Bonhoeffer In Prison
By early April 1943, the Gestapo had gathered enough evidence to arrest Dietrich Bonhoeffer. On April 5th Bonhoeffer was at home and called the home of his sister and brother-in-law, the Von Dohananyis, around noon. Their phone was answered by an unfamiliar man’s voice, so Bonhoeffer hung up. He knew that the Gestapo had made their move. He informed his sister, Ursula, and told her he would be next. He returned to his room, put his papers in order, and had a meal with his father. Around 4:00 pm, his father came over and told him that there were two men upstairs that wanted to talk to him. He went to see them and took his Bible and a copy of Plutarch. He was escorted from his home in handcuffs to their black Mercedes. He was thirty-seven years old.
He would never return.
That night, April 5,1943, even though his Uncle had been the Commandant of Berlin, Bonhoeffer shivered from the cold in his reception cell. The blankets were soiled and the wooden bed very hard. He could not stand the stench. For a young man of privilege who had slept on the best linen and was always German clean, it this was very unclean. Someone wept loudly in the next cell. The next morning dry bread was tossed through a crack in the door. The staff had been instructed not to speak to the new arrival. The Warden called him a scoundrel. It would be four months before he was shown the warrant for his arrest. His first twelve days were spent in solitary confinement, shackled hand and foot. Nights carried the sobs of his fellow prisoners broken by confinement - his new congregation. Once he was released from solitary and given pen and paper, he would write prayers and blessings for his fellow prisoners. He would mail them to his parents who in turn would mail them directly to prisoners. These prayers were not spontaneous. They were carefully composed after hours of prayer and meditation.
Charles Marsh wrote these revealing words about Bonhoeffer:
“But God would not bring down the walls of the prison like those of Jericho. Nor would a violent earthquake shake the foundations, freeing him as Paul and Silas were freed in Acts. Bonhoeffer knew this. And so in the first weeks he fell into a deep despair. Over the years of the Kirchenkampf, he had observed holy silence and practiced the contemplative disciplines, but in solitary confinement, when silence was imposed, he did not feel the consoling presence of his beloved in Christ, only the cold surroundings of concrete and iron. It was overwhelming loss, to which no prayer or blessing seemed equal.” [1]
In a letter written to his best friend, Eberhard Bethge, after he had settled in, he described his daily routine:
“I’ve again been doing a good deal of writing lately and for the work that I have set for myself, the day is often too short. Sometimes, comically enough, I feel that I have “no time” here for this or that. After breakfast I read some theology and then write until midday; in the afternoon I read, then comes a chapter in Delbruck’s World History, some English grammar about which I can still learn all kinds of things and finally, as the mood take me, I write or read again. Then in the evening I am tired enough to be glad to lie down, though that does not mean going to sleep at once. Confinement produces opportunity.”
He told his parents that prison wasn’t all that bad; it was a “steam bath” for the soul. This was only partly true. He was being interrogated, he fought serious bouts of depression, he missed his friends and family terribly, and he lived with a continued sense of dread. He finally made it to cell block 25 where he would spend the next eighteen months. After talking about the freedom of not smoking, he took it up again once permitted. He was allowed thirty minutes a day outside for exercise. He told his parents, “Here in the prison yard a song thrush sings most wonderfully in the morning and now also at nightfall.” The simple pleasures took on a new power in his life. His family was suffering greatly. His brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyi, and brother, Klaus, were also in prison along with his sister, Christine. His parents were grief stricken and his mother, Paula, was as distressed as when she lost her eldest son, Walter, in the great war.
During the two years between his arrest and death, Bonhoeffer never stopped writing - letters, poems, prayers, drafts of novels, plays, stories outlines of future books and essays, aphorisms and exegeses of scripture, as well as sketches on various themes. Collectively, his letters and prison papers document a great unburdening of an active and varied mind who would have influenced the world in so many ways. Yet never as much as his ultimate death would.
Confinement and punishment squeeze the best and the worst from a person. This is the reason that we call our work The Bonhoeffer Project. Not only for his writing, but also for his living. Not only his living, but also for his dying.
Circumstances don’t create our spirit, they reveal it!
I must interject that once it became known who Bonhoeffer was, he was given special favors. At first it was not known that he was a Protestant-theologian and pastor; nor did they recognize him as the son of the famous psychiatrist, Dr. Karl Bonhoeffer, who, as a state employee, had received a dispensation from the Nazi Party to continue his directorship of Berlin’s Charity Hospital. Nor did they know that this Pastor Bonhoeffer was the nephew of General Paul von Hase, former city commandant of Berlin. Once this all came to light, the warden provided Bonhoeffer with more and better food, hot coffee, and cigarettes. He was even served meals on the same china as the guards a few times a week. He was treated with exceptional kindness and some guards even came to apologize. Sometimes the commandant of Tegal would take walks with Bonhoeffer. His parents were given special visitation privileges. His uncle, a German General, visited once and they sat and drank champagne for five hours.
For Bonhoeffer, the rickety scaffolding of Protestantism had finally tumbled to the ground in the wake of the German church’s complicity with the Nazis. A reckoning had come for the church. “If religion is the only garb in which Christianity is clothed - and this garb has looked very differently in different ages - what then is religionless Christianity?”[2]
