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?

Bonhoeffer book: Poetry and theology

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

Two New Books: Bonhoeffer as Youth Worker, Bonhoeffer's Black Jesus

I'd like to mention two new books on Bonhoeffer. 

I haven't read Reggie Williams's book, Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance, but I did hear him speak at a Bonhoeffer Conference in November 2011 at Union Theological Seminary and have little doubt this will be a fascinating read. As I remember, both he and John de Gruchy talked about how blacks in both the US and South Africa, de Gruchy's home, already understood Bonhoeffer's theology of a view from below: it was whites who needed to understand this perspective. de Gruchy and Williams theorized that whites could absorb this theology from a well-heeled German male schooled in a European theological traditional in a way they couldn't from blacks or other marginalized groups. In addition, the influence of Harlem on Bonhoeffer is an area that deserves more focus. Bonhoeffer immersed himself in black literature and culture while in the US, and clearly made a connection between American oppression of blacks in the 1930s and the National Socialist treatment of Jews.  I have included the Amazon blurb below: 

"Williams follows Bonhoeffer as he defies Germany with Harlem’s black Jesus. The Christology Bonhoeffer learned in Harlem’s churches featured a black Christ who suffered with African Americans in their struggle against systemic injustice and racial violence—and then resisted. In the pews of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, under the leadership of Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., Bonhoeffer absorbed the Christianity of the Harlem Renaissance. This Christianity included a Jesus who stands with the oppressed rather than joins the oppressors and a theology that challenges the way God can be used to underwrite a union of race and religion."

I have read Andrew Root's Bonhoeffer as Youth Worker: A Theological Vision for Discipleship and Life Together and can recommend it as a solid, well written book with a strong focus on a ministry that helped lay the groundwork for Bonhoeffer's seminaries. The book includes a biography of Bonhoeffer in its first half before moving to youth ministry in the second. I hope it will be read: it is an intelligent work that doesn't rely on bullet points or oversimplifications of Bonhoeffer's life and thought. One thing I will note: Bonhoeffer believed strongly in the power of developing small groups of Christian disciples as a way to "blow sky high" the "idiocy" of Nazism and other evils. The Amazon blurb for this book is below:

 "The youth ministry focus of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's life is often forgotten or overlooked, even though he did much work with young people and wrote a number of papers, sermons, and addresses about or for the youth of the church. However, youth ministry expert Andrew Root explains that this focus is central to Bonhoeffer's story and thought. Root presents Bonhoeffer as the forefather and model of the growing theological turn in youth ministry. By linking contemporary youth workers with this epic theologian, the author shows the depth of youth ministry work and underscores its importance in the church. He also shows how Bonhoeffer's life and thought impact present-day youth ministry practice." 

Creation and Fall: Was Bonhoeffer Celibate?

Charles Marsh, in his book Strange Glory, contends that Bonhoeffer was celibate, using as evidence a prison letter Bonhoeffer wrote to his best friend, Eberhard Bethge. In this letter, Bonhoeffer notes that he has had more experience of life than Bethge, except for one thing. Marsh interprets that "one thing" as sex. Yet the context of the letter indicates that Bonhoeffer means marriage, not sex itself.

Bonhoeffer's book Creation and Fall, published roughly a decade before the prison letter, however, suggests that Bonhoeffer may indeed have been celibate. This book, based on a series of lectures on Genesis 1-3 that Bonhoeffer gave at the University of Berlin, explores creation, the Fall, and the expulsion from the garden of Eden.

In Creation and Fall, Bonhoeffer pits humans as imago dei, created in the image of God, bound to and guided by the Creator, against sicit deus, humans acting as if they were God. Sicit deus ignores humankind's inherent limits, doesn't depend on God and acts out of its own resources.

For Bonhoeffer, sexuality expresses this post-lapsarian sicit deus or denial of limits. In contrast, the world he imagines in the garden is asexual. Adam, the man, whose point of view Bonhoeffer identifies with and expresses, respects the physical limits of Eve. They can be naked together because Adam will never violate Eve's body.

"Nakedness is innocence," wrote Bonhoeffer.

Bonhoeffer expressly identifies the Fall as "the problem of sexuality." (122)  For after the Fall, Adam transgresses the boundary and wants to possess Eve's body. This "denies and destroys the creaturely nature of the other person." Thus,"sexuality is a passionate hatred of any limit" (Bonhoeffer's italics). Sexuality "lays violent hands on the other person" and "hates grace." (123)

"Sexuality," Bonhoeffer summarizes,  "[is] a perversion of the relation of one human being to another." (125)

This view of sex may startle us in the 21st century. It presupposes a sexuality based on dominance and submission, not mutuality. As with the senior Bonhoeffer's romanticized portrait of their home, it hints that we are entering a different way of seeing. I try to be conscious that I am always viewing Bonhoeffer through a lens slightly blurred by my experience as a person born after the end of World War II.

If Bonhoeffer viewed sex as a problem, as a violation of the Other, does that mean he remained celibate? Did these views change over time? 

My Bonhoeffer Book, A Bonhoeffer House

I recently signed a contract with Cascade to write a book about Bonhoeffer and women, with a focus on Bonhoeffer's last decade of life. I am excited to continue to shape this project, which I have already drafted.

One issue driving my interest in Bonhoeffer has been (ironically) the disembodied way in which the most "this worldly" of theologians has often been portrayed. Charles Marsh's recent biography, Strange Glory, which I am currently reading, is one of the few books I know to try to fill that gap. My book does the same, though with a focus on women and relationships, trying to put flesh--incarnation--into the people and the places in his life.

Reading Marsh's book, I was arrested by a photo labelled "Karl and Paula's new home at Marienburger Allee 43 in Berlin-Charlottensburg."

Proud homeowners today would not depict their brand new house as a blast from the past. 

At first, I was merely stopped by the image's romantic, hazy tone (is it perhaps a painting?), which places the house in woodsy, overgrown setting with no other structures in sight. The house seems set in the remote countryside, not in a neighborhood of other new houses near the middle of Berlin. It also looks old and quaintly picturesque, while the overcast sky adds an eerie cast.

The house, which I visited in 2012, sits at the end of a quiet street, with woods and an apartment complex to one side. When first built, only woods stood to the home's left as you face it. And perhaps the house next door, out of view on the right, home of Bonhoeffer's sister Ursula and her husband and children, had not yet gone up.

The house in the romantic image doesn't conform to the facade you can see in the modern photo above: flat and with three dormered attic windows across the orange tiled roof. Further, the house today looks newer 80 years after it was built than in the romantic image made of it when brand new. The lamppost, sidewalk and curb help locate the modern house in a neighborhood.

Perusing my own photos, I realized the romantic photo must show the back of the house. Through the overgrowth, one can see the glassed in breakfast porch jutting out and the still existing balcony above the ground floor level. The double window in the attic on the side of the house would look into Bonhoeffer's bedroom and into the back yard of his sister's house, the place where Bethge would look down at Bonhoeffer's niece, Renate, who he would eventually marry.

This is how the back facade looks now, You can see the second-story balcony depicted in the early photo.

The Bonhoeffers posed in March, 1943 against the back facade, the same facade as in the photo right above. 

The sunporch today, furnished differently than in Bonhoeffer's day.
You can see it through the overgrowth in the romantic photo. 

I wish I knew more about the romanticized image. According to the photo credits, it comes from "Art Resource, NY." I found it on the web in this collection, but little information about it. When was it taken? By whom? Was it touched up, enhanced?

Today the house's flat back yard is closely cut and neatly kept, with no wild overgrowths. The home has an austere look--angular surfaces, everything well trimmed. But what did the Bonhoeffers perceive when they moved in at the end of 1935? Much as they were critics of the Nazi regime--though privileged to be able to live in such a neighborhood--did they see--or want to see a romantic hundred-year old volkish cottage in the woods, where we (or I) see a home built on balanced, Classical lines?

By the time World War II was in full swing, the back yard we encounter today as a flat sheath of grass had been planted into a garden that included raspberries--perhaps some of the brambly bushes in the early photo are raspberries?--peas, a myriad of vegetables and even an experiment with tobacco.

The backyard today. If only it had been included in the
1943 photo, we'd see it planted into the garden that helped
to feed Bonhoeffer and his brother-in-law in prison. 

The photo in the Marsh book reminds us that what we see today is not what the Bonhoeffers' saw then; how we view the world is not necessarily the lens they used. How people, including Bonhoeffer perceived the world--what they literally saw around them and how it influenced them --continues to fascinate me.