At Easter, Klaus came to visit his younger brother. By now Dietrich was fluent in Spanish and was delighted to show Klaus the sights of Barcelona, including his favorite Saturday activity—the bullfight. Something about the power and rage of the bulls, along with the skill and courage of the matadors, thrilled Dietrich to the core. When he wrote to his sister Sabine about his enthusiasm for the sport, she could not believe he found it so compelling. “I would not have such a spectacle on a silver platter,” she indignantly wrote back.
Despite his sister’s objections, Dietrich went to bullfights as often as possible, and when his parents visited him later in the year, he took them along.
Before Dietrich knew it, his year as an assistant pastor in Barcelona was up. The German congregation asked him to stay on permanently at the church, but Dietrich decided against it. Although he had loved his sojourn in Barcelona, he felt it was time to head back to Berlin and take up a new challenge. Exactly what that challenge was, he didn’t know, but he welcomed the invitation to live back with his family in Berlin.
Chapter 8
New York
Dietrich arrived back in Berlin eleven days after his twenty-third birthday. His time in Barcelona had convinced him that he could not settle for a life either as a university lecturer or as a pastor—he wanted to do both. As a result, Dietrich returned to the university to complete a second thesis, the requirement to become a lecturer.
Dietrich slipped back easily into studying and family activities. While he had never been particularly interested in politics, he noticed some changes that had taken place during the year he had been gone. Germany seemed to be moving away from economic disaster. The United States was pouring millions of dollars in loans into Germany, and Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann had negotiated with the Allies for a reduction in the amount of war reparations and for the Rhineland to be returned to German control by June 1930, five years ahead of schedule.
Dietrich saw these as hopeful signs, but he also detected some troubling trends. The Weimar Republic was still lurching along. In 1929 the government consisted of five main parties: the Social Democratic Party with 153 seats, the Catholic Center Party with 78 seats, the National Party with 73 seats, the Communist Party with 54 seats, and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (or Nazi Party) with 12 seats. Many other smaller parties held a combined 121 seats among them. With so many parties, it was nearly impossible to get anything done in the Reichstag or parliament. The German people were frustrated that no one party had enough power to get the economy moving properly. Because of this, many Germans longed to have the Kaiser back—one man with the power to bring everyone into line. Yet they knew the Allies would never allow the Kaiser to return to Germany from exile in Holland. Somehow they would have to find a new way to become a proud nation once again.
During 1929, Dietrich attended the wedding of his younger sister Susanne. It was a happy day for him. Not only was his sister getting married, but she was also marrying Walter Dress, a fellow theology student at the University of Berlin whom Dietrich had introduced to the family.
Nine months after Dietrich returned from Barcelona, two events occurred in Germany that drew his attention. The first was the death of Foreign Minister Stresemann, who died of a stroke. With him died the hope of many for a strong, peaceful Germany to once again take her place as a leader in Europe. The government was still reeling from Stresemann’s death when another disaster struck. On Tuesday, October 29, 1929, the stock market in the United States crashed. As the value of the market sank, its fall echoed around the world, especially in Germany, where most of the money used to stimulate the economy had been borrowed from the United States. Now, suddenly those American banks wanted their money back, and quickly. Loans were called in, German banks closed their doors, men were laid off from their jobs, and the arguments between the right-wing Nazis and the left-wing communists inside and outside the government reached a boiling point. Riots took place in the streets of Berlin, with police killing protesters. Dietrich realized he could no longer stand on the sidelines and watch the political situation unfold. He wasn’t sure what he could do, but a feeling of dread overcame him when he tried to imagine a bright future for his country.
In early 1930, as Dietrich continued his theological studies and pondered the political situation in Germany, he attended Karl-Friedrich’s wedding. Karl-Friedrich married Grete von Dohnanyi, younger sister of Christine’s husband, Hans von Dohnanyi. By now Karl-Friedrich’s reputation as a world-renowned scientist was well established.
Despite the economic depression that settled over Germany, many German students continued studying abroad, particularly in the United States. The German Academic Exchange Service offered to pay a student’s passage to the United States, and various American colleges offered scholarships.
Dietrich didn’t feel particularly drawn to study in the United States. He would have preferred studying in England or India. However, Superintendent Max Diestel told him about an opportunity to go to the United States and study at Union Theological Seminary in New York City on a Sloane Fellowship. That July, Dietrich had completed his second thesis, titled Act and Being, and at age twenty-four he was a year from being ordained a pastor. Diestel encouraged him to study in the United States to pass the time until ordination. Dietrich followed the superintendent’s advice and applied for the fellowship at Union Theological Seminary. He was quickly accepted to the seminary and immediately booked passage to New York aboard the liner Columbus, departing from Bremerhaven on September 6, 1930.
Things were happening so fast that Dietrich barely had time to keep his family updated. Karl-Friedrich, who had just returned from a lecture tour of the United States, told him what to expect when he got to America. Then, on September 4, Dietrich attended his brother Klaus’s wedding to Emmi Delbrück. Now all six of Dietrich’s brothers and sisters were married. He was the only one who was single, and his sisters teased him about it. Dietrich continued to see Elizabeth Zinn, though they both felt free to pursue their own interests and did not speak of marriage.
The day after Klaus’s wedding, Dietrich set out for Bremerhaven on the Baltic Sea. As he crossed Germany on his way to the port, the country was in an uproar. Six million people were now unemployed, the most since the war. For many people, the Nazi Party, with its strong appeal to German nationalist sentiment, seemed the best hope for the country. Dietrich didn’t know what to make of it all, but he hoped the upcoming election for seats in the Reichstag on September 14 would help clarify things.
The next day in Bremerhaven, Dietrich boarded the Columbus. The vessel represented a new beginning for Germany after the war. At the end of the fighting, the Allies had taken all of Germany’s great oceangoing liners as partial payment of war reparations. The Columbus, built in 1922, was Germany’s first postwar ocean liner. She carried 1,650 passengers and was one of the first liners to have an outside swimming pool installed on her top deck as well as a platform for nighttime dancing. Dietrich was shown to his cabin and after stowing his luggage, he went up on deck for the departure. Once they were steaming along the Baltic Sea, Dietrich went to the salon to write to his grandmother.
My cabin seems not unfavorably located. It lies deep in the belly of the ship. I actually haven’t seen my cabin companion yet. I’ve tried to get a picture of him from the items he has left about. The hat, the walking cane, and a novel . . . suggest an educated young American to me. . . . I have eaten two enormous meals with a healthy appetite; in a word, I’m enjoying the ship as long as it can be enjoyed. I’ve also gotten to know several nice people, so the time is going by quickly. I’ll soon be going to bed since I’d like to see as much of England as possible early tomorrow morning. Just now we are traveling along the Belgian coast. You can see lights way off in the distance.
After Dietrich had finished his letter to his grandmother, he wandered out on deck. The ship was impressive, especially the large swimming pool. He planned to swim in it every day as a way to stay fit while on board.
When he returned to his cabin, Dietrich met his cabinmate for the voyage. Just as he speculated, he was an American. Dr. Edmund De Long Lucas was the principal of Forman Christian College in Lahore, India. He was returning to the United States to raise money for the college. As they talked, Dietrich knew the two of them would become good friends, especially when he learned that Dr. Lucas had earned his doctorate at Columbia University, right across the street from Union Theological Seminary. Dietrich peppered his cabinmate with all sorts of questions about life in New York.
That night Dietrich slept soundly and in the morning was up on deck watching the south coast of England slip by. He wished he had time to visit the place but promised himself he would come back to England one day. In the meantime, Dietrich was determined to enjoy his six days on board the Columbus. He met someone else who was eager to explore the ship, eleven-year-old Richard Ern. Richard and his mother were returning from a visit to Switzerland.
The voyage across the North Atlantic passed quickly, and before he knew it, Dietrich was standing on deck watching the Statue of Liberty as the Columbus slipped into New York Harbor. His young friend Richard eagerly pointed out the recently completed Chrysler Building gleaming in the sun. He proudly informed Dietrich that it was the tallest building on the planet.
At mid-afternoon on Friday, the Columbus docked and Dietrich was free to disembark. Waiting for him on the dock were his distant cousins, Harold and Irma Boericke, who lived about sixty miles away in Philadelphia. Dietrich exchanged greetings with the Boerickes, loaded his luggage into the back of their car, and set off with them for Philadelphia, passing through the Holland Tunnel under the Hudson River. Dietrich was intrigued with the countryside. The road they traveled along was clogged with cars, and everyone seemed to be going somewhere in a hurry.
Waiting at the house in Philadelphia were the three Boericke children: Ray, Betty, and Binkie. Dietrich spent a delightful week with his American relatives before they drove him back to New York City to begin fall semester at Union Theological Seminary. Dietrich didn’t know what his role would be. He wasn’t enrolled as a degree-seeking student or as a lecturer, though he could have been either. Instead he chose to audit classes, which meant he had a lot of freedom to study and go where he pleased.
When he got back to New York, Dietrich learned the results of the Reichstag elections that had been held in Germany on September 14. The results surprised and perplexed him. The Nazis had gone from holding twelve seats in the Reichstag to holding 107 seats. They had gained ninety-five seats in the election, making them the second-largest party in the Reichstag. By contrast, the Communist Party gained only twenty-three seats, and the Social Democratic Party, the largest party in the Reichstag, lost ten seats. Many Germans seemed to breathe a sigh of relief at the result. To them it seemed that at long last one party was becoming strong enough to lead Germany into a new era of respect and power. Dietrich was not one of them. To him and the other members of the Bonhoeffer family, the Nazis and their leader Adolf Hitler were extremists.
Dietrich started classes at the seminary, and it took him only a few days to decide he’d made the right choice to audit classes. As much as he tried to look on the bright side, he was appalled by the different way the seminary went about teaching its students. Dietrich had come from one of the most rigorous systems of teaching in the world. Now he found himself surrounded by people who did not seem to care about the great strands of European theology. These people even laughed at the teachings of Martin Luther and asked Dietrich what someone as far back in time as Luther had to do with anything today.
