Virginia Woolf and Dietrich Bonhoeffer

It's not often we think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Virginia Woolf in tandem, but the two share common ground. Both hail from the educated upper-middle class elite of the pre-World War II era. Both came from large families. Both had ambiguous sexualities. Both were writers. Both were pacifists. Both were fascinated with their families of origin and sought insights through writing about them. Both were close to Quakers without becoming Quakers themselves. Both abhorred Hitler and both fought fascism, not simply in its political manifestation, but  attacked it at its deeper roots of ethical sensibility. Both suffered from depression. Both died during World War II: Woolf through suicide, Bonhoeffer executed at a concentration camp for opposing Hitler's regime: for both, the war was arguably the blow that did them in. And to understand either of them, we need to put on the lenses of another time.

Bethge, Bonhoeffer's close friend, and Bonhoeffer: Bromance or romance? Bethge was a muse to Bonhoeffer, especially when Bonhoeffer was in Tegel Prison.

Bethge, Bonhoeffer's close friend, and Bonhoeffer: Bromance or romance? Bethge was a muse to Bonhoeffer, especially when Bonhoeffer was in Tegel Prison. 

Woolf and Sackville-West, close friends and lovers. Vita was a muse to Virginia.

Both Woolf and Bonhoeffer were born into well-heeled, educated, academic families, and both were well aware of their privilege. Woolf's father, Leslie Stephen, was the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, while Bonhoeffer's father was head of psychiatry at Berlin University. Both Woolf and Bonhoeffer grew up in capital cities: London and Berlin, in spacious homes staffed by servants. For both, their cities became a part of who they were. Both, however, found their happiest memories in annual family holidays to their family's summer home, Woolf's by the ocean in Cornwall at the very tip of Britain, Bonheffer's the Harz Mountains, the highest elevation in Germany. Both developed a love of nature during these holidays.

Woolf was the seventh child in a blended family of eight. Both her parents were widowed. Her father came to the marriage with one child; her mother, Julia Duckworth, with three. Together, Leslie and Julia had four more children. Bonhoeffer was sixth of eight, or, more accurately "sixth-seventh" of eight, as he was one of a pair of twins. He would develop a lifelong close relationship with his twin sister, Sabine, just as Woolf would with her older sister, Cassandra. All in all, the siblings in both families would remain close, and both Woolf and Bonhoeffer would sometimes feel distant from their parents, lost in a large household. Both Woolf and Bonhoeffer developed a fear of ridicule in their families of origin.

Both figures had complicated sexualities. Although married, and finding much support from her husband, Leonard, Virginia probably did not have sexual relations with him. Virginia was strongly attracted to women. Bonhoeffer never married, and though he was engaged late in life, the relationship with his fiancee was fraught. The love of his life, whether bromance or romance, was with his male friend, Eberhard Bethge.

Both figures became famous as writers. Both were committed to pacifism in countries in which this stand was considered radical and bizarre. Bonhoeffer did get involved in the 1944 plot to kill Hitler, but did not believe it was a noble act. In his Ethics, he discusses the tyrannicide in the context of the need sometimes to dirty the purity of one's conscience and even perhaps jeopardize one's afterlife for a greater good. Woolf found war deeply abhorrent at a visceral level.

Given their pacifism, it's not surprising that Quakers played a role in both lives. Bonhoeffer was friends with Quaker Herbert Jehle, who helped Bonhoeffer's fiancee, Maria von Wedemeyer, emigrate to the U.S. after the war. Bonhoeffer visited the Quaker Woodbrooke retreat center in Birmingham during his time in England. Woolf's aunt, Caroline Stephen, was a prominent Quaker who left Woolf money that helped her establish independence. Woolf was also very close with Quaker-raised Roger Fry and Quaker Violet Dickinson.

Several sharp contrasts, however, exist between the two: Bonhoeffer had no sense of woman's rights, a cause that animated Woolf in a core way. Further, Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor and committed Christian, while Woolf identified as an atheist. However, Bonhoeffer was a sharp critic of the Church, believing a total reform would have to occur following World War II. His idea of "religionless Christianity" became popular in liberal circles in the 1960s. Woolf's prose, such as in To The Lighthouse, is often luminous with a sense of the numinous and the miraculous.

For next time: Bonhoeffer and Woolf's lives overlapped between 1906, when he was born, and her death in 1941. During the period, Bonhoeffer had two extended stays in London. The first was as pastor to two German churches in London from late 1933 to early 1935, and the second was a six-week period in spring, 1939, he spent with Sabine, who was in exile in England with her Jewish husband. Could they met? It seems unlikely that Woolf would have much to do with a younger German clergyman, but their upperclass world was small.

The Doubled Life at Jesus Creed

The Doubled Life is being featured today at the Jesus Creed blog at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2016/04/08/dietrich-bonhoeffer-and-women with a guest column by me ... and will be featured for three consecutive Fridays. My publisher has a give-away attached to this prominent theological venue. I hope you will visit. My book focuses on the women in Bonhoeffer's life.

Proud parent of a book

The Doubled Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Speaking at seminaries

My book, The Doubled Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is out, and I am the proud recipient of several review copies. Tuesday, I was pleased to be able to talk about the book at Earlham School of Religion  (ESR) and Bethany seminaries in Richmond, Indiana. A short version of my talk is below:

     In the spring of 1939,  Bonhoeffer visited  his twin sister Sabine in London. He took with him his best friend Eberhard Bethge. World War II  loomed, and during idle moments in Sabine’s garden, amid the forsythia and dark mauve lilacs, during what Sabine called  ‘a magical spring,” Dietrich wondered if he should allow himself to be caught in England when the war started. He was, after all, in the company of the two people in the world with whom he felt, as he put it, “in contrast to . . . other people … a remarkable sense of closeness.”
      Although I started with the hypothesis that women were underrepresented in the Bonhoeffer story, even I was surprised to find out the extent to which women populated the  innermost circle of deepest emotional intimacy in his life. Bonhoeffer had a very wide acquaintance and  many, many friends. He was part of the interwar trans-European elite and as the saying goes, he knew almost everybody. He had by all accounts, a self assurance and a perfect command of manners that made him welcome in the highest echelons of society. His aunts were countesses, his circle included aristocrats and top government officials and he counted among his friend Prince Louis Ferdinand, son of the deposed Kaiser Wilhlem II. Yet those few very closest to him were primarily women: his twin, Sabine, his grandmother Julie Tafel, his older friend Ruth von Kleist Retzow and, at the end of his life, if unwittingly, his fiancée Maria von Wedemeyer. The male in this innermost circle was Eberhard Bethge. It was often women that he was closest to and women who sustained him.
   Why does it matter that women are left out of his story? Beyond the almost self-evident idea that we prefer the truth, that we seek an undistorted picture, that if possible, we like to rub some of the fog away from the glass in our prison house of language so that we can see clearly, the women are important because so often in dialogue with them Bonhoeffer hammered out his theology. Further, this man for whom the personal was always the theological and the theological the personal, built up through these women the layers of experience  that helped form his theology. (Men contributed too—but we have that well documented).
     Writing primarily about women thrust me into the genre of women’s writing—because of the lack of  secondary source material, I relied on the letters and memoirs the women produced. These memoirs were a species of women’s writing, often with a strong emphasis on the domestic, versus a highly masculinized biography like Bethge’s, filled as it is with the manifestly important business of church struggle and theology.  In my book, I worked to capture some of the domestic flavor of the women’s writing—and , through writing narrative nonfiction also to provide a sensory context, including what is missing in many accounts of Bonhoeffer,  such the food people ate, the movies they saw, what bombed Berlin looked like, how a cold winter or rationing affected people. One of my favorite parts of the project was getting into the "skin" of the period and trying to envision what characters were seeing and doing as they went about their lives. 
      Finally, it's a concern for me to note that so few of my students under 30 (which is most of my students) have ever heard of Bonhoeffer, even thought the issues he identified and struggled with as important are almost with identical with issues we struggle with today: living in a post-Christian age characterized by declining church membership, the challenges posed by technology and the post-Enlightenment framing of reality, and particularly the new rise of nationalist demagoguery in conditions of anxiety that are not far divorced from the political realities of the 1920s and '30s. Bonhoeffer’s response is important, both because he was ahead of his time and because he was the product of a time that is in some ways the same and some ways apt to differently configure the political divisions and preoccupations of our own.

The Doubled Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, appearing the end of March

My book, The Doubled Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, will appear in print at the end of March. This book focuses on women in the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. As I did my research, even I was surprised at the extent to which women were part of his innermost circle. Dialogue with, concerns for, and tensions with women helped formed the theology of this man for whom the theological and the personal could not be more closely intertwined. 

A short  review of the book appeared in Publishers Weekly. While the finished book has photos (!), including the first-ever published photo of Elisabeth Zinn, sometimes proposed as Bonhoeffer's first fiancee, the uncorrected page proofs sent to the reviewer did not. I have copied the review below. A $9.99 kindle version of the book will be available, I am told, a few weeks after the release of the admittedly expensive print version. And while I love the play on the Star Trek opening in the first line, I wouldn't  say "many" :) have gone here before. The review follows:

PW reviewer and contributor Reynolds ambitiously treads where many have gone before with this biography of 20th-century German theologian Bonhoeffer, whose involvement in anti-Nazi resistance led to his execution in April 1945, three short weeks before Adolf Hitler committed suicide as the Third Reich collapsed. Reynolds focuses on the women in Bonhoeffer's life, who were many and influential; Bonhoeffer had a female twin, a fiancée, and a patron. He also had a close male friend, Eberhard Bethge, who became Bonhoeffer's definitive biographer. Using letters, photos, and published writings, Reynolds studies the social ecology of her subject, placing him in context to show whom he loved and how those relationships mattered. She doesn't argue for a romantic or sexual relationship between Bonhoeffer and Bethge, but makes a convincing case that their special friendship fit no conventional category. Her study also implicitly calls attention to the job and presumptions of any biographer. Given the complexity of the social network in which she locates Bonhoeffer, a list of figures in his life would have been helpful, as would photographs she refers to that are not included. The field of Bonhoeffer studies will benefit from this balanced correction to popular hagiography.

Working on this book was both an adventure and a labor of love as I had the opportunity to delve deeply into Bonhoeffer's life and times. Because of the complexity of his life, a Bonhoeffer biography is not for the faint of heart, but I believe it a testament to the man that I still like and admire him greatly after all the time we have spent together.

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.