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?