Greetings. I trust you are all safe and well. I very much appreciate the reflections I have received over the past few weeks in response to the communication/reading for Session #2 of our ‘Integrity’ virtual symposium. Please do not hesitate to suggest ways to improve the format/logistics as we move forward, following the order and the content of the first iteration of this virtual symposium I began facilitating in September 2021 with fifteen surgeons affiliated with medical school departments of surgery across the country. Though quite diverse, their (and our) common ground is a shared resolve to be authentic, to show respect, to be gentle, and to be fair in personal and professional encounters. Please know I am honored, challenged, and humbled by the privilege to adapt for you this second iteration of a virtual symposium centered on the examination of integrity.
I have inserted below this cover note (and also .pdf format here) the communication/reading for Session #3 of our ‘Integrity’ virtual symposium.
Remember -- the subject for our virtual symposium is maintaining integrity (in the structural or engineering sense of ‘integrity’) in difficult circumstances, particularly when the consequences can be costly and even dangerous. The intent for the first two sessions has been to firmly establish our understanding of and focus on ‘integrity’. I hope the first two sessions have given context, specificity, nuance, and grip to the disclosures/challenges our disillusioning experiences pose for being truly candid about our integrity and to the unavoidable rethinking/refreshing of our integrity demanded by our disillusioning experiences, using the six ‘personal statement’ questions – i.e., Who am I? Who/what do I trust? What do I do? For whom do I do what I do? To what end do I do what I do? Within what values do I do what I do?
With Session #3, we begin examining our integrity through considering the challenges to integrity faced by the generation in Europe that came of age after World War I through the Nazi years, with special attention on the decisions and reflections of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-45) during his participation from 1939 forward in covert resistance efforts to bring down Hitler and the Nazis.
Re the format -- I am sending you every 3-4 weeks a brief reading along with a few discussion/reflection prompts. You are encouraged (1) to spend the time you can allot during the month meditating on the reading plus the prompts and (2) to send a brief response to each reading when possible. I will respond when/as appropriate. Perhaps we can add a ZOOM meeting from time to time along the way. Note – the communications and readings from the first iteration of this ‘Integrity’ virtual symposium retain their physician/surgeon orientation, requiring you to transpose the orientation of the readings into your professional field if you are not a physician/surgeon.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Doug
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Re my relation to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s narrative and thought
Douglas Brown, PhD
[The reflections below have been selected from the most recently revised draft of a 2001 essay I wrote for several physician/surgeon friends with whom I had been working closely for more than ten years]
No life or set of ideas have been more pivotal for me than the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) and his letters/reflections after being imprisoned by the Gestapo. I remember carefully opening the 16 November 1993 letter I received from Eberhard and Renate Bethge. I had met them a few months earlier when this still vigorous couple made presentations for a Boston University conference that spring on the theme of friendship. My wife and I had subsequently spent several delightful October days with the Bethges at their home in Wachtberg, a few kilometers south of Bonn.
[photos from our first visit with the Bethges – October 1993]
Renate’s mother was the oldest sister of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a controversial German theologian and Nazis resister who was executed (along with several other political prisoners) by the Gestapo at the Flossenburg concentration camp just days before the war in Europe ended. The Gestapo also executed Renate’s father Rudiger Schleicher and two uncles Klaus Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi – in addition to her ‘Uncle Dietrich’ -- in those last days. Her husband Eberhard was Dietrich’s closest friend during the Nazi years. A sympathetic prison guard smuggled letters between Dietrich, Eberhard, and Renate during Dietrich’s eighteen months in Berlin’s Tegel Prison (April 1943-October 1944). The Bethges devoted the balance of their lives to making Dietrich’s life and seminal ideas accessible to subsequent generations.
I had not ceased examining Dietrich’s life and thought since a 1976 graduate course assignment to read his prison letters. In those letters, I found what soon became my most reliable point of reference as I deepened/refreshed my resolve to be ‘with the world face to face’ (a phrase in a quotation Dietrich placed in one of his early prison communications). Dietrich’s courageous decisions and the radical ideas he disclosed in his prison letters to the Bethges were never eclipsed as I tested – as a doctoral student and as a professor -- the existential strength of the most seminal thinkers in the story of western civilization as multiple sclerosis relentlessly attacked my wife for fourteen unremitting years (d. 1987).
Still, when I first met the Bethges in Boston, I was prepared to sever my ties to Dietrich if they thought I was violating his story or misappropriating his ideas. My heart still races when I recall Renate’s observation in her 16 November 1993 letter to me after our days with the Bethges in October -- “I felt and feel an understanding between us, which I don’t often feel, even with people quite near to us. One feels that you have not ‘learned’ Bonhoeffer, but that you have lived with him and so can sovereignly integrate him into your own thoughts.”
Dietrich’s June 1939 decision to return to Germany from New York as the darkness of war descended on Europe still holds my attention. The Bonhoeffer family was a culturally refined and influential Berlin family. Previous generations had made significant contributions in academics, politics, church life, the military, and music. Dietrich’s father was Professor of Psychiatry at The Charité Hospital affiliated with the University of Berlin. Dietrich’s oldest living brother was a noted physicist. Two brothers-in-law were well positioned in the legal field; an older brother, in the aviation industry. His immediate family (including the children) did not fail to see the evil potential in Hitler’s January 1933 maneuver into political control. Dietrich’s parents’ Berlin home quickly became a gathering place for information sharing and for daring conversation about resistance. His confrontational speech on Berlin radio the week after Hitler became chancellor 30 January 1933 prompted the Gestapo to open a file on Dietrich that led to his arrest a decade later.
Dietrich, in the early Nazi years, concentrated on mobilizing into a phalanx of non-violent civil disobedience a remnant of Protestant pastors who were alarmed at Nazi enthusiasm within German Protestant churches. Until the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Hitler worked to consolidate his power while being careful to avoid internationally sensitive incidents. However, by 1938 the Nazis were secure enough to exploit the protesting pastors’ internal debates by reducing their choices to (1) making a public oath of personal allegiance to Hitler or (2) being imprisoned. The ranks of the pastors broke. Only a few remained committed to non-violent civil disobedience. Many were eventually swept up by patriotic fervor as Germany annexed one neighboring country or region after another. Others turned inward and huddled tightly to ride out the storm.
Dietrich had invested too much not to feel deep disappointment and loss of direction. He did know that being loyal to the collapsed strategy of non-violent civil disobedience would be futile and self-serving. As he would later observe in his December 1942 ‘After Ten Years’ essay written for his family and fellow conspirators:
To talk of going down fighting like heroes in the face of certain defeat is not really heroic at all, but merely a refusal to face the future. The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation is to live.
But as late as spring 1939, Dietrich had not yet joined the ring of high-ranking political and military conspirators hidden within the Abwehr (a counter-intelligence arm of the Nazi war machine). Instead, with the conscription date for his birth year approaching and with efforts to stall his order to report for military service exhausted, a travel permit finally arrived by which he could accept an invitation from friends in New York City – including Union Theological Seminary’s Reinhold Niebuhr and William Sloan Coffin – who were intent on rescuing him. He crossed the Atlantic on the Bremen, accompanied by his older brother and noted physicist Karl-Friedrich.
A permanent address . . . exceptional libraries . . . the opportunity to do some serious writing . . . an engaging lecture schedule . . . . New York City was a safe place. But it was the wrong place. Dietrich felt keenly the dislocation. A letter written to Reinhold Niebuhr just a few weeks after arriving at Ellis Island reveals that he quickly recovered his sense of place in the world:
My thoughts about Germany have not left me since yesterday evening. . . . The whole weight of self-reproach because of a wrong decision comes back and almost chokes me. . . . I have made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period of our national history . . . I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of . . . Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people. . . .
By 27 July 1939, Dietrich was back in Berlin. By October the German army had invaded Poland. After his application to be a military chaplain was denied in February 1940, Dietrich crossed the threshold into covert resistance. By now he knew well the members of the seasoned conspiracy circle hidden within the Abwehr that would finally on 20 July 1944 make its move to assassinate Hitler. Under the official cover of being an Abwehr agent, Dietrich used his international connections for three years trying (without success) to convince the Allies there were reasons not to demand another crushing unconditional surrender. Eventually, circumstantial evidence fell into the long-suspicious Gestapo’s hands that led to his arrest and four others – including his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi -- on 5 April 1943.
In prison, Dietrich soon began moving – sometimes at a dizzying pace – toward radically new ideas. For more than forty years, I have pored over his prison letters and seeking out/sitting with Dietrich again and again for conversation about such ideas in his prison letters as:
I sometimes feel a real craving for an evening of music. . . . The mind’s hunger for discussion is much more tormenting than the body’s hunger for food. (9 November 1943; 25 December 1943)
There are two ways of dealing psychically with adversities. One way, the easier, is to try to ignore them; that is about as far as I have gotten. The other and more difficult way is to face them deliberately and overcome them; I’m not equal to that yet, but one must learn to do it, for the first way is a slight . . . piece of self-deception. (5 December 1943)
It’s possible to get used to physical hardships, and to live for months out of the body, so to speak – almost too much so – but one doesn’t get used to the psychological strain; on the contrary, I have the feeling that everything that I see and hear is putting years on me, and I’m often finding the world nauseating and burdensome. . . . I often wonder who I really am – the man who goes on squirming under these ghastly experiences in wretchedness with cries to heaven, or the man who scourges himself and pretends to others (and even to himself) that he is placid, cheerful, composed, and in control of himself, and who allows people to admire him for it . . . (15 December 1943)
But isn’t it characteristic of a man, in contrast to an immature person, that his center of gravity is always where he actually is, and that the longing for the fulfillment of his wishes cannot prevent him from being his whole self, wherever he happens to be? . . . He may have his longings, but he keeps them out of sight, and somehow masters them. And the more he has to overcome in order to live fully in the present, the more he will have the respect and confidence of his fellows, especially the younger ones who are still on the road that he has already traveled. (19 March 1944)
The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over. . . . We are moving toward a completely religionless time. . . . It means . . . that there remain only a few ‘last survivors of the age of chivalry’, or a few intellectually dishonest people, on whom we can descend as ‘religious’. Are they to be the chosen few? Is it on this dubious group of people that we are to pounce in fervor, pique, or indignation, in order to sell them our goods? . . . If we don’t want to do all that, . . . what kind of situation emerges for us? (30 April 1944)
And we cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur. And this is just what we do recognize – before God! . . . The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. . . . The world that has come of age is more godless, and perhaps for that very reason nearer to God, than the world before its coming of age. (16 July 1944)
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. I would talk to my warders freely and friendly and clearly, as though it were mine to command. I would bear the days of misfortune equably, smilingly, proudly, like one accustomed to win. Am I then really all that which others 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 colors, for flowers, for the voice of birds, thirsting for words of kindness, for neighborliness, 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? . . . (lines from his July 1944 ‘Who am I?’ poem)
Dietrich forsook safety in 1939. He shared fully in his fellow Abwehr conspirators’ resolve to strike – violently, if necessary -- at an evil head of state. He maintained his cover and theirs in prison. He dared to question every idea that had collapsed under the weight of horrific evil and human suffering. He sketched in isolation the electric new ways he had begun to think/see. He hung naked from the gallows, dead at thirty-nine years of age.
Shocked, confused, disappointed, offended, threatened, . . . – such reactions to Dietrich’s prison ideas and his brutal execution as a traitor soon surfaced after the war’s end even among friends and students with whom he labored before 1939. Here is what I see. His integrity, firm. His optimism, resilient. His gratitude, unfailing. His ‘religionless’ spirituality, just beginning to form. His death, humiliating. His defeat, honorable.
I had the privilege of participating in Eberhard Bethge’s 90th birthday celebration (August 1999) at Godesburg Castle attended by a host of the Eberhard’s friends from Germany and around the world. After returning to the hotel from a smaller post-celebration gathering at the Bethges’ home, I shared a glass of wine with the other American in attendance. Thirty years earlier, he had been a founding member of the International Bonhoeffer Society. As we explained our experiences with Dietrich’s life and thought, I began to describe the collaborations I have enjoyed with our small but courageous circle within the medical/surgical sphere and our resolve for medicine to be practiced humanely and with a resolute social conscience. At one point, he broke in with the observation, “I see what you and your physician/surgeon friends are . . . conspirators!” When I later checked the etymology (i.e., conspirare, to breathe together), I realized even more fully that so we are.
[a collage drawn by an artist friend of mine using the last known photo of Dietrich, a photo with Eberhard after his 90th birthday celebration, text from one of Dietrich’s prison letters, and text from Renate’s 16 November 1993 letter]
Douglas Brown, PhD
Surgical Ethics Specialist
Center for Humanism and Ethics in Surgical Specialties
Department of Surgery
Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine
St. Louis, MO