Letters and Papers From Prison (49 page)

Of course I have to be interrupted just now! Let me just summarize briefly what I’m concerned about - the claim of a world that has come of age by Jesus Christ.

I can’t write any more today, or else the letter will be kept here another week, and I don’t want that to happen. So: To be continued!

Uncle Paul has been here. He had me brought downstairs at once, and stayed - Maetz and Maass were there - more than five hours! He had four bottles of
Sekt
brought - a unique event in the annals of this place - and was nicer and more generous than I should ever have expected. He probably wanted to make it clear to everyone what good terms he is on with me, and what he expects from the jittery and pedantic M. Such independence, which would be quite unthinkable in a civilian, was most remarkable. By the way, he told me this story: At St Privat a wounded ensign shouted loudly,’I am wounded; long live the king.’ Thereupon General von Lowenfeld, who was also wounded, said, ‘Be quiet, ensign; we die here in silence!’ - I’m curious to know what will be the effect of his visit here; I mean what people will think of it.

Well, good-bye, and forgive me for breaking off. But I think you would sooner have this than nothing at all. I hope we shall be together again early in the autumn.

I think of you faithfully and with gratitude and pray for you each day. With all my heart,

Your Dietrich

I July Seven years ago today we were at Martin’s
⁶²
together!

Notes

[July 1944]

1. Truth and interpretation of scripture;
testim spiritus sancti?
Pp?
sui ipsius interpresl
Authority outside God?

2. Conscience, the voice of the general and the necessary. But agreement, command, recognition by another man is more convincing than a good conscience.

3. To what degree can Christ claim a man’s decision?

4. A confession of faith does not express what another man ‘must’ believe, but what a man believes himself. (Episcopius at the Synod of Dordrecht for the Arminians) Dilthey 102.
⁶³

5. Concept of tolerance.

6. Men go to God in their distress Men go to God in his distress

7. Something new can always happen in conversation.

Why so foolish? I don’t know:

I wait and always disappointment

I wait for God.

8. When I read the poems of poets

To Eberhard Bethge

[Tegel] 8 July [1944]

Dear Eberhard,

If I could assume that you were continuing in the cheerful and contented mood which was expressed by your last letter, I would be really glad. Many thanks for it. It’s a great thing that you’re managing to enjoy memories and not to be troubled by them; I would be glad if I always succeeded. How remarkable and unexpectedly good things have been with you again in the last weeks; first Munich, then Verona, then the day of rain and finally the recognition of your fortune as a special merit. Your advancement is so disquieteningly fast that I certainly can’t catch up with you now; I wouldn’t even have been able to keep pace with you …

A little while ago I wrote you a letter with some very theoretical philosophy about heat. In the last few days I’ve been trying it on my own body. I feel as if I were in an oven, and I’m wearing only a shirt that I once brought you from Sweden, and a pair of shorts (has someone really walked off somewhere with your shirts? I’m sure that you will get them back again later), and the only reason why I don’t complain about it is that I can imagine how badly you must be suffering from the heat, and how frivolous my former letter must have seemed to you. So I will try to squeeze a few thoughts out of my sweating brain, and let you have them. Who knows - it may be that it won’t have to be too often now, and that we shall see each other sooner than we expect.
⁶⁴
The other day I read a fine and striking remark in Euripides, in a scene of reunion after a long separation- ‘So, then, to meet again is a god.’

Now for a few more thoughts on our theme. Marshalling the biblical evidence needs more lucidity and concentration than I can command at present. Wait a few more days, till it gets cooler! I haven’t forgotten, either, that I owe you something about the non-religious interpretation of biblical concepts. But for today, here are a few preliminary remarks:

The displacement of God from the world, and from the public part of human life, led to the attempt to keep his place secure at least in the sphere of the ‘personal’, the ‘inner’, and the ‘private’. And as every man still has a private sphere somewhere, that is where he was thought to be the most vulnerable. The secrets known to a man’s valet - that is, to put it crudely, the range of his intimate life, from prayer to his sexual life - have become the hunting-ground of modern pastoral workers. In that way they resemble (though with quite different intentions) the dirtiest gutter journalists - do you remember the
Wahrheit
and the
Glocke,
⁶⁵
which made public the most intimate details about prominent people? In the one case it’s social, financial, or political blackmail and in the other, religious blackmail. Forgive me, but I can’t put it more mildly.

From the sociological point of view this is a revolution from below, a revolt of inferiority. Just as the vulgar mind isn’t satisfied till it has seen some highly placed personage ‘in his bath’, or in other embarrassing situations, so it is here. There is a kind of evil
satisfaction in knowing that everyone has his failings and weak spots. In my contacts with the ‘outcasts’ of society, its ‘pariahs’, I’ve noticed repeatedly that mistrust is the dominant motive in their judgment of other people. Every action, even the most unselfish, of a person of high repute is suspected from the outset. These ‘outcasts’ are to be found in all grades of society. In a flower-garden they grub around only for the dung on which the flowers grow. The more isolated a man’s life, the more easily he falls a victim to this attitude.

There is also a parallel isolation among the clergy, in what one might call the ‘clerical’ sniffing-around-after-people’s-sins in order to catch them out. It’s as if you couldn’t know a fine house till you had found a cobweb in the furthest cellar, or as if you couldn’t adequately appreciate a good play till you had seen how the actors behave off-stage. It’s the same kind of thing that you find in the novels of the last fifty years, which do not think they have depicted their characters properly till they have described them in their marriage-bed, or in films where undressing scenes are thought necessary. Anything clothed, veiled, pure, and chaste is presumed to be deceitful, disguised, and impure; people here simply show their own impurity. A basic anti-social attitude of mistrust and suspicion is the revolt of inferiority.

Regarded theologically, the error is twofold. First, it is thought that a man can be addressed as a sinner only after his weaknesses and meannesses have been spied out. Secondly, it is thought that a man’s essential nature consists of his inmost and most intimate background; that is defined as his ‘inner life’, and it is precisely in those secret human places that God is to have his domain!

On the first point it is to be said that man is certainly a sinner, but is far from being mean or common on that account. To put it rather tritely, were Goethe and Napoleon sinners because they weren’t always faithful husbands? It’s not the sins of weakness, but the sins of strength, which matter here. It’s not in the least necessary to spy out things; the Bible never does so. (Sins of strength: in the genius,
hubris;
in the peasant, the breaking of the order of life - is the decalogue a peasant ethic?—; in the bourgeois, fear of free responsibility. Is this correct?)

On the second point: the Bible does not recognize our distinction between the outward and the inward. Why should it? It is always concerned with
anthrōpos teleios,
the
whole
man, even where, as in the Sermon on the Mount, the decalogue is pressed home to refer to ‘inward disposition’. That a good ‘disposition’ can take the place of total goodness is quite unbiblical. The discovery of the so-called inner life dates from the Renaissance, probably from Petrarch. The ‘heart’ in the biblical sense is not the inner life, but the whole man in relation to God. But as a man lives just as much from ‘Outwards’ to ‘inwards’ as from ‘inwards’ to ‘outwards’, the view that his essential nature can be understood only from his intimate spiritual background is wholly erroneous.

I therefore want to start from the premise that God shouldn’t be smuggled into some last secret place, but that we should frankly recognize that the world, and people, have come of age, that we shouldn’t run man down in his worldliness, but confront him with God at his strongest point, that we should give up all our clerical tricks, and not regard psychotherapy and existentialist philosophy as God’s pioneers. The importunity of all these people is far too unaristocratic for the Word of God to ally itself with them. The Word of God is far removed from this revolt of mistrust, this revolt from below. On the contrary, it reigns.

Well, it’s time to say something concrete about the secular interpretation of biblical concepts; but it’s too hot!

If you want of your own accord to send Albrecht,
⁶⁶
etc., extracts from my letters, you can, of course, do so. I wouldn’t do it myself as yet, because you’re the only person with whom I venture to think aloud, as it were, in the hope of clarifying my thoughts. But please yourself about it.

The novel has got stuck, and the little work for you is also not completely finished - I had such an unproductive time between January and March. I’m enclosing two poems.
⁶⁷
I would prefer to show you a long one (about this place) here
⁶⁸
; I don’t think that it’s too bad. Perhaps one day it will get out.

I’m so glad that you’re away from the street and that you have a north room and that the countryside is so beautiful where you are. We shall very soon now have to be thinking a great deal about
our journey together in the summer of 1940, and my last sermons.
⁶⁹

Now good-bye, and many thanks for every thought and greeting that comes to me. Don’t give yourself too much trouble with them. I know how hard it is for you now. God bless you, dear Eberhard, and bring you back to us safely and soon. With all my heart.

Your Dietrich

By the way, it would be very nice if you didn’t throw away my theological letters but sent them on to Renate from time to time, as I’m sure they’re too much of a burden for you. Perhaps I might want to read them again later for my work. One writes some things more freely and more vividly in a letter than in a book, and often I have better thoughts in a conversation by correspondence than by myself. But it isn’t at all important! By the way, H. Linke, Berlin-Friedrichshagen, Wilhelmstr. 58 will be glad of a greeting from you from time to time.
⁷⁰

9 July That’s all. I think that we shall meet again soon. All the very best until then!

Your Dietrich

WHO AM I?

Who am I? They often tell me
I would step from my cell’s confinement
calmly, cheerfully, firmly,
like a squire from his country-house.

Who am I? They often tell me
I would talk to my warders
freely and friendly and clearly,
as though it were mine to command.

Who am I? They also tell me
I would bear the days of misfortune
equably, smilingly, proudly,
like one accustomed to win.

Am I then really all that which other men tell of?
Or am I only what I know of myself,
restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,
struggling for breath, as though hands were compressing my throat,
yearning for colours, for flowers, for the voices of birds,
thirsting for words of kindness, for neighbourliness,
trembling with anger at despotisms and petty humiliation,
tossing in expectation of great events,
powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance,
weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making,
faint, and ready to say farewell to it all?

Who am I? This or the other?
Am I one person today, and tomorrow another?
Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
and before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still like a beaten army,
fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?

Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am thine.

CHRISTIANS AND PAGANS

1
Men go to God when they are sore bestead,
Pray to him for succour, for his peace, for bread,
For mercy for them sick, sinning, or dead;
All men do so, Christian and unbelieving.

2
Men go to God when he is sore bestead,
Find him poor and scorned, without shelter or bread,
Whelmed under weight of the wicked, the weak, the dead;
Christians stand by God in his hour of grieving.

3
God goes to every man when sore bestead,
Feeds body and spirit with his bread;
For Christians, pagans alike he hangs dead, And both alike forgiving.

NIGHT VOICES IN TE GEL
⁷¹

Stretched out on my cot
I stare at the grey wall.
Outside, a summer evening
That does not know me
Goes singing into the countryside.
Slowly and softly
The tides of the day ebb
On the eternal shore.
Sleep a little,
Strengthen body and soul, head and hand,
For peoples, houses, spirits and hearts
Are aflame.
Till your day breaks
After blood-red night -
Stand fast!