Saints and Villains Read online

  Saints and Villains

  ALSO BY DENISE GIARDINA

  Good King Harry

  Storming Heaven

  The Unquiet Earth

  Saints AND Villains

  A NOVEL

  DENISE GIARDINA

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  New York London

  Copyright ©1998 by Denise Giardina

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110.

  The text of this book is composed in Goudy with the display set in Goudy Text.

  Composition by A. W. Bennett, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Giardina, Denise, 1951–

  Saints and villains / by Denise Giardina.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-393-08166-4

  1. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 1906–1945—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3557.I136S25 1998

  813'.54—dc21 97-14749 CIP

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  http://www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 10 Coptic Street, London WC1A 1PU

  For Arla,

  Colleen, David,

  Sky, and Tim

  A portion of the “Gratias” section appeared previously in The Carolina Quarterly as “Dietrich Bonhoeffer in West Virginia, 1931.”

  Bonhoeffer’s Reformation Day sermon is based on a text in The Life and Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Mary Bosanquet (New York: Harper & Row, 1968). She in turn is quoting from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Gesammelte Schriften, translated by Eberhard Bethge, 1st ed., 4 vols., vol. 4, pp. 93f.

  The lines from Georg Kaiser’s “From Morn to Midnight” (1912) were translated from the German by Ashley Dukes and appear in Masters of Modern Drama, edited by Haskell M. Block and Robert G. Shedd (New York: Random House, 1962).

  Bonhoeffer’s “Peace Sermon” is a translation by John Bowden found in Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Life in Pictures (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986).

  Quotations from The Cost of Discipleship (Nachfolge) are from the translation of R. H. Fuller (New York: Macmillan, 1949).

  Some of the quotations from Bonhoeffer’s Ethics (Ethik) are from the translation of Neville Horton Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1949).

  Leaflets of the White Rose resistance were translated from the German by Arthur R. Schultz in The White Rose: Munich 1942–1943 by Inge Scholl (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1970, 1983).

  “I’ll Be Seeing You,” Music by Sammy Fain, lyrics by Irving Kahal, 1938.

  The Four Horsemen, woodcut by Albrecht Dürer, from Albrecht Dürer: Master Printmaker (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1971). Distributed by New York Graphic Society, Conn.

  Today there are once more saints and villains. Instead of the uniform grayness of the rainy day, we have the black storm cloud and brilliant lightning flash. Outlines stand out with exaggerated sharpness. Shakespeare’s characters walk among us. The villain and the saint emerge from primeval depths and by their appearance they tear open the infernal or the divine abyss from which they come and enable us to see for a moment into mysteries of which we had never dreamed.

  —DIETRICH BONHOEFFER, Ethics

  Contents

  W. A. MOZART: GROßE MEßE C-MOLL KV427

  Kyrie eleison

  Sabine

  Doppelgänger

  Coming of Age

  Gloria in excelsis deo

  New York

  Gratias agimus tibi

  The White Tunnel

  The Word of the Lord

  Domine deus, rex caelestis

  Doppelgänger

  Berlin, September, 1932

  From Morn to Midnight

  Doppelgänger

  Doppelgänger

  Betrayals

  Time of Trial

  Fatherland

  Qui tollis peccata mundi

  London

  Doppelgänger

  Quoniam tu solus sanctus

  Olympiad

  Stille Nacht

  Disappearances

  Kristallnacht

  …Jesu Christe

  New York

  Credo

  V-Mann

  Operation 7

  V-Mann

  Doppelgänger

  Maria

  Christmas 1942

  The White Rose

  London

  V-Mann

  Last Things

  April 5, 1943

  Et incarnatus est

  Tegel Wehrmacht Interrogation Prison

  Doppelgänger

  Maria and Suse

  Sanctus

  Doppelgänger

  White Tunnel

  Benedictus

  Postscript

  Afterword

  W. A. MOZART: GROßE MEßE C-MOLL KV427

  PROGRAM NOTES

  Mozart intended his Mass in C Minor as a thanksgiving offering after his father, Leopold, grudgingly acknowledged the composer’s marriage to Constanze Weber. The Mass was unfinished when Wolfgang and Constanze traveled from Vienna to Salzburg for a long-postponed meeting with Papa. This visit ended with a performance of the partial work at the Collegiate Church of St. Peter. Constanze was the principal soloist, and many in attendance were scandalized by her arias, which had been composed in a style considered more suitable to the flamboyance and eroticism of an opera than to a sacred work. Wolfgang and Constanze left for Vienna the next day. The Mass remained incomplete, and would never again be performed in Mozart’s lifetime.

  Mozart’s original manuscript came into the possession of music publisher Johann Anton André, who issued it in 1840, noting the Credo was incomplete and the Agnus Dei absent entirely. The original manuscript then went to the Prussian State Library in Berlin, where it was noticed, years later, that the Sanctus and Benedictus were missing.

  Using the original manuscript and André’s notes, the Mass in C Minor was edited and reconstructed in 1882 by Philipp Spitta, and again in 1901 by Alois Schmitt, when it was performed for only the second time, in Dresden. A subsequent reconstruction was completed in 1918.

  The original manuscript, still minus its closing Sanctus and Benedictus, disappeared from the Prussian State Library during the Second World War.

  Kyrie eleison

  Christe eleison

  Kyrie eleison

  Lord have mercy

  Christ have mercy

  Lord have mercy

  Sabine

  WHEN HE WAS SMALL, he was often mistaken for a girl. It was still the fashion in many well-to-do families to dress little boys in gowns of lace and taffeta, and Paula Bonhoeffer considered a skirt a convenience to Fräulein Horn, who must change the diapers. Dietrich’s featherylight blond hair, worn long and curling in corkscrews at the ends to frame his round face, added to the effect. And since three of the four youngest children were girls, strangers who admired Christel, Sabine, and Baby Suse in her pram included the fourth Bonhoeffer “daughter” in their praise as well.

  “Astonishing,” people would say when the children went with Fräulein Horn for a stroll in the Tiergarten, “that two little girls with such different coloring should be twins”—this because Sabine had dark brown hair and black eyes, while Dietrich was fair.

  Fräulein Horn would nod as she pushed the pram and say, “After all, they aren’t identical twins. This one in fact”—pointing to the blond head—“is a little boy.”

  “You don’t say.”

  At three he wore lederhosen and his hair was trimmed to the bottom of his ears, so he was no longer sometimes a she. But with his large eyes and
pale skin he was still a beautiful child. Now people said, “With that hair, this one should have been a girl.”

  To make up for it, he tried to act as he thought boys should act. He took charge of Sabine and Baby Suse, not in a bullying way, but in the role of teacher and defender, directing their play and watching out for dangers beneath the bed and beyond the garden wall. He did not know that Sabine felt the same. When the twins sat for their portrait at age seven, it was Sabine’s hand that rested protectively on Dietrich’s shoulder.

  They lived then in the Brückenallee, near the zoo. Sometimes at night the children could hear the animals in their cages, the trumpeting elephants, the grumbling lions, the sharp cries of monkeys and plumed birds. During the Great War, the cries grew more desperate, then weaker. Sometimes they were screams of agony. The oldest brother, Karl-Friedrich, said poor people from Wedding and Prenzlauer Berg would slip inside at night and slaughter the animals, strip the carcasses to the bone, and carry away the exotic meat in bloody sacks. At night, high in their third-floor room, Dietrich spoke with God about the animals, while Sabine remained anchored in the world, watchful. He thought he heard God answer, but still the animals died.

  Karl Bonhoeffer was Germany’s leading psychiatrist and a great opponent of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis. His wife, Paula, was the daughter of Prussian aristocracy. So it was fitting they should possess a large household. There was Fräulein Horn, the governess. A butler, Schmidt, and two housemaids, Elli and Maria. The cook, Anna. The chauffeur, Keppel. But during the Great War, even the Bonhoeffers’ bread was more sawdust than flour.

  The house in the Brückenallee was near the Bellevue station, and convoys of lorries passed by each day on their way to meet trains bearing the remains of soldiers killed in France. Before long the lorries carried familiar dead, first the relatives of schoolmates, then a Bonhoeffer cousin from Schwäbisch-Hall, then von Hase and von Kalckreuth cousins. Paula Bonhoeffer lost several Prussian nephews. She could not bear the rows of coffins at the Bellevue station, was frantic to keep her children from seeing them, as though they might be cursed by the sight. So her husband moved the family to Wangenheimstraße 14 in the Grunewald quarter. It was a large house with a garden, so the family could grow its own produce, and every evening when lessons were done, the children of parents who had never known menial labor put on their gardening smocks and took up their hoes.

  Then the two oldest boys, Karl-Friedrich and Walter, were conscripted. Dr. Karl Bonhoeffer could have called upon his extensive connections and obtained safe commissions for them; he was pleased though apprehensive when they rejected such special treatment and requested frontline duties. Dietrich, who was eleven, noted his father’s pride and wished he were old enough to join his brothers. He secretly followed the progress of the Kaiser’s troops on a map in his desk drawer, blue-flagged pins for the hated Allies, red pins for the Fatherland.

  The secrecy was necessary because of his mother. In 1914, Christel had come skipping down the Brückenallee sidewalk calling, “Hurrah, there’s to be a war!” Paula Bonhoeffer had slapped her daughter’s face. When Karl-Friedrich and Walter left for the front, the family and servants walked in a small parade, carrying hampers of food, to the Halensee station to see them off. The parents kissed each of the young men in farewell. More than anything this marked the solemnity of the occasion, for in the Bonhoeffer family kisses were bestowed only on birthdays and at Christmas. Dietrich thought the day a glorious one until the train pulled out of the station and his distraught mother ran the length of the platform calling out the names of her sons.

  That night Dietrich paid for his war lust, like a glutton who suffers stomach pains after an evening of indulgence. He and Sabine shared a room overlooking the garden. The plain oak beds stood side by side with a table between. A cross hung on the far wall—their mother’s doing. It was also Paula who led mealtime and evening prayers, while her husband sat by with a bemused but tolerant expression. Karl Bonhoeffer was an agnostic but believed religious observance to be useful and character-building for women and children. The older boys soon followed his lead and openly expressed their doubts about their mother’s faith, but the twins enjoyed the prayers and the hymns their mother sang as she tucked them into bed at night. They liked to lie on their backs and stare at the cross, iridescent in the moonlight, its surface shimmering as though it were underwater.

  On the night his brothers went away to war, Dietrich said, “Mama told us good people go to heaven when they die. But what if they don’t like heaven? Or what if they don’t go anywhere?”

  Sabine turned away from the cross and shut her eyes. “Don’t think about it.”

  “It’s for eternity,” he said. “Think what that means, Sabine. You can say the word over and over and over and over and still not be at the end of anything.”

  He flopped onto his stomach, wrestled the bedclothes a moment, then turned over onto his back again.

  “Say it,” he said. “Say ‘eternity.’”

  “Eternity,” Sabine replied.

  He began a chant. “Eternity eternity eternity eternity eternity…”

  “Stop!” Sabine commanded.

  He fell silent. She heard him breathing loudly. Then he whispered in a terror-stricken voice, “Sabine! I’m afraid I’m going to die!”

  She sat up. “What?”

  “I’m afraid I’m going to die, right this minute. I have to think about every breath. Talk to me, Sabine.”

  “Shall I read to you?”

  He lay back on his pillow, breathing heavily. “Yes, please.”

  She turned on the light between their beds and found a copy of fairy stories left on the table by Fräulein Horn. She began to read the story of the Wild Swans. By the time the princess sat spinning shirts from nettles, he was asleep.

  They fell into a ritual then. Sabine must read to Dietrich, or tell him good night until he fell asleep. As long as he heard her voice, he couldn’t die. Night after night she fought to stay awake so she could keep her brother alive.

  “Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  “Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight.”

  Goodnight.

  Goodnight.

  Goodnight.

  Goodnight.

  Goo-night.

  Goo—

  Most nights, he was still awake when she nodded off.

  Then Walter was wounded. In his last letter home, he wrote,

  Dear Family, I’ve had my second operation. It was disagreeable, because the fragments of shrapnel were quite deep. I have been given two camphor injections. Perhaps that will suffice. I refuse to contemplate the pain. Instead, I think of you, my family, with every ounce of strength that remains.

  Karl Bonhoeffer read the letter aloud to the family gathered in the parlor, Paula seated with her hands in her lap and the children gathered around her. Then he removed his eyeglasses and looked at each of them in turn. “You see,” he said, “how Walter writes? He does not seek to deny the pain of his circumstances, yet he is modest. He does not complain. This is how a Bonhoeffer conducts himself. Your brother is a great credit to our family and to Germany.”

  When word came of Walter’s death soon after, Karl Bonhoeffer called the family together once more to read the official telegram. The children began to sob, and Paula, who was receiving the news at the same time as the others, gave a small cry and stood with a stricken look on her face. Her husband raised his hand and said, “For the sake of the children, my dear, we must show strength and forbearance.” His wife looked at him and walked out of the house. The next-door neighbors, the von Harnacks, found her sitting in their drawing room, rocking back and forth, mute. They put her to bed for several weeks, and when she finally returned to her own house, she still could not speak. This continued for several months, until one morning she said, as though nothing had happened, “I think I should like a cup of tea.” Her husband took off his glasses and laid them on the breakfast table, kissed her on the fo
rehead, and poured the tea. When the children came downstairs with Fräulein Horn, he said, with a severe glance that warned off an emotional response, “Your mother is feeling better and has asked for tea.” Dietrich, who had prayed daily to hear her voice once more, watched her closely while she drank, his hands beneath the table to conceal their trembling.

  After Walter’s death, Dietrich was given his room and Baby Suse moved in with Sabine, because Karl Bonhoeffer made all family decisions during his wife’s illness, and he judged it to be time. The twins had never before stayed apart. Because their mother was not there to tuck them in and help them with their prayers, Dietrich decided he would himself lead their devotions. He would knock on the wall above his bed, and Sabine would knock back. Two knocks meant I’ll be asleep soon. Three knocks meant Think of God.

  On warm nights they could open their windows, lean out, and talk to each other, their heads dark ovals against the faint light of the moon. When they were done, they reached out, arms white in the moonlight. They couldn’t touch.

  He thought he was being punished for Walter’s death.

  For most of his childhood, it was assumed that music would be Dietrich’s vocation. This was what his father foresaw, and so it was accepted. Karl-Friedrich would be the scientist, Walter would have been the lawyer, the girls were talented but would marry and raise families. As for Dietrich, he might have chosen law as well, or medicine, but he seemed to have an aptitude for neither. As he grew older his teachers praised his ability in philosophy, but this made little impression on his practical father. He was an excellent tennis player, and excelled in track, but these were not important at home. Dietrich was dreamy, and a loner. Though he was well liked at school, he had no close friends. The artist’s temperament, Karl told his wife. It was the same with Mozart, who also showed great promise at a young age. For at ten Dietrich had mastered Mozart’s piano sonatas, and soon after began composing his own work. At the family’s frequent musical evenings—for everyone played an instrument—Karl Bonhoeffer often spoke of the Berlin Conservatory and a career as a concert pianist for his youngest son.