"Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy" by Eric Metaxas

“….at some point [Bonhoeffer] would be able to do nothing more than “suffer faithfully” in his cell, praising God as he did so, thanking him for the high privilege of being counted worthy to do so.”
(Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, Eric Metaxas (Thomas Nelson: 2010), p. 195

I can’t remember the last time I was so struck by a sentence. Like so many others under the age of about 55, I have watched organized religion become watered down to the point of being meaningless and airy words like “spirituality” replacing the much harder concept of “faith.”

In this accessible biography of the brilliant Lutheran pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer - hanged by the Nazis for his role in several assassination attempts on Hitler - Eric Metaxas explores the idea of faith in a hopeless world. Bonhoeffer, one of eight offspring, grew up in an extraordinary cultured, intellectual German family. His father, Karl Bonhoeffer, was a renowned professor of psychology and neurology. Bonhoeffer was not the only one in his family who joined the German resistance movement. His brother-in-law, an eminent German jurist, Karl von Dohnanyi and his brother Klaus Bonhoeffer were both executed for their participation. In the early 30s, as Germany began its descent,  Bonhoeffer was studying theology in New York. After a brief return to Germany, he moved to England and then back to New York in the summer of 1939.  He could have remained in either place, but in July 1939—weeks before the beginning of WWII—he was back in Berlin fully aware that his colleagues in the Church were being persecuted. He held no illusions as to where his fate lay.

We can find the reason why Bonhoeffer returns to Germany in the following quotes. The first is taken from a 1935 letter from Bonhoeffer to his brother, Karl-Friedrich, as Bonhoeffer is making a decision to lead the Confessing Church, an illegal seminary. The second was written from Tegal Prison in 1944.

The restoration of the church must surely depend on a new kind of monasticism, which has nothing in common with the old but a life of uncompromising discipleship, following Christ according to the Sermon on the Mount….Things do exist that are worth standing up for without compromise. To me it seems that peace and justice are such things as in Christ himself. (Metaxas, p. 260)

Who stands firm? Only the one for whom the final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all these, when in faith and sole allegiance to God he is called to obedient and responsible action: the responsible person, whose life will be nothing but an answer to God's question and call. (Metaxas, p. 432)

I can’t be the only one who finds these passages moving. But why? I think these words resonate because faith gave Bonhoeffer both courage and comfort- two feelings which most of us struggle to find in our daily lives.

Faith, for Bonhoeffer, meant a belief in something bigger than himself. It was this belief, this devotion, this faith in the larger idea that enabled him to act. What we learn then from Bonhoeffer is that to act when someone is holding a gun to your head requires a disciplined, unshaken faith in something larger than yourself. It is only faith, by this definition, that gives you the courage to act in a hopeless world.

We don’t talk about faith like this today. Faith is associated with God and talking about God has become embarrassing. Further, most of us live in a safe and peaceful world, quite the opposite of 1930’s Germany. We don’t need to have faith in something larger than ourselves. We don’t need to have that kind of courage. It suffices today to have faith only in oneself.

Or does it?

Faith in something bigger than himself clearly gave Bonhoeffer courage, but if you read the opening quote, you will see that it also gave him comfort. When he sat desperate for eighteen months in his cell in Tegal Prison, he prayed daily and engaged in his habit of scriptural meditation, that is, he spoke—we don’t know whether he did this in his head or out loud—words that had been spoken for hundreds of years, by his historical predecessors and by his contemporaries. What can this martyred Lutheran pastor teach us here?

Let me offer a personal example. There is a service contained within Yom Kippur, the holy Day of Atonement for Jews around the world, called Yizkor. This is a short service where one recites a memorial prayer that may date from the time of the Crusades in the 11^th century. It is traditional for people who have not lost a parent, sibling, or child to excuse themselves from this service leaving only the community of mourners. When I thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer alone in his cell at Tegal praying alone, vulnerable, helpless in the face of inevitable death, I thought a lot about Yizkor because it is during this service that we too can feel alone, vulnerable, and helpless in the face of inevitable death. We think as we say these prayers for our parents:  who will say them for us and when?

How can Bonhoeffer’s view of faith as something bigger than ourselves be a comfort to us during this service? If you believe in God as Bonhoeffer did, the answer is clear: you derive comfort in the fact that God is bigger than you. But what if you, like me, have rejected the existence of a divine being.

First, I derive comfort in the fact that my community is bigger than I am. When I say the Yizkor prayer and look around the shul (it is actually a gym housed in a Jewish community centre) at all the people in my Toronto Jewish community, I realize I am just one of many, and that the community will go on with or without me. Second, I find enormous comfort in words that have been said for hundreds of years. That these words have survived and continue to be spoken provides a sense of historical connection to the past and a sense of continuity—they have been spoken before my lifetime, they are spoken in my lifetime, they will be spoken after my death. The words themselves are bigger than I am. They will outlive me, and I find that comforting. When I say these words with and in my community, I am part of something larger and therefore I am not alone.

Of course, as we know from the example of my earlier post on Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, that faith in words and ideas can be disastrous: the reason Bonhoeffer is executed for his faith is because others had faith in something else. For my next post, I will be looking carefully at one of the most important essays on words, George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, written about a year after Bonhoeffer’s execution.

[The English language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. (George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”, 1946)

Book: Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, A Righteous Gentile vs. The Third Reich (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2010)
The references in this posting relate to the e-book version of the text.

 

"Every Man Dies Alone" By Hans Fallada

Several years ago, I read one of the first anti-Nazi novels written immediately after WWII entitled, Every Man Dies Alone, by a well-known German author, Hans Fallada. Fallada, who was at one point in his career a favorite of Joseph Goebbels, wrote the book in 24 days but died just prior to its publication.

Every Man Dies Alone  is based on a true story of a husband and wife who lived in Hitler’s Berlin. This is a mid 20^th city held captive by Nazism. Its population exists in a constant state of fear. Any resistance—whether real or perceived—is punishable by death and not just your death, but the death of your family, associates and friends. And yet, as Fallada tells us, resistance happened. Upon hearing of the death of their son who was killed in action, the very quiet and peaceable, Otto and Anna Quangel, decide that in this city without freedom and without hope, they are going to do something. The something is actually quite mundane—even a bit silly to our 21^st c sensibilities: they drop postcards around the city: “Hitler has murdered my son.”  The Quangels will be betrayed, arrested, tortured and killed. They know this going in, and so does the reader.  We need to ask ourselves: what is Hans Fallada — who later in his career is also caught up in the Nazi mousetrap and incarcerated—trying to say to us almost 7 decades later? What are his ideas? How do they change how we live?

Fallada introduces two key themes that have influenced my reading over the last 2 years. First, that individuals must question their society’s Big Ideas. We do this to keep our politicians and journalists honest and clear in their thinking; we also do this to ensure we don’t wind up in Fallada’s Berlin.

 In an anthropology course I took in the early 90s called something like Cultures of Terror, my professor told us to beware of any word ending in “ism. Isms tend to represent Big Ideas. Vague ideas. Ideas that sometimes contain contradictions.  Writers, journalists, professors, politicians like to use “isms’. They slide these words easily into their writing and we the reader gloss over them and fool ourselves into thinking that a. we know what these words mean and b. that we and the author think these words mean the same thing. Think about it for a minute: Communism, Fascism, Socialism, Neoliberalism, Conservatism, and my personal favorite-post modernism. We all use these words. But what do these words mean? What context are they being used in? Who is using them, and how, and why? Are these words really benevolent or are they loaded with more unsavoury content? When we see these Big Ideas written by authors, journalists and politicians, we need to question them. This, I think, is what Fallada is trying to tell us.  His book is a warning of what happens when we become lazy and let others do our thinking for us.

Fallada’s second theme that has informed my reading is about individual heroism. The Quangels know that their resistance is futile. Why do they persist?  When the State (often in the name of a Big Idea) has a  machine gun with its hand on the trigger pointed at the heads of your spouse and children, how do you resist? What Individual Idea does one need to counter a State’s Big Idea?

My September 10th blog post on the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor who was part of the resistance movement against Hitler, will revisit this theme.

Book: Hans Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone. Melville House Publishing: 2009

Welcome to What the Redhead is Reading

As a history editor who publishes books for undergraduates, I always ask prospective authors: “99% of your students are not going to become history teachers. So….what do you want them to get out of your book? What ideas do you want them to understand? How does your book change how your readers think about their daily life?”

Today, there is a lot to read. We are inundated with words. But if we want to derive more meaning from what we read, we need to ask ourselves these same questions: “What did I get out of this sentence, this phrase, this chapter, this book?” “What ideas have I understood?” “How does this book change how I think about my own life?”

This book blog is my guide to reading more deeply. It is also, I hope, an introduction to books that you may not have considered ever picking up.

The best conversations I have with people these days are about books. I hope that this blog will serve as a place for discussion and debate and, of course, suggestions for books to read.

 All feedback is welcome.