Today’s Daily Lesson is in remembrance of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was hanged for treason by the Nazis at the Flossenberg concentration camp on this date in 1945.
Recently I have been reading a 1982 play by Douglas Anderson about Bonhoeffer’s life titled “The Creaking of the Beams”. In the play there is an early exchange between Bonhoeffer and his brother Klaus Bonhoeffer, who was also executed by the Nazis for purported crimes against the state. Dietrich and Klaus are amongst the few who see what is happening in the early days of the Third Reich, comparing the release of Nazism fanaticism to the work their father Karl Bonhoeffer does as a psychiatrist.
Dietrich: . . . It’s worse than I’d imagined.
Klaus: That’s no surprise; politics are always worse than we imagine.
Dietrich: They seem to be gaining strength.
Klaus: We’re not worried. Hitler has merely flushed the crazies out of the Garret’s and into the open — just what Father has been trying to do for years.
Dietrich: But does anyone know how to treat them?
Klaus: Probably not.
Reading an exchange like this inevitably draws us to comparison with the Bonhoeffer brothers’ time and our own. Comparisons are both accurate and inaccurate. I think too much direct comparison with Hitler has been and is still being made since the end of World War II. Polemic contrasts aside, Hitler was an emperor of evil we in America have still never seen.
And yet, at the same time, we can see that something has changed in America in recent years — going all the way back to the mid-1990s in the dark seeds of the Oklahoma City bombing and now daring to coming out into full light in the late 2010s— which resembles Nazi Germany in the mid-1930s. It seems everywhere we turn there are racist and anti-Semitic white nationalists and neo-Nazis defacing buildings, committing arson, and rallying openly.
The crazies have somehow been let out, inspired and emboldened to act more boldly and maliciously; and we wonder with Dietrich in the play, “Does anyone know how to treat them?”
And the answer to that is to do what Dietrich and Klaus did — to stand up, to actively oppose, to defy, and actively protect and defend against.
The mistake most of the Bonhoeffer family made was thinking that the things they were seeing were not in fact happening. They could not believe fascism could happen in so sophisticated a society as Germany. They were wrong.
And lest we realize it could happen here then we could be wrong too.
We say of the holocaust, “Never again.” But that can only be said if in saying it we mean it should never happen again rather than meaning it could never happen again. For it can. And it might, so long as we continue to treat the crazies like one-off troublemakers and cranks and not as actual existential threats.
We must wake up.
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