.   A difficult evening.  No phone call came.

There was a sadness about Bonhoeffer’s frugal attic bedroom and study with his little desk by the window, and the books of his friend and confidant, pastor and theologian, Eberhard Bethge, around the walls.  After publication of Discipleship in 1937, Bonhoeffer had scant time left at home.  By 1938 he had a sizeable Gestapo file and was banned from Berlin. He was arrested in April 1943 and executed in Flossenberg concentration camp two years later, a few weeks before the end of the War.  His study felt like a memorial to him.

“Lest we Forget” is easier said at the Cenotaph than in the partly bomb-damaged Kaiser Wilhelm Gedachtniskirche with, today, its cross of nails from Coventry Cathedral.  Yet the church provides a deliberate, and remarkable, contrast between its former worship of power, illustrated by the mosaics on the roof and walls showing a procession of Hohenzollen princes and the Kaiser in glory with his first wife, the Empress Augusta Victoria,  and the church’s contents, display cases and peace message.  Triumphalism versus an informed contrition and memorial for the millions who died under the same roof.

Kaiser Wilhelm Gedachtniskirche

Next door is the new evangelical Church which presents a counter, Christian, understanding of power.  In memory of  evangelical martyrs  killed between 1933 and 1945, there is a beautiful 12^th century crucifix with a plaque quoting John 1:5.4 “unser glaube ist der sieg der die welt uberwunden hat”  ( more elegant than “for whoever is begotten by God conquers the world.  And the victory that conquers the world is our faith”).   Alongside is a 1942 charcoal sketch, a Madonna and Child drawn at Stalingrad by the Protestant pastor and military doctor Kurt Reuber, with the defiant words Licht, Leben, Liebe (“Light, Life, Love”), on one side, against the darkness, death and hatred, the horror of war.  A man literally drawing support from his faith in extreme adversity.

Berlin raises a question: for how long, how many generations, should guilt and shame about the past be retained? It is understandable if German youth do not want to be burdened by a past they did not make.  For the younger generation the best comparison in the UK might be how distant slavery seems today in our own past and in the making of Britain’s wealth. Perhaps the answer lies in the difference between guilt and shame: guilt created by a sense of responsibility for wrongdoing, an individual, inner emotion; shame created by belonging to a community, more a painful sense of how others see us as a result of a wrongdoing.   Psychologists seem to approve of guilt and disapprove of shame.  But there is crippling survivor guilt.  And fear of shame and blame can be a powerful restraint. German young people clearly should not feel guilt about the Holocaust.  Though there is something healthy and salutary in a communal sense of shame, at being reminded of the unspeakable events in Europe eighty to ninety years ago.

I can think of no better way of finding the right approach to the past than spending time in the Bonhoeffer-Haus, with its excellent pastor and guide, and spending time in the Kaiser Wilhelm Church in Berlin.  But these are merely the limited experiences of a British bystander, old enough to just about remember the sounds of the sirens in the Battle of Britain and being evacuated from London.

Bonhoeffer Haus in Berlin

The past is another country.  Over time, irrespective of nationality, we have crossed several countries into our current one.  And a little history, painful and shocking as it is, should – the emphasis is on should — make it easier not to repeat the horrors of 1933-1945.

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