"The Banished Heart" by Libi Astaire

Paul Hoffman is preparing to defend his doctoral thesis on William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. He’s been navigating his literature department with varying degrees of success and failure. Everything has become political, and even a 400-year-old play can be suspect. His advisor is in one political camp, the department head in another.  

Political violence erupts the day he is to make his defense; in fact, it happens just as his defense begins. Paul is verbally attacked by the department head and severely beaten by radical students. During a period of unconsciousness, Paul has a dream, in which he’s offered a choice. Stand for truth to make a difference, or die.

 

A story begins. It is a story of a young William Shakespeare, a boy in Stratford-on-Avon. He befriends another boy, whose family is ostensibly Christian and Anglican but are secretly Jewish. According to English law at the time, all Jews are banished from the kingdom. And it is the boy’s grandfather who begins to teach his grandson the Torah in secret. Young Shakespeare finagles his way into the studies, thing the Hebrew words and letters are a secret code.

 

From there, the story moves to Shakespeare’s London. The young boy is now a playwright of growing fame, one who’s caught the eye of Queen Elizabeth. Political events almost mandate that theater companies produce a play about an evil Jew. Shakespeare, remembering his childhood friend, is loath to do it. Eventually, he writes a play that makes the lead Jewish character seem human. It scandalizes the theater owner and Shakespeare’s patron. 

 

Libi Astaire

What does this have to do with Paul Hoffman’s decision? Paul is living in 1933 Berlin. Hitler has just been elected, and Nazi violence, like the famous book burning, is on the upswing. During his thesis defense, Paul, who is Jewish, is attacked by faculty and students espousing Hitler’s cause. And he faces a decision.

 

The Banished Heart by Libi Astaire is the story of Paul in early Nazi Germany and William Shakespeare in a London hostile to Jews. It’s an almost hypnotic tale of anti-Semitism, mob violence, and personal courage. That Astaire combines the two historical periods in one story suggests that she clearly sees parallels.

 

Astaire has also published the Jewish Regency Mystery series, the novel Terra Incognita, a set of the retelling of Chasidic tales entitled Choose Light!, Day Trips to Jewish History: Essays, and The Latke in the Library & Other Mystery Stories for Chanukah. 

 

The Banished Heart is a moving story of hatred, violence, mobs, and the courage required to swim against the stream. And it holds many lessons for our own time. 

“The Prison Meditations” by Father Alfred Delp

Alfred Delp (1907-1945) was born in Manheim, Germany (on the Rhine River near Heidelberg) of a mixed marriage – a Catholic mother and a Protestant father. His schooling was primarily Lutheran, until a falling out with the local pastor. He joined the Catholic Church, where his priest saw his promise and guided him in his education. In 1926, Delp became a Jesuit. He was a teacher, first in Austria and later in Germany. 

The ascent of Hitler changed everything for Delp. He began to develop along Catholic humanist lines. Frustrated in his attempt to study for a Ph.D., he began working for a Jesuit journal from 1939 to 1941, until the Nazi government shut it down. He joined the staff of a church, and quietly began helping Jews escape to Austria.

Delp’s legacy is two-fold. First, He became a leading figure in the Catholic resistance to Hitler. And second, when he was falsely accused of participation in the 1944 to assassinate Hitler, he was imprisoned in Berlin, and began to write. He wrote letters, reflections, meditations, and a few essays, all of which were (somehow) smuggled out and given to friends for safekeeping.

The prosecutor dropped the assassination plot charge, essentially trying Delp for his resistance activities, his being a member of the Jesuits, and his beliefs and philosophy. In the dying days of Nazi Germany, the charges were sufficient to result in the death penalty. Delp was executed by hanging on Feb. 2, 1945. His body, and those of the other prisoners executed at the same time, were ordered to be cremated.

His writings from prison have been collected and published a number of times. This particular edition is the ebook version of the collection, entitled The Prison Meditations of Father Alfred Delp. First published in 1962, it includes extracts from his diary, an introduction by Thomas Merton, worth reading by itself alone, and a number of representative writings. The diary entries provide an insight into Delp’s mind while he was imprisoned, showing doubt, fear, acceptance, resignation, and hope. He remained hopeful until shortly before his official trial that he would be found innocent and released. But a day or so before he started, he realizes what really lies ahead.

His meditations and reflections include a number of discussions about Advent, Christmas, epiphany, humanism, a wonderful series on the Lord’s Prayer, and the Holy Spirit. There is nothing in these writings to suggest that the man is writing them in prison; they are a rather quietly joyful discussion. 

At the end, however, back in the diary, we read his final thoughts. The trial is over, and the sentence handed down, and now he has but to wait. The pre-trial tension that was building is gone, replaced by acceptance and a strong resolution. 

Father Alfred Delp

“It is so easy,” he writes, “to get used to existence again that one has to keep reminding oneself that death is round the corner. Condemned to death. The thought refuses to penetrate; it almost needs force to drive it home. The thing that makes this kind of death so singular is that one feels so vibrantly alive with the will to live unbroken and every nerve tingling with life.” He knows that, at any time, the door will open and the jailer will tell him to pack up, for the transfer to the hanging.

And he goes on to question his actions, his life, his motives, and God. He finally knows that the one thing he has to do is surrender himself completely. And then he writes a letter to his fellow Jesuits.

In recent years, broad interest has grown in the stories of prisoners of conscience during the Third Reich. We’ll never know how many, or how few, there really were. But the examples of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Franz Jagerstatter (the Austrian farmer who refused to fight for the Nazis and whose story is told in the movie A Hidden Life), and Alfred Delp bear witness to those who know that, sometimes, conscience must be followed, even when it leads to death.

“The Radio Signal” by Friedhelm Radandt

In early 1945, Friedhelm Radandt was 12 years old when he, his mother, and a sister were forced to flee their home in Pomerania, a region south of the Baltic Sea and part of both Germany and Poland. At the time, the area was part of Greater Germany and inhabited primarily by ethnic Germans. Freidhelm’s father was with the German Army in Italy; an older brother was with the Hitler Youth and a related organization and an older sister was working as a governess on a rural estate to fulfill her requirements with the Nazi state. 

The reason for the family’s flight was the approaching Soviet Army. Nazi Germany was crumbling, with the Americans and British invading from the west and Soviet Russia from the east.

In Warsaw, the Job family were ethnic Germans who had considered themselves Poles – until Germany invaded in 1939 and gave them German citizenship papers. Ludwig Job worked for the electronic manufacturer Phillips as a research and developer of radio tubes. Ludwig learns that Polish partisans have placed his name on an execution list, and he’s able to transfer to a research site in Germany. But the family stays in Warsaw, until they, too, face the approaching Soviet armies, which, as the Germans knew, had been given full leeway to take all manners of revenge upon the German population.

Friedhelm Radandt’s The Radio Signal is the story of these two families during World War II and immediately after. While they didn’t know each other until well after the war, they had several things in common – their ethnic heritage, living in Poland, becoming part of the German refugee flood that was desperate to escape the Soviets and reach the Americans or the British, and their religious faith. Friedhelm Radandt would also marry Elizabeth Job, bringing the two families and their histories together.

While this is a story of family, The Radio Signal also answers another question – what did practicing, believing Christians do during the Nazi regime? And the answer is rather candidly mixed. They did their jobs; they served in the military. Radandt’s father drew the line, however, at having his sons sent to an elite Nazi training camp, and he lost his job as a result. He solved the unemployment problem by joining the German Army, where the Nazi leaders had less control. And just as everyone else did, they suspected that the Jews were being taken away for evil purposes.

Friedhelm Radandt

Friedhelm and his wife Elizabeth eventually emigrated to the United States. He earned graduate degrees at the University of Chicago. and taught there and at Lake Forest College before serving as president of Northwestern College in Iowa and The King’s College in New York. He is also the author of From Baroque to Storm and Stress 1720-1775: The Literary History of Germany (1977). He now lives in Seattle.

The Radio Signal is an extraordinary story of how ordinary people get caught up in great upheavals, and the choices and decisions they make to save their families.  

Top photograph: German refugees and soldiers fleeing eastern Prussia ahead of the Soviet troops, February 1945; photo by Bundesarchiv via Wikimedia Commons. 

The Hiding Place: Entlassen!

In The Hiding Place, Corrie ten Boom describes a few of the last things her sister Betsie tells her before she dies in the hospital at the Ravensbruck concentration camp. One is that there will be a place with tall windows, for people to come and heal from the spiritual and psychological wounds of the war. And it’s clear that Betsie is not only talking about the people who suffered at the hands of the Nazis, but the Nazis themselves.

Another is that they will be free by the New Year – January of 1945. In a place like Ravensbruck, that likely would have seemed laughable to Corrie. The only way out from Ravensbruck seemed to be sent further east – to the death camps in Poland, although the prisoners had little firsthand knowledge of those.

Sometime after Betsie’s death, Corrie hears her voice shouted by a guard at the door of the barracks. She hurries after her as fast as she can, hobbling with swollen feet. She sites on a bench by a camp official with a few other women. One by one they’re called to the official, who looks at papers and says the word they likely thought they’d never hear.

Entlassen!

Corrie understood the German word for “released.” They were inexplicably being released. In Corrie’s case, the official looks at her feet and sends her first to the hospital; sick prisoners cannot be released. After a few days, he feet less swollen, she’s given a skirt and blouse and the articles taken from her when she arrived, including her mother’s ring (amazing, given the penchant the Nazis had for looting and stealing art and jewelry).

One thing she leaves behind – the small copy of the Scriptures in Dutch she and Betsie had used to read to the women and for worship services. She gives the treasured Bible to a young woman from Holland.

The train takes her first to Berlin, which has been heavily bombed. She finally gets a train for the Dutch border, but the journey takes days – so many delays because of torn up tracks and the movements of troop and supply trains. The last part of her journey to Haarlem is by truck – the train track is destroyed.

She finds family; and she returns to her home above the watch shop. She is a very different Corrie than the one who was arrested some 10 months before. She has seen death and destruction. She has seen people killed. She has seen brutality and what humans are indeed capable of. She has experienced the death of her beloved sister and father. Yes, it is a very different Corrie who returns to Haarlem, one who faith has been refined by fire.

Led by Sarah Salter and Jason Stasyszen, we’ve been discussing The Hiding Place. To see more posts on this chapter, “The Three Visions,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines. This is the last chapter in the book; there is an epilogue. I’ll have a few final thoughts next week.

Photograph by Lilla Frerichs via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Hiding Place: What the Fleas Did

Fleas were a constant pest in the barracks at Ravensbruck, the women’s concentration camp some 56 miles north of Berlin where Corrie and Betsie ten Boom were imprisoned in 1944. As described in The Hiding Place, Betsie had already reminded Corrie that they were to give thanks in all things. Including flea infestations in a camp whose hallmarks were deprivation, brutality, and death.  

Betsie’s health had always been problematic, and the conditions of prison confinement and being forced to be part of work gangs worsened her health problems. Even as she became sicker, her peace and spirit seemed to radiate hope and encouragement to Corrie and the other prisoners.

It is during one camp hospital stay that Betsie learns the reason for one of Ravensbruck’s few blessings – the guards stayed out of their large women’s barracks. Because the guards would not come in, Betsie and Corrie had been unimpeded in sharing the gospel and even conducting not one but two worship services.

The reason was the fleas, Betsie learned. The guards would not come into the barracks because they were afraid of picking up fleas.

And Corrie thinks of Betsie’s admonition to give thanks in all things, including fleas.

We often experience difficult, even terrible situations, without knowing why, without any rhyme or reason. It seems that life – or God – is simply toying with us to see how much we can stand. For Corrie and Betsie ten Boom, having to deal with fleas along with all the other horrors of a Nazi prison camp might seem over the top. Fleas, in addition to brutality and beatings, the smell of awful latrines, the hopelessness hanging over the entire site? Fleas, too, Lord?

In this case, there was a purpose. The fleas effectively kept the Nazi prison guards out, and allowed the gospel and worship to spread.

In a place as terrible as Ravensbruck, those fleas were the conduit for hope.

And Corrie will need hope. Betsie’s health worsens. She’s eventually taken back to the hospital. And the day comes when Corrie slips into the hospital through the bathroom and sees her sister’s body stacked against the wall.

She touches Betsie’s face for the last time.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Hiding Place. To see more posts on this chapter, “The Blue Sweater,” please visit Sarah at Reading Between the Lines.

Photograph: A view of the barracks of the Ravensbruck concentration camp. The reality of the camp was not what this photograph might suggest.

The Hiding Place: Thanking God for Fleas

We’ve reached the point in The Hiding Place where Corrie ten Boom and her sister Betsie have been arrested for helping Jews hide and escape the Nazis in World War II Haarlem, sent first to a jail in Holland and a few months later to their first prison camp. From there, they are herded with other prisoners on a train, traveling south for more than three days into Nazi Germany. This was a dreaded fate – no one had heard of anyone returning from Germany.

Finally, they arrive. And discover they have been sent to Ravensbruck, a women’s prison camp whose horrors had reached back to Holland.

Ravensbruck was some 56 miles north of Berlin. Over the course of its existence, it housed an estimated 130,000 to 150,000 women prisoners from various countries in Europe, including Germany. No one knows for sure how many died there, but estimates run as high as 96,000. Many were transported to death camps in Poland; more than 2,000 were killed in gas chambers on site. Approximately 15,000 women survived and were liberated at the end of the war.

Corrie and Betsie’s first resting place there is a large tent with no sides, inhabited by too many women prisoners and lice. They are eventually assigned to a barracks, sharing a bed with five other women. Corrie still has a small Dutch Bible given to her earlier and her sister’s blue sweater, which she makes Betsie wear for warmth.

Terrible food, terrible latrine-like bathrooms, lice, fleas, and brutality from the guards (including the women guards). That was daily existence in Ravensbruck. When Betsie is taken to the camp hospital, Corrie sneaks in through the bathroom, where she finds bodies stacked against the wall.

At one point, Betsie reminds Corrie that they are to give thanks to God in all things, including Ravensbruck. They hold hands and pray their thanks – for being together, for having the Bible with them, and for the crowded conditions in the barracks that more women might hear the gospel.

And then Betsie tells her to give thanks for the fleas. Corrie can’t do it. “Betsie,” she says, “there’s no way even God could make me grateful for a flea.”

But Betsie insists. And the two sisters give thanks for the fleas.

I can’t imagine it. Right there, in an absolutely horrible, death-filled environment, the two ten Boom sisters give thanks.

For fleas.

Their attitude makes other notice. Gradually, the ten Booms become the center of a widening circle of the gospel.

And they give thanks for fleas.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Hiding Place. To see more posts on this chapter, “Ravensbruck,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Photograph: Female inmates working at Ravensbruck in 1939. Photo courtesy Wikimedia; 

"Bundesarchiv Bild 183-1985-0417-15, Ravensbrück, Konzentrationslager" by Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1985-0417-15 / CC-BY-SA 3.0. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 de via Commons. 

The Hiding Place: Invasion

Haarlem, The Netherlands, September, 1939. A family of aging sisters, and an elderly father and aunt, listen to the assurances of the Dutch government on the radio that the country is neutral, it will not be invaded by Nazi Germany and there will be no war. A few hours later, Holland is at war. Five days after that, the queen flees to Britain and the government surrenders. And everything changes.

German military uniforms are everywhere. Curfews are announced. Radios have to be surrendered.

We’ve reached the point in our book discussion of The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom where the introductory chapters are over, and the story turns to one of the darkest times in Dutch and European history. It is difficult time to be Dutch, and occupied by Nazis. It’s an impossible time to be Jewish. The Jews of Haarlem gradually begin to disappear, starting with the rabbi and other religious leaders. (In a separate story, in Amsterdam, the Frank family, including their daughter Anne, goes into hiding, and will evade the Nazis for three years.)

Corrie ten Boom finds a wide array of responses to the occupation. Some people will fight it and join the resistance. Some will embrace the new conquerors and become much like them. Most will try to muddle through and focus on surviving. And some will be consumed, never to be seen again.

The last time any part of the United States was occupied at least partially by a conquering army was the Civil War. Before that, it had happened during the American Revolution. (During the War of 1812, there were battles and forays like the burning of Washington, but no sustained occupation.) Those occupations, while disruptive and often terrible, cannot compare with what happened in Europe with the Nazis. And yet people’s responses were similar – some resist and fight, some collaborate, most try to survive.

Corrie faced a choice in how she would respond. She could have ducked and likely been left largely alone. But Corrie and her family were strong Christians, and they’re horrified by what’s happening. Persecution of a Jewish neighbor leads her to help him escape, and Corrie ten Boom discovers the underground. And more than that, she will become part of the underground. She will offer herself to God to help the Jewish people.

You read a story like this one and can’t help but ask, what would you do in her situation? You’d like to think you would be courageous – we all like to think of ourselves as noble heroes – but the fact is that you don’t know. And you won’t know until you face the kind of choice and the decision Corrie faced.

She chose the path of courage and danger. She could have kept her head down and ridden out the war relatively unbothered, ignoring what was happening to neighbors and friends, ignoring the men, women and children wearing the yellow star, herded into trucks and taken away.

And she knew there could be a heavy price to pay.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Hiding Place. To see more posts on this chapter, “Invasion,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Photograph: German troops rounding up Dutch Jews for deportation to the camps in Poland.

Art Matters: Asking the Questions No One Can Ask

We recently watched a German mini-series (English subtitles) called Generation War, the story of five young friends in Berlin and what happens to them from 1941 to 1946. Two are brothers, soldiers in the Wehrmacht, sent east to fight the Russians. One girl is a café singer with dreams of a singing career. Her boyfriend is a Jewish tailor with his own dreams of fashion design. And the fifth wants to be a nurse, “representing German women” and helping to tend the soldiers wounded at the front.

It was a riveting series. When it first aired in Germany in 2013, it caused no end of controversy, including a protest by the Polish ambassador over the anti-Semitic depiction of Polish partisans fighting the Nazis. Overall, the series renewed a public conversation lying rather dormant over German war guilt.

The series, and the conversation it inspired in Germany, might not have been possible without the paintings of Anselm Kiefer.

Breaking of the Vessels by Anselm Kiefer (1990)

Until 2014, the sum total of my knowledge of Kiefer and his art was limited to a multi-media sculpture in the St. Louis Art Museum, entitled “Breaking of the Vessels” (photograph above). Few St. Louisans know the work’s official title, but ask anyone who’s been to the art museum “Where can I find the broken glass?” and they know exactly what’s being sought. It’s currently in the main entry hall of the museum. Kiefer created it in 1990.

Last year, I was able to see a major exhibition of Kiefer’s work at the Royal Academy of Arts in London (“Breaking of the Vessels’ wasn’t included; I can’t imagine anyone shipping all that broken glass, and there’s a lot of broken glass). His work is overwhelming and often overpowering. It was the kind of exhibition, and the kind of art, you can leave as a changed person. I walked out with the exhibition catalog and a biography of the artist.

Kiefer was born in 1945, not the most auspicious time to be a baby in the wreckage of Nazi Germany. He grew up in southwestern Germany, and graduated from the University of Freiburg in 1969; he began his studies in law and romance languages but switched to painting. Through a series of art installations and also artworks presented as books, the artist asked the question that no one in the German art world was asking or even wanted to ask: what does it mean to be a German artist after the Third Reich?

Anselm Kiefer

Kiefer’s art essentially forced Germans to consider that question. It was part of a broader question: What does it mean to be a German after the Third Reich? That was the conversation Kiefer started. And it was a conversation that had to happen, or Germany and Germans would have forever lived in the dark shadow, and the dark sin, that was Nazism.

The Royal Academy exhibition included numerous striking works: A large oil and acrylic painting entitled “Interior,” representing a rather decayed and ruined version of Albert Speer’s Mosaic Room in Hitler’s New Reich Chancellery; “Man in the Forest,” a man in a nightshirt holding a burning bush in the deep forest; and “Iron Path,” showing railroad tracks through a muddy, gray landscape (railroad tracks have a special meaning in our understanding of Nazi history).

This is what art can do, and this is one of the reasons why art matters. It isn’t just about beauty and the creative act. Art can take us to places we need to go, but that may be politically or culturally difficult if not impossible. Art can force us to acknowledge that “there’s an elephant in the room.” And art can keep asking the questions, which is what Kiefer continues to do with his art today.

More on Anselm Kiefer:

Anselm Kiefer by Matthew Biro provides a good overview of the artist’s works and development.

Anselm Kiefer by Richard Davey and Kathleen Soriano, the book produced for the exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts.

Related to the theme “Art Matters:”

What I Learned from a 400-Year-Old Painting

The High Calling has a community linkup with the theme of “Art Matters.” To see what others have to see, please visit The High Calling.

Top painting: “Interior,” oil, acrylic and paper on canvas by Anselm Kiefer, 1981; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Claustrophobia

All that is left of Wotan

is a sword in an empty room,

an empty hall, perhaps

the hall of the mountain

king. Wotan himself has fled

to Brazil or Uruguay or

Argentina, leaving his spoils

of the dead for others.

For those who would enter

this room, dressed in black,

waving swords in the desert

of hate, there is always

the trap door, which is both

a door

and a trap.

Painting: Nothung (Notung), oil and charcoal on burlap by Anselm Kiefer (1973); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam.

Saturday Good Reads: The Book Thief

This week, we saw The Book Thief, a movie set in Nazi Germany shortly before and during World War II. It’s the story of a young girl whose parents are communists; she’s sent to live with a couple in Stuttgart (played by Geoffrey Rush and Emily Watson). At one point, the family takes in and hides a young Jewish man.

It’s a wonderful movie, based on the novel of the same name by Markus Zusak and first published in 2007. It’s about friendship, love, growing up, books, reading and writing, all framed within the context of Nazi Germany at war. Sophie Nelisse as the young Liesl is a wonder. Through her eyes, you see that beauty can flower anywhere.

Photo (top) credit: kernelscorner