Keys to Bonhoeffer's Haus

Summary: An American ex-pat in Berlin becomes an English-speaking guide at Bonhoeffer's family home. As she encounters the physical spaces of Bonheoffer, she explores the world around her through that lens.

I have no idea who coined the term “Usable History,” and there is likely nuance to the history of that term that I do not know. But as I have spent more time reading biography and memoir the last year, part of what has drawn me is finding “usable history” to help me understand my life.

Laura Fabrychy is the wife of a US diplomat. As a stay-at-home parent in an overseas posting, she has to learn how to manage the responsibilities of a family in a new culture and with a language that she does not understand well. Fabrychy and her family moved to Berlin in the summer of 2016 and spent three years living not far from Bonhoeffer's family's home. She had been interested in Bonhoeffer before moving to Berlin. (She has a Master's in political theology and is working on her Ph.D. in Systematic Theology.) However, after visiting the home several times for herself or bringing visitors, she was asked if she wanted to become a guide for English speakers.

Keys to Bonhoeffer's Haus is part memoir of her time in Berlin and exploration of culture and what it means to be an ex-pat. It is also an exploration of who Bonhoeffer was and how we can learn from others that can influence our own lives. This is not hagiography or utilitarian “five things we can learn from Bonhoeffer to make our life better,” but an honest grappling of a very human Bonhoeffer. As she attempts to balance family life and the strains of a new culture and language with her interest in Bonhoeffer, she reads several books by and about Bonhoeffer.

One of them, The Battle for Bonhoeffer by Stephen Haynes, explores the use and misuse of Bonhoeffer, a particular problem since Bonhoeffer died so young and interest in his work has so often appropriated part of his life and abandoned other parts. (I am reading A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History right now, which is attempting a similar thing for Civil Rights history.) I am fascinated by how we shape our understanding of the past for current use (also well explored in Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory ). Of course, simply repeating history is the first step in understanding. But it is higher-order understanding to interact to bring a fundamental understanding of both history and current reality and to engage the two meaningfully. Part of the reason that books like Battle for Bonhoeffer and A More Beautiful and Terrible history exist is that so often, there is a flat appropriation of history in a way that distorts instead of illuminates. Haynes has a particular disdain for the ways that Eric Metaxes distorts Bonhoeffer for his own purposes, and it is easy to do the same.

Laura Fabrychy recounts that after reading Battle for Bonhoeffer, she attempted to try out what she had learned in the book in one of her tours and how it had gone so poorly, in part because she had not processed the ideas well herself. As a reader, I do the same thing all the time. I read for spiritual insight and as a spiritual discipline, but the ways I use what I learn can be distorting. The Keys to Bonhoeffer's Haus is an act of discernment; Fabrychy is grappling with Bonhoeffer's life while seeking keys to her own. Simple insights, like exploring Bonhoeffer's spiritual practice of reading Moravian watchwords or thinking about how looking at the neighborhood is different when riding a bike versus driving a car or exploring how thinking about death (and Ars Moriendi) impacted Bonhoeffer, give space to reflect on our world. And we can only rightly discern when we reflect deeply.

I have a lot of love for Bonhoeffer and have read books by and about him widely, but he is an excellent subject for a book like this. I am still not sure how to describe Keys to Bonhoeffer's Haus; it isn't quite biography or memoir or travelogue or spiritual formation, but a mix of all of them, and well worth reading.