Worse Might Be Better

The disturbing relevance of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Eighty years ago today, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed by the Nazis. His heroic resistance to the Nazi regime, as well as his compelling prison writings, have been a source for inspiration for generations of political activists, especially in the 1960s. Recent developments have convinced WoC contributor

Tom Barson

that Bonhoeffer is disturbingly relevant once again.

— Santiago Ramos, executive editor

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Interviewed on March 15 by the New York Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarra, U.S. Senator and Minority Leader Charles Schumer was asked if he “had made the wrong choice” on the Republican-sponsored Continuing Resolution designed to raise the limit on US debt issuance and avoid a government shutdown. Schumer’s response was to contrapose “bad” with “worse”:

… I think it was a very, very difficult decision between two bad options, a partisan Republican C.R. and a shutdown that Musk and Trump wanted. For me, the shutdown of the government would just be devastating and far worse than the Republican C.R.

Later he repeats the point:

… I knew this would be an unpopular decision. I knew that. I know politics. But I felt so strongly as a leader that I couldn’t let this happen because weeks and months from now, things would be far worse than they even are today, that I had to do what I had to do.

For me, Schumer’s words jumped off the page because they riffed a famous phrase by the German Protestant theologian and resistance figure Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was hanged by the Nazis on this day in 1945. Two years earlier, in a typescript circulated to a few friends, Bonhoeffer had laid out all the stances he had seen to fail in the face of the systematic evil of the Nazi regime.

“Who stands fast?” he asked. Not the fanatic, who exhausts himself in opposition to symbols; not the person of conscience who in the end has to lie to himself; not the believer in duty, who will inevitably be co-opted. Above all not the reasonable person

… who will assent to something bad so as to ward off something worse, and in doing so he will no longer be able to realize that the worse, which he wants to avoid, might be better. Here we have the raw material of tragedy.

Against a tightening knot in my stomach, I asked myself, “Could we reach that point here?”

I did not expect to be going back to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Though my initial paperback of Letters and Papers from Prison had disintegrated from daily use in my early twenties, I had probably not opened its hardbound replacement for 40 years. My interests had long since turned from theology to technology, economics and mathematics, from dogmatic commitment (or so I termed it) to analysis. I had forgotten that Bonhoeffer, while bravely committed to the point of becoming an unofficial saint, could analyze with the best of us.

Why Bonhoeffer in the first place? Certainly my twentysomething self needed both a hero and a place in the world. Bonhoeffer’s bravery could inspire me (without being likely to require emulation), and his theology, the “religionless Christianity” he sketched out in his prison letters, for a while seemed to offer me — how can I describe this? — a way to be a leader without being a fake. If one did not have to be “religious” in order to be a Christian (as his writing seemed to suggest), then there might be a way for a not-outwardly religious person to make a difference in the world through a career in the church.

It’s chastening, of course, that Bonhoeffer’s current relevance hinges on the possible falsity of what I found to be his first attraction: Things might get as bad in the United States as they did in 1930s and 1940s Germany. Not only might resistance be required, but resisting might come to require subterfuge as much as public courage. And the worse-might-be-better calculation, along with “what is required,” may change with each issue and with every step along the path. Today, Charles Schumer may be right in holding that it is more important to keep what remains of the legislative process alive than it is to defeat a “bad” bill, especially when the would-be tyrant looks to become his own most effective opponent. There are signs of this: The fallout from “Liberation Day” may be just the sort of worse that ultimately proves liberating. But that’s today. Legislative, political and judicial processes might yet fail. Greater and very different cases of worse may be yet to come.

What this comes down to is that we might have to emulate Bonhoeffer, either publicly or secretly, more than any sane person would want or hope. That possibility is what makes Letters and Papers from Prison relevant, and the first piece in it, itself neither a letter nor written from prison, already seems close to speaking directly to our situation. “After Ten Years” (which I quoted from above) goes point-by-point through the dissimulating, soul-searing business of resistance in an authoritarian state. It does not treat the undercover resistance that Bonhoeffer was already engaged in — he could not endanger his readers any further by writing about that. Instead it details the endless public dance of professing loyalty where one must, refusing where one can, and facing seeming hopelessness all the while. At the end he observes:

We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; we have been drenched by many storms; we have learned the arts of equivocation and pretense; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn or down and made us cynical. Are we still of any use?

Are we still of any use? We have be prepared for Bonhoeffer’s question to come back to each of us. “What does it mean to be a substantive person in this time?” Trump’s attack on American institutions — may seem like a worse that can’t get better, but it may provide us with motivating examples. I have never, at least from actions that weren’t my own, felt such shame as I did at the news that Columbia University, a school I attended, had caved to administration demands to insert an arrest-authorized, single-issue police force onto the campus.

At this hour, I don’t know what to expect of university presidents. Some will be stalwarts. Some will not. But Trump’s attack brings questions that you and I can answer personally. Will you defend free speech at the moment when hateful words are spewing? Are you going to defend the universities, despite the charge of antisemitism against them, and be accused of it yourself? Will you be visible when it’s prudent to hide? I thought I had answered Bonhoeffer’s question, at least for the moment, as I made a donation to the defense fund for Mahmoud Khalil. But the question came back at me, even before the last click. Did I wish to make the donation anonymous?

So it will be. Every step of the way.

That it is difficult and dangerous to meet the moment, Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew well. “When Christ calls a man,” he once wrote, “he bids him come and die.” Hoping to save Bonhoeffer, Reinhold Niebuhr (once his teacher) and Paul Lehmann (once my teacher) arranged in 1939 to bring him to Union Theological Seminary in New York. But, once in America, Bonhoeffer realized that he could not stay. His letter to Niebuhr explaining his decision to return to Germany, though it uses word “Christian” in a way that now rings differently, stands as one of the twentieth century’s few moral monuments:

I shall have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in German after the war if I do not share the trails of this time with my people. … Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose; but I cannot make this choice in security.

Though imprisoned from April 1943, Bonhoeffer was well aware that Germany was collapsing around him. Via smuggled letters, he offered his friends one of Jeremiah’s few consoling verses: “Houses and vineyards and fields shall again be bought in this land” (32:15). For himself, he clung to another: “Thy life I will give you, as a prize of war” (45:5).

But eighty years ago this morning, by Hitler’s order, he was led out to the execution area of the small political prison that was an adjunct to the Flossenbürg concentration camp. The prison doctor wrote later of Bonhoeffer’s calm demeanor, and I wondered, reading this, why a man whose job was to certify innumerable executions would have remembered this one. But a second question answered the first. How often did this doctor watch someone walk to the scaffold who was completely at peace?

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This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

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