Letters and Papers From Prison (29 page)

Unfortunately we have no proper present for you this time, so I’ve just baked you a couple of ‘S’-les,
¹³³
which I will give to Maria. Now all the best and much love,

your Renate

To Eberhard Bethge

[Tegel] 29 and 30 January 1944

Dear Eberhard,

Although I’m sure that you have letters from Renate every day – though they may not be handed over to you every day, so that you can’t avoid the torment of waiting and the uncertainty - I expect that you enjoy every letter; and not only for that reason, but also because I find it hard not to write to you, I’m using this
quiet
Saturday afternoon, so very different from the din that we’ve had the last two nights,
¹³⁴
to talk some things over with you. I wonder how the first few days of direct contact with war, and possibly your first personal impressions of the Anglo-Saxon opponents, whom we have so far met only in times of peace, have affected you? I find it hard to understand why we can’t go through these fundamental experiences together, for later –
sub conditione Jacobea
- we shall have to ponder them together and make them fruitful for our calling. When I think of you every morning and evening, I have to try very hard not to let all my thoughts dwell on the many cares and anxieties that beset you, instead of praying
for you properly. In that connection I must talk to you some time about prayer in time of trouble; it’s a difficult matter, and yet our misgivings about it may not be good. Psalm 50 says quite clearly, ‘Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.’ The whole history of the children of Israel consists of such cries for help. And I must say that the last two nights have made me face this problem again in a quite elementary way. While the bombs are falling like that all round the building, I cannot help thinking of God, his judgment, his hand stretched out and his anger not turned away (Isa. 5.25 and 9.11-10.4), and of my own unpreparedness. I feel how men can make vows, and then I think of you all and say, ‘better me than one of them’ – and that makes me realize how attached I am to you all. I won’t say anything more about it - it will have to be by word of mouth; but when all is said and done, it’s true that it needs trouble to shake us up and drive us to prayer, though I feel every time that it is something to be ashamed of, as indeed it is. That may be because I haven’t so far felt able to say a Christian word to the others at such a moment. As we were again lying on the floor last night, and someone exclaimed ‘O God, O God’ (he is normally a very flippant type), I couldn’t bring myself to offer him any Christian encouragement or comfort; all I did was to look at my watch and say, ‘It won’t last more than ten minutes now.’ There was nothing premeditated about it; it came quite automatically, and perhaps I felt that it was wrong to force religion down his throat just then. (Incidentally, Jesus didn’t try to convert the two thieves on the cross; one of them turned to him!)

I’m sorry to say that I suffered a severe loss the night before last. The man who was, to my mind, by far the most intelligent and attractive in the place was killed in the city by a direct hit.
¹³⁵
I should certainly have put him in touch with you later, and we already had plans for the future. We often had interesting talks, and the other day he brought me
Daumier und die Justiz,
which I still have. He was a really educated man of working-class origin, a philosopher, and father of three children. I was very much distressed by his death.

In the last few days I’ve again been busy on the little work that I
mentioned to you before, about the meeting of two old friends after they had been separated for a long time during the war. I hope to be able to send it to you soon. You needn’t worry – it will
not
be a
roman à clef…
¹³⁶

In earlier times, even one of the problems that we are now having to deal with would have been enough to take up all our time. Now we have to reduce to a common denominator war, marriage, church, profession, housing, the possible death of those nearest and dearest to us and, added to that, my present situation. No doubt most people would regard these simply as separate problems, but for the Christian and the ‘cultured’ man that is impossible; he cannot split up his life or dismember it, and the common denominator must be sought both in thought and in a personal and integrated attitude to life. The man who allows himself to be torn into fragments by events and by questions has not passed the test for the present and the future. In the story of young Witiko we read that he set out into the world ‘
um das Ganze zu tun
(to do the whole thing); here we have the ȁ
νθρωπoζ
τέλ⫤ιoς (τέλ⫤ιoς originally means ‘whole’ in the sense of ‘complete’ or ‘perfect’); ‘You, therefore, must be perfect (τέλ⫤ιoζ), as your heavenly Father is perfect’ (Matt. 5.48) – in contrast to the ά
ν
ί
ρ
δ
ίψυξoζ
(‘a double-minded man’) of James 1.8. Witiko ‘does the whole thing’ by trying to adapt himself to the realities of life, by always listening to the advice of experienced people - i.e. by showing that he is one of those who are ‘whole’. We can never achieve this ‘wholeness’ simply by ourselves, but only together with others…

I have just started to read Harnack’s
History of the Prussian Academy,
it is very good. I’m sure he put his heart and soul into it, and he said more than once that he considered it his best book. – How are you? Do let me know. I’m still surprisingly well. I suppose it makes some difference to know that I mustn’t be ill here in any circumstances. I always find enough strength and concentration for reading, but not always for writing and constructive work, except now and again. How I shall get used to living in company again I don’t yet know.

That’s all. The letter must go. I commend you and Renate and
all of us to the grace of God. Today the gospel is Matt. 8.23, ‘Why are you afraid, O men of little faith? - What sort of a man is this, that even winds and sea obey him?’

Faithfully, in daily fellowship,

Your Dietrich

From Eberhard Bethge

[Rignano] 1 February 1944

Dear Dietrich,

In a few days it will be your birthday and I still don’t know anything about all of you, how the last apparently dreadful attacks up to 30 January were, what happened, how things are with you and Renate. My thoughts are constantly with you all. This bit of individual life that one retains, although in other respects one is treated like the mules which climb the steep mountain paths round here without any will of their own, becomes a torment. Your thoughts that it is precisely this that is a necessary part of our condition and that in precisely this respect we must show ourselves to be what we are, bring me some comfort…With luck the correspondence will now start flowing a bit. My last news is from the 22nd. A letter, of course, took three weeks. The lines of communication have been destroyed to a colossal extent; built up and then smashed down again. And of course there are really very few roads which are passable at all. This problem of the march back is rather oppressive…

I’m very excited about the literary work.
¹³⁷
I hope it will come soon. I’m chiefly occupied in studying Italian and writing letters. I took with me Burckhardt’s
Renaissance
and am enjoying that very much from time to time. But great difficulty is caused for these private concerns by the unrest, constant possibility of being called away and the lack of any place of one’s own to sit…Many greetings for your birthday. You will be reading the text for the fourth with special thoughts.
¹³⁸
I wrote to Frau von Kleist a while ago from here. I wonder whether you will have a letter from me? Faithfully,

your Eberhard

By the way, Schönfeld
¹³⁹
is said to be very worked up at not getting anything. I can’t quite understand it, and only get hints. I’ve just learnt that Paton
¹⁴⁰
died in August. You’ll be sorry about that.

To Eberhard Bethge

[Tegel] 1 February 1944

Dear Eberhard,

Carpe diem
- which in this case means that I take every chance of sending you a greeting. First, because I could write for weeks on end without finishing all that I have to tell you, and secondly, because one never knows how much longer things are likely to last. And since one day you will be called to write my biography, I want to put the most complete material possible at your disposal! So! Today I saw Susi, very nice and fresh and warm-hearted. It is really remarkable how a person like her, who when she was a girl seemed so little predestined to be a pastor’s wife, can grow into her calling, personally and as a member of the church. She is really quite immersed in it, and that’s splendid. And what were we like as youths of 17 or 18? Was it very different? And yet somehow we became pastors. How strange are the ways in which people are led to become ‘Christians’! The visits are very different from each other, although of course I enjoy each one of them. The women are on the whole freer and less restrained…Karl-Friedrich was, of course, very nice…with Rüdiger, whose visit I particularly enjoyed and who really said some friendly things to me (e.g. for the state of health of my parents only the
causa,
and not the
culpa,
lay with me - of course it was Latin!), it was touching how he…kept coming round to talking about Maetz, so as to exclude any subject that didn’t completely comply with the regulations from the start…I haven’t seen anything of Klaus yet…Quite apart from anything else, I think it possible that he’s inwardly too sensitive to want to expose himself to impressions here. Fortunately we’ve become rather more robust in this respect
in our calling. Memories of 23 December
¹⁴¹
are still a source of joy and pride and gratitude to me.

You may know that the last few nights have been bad, especially the night of 30 January. Those who had been bombed out came to me the next morning for a bit of comfort. But I’m afraid I’m bad at comforting; I can listen all right, but I can hardly ever find anything to say. But perhaps the way one asks about some things and not about others helps to suggest what really matters; and it seems to me more important actually to share someone’s distress than to use smooth words about it. I’ve no sympathy with some wrong-headed attempts to explain away distress, because instead of being a comfort, they are the exact opposite. So I don’t try to explain it, and I think that is the right way to begin, although it’s only a beginning, and I very seldom get beyond it. I sometimes think that real comfort must break in just as unexpectedly as the distress. But I admit that that may be a subterfuge.

Something that repeatedly puzzles me as well as other people is how quickly we forget about our impressions of a night’s bombing. Even a few minutes after the all clear, almost everything that we had just been thinking about seems to vanish into thin air. With Luther a flash of lightning was enough to change the course of his life for years to come. Where is this ‘memory’ today? Is not the loss of this ‘moral memory’ (a horrid expression) responsible for the ruin of all obligations, of love, marriage, friendship, and loyalty? Nothing sticks fast, nothing holds firm; everything is here today and gone tomorrow. But the good things of life - truth, justice, and beauty - all great accomplishments need time, constancy, and ‘memory’, or they degenerate. The man who feels neither responsibility towards the past nor desire to shape the future is one who ‘forgets’, and I don’t know how one can really get at such a person and bring him to his senses. Every word, even if it impresses him for the moment, goes in at one ear and out at the other. What is to be done about him? It is a great problem of Christian ministry. You put it very well recently when you said that people feel so quickly and so ‘shamelessly at home’; I’m going to crib that expression from you, and make good use of it…

By the way, do you notice that uneducated people find it very
difficult to decide things
objectively,
and that they allow some more or less fortuitous minor circumstance to turn the scales? It seems to me quite remarkable. I suppose one first has to take pains to
learn
to distinguish between thinking personally and thinking objectively; and, in fact, many people never learn to do so (see our professional colleagues, etc.).

2 February

Is it true that you are
north
of Rome? And at present assigned to the kitchen? I hope you will have a chance to see the city again; it must be tantalizing to be stationed outside the gates, and not be allowed to go in. It’s not much consolation that you’ve already seen it once…As a lot of post has been lost in the past few nights, perhaps you didn’t get my letter of 29 January? That would be a pity. I hope that in the meantime you will have had the one written jointly to you and Renate (about a week ago). How much longer I shall have to go on amusing myself in my present place of residence is still just as uncertain as it was eight weeks ago. I’m using every day to do as much reading and work as possible, for what will happen afterwards is anybody’s guess. Unfortunately the one thing I can’t do is to get hold of the right books, and that upsets all my plans. I really wanted to become thoroughly familiar with the nineteenth century in Germany. I’m now feeling particularly the need of a good working knowledge of Dilthey, but his books are evidently not available. It’s a matter of great regret to me that I’m so ignorant of the natural sciences, but it’s a gap that cannot be filled now.

My present companion, whom I have mentioned several times in my letters, gets more and more pitiable. He has two colleagues here, one of whom spends the whole day moaning, and the other literally messes his trousers whenever the alert goes, and last night even when the first warning was sounded! When he told me about it yesterday - still moaning - I laughed outright and told him off, whereupon he would have me know that one mustn’t laugh at anyone in distress or condemn him. I felt that that was really going too far, and I told him in no uncertain terms what I thought of people who can be very hard on others and talk big about a
dangerous life and so on, and then collapse under the slightest test of endurance. I told him that it was a downright disgrace, that I had no sympathy at all with anyone like that, that I would throw any such specimens out of the party for making it look ridiculous, and so on. He was very surprised, and I dare say he thinks me a very doubtful Christian. Anyhow, these gentlemen’s behaviour is already becoming a byword here, and the result can’t be exactly pleasant for them. I find all this uncommonly instructive, though it’s one of the most nauseating things that I’ve seen here so far. I don’t really think I find it easy to despise anyone in trouble, and I said so quite unmistakably, which may have made his hair stand on end; but I can only regard that as contemptible. There are 17 and 18-year-olds here in much more dangerous places during the raids who behave splendidly, while these…(I almost used an army term that would have surprised you) go round whimpering. It really makes one sick. Well, everyone makes a fool of himself as best he can.