"After Ten Years": Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Our Times 9781506433387, 1506433383

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“After Ten Years”

“After Ten Years” Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Our Times

With an introduction by Victoria J. Barnett

“AFTER TEN YEARS” Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Our Times

Sermon: Copyright © 2017 Fortress Press. Book introduction: Copyright © Victoria J. Barnett. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Email [email protected] or write to Permissions, Fortress Press, PO Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440-1209.

Cover image: bpk Bildagentur / Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, Germany / Art Resource, NY Cover design: Lauren Williamson

Print ISBN: 978-1-5064-3338-7 eBook ISBN: 978-1-5064-3339-4

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Contents

Acknowledgments

1.

Reading Bonhoeffer’s “After Ten Years” in Our Times

vii

1

Victoria J. Barnett

2.

After Ten Years: An Account at the Turn of the Year 1942–1943

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer Translation by Barbara and Martin Rumscheidt Suggestions for Further Reading

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About the Authors

35

Acknowledgments

This edition uses the fine translation of “After Ten Years” that was done by Martin Rumscheidt and the late Barbara Rumscheidt for the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works Edition of Letters and Papers from Prison, published in 2009. I have taken the liberty of making a few slight revisions to their translation, and I hope that this edition will bring their moving translation to new audiences. In the past year I have given several lectures related to “After Ten Years” and its historical context. My introduction to this volume draws upon the material in some of those lectures, including the Bogdanow Lectures, which I gave at the University of Manchester, UK, in January 2017. In particular, a program that was organized by students and several faculty at Princeton Theological Seminary in September 2016 offered the occasion for some rich discussions about how Bonhoeffer’s essay might speak to contemporary issues. Special thanks goes to Professor Nancy Duff at Princeton for inviting me to speak at that program, and for her encouragement. I am very grateful indeed to several friends and colleagues who read my introduction to this volume and offered helpful comments and suggestions: Frank Anechiarico, Doris Bergen, Linda Brandenburg, Martin Doblmeier, Nancy Duff, Clifford Green, Douglas Irvin-Erickson, Charles Kuhlman, and Ulrich Wolf-Barnett. All errors of course are my own. Finally, I want to thank Will Bergkamp, Vice President of Publishing at Augsburg Fortress, and Michael Gibson, Acquisitions Editor in Theology, for their interest and willingness to publish this essay and my introduction in a single edition. As always, it is a pleasure to work with them, and I thank the entire Fortress team, especially Marissa Wold Uhrina, Project Manager, for their help in bringing this book to publication. vii

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Reading Bonhoeffer’s “After Ten Years” in Our Times

Victoria J. Barnett

One must be cautious about drawing simplistic historical analogies. Nowhere is this truer than in the case of comparisons to Nazi Germany, its leaders, and the Holocaust. The period between 1933 and 1945 was characterized by a complex constellation of factors, many of them unique to Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. Nationalism, antisemitism, ethnocentrism, and populism have played a role in different historical periods and national contexts. Moreover, the language of grievance and resentment is usually homegrown, drawing upon the embedded prejudices and fears of a particular society as well as its hopes, which often are articulated in themes revived from the particular history of the host nation. At such moments the responses of citizens and their institutions are crucial. Political culture is not just the product of how citizens engage in and create their society. It is also an expression of what we are willing to tolerate, what compromises we make and the reasons why we make them—and those are the factors that can undermine and even destroy a political culture. 1

“AFTER TEN YEARS”

The veneer of ethics and moral behavior in the public square can be surprisingly thin. Human beings are easily swayed and enraptured; peer pressure and crowd behavior are powerful forces. We are used to living by a particular set of rules, values, and expectations of behavior, individually and socially, and it is often easier for institutions like the civil service, universities, businesses, and religious bodies to conform than to resist. When the rules change it can be difficult to find our bearings, let alone chart a new course that can address and if necessary challenge what is happening around us. These are the themes that Dietrich Bonhoeffer addressed in “After Ten Years.” His context was Nazi Germany, but his observations about what happens to human decency and courage when a political culture disintegrates continue to resonate around the world today. The Historical Context for “After Ten Years” “After Ten Years” is a powerful reflection about what happened to Germany, its people, and their political culture in the decade after the Nazis came to power. It was written in December 1942 by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Protestant theologian and pastor who fought against the nazification of his church and was executed in April 1945 for his ties to the conspiracy to overthrow the Nazi regime. Bonhoeffer came from the Prussian upper middle class, a conservative and largely nationalist milieu from which the National Socialists drew significant support. In contrast, the Bonhoeffer family opposed National Socialism from the beginning, repulsed, as one of them later said, by its “petty nationalism” and sensing intuitively “that this tree would bear no good fruit.”1 Bonhoeffer and his seven siblings were raised in an atmosphere of enlightened humanism, with an emphasis on independent thinking, clear ethical standards, and a broader sense of their obligations as citizens. The Bonhoeffers were church members but not regular churchgoers, and his parents were surprised when Dietrich Bonhoeffer decided to study theology. These family influences on Bonhoeffer are especially evident in “After Ten Years,” and they are reflected in his early critiques of the Nazi regime, its curtailment of civil liberties, and the persecution of the Jewish minority and political opponents. Only weeks after Adolf Hitler became chancellor, for example, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote to 1. Emmi Bonhoeffer (the widow of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s brother Klaus), in a May 6, 1986, interview. In Victoria Barnett, For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest against Hitler (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 25.

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the U.S. theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, under whom he had studied in New York, about the “barbarization” of German culture, noting that “we will need to create a Civil Liberties Union in the coming period.” 2 Few in the German Protestant Church shared his views, and in late 1933 Bonhoeffer went to London, torn by the failings of his church, the growing pressures of the Nazi state, and the search for what his own path in the new Germany should be. He stayed in London for two years, serving two German-speaking churches and returning to Nazi Germany in 1935 to teach seminarians in the Confessing Church, a Protestant movement that had emerged to combat the more extreme pro-Nazi factions within the Protestant churches. He left briefly once again as war loomed in 1939, coming to the United States for what would have been a safe exile and a distinguished career. He arrived with his brother Karl Friedrich, a renowned physicist who had been invited to give a series of lectures. Both men returned to Germany in July 1939 at the family’s request. Dietrich Bonhoeffer told Reinhold Niebuhr that he was returning from a deep sense of obligation to shape the future of his country and his church. “Christians in Germany,” he wrote, “will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose, but I cannot make that choice in security. . . .”3 In the early years of the war his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi, who held a high position in the Justice Ministry, helped Bonhoeffer avoid military service by getting him a post in the Office of Military Intelligence. Under the command of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, that office became the center of the conspiracy to overthrow the Nazi regime. Dohnanyi himself was regarded by many as the intellectual head of the conspiracy, and through him Bonhoeffer was already part of a network of Germans with knowledge of and some involvement in that conspiracy. In 1943 he and Dohnanyi were arrested and imprisoned. In April 1945 they were executed by the Nazi regime, as were two other Bonhoeffer family members engaged in the resistance, Bonhoeffer’s brother Klaus and another brother-in-law, Rüdiger Schleicher. “After Ten Years” was written for Dohnanyi, Bonhoeffer’s close 2. Letter of February 6, 1933. In Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition, Volume 12: Berlin: 1932–1933 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009), 94. 3. Letter of June 1939 to Reinhold Niebuhr. In Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Theological Education Underground: 1937–1939, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 15 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012), 210.

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friend and colleague Eberhard Bethge, and Major General Hans Oster, a German military officer in intelligence work who had been involved in conversations about a possible overthrow of the Nazi regime since 1938 (Oster had secretly informed the Allies about the imminent invasions of Belgium and Holland). Bonhoeffer sent it to them at Christmas 1942; the essay was a retrospective analysis of what had happened to them, and more broadly, what had happened to his church, his country, and his compatriots in the decade that had passed since the Nazis came to power. He focused on the failures of Germans and their institutions to withstand and resist National Socialism, exploring the underlying reasons for these failures. One part of the essay was taken from a passage Bonhoeffer had written in his Ethics manuscripts one year before, and there are themes and even phrases that appear in letters to Dohnanyi and Bethge throughout this period. “After Ten Years” was written, then, as a synthesis of an ongoing and troubled conversation between these men as they wrestled with their consciences and the diminishing options open to those who sought the end of National Socialism. December 1942 was an especially bleak moment. The resistance circle to which Bonhoeffer was connected was one of several networks informed about the plans to overthrow the regime. These networks included high-level diplomats, civil servants, professors, political officials, and career military officers, all of whom were critical of the regime and who had begun to think very concretely about what a postNazi Germany might look like. Some of these circles outlined the possible future of German social, political, and educational institutions; others coordinated communication between different localized resistance groups. Bonhoeffer’s assignment was to convey information and peace feelers from the higher levels of the resistance to his church contacts abroad. He was also visiting resistance groups throughout Germany—in early 1943, for example, a meeting was set up between him and the White Rose students in Munich.4 That meeting never took place because of the arrests and executions of several members of that group in February 1943. The actual plans to overthrow the regime depended on the few highranking military officials who had direct access to Adolf Hitler. Their success would depend on a number of other factors, such as measures 4. The “White Rose” was a resistance group founded by several students at the University of Munich. The group distributed leaflets decrying the mass murders of Jews in the East and calling for public resistance. It was denounced in January 1943 and its leaders, Christoph Probst and Hans and Sophie Scholl, were executed in February. Other members of the group were arrested and executed later that year.

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that could prevent a counter-coup by loyalist Nazis and assure popular support. The officers who were involved vacillated constantly—sometimes according to how the war was going, sometimes driven by their own ambitions and opportunism. By the end of 1942 there had been several failed or aborted attempts to assassinate Hitler. The hopes of the Dohnanyi circle rose after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, but plans for a coup stalled in late 1942 as the battle of Stalingrad turned into a protracted and ultimately catastrophic defeat for the German forces. By 1942 the genocide of the Jewish population was well underway. German Einsatzgruppen and the Order Police had been engaged in mass killings of Jews since the beginning of the war. At the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 senior Nazi officials finalized plans for coordinating the murder of Jews throughout Europe, and over the course of 1942 mass killing operations began at Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec. By December 1942, over four million European Jews had already been murdered. Hans von Dohnanyi, who had begun tracking Nazi crimes even before the war, was receiving reports and documentation of the atrocities from various sources. The conspirators could not know what is clear to us in retrospect: that the tide of the war was turning against Nazi Germany. In December 1942 there were no indications that military leaders were willing to attempt a coup, even as the scope of war crimes and atrocities reached new levels. Several months later, another conspirator, Ulrich von Hassell, would write: “The longer the war lasts, the lower my opinion of the generals . . . they have no civil courage. They lack the self-assurance and the universal views that come from real culture. Almost to a man they bow before Hitler. . . . All upon whom we placed hopes fail us, and they fail us in the most miserable way. For these men admit [Nazi crimes] but they lack courage to act.”5 Yet Bonhoeffer’s haunting statement, “have there ever been people in history who in their time, like us, had so little ground under their feet,” did not simply refer to what the conspirators faced in terms of wartime events, Nazi crimes, and the reluctance of leading military officials to turn against the regime. Bonhoeffer’s letter was not so much an assessment of where they stood in 1942 but of how they had gotten there. “Ten years,” he began, “is a long time in the life of a human being.” He went on to offer a series of “conclusions about 5. Ulrich von Hassell, The Von Hassell Diaries 1938-1944 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1947), 196.

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human experience” that he had drawn from those years. To understand these conclusions and his ethical reflections about them, we must understand the complexity of Bonhoeffer’s own record during those years. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Path through History Adolf Hitler became chancellor on January 30, 1933, and what followed in the subsequent six weeks is a stunning case study in how quickly a political culture can collapse. Germany initially remained a constitutional democracy. Hitler’s conservative nationalist coalition partners expected that they would govern and that the popular new chancellor would be a figurehead who could rally his followers to support the new government after the turbulent Weimar years. There was little open opposition to the Nazi measures against opponents on the left, such as communists, left-wing journalists, and trade unions. Nazi paramilitary groups were given free rein to beat up Jews, gays, and other social “undesirables.” There was widespread silence or rationalization about all these developments throughout German institutions, including the churches. With the March 23 Enabling Act, Hitler abrogated the German constitution, and democracy was replaced by a Nazi state under direct control of the Führer. In those early weeks there were Germans who grasped the moral and political significance of what had just happened to their country. Young Dietrich Bonhoeffer—he was twenty-seven years old—wrote two essays that are striking for their political astuteness. The first essay, “The Führer and the Individual in the Younger Generation,”6 was written in February 1933 and explored why his contemporaries were so enthusiastic about Hitler. Bonhoeffer understood Nazism’s appeal to Germans, especially those of his generation. He himself had lost a brother in the First World War. As a student during the 1920s he briefly joined a right-wing paramilitary organization, and during that period he gave several talks that displayed a certain degree of nationalism and typical German resentment about the Versailles Treaty. Nonetheless, inoculated through his family, his upbringing and experiences abroad, his commitment to the international ecumenical movement, and his faith, Bonhoeffer recognized the dangers inherent in Nazi ideology and rhetoric, and the essay included the warning that even a charismatic “leader” could easily become a “misleader.”7 6. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition, Volume 12: Berlin 1932–1933, 266–82.

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The other essay, “The Church and the Jewish Question,” is a complex text that among other things contains a strongly anti-Jewish passage, displaying the theological prejudices of Bonhoeffer’s generation.8 Its central message however was the radical one that the Nazi regime had already ceased to function as a legitimate form of government precisely because of its persecution of the Jewish minority, and that the church had the obligation to stand with the persecuted, whether they were Christian or not. Bonhoeffer based this position on his interpretation of the Lutheran understanding of the obligations of state authority before God,9 and his views were also informed by the political perspectives of his family and the ecumenical movement in which he was engaged. The essay was written in April 1933, as Protestant church leaders and theologians debated a new church law, based upon the Nazi state racial laws, barring people of Jewish descent from the ministry and other church positions. The scope of Bonhoeffer’s analysis went beyond the sphere of the church, however, and it is likely that his thinking emerged from conversations with several others, including Hans von Dohnanyi, who had also concluded that the Nazi state had neither moral nor political legitimacy. The question they faced in 1933 was: What should they do? In those early days of Nazism there were German dissidents who immediately went to jail or into exile. Bonhoeffer knew some of them personally. Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze was a Protestant pastor who had founded a social welfare center in eastern Berlin, where he worked with activists of all faiths; during the 1920s Bonhoeffer’s brother Klaus had done volunteer legal work there. In 1933 Siegmund-Schultze immediately reached out to Leo Baeck and other Jewish leaders in Berlin to assist German Jews; as a result he was arrested and expelled from Germany in July 1933, forced into exile in Switzerland. In the years that followed, there were others in the Confessing Church who protested or resisted, like Elisabeth Schmitz, a secondary school teacher and Confessing Church member who tried in vain to move the Confessing Church leadership to protest the anti-Jewish measures, finally courageously resigning her teaching position in protest after the November 1938 pogroms. Ludwig Steil, Ernst Wilm, and Paul Schneider were Confessing Church pastors whose public denunciations of Nazi policies 7. Ibid., 280. 8. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition, Volume 12: Berlin 1932–1933, 361–70. 9. See Michael P. DeJonge, Bonhoeffer’s Reception of Luther (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 110–17. DeJonge argues that Bonhoeffer’s views were a corrective of widespread distortions of Luther’s “two kingdoms” teaching.

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from the pulpit led to their imprisonment in concentration camps; Steil and Schneider were killed. Yet although Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s political views were clear, the actual record of his resistance during the 1930s is more complex. In comparison to the individuals named above, he was cautious, and notably silent after the November 1938 pogroms. Although he was at the forefront of the radical wing of the Confessing Church fighting against the nazification of the churches, that activism didn’t extend (at least not publicly) outside of the church struggle. The same must be said of many of the individuals who eventually found their way into the July 20 conspiracy to overthrow the regime. During the 1930s they pursued their careers and chose their battles. Some were early supporters of National Socialism, coming late to their criticism of the regime. Others, like Hans von Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer, clearly recognized its evil from the beginning but sought to combat it from where they stood—for Dohnanyi, from within the Justice Ministry; for Bonhoeffer, from within the Confessing Church. All of them soon found themselves in a murky realm of complexity, ambiguity, and complicity. Dohnanyi, a brilliant rising lawyer, was just beginning his career in the early 1930s. He was brought into the Justice Ministry and soon rose through the ranks, working directly under Franz Gürtner, who would be justice minister until his death in 1942. Like many high-ranking officials whose careers began before 1933 and who reached high positions in the Nazi years, Gürtner remained an ambiguous figure. Trusted by many in the Confessing Church, he personally covered for Dohnanyi on a number of occasions. At the same time, Gürtner continued to carry out Nazi policies and orders, for example, firing a lawyer who attempted to block the Nazi “euthanasia” measures during the early war years. In the case of Hans von Dohnanyi there is substantial evidence of his ongoing opposition to Nazism as well as his assistance to Jewish friends and colleagues. In letters to his wife Christine written at various points throughout the 1930s, there was a recurring question: Was it time for him to leave his job? Was he becoming too compromised? There is a haunting picture from 1934 of a group of Nazi officials and bureaucrats listening to Adolf Hitler speak in the wake of the Röhm putsch, in which Hitler not only wiped out his party rivals but took it as an opportunity to murder political opponents; Hans von Dohnanyi is standing in the back of the room. “I envy anyone who can live through the day

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without having to give an accounting for what goes on around him and within him,” he wrote Christine in 1935.10 While Dohnanyi’s consistent opposition to Nazism is well documented, among his colleagues were those whose positions are less clear—people who advanced their careers, compromised and benefited from the Nazi anti-Jewish measures by obtaining the homes or jobs of Jews who had been forced out, and who calculated carefully when to speak out and when to remain silent. The broader resistance circles in which Bonhoeffer and Dohnanyi found themselves included many such figures. Bonhoeffer’s second cousin Paul von Hase, who was also executed after July 20, is a striking example. A career military officer, von Hase had risen through the ranks during the 1930s. Despite accounts that indicate his personal misgivings, Hase gave speeches praising Hitler’s racial policies and ultimately became city commandant of Paris during the German occupation before being promoted to commandant of Berlin, an appointment that was welcomed by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.11 This was the situation Bonhoeffer described in “After Ten Years,” writing: “Have there ever been people in history who had so little ground under their feet . . . ? The huge masquerade of evil has thrown all ethical concepts into confusion. . . . We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds . . . are we still of any use?” Over the course of ten years, even Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hans von Dohnanyi, and Eberhard Bethge—men of conscience who had seen through National Socialism from the beginning—could not completely extricate themselves from what was unfolding around them. Bonhoeffer’s sister Christine von Dohnanyi after the war described the “unavoidable complicity” of her husband in the regime that he sought to bring down.12 In his memoirs, Eberhard Bethge wrote a haunting paragraph about his period as a German soldier in Italy under the command of Marshall Albert Kesselring, who oversaw the massacres of Italian civilians and was sentenced to death at Nuremberg. Bethge, who had a desk job and didn’t see combat, noted in his memoir that his comrades must have been involved in “gruesome actions. I didn’t ask much about those, or I repressed them quickly.”13 10. Marijke Smid, Hans von Dohnanyi und Christine Bonhoeffer: Eine Ehe im Widerstand gegen Hitler (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2002), 158. 11. Roland Kopp, Paul von Hase: Von der Alexander-Kaserne nach Plötzensee. Eine deutsche Soldatenbiographie 1885-1944 (Münster: Lit, 2001). 12. Smid, Hans von Dohnanyi und Christine Bonhoeffer, 2. 13. Eberhard Bethge, In Zitz gab es keine Juden: Erinnerungen aus meinen ersten vierzig Jahren (Munich: Kaiser Verlag, 1989), 142.

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The year before he wrote “After Ten Years,” Bonhoeffer spent several months at Ettal, a Benedictine monastery in the Bavarian Alps. His time there is usually portrayed as a quiet period of retreat with the monks, during which he, Hans von Dohnanyi, and Eberhard Bethge met secretly with resistance contacts from the Vatican. It was also the period during which he worked on his Ethics manuscripts, in which he wrote of “the sphere of relativity, in the twilight that the historical situation casts over good and evil.”14 Even in a remote monastery, however, Bonhoeffer faced the realities of life in Nazi Germany, for during his time in Ettal there were fiftynine forced laborers working in the monastery buildings and grounds. Thirty-five of them were Soviet prisoners of war and twenty-four were civilians whom German soldiers had forcibly brought from eastern Europe, including a young Polish couple with two small children.15 As the German army marched across Europe it not only subjugated local populations, but brought civilians and prisoners of war back into the Reich as forced labor. The civilians had been ripped from their homes, communities, and sometimes their families, and they had been brought back often under horrific circumstances by German soldiers. By the end of the war millions of civilians had been taken as forced laborers for the Reich.16 Around 6000 of them ended up working in institutions run by the Protestant and Catholic churches, including the Benedictine monastery of Ettal.17 We do not know whether Bonhoeffer took note of the situation of the laborers in Ettal, but his reflections in Ethics about the meaning of human responsibility in the “twilight of relativity” suggest that he was confronting the moral questions of complicity that now permeated German society under National Socialism. To understand “After Ten Years,” we must suspend an over-idealistic picture of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the resistance circles in which he moved. It is a mistake to think of the German resistance as entirely untouched and outside the parameters of Nazi evil; this was also true of German society as a whole. Throughout the 1930s, the vast majority of Germans were able to pursue their careers, build families, and live normal lives, even 14. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Reader’s Edition, 2015), 147. 15. Volker Laube, Fremdarbeiter in kirchlichen Einrichtungen im Erzbistum München und Freising, 1939-1945: Eine Dokumentation (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2005), 85–87. 16. See https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005180. 17. After the use of forced labor in church institutions became known in 2000, both the Roman Catholic and Protestant Church leadership in Germany issued apologies and began to pay reparations.

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as their political system and culture were transformed into what the historian Klemens von Klemperer later called a “consensual dictatorship.”18 As I wrote on the seventieth anniversary of Bonhoeffer’s death: “When it reaches the scale of National Socialism the nature of human evil is like rising water, leaving nothing untouched, no one untainted or unchanged.”19 “After Ten Years” Bonhoeffer’s essay consists of a series of seventeen aphorisms and meditations that build upon each other. Each section leads naturally into the reflections of the next, beginning with Bonhoeffer’s opening question: “Have there ever been people in history who in their time, like us, had so little ground under their feet . . . ?” In the sections that followed, he reflected on their ethical responsibilities as citizens and the particular challenges they faced. As he had already observed one year previously in his drafts for Ethics, National Socialism had subverted traditional moral and ethical standards. What then could people hold onto? Who could stand firm? Noting that human beings are capable of adjusting their principles and values to conform to the demands of the hour, he called for a more deeply grounded sense of individual responsibility in every sphere of their lives. Subsequent sections explored the different indications that Germans thus far had failed to acknowledge such responsibility: the widespread erosion of civil courage, the seductive successes of National Socialism, and the prevalence of what he called a collective “stupidity.” German civil servants in particular had been trained to view obedience as the means to serve the greater good, failing to understand that such faithful service could be misused for evil ends. Bonhoeffer distinguished between that sense of service and true civil courage, which could only emerge from the individual’s sense of freedom and responsibility. The German people, he wrote, had come to view civil courage as irrelevant, and so the conspirators faced the question of whether they should continue a Don Quixote-like battle against the Nazi regime, or concede defeat and come to terms with its success. 18. Klemens von Klemperer, “Church, Religion, and the German Resistance,” in The Moral Imperative: New Essays on the Ethics of Resistance in National Socialist Germany, 1933-1945, ed. Andrew Chandler (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998), 49. 19. Victoria J. Barnett, “Bonhoeffer is widely beloved. But to understand him we should first dial back the hero worship,” The Washington Post, April 9, 2015: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ acts-of-faith/wp/2015/04/09/bonhoeffer-is-widely-beloved-but-to-fully-understand-him-weshould-first-dial-back-the-hero-worship/?utm_term=.0a0f7c5fcafc.

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Bonhoeffer reminded them, however, that success is never “ethically neutral,” and the successes of National Socialism had been achieved through evil means. Their responsibility now was to understand “success” differently. Even if it was unlikely they would live to experience the fall of the regime, the task they faced was not to ensure that they would be honored as heroes, but to act in a way that would lay the foundation for the coming generations, for a different kind of future. Poignantly, this different kind of future—and Bonhoeffer’s hopes for the next generation of Germans—seemed especially irrelevant given what had happened to the majority of their fellow citizens. How could Germans have succumbed to this ideology and its leaders? Bonhoeffer’s answer—“stupidity”—is one of the most often-quoted sections of this essay, and it goes to the heart of what had happened to German political culture. The stupidity of his compatriots, Bonhoeffer concluded, was not intellectual but of a collective sociological nature: “[I]t becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity....... The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.” The only solution was an inner liberation, and this insight led to one of the most misunderstood sections of the essay, on “contempt for humanity.” Bonhoeffer warned against developing a sense of contempt for their compatriots, but neither here nor in the section on stupidity was he writing out of a sense of condescension or elitism. He was responding to the open contempt that Nazi leaders and their followers had displayed toward their victims, the rest of the world, and the values that Bonhoeffer sought to preserve. In his Ethics manuscript, Bonhoeffer had written of the “tyrannical despiser of humanity” who epitomized “contempt for humanity.”20 It was tempting for the conspirators in turn to respond with contempt for the mass rallies, the storm troopers, and the ways in which broad sectors of the German population, from ordinary citizens to church leaders, had become enthusiastic supporters of National Socialism. Bonhoeffer countered that such a response would amount to a surrender to the Nazis’ own methods, and in the next four sections—on “Immanent Justice,” “God’s Action in History,” “Trust,” and “The Sense of Quality”—he articulated the worldview and values that he believed would be necessary to combat National Socialism. While evil reveals its fundamental stupidity (“often in a surprisingly short span of time,” 20. See Bonhoeffer, Ethics, Reader’s Edition, 33. Thanks to Clifford J. Green for providing this reference.

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he noted), this didn’t necessarily guarantee that justice would follow. Indeed, in 1942 it looked as if justice would not triumph, at least not in their lifetimes, and it is clear from this section that Bonhoeffer was personally wrestling with this reality. He insisted nonetheless that there were laws beyond human laws, and ultimate limits to human power. God’s eternal justice “tries and judges hearts,” he wrote, and in the section on “God’s action in history” he argued against the fatalism and pessimism that threatened to paralyze them. The section on “The Sense of Quality” is the most dated one in the essay, but it should be read as an expression of Bonhoeffer’s deep appreciation for the culture in which he had been raised, and for the humanist and Christian traditions and values that had been replaced by the “anarchy of human values” that characterized Nazi Germany. Bonhoeffer called for a “new nobility” of the human heart, one that rejected the cheap sensationalism of the Nazi public square. The final sections are the most personal and autobiographical, offering a poignant glimpse into Bonhoeffer’s own journey through those ten years. He writes of the loss of trust and the betrayals by friends and colleagues. In the section on “Sympathy” he summons himself and his friends to a greatness of heart that will open their consciences to the victims of Nazism: “inactive waiting and dully looking on,” he wrote, could not be Christian options when other human beings were persecuted. In the section on “Suffering,” Bonhoeffer acknowledges the isolation and anguish of their role: “It is infinitely easier to suffer in community with others than in solitude. It is infinitely easier to suffer publicly and with honor than in the shadow and in dishonor.” In the section on “Present and Future,” Bonhoeffer reflects on how their own lives had been altered under their dramatic historical circumstances. Personally, they had to face the reality that they no longer had any control over their daily lives or their futures. Such a situation could lead to passivity, depression, and despair, or to living frivolously for the moment. Or—as Bonhoeffer wrote—they could accept this reality, and take responsibility to act in such a way that would serve the coming generations, the future. While this course seemed to be one of optimism, he acknowledged that pessimism and a withdrawal either into despair or “pious flight from the world” came more naturally. Optimism, then, had to be more than a superficial hope. They would need “a power to hold our heads high when all seems to have come to naught, a power to tolerate setbacks, a power that never abandons the future to the opponent but lays claim to it.”

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The essay concludes with some deeply personal reflections on the reality of facing death, the acknowledgment of their failures and weaknesses during the Nazi years, and finally, Bonhoeffer’s reflections on “the view from below”: “It remains an experience of incomparable value that we have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and reviled, in short, from the perspective of the suffering.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer is often portrayed as someone who understood that “view from below” from the very beginning. Although he was critical of National Socialism from the beginning, however, he nonetheless had retained a certain privilege throughout the 1930s. He and those in his circles were not the immediate targets of Nazi ideology. It had been possible for them to pursue their lives and careers, making choices along the way about where and when to speak out. “After Ten Years” marks a turning point: a moment of reflection on their own complicity, leading to the necessary rejection of all that was going on around them and embracing the freedom with which they had decided clearly where to take their stand. It may be that a full understanding of the “view from below” came only when he faced his executioners in the early morning hours of April 9, 1945, but in December 1942 Dietrich Bonhoeffer had begun to comprehend what it truly means to be powerless and vulnerable to the powers of this world. In many ways this essay articulates his path toward that recognition, opening the way for him to follow that path toward its end, and grasping in the process what it means “to do justice to life in all its dimensions.” Some Final Thoughts Dietrich Bonhoeffer was thirty-five years old when he wrote this essay. Only four months later, on April 5, 1943, he and Dohnanyi would be arrested. The voice we hear in “After Ten Years” is not that of someone who was certain, hopeful, who believed that good would ultimately triumph, much less was it the voice of someone who saw himself as a hero. Looking at the wreckage that surrounded him in late 1942 Bonhoeffer was reflecting on what happens to good people, what happens to the soul, the human sense of morality and responsibility, when evil has become so embedded in a political culture that it is part of the very fabric of daily life, and it becomes impossible even for good people to remain untouched by it.

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The historical context of “After Ten Years” is crucial, but it cannot be understood apart from his understanding of his Christian faith. From the beginning of his career, Bonhoeffer’s theology centered on the question of how to live as a Christian in this world and, just as importantly, on what the task of the church should be. His answer was clear (“the church must speak out for those who cannot speak”21). The starting point for that answer was a particular understanding of what Christianity meant. Bonhoeffer’s Christianity was characterized by personal faith and prayer, a commitment to the community of the church, and a deep responsibility toward others. Elsewhere Bonhoeffer argued that one could not be a Christian in isolation, and he understood sin not merely as an individual transgression but as inherently social, in that sin injures other human beings and frays the fabric of human society. He understood the church as a community, as the body of Christ acting in the world. He described Jesus Christ as someone who lives for the other, the church as existing only when it exists for others. He focused on the essentials of discipleship as expressed through a life of faith in this world, always in the consciousness that Christians serve a different Lord than the short-term lords of this world, and he knew that Christian hope is not driven by the affirmations and successes of this world, but by a very different source. “What remains for us,” he wrote in “After Ten Years,” “is only the very narrow path, sometimes barely discernible, of taking each day as if it were the last and yet living it faithfully and responsibly as if there were yet to be a great future.” Bonhoeffer was also analyzing the dynamics of political culture and what happens when it disintegrates. He pondered the struggle for integrity, decency, and morality in the political sphere, which so often operates by very different rules. He knew that political culture depends not just on leadership, but on the ethical engagement of ordinary citizens, of leaders and professionals in all social, civic, and political institutions. In focusing on what he and his closest friends might have to offer this broken world, he wrote: The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from this affair, but how the coming generation is to live. . . . “After Ten Years” could be included in the timeless body of texts that includes Martin Luther King’s “Letter to a Birmingham Jail” and Abraham Joshua Heschel’s “No Religion Is an Island”—writings that addressed the specific challenges of their times by speaking to the 21. From a letter to Erwin Sutz, September 11, 1934. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition, Volume 13: London: 1933–1935, 217.

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greater issues at stake. Those issues include the human capacity in all ages for decency, for courage, and for an engagement in political culture that affirms these values and honors human integrity. In whatever particular historical moment we find ourselves, we are summoned to determine what our place in history will be, to think and act beyond our self-interest for the sake of a common good: not just the common good of the moment, our particular political group, or even our society, but of our times—to act, as Bonhoeffer put it, on behalf of history itself and for the sake of future generations and the kind of society we would wish for them.

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2

After Ten Years: An Account at the Turn of the Year 1942–1943

Dietrich Bonhoeffer Translation by Barbara and Martin Rumscheidt

Ten years is a long time in the life of every human being. Because time is the most precious gift at our disposal, being of all gifts the most irretrievable, the thought of time possibly lost disturbs us whenever we look back. Time is lost when we have not lived, experienced things, learned, worked, enjoyed, and suffered as human beings. Lost time is unfulfilled, empty time. Certainly that is not what the past years have been. We have lost much, things far beyond measure, but time was not lost. Indeed, the insights and experiences we have gained and of which we have subsequently become aware are only abstractions from reality, from life itself. Yet just as the ability to forget is a gift of grace, so similarly is memory, the repetition of received teachings, part of responsible life. In the following pages I want to try to give an account-

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ing of some of the shared experience and insight that have been forced upon us in these times, not personal experiences, nothing systematically organized, not arguments and theories, but conclusions about human experience—lined up side by side, connected only by concrete experience—that have been reached together in a circle of like-minded people. None of this is new; rather, it is something we have long been familiar with in times gone by, something given to us to experience and understand anew. One cannot write about these things without every word being accompanied by the feeling of gratitude for the community of spirit and of life that in all these years was preserved and shown to be worthwhile. Without Ground under One’s Feet Have there ever been people in history who in their time, like us, had so little ground under their feet, people to whom every possible alternative open to them at the time appeared equally unbearable, senseless, and contrary to life? Have there been those who like us looked for the source of their strength beyond all those available alternatives? Were they looking entirely in what has passed away and in what is yet to come? And nevertheless, without being dreamers, did they await with calm and confidence the successful outcome of their endeavor? Or rather, facing a great historical turning point, did the responsible thinkers of another generation ever feel differently than we do today—precisely because something genuinely new was forming that was not yet apparent in the existing alternatives? Who Stands Firm? The huge masquerade of evil has thrown all ethical concepts into confusion. That evil should appear in the form of light, good deeds, historical necessity, social justice is absolutely bewildering for one coming from the world of ethical concepts that we have received. For the Christian who lives by the Bible, it is the very confirmation of the abysmal wickedness of evil. The failure of “the reasonable ones”—those who think, with the best of intentions and in their naive misreading of reality, that with a bit of reason they can patch up a structure that has come out of joint—is apparent. With their ability to see impaired, they want to do justice to all sides, only to be crushed by the colliding forces without having

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accomplished anything at all. Disappointed that the world is so unreasonable, they see themselves condemned to unproductiveness; they withdraw in resignation or helplessly fall victim to the stronger. More devastating is the failure of all ethical fanaticism. The fanatic believes that he can meet the power of evil with the purity of a principle. But like the bull in the arena, he attacks the red cape rather than the person carrying it, grows tired, and suffers defeat. He becomes entrapped in nonessentials and is caught in the trap of the cleverer one. The man of conscience has no one but himself when resisting the superior might of predicaments that demand a decision. But the dimensions of the conflict wherein he must make his choices are such that, counseled and supported by nothing but his very own conscience, he is torn apart. The innumerable respectable and seductive disguises by which evil approaches him make his conscience fearful and unsure until he finally settles for a salved conscience instead of a good conscience, that is, until he deceives his own conscience in order not to despair. That a bad conscience may be stronger and more wholesome than a deceived one is something that the man whose sole support is his conscience can never comprehend. The reliable path of duty seems to offer the escape from the bewildering plethora of possible decisions. Here, that which has been commanded is clutched as the most certain; the responsibility for what has been commanded lies with the one giving the command rather than the one who carries it out. However, duty is so circumscribed that there is never any room to venture that which rests wholly in one’s own responsibility, the action that alone strikes at the very core of evil and can overcome it. The man of duty will in the end have to do his duty also to the devil. There is the one who determines to take a stand in the world by acting on his own freedom. He values the necessary action more highly than an untarnished conscience and reputation. He is prepared to sacrifice a barren principle to a fruitful compromise or a barren wisdom of mediocrity to fruitful radicalism. Such a one needs to take care that his freedom does not cause him to stumble. He will condone the bad in order to prevent the worse and in so doing no longer discern that the very thing that he seeks to avoid as worse might well be better. This is where the basic material of tragedy is to be found. In flight from public discussion and examination, this or that person may well attain the sanctuary of private virtuousness. But he must close

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his eyes and mouth to the injustice around him. He can remain undefiled by the consequences of responsible action only by deceiving himself. In everything he does, that which he fails to do will leave him no peace. He will either perish from that restlessness or turn into the most hypocritical of all Pharisees.1 Who stands firm? Only the one whose ultimate standard is not his reason, his principles, conscience, freedom, or virtue; only the one who is prepared to sacrifice all of these when, in faith and in relationship to God alone, he is called to obedient and responsible action. Such a person is the responsible one, whose life is to be nothing but a response to God’s question and call. Where are these responsible ones? Civil Courage What really lies behind the lament about the lack of civil courage? In these years we have encountered much bravery and self-sacrifice but civil courage almost nowhere, even among ourselves. Only an altogether naive psychology would trace this deficiency back simply to personal cowardice. The reasons behind this are quite different. In the course of a long history, we Germans have had to learn the need for obedience and the power thereof. We saw the meaning and greatness of our life in the subordination of all personal wishes and ideas under the commission that came to be ours. Our gaze was directed upward, not in slavish fear but in the free trust that beheld a career in the commission and a vocation in the career. The readiness to follow an order from “above” rather than one’s own discretion arises from and is part of the justified suspicion about one’s own heart. Who would contest that, in obedience, commission, and career, the German has again and again accomplished the utmost in bravery and life commitment? But he safeguarded his freedom—where in the world was freedom spoken of more passionately than in Germany, from Luther to the philosophy of idealism?—by seeking to free himself from self-will in order to serve the whole: career and freedom were to him two sides of the same thing. However, in doing so he misjudged the world; he did not reckon with the fact that the readiness to subordinate and commit his life to the commission could be misused in the service of evil. When such misuse occurred, the exercise of the career itself became questionable, and all the basic moral concepts of the Germans were 1. Editor’s comment: The pejorative reference to “Pharisees” reflects the theological anti-Judaism of Bonhoeffer’s era.

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shaken. It became apparent that Germans still lacked one decisive and fundamental idea: that of the need for the free, responsible act, even against career and commission. In its place came the irresponsible lack of scruples, on the one hand, and self-tormenting scruples that never led to action, on the other. But civil courage can grow only from the free responsibility of the free man. Only today are Germans beginning to discover what free responsibility means. It is founded in a God who calls for the free venture of faith to responsible action and who promises forgiveness and consolation to the one who on account of such action becomes a sinner. On Success While indeed it is not true that success justifies even the evil deed and the reprehensible means, it is similarly out of the question to regard success as something that is ethically wholly neutral. It so happens that historical success creates the ground on which alone life can go on. The question remains as to whether it is ethically more responsible to go to war like Don Quixote against a new age or, conceding one’s defeat, to consent finally and freely to serving the new age. Success, after all, makes history, and the One who guides history always creates good from the bad over the heads of the men who make history. It is a short circuit when the stickler for principle, thinking ahistorically and hence irresponsibly, simply ignores the ethical significance of success. It is good that for once we are forced to engage seriously the ethical problem of success. As long as the good is successful, we can afford the luxury of thinking of success as ethically irrelevant. But the problem arises when success is brought about through evil means. In the face of such a situation, we learn that neither the onlooker’s theoretical critique and self-justification, that is, the refusal to enter into the arena of facts, nor opportunism, that is, disavowal and capitulation in the face of success, does justice to the task at hand. We may not and do not desire to act like offended critics or opportunists. Case by case and in each moment, as victors or vanquished, we desire to be those who are co-responsible for the shaping of history. The one who allows nothing that happens to deprive him of his co-responsibility for the course of history, knowing that it is God who placed it upon him, will find a fruitful relation to the events of history, beyond fruitless criticism and equally fruitless opportunism. Talk of going down heroically in the face of unavoidable defeat is basically quite nonheroic because it

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does not dare to face the future. The ultimately responsible question is not how I extricate myself heroically from a situation but [how] a coming generation is to go on living. Only from such a historically responsible question will fruitful solutions arise, however humiliating they may be for the moment. In short, it is much easier to see a situation through on the basis of principle than in concrete responsibility. The younger generation will always have the surest sense whether an action is done merely in terms of principle or from living responsibly, for it is their future that is at stake. On Stupidity Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind at least a sense of unease in human beings. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed—in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical—and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous. If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature. This much is certain, that in essence it is not an intellectual defect but a human one. There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid. We discover this to our surprise in particular situations. The impression one gains is not so much that stupidity is a congenital defect but that, under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or that they allow this to happen to them. We note further that people who have isolated themselves from others or who live in solitude manifest this defect less frequently than individuals or groups of people inclined or condemned to sociability. And so it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem. It is a particular form of the

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impact of historical circumstances on human beings, a psychological concomitant of certain external conditions. Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. It would even seem that this is virtually a sociological-psychological law. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings. Yet at this very point it becomes quite clear that only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity. Here we must come to terms with the fact that in most cases a genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it. Until then we must abandon all attempts to convince the stupid person. This state of affairs explains why in such circumstances our attempts to know what “the people” really think are in vain and why, under these circumstances, this question is so irrelevant for the person who is thinking and acting responsibly. The biblical passage, that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, states that the internal liberation of human beings to live the responsible life before God is the only genuine way to overcome stupidity. But these thoughts about stupidity also offer consolation in that they utterly forbid us to consider the majority of people to be stupid in every circumstance. It really will depend on whether those in power expect more from people’s stupidity than from their inner independence and wisdom.

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Contempt for Humanity? The danger of allowing ourselves to be driven to contempt for humanity is very real. We know very well that we have no right to let this happen and that it would lead us into the most unfruitful relation to human beings. The following thoughts may protect us against this temptation: through contempt for humanity we fall victim precisely to our opponents’ chief errors. Whoever despises another human being will never be able to make anything of him. Nothing of what we despise in another is itself foreign to us. How often do we expect more of the other than what we ourselves are willing to accomplish? Why is it that we have hitherto thought with so little sobriety about the temptability and frailty of human beings? We must learn to regard human beings less in terms of what they do and neglect to do, and more in terms of what they suffer. The only fruitful relation to human beings—particularly to the weak among them—is love, that is, the will to enter into and to keep community with them. God did not hold human beings in contempt but became human for their sake. Immanent Justice It is one of the most astonishing experiences and also one of the most incontrovertible that evil—often in a surprisingly short span of time—proves itself to be stupid and impractical. That does not mean that punishment follows hard on the heels of each individual evil deed; what it does mean is that the suspension of God’s commandments on principle, in the supposed interest of earthly self-preservation, acts precisely against what this self-preservation seeks to accomplish. One can interpret in various ways this experience that has fallen to us. In any case, one thing has emerged that seems certain: in the common life of human beings, there are laws that are stronger than everything that believes it can supersede them, and that it is therefore not only wrong but unwise to disregard these laws. This helps us understand why Aristotelian-Thomistic ethics elevated wisdom to be one of the cardinal virtues. Wisdom and stupidity are not ethically indifferent, as the neoProtestant ethics of conscience wanted us to believe. In the fullness of the concrete situation and in the possibilities it offers, the wise person discerns the impassable limits that are imposed on every action by the abiding laws of human communal life. In this discernment the wise person acts well and the good person acts wisely.

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There is clearly no historically significant action that does not trespass now and again against the limits set by those laws. But it makes a decisive difference whether such trespasses against the established limit are viewed as their abolishment in principle and hence presented as a law of its own kind, or whether one is conscious of perhaps an unavoidable guilt in such trespassing, seeing its justification only in the reinstatement and honoring of that law and limit as quickly as possible. It is not necessarily hypocrisy when the aim of political action is said to be the establishment of justice and not simply self-preservation. The world is, in fact, so ordered that the fundamental honoring of life’s basic laws and rights at the same time best serves self-preservation, and that these laws tolerate a very brief, singular, and, in the individual case, necessary trespass against them. But those laws will sooner or later—and with irresistible force—strike dead those who turn necessity into a principle and as a consequence set up a law of their own alongside them. History’s immanent justice rewards and punishes the deed only, but the eternal justice of God tries and judges the hearts. Some Statements of Faith on God’s Action in History I believe that God can and will let good come out of everything, even the greatest evil. For that to happen, God needs human beings who let everything work out for the best. I believe that in every moment of distress God will give us as much strength to resist as we need. But it is not given to us in advance, lest we rely on ourselves and not on God alone. In such faith all fear of the future should be overcome. I believe that even our mistakes and shortcomings are not in vain and that it is no more difficult for God to deal with them than with our supposedly good deeds. I believe that God is no timeless fate but waits for and responds to sincere prayer and responsible actions. Trust Few have been spared the experience of being betrayed. The figure of Judas, once so incomprehensible, is hardly strange to us. The air in which we live is so poisoned with mistrust that we almost die from it. But where we broke through the layer of mistrust, we were allowed to experience a trust hitherto utterly undreamed of. There, where we trust, we have learned to place our lives in the hands of others; contrary to all the ambiguities in which our acts and lives must exist,

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we have learned to trust without reserve. We now know that one can truly live and work only in such trust, which is always a venture but one gladly affirmed. We know that to sow and to nourish mistrust is one of the most reprehensible things and that, instead, trust is to be strengthened and advanced wherever possible. For us trust will be one of the greatest, rarest, and most cheering gifts bestowed by the life we humans live together, and yet it always emerges only against the dark background of a necessary mistrust. We have learned to commit our lives on no account into the hands of the ignoble but without reserve into the hands of the trustworthy. The Sense of Quality When we lack the courage once again to establish a genuine sense of boundaries between human beings and personally to fight for them, we perish in an anarchy of human values. The impudence that has its being in the contempt for all such boundaries is just as much a mark of the rabble as the inward uncertainty, haggling, and courting the favor of the insolent; making common cause with rabble is the way toward rendering oneself rabble. When one no longer knows what one owes oneself and others, where the sense for human quality and the strength to respect boundaries cease to exist, chaos is at the door. When for the sake of material comfort one tolerates impudence, one has already surrendered, there the floods of chaos have been permitted to burst the dam at the place where it was to be defended, and one becomes guilty of all that follows. In other times it may have been the task of Christianity to testify to the equality of all human beings; today it is Christianity in particular that should passionately defend the respect for human boundaries and human qualities. The misinterpretation that it is a matter of self-interest, or the cheap allegation that it is an antisocial attitude, must be resolutely faced. They are the perennial reproaches of the rabble against order. Whoever becomes soft and unsure here does not understand what is at stake, and presumably those reproaches may well apply to him. We are in the midst of a process of coarsening at every level of society. But we are also at the hour of a new sense of nobility being born that binds together a circle of human beings drawn from all existing social classes. Nobility arises from and exists by sacrifice, courage, and a clear sense of what one owes oneself and others, by the self-evident expectation of the respect one is due, and by an equally self-evident observance of the same respect for those above

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and those below. The issue across the board is the rediscovery of experiences of quality that have been buried under so much rubble, of an order based on quality. Quality is the strongest foe of every kind of leveling of society. Socially this means abandoning the pursuit of position, breaking with the star cult, an opening out upward and downward particularly in connection with the choice of one’s friends, a delight in private life and courage for public life. Culturally the experience of quality signals a return from the newspaper and radio to the book, from haste to leisure and stillness, from distraction to composure, from the sensational to reflection, from idealized virtuosity to art, from snobbery to modesty, from extravagance to moderation. Quantities compete for space; qualities complement one another. Sympathy We have to consider that most people learn wisdom only through personal experiences. This explains, first, the astonishing inability of most people to take any kind of preventive action—one always believes that he can evade the danger, until it is too late. Second, it explains people’s dulled sensitivity toward the suffering of others; sympathy grows in proportion to the increasing fear of the threatening proximity of disaster. There is some justification in ethics for such an attitude: one does not want to interfere with fate; inner calling and the power to act are given only when things have become serious. No one is responsible for all of the world’s injustice and suffering, nor does one want to establish oneself as the judge of the world. And there is some justification also in psychology: the lack of imagination, sensitivity, and inner alertness is balanced by strong composure, unperturbed energy for work, and great capacity for suffering. From a Christian perspective, none of these justifications can blind us to the fact that what is decisively lacking here is a greatness of heart. Christ withdrew from suffering until his hour had come; then he walked toward it in freedom, took hold, and overcame it. Christ, so the Scripture tells us, experienced in his own body the whole suffering of all humanity as his own—an incomprehensibly lofty thought!—taking it upon himself in freedom. Certainly, we are not Christ, nor are we called to redeem the world through our own deed and our own suffering; we are not to burden ourselves with impossible things and torture ourselves with not being able to bear them. We are not lords but instruments in the hands of the Lord of history; we can truly share only in a limited measure in the suffering of

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others. We are not Christ, but if we want to be Christians it means that we are to take part in Christ’s greatness of heart, in the responsible action that in freedom seizes the hour and faces the danger, and in the true sympathy that springs forth not from fear but from Christ’s freeing and redeeming love for all who suffer. Inactive waiting and dully looking on are not Christian responses. Christians are called to action and sympathy not through their own firsthand experiences but by the immediate experience of their brothers, for whose sake Christ suffered. On Suffering It is infinitely easier to suffer in obedience to a human command than in the freedom of one’s very own responsible action. It is infinitely easier to suffer in community with others than in solitude. It is infinitely easier to suffer publicly and with honor than in the shadow and in dishonor. It is infinitely easier to suffer through putting one’s bodily life at stake than to suffer through the spirit. Christ suffered in freedom, in solitude, in the shadow, and in dishonor, in body and in spirit. Since then, many Christians have suffered with him. Present and Future To this day, it seemed to us that developing a plan for our professional and personal life was one of the inalienable rights of human life. That has come to an end. Through the weight of circumstances, we have been put into the situation where we must forgo “worrying about tomorrow.” But there is a crucial difference as to whether this results from the free response of faith, as the Sermon on the Mount states, or is coerced subservience to the demands of the present moment. For most people the enforced renunciation of planning for the future means that they succumb to living only for the moment at hand, irresponsibly, frivolously, or resignedly; some still dream longingly of a more beautiful future and try thereby to forget the present. For us, both of these courses are equally impossible. What remains for us is only the very narrow path, sometimes barely discernible, of taking each day as if it were the last and yet living it faithfully and responsibly as if there were yet to be a great future. “Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land,” Jeremiah is told to proclaim—in paradoxical contradiction to his prophecies of woe—just before the destruction of the holy city; facing the utter collapse of any hope for the future, those

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words were a divine sign and a pledge of a great, new future. To think and to act with an eye on the coming generation and to be ready to move on without fear and worry—that is the course that has, in practice, been forced upon us. To hold it courageously is not easy but necessary. Optimism It is more sensible to be pessimistic; disappointments are left behind, and one can face people unembarrassed. Hence, the clever frown upon optimism. In its essence optimism is not a way of looking at the present situation but a power of life, a power of hope when others resign, a power to hold our heads high when all seems to have come to naught, a power to tolerate setbacks, a power that never abandons the future to the opponent but lays claim to it. Certainly, there is a stupid, cowardly optimism that must be frowned upon. But no one ought to despise optimism as the will for the future, however many times it is mistaken. It is the health of life that the ill dare not infect. There are people who think it frivolous and Christians who think it impious to hope for a better future on earth and to prepare for it. They believe in chaos, disorder, and catastrophe, perceiving it in what is happening now. They withdraw in resignation or pious flight from the world, from the responsibility for ongoing life, for building anew, for the coming generations. It may be that the day of judgment will dawn tomorrow; only then and no earlier will we readily lay down our work for a better future. Peril and Death In recent years we have become increasingly familiar with the thought of death. We ourselves are surprised by the composure with which we accept the news of the death of our contemporaries. We can no longer hate Death so much; we have discovered something of kindness in his features and are almost reconciled to him. Deep down we seem to feel that we are his already and that each new day is a miracle. It would not be correct to say that we die gladly—even though no one is unacquainted with that weariness, which ought not to be allowed to arise under any circumstances. We are too inquisitive for that, or, to put it more seriously, we would like to see something more of our fragmented life’s meaning. But we do not make of Death a hero either; life

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is too great and too dear for us to do so. Still more do we refuse to look for the meaning of life in danger; we are not desperate enough to do so and know too much of the treasures of life. We also know too well the fear for life and all the other destructive effects of unrelenting imperilment of life. We still love life, but I believe that Death can no longer surprise us. After what we have experienced in the war, we hardly dare acknowledge our wish that Death will find us completely engaged in the fullness of life, rather than by accident, suddenly, away from what really matters. It is not external circumstances but we ourselves who shall make of our death what it can be, a death consented to freely and voluntarily. Are We Still of Any Use? We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds. We have become cunning and learned the arts of obfuscation and equivocal speech. Experience has rendered us suspicious of human beings, and often we have failed to speak to them a true and open word. Unbearable conflicts have worn us down or even made us cynical. Are we still of any use? We will not need geniuses, cynics, people who have contempt for others, or cunning tacticians, but simple, uncomplicated, and honest human beings. Will our inner strength to resist what has been forced on us have remained strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves blunt enough, to find our way back to simplicity and honesty? The View from Below It remains an experience of incomparable value that we have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and reviled, in short, from the perspective of the suffering. If only during this time bitterness and envy have not corroded the heart; that we come to see matters great and small, happiness and misfortune, strength and weakness with new eyes; that our sense for greatness, humanness, justice, and mercy has grown clearer, freer, more incorruptible; that we learn, indeed, that personal suffering is a more useful key, a more fruitful principle than personal happiness for exploring the meaning of the world in contemplation and action. But this perspective from below must not lead us to become advocates for those who are perpetually dissatisfied. Rather, out of a

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higher satisfaction, which in its essence is grounded beyond what is below and above, we do justice to life in all its dimensions and in this way affirm it.

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Suggestions for Further Reading

Works by Dietrich Bonhoeffer Discipleship. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works—Reader’s Edition. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2015. Ethics. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works—Reader’s Edition. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2015. Letters and Papers from Prison. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works—Reader’s Edition. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2015. Life Together. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works—Reader’s Edition. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2015.

Works by Other Authors Victoria Barnett. For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest against Hitler. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Eberhard Bethge. Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography. Revised Edition, Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2000. Sabine Dramm. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Resistance. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2009. Martin E. Marty. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “Letters and Papers from Prison”: A Biography. Lives of Great Religious Books. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern. No Ordinary Men: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi: Resisters Against Hitler in Church and State. New York: New York Review Books Collection, 2013.

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Christiane Tietz. Theologian of Resistance: The Life and Thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2016. Inge Jens, ed. At the Heart of the White Rose: Letters and Diaries of Hans and Sophie Scholl. Plough Publishing House, Reprint. 2017.

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About the Authors

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) is one of the mostly widely read and influential Protestant theologians of the twentieth century. A German theologian, pastor, and ecumenist, he studied in Berlin and at Union Theological Seminary in New York. After 1933 he became a leading voice in the Confessing Church and an international advocate for its witness under National Socialism. From 1935 to 1939 he directed a theological seminary for the Confessing Church. After the Second World War began he was connected to the German resistance circles planning the overthrow of the Nazi regime. He was arrested and imprisoned in April 1943; he was executed on April 9, 1945, as were one of his brothers and two brothers-in-law. Bonhoeffer’s theological depth, his courageous witness, and his provocative writings continue to speak to people around the world. His books Discipleship, Life Together, Ethics, and Letters and Papers from Prison have become spiritual classics. Victoria J. Barnett served from 2004 to 2014 as one of the general editors of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, the English translation series of Bonhoeffer’s complete works published by Fortress Press. She is an expert on Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the history of the churches and the international interfaith community during the Holocaust, and has published and lectured widely on these topics. She is the author of For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest against Hitler (Oxford University Press, 1992) and Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity during the Holocaust (Greenwood Press, 1999). She is also the translator of Christiane

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Tietz, Theologian of Resistance: The Life and Thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Fortress Press, 2016). Since 2004 she has directed the Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She is a graduate of Indiana University, Union Theological Seminary (New York), and George Mason University.

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How does one read the signs of the times? What does it mean to resist? Dietrich Bonhoeffer has achieved iconic status as one who epitomizes both what it means to struggle and resist tyranny and fascism and how one acts in faithful witness as a religious and political commitment. The complexity of Bonhoeffer’s witness and example is more relevant than ever. A testimony to that is a crucial essay penned by Bonhoeffer in 1942; “After Ten Years” is a succinct and sober reflection and remains one of the best descriptions ever written about what happened to the German people under National Socialism. Victoria J. Barnett presents this timely and unique essay with a penetrating introduction and analysis of its importance—in Bonhoeffer’s time and now in our own.

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B o n h o effer an d R es i stan c e

Praise for “After Ten Years” “Victoria J. Barnett, like few others can do, brings alive Bonhoeffer’s powerful words to ask us to consider our place in history and how we will deal with the ground under our own feet. No one can read her brilliant essay or Bonhoeffer’s own reflections without pondering their urgent relevance today.” —Mike McCurry , former White House Press Secretary, Wesley Theological Seminary

“This brief new work elevates Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ‘After Ten Years’ essay to the central place in the Bonhoeffer canon that it deserves. Barnett’s new introduction to this seminal Bonhoeffer text helps readers understand it better in its own context—and in the context of our own troubled times. Highly recommended.” “Readers of this text will find in its pages a work that has the ability to inform their context with depth and insight. This is an amazing accomplishment considering that a young German scholar wrote it in 1942. Victoria J. Barnett’s treatment of this text is a significantly helpful complement to the essay for contemporary readers.” —Reggie L. Williams , McCormick Theological Seminary

“With great finesse, Victoria J. Barnett’s introduction to ‘After Ten Years’ honors Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s resistance to Hitler without exaggerating it. She also cautiously, almost indirectly, invites readers to consider Bonhoeffer’s work in light of our own troubled political time. Her analysis and summary of this important document will be invaluable to anyone interested in Bonhoeffer’s work and the historical context in which it was written.” —Nancy Duff , Princeton Theological Seminary

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—David P. Gushee , Mercer University, president of the Society of Christian Ethics

“AFTER TEN YEARS” Di e t ri ch Bonhoe f f e r and Our Ti me s

D i e t r i c h B o n h o e f f e r (1906–1945) was a German pastor and theologian whose striking theological journey and public witness against the Nazi regime led to worldwide fame after his death in 1945. V i c t o r i a J . B a r n e t t served from 2004 to 2014 as one of the general editors of the Dietrich

Bonhoeffer Works, the English translation series of Bonhoeffer’s complete works published by Fortress Press. She has lectured and written extensively about the Holocaust, particularly about the role of the German churches. Her published works include Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity during the Holocaust (1999) and For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest against Hitler (1992). She is a graduate of Indiana University, Union Theological Seminary, New York, and George Mason University.  Religion / Theology

Edited and introduced by Victoria J. Barnett