7/31/2019 Waiting for the Word - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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The custom of food conversation became in prison a desire that could seldom be satisfied.

After a year of hardly being able to carry on such conversations, Dietrich recognized that he yearned

for them. He confessed to Bethge, I would certainly like to have a good talk with someone, but

aimless gossip gets on my nerves terribly. A good conversation had to be about something for the

Bonhoeffers to consider it worthwhile. When is such a conversation worthwhile? For an answer we

can turn to the Fiction from Prison. In a literary attempt by Bonhoeffer from prison, he compensated

his lack of good conversation with fictional exchanges that he let his figures carry on with each

other. The drama as well as the novel consist for the most part of dialogues, conversations as, one

may assume, had taken place in the Bonhoeffer family. Some conversations are about the art of

conversation. There are conversations in which the partners challenge each other; other

conversations are like violent explorations; still others are noncimmital chats that varely veil the

distance, the strangeness, and the indifference between people. But when a conversation is

mutually giving and receiving there is neither violence nor indifference. Such conversations, in which

openness and trust between the conversation partners is not at the expense of the freedom

afforded each other, is what Bonhoeffer calls a good conversation.

The dialogue that he then attributes in his novel to Christoph and his loved one Renate is a

good example of that. Bonhoeffer presents their dialogue as an effortlessly unfolding conversation

that seems to carry the speakers along on its rhythm. They didnt question each other; what each

wanted to say of ones life, ones views, ones closest friends, was to be said freely. In this way, one

of those rare and happy conversations came about in which each word is taken as the free gift of the

one to the other It is a slow, free process of mutual bonding. A good conversation requires a

deepening of the relation between the conversation partners and the exploration of their

personalities. In such dialogue people help reveal each others humanity. The word gift is

significant in this context. Being with and for each other in conversation is a sort of secularexperience of grace. Without others, a person is nothing and nobody. Language seems consequently

to be for Bonhoeffer more than a mere instrument. It is a communicative medium in which the heart

of being human is revealed. We are nothing, but in speaking we become someone for others.

Conversation is a locus of anthropological revelation, in which people mutually bestow to each

other their essence. In this context we read that when a conversation is mutually giving and

receiving there is neither violence nor indifference. The unspoken remnant is a hint of undiscovered

treasures of still concealed wealth in the other which will reveal itself at a given hour.

People really encounter each other in a relationship of disclosure and concealment that can

in no way be manipulated. The inviolable secret of each person manifests itself in that which is notsaid, precisely in the fact that it cannot be forced out of them. Almost all reflections on language

(and its limits) in Bonhoeffers writing are placed in this metaphysical anthropological framework.