The German Genius

metaphor, for the fact is that faith will always rise up again, however dead the world may seem. The German repudiation of the “Quest of the historical Jesus” reached its zenith in the theology of Rudolf Bultmann. 26 He never amended his views to accommodate the Nazis, but he steered clear of politics and kept out of the Führer’s sights.
    The third man in this renaissance of theology was Paul Tillich, born in 1886 in Brandenburg in eastern Germany and the son of yet another Lutheran pastor. He served as a chaplain in the German army throughout World War I, then taught theology at Berlin, Marburg (where he met both Bultmann and Heidegger), Dresden, Leipzig, and finally Frankfurt, where he became part of the Frankfurt school. 27
    As the 1920s passed, Tillich became an increasingly outspoken socialist, publishing Die sozialistische Entscheidung ( The Socialist Decision ), an examination of the relationship between religion and politics. Unfortunately, it was released in 1933, was quickly suppressed, with copies confiscated and burned by the newly appointed Nazis. Tillich himself was dismissed (his name was on the first list of those suspended from university teaching, dated April 13, 1933, along with Max Horkheimer, Paul Klee, and Alfred Weber), but as luck would have it Reinhold Niebuhr, a prominent socialist and a professor of practical theology at the Union Theological Seminary in New York, and himself the son of an emigrant German pastor, was in Germany just then, and he and the seminary’s president, Henry Sloane Coffin, invited Tillich to join the Seminary. Tillich and his family emigrated soon after.
    T HE D EFINING E DGE OF E VIL
     
    Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–45), in fact almost the entire Bonhoeffer family, must rank among the most courageous people in all Germany, a reproach to those who say there was no chance of resistance in the Third Reich, and to those who say that there were no good Germans.
    Bonhoeffer was born in Breslau, he and his twin sister, Sabine, being two of eight children born to Karl and Paula (von Hase) Bonhoeffer. Karl was a leading psychiatrist, a professor at the University of Berlin, though an empiricist, not a Freudian. 28 Dietrich’s brother, Karl, was killed in World War I; his sister Christel married Hans von Dohnanyi and became the mother of Christoph von Dohnanyi, the conductor, and Klaus von Dohnanyi, a mayor of Hamburg. Although his father was a psychiatrist, Dietrich was drawn to the church and studied at Tübingen and then Berlin. He took his doctorate when he was only twenty-one but was forced to wait until he was twenty-five before being ordained. 29 He spent the intervening years at the Union Theological Seminary in New York, during which time he formed an enviable collection of African-American spirituals. 30
    He returned to Germany in 1934 where, together with 2,000 Lutheran pastors, he helped organize the Pastors’ Emergency League in opposition to the state church controlled by the Nazis. This was the organization that evolved into the Confessing Church under Barth’s leadership. At the outbreak of World War II, Bonhoeffer joined the Resistance, in particular a small group of senior officers in the Abwehr , Military Intelligence, intent on assassinating Hitler. Bonhoeffer was arrested in April 1943 after money used to help Jews escape to Switzerland was traced to him. He was tried and hanged (naked) on April 9, 1945. His brother Klaus and his brothers-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi and Rüdiger Schleicher, both of whom had been active in the Resistance, were shot elsewhere later that month. 31
    Before his arrest, Bonhoeffer composed his most important book, Ethik ( Ethics ), a profound work but one that shows the scars of the time and may be seen as a cross between Pietism and existentialism. 32 For Bonhoeffer, the task in life is to become a responsible person, modeled on the example of Jesus Christ, but always realizing that it is action that counts, that it is how we participate in life in regard to good and evil that determines who we are and how Christian we may regard ourselves. Bonhoeffer thought that what really matters is how we confront evil on those occasions in our life when it really matters. Moral choices only matter when they are real and immediate—their reality and immediacy are their defining attributes, “urgency is invariably the defining edge of evil.” In any given situation, Bonhoeffer says, there is a right thing to do. We can recognize