Strange glory A life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Charles Marsh, 1958-

Book - 2014

A portrait of the German pastor-theologian draws on new research to cover the 1930 visit to America that shaped his perspectives on faith and moral responsibility, his achievements as an anti-Nazi activist, and the plot against Hitler that would result in his execution.

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BIOGRAPHY/Bonhoeffer, Dietrich
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Subjects
Published
New York : Alfred A. Knopf 2014.
Language
English
Main Author
Charles Marsh, 1958- (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
x, 515 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 467-487) and index.
ISBN
9780307269812
9780307390387
  • Eternity's child
  • "Italy is simply inexhaustible"
  • University studies
  • "Greetings from the matador"
  • "Covered in the moss of tradition"
  • "I heard the gospel preached in the Negro churches"
  • "Under the constraint of grace"
  • Theological storm troopers on the march
  • Crying in the wilderness
  • "A new kind of monasticism"
  • "I must be a sojourner and a stranger"
  • "Christmas amid the ruins"
  • Killing the madman
  • "The greatest of feasts on the journey to freedom."
Review by Choice Review

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's compelling thought, unlikely life, and execution at the hands of the Nazis have made him a 20th-century icon. Avoiding hagiography and finding a fresh line of interpretation is no easy matter for a biographer of Bonhoeffer, but Marsh (Univ. of Virginia) succeeds on both counts. One of his chief revelations concerns Bonhoeffer's relationship with Eberhard Bethge, another member of the dissident Confessing Church during the Nazi era. Marsh depicts their relationship, though not sexual, as extraordinarily intimate. Bonhoeffer comes across as emotionally needy, judgmental about his intellectual inferiors, and something of a dandy. These all-too-human qualities in no way undermine Bonhoeffer's signal achievement as a thinker and political actor. Marsh shows how Bonhoeffer's life and thought are of a whole. He does this especially well in two areas. First, he describes how Bonhoeffer's year in the US--particularly his introduction to African American religious life--constituted a turning point in his thought. Second, he discusses Bonhoeffer's openness to Roman Catholicism and his experiments with "a new kind of monasticism." Though not a definitive biography, this volume powerfully complements other accounts of Bonhoeffer's remarkable life. --Steve Gowler, Berea College

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review

COMING TO TERMS with the genocidal century just past, especially the unvarnished evil of Nazi Germany, has prompted theologians and philosophers to adjust and recalibrate much of what they thought they knew. Writers as diverse as Reinhold Niebuhr, John Pawlikowski, Richard Rubenstein and Elie Wiesel - some more successfully than others - have all struggled to reconcile the existence of the divine with unspeakable atrocities, many of them carried out in the name of God. Few theologians witnessed the juggernaut of Nazi depravity at closer range than Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In "Strange Glory," Charles Marsh, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, renders Bonhoeffer's life and thought in exquisite detail and with sympathetic understanding, and in the course of more than 500 pages, we see Bonhoeffer's transformation from pampered scion and theological dilettante to energetic churchman and Christian martyr, all against the backdrop of cataclysmic changes in Germany. Born the sixth of eight children in Breslau, Prussia, in 1906 to a psychiatrist and his wife, Bonhoeffer grew up in a privileged environment but one that was not especially religious. When Dietrich announced at age 13 his intention to become a theologian, his siblings questioned and even belittled his choice, arguing that the church was hopelessly irrelevant. "In that case," the undeterred teenager replied, "I shall reform it!" After his family moved to Berlin, Bonhoeffer attended the Grunewald Gymnasium, graduating at the precocious age of 17, and in 1923 settled in for a year of study at Tübingen University, while the Weimar Republic continued its downward economic spiral. Insulated by his family's wealth, Bonhoeffer barely noticed. The following year, he set off on an aesthetic summer in Italy. Whereas Martin Luther had been repulsed by the opulence and corruption he witnessed on his visit to Rome four centuries earlier, Bonhoeffer was rather enchanted with the Eternal City and even, in Marsh's telling, lured by the "beauty, exuberance and grandeur" of Roman Catholicism. Bonhoeffer's theological training began in earnest under the tutelage of Karl Holl, Reinhold Seeburg and Adolf von Harnack at Friedrich Wilhelms University in 1924. These were tempestuous times, not only politically but theologically. Although the eminent theologian Karl Barth had also studied with Harnack, he rejected what he saw as Harnack's enervated liberalism, tethered as it was to nationalism and reduced to social utility. Barth sought a fresh understanding of divine transcendence. Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1924. Bonhoeffer was entranced, and in ensuing years he would seek to embellish Barth's insights by emphasizing the ethical and communal ramifications of doctrine, insisting that the Christian Gospel unfolds most authentically within community, "not through individual social or ethical experience." Bonhoeffer was searching, Marsh writes, "for a more embodied, vital and dynamic Protestantism." The danger in Bonhoeffer's ideas, as Marsh acknowledges, is that his notion of the kingdom of God, in the context of rising nationalism, could be commandeered in the service of Germany, especially when the German theological establishment "presumed the providential blessings of the warrior God." Bonhoeffer's brief stint as an assistant pastor to the German Lutheran congregation in Barcelona provided a respite from the growing crisis in Germany and also exposed him to those less fortunate (although he continued to live comfortably). Even more formative was his year in the United States for postgraduate study in 1930. Although he was underwhelmed by his courses at Union Theological Seminary - and found that among his fellow students everyone "just blabs away so frightfully" - he responded to the Gospel he heard at Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church, where he became a pastoral assistant. And a road and rail trip through the South and into Mexico allowed him to see firsthand the effects of poverty and racism. Bonhoeffer came to admire the social conscience of Union students, although he found no more sustenance in the preaching of liberal Protestants in the United States than he had in Germany. "The sermon has been reduced to parenthetical church remarks about newspaper events," he lamented. Back in Berlin in 1931, Bonhoeffer continued his engagement with the poor in parish work, but the Lutheran church in Germany was quickly capitulating to Hitler's regime. Nazi banners ornamented the churches; one minister declared, "Christ has come to us through Adolf Hitler." Bonhoeffer's initial protest centered on the so-called Aryan paragraph, passed by the Reichstag on April 7, 1933. It mandated the removal of all Jews, even baptized Jews, from civil service, which included the churches. The protests were unavailing. As a leader of what would become the Confessing Church, Bonhoeffer organized a school for dissident seminarians at Finkenwalde, near the Baltic Sea Until it was closed down by the Gestapo in 1937, Finkenwalde immersed Bonhoeffer in Christian community, a place where, in his words, "the pure doctrine, the Sermon on the Mount, and worship are taken seriously." It was also where Bonhoeffer developed a life-long, homoerotic relationship with a student, Eberhard Bethge, although Marsh insists it was chaste. Marsh is a bit less persuasive in making the case that Bonhoeffer in no way cooperated with the Nazi regime. An avowed pacifist, Bonhoeffer secured an appointment with German military intelligence, which allowed him remarkable freedom to travel both in and out of Germany. His complicity in a plot to assassinate Hitler, however, sealed his fate, although his principal involvement lay in providing moral justification for tyrannicide. Marsh contends that Bonhoeffer produced his finest work during his final months, including those in prison, where "the strenuous austerity of his writings" gave way to "a faith more open, munificent and sensuous." Here the paradox of a believer in the face of evil comes fully into focus. Bonhoeffer "gave his blessings to those who conspired to murder the Führer while affirming the essential nonviolence of the Gospel," Marsh writes, invoking Luther's dictum to sin boldly. "Bonhoeffer did not try to resolve the paradox by assuming moral innocence but accepted the paradox by incurring the guilt born out of responsible action." In addition, "Bonhoeffer realized finally that genuine humanness would forever wander into abstraction if it were not anchored in the history, suffering and religion of the Jews." Marsh guides his narrative with a steady hand, although at times his indictment of German liberalism is searing. "The German Christian movement did not so much destroy as emerge from the ruins of the once-grand Protestant liberal architectonic," he writes. "It was perhaps a predictable denouement for a tradition that increasingly turned theology into anthropology, surrendering the disciplined language of belief to the habit of speaking about God as if of human nature writ large." On the final day of his life, before the Gestapo ushered him to Flossenbürg for execution, Bonhoeffer joined with others in the singing of "Eine Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott," which Johann Sebastian Bach composed to the words that Luther had written while exiled in Wartburg Castle - lyrics better known in English as "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God." Though often rendered lugubrious in American churches, Bonhoeffer (and possibly Bach as well) preferred that it be sung briskly, with "bouncing rhythms." "We still love life, but I believe that death can no longer surprise us," Bonhoeffer wrote in his final months - a fitting epitaph for a genocidal century. RANDALL BALMER teaches at Dartmouth College. His most recent book is "Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 3, 2014]
Review by Library Journal Review

Starred Review. The trajectory of German Lutheran pastor Bonhoeffer's life was set early toward a religious vocation. From his youthful musings on the nature of eternity to his growing confidence in his burgeoning skills as a theologian, listeners move along with Bonhoeffer as he travels the world, gathering spiritual insights at every turn. The road darkened considerably with the rise of the Nazis in his native Germany. With his country and church quickly succumbing to the conflagration of World War II, Bonhoeffer feverishly sought a place for God and the new Christian life in a skeptical, post-religious world. Paul Hecht narrates this comprehensive biography with warmth and perspective. Though the story never descends into intricate apologetics, the theology is deftly handled. Hecht's pronunciation of German names and terms is flawless. VERDICT Recommended for anyone interested in religion, especially in the religious life lived at the edge of mortal danger, and for those curious about the history of Nazi Germany. ["The intimate glimpses Marsh provides into a great man make for a powerful new account," read the starred review of the Knopf hc, LJ 6/15/14.]-Denis Frias, Mississauga Lib. Syst., Ont. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A fresh look at Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), both intimate and theological.Marsh (Religious Studies/Univ. of Virginia; The Beloved Community, 2005, etc.) looks anew at the famed theologian and anti-Nazi activist, using rarely glimpsed correspondence to paint a warts-and-all portrait of this German martyr. His dispassionate biography excels in two ways. First, Marsh thoroughly details how Bonhoeffer related to theology and to the theological backdrop of his times. Even as a young man, he rubbed shoulders and corresponded with some of the premier spiritual figures of his day: Niebuhr, Barth and even, to a slight degree, Gandhi. A major point of exploration for the author is how such people shaped the rising theological star. Secondly, Marsh attempts to provide a more closely examined view of Bonhoeffer's personality than past biographers. For instance, he presents Bonhoeffer as spoiled and immature in his early adulthood and as comparably materialistic and peevish in the years leading up to the depths of war. Marsh delves into Bonhoeffer's extraordinarily intimate relationship with his student, Eberhard Bethge, providing more detail, and more fodder for psychoanalysis, than previous biographers. Throughout the work, Marsh looks for ways of revisiting old truths about Bonhoeffer and offering fresh perspectives. Even his death is re-examined. Instead of simply repeating the story told by the concentration camp doctor that he died a quick death with grace and composure, Marsh points out that camp survivors have told different stories about how executions took place, leading one to believe Bonhoeffer suffered a terrible and tortuous end. Such re-examinations of previously unquestioned assumptions are common throughout the book. Though Eric Metaxas' Bonhoeffer (2010) is a more sensitive and well-written account of the subject's life, Marsh also serves readers well.There is no doubt Marsh's portrayal will infuse new controversy into discussions about Bonhoeffer for years to come. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

chapter one 1906-­1923 Eternity's Child When he was a young child, and his family rented a sprawling villa near the university clinics in Breslau, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his twin sister, Sabine, lay awake at night trying to imagine eternity. The ritual eventually became a game, with each child concentrating on the word to clear the mind of distractions. And on funeral days, as horse-­drawn hearses approached the cemetery that lay just to the north, the twins would watch from their bedroom window. Eternity. Ewigkeit. Sabine found the word "very long and gruesome." Dietrich found it majestic: an "awesome word," he called it. Sometimes he would picture himself on his deathbed, surrounded by family and friends, reclining on the threshold of heaven. He knew what his last words would be and sometimes rehearsed them aloud, though he dared not reveal them to anyone.He hoped to welcome death as an expected guest--­he did not want to be taken by surprise. But, sometimes, when he went to bed convinced that death would come that very night, he would grow light-­headed, and the walls of his bedroom would reel about, as if he were at the axis of a carousel. He imagined himself rushing from sister to brother, from father to mother, pleading for help. The prospect of its happening now--­of his vanishing tonight into the vast mysterium--felt so real he had to bite his tongue to reassure himself that he was still among the living. That he could feel mortal pain. At such moments, he worried that he suffered from an "incurable fear." When the twins got separate bedrooms they devised a code for keeping up their metaphysical games. Dietrich would drum lightly on the wall with his fingers, an "admonitory knock" announcing that it was time once again to ponder eternity. A further tap signaled a new reflection on the solemn theme, and so it went, back and forth, until one of them discerned the final silence--usually it was Dietrich. And with the game concluded, he lay awake, the only light in his room coming from a pair of candle-­lit crosses his mother had placed atop a corner table. "When at night I go to bed, fourteen angels round my stead," he would hear her sing. He liked the idea very much: one angel "dressed in a little white cloak," standing by his bed, and others watching over children everywhere. Dietrich believed the nightly ritual spared him from "being devoured by Satan," Sabine later wrote, though there are few references to Satan in her brother's adult writings, early or late. Ultimately, death would enthrall more than it frightened, and the devil would frighten him hardly at all. "God does not want human beings to be afraid," he would one day preach to the congregation in a posh London suburb. God's only desire is that people "reach out 'passionately' and 'hungrily' for mercy and love and . . . grace." Unlike most Protestant theologians of the twentieth century, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was not the child of a minister. The sixth of eight children (his twin being the seventh), he was born on February 4, 1906, in Breslau, into a family of prodigiously talented humanists, who preferred spending religious holidays in the festive company of relatives and friends rather than in church. "Popguns, soldiers!" he wrote in his first letter to Father Christmas. Over the years he would ask for musical instruments, suits of clothes, fur hats, shirts and ties, trips abroad, shoes for every occasion, and the works of Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel. His wishes were most often granted. The family lived at 9 Birkenwäldchen Strasse in the affluent Breslau suburb of Scheitnig. Across the street a narrow park traced the bend in the Alte Oder River south beyond the Dombrücke to the city zoo and Bishop's Forests; to the north, a path cut through dense pine woods to the cemetery and to the psychiatry and nerve clinic, where Dietrich's father worked. Sabine recalled a summer afternoon when her twin brother disappeared after the call to dinner. It was during a heat wave in lower Silesia. Dietrich, tanned and sporting "a shock of flaxen hair," had been larking about in the backyard hoping to ward off the midges. Finally, he took shelter in a garden niche deep in the overgrown field between the rose arbor and the edge of the property. As his nursemaid stood on the veranda, repeating the dinner call, Dietrich paid no mind. Heedless of the heat and the fading light, he was content in the solitude of his secret place in the summer garden. With its thick walls, narrow windows, and piercing spires, the house stood on the eastern bank of the Alte Oder, off a cobblestone street abutting another narrow wood. Arches and corbels enlivened the brickwork, and touches of Gothic-­Baroque appeared in the finials, overhangs, and trussing. A hipped roof and screened-­in porch entry, with deep eaves and dormer and eyebrow windows, gave the impression of a Low German farmhouse extending whimsically in every direction. But for the rose arbor and a small vegetable garden, both carefully tended, the backyard was left to grow wild, according to fashion. Hens and roosters skittered about the yard and across the aging tennis court. Goats and sheep roamed freely in and out of the stables and even into the house when the doors were left open. Dietrich's mother kept a children's zoo with "rabbits, guinea pigs, turtledoves, and squirrels," a terrarium with lizards, and snakes, and "collections of birds' eggs and mounted beetles and butterflies." In the shade of a linden tree, Dietrich's father and older brothers built a tree house on dark piers, a latticework affair with a small stage for skits. One summer, Dietrich helped those same older siblings dig an underground passageway from the arbor to a boulder. Beyond the family's three acres lay what the neighborhood children called "the wilderness." There the land rolled softy toward the river and into a bog where they collected algae, worms, lizards, and bullfrogs for their terrariums and things to inspect under their microscopes. Word that the family was moving to Berlin, more than three hundred kilometers from Breslau, came as a surprise to the children and elicited grumbling in the ranks. In 1912, the year Dietrich turned six, Dr. Karl Bonhoeffer was offered the chair of neurology and psychology at Friedrich-­Wilhelms-­University in Berlin, a prestigious post overseeing the clinic for nervous and psychiatric disorders. At Breslau, which had numbered Max Born, Erwin Schrödinger, Fritz Haber, and Otto Stern among its many Nobel laureates, his position had been more than respectable. But Berlin offered greater prominence for Karl's clinical studies--­along with a better salary and "more possibilities" for the children's development. And the metropolis of two million held great potential for cases of hysterics and addiction to study. At first, the family rented a place on the Brückenallee, a street that no longer exists, near the Tiergarten, the former royal hunting estate that had become a public park, where Dietrich and Sabine might see the kaiser's children also at play. Four years later, Dr. Bonhoeffer purchased a three-­story Gründerzeit-­Villa in Grunewald. The suburb had been the brainchild of Otto von Bismarck, the first chancellor of the German empire, who set aside a large parcel of pristine forest to be developed as a residential district. A colony of grand country houses in a variety of architectural styles, Grunewald, or "green forest," was the ideal rus in urbe, offering rural atmosphere within reach of urban amenities, while keeping the city's grittier aspects at bay. Scientists, statesmen, and scholars, filmmakers and movie stars, financiers and industrialists, all promenaded along the same leafy boulevards and mingled together at neighborhood soirées. In the summer, canopies of linden and birch shaded the paved streets, and the woodlands to the south seemed to entwine the neighborhood's generously proportioned blocks. The writer Christopher Isherwood, who in the 1920s rented a flat in a noisy working-­class urban district, called Grunewald a "millionaire's slum." The Bonhoeffers warmed to their new home at 14 Wangenheimstrasse. Though smaller than their rented Breslau villa, the house was elegant and lean, built in the style of a classic German country home, with a hip, shingled roof, a bow front dormer, and a clinker brick face on the basement socle. There was also a deep yard, a large veranda facing the garden, and an office suite for Dr. Bonhoeffer's home clinic. On mild days, music drifting through the open windows could be heard in the garden of primroses and young bracken. "An unobtrusive wealth and an uninhibited taste for pleasure and comfort," Bonhoeffer wrote in his unfinished autobiographical novel. "It wasn't so much the importance of the individual object that pleased the eye and warmed the heart as the solicitous care given to the whole." Inside, the plain cedar floors, crafted to the highest German standards, were well worn. A "thick, plaited mat covered the parquet floor" in the front hall, there being no need, as the lady of the house, Paula Bonhoeffer, saw it, for children "to run across Persian rugs before they knew how to keep their shoes clean." The appointments were simple and sturdy throughout, made to last of top-­quality wood and fittings. Beyond the foyer was an enormous living room (twenty meters wide, twenty-­five meters deep) that the Bonhoeffer family called simply das Zimmer, "the room," or, if necessary, das grosse Zimmer, "the big room," but never der Salon, the "parlor," which to Paula's ear sounded pretentious. A massive dining table, the wood engraved on all sides, could comfortably seat a dozen in chairs of dark Bavarian timber. On the sideboard, Julie Tafel Bonhoeffer, the children's grandmother, who lived in Tübingen until moving to Berlin with her housekeeper in 1925, kept an antique silver box from which she occasionally drew pieces of chocolate to treat the little ones. Family portraits and austere landscapes, many now hanging in Munich's Neue Pinakothek or in Hamburg's Kunsthalle, graced the spacious rooms downstairs. Some of the paintings were by Franz von Lenbach, the brothers Achenbach, and Johann Wilhelm Schirmer, but most were the work of Dietrich's great-­uncle, Leopold Graf von Kalckreuth, and his father, Stanislaus Graf von Kalckreuth. Of them all, Dietrich best liked the portrait of his great-­grandfather August von Hase, over a corner sofa. In the painting, the aging provost, for decades a distinguished professor of church at Jena, kneels before a crucifix, holding an empty hourglass. With the help of a small army of servants--­chambermaids, housekeepers, a cook and a gardener, a governess for each of the older children, a nurse for the small ones--­Paula was praised for keeping a well-­tuned, comfortable, and stimulating home. After the move to Berlin a receptionist for Dr. Bonhoeffer's private clinic, housed in two side rooms off the main floor, was also hired, as well as a chauffeur. The earliest German descendants of the Dutch clan van den Boenhoff left Nijmegen in 1513, settling in Schwäbisch Hall as goldsmiths, aldermen, and landowners. On the family seal a lion clutches some beans, against a blue field. Roughly translated, "Boenhoff" means "beanfield." But by the nineteenth century, the family had achieved prominence in law, medicine, and the Lutheran Church. Karl Bonhoeffer was the son of Judge Friedrich Ernst Philipp Tobias Bonhoeffer, a lawyer who served most of his life as president of the provincial court in Ulm. A contrary and emotionally distant man, he was a "firm enemy of everything faddish and unnatural." He abhorred buses and trains, remaining convinced that any journey of less than sixty kilometers was better undertaken on foot, when all the transfers and inevitable delays were factored in. This meant that, for holiday visits, Karl and his siblings would have to walk the forty kilometers from Tübingen to their grandparents' home in Stuttgart. Each spring the judge trekked alone through the Swabian Alps with a burlap bag of radish seeds, which he scattered Johnny Appleseed style, returning in the autumn to collect the harvest. Karl Bonhoeffer inherited his father's exactitude and his aloofness, though not, it appears, his short temper. Outwardly gentler than the judge, Karl nevertheless demanded as much of his children as of himself. This was especially so of the way the children formulated their thoughts and expressed themselves. He expected precise and measured judgments, brooking no "spontaneous utterances" or banter in his home. Any child with something to say in the presence of adults had better choose his words carefully. Not that Karl was uninterested in his children's opinions; rather, he took pleasure in clarity of argument. A word spoken in haste or a half-­baked thought made him visibly unhappy. He could bring a child to attention by asking, "Was sagst du?"--­"What are you saying?" He may never have raised his voice, but he rarely embraced or kissed his children. Karl subscribed to an enlightened skepticism toward the miraculous and the supernatural, toward any belief that contradicted the laws of reason. He accepted his wife's instructing the children in religion only in measured doses, and so long as it served a useful purpose. Nearly two decades of clinical work in empirical psychiatry and neurology had inclined him to think of religion as a tool that might sometimes help people order their lives and ward off chaos--­although he felt there were better alternatives. He chose not to accompany his wife and younger children to the Lutheran Church of Grunewald they attended now and then, and he steered clear of the Sunday-­afternoon social hours that Paula convened over coffee and cake, with hymns sung around the piano. The twins' religious formation was of more importance to their mother than that of the older children, perhaps because of her awareness of the boy's spiritual predilections. Karl Bonhoeffer did not oppose baptisms and confirmations--­if they included a celebration in a spring garden, he rather enjoyed them--­but he preferred to keep the Sabbath in his own way. It was his custom, after the evening meal, to gather the family in the library and read aloud stories, poems, and letters. Theodor Fontane and Friedrich Schiller were his favorites, though he also read from Fyodor Dostoevsky, Hermann Hesse, and Fritz Reuter, the popular nineteenth-­century chronicler of rural life. This was much more intellectually satisfying than religion, or psychoanalysis, which he criticized forthrightly for encouraging the same sort of meandering speech and speculative indulgences he found so insufferable. "I understand nothing of that," he once said with a sigh after his wife had read the Advent story from the Gospel of Luke. He was only too happy to delegate stories of angels and virgin births to her capable care. Paula Bonhoeffer was the daughter of Karl Alfred von Hase and Clara Gräfin von Hase, née Countess Kalckreuth. Karl Alfred had been chaplain to the emperor at the Potsdam Garrison Church, and his father, the aforementioned nineteenth-­century church historian of some distinction. Paula's blue eyes, blond hair, and open, confident face set a striking contrast to her husband's pursed lips and melancholy eyes. Excerpted from Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Charles Marsh All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.