Introduction: Bonhoeffer and Kristallnacht
On 13 November 1938 – the Sunday following the eruption of anti-Jewish Nazi brutality known as the Night of Broken Glass, or Kristallnacht Footnote 1 – Dietrich Bonhoeffer had no pulpit from which to preach a sermon.Footnote 2 He made no public comment about these widespread pogroms.Footnote 3 Scholars, then, search elsewhere for Bonhoeffer's response to this outbreak of violence. Eberhard Bethge, the theologian's friend and confidant, recalls that Bonhoeffer was in Groß-Schlönwitz at the time, where he did not directly witness any violence, but soon after travelled to Berlin to survey the extent of attacks against Jewish persons, property and places of worship – including the burning of synagogues and the desecration of Torah scrolls.Footnote 4
Shortly thereafter,Footnote 5 in his regular study of scripture, Bonhoeffer made an annotation in the margin of the Psalms, writing, ‘9.11.38’, the date of Kristallnacht.Footnote 6 This annotation appears next to Psalm 74:8. The full verse reads: ‘They say in their hearts, let us plunder them! They burn all the houses of God in the land.’Footnote 7 According to Bethge, this annotation is unparalleled in Bonhoeffer's Bible, since ‘apart from here . . ., there is not a single note in his Bible giving a date or key word for something contemporary or of political or family or personal importance’.Footnote 8 The place of Psalm 74 in Bonhoeffer's response to Kristallnacht was further accented by his 20 November 1938 letter to former students of Finkenwalde, where – in a reflection on recent events – he refers to it once more: ‘In the last few days’, Bonhoeffer wrote, ‘I have thought much about Ps. 74, Zech. 2:8, Rom. 9:4–5, and 11:11–15. That leads deeply into prayer.’Footnote 9
In the absence of any other explicit response to the crimes of Kristallnacht, Bonhoeffer scholars have devoted considerable attention to the meaning of his marginalia. Yet, as I will argue, while scholars have helpfully recognised possible political or historical implications of associating this psalm text with Kristallnacht, the discourse has yet to examine this annotation more thoroughly in the context of Bonhoeffer's then-burgeoning commitment to figural interpretation of the Psalter. This article will establish the backdrop of Bonhoeffer's figural approach to the Psalms, in order to address this question: by connecting Psalm 74:8 with Kristallnacht, what theological claim might Bonhoeffer have been making about the events of November 1938?
From rejection to approval: Bonhoeffer on figural interpretation, 1925 to 1935
Before analysing the annotation in relation to Bonhoeffer's figural practices, I must first detail the context of his appraisal of figural exegesis – especially as it applies to his interpretation of the Psalms. Bonhoeffer's position on figural interpretation shifted notably, from outright rejection of figural exegesis in the mid-1920s to his adoption of figural practices by the mid-1930s.Footnote 10 In 1925, while a student at the University of Berlin, Bonhoeffer wrote a paper on the ‘Historical and Pneumatological Interpretation of Scripture’, in which he unambiguously dismisses the validity of figural exegesis.Footnote 11 Bonhoeffer cites figural interpretation as an example of the interpretive ‘abuses’ that result from applying ‘hermeneutical standards external to scripture’ to the exegetical task.Footnote 12 As Bonhoeffer explains, ‘The method of allegorical interpretation completely ignored historical reality. It used speculative and rationalistic methods that could read into the text whatever one wished.’Footnote 13 Nowhere in the paper does Bonhoeffer mollify this rejection.
However, in August 1935, Bonhoeffer delivered a lecture on ‘Contemporizing New Testament Texts’, in which he voices approval of figural exegesis: ‘The right of the allegorical interpretation’, he writes, ‘consists in acknowledging the possibility that God does not allow his word to be exhausted in its grammat[ical], logical, unequivocal meaning, but rather that this word has even other perspectives and can better serve understanding.’Footnote 14 While preserving the validity of non-figural interpretations, Bonhoeffer concedes that figural readings may additionally be valid: ‘why’, he asks, ‘should the word not also have symbolic or allegorical meaning?’Footnote 15 Bonhoeffer qualifies figural practices by delimiting conditions under which such exegesis is admissible,Footnote 16 yet the contrast to his earlier work is clear. Bonhoeffer may have been influenced by the figural practices of Luther or Wilhelm Vischer, but these influences seem inadequate to account for the marked change in Bonhoeffer's position.Footnote 17 Rather, the key to Bonhoeffer's acceptance of figural interpretation may lie in his conviction that a christological definition of holy scripture at times requires figural practices. In the same lecture, Bonhoeffer explains: ‘Because Scripture as a whole and in all its parts is to be understood as a witness to Christ, and because difficulties do apparently arise in the concrete demonstration of this assertion – the question arises whether it is permissible to employ allegorical exegesis for obscure scriptural passages.’Footnote 18 Bonhoeffer's qualified acceptance of figural interpretation, then, appears to arise from his view that such practices are necessitated by the conviction that all of scripture bears witness to Christ.Footnote 19 For Bonhoeffer, it seems, figural interpretation is required in order for a christological construal of scripture to be hermeneutically sustained.
After emerging in 1935, seemingly out of theological necessity,Footnote 20 figural interpretation occupied a prominent role in Bonhoeffer's exegetical work, notably in his treatment of the Psalms. In the same summer of 1935, Bonhoeffer delivered a lecture titled ‘Christ in the Psalms’, which indicates the subsequent direction of his figural approach to the Psalter. In this lecture, he considers the tension that a psalm is the divine word of God yet also a human prayer to God: ‘How can the prayerful word of the church-community’, he asks, ‘simultaneously also be God's word?’Footnote 21 Bonhoeffer harmonises these seemingly incompatible functions of the Psalms christologically: ‘God as the one praying and God as the one answering the prayer’ is a problem that, he maintains, ‘is resolved only in Jesus Christ’.Footnote 22 The Psalms can be the divine-human word only insofar as they are the word of the divine-human Jesus, for ‘Christ is the supplicant in the Psalter’.Footnote 23 Historical considerations regarding the provenance of Psalms are accordingly marginalised for Bonhoeffer since, as Stephen Westerholm and Martin Westerholm observe: ‘What matters to him is that the voice of Christ is to be heard in every psalm.’Footnote 24
Indeed, Bonhoeffer does not apply this christological lens exclusively to Psalms closely associated with Jesus either in the New Testament or in the later Christian tradition. Rather, Bonhoeffer specifies that ‘the whole Psalter can be understood as the prayer of Jesus Christ’.Footnote 25 In Bonhoeffer's understanding, since it is Christ who speaks through every psalm, the frame of reference for interpreting Psalms becomes Christ himself, since ‘[w]hat is important now’ is that ‘we understand and pray together these psalms as the prayers of Jesus Christ in his church-community’.Footnote 26 This christological construal of the ‘I’ of the Psalms decisively shapes Bonhoeffer's subsequent exegesis of the Psalter.
Psalms of suffering in Bonhoeffer's figural exegesis
The manifold interpretive implications of Bonhoeffer's christological understanding of the Psalter became evident in two later works, one written shortly before Kristallnacht and the other written just over a year afterward. These works offer a valuable glimpse of Bonhoeffer's figural approach to the Psalms around the time of Kristallnacht, which will help illuminate the correlation that his annotation implies between Psalm 74:8 and the pogrom of 1938. Significantly, the figural exegesis in these two works includes particular attention to the voice of lamentation and suffering in the Psalms, of which Psalm 74:8 is an example.
In Life Together, written just prior to Kristallnacht in September and October 1938, Bonhoeffer reiterates the figural claim that the one who prays the Psalms is Christ himself: ‘The Psalter is the prayer book of Jesus Christ in the truest sense of the word. He prayed the Psalter, and now it has become his prayer for all time.’Footnote 27 Bonhoeffer had previously stated that ‘Christ in the Psalms is Christ the Crucified’,Footnote 28 and in Life Together he elaborates by clarifying how the voice of the suffering Christ speaks in psalms of suffering. The one ‘who has come to such infinite depths of suffering’ in the Psalms, Bonhoeffer declares, ‘is none other than Jesus Christ himself’.Footnote 29 Accordingly, Bonhoeffer reasons that those who pray psalms of suffering ought not to feign personal familiarity with such suffering, but rather must recognise the suffering of the Psalms as an expression of – and indeed inscribed in – the suffering of Christ. Bonhoeffer explains:
And how should we pray those prayers of unspeakable misery and suffering, since we have hardly begun to sense even remotely something of what is meant here? We can and we should pray the psalms of suffering, not to become completely caught up in something our heart does not know from its own experience, nor to make our own complaints, but because all this suffering was genuine and real in Jesus Christ, because the human being Jesus Christ suffered sickness, pain, shame, and death, and because in his suffering and dying all flesh suffered and died.Footnote 30
Thus, Bonhoeffer's earlier claim that the Psalms express the voice of Christ takes on interpretive specificity in Life Together, as he explains that psalms of suffering in particular must be heard as the despairing cries of Christ himself. As Patrick D. Miller remarks, this realisation proved momentous to Bonhoeffer: that ‘[t]he Psalms were the prayers of a suffering and dying Christ’ was, to Bonhoeffer, ‘the most important thing to say about the Psalms’.Footnote 31
In Prayerbook of the Bible: An Introduction to the Psalms, published in 1940, we see Bonhoeffer's figural approach to the Psalter receiving its most extensive treatment. In this work, Bonhoeffer leaves historical-critical considerations aside as he explores the interpretive reach of figural exegesis. Bonhoeffer restates his prior conclusion that Christ prays the Psalms,Footnote 32 then premises his exegesis on christological considerations: ‘we must not, therefore, first ask what [the Psalms] have to do with us, but what they have to do with Jesus Christ’.Footnote 33 Basing his approach in Prayerbook on the figural framework already established in 1935 and 1938, Bonhoeffer moves systematically through types of psalms, showing how each psalm can – and, in his understanding, must – be interpreted primarily as the prayer of Christ.Footnote 34
In this context, Bonhoeffer applies his christological approach to interpreting psalms of suffering. He repeats his caution against reading such psalms as expressions of one's own suffering: ‘No single human being can pray the psalms of lamentation out of his or her own experience.’Footnote 35 Rather, Bonhoeffer advocates hearing these psalms as the prayers of Christ, who ‘has known torment and pain, guilt and death more deeply than we have’.Footnote 36 Accordingly, in psalms of suffering such as Psalm 22, ‘we always hear Jesus Christ praying’.Footnote 37 Bonhoeffer had previously established these themes, but here he extends this christological reach into the present, claiming additionally that the voice of Christ in psalms of suffering discloses the presence of Christ in human suffering today: ‘psalms of lament’, he states, ‘proclaim Jesus Christ as the only help in suffering, for in Christ God is with us’.Footnote 38 Indeed, in the same context Bonhoeffer adds: ‘Now we know that there is no longer any suffering on earth in which Christ, our only helper, is not with us, suffering and praying with us.’Footnote 39 Thus, Bonhoeffer concludes that, inasmuch as Christ is the one praying psalms of suffering, Christ promises his presence in the midst of all contemporary suffering.
To summarise: Bonhoeffer did not claim merely that certain psalms prefigure Christ or find their full meaning in Christ, but instead made the more radical claim that all psalms must be interpreted as the very prayers of Christ. And, importantly for the purpose of analysing his Kristallnacht annotation, Bonhoeffer emphasised the need to hear the suffering Christ as the voice speaking in psalms of suffering, revealing Christ's presence amid contemporary suffering, lamentation and abandonment.
Reinterpreting the Kristallnacht annotation
Bonhoeffer's figural engagement with the Psalms – and with psalms of suffering, in particular – suggests striking theological implications for the Kristallnacht annotation. Nonetheless, the scholarly discourse has tended to register the historical and political implications of the marginalia while overlooking the context of Bonhoeffer's figural approach to the Psalter. Influentially, Bethge construes the annotation specifically in terms of historical parallels. According to Bethge, the annotation indicates that Bonhoeffer discerned similarities between the ancient historical context of Psalm 74 and the recent history of Nazi Germany, a historical correspondence that purportedly evoked in Bonhoeffer a heightened sympathy for the Jewish victims of Kristallnacht. Bonhoeffer ‘was struck’, Bethge writes, ‘by the shattering experience of abandonment felt by the desperate victims of the pogrom two and a half thousand years earlier, when the Babylonians laid waste the Temple and deported the people, and now, through the strength of his identification with them, he was similarly struck by the acute and real cries of abandonment of that night’ in November 1938.Footnote 40 To Bethge, the Kristallnacht annotation is a historical rather than a theological comment.
Scholars are indebted to Bethge's work on this topic, since without his personal recollections and historical reconstructions we would have little knowledge of Bonhoeffer's private responses to Kristallnacht. Nonetheless, it seems that Bethge analyses the Kristallnacht annotation in isolation from Bonhoeffer's figural interpretation of the Psalms during that period. This approach, I suggest, yields a narrowly historical construal that is incommensurate with Bonhoeffer's contemporaneous approach to the Psalter. Since in the late 1930s Bonhoeffer interpreted the Psalms through a radically ahistorical lens, privileging christological resonances over historical-critical considerations, it seems inadequate to read the Kristallnacht annotation as implying a purely historical correlation between an ancient event and its contemporary counterpart.
Still, Bethge's analysis of this subject in the early 1990s influenced subsequent scholarly discussions of the annotation. Miller, for instance, reiterates Bethge's historical position, describing how ‘there came to [Bonhoeffer] this shattering awareness of the loneliness of the despairing Jews in the pogrom over two thousand years before when the Babylonians destroyed the temple and deported the people’, which resonated with ‘the burden of a solidarity he felt with the despairing cries of the Jews on that Crystal Night of the later pogrom’.Footnote 41 Similarly, Martin Rumscheidt maintains that, for Bonhoeffer, Psalm 74 ‘described the utter desolation felt by Jews in Germany over the Nazis’ desecration of the Holy, the action that manifested their idolatrous veneration of blood, soil, fatherland, their nationalism, xenophobia, patriotism, their veneration of the Führer’.Footnote 42 The profound connections Rumscheidt suggests between Psalm 74 and Nazi Germany again preserve Bethge's appraisal of the essentially historical correlation between the psalm and Kristallnacht.
Scholars have usefully examined the place of this annotation in the matrix of political and historical forces that shaped Bonhoeffer's context; however, I suggest that our understanding of the Kristallnacht annotation will be enriched by attending more closely to Bonhoeffer's figural work, which reveals the deeper theological resonance of connecting Kristallnacht with Psalm 74. As David McI. Gracie states in his brief discussion of the annotation: ‘It is important to note at the outset that Bonhoeffer taught that the psalms were to be prayed, prayed with Christ, whose prayers he believed they really were – in this case with the Christ who was being driven out of Germany when the Jews were driven out.’Footnote 43
Particularly problematic to a purely historical understanding of the Kristallnacht annotation is that it assumes Bonhoeffer construed connections between psalms and the present-day in terms of linear, temporal and historical correlation. Scholars such as Bethge have read the annotation as a claim about similarities across time, a comment on correspondences between two temporally remote events. However, in Bonhoeffer's figural approach, the time between these events can effectively be collapsed. Friedrich Ohly describes figural interpretation as ‘the rendering visible of a simultaneity of what is not simultaneous’,Footnote 44 and this feature of figural exegesis seems especially operative in Bonhoeffer's work. As Harvey observes:
Bonhoeffer uses figural exegesis to posit a real connection grounded in the revelatory activity of God in Christ between the people and events narrated in the Old Testament and those in the Germany of his day. Through these interpretations he endeavors to show the way that these people and events, separated in time and space, nonetheless belong together as two aspects of a single economy or pattern orchestrated around the one divine utterance made incarnate in Christ. Though events never repeat themselves identically, there is the contention that a nonidentical repetition is at work in God's redemptive activity in the world, a repetition articulated through typological interpretation.Footnote 45
This ‘real connection’, as Harvey explains, does not merely involve noting parallels across time, but indeed entails the compression of temporal distance: figural interpretation draws together what historical distance would seem to separate. It is in this way that, as Jeremy Worthen observes, when Bonhoeffer reads Psalm 74 in the context of Kristallnacht, the subject of the psalm is not ‘merely “some ancient Israelites”’, but indeed ‘might be extended to include the Jewish people’ of 1938.Footnote 46
I conclude, then, that a more plausible reading of the Kristallnacht annotation is that Bonhoeffer is making a stronger claim than a historical reading would imply. The connection Bonhoeffer discerned between Psalm 74 and November 1938 seems unlikely to consist only in historical parallels, but rather entails christological presence: Bonhoeffer heard the voice of Christ praying in despair in Psalm 74:8, and – in keeping with the revelatory simultaneity of figural interpretation – he heard this voice not in the distant past of Israelite history but in the contemporary persecution of present-day Jews. Kelly argues that Bonhoeffer's theology implies ‘the presence . . . of Jesus Christ himself’ in the victims of the Holocaust,Footnote 47 and something similar may be discerned in this context, as the annotation testifies to a connection that is more appropriately understood as christological than historical. Bonhoeffer did not, I suggest, view Psalm 74 only as a historical precursor to November 1938, but rather heard in Psalm 74 the voice of Christ crying out in human suffering amid the Jewish victims of Kristallnacht.
Concluding note: assessing the stakes
This article may appear to give inordinate attention to brief marginalia, so I will conclude by attempting to clarify the stakes involved, as I wish neither to exaggerate nor to minimise the importance of this marginal artefact. As noted at the outset, Bonhoeffer made no public comments on Kristallnacht, a historical circumstance that leaves scholars scouring margins for hints of his private reflections. At least in terms of the historical and biographical reconstruction of Bonhoeffer's life and thought, then, the annotation requires scholarly attention.Footnote 48 And indeed, the Kristallnacht annotation is frequently cited in Bonhoeffer scholarship, especially in two contexts: Bonhoeffer's reading of scripture, and Bonhoeffer's relationship to Jews and Judaism in Nazi Germany.Footnote 49 With respect to the former context, this article may highlight the importance of reading this marginal note within the wider framework of Bonhoeffer's figural exegesis of the Psalms. With respect to the latter context, this article may problematise attempts to invoke the annotation as a clear illustration of Bonhoeffer's personal solidarity with Jews, since his christological reading of the Psalter introduces added complexities in this regard.Footnote 50
At the same time, it is important not to exaggerate the gravity of Bonhoeffer's act itself, and I do not intend to lionise this annotation as some sort of resistance by marginalia. As Stephen R. Haynes underscores:
Not all interpreters have been impressed by these notations in Bonhoeffer's Bible. Wolfgang Gerlach observes that it was probably during this period that Bonhoeffer famously remarked, ‘Only he who cries out for the Jews may also sing Gregorian chant.’ Yet, Gerlach complains, Bonhoeffer himself ‘did not cry out but only underlined Ps. 74:8 in the Bible that he used for prayer and meditation.’Footnote 51
For his part, Bethge makes clear that Bonhoeffer's – and indeed, his own – response to Kristallnacht ought not to be likened to those of rare Christian leaders who reacted by publicly decrying the Nazi barbarity.Footnote 52
My more modest objective is to offer an interpretation of the annotation that, simply put, fits with Bonhoeffer's treatment of the Psalms during this period. Previous discussions, including Bethge's influential work, have foregrounded historical perspectives, suggesting that Bonhoeffer connected Psalm 74 with Kristallnacht on the basis of historical parallels. Historical resonances likely figured somewhat into Bonhoeffer's construal of Psalm 74, but – as we have seen – historical considerations occupied a relatively minor role in Bonhoeffer's reading of the Psalter in this period. Accordingly, I suggest that a more plausible interpretation, which more adequately accounts for Bonhoeffer's figural exegesis of the Psalms in the late 1930s, is that Bonhoeffer understood Psalm 74:8 and Kristallnacht not as incidentally related by the accidents of history, but as profoundly and timelessly yoked in Christ, the one who knew the fullness of human suffering and who, in Bonhoeffer's understanding, was present and praying the psalm alongside the Jewish victims of November 1938.Footnote 53