I am so
pleased today to have the opportunity to talk with my good friend Diane
Reynolds about her new book, The Doubled
Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Women, Sexuality, and Nazi Germany:
Those
who read my blog regularly have often seen Diane’s name, invariably in the
context of some aspect of Jane Austen’s writing and/or biography as to which
Diane and I are in agreement. Indeed, Diane and I have become friends over the
past 7 years in no small part via our continuing shared fascination and love
for Jane Austen’s writing, and our belief that the real Jane Austen, two
centuries after her death, has still not really been seen by her large worldwide
readership and fanbase.
Diane
and I have spurred each other on, in the quest for a clearer understanding of the
real lives and characters of Austen and other women in her era, via Austen’s
fiction and her letters---and along the way, we’ve been helping each other
debunk aspects of the Myth of Jane Austen that has been obscuring that truth
for two centuries.
I’m so
glad that Diane has now taken a similar approach to demystifying the life of this
extraordinary man, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, with particular emphasis on the women
in his life, about whom I knew nothing before hearing about, and that I’ve
finally gotten to read Diane’s engrossing book. And let me also add, Diane has
the extraordinary gift of expressing deep and complex ideas without even a hint
of jargon or ego, which is extremely rare in scholarly writing.
One of
the things that piqued my curiosity about Diane’s book is that connection
between the obscurity surrounding Austen (who tragically died at 41 in 1817),
and the mystery surrounding the relationship of Bonhoeffer (who tragically died at 39 in 1945)
with the women in his life. However, in Bonhoeffer’s case, the situation is
flipped, because he’s the famous person,
and it’s the women close to him who’ve been ignored, whereas with Austen she’s the famous person who nonetheless
(and ironically) has not been accurately portrayed in much of the scholarly and
popular writing about her.
With
that brief introduction, then, here’s a transcript of our chat the other day:
A: Diane,
did studying Austen lead you to studying Bonhoeffer, or vice versa, or no
connection?
D: Austen
and Bonhoeffer have been two separate tracks, but mystery links both figures.
In Austen, I was tantalized at something I sensed dancing behind her texts,
just out of view. Likewise, I found myself entangled in Bonhoeffer because
women seemed inexplicably erased from his life story. I wanted in both cases to
know what was going on. I found both compelling figures in their own rights:
both are artists. I loved Austen's six novels and I loved Bonhoeffer's Letters
and Papers from Prison, but it was the mystery that pulled me in. Then with
Bonhoeffer, I found myself wanting to get in the skin of his times, to try to
understand what he and the women might be thinking.
A: In
the case of Austen, you and I know that there were key figures in Austen family
history who decisively shaped that exclusionary version of her life --was that
the case in Bonhoeffer's biography as well? For example, did his sister or any
other woman in his life ever write their version of things?
D:
Bonhoeffer’s biographer and best friend, Eberhard Bethge, cannily devised Bonhoeffer’s
life story in a huge biography that floods the reader with details but says
almost nothing about the women--it really distorts and it is a
labyrinth--deliberately. Bonhoeffer’s sister, his twin, with whom he was very
close, Sabine, left a memoir, and she cooperated with the first bio of
Bonhoeffer, before Bethge's. She steered the story, but left clues. It was
Bethge who deliberately obscured things. Sabine, like many in the Austen
family, was concerned with image, but was an honest person too.
A: And
then all subsequent biographers ignored her memoir? Were you able to read it?
D: People
don't look much at her memoir. I read it multiple times. People will lean into
Sabine for childhood stories. They lose how close the two were all their lives.
A: Can
you give an example or two of the kind of insight she provided, that has been
missing from other male-oriented bios?
D: She
emphasizes that Bonhoeffer was no saint. I think of James Edward Austen Leigh’s
(JEAL) saintly portrait of his Aunt Jane Austen, but Sabine wouldn't go there:
she paints a positive picture, but notes that he wasn't perfect and brings up
that German males were basically chauvinist pigs. She says it more politely
than that. She says Bonhoeffer “was no pillar saint."
Bethge,
like the Austens, basically didn't want people to know things, such as that
Bonhoeffer was same sex oriented and that he, Bethge, schemed for years to
marry Bonhoeffer's niece, Renate.
A: As
you know, I’ve written a lot about the many ways that JEAL sneakily but
systematically distorted the picture of his aunt: both metaphorically, but also
literally, in that he commissioned a revision of JA’s sister’s authentic sketch
of JA when JA was 35, and turned a no-nonsense glaring countrywoman into a
placid cow-like smiler.
And
JEAL wasn’t the first, Bethge also sounds a lot like Jane’s brother Henry
Austen in his Bio Notice of Jane Austen, published the year after her death,
which kicked off what I call the Myth of Jane Austen that is still going strong
two centuries later.
So, getting
back to Bonhoeffer, from what you gathered from Sabine’s Memoir, what do you
speculate Sabine would think of your book, if she were able to read it today-
would she say, "Thank God someone has really gotten the complexity of my
brother’s life?”
D: I
think she would have mixed feelings. She wanted to protect the family franchise,
but she would have, I think, not been altogether unhappy. Yes, Bethge could be
likened to Henry Austen. One good thing about the Bonhoeffers--they didn't
destroy letters wholesale. We can get a more complete story. Some key letters
got "lost" but that is different from whole packets consigned to the
flames. I am still hopeful that more Austen letters will show up.
A: Me
too as to those Austen letters! I sometimes wonder some still exist, but are
being deliberately concealed by family who don't want something
"dark" (such as, e.g., her support for radical feminist causes or her
complicated personal sexual preference) about Jane Austen to be made public.
…I
meant to ask about Dietrich's attitude but I am glad you responded re the
sister's...
D: I wonder sometimes
how both Austen and Bonhoeffer would have felt about their true stories being
told. I don't know that either would have liked it. I don't think Bonhoeffer
would have. What do you think about Austen?
A: Contrary
to the near universal belief that Austen shunned public attention, I believe she
was desperate for her true life to be known, most of all in regard to her
complicated sexuality, and also her desire to be an inspiration to women to
become conscious of their oppressed status. I see her last poem (“But behold me
immortal!”) as a literal last gasp shaking her fist at all the forces
squelching her voice.
D: I am
more inclined to think Austen wanted to be put her story out there--and yes,
the final poem supports that. I think DB would have been more reticent--but I
don't know. He died in another time and place.
A: Do
his theological writings in any way shed light on his personal self?
D: For
him the personal was always the theological and vice versa, so yes, they do. I
wonder how he would have been, say, post Stonewall. In his time and place, he
wasn't going to say he was same-sex oriented.
A: Makes
sense - gay liberation was not even a possibility then, so he opted instead for
the struggle against Hitler.
D: He
definitely comes from a more privileged location than Austen too--he was a
male, had money, autonomy, voice--his twin sister, Sabine, is more of a cognate
to Austen, and more likely to appreciate her full story being told.
A: Which
leads to my next question -- can you glean any sense of how his theology was
influenced by her?
D: As a
woman married to a Jew in Nazi Germany, she was more silenced the way Austen
may have been--she just couldn't speak her mind.
A: Did
she marry a Jew before Hitler's rise?
D: Yes,
she married a Jew in 1926--even then the family was worried, but supported her.
A: Did
she support his decision to become a man of the cloth?
D: Sabine
was Bonhoeffer’s first theological partner and his theology, his absolute
desire to oppose Hitler and Hitler's church-based anti-Semitism was driven by
great worry about her and her husband and their two daughters. It was personal.
And yes, she supported him in becoming a pastor.
A: So
interesting -- as I read your 2014 blog post about Austen and Bonhoeffer, I was
reminded of Edward Ferrars's and Edmund Bertram's decisions to become
clergymen.
D: Yes.
And Austen supported her brothers too.
D: I am
sure Bonhoeffer never wavered in his opposition to any kind of anti-Semitism
because of her, and also because of his brother in law, who was also Jewish,
though Hitler absolved him of that "stain" in 1940. It was personal.
A: So...are
you suggesting that if his sister had not married a Jew, Bonhoeffer might not
have followed his anti-Hitler path as he did?
D: The
entire family was completely opposed to National Socialism, but yes, I think
Bonhoeffer was human and Jewish persecution might not have been as urgent, as
pressing to him, without her. What I am saying is yes, the opposition is driven
not only by abstract theology, but by a need to protect his sister and her
husband. They are in grave danger and can't speak for themselves. Jews just
couldn't.
A: I’m
reminded of Jane Austen’s shadow stories there – I think that she saw herself
as giving a voice to what English women were afraid to even think, let alone
speak out loud. The best example is the high incidence of death in childbirth
that combined with serial pregnancy to generate a very high death rate for
young married English gentlewomen. While JA could not express her outrage
publicly, her surviving letters are filled with sarcastic comments about wives
caught in this insidious trap literally for decades, and I believe Northanger Abbey’s shadow story is at
its heart concerned with this plague on English wives, whom, I believe, JA
wished to inspire to start talking about this domestic Gothic horror.
D: I
think they both had to say what they meant in veiled ways.
A: Did
you find evidence of him and his sister talking about Nazism through a
Christian lens?
D: Well,
I am not sure what you mean. They both abhorred the attempt to hijack the
Christian Church and turn it Aryan. They wished more Christians would stand up
to Hitler but unfortunately that didn't happen.
A: I
was just wondering if she and he conversed at any point in theological language
-- was that an intellectual realm that she entered too? Or did she influence
his theological stance in other modalities?
D: Really
we don't have a record of that, except a few oblique hints. It's largely a
blank, although they surely discussed theology. She does mention that they
talked over his pacifism in 1939--and in Nazi Germany, there was no CO
option--if you declared as a pacifist, they basically shot you. He was able to
talk this over with her and she understood and supported him--most of his
theological partners in Germany couldn't comprehend being a pacifist. It was
just not something they could wrap their brains around and she could,
completely. And his close friend Ruth, understood, but advised him to lay low,
as she knew what kind of trouble he could get into. She was right. The women he was closest to did understand the
pacifist stance in a way German men in that era couldn't.
A: Same
as in the time of Aeschylus and in the time of Trump.
D: Yes.
Warfare is still tied up with masculinity.
A:
Apropos the ignoring of women close to a “great man”, I have a quick aside I
think you will enjoy. Laurie Anderson the performance artist/poet, put out
something sharply ironic in that regard about 20 years ago. When you first told
me the premise for your book about telling the untold female story, I was immediately
reminded of one particular part of Anderson’s great music/spoken word album
"Stories from the Nerve Bible" Here is the text of it:
"the
only sadder cemetery I saw was last summer in Switzerland. And I was dragged
there by a Hermann Hesse fanatic, who had never recovered from reading
Steppenwolf, and one hot August morning when the sky was quiet, we made a
pilgrimage to the cemetery; we brought a lot of flowers and we finally found
his grave. It was marked with a huge fir tree and a mammoth stone that said
"Hesse" in huge Helvetica bold letters. It looked more like a marquee
than a tombstone. And around the corner was this tiny stone for his wife, Nina,
and on it was one word: "Auslander" foreigner. And this made me so
sad and so mad that I was sorry I'd brought the flowers. Anyway, I decided to
leave the flowers, along with a mean note, and it read: Even though you're not
my favorite writer, by long shots, I leave these flowers on your resting
spot."
Sadly,
it sounds like women being relegated to the shadows is a common denominator in
the realm of the arts and theology just as much as in other fields. It also makes
me wonder whether Jane’s oldest brother James, the “golden child” of the
family, had the idea that books would be written about him, but then little
sister Jane did not get the memo, and became the famous one in the family
instead.
D: Yes
interesting. Nobody in the Austen expected Jane to be their claim to fame and
nobody in the Bonhoeffer family expected it to be Dietrich. They thought he had
thrown his life away by studying theology. One thing too I think is a backdrop
common to both Bonhoeffer and Austen is the high level of censorship--we KNOW
that about Nazi Germany, but also England is in the Napoleonic Wars--the last
great war until the 20th century, and the leadership is seriously worried and
writers can't say what they want, certainly nothing republican or even semi
radical. There never was a First Amendment in England. I think we forget how
severely Austen was curtailed. It’s very interesting, because her Regency
English culture is much closer to Nazi German culture than either one are to
American culture. We find it so surprising, for instance, that both cultures
thought Republics were dangerous: to us, being a Republic is ingrained.
A: Yes,
and especially if the writer was a woman who wanted to blow the whistle on everything about life in England that
was bad for women.
D: Yeah--and
as Ellen [Moody] has been saying about Charlotte Smith--they buried her novels
because she said too much that was too uncomfortable to hear and the Austens
weren't going to let Austen do that. The kind of hierarchy that both Regency
England and Nazi Germany upheld kept women constrained, as it did gays or
anyone likely to step out of line.
A: Nosiree
Jane.
D: And so both these figures are severely
censored--I think much of the interest lies in that and pulling that out as a
reality for Austen.
A: As we've
been posting, Austen made sure to weave Smith's overt stories into her own
shadow stories.
D: Yes.
I find that very interesting--just the fact that she alluded to Smith at all speaks
volumes.
A: My
next question is re Bonhoeffer's irony -how did he go about being ironical? You
and I both know how Jane Austen did it, but I am curious to hear how he did it
in his writings
D: Well
that's a complicated question--he uses terms ironically, like a "world
come of age." He talks about a mis-fuhrer or misleader of the people--he
can be sardonic about Hitler as the emperor with no clothes ... I don't know
how much you want to go here, as his theology gets complicated.
A:
Whatever you found most interesting--what made you smile the way we smile at
Austen's irony?
D: Well
he is not ironic in the same way. Think of the reams of words it would take to
even explain the irony in the speech by Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey about every Englishman being a spy. When everyone
was arguing that you had to join the Nazis to combat them, Dietrich said that
if the train is heading for a crash and you had climbed on it and are running
in the opposite direction of the crash through the cars, you are still going to
crash. I think he realized the Nazis were pea brains and bullies. But it gets
to a point when its not funny that these morons are in charge
A: No,
just as I can no longer laugh at Trump. It reminds me of Elizabeth Bennet’s
great putdown of Darcy: “My temper would perhaps be called resentful. My good
opinion once lost, is lost forever."
"That is a failing indeed!" cried
Elizabeth. "Implacable resentment is a shade in a character. But you have
chosen your fault well. I really cannot laugh at it. You are safe from me."
D: I am
sure it was hard for Austen too to deal with the tin-plated bullies like her
Aunt Leigh-Perrot.
A: For
sure---and part of the way she coped was to skewer those bullies in the shadow
stories of her novels. And speaking of Trump, that prompts another segue --- What
can we in America today learn from Bonhoeffer's writings that can better equip
us to combat this current dangerous flirtation with fascism that seems to have
infatuated way too many Americans?
D: Absolutely
don't fall for it. Stay in community. Resist it. Recognize that Trump is a
fraud. When solutions to problems --this is what Bonhoeffer would say and you
can agree or not--go out of what the Old Testament and New Testament would say
are legitimate responses to problems--not where people in the Bible went crazy
and did things wrong--but when the core Torah/Jesus beliefs are being turned on
their heads, head for the hills, say no—instead, base your life in a sane
reading of those texts. What happened when people tried to build the tower of Babel--is
that like building a wall to keep out Mexicans? He would keep bringing it back
to that--maybe that is old fashioned to our ears, but maybe it's good advice.
He
would say, treat people decently—that means don’t kill people, don’t deport
people, you don't nuke people, you don't do this sort of thing to them. It's
pretty basic.
A: Funny
that we are not hearing any prominent American theologians speaking out about
Trump, especially today of all days, when Trump has perhaps gone too far even
for him.
D: We
need to hear more.
A: Many
of them are compromised -- they are so hung up on abortion, that they won't
openly criticize a Trump who promises to give them SC justices to do their
bidding.
D:
History repeats itself. And in Germany--Jews thought they could keep quiet and
ride it out and Christians got diverted by promises to restore some mythic pre-Weimar
moral golden age.
A: I
was just thinking about Austen vis a vis what you said above--- I realized, in
her era, there was no real “Resistance” she could be part of --- And that’s one
big difference --- in her time, it wasn't horrific Nazis who were perpetrating
horrific evil that was obvious to everyone sane. It was everybody - even the
Edmund Bertrams, country clergymen who believed they were on a higher moral
plane than big city folks, were part of the oppression.
D: Yes.
People believed in it, thought it was how society had to be. And Hitler wanted
to restore that. He loved patriarchy.
A: Is
there any other topic I did not bring up, that you'd like us to talk about before
we conclude?
D: I would
like to emphasize how relevant both figures are to the world of today--we are
facing the same issues. Basically, Austen and Bonhoeffer are fighting similar
ideological battles. We don’t like to compare Regency England to Hitler’s
Germany, but the ideological similarities—extreme belief in patriarchy,
hierarchy, militarism, violent punishment, colonialism, the inferiority of
certain “races,” fear of the other –are uncomfortably similar.
A: Amen.
Thank again, Diane, for answering my questions, and congratulations on a book
of great interest to Janeites and all other thinking people as well!
