The great anti-Nazi German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) was a man who not only wrote about the power of faith and courage to overcome evil, but took action to stop it. He was a churchman involved as a secret operative in the "officers plot" to assassinate Adolph Hitler through contacts he had with his brother-in-law in the Abwehr (German military intelligence). Arrested in early 1943, he spent two years in Gestapo prison camps, writing to his friends and family members and his fiancee, hoping to secure freedom but also trying to lift their spirits despite his own dire circumstances facing a kangaroo court trial. After the attempted assassination of Hitler went off badly--he survived--the young man's fate was sealed, as were those of his relatives also involved.
The book that came out of that correspondence--along with other sundry writings that were preserved after his execution at the Gestapo's Flossenberg Prison on April 9, 1945, make up his final testament, Letters and Papers from Prison . It is a collection of letters, poems, story fragments, notes, journal entries, et al, that I found inspiring, not least for the fact that from all reports by surviving prisoners the man who wrote them "walked the walk" to the very steps of the gallows.
He was not a Jew or a communist and he came from a prominent family. I point that out because it would have been easy for him to either "go along" as so many "German Christians" did and accept the oversight of Hitler's Regime in the corruption of the Lutheran Church or simply to escape to a safe have such as London or the United States. Indeed twice he went abroad (to Britain in the early thirties and later, in 1939, to the New York Theological Union) at the urging of others so he could escape and continue his writings and lectures and works free from fear and arrest.
The young Bonhoeffer had first come to America in the late 1920's. He was quite taken with many aspects of American spiritualism, particularly an African-American Abyssinian Methodist Church in Harlem, where he did mission work and collected many of the gospel songs in an album he kept for future use.
But twice Bonhoeffer went back to Germany and continued to train seminary students in the so-called "Confessing-Church" that had been set up in defiance of Hitler's concordant that all church officials submit to Nazification. He loved his country and had a sense of the Moral Law that transcended his concern for his family, for the love of his fiancee Maria von Wedemeyer, for his happiness and for his life. Other German men and women did as well. To remember this man and read his work is to be renewed that others have faced far worse in this life than we may ever have to and they have come through to remind us that there is a Right and a Wrong and a Free Will., no matter what post-modernists tell us.
This book provides us with a person who has unfailing devotion to the truth. Like Martin Luther King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail and Mahatma Gandhi's writings (contained in The Essential Gandhi) written in part from prisons in South Africa and India, we see examples of men of faith devoted to living the ethics he wrote out for others. Those who might question why a cleric of the Christian Faith would endorse violence, unlike King and Gandhi, need only recall what kind of man ruled Germany and what re-courses were left to his opponents. He had tried to embrace pacifism and admired Gandhi but in 1942 he concluded the only answer was not just to train young men to be men of God, but to end the life of an evil man and shorten the terrible war and genocide Hitler had brought on his people.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said "Ideas must work through the bones and arms of good men or they are no better than dreams." Too many of us--myself included-- are content to dream, while others like Oscar Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg,and Paul Rusesabagina ,the hotelier from "Hotel Rwanda", actually do something about evil, whether inspired by religion or by simply not ignoring their conscience.
Not all of us will have to face pure evil as a madness inflicting our neighbors, but all of us can stop at least some bad things from happening to one other person at some time in our lives.
For more on Bonhoeffer, please see this biographical link to his life from the US National Holocaust Museum: www.ushmm.org/bonhoeffer/
No comments:
Post a Comment