Television Agent of Grace A theologian in
Nazi Germany
By RAYMOND A. SCHROTH
Six months ago, when the historians
searched their bookshelves and consciences for the central meaning of the
millennium and the century coming to an end, attention focused most on World
War II. Who was where when Hitler came to power?
Those of us who remember the 1930s and 1940s remember that there
were houses on the street with gold stars in the windows and others with
healthy young men still inexplicably at home in 1943. And the best movie of
1941 was Gary Cooper in Sergeant York, the story of a World War I
hillbilly sharpshooter who overcame his religious scruples in time to kill a
lot of Germans.
For a number of reasons, recent film and TV dramas on World War II
and moral responsibility have centered on the Holocaust, but to do so too
narrowly can miss other aspects of Fascist malevolence, like the struggles
within Christian churches over how much liberty -- really integrity -- they
were willing to surrender in order to get along with the state.
With this in mind, Bonhoeffer: Agent of Grace, the
story of the young German Lutheran theologian executed for his role in the plot
to assassinate Hitler, is a welcome and challenging TV event.
Welcome particularly because Dietrich Bonhoeffers The
Cost of Discipleship (1937) and Letters and Papers from Prison
(1951), as interpreted by influential theologians such as Harvey Cox in The
Secular City (1965) and John A.T. Robinsons Honest to God
(1963), were at the heart of the New Theology of the 1960s. Somehow
Bonhoeffers critical -- but fragmentary -- rethinking of basic Christian
principles in the face of the Nazi regime inspired American 60s activists
in their confrontations with authorities both secular and sacred during Vatican
II and the Vietnam War.
Born in 1906, son of a psychiatry professor at the University of
Berlin and a mother whose grandfather had been chaplain to the emperor until he
disagreed with his majesty, Dietrich was raised in a big family of three
brothers, a twin sister and three other sisters. As a student at Tübingen
and Berlin, he was influenced by both historian Adolph vonHarnack and
theologian Karl Barth. From the beginning his theological outlook was pastoral,
ecumenical and international. He was an assistant pastor in Spain and London
and an exchange student at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he
enjoyed his forays into Harlem, a few blocks east, and learned to play and sing
Negro spirituals.
The TV Bonhoeffer story opens in 1939 on the last days of his
visit to the United States: His friends, including theologian Reinhold Niebuhr,
warn him that if he returns to Germany he will be arrested because of his
ideas. But he is a patriot, too, and knows where he is most needed.
From his return to Germany until his arrest in 1943, Bonhoeffer
was a leader of what was called the Confessional church, those German
Protestants opposed to the Nazi regime. Philosophically, he objected that
Hitler had usurped the authority that belongs only to the individual human
conscience -- symbolized by the oath of loyalty to the führer all subjects
were obliged to take. Personally, through his family, he became deeply involved
in the clandestine movement to overthrow the regime. (One brother-in-law was
Jewish; another a conspirator.) To avoid the draft, he became a member of the
Abwehr, a branch of military intelligence whose leaders were plotting to remove
Hitler.
So certainly the last five years of Bonhoeffers life have
the makings of an excellent film or TV docudrama. For six years a combination
of American Public TV, British writers, a Canadian director, German production
company and a German cast, starring Ulrich Tukur in the title role, have
labored to bring this story to the public. They have even advertised in the New
York subway.
To what effect? It depends partly on what a viewer brings to the
viewing. Lutheran and seminary discussion groups who might have read Letters
from Prison will profit most. Ive read Letters a couple of
times, parts of Discipleship and three biographies, but even your
well-informed standard PBS viewers will be asking themselves, as I did, Who are
these people? What year is this? Where are we now? Since all these people in
this truck were executed, how do we know what they talked about? In Sweden,
Dietrich visits a wise old man dressed in black to discuss Hitlers
assassination. Who is this man? Did this happen?
The writers frame much of the story as a conflict between
Bonhoeffer and his nemesis, Manfred Roeder, a Gestapo leader who has forbidden
him to speak and publish and who, following the first attempt on Hitlers
life, imprisons Bonhoeffer in Berlin and interrogates him continually, matching
wits, even attempting crude theological arguments to ensnare him.
According to the script, but news to me, the Gestapo allowed
Dietrichs 17-year-old fiancée, Maria von Wedemeyer, to visit him
in prison, but only in the presence of Roeder, who would write down and
interrupt their conversations. The relationship between Bonhoeffer and Maria, a
former pupil 20 years younger than he, the granddaughter of a family friend,
remains a mystery. In one scene she picks up the manuscript of his
Ethics and reads off epigrams as if they were song lyrics -- It is
better to do evil than be evil -- and gushes, Do you really mean
that? You never told us that in Confirmation class. On TV, however,
better a love interest that makes no sense than no love interest at all.
The greatest challenge to the filmmakers, however, is to relate
the events in the central characters life to the changes in his ideas.
Bonhoeffers decisions to oppose Hitler and help Jews are not hard to
comprehend; the decision to move from pacifism to being an accomplice in
Hitlers murder is a more radical leap. How he justifies it we do not see.
In one scene Bonhoeffer watches three conspirators plan the first assassination
attempt; and the soldier involved, who must blow himself up to kill Hitler,
asks him for a blessing. Bonhoeffer hesitates, then quotes Johns gospel:
Greater love than this no man has than to lay down his life for his
friends.
True, but does that make a suicide-assassination right?
In an earlier scene, Bonhoeffers coworkers have somehow
obtained passports through the Gestapo to help a group of Jews leave the
country. An older Jewish woman objects to using Nazi documents to gain her
freedom; something must be wrong here. Trust me, says Bonhoeffer. But she warns
him, Dont win the war to lose your soul. Its a strange
moment, and we dont expect a Jew to paraphrase Jesus to a Lutheran. But
its the only minute in the films 85 minutes to suggest that
Bonhoeffers ethical system might have some holes in it.
Of course Bonhoeffers ecclesiology and Christology,
developed in some of the later letters from prison, are even harder to portray
in a TV drama. Bonhoeffer had come to believe that Christians were using
institutional religion, with its excessively metaphysical theology, as a
stopgap to fill in the intellectual gaps left by the advancement of
science. Christians must rediscover God, thought Bonhoeffer, by putting Jesus
at the center and becoming men for others.
We see Bonhoeffer deliver these thoughts in an impromptu homily
right before the Gestapo reappear with new evidence of his guilt, to take him
to his execution.
On April 9, 1945, he stands alone in the courtyard of Flossenburg
prison. Roeder arrives and orders him to strip. He shivers, and Roeder asks if
he is afraid. No, he is cold.
So, this is the end, says Roeder.
No, says Bonhoeffer. He walks nude to the scaffold and
climbs the steps. Father, he prays, give us the peace the
world cannot give. The camera focuses on his bare feet. A fly lights on
his heel.
Bonhoeffer: Agent of Grace was to premier June 14 on
PBS. The distributor of the video is Aid Association for Lutherans.
Jesuit Fr. Raymond A. Schroth is at St. Peters College in
Jersey City, N.J.
National Catholic Reporter, June 16,
2000
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