Letters and Papers From Prison (46 page)

I’ve again seen from our conversation recently that no one can interpret my thoughts better than you can. That is always a great satisfaction to me. How and where will you find your unit again after the move from Rome? God bless you, wherever you are.

In faithfulness and gratitude.

Your Dietrich

THE PAST

O happiness beloved, and pain beloved in heaviness,
you went from me.
What shall I call you? Anguish, life, blessedness,
part of myself, my heart - the past?
The door was slammed;
I hear your steps depart and slowly die away.
What now remains for me - torment, delight, desire?
This only do I know: that with you, all has gone.
But do you feel how I now grasp at you
and so clutch hold of you
that it must hurt you?
How I so rend you
that your blood gushes out,
simply to be sure that you are near me,
a life in earthly form, complete?
Do you divine my terrible desire
for my own suffering,
my eager wish to see my own blood flow,
only that all may not go under,
lost in the past?

Life, what have you done to me?
Why did you come? Why did you go?
Past, when you flee from me,
are you not still my past, my own?
As o’er the sea the sun sinks ever faster,
as if it moved towards the darkness,
so does your image sink and sink and sink
without a pause
into the ocean of the past,
and waves engulf it.
As the warm breath dissolves
in the cool morning air,
so does your image vanish from me,
and I forget your face, your hands, your form.
There comes a smile, a glance, a greeting;
it fades, dissolves,
comfortless, distant,
is destroyed, is past.

I would inhale the fragrance of your being,
absorb it, stay with it,
as on hot summer days the heavy blossoms welcoming the bees
intoxicate them,
as privet makes the hawk-moths drunken-
but a harsh gust destroys both scent and blossoms,
and I stand like a fool
seeking a past that vanished.

It is as if parts of my flesh were torn out with red-hot pincers,
when you, a part of my life that is past, so quickly depart.
Raging defiance and anger beset me,
reckless and profitless questions I fling into space.
‘Why, why, why?’ I keep on repeating -
why cannot my senses hold you,
life now passing, now past?
Thus I will think, and think anew,
until I find what I have lost.

But I feel
that everything around me, over, under me
is smiling at me, unmoved, enigmatic,
smiling at my hopeless efforts
to grasp the wind,
to capture what has gone.

Evil comes into my eye and soul;
what I see, I hate;
I hate what moves me;
all that lives I hate, all that is lovely,
all that would recompense me for my loss.
I want my life; I claim my own life back again,
my past, yourself.
Yourself. A tear wells up and fills my eye;
can I, in mists of tears,
regain your image,
yourself entire?
But I will not weep;
only the strong are helped by tears,
weaklings they make ill.

Wearily I come to the evening;
welcome are bed and oblivion
now that my own is denied me.
Night, blot out what separates, give me oblivion,
in charity perform your kindly office;
to you I trust myself.
But night is wise and mighty,
wiser than I, and mightier than day,
What no earthly power can do,
what is denied to thoughts and senses, to defiance, to tears,
night brings me, in its bounty overflowing.
Unharmed by hostile time,
pure, free, and whole,
you are brought to me by dream,
you, my past, my life,
you, the day and hour but lately gone.

Close to you I waken in the dead of night, and start with fear -
are you lost to me once more? Is it always vainly that I seek you,
you, my past?
I stretch my hands out,
and I pray -
and a new thing now I hear:
‘The past will come to you once more,
and be your life’s enduring part,
through thanks and repentance.
Feel in the past God’s forgiveness and goodness,
pray him to keep you today and tomorrow.’

To Eberhard Bethge

[Tegel] 6 June 1944

Dear Eberhard,

I’m sending you this hurried greeting, simply because I want in some way to share the day
⁴⁹
with you yourself and with all of you. The news didn’t come as a surprise to me, and yet things turn out differently from what we expect. Today’s texts take us to the heart of the gospel - ‘redemption’ is the key word to it all. Let us face the coming weeks in faith and in great assurance about the general future, and commit your way and all our ways to God.

Your Dietrich

From Eberhard Bethge

[Sakrow] 6 June 1944

Dear Dietrich,

Many thanks for your letter. The sermon has come. Above all, thank you for the two meditations. I’ve read them once for myself and thank you very much for the helpful, brotherly word …

Frau von Kleist writes today that she has heard that the grandparents gave me their permission to visit. She’s so pleased about it: ‘How heart-rending it will have been for the two of you.’ Yes, of course it was ‘heart-rending’, but that’s an aspect that one didn’t notice so much. Instead, we get down to things very quickly in a cheerful and concentrated way. The reason for that is that you aren’t sorry for yourself, and don’t seek recognition of your ‘role’. The Bultmann letter is still missing. As far as I can tell I can rely on comrade R[ainalter]. Things got going in the West today. I hadn’t expected it yet; but I’m glad you’ve at last won a bet. I’ve heard from the wife of a comrade here that the Velletri people have all settled well in the northern place.
⁵⁰
Meanwhile they will have gone further. And I must search. Many greetings and thanks; keep cheerful.

Your Eberhard

Wednesday evening. Many thanks for the further letter which I found here with the parents. Also for the one to Justus, which he will get tomorrow. Off early tomorrow.

Your Eberhard

To Eberhard Bethge

[Tegel] 8 June 1944

Dear Eberhard,

While you’re spending your first hours in the train and moving further away from us hour by hour, my thoughts are going with you; perhaps this letter will meet up with you just at the time when you reach your new destination. It was a special delight to get another letter from you early this morning. That you were as glad about our meeting as I was is reassuring, as I’d already been thinking that I had robbed you of this whole afternoon … In some respects at least, you will have left with a lighter heart than you had feared at first. We had put off our meeting from Christmas to Easter, and then from Easter to Whitsuntide; one feast went by, and then another. But the next feast is sure to be ours; I’ve no doubt about that now. It’s good that you saw Karl-Friedrich. He’s written me such a good letter again. It’s probably
hard for Klaus to find a starting point after so long a time.
⁵¹
I really know that it isn’t a lack of warm-heartedness … Klaus has inherited mother’s tendency to complicate things and her natural need to help, together with father’s uncommonly wise foresight … There is hardly anything more stimulating than to have a conversation with him, and I can’t think of a more kind-hearted and generous, more distinguished character than he is, but he is not the man for the simple … decisions of life …

There are always reasons for not doing something; the question is whether one does them nevertheless. If one only wants to do something that has
everything
in its favour, one will never get round to doing anything, or rather, the action will no longer be necessary because other people will already have anticipated one in it. Every real action is of such a kind that no one other than oneself can do it. I am, however, clear that I must first have this conversation with myself, for you know best how difficult I often find it to make up my mind in little things. This must be a legacy of my grandfather Bonhoeffer.

I was very pleased about Sabine’s and G.’s
⁵²
greetings (I hadn’t known anything about either of them … I had often asked!).

You now ask so many important questions on the subjects that have been occupying me lately, that I should be happy if I could answer them myself. But it’s all very much in the early stages; and, as usual, I’m being led on more by an instinctive feeling for questions that will arise later than by any conclusions that I’ve already reached about them. I’ll try to define my position from the historical angle.

The movement that began about the thirteenth century (I’m not going to get involved in any argument about the exact date) towards the autonomy of man (in which I should include the discovery of the laws by which the world lives and deals with itself in science, social and political matters, art, ethics, and religion) has in our time reached an undoubted completion. Man has learnt to deal with himself in all questions of importance without recourse to the ‘working hypothesis’ called ‘God’. In questions of science, art, and ethics this has become an understood thing at which one now hardly dares to tilt. But for the last hundred years or so it has
also become increasingly true of religious questions; it is becoming evident that everything gets along without ‘God’ - and, in fact, just as well as before. As in the scientific field, so in human affairs generally, ‘God’ is being pushed more and more out of life, losing more and more ground.

Roman Catholic and Protestant historians agree that it is in this development that the great defection from God, from Christ, is to be seen; and the more they claim and play off God and Christ against it, the more the development considers itself to be anti-Christian. The world that has become conscious of itself and the laws that govern its own existence has grown self-confident in what seems to us to be an uncanny way. False developments and failures do not make the world doubt the necessity of the course that it is taking, or of its development; they are accepted with fortitude and detachment as part of the bargain, and even an event like the present war is no exception. Christian apologetic has taken the most varied forms of opposition to this self-assurance. Efforts are made to prove to a world thus come of age that it cannot live without the tutelage of’God’. Even though there has been surrender on all secular problems, there still remain the so-called ‘ultimate questions’ - death, guilt - to which only ‘God’ can give an answer, and because of which we need God and the church and the pastor. So we live, in some degree, on these so-called ultimate questions of humanity. But what if one day they no longer exist as such, if they too can be answered ‘without God’? Of course, we now have the secularized offshoots of Christian theology, namely existentialist philosophy and the psychotherapists, who demonstrate to secure, contented, and happy mankind that it is really unhappy and desperate and simply unwilling to admit that it is in a predicament about which it knows nothing, and from which only they can rescue it. Wherever there is health, strength, security, simplicity, they scent luscious fruit to gnaw at or to lay their pernicious eggs in. They set themselves to drive people to inward despair, and then the game is in their hands. That is secularized methodism. And whom does it touch? A small number of intellectuals, of degenerates, of people who regard themselves as the most important thing in the world, and who therefore like to busy themselves
with themselves. The ordinary man, who spends his everyday life at work and with his family, and of course with all kinds of diversions, is not affected. He has neither the time nor the inclination to concern himself with his existential despair, or to regard his perhaps modest share of happiness as a trial, a trouble, or a calamity.

The attack by Christian apologetic on the adulthood of the world I consider to be in the first place pointless, in the second place ignoble, and in the third place unchristian. Pointless, because it seems to me like an attempt to put a grown-up man back into adolescence, i.e. to make him dependent on things on which he is, in fact, no longer dependent, and thrusting him into problems that are, in fact, no longer problems to him. Ignoble, because it amounts to an attempt to exploit man’s weakness for purposes that are alien to him and to which he has not freely assented. Unchristian, because it confuses Christ with one particular stage in man’s religiousness, i.e. with a human law. More about this later.