Bonhoeffer, friendship and the blue flower

In his Letters and Papers from Prison, Bonhoeffer famously refers to friendship as the cornflower blooming between the straight rows of the "fertile wheat" of the mandates, those human institutions of marriage, work, government and church that in Lutheran theology come down to humans from God. The gentle cornflower image, occurring to Bonhoeffer as he sat in a dank prison cell, no doubt harkens back to his youth, wandering the fields around Griefswald with newly-married Sabine or earlier still, gleaning wheat on his von Hase cousins' and other nearby farms during the "hunger days" of World War I. More pointedly, it describes his adult friendship with Eberhard Bethge, a relationship that animated and brought great joy to the last decade of his life.

Anticipating release from prison and hence threatened with displacement by Bethge's marriage (the marriage took place two weeks before Bonhoeffer's arrest in a civil ceremony and six weeks after the arrest in a religious ceremony that to the family marked the real marriage), Bonhoeffer used the cornflower to insist on friendship's importance: "Does one not leave the cornflower in place next to the fertile wheat? Does one pull it up because it is not necessary for life?" (DBWE 8)

Sadly, this very image speaks to anachronism, another time and place, for pesticides have largely eradicated the brilliant blue blooms that once blossomed in the fertile spaces between rows of grain, and in the United States, at least, we are not accustomed to see clusters of blue blooming between crops.

The cornflower has many symbolic resonances: it was a symbol of Germany, and the flower, also called bachelor's button, symbolized contentment with unmarried life, according to conservapedia.com. Most interestingly, Bonhoeffer references Novalis, the German Romantic writer, on May 1, 1943, early in his prison stay. A blue flower, possibly a cornflower, is an image in Novalis's  Heinrich von Ofterdingen, where Heinrich longs above all else to reach an unattainable blossom that he sees in a vision: "A tall, pale blue flower ... stood beside the spring ... He saw nothing but the blue flower." (quoted from Jennifer Hoyer, The Space of Words.) We don't know if Novalis's image sprang to his mind during Bonhoeffer's May 1 musings, but we know he deeply missed Bethge, and it's not impossible he conflated his longing to see his friend with Novalis's mystical blue flower.

In his poem "The Friend," Bonhoeffer uses the cornflower as an extended metaphor to describe friendship's beauty and strength. The poem, in which he reflects on his past after the failure of the July 20, 1944 assassination plot against Hilter, shows Bonhoeffer both appreciating what has gone before and reconciling himself to death. Entwined in it is a tribute to Sabine, his first friend and always dearly beloved twin: "Playmates at first /on the spirit's long journeys/into wondrous,/far away realms..." (DBWE 8).  The emphasis of the poem, however, falls on Bethge.

Friendship remained supremely important to Bonhoeffer throughout his life and should perhaps be highlighted as a point of light and color against a grim period of church struggle, resistance, assassination attempts and death. To end even more firmly on friendship, I repeat a Joseph Addison quote noted by my own cyber-friend, Ellen Moody:

"But the mind never unbends itself so agreeably as in the conversation of a well-chosen friend. There is indeed no blessing of life that is any way comparable to the enjoyment of a discreet and virtuous friend. It eases and unloads the mind. clears and improves the understanding, engenders thoughts and knowledge, animates virtue and resolutions, soothes and allays the passions, and finds employment for most of the vacant hours of life.”

I am sure Bonhoeffer would agree. What are your thoughts on Bonhoeffer and friendship?

This blog also appeared on TheBonhoefferCenter website.

The Mysterious Mary Bosanquet

We know very little about Mary Bosanquet, who wrote the first Bonhoeffer biography. Her lively book, The Life and Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, published in 1968, is filled, however, with a rich vein of primary source material.

     We do know that Bosanquet, writing in the mid-1960s, had earlier become friends with Sabine Leibholz, Bonhoeffer’s twin sister, and both Leibholz and Eberhard Bethge cooperated with the biographical project. Sabine spoke with Bosanquet for “many hours” and was impressed with her “exceptional sensitivity,” saying “she has recognized Dietrich for the man he was. … I can fully agree with her interpretation.”

The young Mary Bosanquet graced the frontispiece of her book Canada Ride.

While Sabine’s glowing endorsement of the book (which includes more than is quoted above) might lead one to suspect Bosanquet functioned as Leibholz’s and Bethge’s proxy, the book transcends mere transcription of those two’s thoughts. It includes, for example, remembrances from Bonhoeffer’s beloved governesses, Käthe and Maria Horn. Although in their 80s, the Horn sisters took the time to write Bosanquet letters about their young charge.

In the biography, Bosanquet quotes Käthe Horn’s letter at greater length than Maria’s.  Käthe remembers Sabine and Dietrich as “gifted and ready to learn,” as well as “jolly,” and notes the youngsters liked to surprise her with good deeds, such as setting the table for supper so she wouldn’t have do it. She also notes that the young Dietrich was “mischievious” and “up to various pranks.” Bethge’s portrayal of their mother, Paula, as emotional and a woman not to be crossed, gains credence from  Käthe’s recollection of a time Dietrich became “thorough nuisance.” Paula “descended upon him, boxed his ears left and right and was gone. Then the nonsense was over.” Maria Horn, however, noted that while the Bonhoeffer children were “high-spirited,” they “were never rude or ill-mannered.”

I was tantalized by these few breadcrumbs of recollection from Bonhoeffer’s governesses that made their way into the book. Surely their full letters must exist somewhere? I wondered, too, if Bosanquet could still be alive.

My Bosanquet sleuthing proved harder than I expected. The internet yielded no information –although I learned from bookseller sites that Bosanquet had published several other books, including Canada Ride, her account of riding across Canada on horseback in 1939 and Journey into A Picture, her story of being posted to Italy with the YMCA during World War II as the Nazis were being pushed out. I ordered the books, both out of print, from used booksellers.  Canada Ride, also published under the title Saddlebags for Satchels, duly arrived; Journey into A Picture never did.

Canada Ride yielded interesting biographical information about Bosanquet. She grew up in Beechingstoke Manor farm in the tiny village of Beechingstoke, England. Her father was a diplomat in Frankfurt, and so she spent part of her childhood there, developing a fondness for the German people. When she rode across Canada, her way of distancing herself from the war she knew was coming (it broke out during her ride), she was 24, and had already had a Christian conversion experience. On March 31, 1939, when she boarded the Duchess of Bedford to sail to Canada, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was visiting Sabine in London during the “glorious” spring of 1939.

Dietrich visiting Sabine in London, 1939.

Canada Ride, translated into German, became a best seller there after the war, perhaps in part because Bosanquet spoke generously of the Germans in the book, stating when the war broke out that she could never hate them. In 1948, Bosanquet met and hit it off with Sabine. This isn’t surprising, given that the two women were from the same social class, elite but not aristocratic, close in age, had lived in the other’s home country,  were fluent in both German and English, and were intelligent, accomplished women.

All of this fascinated me. Since I discovered Bosanquet was born in 1913, I now imagined she had passed away. (She may still be alive at 101–she was born in December, 1913.) Knowing her father was a diplomat helped me locate her particular family, but as for any direct descendants I was stymied. I contacted a British cyber friend and genealogist, Ron Dunning, who established that Bosanquat had married a Robert Sinkler Darby in Princeton, NJ in 1947. The intrepid Ron also discovered  that the couple had three children, moved back to England and that at least some of the now adult children (and/or their own children) live near Bath.

Since that time (last June), I have been too busy to pursue this line of sleuthing any further, but would be interested to know if any of Bosanquet’s Bonhoeffer papers are extant. To the extent she corresponded with Sabine, Eberhard, the Horn sisters and others, her materials would surely be of interest to Bonhoeffer scholars. I hope to share more information as I have time to continue these researches and would be glad of any input.

I find it fitting that Bonhoeffer’s first biographer was a woman, an accomplished author, and a friend of Sabine’s. After all, as I discovered, except for Eberhard, Bonhoeffer’s innermost circle consisted entirely of women, and except for Eberhard, Dietrich was closest to Sabine. I’m not surprised Sabine would strike up a friendship with Bosanquet–or that a woman would be the first to tell Sabine’s beloved brother’s story.

Bosanquet, Bonhoeffer and the problem of memory

In “Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Witness in an Ambiguous World,” Robin W Lovin and Jonathan P. Gosser call understanding Bonhoeffer's life “a necessary project.” They write, “it is only as the man emerges for us from his work [or, I would say, as that work emerges from the man] that we are restrained from appropriating his suggestive, enigmatic and fragmentary words and twisting them entirely to our own purposes." (148)

But how do we unearth the reality of Dietrich Bonheffer, this man for whom the personal was always the theological and the theological always the personal?

Beyond his own writings, we look inevitably--necessarily-- to the fragmented and elusive, often frustrating, memories of those who knew him.

Mary Bosanquet, Bonhoeffer's first biographer, had access to an enviable array of memories: many of the people who knew Bonhoeffer still lived and thrived when she began her book in 1964, not 20 years after Bonhoeffer's death. Yet Sabine initially met Bosanquet's book project with dismay, writing "I could not quite suppress my alarm, and wrote to her frankly expressing my concern." Coming from Sabine, notable for her tendency to understatement, the word "alarm" should stop us, and we might wonder how Bosanquat reassured her.

What Sabine worried about we can only surmise, but she most probably acted as a protective sister wanting to shield her favorite sibling.  All the same, her initial reaction was not open arms, even to a woman she knew and liked, a woman of her own age and class. For from the start, as we see, biography comes to us half-shrouded with an impulse towards privacy that competes with its desire to shine a light on and remember another.

Sabine and Eberhard eventually cooperated generously with Bosanquet's project, and it is presumably through Sabine that we get such flesh and blood tidbits as a 1923 vision of the Bonhoeffer parents, Paula and Karl, "dressed as Wotan and Freya," receiving guests in their Grunewald home during one of their famous costume parties. (46)

Yet as we know, such memories as these which populate biography in ways we would not want to forego, likewise remain problematic. Gregory Cowle, as just one example, recently wrote in The New York Times that memoirs, even

 “ by scrupulous writers making good-faith efforts to reconstruct their pasts, are by nature unreliable — as tenuous and conditional and riddled with honest error as memory itself.”

We need memoir to breathe life into facts and dates, to fill in details, to provide facts and color, to animate the dry bones of a life--and we need to handle it with care.

As noted in my last blog post, Bosanquet received letters from the Horns, Bonhoeffer's governesses. While invaluable, the correspondence illustrates the problems with memory. Käthe Horn remembered that Dietrich could be "a thorough nuisance," while Maria Horn, in contrast, recalled that the Bonhoeffer children were "never rude or ill-mannered."

Maria Horn, a Bonhoeffer governess and, later, close family friend.

It's hard to imagine that the young, exuberant Bonhoeffers, if they were actual human beings, were never rude or ill-mannered, but easy to imagine a faithful employee and friend protecting the family image even years after retirement. Maria Horn, like all of us, comes in with a predisposition. Thus, the more we can read of a person's recollections, the clearer a picture will eventually emerge. The full text of the Horn sister letters might help us better to understand their emotional landscape or even the context of the questions asked. Perhaps Bonsanquet, with good instincts, drew out the best parts. We don't know.

What of that initial letter Sabine sent to Bosanquet with her concerns? Such a document might be helpful in understanding the nature of her alarm.

In the end though, these ruminations are less important than the bigger question: How do we handle fragile, malleable memories with care? How do we determine what's true?

This post first appeared on The Bonhoeffer Center blog.

Maria von Wedemeyer: Hiding in Plain Sight

While researching Dietrich Bonhoeffer and women, I was tantalized by a line from Maria’s sister Ruth-Alice von Bismarck in Love Letters from Cell 92: The Correspondence between Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Maria von Wedemeyer: 1943-45: “In 1974 … She [Maria] also gave an interview about her relationship with Bonhoeffer for a television documentary.” (354)

An interview? Why had I not heard of this? What could be more compelling than to see and hear a historical figure in whose letters I had spent so much time? I went searching for the interview, but came up empty-handed: 1974 and television were too vague as parameters. I even spoke on the phone to a kind person at Union Theological Seminary, who suggested I check with PBS.

I eventually discovered the interview in Malcolm Muggeridge’s series A Third Testament, which “explores the spiritual awakening of six renowned thinkers,” ending with Bonhoeffer. Suffice it to say that I immediately ordered the DVD.

Maria von Wedemeyer with Malcolm Muggeridge being interviewed  in her woodsy New England home: intelligent, giving, self-possessed and beautiful at 50. 

What a find it was. The interview confirms reports of Maria as remarkably self-possessed, and at 50, still a beautiful woman, sporting a form fitting sweater dress. It was fascinating to see the woodsy contemporary home she bought in New England during her tenure as the highest ranking female manager at Honeywell.  I wondered if the thick Oriental rug on the floor was the one from the Patzig estate used to cover the wagon in which she, some younger siblings and several old women escaped across the frozen Oder river as the Russians arrived.

Could the Oriental rug on the floor be from Patzig?

The interview had its frustrations, however, as I watched the self-possessed Maria hesitate, pause and thoughtfully grope for the right word to describe her relationship with Dietrich, only to have Muggeridge, apparently unwilling to wait, supply a word for her. She acquiesces and repeats it—but what would she have said if left to speak her own thoughts? We’ll never know—and yet, the interview, short as it is, exists, and for that we can be grateful. 

I include some analysis of this interview in my upcoming book, and I hope more of these “submerged” sources will rise to the surface in Bonhoeffer studies. For instance, while we to date have only a few seconds of film of Bonhoeffer himself and no recordings, I wonder if the Gestapo ever taped a telephone conversation of a man of such interest to them. Bonhoeffer did, after all, strongly suspect his phone was tapped. We know too that the regime played back recordings of Niemoller talking on the phone to Confessing Church cohorts in order to embarrass him. If similar Bonhoeffer recordings were made and still exist, locked away in some archive, wouldn’t that be a find? But on we dream … 

Note: This is cross-posted and first appeared at the following site: http://thebonhoeffercenter.org/blog/maria-von-wedemeyer-hiding-in-plain-sight/

Bonhoeffer in London: the German Girl's School

As I recall my recent visit to Bonhoeffer's "parsonage" in London, I wonder more about the German Girl's School that occupied the first two floors of his house. It's impossible for a place not to enter the imagination as more "real" once one has visited it. This trope animates Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, for the "light, bright and sparkling" Elizabeth Bennett cannot really imagine other people's homes until she visits them, after which, her views, not surprisingly, change--and this reality continues to drive our  tourism and pilgrimage. We can google earth endlessly, but that fails to recreate what it is like to actually physically be in a place.

One of my frustrations after landing back home was that although workmen were in front of the house, I didn't ask to go inside! It never once occurred to me at the time. What a treasure it would have been had I asked, and they had let my husband and me go up to the attic!

That can't be now, but at idle moments since returning, I've entertained more and more questions about this setting: what was the name of the German girl's school in the parsonage? Who ran it? How many students did it have? Did Bonhoeffer, who had a knack at youth pastoring, interact with the students at all? Were some of them in his Forest Hills congregation, as one could only imagine was likely? Were all of them? Did Bonhoeffer enter his attic parsonage through the front door of his house and up a main staircase, thus seeing students? Or did he slip in a back door and up a back staircase for privacy? Was the school a boarding school or a day school? I assumed a day school, but even if so, wouldn't the school's principal--and possibly some teachers--live in the house? If so, were they bothered by the late night talk, laughter, mock arguments and piano playing in the attic? Who was the principal of the school? What were the names of the teachers who taught there? Was it because of financial restraints--lack of being able to afford a gardener--that the large garden in the back of the house was reverting, as reported, to a "wilderness?"

I looked through "likely suspect" books to try to find some answers: Life in Pictures, Bethge's biography and Mary Bosanquat's biography. Unfortunately, I borrowed from the library both Keith Clements' Bonhoeffer in Britian, and the Works volume he edited that covers Bonhoeffer's time in England, both of which may offer answers, but which have since gone back to their homes. None of the books on my shelf shed light on my questions.

Researching this school represents one of the places where the Internet comes to its limits, but I did find some information in a book called Germans in Britain Since 1500 by Panikos Panayi, thanks to Google Books. According to Panayi, children "who were living with their families in London" could attend St. Mary's School, on Cleveland Street, founded by the Evangelical Lutherans in 1708-- or the Forest Hills School at Manor Mount. The Forest Hills School opened in 1893 as "both a preparatory and a secondary school, Realschule, for boys and girls." During World War I, "classes for upper-level boys were suspended and never revived, although the rest of the school functioned throughout the 1930s."

Clearly, this was the school with which Bonhoeffer had at least a glancing acquaintance. A day school rather than a boarding school, one can surmise it closed at the end of the 1930s due to the tensions brought on by World War II, although I also imagine it was struggling financially by Bonhoeffer's time.

Panayi's book suggests that younger boys may have been attendance in the 1930s, but from what all the Bonhoeffer sources say, it must have been overwhelmingly, if not entirely, a girl's schools by late 1933.

Bonhoeffer doesn't have as much to say about London as a backdrop as he does about Rome, Barcelona or Manhattan, probably because England was not as "exotic" or different from Germany as the other three locales. Biographies indicate the grimness of Bonhoeffer's London surround: from rain to drafty windows and doors,  from a mice infestion to lack of hot water to  a sense that the house lacked the "graciousness" of the Bonhoeffer family's Grunewald home. Bonhoeffer, as has been much repeated, had frequent colds while there, and also flew to Germany often, something not at all a part of his other foreign adventures (of course, he couldn't have flown back and forth across the Atlantic at that time.)

Most of the primary source material from Bonhoeffer during his stay in London concerns his intense involvement in the church struggle and the work of pastoring two parishes. It would be interesting to learn more of his thoughts about Britain itself as he encountered it in its last days as the preeminent world power, its last gasp as empire. So much would change soon after he left--and yet much would remain the same.

Does anyone know more? Other information about the girl's school would be most welcome.

Bonhoeffer's home in London

In the same way I am fascinated with anachronism, the idea that other times are not our times, and how to understand the slippage between different historical periods, I am also fascinated with place, and how difficult is it to convey a sense of place through photos and descriptions. I was therefore delighted last week when I had a chance to see the house where Bonhoeffer lived during his 15 months as a pastor of two German parishes in London.  It was fascinating to visit the house, because photos, by decontextualizing a site or building, often distort one's concept of it.

The house where Bonhoeffer lived  during his time pastoring two German churches in London as it looks today, in 2015. It is close to the street. though there is a shallow circular driveway in front of the home. 

During his time in London from October 1933 to March 1935, Bonhoeffer lived in the neighborhood of the wealthier of his two parishes, Forest Hills, on the south side of the Thames. His home was the attic floor of a house that was used as a German girls' school, at 2 Manor Mount.

A view of part of the attic where Bonhoeffer lived. The cast of the home's brick is yellowish.

I had seen a number of pictures of the house and read about its large, overgrown backyard. Because the photos showed the house alone, because it functioned as a school, and because of the big back garden, I had imagined it set off apart from other houses. In fact, it is completely integrated into a row of houses, at the top of a hill of residential homes all lined up neatly close to the street. In fact, looking at it, it is surprising to think it could have held a school. I was also surprised at how pale the brick is, consistent with the rest of the neighborhood: this is not apparent in black and white 1930s photos.

This photo doesn't exactly capture the extent to which Bonhoeffer's house was at the top of a hill or integrated into the row of houses at which it stood at the top and corner, but it does, at least, provide a view down the street from the vantage point of the sidewalk in front of the house. Imagine the house as fairly close to the sidewalk, a part of the urban neighborhood. A far better shot of Manor Mount, showing both the steep slope of the street and the proximity of the houses to the road
can be found on page 19 of a pdf about Forest Hills at  https://www.lewisham.gov.uk/myservices/planning/conservation/living/Documents/ForestHillConservationAreaAppraisalPart1.pdf

Manor Mount is faded now, but the street seems largely unchanged from how it must have looked when the neighborhood was a prosperous, if even then fading, suburb of diplomats and businesspeople in 1930s London.  Many of the houses look like the house Bonhoeffer lived in, suggesting the neighborhood was constructed by a single builder. The large size of the houses, which would have needed servants to maintain, and Bonhoeffer's records of the dilapidated state of his attic--drafty, mice infested, lacking central heat-- indicate a pre-20th century date for the neighborhood, and apparently many of the large homes were constructed in the 1860s, after rail travel to London became convenient and after the relocation of the stylish Crystal Palace from central London to Forest Hills.

Workers at the house let us take photos and peek into the back yard. The lot must have been subdivided since the 1930s, as the back garden is now narrow and small.

Here you can see the shallow circular drive in front of the house. Again, it must be emphasized how close the house is to the street, set back just a little. From pictures I have seen, the facade looks unchanged from Bonhoeffer's time. The house was probably built in the 1860s, so that it would have been about 70 years old when Bonhoeffer arrived.

Another surprise for me was how far the church Bonhoeffer pastored was from his house. Somehow I had pictured this home and the church as adjacent or on the same block, especially as the attic flat was often referred to as the parsonage. In fact, the church Bonhoeffer pastored  is on the other side of the main thoroughfare dividing Forest Hills, about four or five blocks from where Bonhoeffer lived. He would have gotten good exercise walking to the church  in the hilly neighborhood.

The rebuilt church, modern and much different architecturally from the church Bonhoeffer pastored, is bordered closely by buildings on either side. 

I have gained a different picture of Bonhoeffer's life in London: hillier, integrated into a neighborhood of large houses, and farther from his Forest Hills church than I had imagined.

Interestingly, I spent my junior year of college living in Lewisham, very close to Forest Hills, and studying at Goldsmith's College of the University of London. While there, although I had read Letters and Papers from Prison, I had no idea Bonhoeffer had spent any time in London, no less so close to my London home. I wonder if others have been surprised by Bonhoeffer sites looking different than they expected?

A plaque is the only indicator that the house, which looks like the other houses on the block, had anything to do with Bonhoeffer.  Apparently it was once hidden by shrubs, but as can be seen, these have been trimmed away.

On Biography

Thursday a week ago I sent my final Bonhoeffer manuscript to the publisher and in the meantime have continued to ponder the project of writing biography: with what hubris can we presume to know the life of another person?

Bonhoeffer: Who was he? He asked the question and so do we.

Clearly, in the case of a person like Bonhoeffer, we have an extensive body of documents: some of his letters catapulted him to fame, and all of them provide a valuable window into his thoughts. But then letters, especially letters written in Nazi Germany, where the expectation of spying permeated the environment, become problematic. They only show a glimpse: many parts of the rooms of Bonhoeffer's life, both inner and outer, remain out of view.  Even without overt censorship, letter writers fashion selves and to some extent control the image they present. As biographers we look for patterns and for places where the mask slips.

My biography focuses on women, especially the Bonhoeffer's twin sister Sabine, his close friend Ruth von Kleist-Retzow and his fiancee Maria von Wedemeyer, and again the same problem emerges: how does one purport to know another person?

The tradition of writing biography dictates speaking authoritatively, but as I look at the biographies of figures I "know" well, I find people who seem different from those I encounter in the primary sources. In Marsh's biography, for example, we have such index entries under Dietrich Bonhoeffer as "arrogance and pretensions of," "boredom and doldrums of," "drug use of" (this refers to prescription drugs, but the idle glancer could be forgiven for assuming an addict), "indolence and indulgences of," "as late riser,""religious practice lacking in," and "restlessness of." Bonhoeffer, like most of us, was from time to time guilty of  boredom, arrogance, pretension, indolence, restlessness, sleeping in, and self indulgence, but this effete, spoiled rich person is not predominately the Bonhoeffer I encountered in my research. Bonhoeffer was wealthy, entitled and privileged and we distort the historical reality if we ignore this, but  his life,  as I understand it, was a struggle (not always successful, but who of is or should be held to perfection?) against privilege. Bonhoeffer knew that privilege could stifle, stunt and dull a person, especially spiritually.  He fought, as he wrote to Sabine, against being sucked into the vortex of "bourgeois" security, understanding that this preference for safety took the vital edge off of living and led down the road to moral compromises he loathed to make. Did he sometimes lean into his privilege: yes, especially as the noose tightened around him during the war, but he was usually (not always) aware of the choices he was making--and he tried to used his privilege as a wedge against Nazism, not merely a way to play it safe as others suffered. His life is interesting because of the moral and ethical dilemmas he faced with his eyes open.

The Bonhoeffer I came to know, rather than indolent, was almost dizzyingly active, and biographers are constantly making mistakes because it's difficult to keep up. The Bonhoeffer I encountered returned a deck of cards his sister sent him in prison because he didn't want to fritter his time away mindlessly playing solitaire in his cell (hardly a mark of indolence)--and  in prison kept himself remarkably busy, working in the sick bay, doing handwriting analysis, playing chess, reading, writing and trying to exercise. While free, he was so active that sometimes he exhausted the healthy Bethge, and his incessant demands that his friend keep up could become a source of contention.

Perhaps not Marsh's "flamboyant abbot."

I say this not to bash Marsh, who wrote a lyrical biography, but because it makes me wonder how much any writer's self distorts a biography--and because biography should generate conversation, not be seen as the definitive answer to the question of who a person was. As I reflect on my own book, I tend to want to go back and make it more open-ended, more tentative, more transparent about the decisions that go into interpreting another's life--and yet I recognize that too as the stuff of another kind of writing. In the end, as Bonhoeffer himself would have said, one must act in the world, makes decisions and move forward.

Like historical fiction or any history writing, a writer's work, positioned necessarily in his or her own place and time, says as much about the writer's historical moment as about the period covered. Anachronisms clash. Perhaps that is the most interesting part of this form of writing and reading, the clash of times and places. For our times are not Bonhoeffer's time, and the question remains: what do we learn and what do we distort when we bring the two together?