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.