THE MEANING MAZE

THE MUTILATION OF MEANING

Wisdom and sensible advice,

when clothed in the garments of familiarity and routine,

including a heavy coat of effort and toil,

are readily judged to be suited to another season and put aside.

VOICES

In 1912 Karl and Paula Bonhoeffer arrived in Berlin from Breslau, in eastern Germany (now Wroclaw, in Poland), where Karl had begun his outstanding career on the celebrated medical faulty at Breslau University, and where Paula had grown up. Karl was descended from a patrician family in Württemberg; his forefathers were doctors and lawyers . . . his new appointment, in 1912, as head of neurology and psychiatry at the Charité, Berlin’s principal hospital, put him at the pinnacle of the German psychiatric profession.

The Bonhoeffers had eight healthy children, four girls and four boys, when they moved four years later to Grunewald, the pleasant, leafy district of Berlin that was popular with the capital’s upper classes. They lived austerely, in Spartan luxury, in a comfortable big house with a big garden . . . The children’s uncle Hans von Hase lived in a rectory nearby, as did their maternal grandfather, the well-known theologian Karl-Alfred von Hase. Other neighbors and colleagues included the historian and theologian Adolf von Harnack and his family; the physicist and Nobel laureate Max Planck and his family; Planck’s brother-in-law the renowned historian Hans Delbrück, with his seven children, among them Justus, Emilie, and Max (a Nobel laureate-to-be); and the museum director Richard Schöne, who was next door. There was also a significant presence of highly assimilated Jews – some of them friends of the family. . . .

In 1914, with the outbreak of the Great War, most of the elite of Germany’s clergy and professoriat thrilled to what they saw as a challenge to the nation, a moral trial for Germany that would purge it of its all-consuming materialism. The Bonhoeffers too were proud of their country and hopeful about its future, but as the horrors of the war continued so remorselessly over the next three years, they shrank from the nationalist superpatriots who clamored for a victory that would ensure Germany’s invincible supremacy in Europe. . . . in April 1918 the second son, Walter, died of wounds incurred in Germany’s last great spring offensive. . . .

The death of Walter and, within months, the wounding of the oldest brother, Karl-Friedrich, and the call-up of the younger Klaus devastated Mrs. Bonhoeffer, who withdrew to a darkened bedroom . . .

That the Great War was the Ur-catastrophe of the twentieth century has become common wisdom in our time; for Dr. Bonhoeffer it was probably his formative political experience, the first occasion, for him – as for many Germans – when public events shook and overwhelmed private lives. . . . As we shall see, his political and professional antennae were sensitively attuned to the emergence of psychopathic leaders in times of upheaval. He did not become a political person, but in a distant and professional manner he understood the psychic dramas of the post-1918 world. . . .

Most Germans were stunned by their nation’s sudden defeat in 1918, the road to it having been so well hidden by wartime censorship, and many mourned the disappearance of ancient monarchies and dynasties; they considered the Weimar Republic with its revolutionary trappings as a strange, alien excrescence on the body of their nation. The questions “Who lost the war?” and then “Who accepted the ignominious peace of Versailles?” were dominant. Hitler’s answer — that Jews and marxists had — was a basic tenet of his unceasing propaganda in the 1920s, and it appeared to Germans as an escape from the truth. Also, virtually all Germans were outraged by the harsh terms of the Versailles Treaty (as were some non-Germans, notably John Maynard Keynes): the right seethed in resentment of President Wilson’s “betrayal,” moderates despised the treaty yet were prepared to work for its gradual revision, and everyone was indignant about the “war-guilt” clause, which made Germany “solely” responsible for the outbreak of the war.  .  .  .

The Bonhoeffers were appalled by the ferocious mendacity and physical violence of right-wing nationalistic thugs and early nazis. And they were outraged by the murder in Berlin in 1922 of Weimar’s foreign minister, the Jewish industrialist and statesman Walther Rathenau, who was gunned down as he was driven to work from his home in Grunewald. They rightly — and instantly — saw this crime as a portent. Dietrich reported to Sabine [his twin sister] on June 25 that the day before, he and his classmates had heard in school “a strange crackling. It was the murder of Rathenau — only 300 meters from us. Swinish types [Schweinevolk] of rightist Bolsheviks [Rechtsbolschewisten].” (Dietrich rightly intuited an affinity of radical right-wing murderers and Bolsheviks. A year later, Karl Radek, a leading Comintern member, floated the idea of some kind of collaboration between Bolsheviks and right-wing German nationalists.) Christine wrote to her fiancé, Hans von Dohnanyi, then a law student in Berlin, that “of all the hideous acts of these accursed swastika people,” this was the worst yet. He did not disagree. Rathenau’s assassination signaled that Germany’s government was in serious danger, he told her on July 1. “The police have brought to light huge whole lists of [more] marked targets for murder.” Another letter to Dohnanyi, this one from Christine’s brother Klaus, reported on further sickening displays of loutish political behavior among his fellow law students: “Hans, only think of the trouble we shall have later with these people.” .  .  .

Given the family’s general tone, it was no surprise that they were all alarmed by Hitler’s political successes. “From the start,” Dr. Bonhoeffer wrote later, “we regarded the victory of National Socialism in 1933 and Hitler’s appointment as Reich chancellor as a misfortune — the entire family agreed on this. In my own case, I disliked and distrusted Hitler because of his demagogic propagandistic speeches, his sympathy-telegram after the murder,  . . . [and] because of what I heard from professional colleagues about his psychopathic symptoms.”

In 1924 the eighteen-year-old Sabine told her parents that she was engaged to Gerhard (Gert) Leibholz, a converted jew four years her senior with a promising career in law and state service. (Gert had met Klaus Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi years before, when, as boys, all three were being prepared for confirmation.)

Elizabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern (2013). No Ordinary Men: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnányi, Resisters Against Hitler in Church and State. New York: New York Review Books, pp. 7 – 17

 

Photos:

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (left, 1939) and Hans von Dohnányi (1940)

(Art Resource, NY): Cover photos for Elizabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern (2013). No Ordinary Men: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnányi, Resisters Against Hitler in Church and State. New York: New York Review Books

Accompanying Music:   

Ludwig van Beethoven    Symphony No. 7,   2. Allegretto  

Christoph von Dohnányi,    The Cleveland Orchestra    Telarc Digital