Letters and Papers From Prison (24 page)

16 December

Of course, the lawyer has left me in the lurch again. This waiting is revolting. Prisoners are like sick people and children; promises with them should be kept. It’s still quite uncertain what will become of me after my release. But if you have a reasonable NCO in Italy, can’t you talk with him quite openly and tell him that you have a friend and cousin whom you’d like to have with you and ask him whether he can’t requisition me? That would be really splendid! Then one could withstand any situation! I’ll stop, so as not to make excessive demands on your time. I wish you and Renate an incomparably splendid Christmas and a confident farewell…You’re certainly right in describing marriage as ‘what remains stable in all fleeting relationships’. But we should also include a good friendship among these stable things. Now goodbye and God bless you. I’m steadfastly thinking of you.

Your Dietrich

The lawyer is just on his way!

To his parents

[Tegel] 17 December 1943

Dear parents,

There’s probably nothing for it but to write you a Christmas letter now to meet all eventualities. Although it passes my comprehension why they may possibly still keep me here over Christmas, I’ve learnt in the past eight and a half months that the unexpected often happens, and that what can’t be changed must be accepted with a
sacrificium intellectus,
although the
sacrificium
is not quite complete, and the
intellectus
silently goes its own way.

Above all, you mustn’t think that I’m going to let myself be depressed by this lonely Christmas; it will always take its special place among the other unusual Christmases that I’ve kept in Spain, America, and England, and I want in later years to look back on the time here, not with shame, but with a certain pride. That’s the only thing that no one can take from me.

Of course, you, Maria and the family and friends, can’t help thinking of my being in prison over Christmas, and it’s bound to cast a shadow over the few happy hours that are left to you in these times. The only thing I can do to help is to believe and know that your thoughts about it will be the same as mine, and that we shall be at one in our attitude towards the keeping of this Christmas. Indeed, it can’t be otherwise, for that attitude is simply a spiritual inheritance from you. I needn’t tell you how I long to be released and to see you all again. But for years you have given us such perfectly lovely Christmases that our grateful recollection of them is strong enough to put a darker one into the background. It’s not till such times as these that we realize what it means to possess a past and a spiritual inheritance independent of changes of time and circumstance. The consciousness of being borne up by a spiritual tradition that goes back for centuries gives one a feeling of confidence and security in the face of all passing strains and stresses. I believe that anyone who is aware of such reserves of strength needn’t be ashamed of more tender feelings evoked by the memory of a rich and noble past, for in my opinion they belong to the better and nobler part of mankind. They will not overwhelm those who hold fast to values that no one can take from them.

From the Christian point of view there is no special problem about Christmas in a prison cell. For many people in this building it will probably be a more sincere and genuine occasion than in places where nothing but the name is kept. That misery, suffering, poverty, loneliness, helplessness, and guilt mean something quite different in the eyes of God from what they mean in the judgment of man, that God will approach where men turn away, that Christ was born in a stable because there was no room for him in the inn - these are things that a prisoner can understand better than other people; for him they really are glad tidings, and that faith gives him a part in the communion of saints, a Christian fellowship breaking the bounds of time and space and reducing the months of confinement here to insignificance.

On Christmas Eve I shall be thinking of you all very much, and I want you to believe that I too shall have a few really happy hours, and that I am certainly not allowing my troubles to get the better of me. It will be hardest for Maria. It would be marvellous to know that she was with you. But it will be better for her if she’s at home. It’s only when one thinks of the terrible times that so many people in Berlin have been through lately that one realizes how much we have to be thankful for. No doubt it will be a very quiet Christmas everywhere, and the children will remember it for a long time to come. But it may perhaps bring home to some people for the first time what Christmas really is. Much love to the family, the children and all our friends. God bless us all. With much gratefulness and love.

Your Dietrich

To Eberhard Bethge

[Tegel] 18 December 1943

Dear Eberhard,

You too must at least have a letter for Christmas. I’m no longer expecting to be released. As far as I could see, I should have been released on 17 December, but the jurists wanted to take the safe course, and now I shall probably be kept here for weeks if not months. The past weeks have been more of a strain than any
thing before that. There’s no changing it, only it’s more difficult to adapt oneself to something that one thinks could have been prevented than to something inevitable. But when facts have taken shape, one just has to fit in with them. What I’m thinking of particularly today is that you will soon be facing facts that will be very hard for you, probably even harder than for me. I now think that we ought first of all to do everything we can to change those facts while there’s still time; and then, if we’ve tried everything, even though it has been in vain, they will be much easier to bear. Of course, not everything that happens is simply ‘God’s will’; yet in the last resort nothing happens ‘without God’s will’ (Matt. 10.29), i.e. through every event, however untoward, there is access to God. When a man enters on a supremely happy marriage and has thanked God for it, it is a terrible blow to discover that the same God who established the marriage now demands of us a period of such great deprivation. In my experience nothing tortures us more than longing. Some people have been so violently shaken in their lives from their earliest days that they cannot now, so to speak, allow themselves any great longing or put up with a long period of tension, and they find compensation in short-lived pleasures that offer readier satisfaction. That is the fate of the proletarian classes, and it is the ruin of all intellectual fertility. It’s not true to say that it is good for a man to have suffered heavy blows early and often in life; in most cases it breaks him. True, it hardens people for times like ours, but it also greatly helps to deaden them. When
we
are forcibly separated for any considerable time from those whom we love, we simply
cannot,
as most can, get some cheap substitute through other people - I don’t mean because of moral considerations, but just because we are what we are. Substitutes repel us; we simply have to wait and wait; we have to suffer unspeakably from the separation, and feel the longing till it almost makes us ill. That is the only way, although it is a very painful one, in which we can preserve unimpaired our relationship with our loved ones. A few times in my life I’ve come to know what homesickness means. There is nothing more painful, and during these months in prison I’ve sometimes been terribly homesick. And as I expect you will have to go through the same
kind of thing in the coming months, I wanted to write and tell you what I’ve learnt about it, in case it may be of some help to you. The first result of such longing is always a wish to neglect the ordinary daily routine in some way or other, and that means that our lives become disordered. I used to be tempted sometimes to stay in bed after six in the morning (it would have been perfectly possible), and to sleep on. Up to now I’ve always been able to force myself not to do this; I realized that it would have been the first stage of capitulation, and that worse would probably have followed. An outward and purely physical régime (exercises and a cold wash down in the morning) itself provides some support for one’s inner discipline. Further, there is nothing worse in such times than to try to find a substitute for the irreplaceable. It just does not work, and it leads to still greater indiscipline, for the strength to overcome tension (such strength can come only from looking the longing straight in the face) is impaired, and endurance becomes even more unbearable…

Another point: I don’t think it is good to talk to strangers about our condition; that always stirs up one’s troubles – although we ought to be ready, when occasion arises, to listen to those of other people. Above all, we must never give way to self-pity. And on the Christian aspect of the matter, there are some lines that say

…that we remember what we would forget,
that this poor earth is not our home.

That is indeed something essential, but it must come last of all. I believe that we ought so to love and trust God in our
lives,
and in all the good things that he sends us, that when the time comes (but not before!) we may go to him with love, trust, and joy. But, to put it plainly, for a man in his wife’s arms to be hankering after the other world is, in mild terms, a piece of bad taste, and not God’s will. We ought to find and love God in what he actually gives us; if it pleases him to allow us to enjoy some overwhelming earthly happiness, we mustn’t try to be more pious than God himself and allow our happiness to be corrupted by presumption and arrogance, and by unbridled religious fantasy which is never satisfied with what God gives. God will see to it that the man who finds
him in his earthly happiness and thanks him for it does not lack reminder that earthly things are transient, that it is good for him to attune his heart to what is eternal, and that sooner or later there will be times when he can say in all sincerity, ‘I wish I were home.’ But everything has its time, and the main thing is that we keep step with God, and do not keep pressing on a few steps ahead - nor keep dawdling a step behind. It’s presumptuous to want to have everything at once – matrimonial bliss, the cross, and the heavenly Jerusalem, where they neither marry nor are given in marriage. ‘For everything there is a season’ (Eccles. 3.1); everything has its time: ‘a time to weep, and a time to laugh;…a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;…a time to rend, and a time to sew;…and God seeks again what is past.’ I suspect that these last words mean that nothing that is past is lost, that God gathers up again with us our past, which belongs to us. So when we are seized by a longing for the past - and this may happen when we least expect it - we may be sure that it is only one of the many ‘hours’ that God is always holding ready for us. So we oughtn’t to seek the past again by our own efforts, but only with God. Well, enough of this; I can see that I have taken on too much, for really in these matters I can tell you nothing that you don’t know already.

Advent IV

What I wrote yesterday wasn’t a Christmas letter. Today i must tell you above all how tremendously glad I am that you can spend Christmas at home.
⁹⁵
That’s a piece of good fortune that no one has as easily as you!

The thought that you’re celebrating the fifth Christmas of the war in freedom and with Renate is so comforting, and makes me so confident for the future, that I delight in it every day. You will celebrate a very splendid and joyful feast; and after what has happened to you so far, I don’t think that it will be very long before you’re on leave again in Berlin. And we’ll celebrate Easter again in peace, won’t we?

For this last week or so these lines have kept on running through my head:

Let pass, dear brothers, every pain;    
What you have missed I’ll bring again.

What does this ‘I’ll bring again’ mean? It means that nothing is lost, that everything is taken up in Christ, although it is transformed, made transparent, clear, and free from all selfish desire. Christ restores all this as God originally intended it to be, without the distortion resulting from our sins. The doctrine derived from Eph. 1.10 – that of the restoration of all things,
άνακεϕαλαίωσιζ, recapitulate
(Irenaeus) – is a magnificent conception, full of comfort. This is how the promise ‘God seeks what has been driven away’ is fulfilled. And no one has expressed this so simply and artlessly as Paul Gerhardt in these words that he puts into the mouth of the Christ-child: ‘I’ll bring again’. Perhaps this line will help you a little in the coming weeks. Besides that, I’ve lately learnt for the first time to appreciate the hymn ‘Beside thy cradle here I stand’. Up to now I hadn’t made much of it; I suppose one has to be alone for a long time, and meditate on it, to be able to take it in properly. Every word is remarkably full of meaning and beauty. There’s just a slight flavour of the monastery and mysticism, but no more than is justified. After all, it’s right to speak of ‘I’ and ‘Christ’ as well as of ‘we’, and what that means can hardly be expressed better than it is in this hymn. There are also a few passages in a similar vein in the
Imitation of Christ,
which I’m reading now and then in the Latin (it reads much better in Latin than in German); and I sometimes think of