Bonhoeffer and the Anomaly

Bonhoeffer thought often about the anomaly, especially in the later  part of his life.

Dictionary.com defines an anomaly as follows:

A deviation from the common rule, type, arrangement, or form. an anomalous person or thing; one that is abnormal or does not fit in.

In the work of H.P Lovecraft (1890-1937), the American horror writer who was a rough contemporary to Bonhoeffer,  anomaly describes that which is horrific or monstrous. It is what we can not bear to contemplate because it stands outside the normal order of life as we understand it. It leads us to madness. 

A Lovecraft anomaly: a horror

This atavistic undertone informs the fear of the anomaly in Nazi Germany and our own times. Bonhoeffer, of course,  confronted the reality of what happened to those defined as "anomalous" within National Socialism. Those who were not perceived as part of the ethnic German volk faced imprisonment, torture, and genocide. As his own twin sister (not to mention two other of his siblings) were married to assimilated Jews, the question was not trivial to him. 

In his non-familial relationships, Bonhoeffer faced the anomalous nature of his friendship with Bethge, a friendship both men acknowledged as outside the norms of their society. Bethge, for instance, complained that he was not automatically passed Bonhoeffer's letters from Tegel prison from the Bonhoeffer family,  and both men mourned the inability of Bethge--because friendship had no standing--to visit Bonhoeffer in Tegel, a right afforded his parents and the fiancee he barely knew. Bethge appreciated, as he told Bonhoeffer, his marriage to Renate, in part because it was part of the normal "order" of family as envisioned by the Lutheran Church and German society. It was visible, not anomalous. (Of course, he also loved Renate in her own right.)

In sharp distinction to Lovecraft and Nazi Germany, Bonhoeffer fought to reframe the anomalous into the beautiful, rather than reject it as the horrific. For Bonhoeffer, the lovely blue cornflower became the symbol of  the anomaly of close friendship. In Bonhoeffer's day, before the widespread use of pesticides and controlled farming, cornflowers grew as weeds between farmers' orderly rows of wheat. Bonhoeffer likened the cultivated wheat to the Lutheran social orders of family, work, church, etc, and appreciated these "grains" as useful and necessary. But he also celebrated the freedom, spontaneity, and beauty of the gentle and anomalous cornflower, which became his symbol of  friendship. Unlike the Nazis, he saw the creative potential in the anomalous: this humanity and generosity is perhaps what draws us most strongly to him--and is pertinent for our own times.

Cornflower amid wheatfield

Bonhoeffer drew around him women as part of his closest inner circle, and even for a brief moment had the anomalous Bertha Schultz as his "housekeeper" or secretary. She shared his attic home in South London, along with male and family visitors.  Bertha did not remain long in London--precisely from fears on the part of Bonhoeffer and his friends that she might be trying to cross the line from anomaly--single, highly intelligent and educated working woman--to Bonhoeffer's wife. (We have no idea if this was Bertha's plan or if this was merely projection).

Bonhoeffer's close friend Ruth von Kleist Retzow was a borderline anomalous women, though in a very different way from Bertha. Widowed early, she never remarried and, while staying respectable for remaining close to family and church, she also exhibited a high degree of independence. She protested at first taking six grandchildren into her Stettin apartment when their families wanted to remove them from local Nazi scrutiny. While she did supervise them for several years, and saw to it that they had contact with Bonhoeffer's seminarians, she lived much of her life independently, rotating between her Stettin apartment and her country cottage, very much in charge of both. However, she could feel anomalous--that she did not fit in--with Bonhoeffer's plans or life, noting he was too quick to dismiss seeing her and complaining at one point that she would not "beg" for his company.

How we treat the anomaly or outsider sheds light on who we are as people. Bonhoeffer showed his deep humanity in his concept of male friendship as a realm of freedom worth cultivating and in his close embrace of certain women as intimate platonic friends. 

Virginia Woolf and Dietrich Bonhoeffer

It's not often we think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Virginia Woolf in tandem, but the two share common ground. Both hail from the educated upper-middle class elite of the pre-World War II era. Both came from large families. Both had ambiguous sexualities. Both were writers. Both were pacifists. Both were fascinated with their families of origin and sought insights through writing about them. Both were close to Quakers without becoming Quakers themselves. Both abhorred Hitler and both fought fascism, not simply in its political manifestation, but  attacked it at its deeper roots of ethical sensibility. Both suffered from depression. Both died during World War II: Woolf through suicide, Bonhoeffer executed at a concentration camp for opposing Hitler's regime: for both, the war was arguably the blow that did them in. And to understand either of them, we need to put on the lenses of another time.

Bethge, Bonhoeffer's close friend, and Bonhoeffer: Bromance or romance? Bethge was a muse to Bonhoeffer, especially when Bonhoeffer was in Tegel Prison.

Bethge, Bonhoeffer's close friend, and Bonhoeffer: Bromance or romance? Bethge was a muse to Bonhoeffer, especially when Bonhoeffer was in Tegel Prison. 

Woolf and Sackville-West, close friends and lovers. Vita was a muse to Virginia.

Both Woolf and Bonhoeffer were born into well-heeled, educated, academic families, and both were well aware of their privilege. Woolf's father, Leslie Stephen, was the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, while Bonhoeffer's father was head of psychiatry at Berlin University. Both Woolf and Bonhoeffer grew up in capital cities: London and Berlin, in spacious homes staffed by servants. For both, their cities became a part of who they were. Both, however, found their happiest memories in annual family holidays to their family's summer home, Woolf's by the ocean in Cornwall at the very tip of Britain, Bonheffer's the Harz Mountains, the highest elevation in Germany. Both developed a love of nature during these holidays.

Woolf was the seventh child in a blended family of eight. Both her parents were widowed. Her father came to the marriage with one child; her mother, Julia Duckworth, with three. Together, Leslie and Julia had four more children. Bonhoeffer was sixth of eight, or, more accurately "sixth-seventh" of eight, as he was one of a pair of twins. He would develop a lifelong close relationship with his twin sister, Sabine, just as Woolf would with her older sister, Cassandra. All in all, the siblings in both families would remain close, and both Woolf and Bonhoeffer would sometimes feel distant from their parents, lost in a large household. Both Woolf and Bonhoeffer developed a fear of ridicule in their families of origin.

Both figures had complicated sexualities. Although married, and finding much support from her husband, Leonard, Virginia probably did not have sexual relations with him. Virginia was strongly attracted to women. Bonhoeffer never married, and though he was engaged late in life, the relationship with his fiancee was fraught. The love of his life, whether bromance or romance, was with his male friend, Eberhard Bethge.

Both figures became famous as writers. Both were committed to pacifism in countries in which this stand was considered radical and bizarre. Bonhoeffer did get involved in the 1944 plot to kill Hitler, but did not believe it was a noble act. In his Ethics, he discusses the tyrannicide in the context of the need sometimes to dirty the purity of one's conscience and even perhaps jeopardize one's afterlife for a greater good. Woolf found war deeply abhorrent at a visceral level.

Given their pacifism, it's not surprising that Quakers played a role in both lives. Bonhoeffer was friends with Quaker Herbert Jehle, who helped Bonhoeffer's fiancee, Maria von Wedemeyer, emigrate to the U.S. after the war. Bonhoeffer visited the Quaker Woodbrooke retreat center in Birmingham during his time in England. Woolf's aunt, Caroline Stephen, was a prominent Quaker who left Woolf money that helped her establish independence. Woolf was also very close with Quaker-raised Roger Fry and Quaker Violet Dickinson.

Several sharp contrasts, however, exist between the two: Bonhoeffer had no sense of woman's rights, a cause that animated Woolf in a core way. Further, Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor and committed Christian, while Woolf identified as an atheist. However, Bonhoeffer was a sharp critic of the Church, believing a total reform would have to occur following World War II. His idea of "religionless Christianity" became popular in liberal circles in the 1960s. Woolf's prose, such as in To The Lighthouse, is often luminous with a sense of the numinous and the miraculous.

For next time: Bonhoeffer and Woolf's lives overlapped between 1906, when he was born, and her death in 1941. During the period, Bonhoeffer had two extended stays in London. The first was as pastor to two German churches in London from late 1933 to early 1935, and the second was a six-week period in spring, 1939, he spent with Sabine, who was in exile in England with her Jewish husband. Could they met? It seems unlikely that Woolf would have much to do with a younger German clergyman, but their upperclass world was small.

The Doubled Life at Jesus Creed

The Doubled Life is being featured today at the Jesus Creed blog at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2016/04/08/dietrich-bonhoeffer-and-women with a guest column by me ... and will be featured for three consecutive Fridays. My publisher has a give-away attached to this prominent theological venue. I hope you will visit. My book focuses on the women in Bonhoeffer's life.

Proud parent of a book

The Doubled Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Speaking at seminaries

My book, The Doubled Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is out, and I am the proud recipient of several review copies. Tuesday, I was pleased to be able to talk about the book at Earlham School of Religion  (ESR) and Bethany seminaries in Richmond, Indiana. A short version of my talk is below:

     In the spring of 1939,  Bonhoeffer visited  his twin sister Sabine in London. He took with him his best friend Eberhard Bethge. World War II  loomed, and during idle moments in Sabine’s garden, amid the forsythia and dark mauve lilacs, during what Sabine called  ‘a magical spring,” Dietrich wondered if he should allow himself to be caught in England when the war started. He was, after all, in the company of the two people in the world with whom he felt, as he put it, “in contrast to . . . other people … a remarkable sense of closeness.”
      Although I started with the hypothesis that women were underrepresented in the Bonhoeffer story, even I was surprised to find out the extent to which women populated the  innermost circle of deepest emotional intimacy in his life. Bonhoeffer had a very wide acquaintance and  many, many friends. He was part of the interwar trans-European elite and as the saying goes, he knew almost everybody. He had by all accounts, a self assurance and a perfect command of manners that made him welcome in the highest echelons of society. His aunts were countesses, his circle included aristocrats and top government officials and he counted among his friend Prince Louis Ferdinand, son of the deposed Kaiser Wilhlem II. Yet those few very closest to him were primarily women: his twin, Sabine, his grandmother Julie Tafel, his older friend Ruth von Kleist Retzow and, at the end of his life, if unwittingly, his fiancée Maria von Wedemeyer. The male in this innermost circle was Eberhard Bethge. It was often women that he was closest to and women who sustained him.
   Why does it matter that women are left out of his story? Beyond the almost self-evident idea that we prefer the truth, that we seek an undistorted picture, that if possible, we like to rub some of the fog away from the glass in our prison house of language so that we can see clearly, the women are important because so often in dialogue with them Bonhoeffer hammered out his theology. Further, this man for whom the personal was always the theological and the theological the personal, built up through these women the layers of experience  that helped form his theology. (Men contributed too—but we have that well documented).
     Writing primarily about women thrust me into the genre of women’s writing—because of the lack of  secondary source material, I relied on the letters and memoirs the women produced. These memoirs were a species of women’s writing, often with a strong emphasis on the domestic, versus a highly masculinized biography like Bethge’s, filled as it is with the manifestly important business of church struggle and theology.  In my book, I worked to capture some of the domestic flavor of the women’s writing—and , through writing narrative nonfiction also to provide a sensory context, including what is missing in many accounts of Bonhoeffer,  such the food people ate, the movies they saw, what bombed Berlin looked like, how a cold winter or rationing affected people. One of my favorite parts of the project was getting into the "skin" of the period and trying to envision what characters were seeing and doing as they went about their lives. 
      Finally, it's a concern for me to note that so few of my students under 30 (which is most of my students) have ever heard of Bonhoeffer, even thought the issues he identified and struggled with as important are almost with identical with issues we struggle with today: living in a post-Christian age characterized by declining church membership, the challenges posed by technology and the post-Enlightenment framing of reality, and particularly the new rise of nationalist demagoguery in conditions of anxiety that are not far divorced from the political realities of the 1920s and '30s. Bonhoeffer’s response is important, both because he was ahead of his time and because he was the product of a time that is in some ways the same and some ways apt to differently configure the political divisions and preoccupations of our own.