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In my recently published book on Bonhoeffer I have assessed his role in German history during the Third Reich as being that of a revolutionary in two distinct senses. First there is the obvious meaning of a ‘revolutionary’, namely a person who conspires to overthrow the established government. And this Dietrich Bonhoeffer clearly did through his association with a very small group of officers and public servants who saw no alternative but to physically eliminate Hitler because there were insufficient of the officer class who were prepared to renege on their oath of unconditional allegiance and obedience to endorse a coup d etat and put Hitler on trail for high treason. For them there had always been the obligatory to swearing of an oath of allegiance to the monarch by divine right, but they were incapable of making the distinction between the tyrant, Hitler, who put himself on an equal plane with God, and the Hohenzollern dynasty which had always perceived itself as essentially God-fearing. We need to keep in mind that Hitler with his requirement that the officer corps unequivocally endorse his person as the sole unchallengeable source of all authority had changed the nature of the officer corps from being a kind of religious order, like the Jesuits, sworn to uphold the authority of the Catholic monarch, to that of a Praetorian guard beholden exclusively to the person of the Emperor.
There was, as well, another sense in which Bonhoeffer was a revolutionary and that was in his repudiation of the entire intellectual historical tradition of Prussia- Germany with its cult of unquestioning obedience to the authority of the monarch. It took Bonhoeffer, of course, some considerable time to come to this position, namely to regard the person of the monarch as that merely of fallen human being whose judgment in anything, including either military and political was far from being reliable, and by implication challengeable. Bonhoeffer worked this out in his final fragment subsequently published as Ethics and so devised a theologically based argument for opposing the arbitrary decisions of the Führer.
Now what I wish to do here by way of introduction is first to outline the religious–political culture into which Bonhoeffer was born, namely that of Prusso-German militarism, and then to sketch the political history of Prussia up to Bismarck’s Prussian solution to the German Question in 1871 and to highlight the disastrous implications of that development for both European and world history generally. We will have to conclude that Bonhoeffer’s repudiation of the Germany of Bismarck was not that of a traitor, as he has been portrayed, but of a true German patriot who wanted the development of a just society that took account first and foremost of the welfare of all classes, but especially that of the working class in a large industrial society. In a word, the driving principle was the notion of service to others, of being there for others. The role of the church in society was to act as monitor of the State and not as before to be the mere handmaid of the State. Thus was Dietrich Bonhoeffer a prophet for his times whose legacy exists as a permanent challenge to all politicians who seek a principle upon which to base their rationale for a peaceful and just world both internally and externally.
Bonhoeffer’s Formation:
DB was born 1906 as the twin brother to Sabine being the fifth and sixth of a family of eight siblings, children of Professor Karl and Paula Bonhoeffer. The Bonhoeffers came to Berlin in 1912 when Karl was appoint professor of psychiatry at the famous Berlin hospital Le Charité attached to the University of Berlin. The Bonhoeffers were Bildungsbürger, meaning they belonged to that specifically German class of highly educated bourgeoisie, the aristocrats of learning and the custodians of true German values. As we in the Western tradition do not have a parallel to the Bildungsbürgertum it is necessary to define more closely.
With the advent of the industrial revolution in the West the function of tertiary education changed. Whereas previously universities were places to educate the clergy and lawyers, doctors and bureaucrats, now there was a need to introduce a range of disciplines that served the needs of the commerce and industry. Education, consequently, became primarily a practicable means of advancing business. It was not necessarily an end in itself.
In Germany, on the other hand, there had been long established a venerable university tradition in which learning was pursued for its own sake. Of course, there were the original disciplines of the law, theology and medicine as inherited from the Middle Ages. And this tradition continued long after the industrial revolution had sparked off the educational relation in the West to which we have just referred. The result was that mostly young men from well situated families went to university to acquire education or Bildung without any thought of applying it commercially. If their vocational goal was not the clergy, then it would have been within the Beamtentum, namely the public service. And in Germany in the 18th and 19th centuries there would have been a large proportion of so-called Privatgelehrter, namely private or gentleman scholars. As well, of course, the scholars produced by the universities would have in turn become the professors of the next generation of university teachers.
What interests us here are the political implications of this phenomenon. As noted, many of the university graduates who would have studied mostly classics or the law, entered the public service having sworn an oath of allegiance to the monarch. Indeed, all university teachers had to swear also an oath to the monarch called the venia legendi before they were permitted to teach. This circumstance ensured that the public service was essentially very conservative and unlikely to be attracted to revolutionary philosophies, unless, of course, you were Karl Marx and were innovative enough to devise your own revolutionary philosophy. And in Marx, of course, we have the supreme example of how a Privatgelehrter became the exception to the rule. But overwhelmingly, the Bildungsbürgertum was an ultra conservative social phenomenon.
And here we need to be aware of the so-called self-perception of this class within the broader German community. They were the self professed opinion makers; they set the standards by which society should progress. But obviously social change or even technological innovation was only permissible within the existing framework of monarchy by divine right. The Bismarckian-Wilhelmine Germany was a nation state into which Bonhoeffer was born was indeed like this. It was arguably the world’s most modern industrial power, but one which rested on a constitution that derived from the 17th century, that is a militaristic constitution, suited to a country still virtually in a feudal situation. Consequently, the 19th century Prusso-german empire suffered from great social problems due to the existence of an enormous industrial working class that could not be integrated;and as well there was a highly influential Jewish community predominant in banking and in certain key industries which was the excuse for a virulent anti-Semitism. And to cap all this off, there was still an unresolved tension between the Protestant majority and the RC political minority. Indeed, the Bismarckian-Wilhelmine state was a ‘negatively integrated’ state, meaning that the external social unity was more apparent than real, indeed, one enforced by the draconian Bismarckian constitution which rested on the power of the Prusso-German army. What needs to be grasped is the fact that the Prusso-German military was in fact a state within a state with its own constitution and whose budget was in part guaranteed by the imperial constitution.
Liberals and Social Democrats in Germany were acutely aware of this anti-modern reality in which they were forced to live. And some Bildungsbürger, such as the literary families of Thomas and Heinrich Mann, as well as the Bonhoeffers, were highly critical of the Wilhelmine State for a variety of reasons. But they were far from being revolutionaries. Intelligent Bildungsbürger could see the need for reform, especially in the way the State handled the so-called social or labour question, but were powerless to initiate a reform movement short of holding congresses in which the these issues were canvassed. The Wilhemine State remained an authoritarian, anti-parliamentary, militaristic entity, quite incapable of envisaging rational reform because of the widespread fear of the spread of revolutionary ideas. Indeed, the powers-that –be at the time suffered from a perennial Konzeptionslosigkeit, meaning a chronic inability to devise alternative solutions which presumed the need to compromise. In a word, the ruling classes in Wilhelmine Germany had painted themselves into a corner. There was a remarkable childlike confidence in the ability of armed forces to take care of both rebellion at home and threat from abroad.
When the war came in 1914, the Bonhoeffer family sacrificed one of Dietrich’s older brothers, like countless other bourgeois families.
After the war they adjusted to the revolutionary Weimar Republic as the only reasonable thing to do. The alternative was either to support the Communists, Social Democrats or one of the extreme right wing anti-Semitic parties. In the end the parents threw in their lot with the DDP the party of the new constitution. So they were law-abiding and moderate in their politics. Dietrich duly reached the age when he would enroll at a university and he went to Tübingen in order to begin studies in theology, a subject that puzzled his agnostic-leaning father, but who nevertheless indulged his son’s ambition.
Time will not allow us to trace Bonhoeffer’s intellectual-spiritual adventures which led him to the completion of his doctorate by the age of 21; indeed, a remarkable achievement. There is no doubt that he was unusually gifted, especially in languages, philosophy and, of course, in theological, acumen. Bonhoeffer was a theological Wunderkind who had sat at the feet of the most outstanding of German scholars in the discipline at the time such as Adolf von Harnack, Adolf Deissmann, Karl Holl and his Doktorvater, Reinhold Seeberg. But above all Bonhoeffer owed most in his theological formation to the Swiss scholar, Karl Barth. His declaration of loyalty to Barth was the first step in his theological revolution against his German mentors, in particular von Harnack.
This is crucially important because von Harnack was the chief advocate of so-called German liberal theology which argued that the will of God could be discerned in the policies of the greatest power state! In a word, if you wanted to know God’s plan for humanity you studied the foreign policy of imperial Germany. The ‘history of salvation’ was not to be located in the Great Power struggle. This is what the German theologians and historians at the outbreak of the First World War were so militant and especially hostile towards their colleagues in the West. On this there is an extraordinarily large amount of literature which was sparked off by Professor Karl Barth’s attack in 1914 on the declarations of his German colleagues in favour of the war as being an apocalypse sent by God finally to decide which Great Power would hence forth rule the world, and that Power, of course, would be Germany.
Karl Barth, being a Swiss Social Democrat refused to buy this ‘liberal theology” and he made the interesting statement to the effect that what the German theologians believed was the will of almighty God was in fact the wish-dreams of fallen and gullible men. It was interesting that the Bonhoeffers and the von Harnack family were neighbours in the leafy suburb of Grünewald., and as a young student, Bonhoeffer used to travel with von Harnack on the train from their outer suburban station of Hallensee to the Humboldt University in Berlin Mitte. But somehow Bonhoeffer managed not to offend von Harnack and sustained a filial relationship to the hostile older men. And here it must be understood that von Harnack was the doyen of the Bildungsbürgertum among the theologians. Karl Barth could not be a member of that august club because he was Swiss and a democrat with little time for the Kaiser. For the remainder of Bonheffer’s student life until he wrote his Dr. Habil (post. Doc) one perceives his steady drawing apart from the stifling world of ideas of his mentors. There are stations along the way, such as the sojourn in Rome, the subsequent time spent in the German chaplaincy in Barcelona, and above all in the USA with his encounter with the fellow post doc students at Union theological Seminary. So when he finally came back to Germany he was thoroughly immunized against German liberal theology which, of course, was at bottom nationalist and racist. God’s revelation in Jesus Christ was for all humanity, not just the master race. Further, Bonhoeffer in New York had to come to grips with the Negro Question, and he had become warmest friends with several black theologians he had met at Union. And this undoubtedly gave him a new angle on the Jewish question when he came back to Berlin in 1931 when he had to confront the rise of the Nazi movement and the phenomenon of the Führer Principle.
What was perfectly clear by the early ’thirties was that the Nazi movement constituted a massive problem for those Germans who had endorsed the Weimar Constitution with its emphasis on basic rights (Grundrechte des deutschen Volkes). The Hitler movement had made no secret of the fact that they despised the constitution, as did other right wing parties, for being Marxist-inspired, pro-Jewish and virtually an imposition of the victorious Western Allies. Bonhoeffer’s brothers and brothers-in-law assessed the threat to the rule of law accurately, and were among the earliest bourgeois opponents of National Socialism. Even before Hitler assumed power end of January 1933, Bonhoeffer had urged an international coalition against Hitler by seeking a solidarity declaration of the churches in the ecumenical movement each to urge their governments to act in unison against the Nazi Party should it succeed in seizing power. That, of course, did not happen but it indicated precisely where Bonhoeffer stood from the outset. He could see that the Nazis spurned human rights and were driven by garbled social-Darwinistic principles that were totally irreconcilable with Christianity. So right from the beginning of the Third Reich Bonhoeffer saw the need to overthrow Hitler. He said this in a public lecture entitled ‘The Church and the Jewish Question’ June 1933, the first major statement of revolutionary content that Bonhoeffer formulated. In it he attacked the Hitler regime for being a false ‘Obrigkeit’, meaning the opposite to what a Christian monarch stood for, namely the protection of all subjects regardless of race or religion. Hitler in the Aryan laws denied citizenship to persons of Jewish blood, thus outlawing them on the basis of race and religion, indeed, denying them their humanity.
Bonhoeffer’s response to this was to call the Church to protest. Normally the Church in the Lutheran scheme of things has no right against the State to demand that it change its policies because it was the Luther’s view that the State was autonomous in its sphere because under God it had the obligation to keep law and order and to protect the realm from invasion. Indeed the State under a monarch by divine right was the secular arm of God on earth. The Church’s role was to oversee the spiritual health of citizens by preaching the Word of God and administering the sacraments. Neither Church nor State had the right to interfere in what the other was doing in its allotted sphere: the so-called doctrine of the two kingdoms.
But precisely here Hitler violated the traditional Lutheran doctrine. First he made himself as Führer the sole authority over the conscience of the individual; secondly he made citizenship dependent on the spurious doctrine of the purity of the Aryan blood thus alienating all Jews; and thirdly the law was placed on an entirely novel basis, namely that all legislation had to conform to National Socialist principles which meant the mind of the Führer. Hitler became an absolutist monarch without the restriction of responsibility to almighty God. The democratically elected parties in the Reichstag were all outlawed, leaving only Nazis in charge. Hitler was free to implement his in humane plan to ‘solve the Jewish Question’ as he pleased and to disregard international law respecting re-armament, and in this he enjoyed the overwhelming support of the army without which he could have done nothing. Their old plan of world domination, frustrated by the defeat in 1918, could now be resurrected.
Fortunately for the reputation of the officer corps and the Bildungsbürgertum there were some stalwart souls who realized that to stand by and do nothing was tantamount to an endorsement of a palpable evil. Consequently, a small elite of Bildungsbürger resolved that Hitler had to be eliminated. Their first preference would have been to put Hitler on trial for atrocities against humanity, but since that would have required a majority of the officer corps that course had to be abandoned. And here is the crucial point: The officer corps had sworn an oath of allegiance to Hitler and because they could not think outside the tradition of the corps they failed to grasp that Hitler was NOT an Obrigkeit with a claim on their unconditional obedience. That was their and the nations’s tragedy.
Bonhoeffer comprehended this, and in a reflection he wrote just prior to his arrest called ‘After Ten Years’ he castigated those of his own class who stood by and did nothing but who had a bad conscience [Quote from page 176] And while in prison Bonhoeffer penned a series of fictional writings including one he called simply, Novel in which he pulls no punches in sheeting home the blame for the catastrophe to his own class.[Quote from page 188, and for a conclusion read on page 189.