Bonhoeffer's Drama Fragment

I just got vol. 7 of Bonhoeffer’s Works, Fiction from Tegel Prison, and have so far read through the Drama fragment. The editorial notes indicate he abandoned it at some point, realizing it wasn’t the stuff of drama, and worked on the same idea in novel forms (which is what I’m planning on reading next). Still, I wish he’d finished it! I wonder where he was going with it. It’s not immediately clear in every case where his sympathies lie or what the growing edge will be for each character.

In what we do have, one of the items that struck me the most was the class conflict at the end between Heinrich (who grew up in a poor and dissolute area) and Christoph (a middle-class upright young man, modeled on Bonhoeffer himself). Christoph sees the assault of the fascism around him on the noble culture that has been the foundation of his life and formed his capacity for self-giving; but Heinrich has never had this. The latter says accusingly: “People like you have a foundation, you have ground under your feet, you have a place in the world… If you want to live, you need ground under your feet—and we don’t have this ground. That’s why we’re scattered around whichever way the storm winds are blowing. That’s why we have nothing for which we can or want to put our heads on the block.”

It’s remarkable to me that Bonhoeffer could capture so clearly the dilemma he faced. On the one hand, the replacement culture forced on Germany by the Nazis was demonic, false, and destructive. He wanted to preserve the genuine good of the classic German culture that was under assault. On the other hand, this classic German culture had not been able to gather all Germans into its fold. It really left some to rot in slums and poverty. In one way, the cowardice or even willingness of these impoverished souls in cooperating with Nazism was understandable because the previous culture had failed them. How could middle-class people like Bonhoeffer find a non-snobbish way to promote and cultivate the real treasures of their inherited culture, but in a way to include and ennoble these lost souls, not in a paternalistic or patronizing way, but in a way that really brought out their full humanity? Bonhoeffer realized that just tossing out the old elite culture and starting over would not work—it would lead to the genocidal excesses of Nazism and Stalinism. But the way forward was hardly clear.

This also reminds me of the part in his Ethics where he discusses the ultimate and the penultimate. They oughtn’t be confused, but some people will be incapable of recognizing and embracing the ultimate because of unmet needs at the level of the penultimate. I think in the drama he is exploring the penultimate importance of culture, apart from which the ultimate is veiled.