‘Are we still of any use?’ - Impunity, the media and Dietrich Bonhoeffer

A few days before his 27th birthday, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran minister and already a distinguished teacher of theology at Berlin University, was at the microphone. A series of radio programmes had been arranged by the Berlin Church to explore the condition of Germany in 1933. Bonhoeffer had been invited to speak about youth work. He chose to call his talk, ‘The younger generation’s altered view of the concept of “Führer” (leader)’.

Berlin was still celebrating the emotional events of two days earlier when Adolf Hitler had taken over the leadership of Germany from President Hindenburg. Already in many minds ‘Führer’ meant Adolf Hitler. The majority of Germans were wildly enthusiastic about this new dynamic leader.

Even church leaders poured exaggerated praise upon the swastika, the National Socialist Party and the Führer. A forest of swastika flags surrounded the altar of Magdeburg Cathedral and the Dean interpreted the scene:

‘It has simply become a symbol of German hope. Whoever reviles the symbol is reviling our Germany. The swastikas round the altar radiate hope – hope that a new day is about to dawn’ (Bethge, 1999: 257).

In that emotional atmosphere, with all hope for the future placed upon the person of the new Reich Chancellor, ‘der Führer’, Bonhoeffer broadcast his talk. He analysed rapidly developing changes in the minds of young people about their leaders. Bonhoeffer was not against strong leadership, but it had to be well founded and circumscribed, lest it become ‘a form of collectivism which could turn into intensified individualism.’ He made no secret of his contempt for ‘the unnatural narcissism of youth made vain by old fools’. Towards the end, he warned his listeners that should the leader ‘surrender to the wishes of his followers, who would always make him their idol, then the image of the leader would gradually become the image of the misleaders… leaders or offices that set themselves up as gods mock God.’

Before these last sentences could be broadcast, the talk was cut and no reason given. Bonhoeffer was angry. He had the whole script duplicated and circulated as widely as he could with the explanation that he had been cut off, which had ‘distorted the greater picture’. His biographer, Eberhard Bethge, comments: ‘Never again did he use this treacherous medium.’

Subsequent growth of control
The notorious burning of the Reichstag on the night of 27 February 1933, only weeks after his election, gave the Führer the ‘cause’ he needed to impose an ominous decree for ‘The Protection of People and State’. It abolished virtually all personal rights which had been guaranteed by the Constitution and made concentration camps legal.
This edict of 28 February 1933 read:

‘Restrictions of personal freedom, of the right of free speech, including the freedom of the press, of the right of association and public assembly, the intervention in the privacy of post, telegraph and telephone, authorisation of house searches and the confiscation or restriction of property beyond the hitherto legal limits, will henceforth be admissible.’

It was called an ‘emergency decree’, but was not rescinded until Germany surrendered to the Allies on 8 May 1945.

Use of the media
All nations at all times, whether in the crisis of war or the partisan divisions of peace, control their mass media. But under a democratic regime, there are checks and balances. There are investigative journalists and independent newspapers and broadcasting stations. There are ways of persuading these to toe the government line, but a healthy juridical system can make a legislature accountable. Such checks and balances were not there under the Nazi regime and abuses of the media – common to all governments – were unusually excessive. Falsehood, silence and oblivion were used far beyond the practice of most nations.

On 21 March, the ‘Malicious Practices Act’ enabled Hitler to suppress unfavourable news about Germany both in the mass media and also in personal communications. It could be invoked legally against anyone who ‘with malice aforethought puts forward or spreads an untrue or grossly distorted assertion of a factual nature that is likely to impair the welfare of the Reich… or the reputation of the Reich government.’ The Act put anyone who was unwilling to affirm absolute loyalty to the Nazi regime in danger.

The Bonhoeffers in this situation
The whole Bonhoeffer family recognised the injustice of treating the Jews as inferior citizens, unfit to hold office in any section of society. The campaign to stigmatise the Jew was promoted by the government via the mass media. On 1 April 1933 a boycott of all Jewish shops was called for. Bonhoeffer’s 91-year-old grandmother deliberately walked through a cordon of uniformed ‘Brownshirts’ to shop at the Jewish owned Kaufhaus des Westen in Berlin. Meanwhile, Bonhoeffer himself was corresponding with friends in the USA about how to send information on what was really happening in Germany.

When the State interfered with the Church by declaring that Christians of Jewish origin could not hold office in the Church and that their ordination must be declared invalid, Bonhoeffer called on the Church to separate itself from the State. He had no support. Too many Church dignitaries supported the regime and even those opposed to intervention of the State in Church affairs were silent. High-ranking officials in the regional ands free churches wrote to their ecumenical partners abroad or to their parent churches in England and the USA, asking them to oppose such propaganda against Germany’s new order. Bonhoeffer stood almost alone, particularly in his opposition to the treatment of the Jews. In that same year, he circulated an article on ‘The Church and the Jewish problem’, condemning the current use of Martin Luther as justification for anti-Semitism.

Bonhoeffer in England
Isolated and a little uncertain of himself, Bonhoeffer accepted an invitation to be minister of two German-speaking congregations in London. There, he began a close friendship with George Bell, Bishop of Chichester. At last he found a way to bring the truth about Germany to a Britain confused by the ‘falsehood, silence and oblivion’ in the news coming from Germany, both from Church dignitaries at international conferences and in the media. In Bell he found a friend and ally in his attempts to communicate the truth about what was happening in Hitler’s Reich.

Bell was able to speak in the House of Lords, write in The Times, and through his international contacts convey the information which Bonhoeffer provided for him to a wider audience. Falsehood was unmasked, silence was broken and that which had been cast into oblivion came into the light. Bell remained faithful to the truth through three stages of this dismal history leading to war. He spoke against the Nazi regime, armed with far more information than anyone else in England. He cared for the refugees from Nazi Germany and tried to explain that there was another Germany than Hitler’s. When victory came, he argued for a just peace and an attempt to restore Germany to the community of nations. Bell was aware that so much control of the media by both sides in the conflict of war made reconciliation almost impossible. However, he succeeded to the extent that there was no ‘Versailles Treaty’ after the 1939-45 War. Instead there was Marshall Aid.

Ethics of conspiracy
After two years in London, Bonhoeffer returned to Germany to lead a theological seminary for students prepared to resist the untruths of the Nazi regime. At the seminary in Finkenwalde they learnt the cost of discipleship. They ruined any chances of a career in the National Church and learnt to discern its lies. The seminary was closed down, but Bonhoeffer kept in touch with his students, guiding and directing them. He was soon barred access to all the means of communication available – forbidden to preach, publish or hold assembly. He was silenced.

American friends attempted to rescue him by inviting him to lecture in the USA, but he returned to Germany as soon as he saw was becoming inevitable. He had to be with his people in those trying times if he were to have any part in rebuilding Church and State after a disastrous war. In Germany he joined a conspiracy to unmask and destroy the evil regime. With Luther’s strong teaching about the separation of Church and State, it was unthinkable that a Lutheran pastor should plot the overthrow of his country’s government – and this in wartime.

Bonhoeffer began to see that traditional ethics were inadequate to face the new depths of evil of the Nazi regime. In the past, the weapons against evil were reason, principles, conscience, duty, absolute freedom and private virtuousness. These were not the ethics of evil people but the ‘achievements and attitudes of a noble humanity’.

‘It is all too easy,’ he wrote, ‘to pour scorn upon the weapons we have inherited from our ancestors, weapons which served them to perform great feats.’ Then he added, but ‘they are weapons which in the present struggle can no longer be sufficient. None of these can produce the bold stroke of the deed which can strike at the heart of evil and overcome’ Green, 1999: 305-6). The one-time pacifist was now prepared to join the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. The ‘bold stroke of the deed’ which he wrote about must, he said, ‘be done on “one’s own free responsibility”.’

‘Responsible action’, ‘free responsibility’, these are at the heart of Bonhoeffer’s ethics. There is a danger here, particularly as Bonhoeffer insists it must be ‘bound-up with exclusive allegiance to God.’ Was he supporting the ‘suicide bombers’. No, because his ethics depends upon that God being the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

It was with much agonising and many doubts that Bonhoeffer took this step, because of the impunity of the media and its effects upon victims and oppressors alike. When there is no other way to destroy such evil, righteousness itself must be sacrificed if need be. But he was not sure and it is largely in his poems at the end of his life, under the shadow of his execution, that the truth emerged for him.

Bonhoeffer’s doubts and their resolution
The conspiracy failed and the cost was awful. On 20 July 1944, while Bonhoeffer was in prison, the attempt was made and it failed. Then hundreds of the finest men in Germany were massacred. Before that failed attempt, indeed before his arrest, Bonhoeffer wrote a circular to his friends in which he asks, ‘Are we still of any use?’:
‘We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; we have been drenched by many storms; we have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretence; experience has 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? What we shall need is not geniuses or cynics or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, straightforward men (and women). Will our inward power of resistance be strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves remorseless enough, for us to find our way back to simplicity and straightforwardness?’ Bonhoeffer, 1971: 16).
Later, when the plot to kill Hitler had failed and he was still in prison, a few months before his execution, in what is probably his best poem, he included the following lines:

I sink into brooding,
I lower myself into the heart of darkness.
You, night, full of horror and evil,
make yourself known to me!
Why and how long will you gnaw at our patience?
Silence, deep and long.
Then I hear the night as it comes down to me:
‘I am not dark, the darkness is your guilt!’
Guilt! I hear a trembling and a shudder,
a murmur and a cry.
I hear men in angry mood,
innumerable voices in wild confusion,
a dumb choir assaults the ear of God.
Hunted by men and maligned.
Defenceless and guilty to their mind,
by intolerable burdens abused.
Yet we declare them the accused.
We accuse those who drove us to the evil deed,
who allowed us to share their guilty seed,
who made us witnesses of the just abused,
only to despise those they had used.
Our eyes must see violence,
entangling us in their guilty offence;
then as they silence our voice,
like dumb dogs we have no choice.
We learn to call lies just
uniting ourselves with the unjust.
When violence was done to the weak
our cold eyes did not speak.
And what in sorrow our hearts had broken,
remained hidden and unspoken.
We quenched our burning ire
and stamped out the inner fire.
Sacred bonds by which we once were bound,
are now torn and fallen to the ground.
Friendship and truth betrayed,
Ttars and remorse in ridicule displayed.
We sons from upright men descended,
who once rights and truth defended,
have now become despisers of God and man,
amidst the mocking laughter of Hell’s plan.
Though robbed of freedom and honour, we stand tall before men with pride.
and when we are wrongly decried,
before men we declare our innocence freely.
At peace and firm, we stand man to man,
as the accused we accuse.
Only before Thee, maker of all,
before Thee alone we are sinners.
Shrinking from pain and poor in deeds,
we have betrayed Thee before men.
From ‘Voices in the Night’, (Robertson, 1998).

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ‘silent witnesses of evil deeds’ referred to those individuals who stood by while crimes against human dignity were committed. But he was also referring to the mass media. Under the Nazi regime, newspapers and radio were manipulated and censored to enable deception, coercion and total misinformation. To a certain extent, it was only by controlling the mass media, and therefore what ordinary German people ‘knew’ about the regime, that Hitler’s cronies were able to consolidate a totalitarian State.

Bonhoeffer called on the Church and all ‘straightforward men and women’ – by which he meant those who had not been corrupted by the State – to stand up for moral decency. He was calling for an end to the impunity that ‘violates and poisons the memory’ and ‘makes true reconciliation impossible’ (Jacques, 2000: 4). Impunity betrays humanity by making gross violations unaccountable. Bonhoeffer demanded that men and women, and the mass media they create, be both responsible and accountable in the eyes of their fellow human beings and in the eyes of God.

Bonhoeffer reserved his criticism of those who use the media with impunity for his Church. The majority of the Christian communities supported the actions of the Nazi government: they repeated its falsehoods, kept silent when it was ‘politically correct’ to do so and left the people confused over ethical decisions. Bonhoeffer stated his criticism most clearly in May 1944 in a sermon sent from prison to a baby about to be baptised. Referring to the great words of Christian proclamation that would be said over the baby, he wrote:

‘All these things are so difficult and so remote that we hardly venture any more to speak of them. In these traditional words and acts we suspect there may be something quite new and revolutionary, though we cannot as yet grasp or express it. That is our fault. Our Church, which has been fighting in these years only for its self-preservation, as though that were an end in itself, is incapable of taking the word of reconciliation and redemption to humankind and the world. Our earlier words are, therefore, bound to lose their force and cease, and our being Christians today will be limited to two things: prayer and righteous action before men.’

His hope lay in the future when the tainted generation had passed away. The sermon continued:

‘It is not for us to prophecy the day (though the day will come) when men (and women) will be called upon so to utter the word of God that the world will be changed and renewed by it. It will be a new language, perhaps non-religious, but liberating and redeeming… it will shock people and yet overcome them with its power, it will be the language of a new righteousness and truth’ (Bonhoeffer, 1971: 299-300).

References
Bathge, Eberdard (1999). Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography. (Revised edition.) Fortress Press, USA.
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich (1971). Letters and Papers from Prison. London: SCM Press.
Green, Clifford J. (1999). Bonhoeffer: A Theory of Sociology. (Revised edition.) Eerdmans, USA.
Jacques, Geneviève (2000). Beyond Impunity. Geneva: WCC.
Robertson, Edwin H. (1998). The Prison Poems of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. London: Eagle/IPS.

Edwin H. Robertson was Executive Director of the World Association for Christian Broadcasting (1964-68), one of the organisations that merged to form the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) in 1968. He is a specialist in the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.