The Plot to Kill Hitler: Chapters 5–9

The altar was dripping with lace, the ceilings were encrusted with gold, and guards in garish orange-and-blue-striped costumes stood sentry in the corners.

The altar was dripping with lace, the ceilings were encrusted with gold, and guards in garish orange-and-blue-striped costumes stood sentry in the corners.

The altar was dripping with lace, the ceilings were encrusted with gold, and guards in garish orange-and-blue-striped costumes stood sentry in the corners.

Bonhoeffer, accustomed to the simple wooden churches of Germany, was appalled.

And Bonhoeffer was a member of the Lutheran Church—the first church to break away from Rome, in part because of the kind of opulence on display at St. Peter’s.

He saw a throng of seminarians, monks, and priests of every skin color imaginable.

Suddenly, his own church, which was almost synonymous with being German, seemed small, provincial, and narrow-minded.

And it would be a belief that would propel him, years later, when Hitler was on the march, to turn to members of the clergy all across Europe and beg for help.

The Bonhoeffers’ large, gracious Berlin home was adorned in garlands as men in evening attire and ladies in ball gowns floated across the parlor floor to the lilting strains of a Schubert waltz.

As he looked on at the wedding celebration, Dietrich Bonhoeffer again found himself alone. Sabine had been his best friend. Now she had a new mate, while he was preparing for the solitary life of a scholar.

But it was through Sabine’s marriage to Gert that Bonhoeffer would eventually face a crisis of conscience that would upend that quiet, uneventful life.

No one in the Bonhoeffer family had ever married a Jew, but many of their friends in the progressive university neighborhood where they lived were Jews.

And many of Karl and Paula Bonhoeffer’s friends were Jews who held top positions in academia, commerce, and the arts.

And many of Karl and Paula Bonhoeffer’s friends were Jews who held top positions in academia, commerce, and the arts.

He was just twenty, but he was writing his dissertation at the same time as he took his regular course load—a demanding course of study for anyone, let alone someone so young.

He wrote every day after going for a swim, working on a thesis that was both unconventional and, in the view of some of his teachers, naïve.

His Lutheran professors worried that he was too enamored of the Catholic Church and demanded that he defend this strange idea.

His dissertation, “Sanctorum Communio (Communion of Saints),” was a 380-page paper in which Bonhoeffer insisted that the church wasn’t a historical institution; it was a living community that could transcend national, ethnic, class, and even religious boundaries.

And since he was still too young to have his own parish, he’d taken a job as an assistant minister at a church for Germans living in Barcelona.

And the few times he was allowed to preach, his lofty sermons flew over the heads of the congregants.

And the few times he was allowed to preach, his lofty sermons flew over the heads of the congregants.

He lived in a ramshackle boardinghouse, alone in this foreign, friendless city.

He had found his calling—and would find he always preferred the rough and tumble of working with underprivileged children to the pristine halls of academia.

Eventually, Bonhoeffer adopted the local customs, writing in cafés and having dinner at ten p.m. He continued his philosophical musings and wrote further about his idea of the “living church.”

There were endless squabbles in Parliament, and many Germans wanted to return to a monarchy.

And they yearned for a strong, decisive leader who could lift them out of this national malaise.

And classes at Berlin University, where Bonhoeffer had enrolled in post-graduate studies, were dull. Worse than that, they started early in the morning. It was a tough transition from the languid life he’d enjoyed in Barcelona.

The one bright spot was a witty theology student named Franz Hildebrandt.

Now that they were reunited, they griped about lectures that made them yawn and the doldrums of Berlin in winter.

After one debate where Bonhoeffer triumphed, Hildebrandt gave him a book he inscribed “to (my) ancient foe.”

Bonhoeffer wrote about the proof of God’s existence in the birth of a baby as a “whisper ‘between eternity and eternity,’” and as evidence of a divine hand in “the power of what ‘future things’ will bring.”

In his dissertation entitled “Act and Being,” Bonhoeffer was critical of religious thinkers who believed that constant thought and reflection was a way to be closer to God; that sort of cerebral approach was what killed faith, he said.

Again, his professors disagreed with Bonhoeffer’s unorthodox thinking, but they had to agree: his writing was brilliant.

And so when he received an invitation to study at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, he took it.

The first-class minds in science and philosophy were in Europe, they said, not in that upstart country across the Atlantic.