BOOKS

...The night after the funeral Richard has his first sexual experience with Marietta, who next day dismisses him...

...But John dies of pneumonia as a result of his treatment...

...This he does, in part, in his brief volume, having already written the definitive biography of his friend and teacher...

...The poets have tags for it doubtless...

...Dancing a square dance, he reached out to change partners and dance with his mother, hitting her hard with the rake...

...Tom, the preacher-turned foreman, saves it, and tells Don Elizario to "fire the no-good runt...

...In all three novels the answer, described in a relentless sequence of events, is always perceived at the level of the perceiver, whether Richard is six, or seventeen, or twenty...

...During World War II he received the Legion of Merit...

...Rules of conduct had been suspended...

...Max swims, while Richard, afraid to, is also afraid Max will not return...

...Buz, for the heck of it, tries to drown a sheep, forcing it under the poisonous dip, but not releasing it...

...Goddard's Bonhoeffer, perhaps less saintly than the legend, is nevertheless clearly involved in questionable doings...

...Thus, Simone Weil —that gentle soul who died affirming her solidarity with outcasts—as well as Jesuit Alfred Delp and Dietrich Bonhoeffer all carry the martyr's palm...

...At the party, in the midst of the fireworks and crowd, Max drives Richard to an old quarry, now filled with water...

...Perhaps [Roman Catholics] know better from their own history what suffering and martyrdom really are...

...Upon returning from the U.S., he assumed active involvement in the plot...

...Of necessity, Goddard indulges in what is now called, thanks to Alex Haley's Roots, "faction" —a reconstruction which takes liberties in fleshing out the bare bones of what is known, inventing, as the dust jacket puts it, "the substance (though not the fact) of his interrogations, as well as conversation, incident and even some minor characters in the story...

...Haley may have aroused a few historians with this technique: Goddard should agitate none—least of all Eberhard Bethge, to whom a "heavy debt" is gratefully, if reverentially, acknowledged in the intro...

...When Max was a child at a rustic birthday party for him, Max, disguised as a scarecrow, carried a big rake...

...Max's father could not cope, retiring into his library...

...Here the ache of growing up, of death and destruction, is mitigated by the basic goodness of all the protagonists...

...He has received twenty honorary doctorates, including one from Yale, and has been elected a member of the National...

...Yet, as Bethge relates, with some shame and disappointment, "only 20 men serving the church were killed for the sake of the Gospel...

...Buz and Richard borrow a car to visit the local town, where they share the favors of a waitress in a drunken orgy...

...The actual facts serve to further underscore the topsyturvy morality of World War II...

...He returned to the Fatherland in solidarity with the guilt of his nation...

...You will realize that later if you don't now...

...Goddard has recreated Bonhoeffer's eighteen month imprisonment in a way that challenges the nearly 20«year-old legend of the saintly scholar brutalized by the Gestapo...

...Richard notes, in the very first paragraph of Things as They Are that: "the loss of innocence is a lifelong process— the wages of original sin...

...Bethge finds his friend in "the first rank of the conspirators," when one considers his actions from a political framework...

...All meshed, but never converged to present contradiction to the questioners or give them ammunition to discredit his testimony...

...Richard seems thin, pulled down: the local doctor, a friend of Don Elizario, arranges for Richard to be sent for six weeks to work on Magdalena, the Wenzel ranch, where the annual sheep dipping requires the hiring of extra hands...

...There was no precedent in the Lutheran church for what Bonhoeffer attempted...

...Bonhoeffer himself speculated: "Perhaps we've made too much of this question of suffering, and been too solemn about it...

...And Paul Horgan begins the next chapter with the comment: "All growth is the discovery of power—or powers...

...But th< Governor is a crook, discovered anc dishonored at book's end...

...One wonders: would Bonhoeffer's name still evoke the sympathy and reverence of Lutherans, Anglicans, Roman Catholics—Christians of whatever denominational stripe—had the ill-fated assassination actually gone off as planned...

...Richard finds himself sharing a bunk with Buz, a foul-mouthed, totally valueless human being who (of course) instantly determines to "make" Wenzel's wife...

...In these three books he has recorded, brilliantly and lucidly, the "agony and ecstasy" of one young life in these United States during the first quarter of this century...

...But he does...

...he successfully sustains the tension, building up to the actual attempt on Hitler's life so that until Hitler staggers from the room, shaken but obviously alive, there is a possibility that the assassination plot might succeed...

...During the years 1938-1939, before he attempted to, in Bethge's words, "evade his duties" by going to New York, Bonhoeffer became "an accessory to underground political activities," as a result of his access to conspiracy information transmitted by his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi...

...Richard now knows he faces two ways: "one toward the inner self where my father still reigned...

...Buz explains to Richard that he only apologized because he needed the money...

...For five years he was Director of the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University...

...Hitler's accidental survival—at the last minute an aide somewhat carelessly kicked the bomb-rigged case under a heavy oak table which shielded the Fiihrer from the concussion—and Bonhoeffer's (as well as others) execution are indisputable history, never again, we pray, to be relived...

...But as facilely as we, with glib moral righteousness and the easy convictions of over 30 years hindsight, view Hitler's war as an outrage and Pastor Bonhoeffer's actions as more than justifiable, the conspiracy must be subjected to scrutiny...

...Even today," he chides, "it is embarrassing to feel that Christians consciously or subconsciously expect Bonhoeffer to justify his activities as a conspirator...

...She has made him see he is a boy in his last year at school and she is, in effect, Max's widow...

...Surprisingly, he was not directly interrogated about the conspiracy...

...the other, toward a world of knowing which, good or evil, I must see for myself and judge and use...

...It is up to Eberhard Bethge to explain the theological justification for Bonhoeffer's life and death...

...Now, however, martyrdom is seldom the outcome of bearing testimony to Jesus's name in a primitive, hostile world...

...Apartheid as the new Nazism has yet to be fully appreciated...

...Later she developed a tumor, and in a two-hour operation while Max waited at the hospital and Marietta's father was in attendance, her hand was amputated...

...Richard opts to leave college and move with his parents to the Southwest, where the "mountain air" is recommended...

...I would suggest that you read Goddard first for the drama, then Bethge for his theological applications follow-up...

...All these musings are compellingly portrayed in Donald Goddard's Last Days of Dietrich Bonhoeffer...

...Evaluating Bonhoeffer's involvement in the attempted assassination from an ecclesiastical framework underscores the moral muddle of war-torn Germany...

...The Principal enters the classroom...

...Richard wants to go home, but the Principal has contacted John's mother, who asks that he stay till school is over...

...He has written over a dozen novels, over two dozen books...

...But his parents wonder why John's Commonweal: 123 parents never again spoke to them or to Richard...

...Since Buz's amulet is found in Don Elizario's dead hand, Buz is clearly guilty, and is eventually condemned to death, after trying to persuade Richard, who was guarding him, to let him go...

...Protestants generally exclude martyrs preferring to accord higher esteem to theological textbooks than to biographies of great witnesses...

...The irony in Bonhoeffer's rejection of martyrdom, of course, is that in the eyes of countless Christians he is a martyr, admittedly propelled by somewhat different motivation than the early Christians, but popularly acclaimed nonetheless...

...plans proceeded apace without him, undetected by the Gestapo...

...As is Max, who has lovely manners and a lovely girl-friend, Marietta, daughter of the local doctor...

...It is understandable that Bonhoeffer's martyrdom is unique in Lutheran*1 ism...

...The Thin mountain Air PAUL HORGAN Farrar, Straus A. Giroux, $8.95 ANNE FREMANTLE Paul Horgan is a Protean figure, yet so modest that it is necessary to mention the diversity of his achievement...

...Richard flees and fetches John's mother, who rescues him...

...Max's sports car, the swimming pool, tennis courts, glasshouses full of rare flowers are magnificent...

...Yet, he was hardly there when, as Eberhard Bethge relates, "he realized the truth...

...In a few months they went to "live in Florida for the rest of their lives...

...He is an accomplished painter, too, and his watercolors, some of which illustrated his Lamy of Santa Fe, have a Blakeian sense of light, and are Lear-like in their uncluttered economy of place...

...deception and camouflage carried the obligation of moral duty...

...What, exactly, is his theme...

...She tells Richard the reason for Max's mother's disability—she has an artificial hand...

...Richard remembers that John was a "good boy who never made trouble" and the two kids "owned the whole world all day long except for the nap after lunch...

...Yet, such a noble and, on the surface, altruistic interpretation of Bonhoeffer's situation has not gone unchallenged...

...Yet it may well be, that a hundred years hence, what will seem his most valid and valuable works will be the three "Richard" novels, a trilogy written, perhaps significantly, in the first person...

...Bethge's development of Bonhoeffer's ideas with regard to the South African churches is pointed and stimulating...

...Buz then goes to Don Elizario's house and violates his wife, who is a virgin...

...But John's mother asks him, did he realize John was different from other boys...

...Of course, as in Day of the Jackal, the outcome of both the assassination attempt and Bonhoeffer's incarceration is known, the plot and suspense muted...

...In the end, when the statistics were exposed regarding the colossal waste of human life that directly resulted from the Third Reich, almost 2000 ordained Ministers of the Protestant church were killed in action in Hitler's war, if not actually fighting for it...

...That, as Osca Wilde said "each man kills the thin he loves...

...The execution in 1940 of an acquaintance who openly objected to military service jolted Bonhoeffer into the realization that though he shared the same convictions as his friend regarding the war and service in the military, he had moved in the opposite direction from heroic self-sacrifice...

...Bonhoeffer briefly considered resisting Hitler's war as a conscientious objector but rejected such a move as "an act of irrelevant self-fulfillment...

...Additionally, Bethge applies Bonhoeffer's theology to, among other countries, Soviet-dominated Poland, where Roman Catholics appreciate Bonhoeffer because he has "dared to anticipate in thought our problem of how to meet Christ in a religionless world...

...a somewhat private act, a kind of egocentric flight from increased responsibility and guilt" (Bethge...

...Only 20 men perceived their national responsibility and acted with moral courage and integrity...

...A quiet, scholarly man who from childhood had trained himself, physically and psychically, to think of God and nothing else, an academic man more at home debating theological niceties than hatching a plot to destroy Hitler and end the war, Bonhoeffer makes a curious conspirator, somewhat out of step with his fellows yet lending moral weight and conviction to the failed operation...

...For example, Richard, going to school for the first time, is asked by the mother of the boy next door, John Burley, to accompany him...

...Council of the Humanities and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences...

...But she tells him: "We made love for Max as much as for each pther last night...

...And Richard's lovely, belove< mother has the last word: "Wouldn* it be wonderful not to have to makt the best of things...

...Now, Richard's moth< (who suspected the affair all along tells him, he is "grown up...

...Then John's mother tells him, "We wonder if perhaps it is not better that God took him...

...In the second novel, Everything to Live For, Richard, now seventeen, goes to stay with some cousins who are immensely rich...

...Richai rejoins his family, where his fathi tells him before he died that he hi had an affair for years with his wife best friend...

...Yet, to question Bonhoeffer's involvement is, for Bethge, virtually heretical...

...And the first pages describe Richard's deliberate drowning of a beloved kitten— his first conscious sin...

...Hitler's Germany had diabolically reversed all values and moral principles...

...another for his fellow prisoners...

...A second question to which all three novels address themselves is whether what you gain is worth what you lost...

...Once in prison, several personae emerged: one communicated by his carefully scrutinized letters to his parents...

...Their only son, Max, is about to celebrate his twentyfirst birthday at their annual mammoth Fourth of July party...

...Richard has never seen such splendor...

...In his Ethics, Bonhoeffer concluded: "What is worse than doing evil is being evil...

...When John and Richard start home together, they are waylaid by five other boys who take John into a garage belonging to the rich parent of two of them, strip John and hose him down with cold water...

...What ha Richard learned...

...He drives his fancy sports car onto a railway crossing as the express arrives, and is killed...

...John collapses, and is led off by the Principal, who summons Richard to mind John...

...That "we are born ii other's pain, and perish in our own" That "Even the weariest river, wind somewhere safe to sea...

...Treason" was true patriotism and what was normally patriotism became, from the objective view, actual treason no matter what its subjective cause...

...Lutheran Bishop Meiser absolutely refused to attend a remembrance service for Bonhoeffer because, he said, "Bonhoeffer was only a political martyr and not a Christian martyr...

...To which Richard replies, "Did you have him die...

...At one time, during the Reformation, both Protestants and Catholics honored their own martyrs—exemplary believers (often fiery personalities) burned or hanged by the opposition...

...Should it not be the other way round...

...Marietta knows that Max, who adores his mother, feels guilty...

...Now, martyrdom is most often the result of witnessing on behalf of a threatened "humanum," as Bethge designates it—"sacrifice for the sake of humanity...

...But when the boys reach it, and the teacher is introducing herself to the class, the other boys, aware that John is retarded, start chanting rude remarks...

...Bethge preaches rather more than Goddard, which is not necessarily a fault, just a noticeable difference...

...As Reformation/ Counter-Reformation militancy burned itself out, Protestants and Catholics actually competed with each other in the mission-field for the honor of a martyr's death at the hands of the heathen...

...He is a unique case," judges Bethge...

...How could he present himself for martyrdom when his friends, his brothers and sisters were now risking their lives in political action...

...His father has been elected Lieutenan Governor of New York State...

...Here he meets Don Elizario Menzel, an old, rich man, and his lovely young wife...

...His first published novel, The Fault of Angels, won the Harper Prize, and he has won the Pulitzer Prize twice: once, in 1954, for his Great River, the Rio Grande (which also won the Bancroft Prize for History) and for Lamy of Sante Fe in 1976...

...He is shocked and anguished, having fallen in love...

...Richard has learned the power of truth...

...The question is purely academic...

...The school, run by Catholic nuns, was only a few blocks away...

...Bonhoeffer's intimate friend and biographer, Eberhard Bethge, outlines Bonhoeffer's hesitant and prolonged shift from purely ecclesiastical resistance into political conspiracy...

...That Bonhoeffer today shares the title "martyr" with the likes of Stephen and Tarcissus results from the temper of the times...

...Richard is sent for and given John's toys...

...The third question then seems to be what does that really mean...

...In the third volume, The Thin Mountain Air, Richard, who has been able to face the evil within himself as a child, meets evil all around...

...Richard says, "sometimes...

...Bethge writes that such a sacrifice "may have appeared to [Bonhoeffer] under the existing circumstances as an admirable private action, but which entailed a refusal to share, in the name of Christ, what others in Germany had to take upon themselves...

...The descriptions of working on the ranch, of the sheep dipping in the opaque, ill-smelling, yet necessary slime, day after day in the boiling sun, are superb...

...Would the world today honor Bonhoeffer and his co-conspirators as Germany's liberators, as avenging angels meting out the Lord's vengeance...

...Bonhoeffer: Exile ami Martyr EBERHARD BETHGE Seabury, $7.95 The Last Day* of Dietrich Bonhoeffer DONALD GODDARD Harper & Row, $10.95 MICHAEL F. McCAULEY Just thirty-two years ago, on April 9, Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged for high treason as a conspirator in a nearly successful attempt to assassinate the Fiihrer...

...The old priorities did not fit any longer...

...Richard...

...From Goddard we learn that Bonhoeffer, faced with the prospect of arrest, had "no ethical objection to killing himself...

...She asks, angrily: "Don't you believe we loved him...

...He has also been much honored...

...A few days later, finding Don Elizario outside at night, Buz throws him backwards into the dip, where he drowns...

...The next night the night-blooming cereus in the hothouse flowers: the family and Marietta are gathered, but Max again disappears, this time alone...

...But Goddard preserves the drama...

...These, are accounts of three stages in one boy's growing up, partly in New York State, partly in the Southwest, the later venue of the third volume...

...In fact it was his pursuit of theology and its ecumenical implications that temporarily "exiled" him to New York City in 1939...

...His top priority now was not mere resistance or even agitation but almost exclusive concentration on eliminating Hitler and negotiating peace...

...Goddard develops in the manner of a novelist Bonhoeffer's transformation from a proud, privileged, well-connected, aloofly intellectual seminary professor and prominent theologian to a strippeddown human being whose perception of Jesus as the man for others has powerfully redirected a whole generation of Christians...

...He rejected suicide largely because it might have been interpreted as a sign of his guilt and ultimately would have implicated his brother-in-law...

...A debt accumulated for every German which had to be paid off...

...But instead, since Buz is needed to finish the dipping, Don Elizario ducks him in the slimy dip, then makes him apologize to Tom...

...father is found to have advanced tuberculosis...

...It is worse for a liar to tell the truth than for a lover of truth to lie...

...The two volumes make the most impact when taken in this order...

...one which he maintained in front of his interrogators...

...Only 20 men ultimately refused to be content with easing their consciences...

...The objection to suicide was practical, not ethical...

...Richard tells her, "You never sent for the doctor...

...But whatever the answer is the reader has learned to relive Rich ard's growing pains, and what it meant some of the time, perhaps all of thi time, to be young between 1905 am 1925 in a happy, loving family in th< USA...

...Etcetera etcetera...

...Richard, clutching John's power boat, escapes as John's mother lunges at him...

...He has conducted a national orchestra, and was narrator for Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex at its first performance...