I had not heard of this book before, but as a person particularly interested in the intersection of literature and theology, it has aroused my curiosity. I will try to either buy it or borrow it through interlibrary loan. Has anyone read this? I have included a review of it below, written by Mark R. Lindsay below, which a friend sent to me.
"Who Am I?" Bonhoeffer’s Theology through His Poetry. Edited by Bernd Wannenwetsch. London, T&T Clark, 2009.
"When Dorothee Soelle suggested that Dietrich Bonhoeffer would be the one German theologian who
would be read with profit into the twenty-first century, it is unlikely that she had in mind the constructive contribution to his legacy, and to the theological landscape more generally, provided by his poetry. Indeed, much like Bonhoeffer’s prison fiction, his poems have received only a little scholarly attention until relatively recently. Bonhoeffer came to both genres late in life, under the duress of imprisonment, and through both we gain fascinating insights. Through the prison fiction, we learn little more than we knew already of his theology, yet gain a richer understanding of the man behind it. In his poems, on the other hand, we catch autobiographical glimpses and are also instructed more fully into the depths of his theological acumen.
In the decades since his martyrdom, Bonhoeffer’s poems have been widely used in liturgies, hymnody and in the practice of spiritual contemplation. The profundity of their theological insight, however, has been largely under-explored. (Wannenwetsch notes only four others who have previously gathered together the prison poems. E. Bethge, /Auf dem Wege zur Freiheit: Gedichte aus Tegel /(1946); J.C. Hampe, /Von gute Mächten: Gebete und Gedichte /(1976); J. Henkys, /Dietrich Bonhoeffers Gefängnis Gedichte: Beiträge zu ihrer Interpretation /(1986); J. Henkys, /Geheimnis der Freiheit: Der Gedichte Dietrich Bonhoeffers aus der Haft. Biographie, Poesie, Theologie /(2005); E. Robertson, /The Prison Poems of Dietrich Bonheoffer (1998). Of these four, only Henkys and Hampe have endeavoured to provide a theological analysis.) Thankfully this book, which has emerged as the fruit of an Oxford conference in celebration of the centenary of Bonhoeffer’s birth, addresses that lacuna and shows unequivocally the rich seam of faithful witness to which both the poems themselves, and the life of their author, attest.
Importantly, the poems presented here are neither, despite the setting of their composition, the soliloquies of a reflective introvert, nor the personal musings of a man whose innermost thoughts have now, in spite of his intentions, been disseminated to an audience wider than he intended. On the contrary, these poems are framed by a critical ecclesiology. More, even, than creative ways of remaining in contact with loved ones outside the prison walls, they are communications to a community. As Wannenwetsch rightly says, this poetry is not an ‘auto-therapeutic exercise’, but rather ‘a mode of conversing with those who had contributed to his horizon up to this point . . .’ (pp. 5–6). Through his poetry, no matter how stumbling the attempt Bonhoeffer himself might have thought it to be (‘I am certainly no poet!’, /LPP/, p. 372), Bonhoeffer returns to his original love, the sanctorum communio. It is as we read these verses as conversation pieces, and not simply as monologues, that we begin to hear them authentically. To quote again from Wannenwetsch, the prison poetry is ‘only fully intelligible when being read as an instance of immers[ion] . . . into the stream of conversation that is the Christian theological tradition . . .’ (p. 7). After a brief introduction to the author, through an inversion of his own Christological question, i.e., Who is /Dietrich Bonhoeffer /for us today?, the book winds its way through fascinating exegeses of each of the ten poems Bonhoeffer wrote during his Tegel imprisonment. Written over a period of only six months (June to December 1944), Bonhoeffer’s poetry is not only evidence of his remarkable productivity, but also shows again Bonhoeffer’s capacity to range comfortably across diverse themes. Because of their widespread use for various liturgical and worshipping purposes, most of the poems are textually familiar. ‘Stations on the Way to Freedom’, ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Christians and Pagans’ have become especially well known to the past two generations of Protestant Christians around the world. And yet, the essays here illumine the theology of the familiar, which can too easily be overshadowed in the process of congregational hymn-singing and litany. Michael Northcott argues that Bonhoeffer’s account of authentic selfhood, as evidenced in the poem ‘Who am I?’, combines both the political self and interiority. Northcott rejects the rejection of interiority in favour of sociality, which Wannenwetsch, Hauerwas and RowanWilliams tend to see in Bonhoeffer’s concept of the responsible I. While there is an inner struggle for identity (‘Am I this or the other? . . . Both at once?’), this does not result in a flight from the world into the hidden recesses of the soul, nor in a flight from inwardness to the political self. Rather, it manifests in a true self formed by and in community (p. 19). Implied in this, argues Northcott – as indeed is testified by Bonhoeffer’s own life – is a moral responsibility and spiritual maturity which are formed in mutuality (p. 21).
In commenting upon one of the lesser known poems, ‘Success and Failure’, Brian Bock notes that the ambiguities in the translated title (i.e., should it be ‘Sorrow and Joy’, ‘Happiness and Unhappiness’, or ‘Fortune and Calamity’?, each of which has been used in different translations) reflect the uncertainties of life which are the subject of the poem itself. The ethical question which arises for Bonhoeffer thus becomes, How then does one live in this context of ambiguity? Bock suggests that it is through the mediating activity of /Treue/, faithfulness, that Bonhoeffer is able, in his own imprisoned life and more generally, to see the transfiguration of unhappiness by the act of divine love (p. 57).
This theme of /Treue /is explored further by Stanley Hauerwas in his reflections on the poem ‘The Friend’. Inspired by his friendship with Eberhard Bethge, who Hauerwas says Bonhoeffer ‘trusted and depended on . . . in a manner different to anyone else in his life, including Maria’ (p. 102), this poem is a prism though which we can consider Bonhoeffer’s (incomplete) concept of mandates. Concerned to find a sociological space for the idea of friendship, Bonhoeffer sees it as being located within the /necessitas /of freedom. As such, it is made possible by the mandates, but at the same time is the thing by which the mandates are themselves critically self-limited. In other words, Hauerwas argues that, in Bonhoeffer’s view, the /Treue /of friendship rescues it from being an escape into the private sphere, and makes it instead the source of trust by which moral responsibility can be dared. Friendship is therefore the very opposite of the privatization of the self by which totalitarianism is empowered. As such it is more than simply a sociological category but, on the contrary, a distinct alternate ethic.
In both ‘Stations on the Way to Freedom’ and ‘Christians and Pagans’, we are confronted with the
existential dialectics of /God’s /life with us, and /our /life with God. Hans Ulrich notes that in ‘Stations’, Bonhoeffer explores not how Christians should live, but how /God /lives /with us /in the /extremis /of our lives (p. 52) – the answer, of course, being in discipline, action, suffering and death. In ‘Christians and Pagans’, on the other hand, the emphasis is on /our /‘standing /by God/’, in both His need and ours. As Wannenwetsch has realized, evangelical responsibility – that which makes someone a Christian – is not a religious act, but the willing participation in the cries of and tears of Gethsemane (p. 181) and, by extension, in all other places where Jesus’ cries can be heard, that is, when we see and participate in ‘the sufferings of God in the secular life’ (pp. 193–194; /LPP/, p. 361). In the other poems, similar attention is given to questions of identity and responsibility. ‘Jonah’, in particular, ‘distils Bonhoeffer’s sense of what is involved in vicarious, representative action’ (p. 210). In the same vein, Craig Slane suggests that the poem ‘The Death of Moses’ can best be understood as ‘a protracted quest to understand theologically and to live personally the so-called responsible life’ (p. 228).
More, of course, could be said about each poem, and about the respective exegeses of each, which are presented in this book. In sum, though, the collection of essays brought together here serves a much-needed purpose. Each interpreter has worked hard to contextualize the poetry, and then show how it resonates within the being of Christian discipleship today. In doing so, Bonhoeffer’s poems, and the theology which underpins each of them, are brought alive for the life of responsible faith. Dorothee Soelle may well not have had the prison poems in view when she spoke of Bonhoeffer’s enduring legacy. But this book, expertly woven together by Wannenwetsch, demonstrates that Bonhoeffer’s poems too make him a compelling communicator of responsible discipleship for the twenty-first century."
MCD University of Divinity, Melbourne Mark R. Lindsay
