One impact a theologian or historian considers
when writing biography are the early influences that made his subject the
person we have come to know. These influences not only pertain to family life,
but also environmental factors such as the city where one was born and culture
in which one developed a worldview. So as we move towards the 111th anniversary
of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s birthday, I wanted to briefly explore the cultural and
social climate of his birth city during the days before World War II.
Bonhoeffer was born in Breslau, Germany on
February 4, 1906, which today resides in Poland and was renamed to Wrocław following the
Potsdam Conference in July-August 1945. Characteristic
of Breslau in Bonhoeffer’s time was its liberal environment, university, and significant
Jewish population with respect to other German cities. Eberhard Bethge noted
that Breslau’s reputation as a haven for liberal thought was a stumbling block
for his maternal grandfather Karl Alfred von Hase, who found himself at odds
with the liberal theology department over the appointment of another
conservative professor, and who himself was given an honorary professorship,
perhaps on the power of his family name. Even so, writes, Bethge, “there was
little appreciation for a colleague in practical theology who was also a church
official.”[1]
Breslau featured one of the oldest and most renowned
synagogues in Europe, the White Stork synagogue, which was home to the Orthodox
Jewish community and the New Synagogue, which became a center for Liberal
Judaism, which formed after a schism within the Orthodox community. Zecharias Frankel, one of the founders of
Conservative Judaism also formed his movement here. His theology of
positive-historical Judaism borrows from trends in German Protestantism at
large. More specifically, Bonhoeffer maintained a proximity to the relationship
of history and revelation through his association with his dissertation advisor
Reinhold Seeberg, a leading systematic theology in Germany working in this
method. Thus, the historical-critical method becomes identified with Frankel’s movement
as the cutting edge of progressive Jewish thought in his day, challenging both
the Reform and progressive Orthodox views. Abraham Geiger, the leading figure
in the Jewish Reform movement was also a resident of Breslau. And with regard
to the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah),
only Berlin and Konigsberg rivaled Breslau in terms of Jewish scholarship. Breslau
was home to the famous Jewish Theology Seminary built to educate Jewish
seminary students in 1854. None of these
facts should be recognized as a small matter. And the fact that two movements,
progressive in character, can trace their origins to this city is remarkable
given the dominance of Orthodox Judaism as the premiere Jewish chain of
tradition (Shashelet ha-quaddah).
While scholars have noted that Bonhoeffer
inserts himself into the Jewish crisis only briefly in his writings in the early
1930s because of the laws passed by the Germany government restricting Jews from
serving in civil service jobs and later preventing converted Jews from serving
in the churches, we can imagine that Breslau provided ample opportunity for the
Bonhoeffer family to encounter the Jewish population, which, despite their
bourgeois sensibilities, was reported to take special interest in the
downtrodden, less fortunate, and outsider.
An interesting book I Knew Dietrich Bonhoeffer emerged in 1966 as a compilation of
memoirs by friends who knew Bonhoeffer directly. In those reflections
describing his early life, there is a significant emphasis on the themes of
justice and social intercourse with people that went beyond his social circles.
It is regularly reported that the Christian gospel was only a nominal part of
his life at the time and did not play a role in his early interactions. When
Bonhoeffer revealed that he wanted to pursue theological studies, he was met
with less-than-enthusiastic responses from his family. Perhaps what the Christian gospel did do,
however, was work to reinforce what he was already burgeoning in his life and
give his concerns divine sanction. Dietrich could then see his own interest in
social justice and care for the outsider as a work mirrored by gospel virtues. These anecdotal stories nonetheless prove
valuable as we examine the circumstantial evidence for interactions with
competing communities.
Life in Breslau for Jews and Christian
dialogue during the 19th century and 20th century remains difficult to cohere
entirely, as Till van Rahden has noted, since interest in Breslau has been
marginal and source material for the past 200 years has produced nothing of
noteworthiness. What we do know is that Breslau benefitted significantly from
being in the Silesia region where rich mines and trade routes established the
city’s prosperity, and where, as early as the 18th century, Frederick II
reluctantly allowed Jews to return and trade in the area with limited
resettlement opportunities due to their mercantile acumen. By 1840, the Jewish community grew
exponentially, an event that instigated conflict with its German Christian neighbors,
especially as the former found their way into the more attractive social
circles in the city. With this economic growth came expansions in social and
religious growth. Records from the city show a rise in intermarriages,
especially among Jewish women to Christian men, and this fact remains a way for
historians to gauge social interactions, as van Rahden writes that private
contact between the two religious communities became “a matter of course.”[2]
This observation suggests that “the city’s social life offered people manifold
opportunities to get to know, to befriend, and possibly to marry one another
across denominational boundaries.”[3]
Likewise, many social institutions and associations were open to Jews, even
going so far as to allowing Jews to maintain their ethnic identities without
fear of public shame.
By 1910, when Dietrich was four years old, the
population was about 500,000, the size of modern-day Baltimore city, with about
60% Protestant, 35% Roman Catholic, and 5% Jewish. Abraham Ascher notes that
Breslau’s Jewish population remained a good deal higher than the rest of
Germany.[4]
Jews on the whole did much better economically than their Protestant
counterparts, averaging about three times more the average salary, and
represented about 20% of the total income in the city.
While it is common to assume that
Jews were reproached for their disproportionate wealth in the political
rhetoric of Hitler, as early as 1918, Jews, and those in Breslau as well, were
dealing with the effects of hyperinflation following the first World War. Many
had their economic status threatened and in losing their wealth found their
social status threatened as well. Van Rahden remarks that the geopolitics of
Breslau made it more difficult for Jews where the Upper Silesian frontier town
had been threatened by Polish-German tensions for years. Jews, who had lost
their social and economic statuses, no longer had the benefit of asserting
their “Germanness” as if to suggest that their national identities were on loan
provided they maintain the economic health of the city. They were now under
suspicion—as toxic to German stability as the Silesian Poles—and disdained as
interlopers, even as national sentiment and anti-Semitism combined to aggravate
the situation.
One cannot point to a specific event
in these early years that might have shaped the Bonhoeffers’ resolve and
produced such a family which actively resisted Nazism. But it is hard to
imagine living decades in a city and not being affected by its social and
intellectual climate. The family finally moved from Breslau in 1912, when Karl
Bonhoeffer 44, accepted a post in Berlin. Paula Bonhoeffer was 38, and her son Dietrich
was just six. If we are to believe
anecdotal accounts about the family from this time, saturation in Breslau might
had an extended effect on their near-future interactions. Even if it is highly
unlikely to have had any direct effect on young Dietrich personally, these
values must have been passed on by his parents. Every indication was that Karl was
a man of unflinching character. In one instance, he reportedly told his
assistant Fred Quadfasel that going to jail was nothing to be ashamed of, that
his family had a history of spending time in jail, and, in particular, during
the 1848 revolution. Norman Geschwind
also reported that Bonhoeffer never hung a picture of Hitler on his wall and
maintain a “classic Greek quality of measure in all things.”[5]
Events like the Judenzählung (Jewish census) of 1916, no doubt increased public
consumption of anti-Semitism, despite the alleged suppression of factual
information about Jews serving in the military. By the early ‘20s, when Bonhoeffer was himself
a schoolboy, anti-Semitic antagonism reached a tipping point, and, in Breslau, that
energy seemed to be intensified by its youth. “Young people, who had been
spared any experience of the front”[6]
were the main provocateurs of violence. Van Rahden asserts that the students
defaced “school buildings with swastikas, handed out thousands of anti-Semitic
leaflets, and sought to undermine Jewish teachers’ authority by bringing their
hatred of Jews with them into the classroom.”[7] Perhaps
it was Bonhoeffer’s strong family structure and upper middle-class
accommodations that saved him. But others could also point to similar
upbringings, and those who grew up in “religious settings,” like Martin
Heidegger and Paul Althaus, went on to support the Nazis for a time. Rather, it
was the character of that upbringing, the intellectual climate, and the combination
of early experiences, not least of all in Breslau, which appears to have set
the stage. The Bonhoeffers had left Breslau two years prior to the outbreak of
open hostilities towards Jews, and so perhaps the sensibilities they carried
with them of an open and morally egalitarian society remained firmly implanted
despite the soon-tragedy facing Germany. Bonhoeffer became refined in these
fires, a young theologian whose intellectual gravitas resounded Christian
virtue and Breslau sensibility. Quoting on several occasions Proverbs 31:8, he
wrote, “Open your mouth for those who have no voice,” followed once with the
question: who still knows that in the church today; that this is the least
requirement of the Bible in such times?”[8]
[1]
Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, p. 7
[2] Till
van Rahden, Jews and Other Germans: Civil Society, Religious Diversity, and
Urban Politics in Breslau, 1860-1925, Trans. By Marcus Brainard (The University
of Wisconsin Press: Madison, WI, 2008), 18.
[3] Ibid.,
19.
[4] Abraham
Ascher, A Community Under Siege: The Jews of Breslau Under Nazism, Stanford
Studies in Jewish History and Culture (Stanford University Press: Stanford, CA,
2007), 31.
[5] Norman
Geschwind, “The Work and Influence of Wernicke,” Boston Studies in the
Philosophy of Science, Proceedings of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy
of Science, 1966/1968, Volume IV, Edited by Robert S. Cohen and Marx W.
Wartofsky (D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland, 1969), 10-11.
[6] Van
Rahden, Jews and Other Germans, 232.
[7] Ibid,
234.
[8]
DBW 13: London 1933:1935, 204-5.
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