Saints and Villians
Denise Giardina
Random House, New York City
1998

Sometimes history requires a work of historical fiction to raise a reader’s awareness to taking on the true history itself. Denise Giardina’s Saints and Villains is a case in point. Based on the short, turbulent adult life of German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Saints and Villains reveals in engaging narrative fashion Bonhoeffer’s secular intellectual/theological development and presents the theologian’s spiritual bildungsroman, transforming from theologian to Christian while attending Union Theological Seminary in New York.

Giardina captures the young pastor’s epiphany that the discrimination of Blacks in America simply mirrored the mistreatment of the Jews in Germany following Hitler’s rise to power in the early 1930s, a discrimination Bonhoeffer felt more malignant in America with the blacks than Germany with the Jews. The effect of this realization is the initiating event in Bonhoeffer’s thought that Christian belief and action go hand-in-hand, solidifying Bonhoeffer’s religio-political vision.

Saints and Villains is a novel depicting events well known and rigorously recorded previously in Eberhard Bethge’s excellent Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theologian, Christian, Man for His Times: A Biography Rev. ed. (Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 2000), Bonhoeffer’s Letter and Papers from Prison (edited by Eberhard Bethge) and his various theological treatises, and smaller biographies in print and on the internet. Anyone familiar with the Bonhoeffer story will know how the story ends. It is getting from point A to point B that leaves the pedestrian Bonhoeffer scholar wanting.

Eberhard Bethge (1909-2000) was a student and friend Bonhoeffer, married to the theologian’s niece. Bethge himself was a fellow resister of the Nazis, editor, and biographer of the great theologian. In a bold and perhaps misguided editorial stroke, Giardina excluded all signs of the biographer from Saints and Villains, reasoning that Bethge entered the Bonhoeffer picture relatively late in the theologian’s life and the inclusion of him as a character would interrupt the natural flow of the narrative. While the wisdom of such an omission is debatable, Giardina’s combination of characters, most particularly coming together in the personage of Bonhoeffer’s brother-in-law Han von Dohnanyi effectively condenses the story to a manageable length.

Additionally, there is the fictional love interest of the Jewish Elisabeth Hildebrandt and their erstwhile physical relationship that some critics claim would have been most unlikely in the environment which produced Pastor Bonhoeffer. I defend this inclusion to illustrate Bonhoeffer’s transformation from academic theologian to Christian and the conflicts that arrive from the blending and ultimately the dilution of the secular in the spiritual. The novel portrays Bonhoeffer as a Theo-Christological work-in-progress that does not achieve completion until his execution at the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp, April 9, 1945, fulfilling the theologian’s most famous and prophetic line from The Cost of Discipleship:

"The cross is laid on every Christian. The first Christ-suffering which every man must experience is the call to abandon the attachments of this world. ... we surrender ourselves to Christ in union with His death - we give over our lives to death. ... When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die."

All critical quibbles aside, what Giardina’s historical fiction provides are beautiful period details of the German upper-class before and during World War II held together by the thread of Mozart’s incomplete Great Mass in C minor, whose completed parts, in Latin, introduce the sections of the book. The musical piece also provides Bonhoeffer a work of German art he disdains that is highly valued by the protagonist theologian’s antagonist “doppelganger,” the fictional SS Judge Advocate Alois Bauer (who ultimately imprisons Bonhoeffer). Bauer loves the Mass, longing to possess the original manuscript, which goes missing after the war. This is a keen literary device that draws together all of the consistencies and contrasts presented in this complex modern day morality play.

Further comment of the use of the Mozart Mass is beneficial. In The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer defines two types of grace: cheap grace received with no sacrifice or atonement, and costly grace attainable only with dedicated sacrifice. To Bonhoeffer, the Mozart mass is garish, a whorey operatic affectation not suitable for worship. For Bauer it is the highest form of art: the creative manifestation of God revealed through the talent of the German Mozart (Bonhoeffer preferred the more pious Bach. The Mass is the perfect metaphor for cheap grace, sung from the mouths of dilettantes who would go soft in the bowels if faced with the gallows for their conviction as Bonhoeffer himself was. Bauer longed to possess what should belong to everyone and the thing that should ultimately be shared by his personal dispossession of it.

In the same way that director Taylor Hackford depicted history in the making in his cinematic biopic about Ray Charles, Ray, so Denise Giardina does in print in Saints and Villains. The author infuses the critical moments in Bonhoeffer's life - for example, Bonhoeffer’s sermon on Reformation Sunday, 1932, sympathizes with the memory of Martin Luther, who the church will not let rest and accuses the church of being too focused on liturgy and dogma. He closes his remarks with, “Leave the dead Luther in Peace, and hear the Word of God.” This thought foreshadows Bonhoeffer’s idea of “Religionless Christianity.”

Giardina captures the genesis of Bonhoeffer’s Christian activism in his sweaty epiphany while re-reading the Sermon on the Mount:

[Bonhoeffer reads] “You have heard that it was said ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other one also ... [These words] cannot mean to do nothing.  It cannot mean that … For how can one justify one’s own suffering for the good if it leaves the other’s suffering unaddressed."

Several pages later as Bonhoeffer's epiphany settles, he seeks absolution from Bishop George Bell in Chichester for relief and clarity of his conflicted reading of the Beatitudes, and after returning to his room, “Deitrich took out his notebook and sat at the small writing table. He Wrote, 'Cheap Grace is the deadly enemy of our church. We are fighting today for costly grace…'”

Thus introducing his most famous work, The Cost of Discipleship.

And finally, toward the end of the novel and Bonhoeffer’s life, the theologian spars with his SS counterpart, the fictional judge advocate Alois Bauer in an imagined conversation addressing who God loves most for saving more Jews, Bauer (who allowed more to live) or Bonhoeffer (who saved all he could):

“I have somewhat of an answer for you. I do not know which of us God loves best. But I hope it is you. However, I warn you, the love of God burns like fire. You will not be able to stand in the face of it.”

This is powerful rhetoric for our current times. Vilified by many modern evangelical “theologians” for not emphasizing the “Letter of the Word,” it is Bonhoeffer who talked the talk and walked the walk, demanding no less from from his peers. His theological and spiritual conviction is beyond question; it is up to us to rise to the awareness of his perfect acceptance of the burden of the Cross.

While spinning history into this compelling narrative, Giardina reminds us of Bonhoeffer’s familial relationship with fellow martyr Hans von Dohnanyi, the son of Hungarian composer Ernst von Dohnanyi and father to German-American conductor Christoph von Dohnanyi, longtime musical director of the Cleveland Orchestra who currently (at age 77) directs the NDR Symphony Orchestra since returning to Hamburg in 2005.

In illuminating these relationships, the author effectively telegraphs Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s story over the span of a tumultuously creative and destructive century, illustrating that the human and spiritual remnants of faith and dedication of Deitrich Bonhoeffer remain alive among us and are not simply a dusty history to be briefly studied and dismissed.

This article was originally published in Blogcritics.