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/