Beeson Podcast, Episode 379 Victoria Barnett February 13, 2018 https://www.beesondivinity.com/podcast/2018/From-Harlem-to-Berlin Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now, your host, Timothy George. Timothy George: Welcome to today's Beeson podcast. This past January, we had the privilege of welcoming to Beeson Divinity School Dr. Victoria Barnett. She is the director of the Ethics, Religion, and Holocaust program at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. She was here at Beeson to deliver a public lecture on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. We're going to hear that on the podcast today, and also to participate in a course on Bonhoeffer that we taught during our January term. A wonderful scholar, a great teacher, and it was just a joy to interact with her and to get her perspective on that whole traumatic period of the Third Reich, and especially the role of Bonhoeffer in it. She's the author of "For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protests Against Hitler," and also a book called "Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity During the Holocaust." We're going to hear this lecture today in which she's talking really about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the relationship that he had from his experience in America, his interaction with American racism, and the impact that had on his view of what was happening in his own home country of Germany. Her lecture was entitled, "From Harlem to Berlin: Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Experience of American Racism," given right here at Beeson in January 2017. Let's listen to our friend, Dr. Victoria Barnett. Victoria Barnett: Well, thank you so much for that generous introduction and for the hospitality I've been enjoying this week here at Beeson. I'm really enjoying the class, the teaching, and it's been a very rich experience for me personally. Thank you so much for the invitation. In September of 1930, Dietrich Bonhoeffer arrived in New York City for a year of study at Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan. He was 24 years old. Although Bonhoeffer's brief life was so intense and full that every single year could be described as profoundly eventful, the year in New York was profoundly eventful. It had a significant impact on him, on his future path, and two primary reasons for that were his friendship with a fellow student, Albert Fisher, who was African-American, and his experience at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. Union Theological Seminary is on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, on the corner of 120th Street and Broadway. Then and now, it's a short walk uptown and across town over to Harlem. Abyssinian is a little bit farther uptown at 138th Street. It's a historic church founded in 1808. In 1930, the legendary Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., was just beginning his years of service there as senior pastor. Albert Fisher introduced this young German student to the worship services at Abyssinian and before long, Bonhoeffer became a regular participant in the life of that church. He and Fisher taught Sunday School. Bonhoeffer began to attend worship services that were dramatically different from the ones he was used to. Parishioners at Abyssinian opened their homes to Bonhoeffer, who also led a woman's Bible study and assisted in a weekly church school. At the end of that year, Bonhoeffer had to write a report on his year in New York, and he wrote, "I heard the Gospel preached in the Negro churches. Here one could really hear someone talk in a Christian sense about sin and grace and the love of God and ultimate hope." He contrasted the often lecture-like sermons that he heard preached in white churches with what he described as the captivating passion and vividness of the sermons he heard at Abyssinian. Bonhoeffer did more than attend Abyssinian, however. Indeed, it is striking to see the extent to which Bonhoeffer, during that year, immersed himself in the issues of race in the United States. He took several courses at Union that focused on social issues and, in particular, the racial problems of this country, reading the literature of African-American authors like Countee Cullen, Booker T. Washington, and W.E.B. DuBois. American newspapers that year were reporting on things like the lynching of an African-American man in Missouri and the infamous Scottsboro case in which nine young African-Americans, the youngest only 13 years of age, were arrested, tried, and all of them except the 13-year-old sentenced to death for the purported rape of two white women. Bonhoeffer wrote about these events in some of his papers, and he even wrote a church leader back in Germany, urging him to join the international outcry over the Scottsboro case, which went all the way to the Supreme Court and was eventually led to the overturning of the convictions after one of the women acknowledged that the accusations had been false. Bonhoeffer even had a personal experience of American racism. In November of 1930, he traveled with Albert Fisher to Washington, DC, to attend a meeting of the Federal Council of Churches, also visiting Fisher's alma mater of Howard University. They went one evening out to a restaurant and Fisher was refused service. The two men walked out of the restaurant. All of this had a profound impact on Bonhoeffer. Part of it was the new form of religiosity that he experienced at Abyssinian, in which I think he tried later to awaken within the Confessing Church back in Germany. One of his fellow students at Union, a man named Miles Horton, later wrote about encountering Bonhoeffer one Sunday after he returned from Abyssinian. Horton wrote, "He was very emotional. He did not try to hide his feelings. He said it was the only time he had experienced true religion in the United States and he was convinced that it was only among blacks who were oppressed that there could be any real religion in this country." When Bonhoeffer returned to Germany, he took a recording of Negro spirituals that he would later play for his seminarians. He apparently wrote a number of letters to Albert Fisher that Fisher didn't reply to and which, unfortunately, have been lost. But these experiences did more than introduce Bonhoeffer to a different kind of Christianity. What he saw in the racism in this country reminded him of the phenomenon of anti-Semitism back in Germany. Bonhoeffer's older brother, Karl Friedrich, already a renowned physicist, had also spent time in the United States and had even been offered a prestigious position at Harvard. When Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote his brother about his impressions of American racism, his brother replied that in his opinion, racism "really is the problem at any rate for people with a conscience," noting that it was one reason why he had turned down the offer at Harvard. He said he didn't want to raise a family in a society with such deep divisions. Then he concluded the letter with a revealing comment. "In any case, our Jewish problem is a joke by comparison. Jews in Germany cannot claim they are oppressed, at least not in Frankfurt." It is a telling remark in several ways. Of course, Karl Friedrich Bonhoeffer could not foresee that only two years later circumstances in Germany would change dramatically. But the underlying tone of that comment, the oblique reference to Jewish wealth, and the apparent minimization of the problem of anti-Semitism in Germany betrays, I think, among other things a certain aspect that he spoke from a clear position of privilege. He wasn't directly affected by this. He didn't see anti-Semitism in 1931 as German Jews experienced it. Indeed, German Jews in 1931 were quite fearful about what was going on around them, the rising nationalism in Germany and the anti-Semitism that had never gone away. I've been doing research on the Grunewald neighborhood and the school where Bonhoeffer lived and attended school. Because Grunewald had a very high percentage of Jews among the suburbs of Berlin, and about 1/3 of Bonhoeffer's classmates were Jewish. I found some striking accounts of the anti-Semitism that they encountered during their years in that school in the early 1920s from teachers and other students. At the same time, many Jews still viewed Germany as a much safer place for them than other parts of Europe. In the early 20th century, thousands of Jews fled the pogroms in the east and they ended up in Germany. For German Jews, emancipation and assimilation seemed to represent a form of security and progress. Despite the rise during the 1920s of right wing groups in Germany and ongoing anti-Semitism, Jews in Germany hoped that the worst days were behind them. To that extent, Karl Friedrich may have been correct in picking up on a certain optimism that he didn't see in this country. Yet two years later, Adolf Hitler had only to call the demons forth to find wide support among the German people for a number of anti-Semitic measures. Indeed, one of the most shocking things for me in studying the history of Nazi Germany is to see how in the early weeks of Nazism, in the early weeks of 1933, the quickness with which Germans turned against their Jewish neighbors and colleagues. Anti-Semitism discriminatory to laws and violence against Jews soon became state policy. But there was a lot of it already there on the grassroots level. But it's interesting, isn't it, that both Bonhoeffer brothers, even in 1931, were drawing the certain similarity between American racism and the anti-Semitism in Germany? Racism has often been described as America's original sin. The same could be said of anti-Semitism in western culture, which has a long and deep history. There's a remarkable account by Werner Milch, who was a fellow student of Bonhoeffer's and in his confirmation class. Milch recalled how when the pastor asked the confirmation for an example of original sin, Bonhoeffer spontaneously replied, "Anti-Semitism." This was in 1921. Dietrich Bonhoeffer would have been 15 years old. This leads me to some reflections on what it means to talk about a form of prejudice as an original sin. I think it gives some insight not only into our own situation in this country and our own struggles with racism, but into what happened in Nazi Germany, as well as into Dietrich Bonhoeffer's journey throughout the 1930s. I think when a prejudice becomes something like an original sin, what that means is that certain divisions within society, certain preconceptions about a group, certain histories of their relationship in that society, has such a long and troubled history that they become very deeply embedded in the culture in a way that really makes it very difficult to ever completely stamp it out or eradicate it. For that reason, I think it becomes very difficult for those of us who are raised in that society and such societies or in such circumstances to ever step completely outside of the issue, of the history, to have the capacity to think completely outside the box, as it were, of certain presuppositions and prejudices. Even after things change, even if we are committed to a different way of thinking, even when laws are passed and things begin to change, there's still this long and deep history that is just right under the surface that we all bear the marks of. It becomes impossible to lose a certain self-consciousness about one's place in that scheme of things. The stereotypes remain, the language remains, the deep divisions lie right underneath the surface. Our country is deeply marked by the history of slavery and its legacy and the long history of racial tension and violence that Bonhoeffer picked up on during his year here despite the progress and the setbacks. This inevitably has an impact on all of us who grow up here, whatever our race, wherever we stand. I think this may often be subconscious until some event happens that puts it on the forefront. Certainly, we are more aware of this than we used to be. Certainly, there are in some places more open conversations. Yet, it remains extraordinarily difficult for us to talk about this. In a similar fashion, the centuries of anti-Semitism that have marked western culture, both throughout Europe and in this country, as well, have proven difficult to eradicate completely, even in the aftermath of the Holocaust, when one would think and hope that finally one could put an end to this form of hatred. But it remains alive throughout the world today, extending into all different countries and cultures. Originally framed as a religious prejudice propagated through certain understandings of Christian doctrines and teachings, by the Middle Ages, anti-Jewish prejudice had led to violence ghettos, and an expanded form of prejudice that by the late 19th century was taking on distinctly ethno-nationalist forms. The Nazis racialized it. They conceived of white Europeans as superior to other ethnic groups, and they defined Jews in particular as subhuman. Nazi anti-Semitism may have represented the most extreme form of this hatred, but it's worth noting that German Jews in the early 1930s didn't think they were seeing something new. They recognized this. This was an all too familiar hatred. The very nature of an embedded prejudice means two things, I think. The first is that the targets of such hatred, in this case Jews in Germany and African-Americans in this country, can never stop feeling vulnerable. Karl Friedrich assumed that German Jews had put these insecurities safely behind them, but there was no way they could, given the ongoing realities of anti-Semitism. The second consequence is that it is rare and difficult for someone outside the persecuted community to really have the capacity to understand and bridge the gap, to share that deep, visceral sense of vulnerability, and rarer still for someone to move from a position of privilege to one of vulnerability toward the kind of genuine solidarity that means one is willing to run the same risks and even share the same fate as the persecuted group. It's always possible for people who are not directly affected to walk away, to look away, to put certain issues aside, to choose where they're going to become engaged and not become engaged. One of the first things we see in 1933 when the Nazis come to power is that non-Jews very quickly turn their backs on their Jewish neighbors, even against people whom they knew, even against neighbors and colleagues. It happened in every sphere of German life, including, it must be said, the churches. Bonhoeffer, in 1931 in Harlem, recognized something, was moved by what he experienced, and outraged by what he saw of American racial inequality. In 1933, it's interesting how we can see certain signs of how this may have influenced his early responses to the excesses of the Nazi regime. Only one week after Hitler came to power, Bonhoeffer wrote a letter to his professor at Union, Reinhold Niebuhr, describing the barbarization of German society and writing ominously, "If this keeps up, we'll need a civil liberties union here soon." I think it was February 6th, 1933, literally just a week after Hitler comes to power. Bonhoeffer was an immediate opponent of National Socialism when Hitler came to power. He immediately opposed the Nazi racial laws, as well as the attempt to implement them in the church. However, although intellectually and even emotionally, I think Bonhoeffer felt a sense of solidarity with the Jewish community. One can say that in 1933 he didn't share that vulnerability in the sense that he really stood with them and became the target of the violence that was being directed against them. Throughout the 1930s, we see how his focus turns to other things, primarily what's happening within the church. It's only the course of his own journey. Once he actually becomes part of the German resistance and himself becomes the target of Nazi violence that he begins, I think, to understand this issue in a different and more vulnerable way. Now, the popular portrait of Bonhoeffer is a much more heroic one. He's often seen at the forefront of all these issues from the very beginning. Let me talk a little bit about why I see his path as a much more gradual one, that he moves very slowly toward this place of resistance and a deeper sense of solidarity that moved him really beyond empathy and into a real solidarity. Adolf Hitler, of course, becomes chancellor on January 30th, 1933, and what followed in the subsequent six weeks is a rather stunning case study in how quickly a society can collapse. Until Hitler abrogated the German constitution on March 23rd, Germany remained a constitutional democracy. His conservative nationalist coalition partners expected that they would run the government. They thought that this popular new chancellor would be a figurehead who could rally the support of a wide part of the German population in a way that the Weimar Republic had never been able to do. But those first six weeks of National Socialism show how quickly the dominoes can fall. Hitler had the popular support of a broad segment of the German population that included many in the German upper classes. There was little opposition to the Nazi measures against his opponents on the left, the communists, the liberal parties, the trade unions, journalists, other voices of dissent. Nazi paramilitary groups in the early days of the Reich were given free reign to roam the streets and beat up Jews and other so-called social undesirables. Against all these measures, the cautious conservatives were notably silent. By March 23rd, when Hitler got rid of the constitution, it was essentially all over. There were, however, Germans in 1933 who understood very clearly the moral and political significance of what had just happened. Here, of course, we look not just to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but to his brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnányi married to Bonhoeffer's sister, Christine, and a man who profoundly influenced how Bonhoeffer addressed the political realities around him. In the early months of Nazism, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote two striking essays that show a certain political insight. One was titled, "The Fuhrer and the Younger Generation," which begins with these insightful reflections where Bonhoeffer lays out why he understands the appeal that Hitler has to younger Germans and then it ends up by warning them what Nazism is really all about. The other essay is called, "The Church and the Jewish Question," written after the passage of the first racial laws in April 1933 and published of June of that year. "The Church and the Jewish Question" is an incredibly complex text because among other things, it includes a strongly anti-Jewish theological passage. The central message of the essay is the very radical one, that the Nazi regime was not a legitimate form of government because in persecuting the Jewish minority, it wasn't exercising its authority legitimately. Bonhoeffer based his position on the Lutheran understanding authority, but the arguments that he made in the essay really echoed some of the civil liberties language that we hear in the United States in that period. In so doing, he joined a small group of Germans that included Hans von Dohnányi who were beginning to question the very legitimacy of how Hitler was perceiving and concluding that the Nazi state had neither moral nor political legitimacy. You can see the seeds of resistance right there in 1933. In other words, only weeks after the Nazis come to power, Dietrich Bonhoeffer's challenging their legitimacy because of their treatment of the Jews. The question that confronted him and others who felt like him was, "What should we do?" There were German dissidents who were immediately arrested. There were people who went into exile. Throughout the 1930s, there was a handful of Germans who resisted Nazism and stood with the Jewish victims. I can name some people this evening who were not as well-known as Bonhoeffer. Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze, a Protestant pastor who had founded a social welfare center in eastern Berlin where he worked with activists of all faith, worked very closely with Rabbi Leo Beck in the early months of 1933, and in July 1933, because of his activities, he's deported by the gestapo. Elizabeth Schmitz a secondary schoolteacher and a Confessing Church member who courageously resigned her position in protest after the November 1938 pogroms. She also wrote impassioned letters urging the Confessing Church to speak out about the treatment of the Jews and she eventually helped some Jews hide. Hermann Mosse was a remarkable Lutheran pastor in Heidelberg who befriended the Jewish community there and formed such a strong bond with the local rabbi that when the rabbi had to leave Germany in 1936, Mosse actually took over the services of the temple and helped the congregation and eventually helped some of the people in that congregation hide and flee Nazi Germany. Another pastor, Julius von Jan, preached a powerful sermon after the November 1938 pogroms, condemning the anti-Jewish violence and was beaten by Nazi thugs before being sent to prison. Ludwig Steil, Ernst Wilm, and Paul Schneider were Confessing Church pastors whose public denunciations of Nazi policy from the pulpit led to their imprisonment in concentration camps and Steil and Schneider were killed. Bernhard Lichtenberg was a Catholic priest in Berlin who prayed publicly on behalf of the Jews and died on the way to Dachau. These individuals are not as well-known as Bonhoeffer, but they stand out throughout the 1930s because of their public solidarity with the Jews of Germany, a solidarity for which they paid in some cases with their lives. On this point, I think Bonhoeffer stands in a rather odd contrast. Although certainly sympathetic to the Jews and critical of the regime, this doesn't seem to have been his major battle. Now, there is certainly evidence of his engagement behind the scenes, in some cases helping certain individuals emigrate in 1935, combating in his church statement that would have supported the Nuremberg Laws, for example. But his public battles, where he stood in the public sphere, his most forthright statements from this period are really focused on the battle for the theological integrity of the Confessing Church itself. He opposed the Nazification of the church. He is notably silent and passive after the November 1938 pogroms. That was a moment when many people felt that the outcry had to come. Although he was at the forefront of the radical wing of the Confessing Church during the 1930s, that activism publicly wasn't extended yet outside the church struggle. The interesting thing is that the same can be said of many of the figures who find their way into the German resistance. Notably, the July 20th conspiracy to overthrow the regime of which Dietrich Bonhoeffer became a part. In some cases, the conspirators were career military men, career diplomats, career bureaucrats who made their careers throughout the 1930s under the Nazi regime and only turned against it at a certain point. In other cases, they were people who, like Hans von Dohnányi, were opposed to the regime from the beginning but felt that they could be most effective by working within the structures and trying to achieve something from within. What this meant throughout the 1930s was that as they pursued their careers and chose their battles, people like Hans von Dohnányi and, I would say, even to some extent Dietrich Bonhoeffer found themselves in a murky realm of complexity, ambiguity, and sometimes even complicity. If we look at Hans von Dohnányi and track his career over the 1930s, we get a sense of what that must have meant. Dohnányi was a wise and brilliant lawyer with numerous Jewish friends. Just beginning his career in the early 1930s, he was brought into the justice ministry. He soon rose through the ranks, working directly under Franz Gürtner, who would become justice minister until his death in 1942. Like many of these people, Franz Gürtner is a very complex and sometimes ambiguous person. He was trusted by the Confessing Church. They viewed him as an opponent of the regime, but he's justice minister of the Nazi state. He personally covered for Dohnányi on a number of occasions. But you don't stay on as justice minister in that capacity for 10 years without making a number of compromises. Gürtner, for examples, fired a church lawyer who was attempting to stop the so-called euthanasia program. In the case of Hans von Dohnányi, we have substantial evidence of his early opposition to Nazism and his attempts to help Jewish colleagues. There's a wonderful biography published in German several years ago by Marika Schmidt and which publishes a number of his letter to his wife, Christine, Bonhoeffer's sister. There's a recurring question that comes up in these letters throughout the 1930s that I will simply paraphrase as, "Is it time for me to get out? Where's the line?" His have been crossed. "Do I need to leave my position?" There's a haunting position from 1934 of a group of high-ranking Nazi officials listening to Adolf Hitler speak in the wake of the Röhm-Putsch in which he wiped out not just his party rivals, but took it as an opportunity murder political opponents. There in the back of the picture is Hans von Dohnányi. He's in the room. Dohnányi's father had been raised by a Jewish couple, so he was never able to get an Aryan certificate. Adolf Hitler personally signed the form that exempted him from that. His sister, Greta, who was married to Karl Friedrich Bonhoeffer, got the same exemption. In Dohnányi's case, we have extensive documentation of where he stood politically. But he, too, was surrounded by colleagues and others who were making compromises, who benefited from the Nazi anti-Jewish measures by obtaining the homes or jobs of Jews who had been pushed out, and people who calculated very carefully when they could speak out and when they should remain silent. Once the war began, the German resistance circles in which Bonhoeffer found himself were filled with people whose lives and records were even messier. Bonhoeffer's second cousin, Paul von Hase, who was also executed after July 20th, is striking example. A career military officer, von Hase rose through the ranks during the 1930s, gave speeches praising Hitler's racial policies, moved with his family into a home that had been taken from a Jewish family, and finally became city commandant of Paris during the German occupation before being promoted to commandant of Berlin. This was the world in which Dietrich Bonhoeffer found himself moving once he became involved in the resistance. In December of 1942, he wrote a letter to Hans von Dohnányi, his friend, Eberhard Bethge, and Colonel Hans Oster, a member of the resistance. The letter has come to be known as "After 10 Years: A Reckoning." It's a remarkable reflection of what had happened to Germany and its people in the 10 years of National Socialism. But it's also a very moving and revealing account of Bonhoeffer's own journey from the critical but privileged position he had in the 1930s to becoming part of a resistance from which vantage point he began to really see his realities very differently. The essay contains many of Bonhoeffer's most memorable quotes, but I think they're often misunderstood if they're read too heroically. I think that Bonhoeffer wrote this essay at the very moment where he was coming to terms with the fact that he and his fellow conspirators had made too many compromises. It failed in some ways. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his brother-in-law, Eberhard Bethge, good men who had been well aware of the evils of Nazism from the beginning, were trying to do what they could from where they were, nonetheless had not ever been able to completely detach themselves from the evil around them. Again, this is what I'm thinking of when I talk about the embeddedness of evil in a society. Last year, on the 70th anniversary of Bonhoeffer's death, I published a short essay in "The Washington Post" On Faith Blog in which I described the nature of human evil during National Socialism as being like rising water, leaving nothing untouched, no one untainted or unchanged. Dietrich Bonhoeffer's sister, Christine von Dohnányi, said something similar after the war where in describing her husband's role she described it as "a place of unavoidable complicity" in the evils of Nazism even as he was trying to fight them. This is the world in which Bonhoeffer was. The year before he wrote "After 10 Years," he spent Christmas at Ettal, a Benedictine monastery in the Bavarian Alps. The photographs of Ettal, if you've ever see them, are like picture postcards, monastery buildings tucked among the snow-covered Alps. His time there is often portrayed as a quiet period of retreat with the Benedictine monks in a place where he, Hans von Dohnányi, and Eberhard Bethge were also meeting secretly with resistance figures from the Catholic church. In fact, several leading figures from the Vatican crossed over the border to meet with them in the monastery there. Yet it turns out that Ettal was a busy place during Bonhoeffer's time there. It had taken in civilians from bombed out German cities in the north and Father Rupert Mayer, a German Jesuit dissident, was there under house arrest. More relevant to my theme this evening, during Bonhoeffer's time at Ettal, there were 59 forced laborers working for the monastery in housekeeping and on the grounds. 35 of them were prisoners of war. 24 of them were civilians who German soldiers had forcibly brought from Eastern Europe, including a young Polish couple with two small children. As the German army marched across Europe they not only subjugated local populations, but it brought civilians and prisoners back into the Reich for slave labor. Some of these people ended up working in factories. Others were put to work in various public projects. 6,000 of them ended up working in institutions that were run by the church, including monasteries. They were not paid. These were human beings who had been ripped from their homes, communities, and sometimes their families, and they had been brought back often under horrendous circumstances by German soldiers. By August 1944, there were over 7.5 million non-German workers registered as forced laborers in the Reich, and 59 of them were in Ettal. When I realized this, I went back and began to read Bonhoeffer's book "Ethics" differently. He wrote "Ethics" in Ettal. He doesn't write explicitly in "Ethics" about slave labor, but he has a chapter about the right to bodily life. He has a chapter in his reflections about the right to freedom. There's a haunting chapter called "History and the Good" where he speaks of the blurring of lines between good and evil and the difficulty of finding one's ethical bearings under these circumstances. This has led me to reflect more deeply on the complexity of Bonhoeffer's path. We have on the one hand these remarkable statements in his writings, an early opposition to Nazism, his recognition of its fundamental inhumanity, and its illegitimacy, his warning that the church was called to speak out for those who cannot speak, and we can think further back to those days at Abyssinian and his experience of the deep reality of the faith he found there, and there's certainly echoes of that in this 1942 letter. Then there are also central elements of his theology that I think resonate in this 1942 essay. His emphasis on the sociality of sin, this belief that all sin is social sin because it injures other human beings and frays the fabric of human society, his understanding of Christ as being the man who lives on behalf of others and the meaning of being a Christian living for others. All these threads begin to come together in this 1942 letter and so I would like to quote some of the passages from that letter. "One may ask," he writes, "whether there have ever before in human history been people with so little ground beneath their feet, people to whom every available alternative seems equally intolerable, repugnant, and futile. The great masquerade of evil has played havoc with all our ethical concepts. In recent years, we have seen a great deal of bravery and self-sacrifice, but civil courage hardly anywhere. Even among ourselves. We must learn to regard people less in light of what they do or fail to do and more in the light of what they suffer." "We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds. We have been drenched by many storms. Experiences made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open. Intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical. Are we still of any use? Finally, there remains an experience of incomparable value. We have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled. That is, from the perspective of those who suffer." I would contend that it is at this point in that last passage that we get a glimpse that Dietrich Bonhoeffer realizes what it means to speak from a place of deep vulnerability, of solidarity with the victims. He was 35 when he wrote that essay. His voice here is prophetic, but not triumphalist. The voice we were in "After 10 Years" is not of someone who is certain of the future, hopeful, who believes that good will ultimately triumph in 1942. There was not yet any sign of that. Much less is it the voice of someone who sees himself as a hero. But isn't that voice from which, or the place from which, victims of injustice often speak? From 1933 to 1942, Bonhoeffer gradually moved on a certain path, on a certain spectrum, certainly moving from a position of privilege and safety to a place of vulnerability and resistance. His focus became as never before on what he and his closest friends might have to offer this broken world. He wrote in the same letter, "The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask is not how to extricate himself heroically from this affair, but how the coming generation is to live." The French philosopher and historian René Girard once coined the term "disruptive empathy" as a description of the moment in which our empathy with the fate of another human being becomes so genuine, so real, that it changes our lives, that it disrupts our lives, our reality, that we are willing to step out of our normal daily routine and reach out and help that person. When that happens, we no longer live as before. We can no longer act as though the injustice around us has nothing to do with us. We become more willing to stand with the other person and share their fate. It marks the moment at which the cause of the persecuted becomes one's own cause, one's own battle, and a readiness to spare the consequences. Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Harlem, attending Abyssinian Baptist Church, taking a trip with his friend, Albert Fisher, witnessed racism that deeply outraged and troubled him and he surely carried those impressions with him in the years that followed. But it didn't immediately change his life's course, nor, it must be said, did the persecution of German Jews immediately alter his own personal circumstances in Germany. But over time, by 1942, in "After 10 Years" we see, I think, a different Bonhoeffer. The letter is, among other things, a lengthy critique of the values, class, and world that had been his, his recognition that the world from which he came and of which he had been a part had morally failed at a very profound level. The question "Are we still of any use?" is the acknowledgement of that failure. Yet, the view from below passage reveals the limitation even at this point of Bonhoeffer's perspective. While the phrase "the outcasts, the persecuted" does describe who these people were after 1933, they had been full citizens of Germany up to 1933 with rights and lives and hopes for a future. The inevitable tension between Bonhoeffer's approach to the Jewish question as a civil liberties issue and the privilege of his own position meant that he might never feel the full brunt of Nazi persecution on his own person. In the same way that people after the Holocaust could not fully comprehend what had happened to the Jews, except for the Jews who had suffered, and in the same way in this country we cannot understand fully as whites what it means to be an African-American in our society. But I think just seeing how Bonhoeffer moved is a powerful source of reflection about history, but about our own circumstances. In December 1942, Bonhoeffer was of course still a free man. He would be arrested several months later in April 1943. On July 21st, 1944, one day after the failed coup attempt, Bonhoeffer wrote a letter to his friend Eberhard Bethge. It's clear from the letter that Bonhoeffer realized the personal implications of what had just happened. With that final failure to overthrow the regime and kill Hitler, Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew that he was not going to get out of prison. He writes Bethge and I'll read an excerpt of the letter. "I remember a conversation I had 13 years ago in America with a young French pastor. We simply asked ourselves what we wanted to do with our lives. He said, 'I want to become a saint.' This impressed me very much at the time. Nevertheless, I disagreed with him, saying something like, 'I just want to learn how to have faith.' For a long time, I did not understand the depth of the antithesis. I thought I could learn to have faith by living something like a saintly life." "Later on, I discovered, and I'm still discovering to this day, that one only learns to have faith by living in the full this-worldliness of life. Then one takes seriously no longer one's own sufferings, but rather the sufferings of God in this world. Then one stays awake with Christ in Gethsemane. How should one become arrogant over successes or shaken by one's failures when one shares in God's suffering in this world? You will understand what I mean even if I put it so briefly. I am grateful that I have been allowed this insight and I know that it is only on the path that I have finally taken that I was able to learn this. I am thinking gratefully and with peace of mind about past as well as present things." Bonhoeffer's time at Abyssinian, his experience and reflections about the meaning of American racism, was, I would say, a turning point. It marked the beginning of something, not its end or fulfillment, but there's no doubt that he's carried it with him along his journey after 1933, taking his insights from Harlem back to Berlin. Eventually, this led him from criticism and opposition to Nazism to a much deeper form of solidarity and understanding, leading ultimately, of course, to the concentration camp in Flossenbürg where in April 1945 he was murdered. Thank you so much for your attention. Announcer: You've been listening to the Beeson podcast with host Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson podcast at our website, BeesonDivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational evangelical divinity school training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aid and encourage your work. We hope you will listen to each upcoming edition of the Beeson podcast. https://www.beesondivinity.com/podcast/2018/From-Harlem-to-Berlin