Against the Titans. Peter Nguyen
The third Kreisau meeting, which took place over Pentecost 1943 (June 12–14) dealt with foreign affairs and the international economic order in the postwar period. It also grappled with the issue of punishing war criminals. Delp participated in this meeting and contributed in the area of restoring the rule of law. Delp’s handwritten drafts indicated the direction of his thoughts on these critical issues.120 His ideas aligned with the fundamental principles of a state governed by the rule of law, which proceeded from the premise of a human being’s God-given rights. He was concerned about the right to form associations and about the family. Delp believed that protecting the family was in the interest of society, such as by advocating for a family wage that would allow one parent to work and the other to raise their children. He also supported a healthy safety net that would protect households in the event of an economic crisis. The historian Ger van Roon points out that the “Declaration of Principles,” like other Kreisau Circle documents that emerged during and after the end of the third meeting, emphasized a responsible freedom. Roon writes,
To describe this social order as “free” is inadequate. Freedom can be interpreted as arbitrariness, as un-freedom for others. A better word is “responsible” used in several Kreisau documents. Responsibility assumes an obligation towards the community, but it does not set freedom aside or twist into collectivism. Every “responsible” order ought to develop between two poles of freedom and obligation; it is not the case of either/or, but of both/and. This approach shows the influence of Catholic ideas, as expressed in Quadragesimo Anno and other papal documents, as well as a reaction against the excessive claims which National Socialism made for the state.121
The planners worked from the premise that human beings were the subjects of the state rather than objects for its control and that human beings needed a social order that enabled them to live out their dignity as persons made in the image of God.122 Overall, Delp’s social and political concern was not to oppose the modern age but to address its problems, including its deep-seated anxiety, and to orient the modern world to the fullness of life in God. This orientation will be discussed in chapter 3.
On January 19, 1944, as part of a wider crackdown against conspirators and dissenters within the Abwehr, the Reich Security Office arrested Moltke. They were tipped off by a mole, who had overheard Moltke speaking about the war being lost and the necessity for a replacement for Hitler. The arrest had a decisive, adverse influence upon the development of the Kreisau Circle. Though Delp was arguably its intellectual head, especially regarding matters of state and the economy, it was Moltke who held everything together, provided the stimulus, and took the initiative. Moltke had organized the meetings, scheduled the conferences, and inspired people to action. The center was now missing, and the work of the Kreisau Circle came to a standstill, separating the group into individuals dispersed across Germany.
With Bound Hands: Delp’s Letters and Reflections from Prison
After a failed assassination attempt against Hitler on July 20, 1944, by Claus von Stauffenberg,123 the majority of the Kreisau members were implicated and detained. Eight days later, Delp was arrested in the sacristy after celebrating Mass at St. Georg’s in Munich. Delp was taken to the Gestapo prison in Berlin, where he remained in solitary confinement for nearly two months and was subjected to interrogation and abuse. During those months, some members of the Kreisau Circle were tortured, tried, and executed.124 In Delp’s case, the Gestapo attempted to persuade him to leave the Jesuits and to join the Nazis to save his life. At the end of September 1944, the remaining Kreisau prisoners were ordered out of their cells and into the courtyard of the prison. When Protestant pastor Eugen Gerstenmaier saw Delp standing behind him and turned to greet him, he reported that Delp stared through him as if he were a pane of glass.125 Two months of torture and misery had taken its toll. The prisoners were eventually hustled into a truck that took them to Tegel Prison, a jail for ordinary criminals. The Gestapo prison had become too damaged by Allied bombing to hold the prisoners securely.
The surviving members of the Kreisau Circle soon learned that they were all being held in the same area. They were transferred to the cellar of Department 8 of House 1, known as the “House of the Dead” (Totenhaus) because those who were held there were eventually executed. Delp was prisoner number 1442, and he lay in cell 8/313. Gerstenmaier, Moltke, Delp, and Josef Ernst Fugger occupied adjoining cells. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s cell was in another part of the prison, so the surviving members of the Kreisau Circle and Bonhoeffer most likely never met. Tegel was run by ordinary prison staff, who were less abusive than the Gestapo.126
A few days after moving to Tegel Prison, Delp wrote to Marianne Hapig and Marianne Pünder, two social workers who knew him from Munich and were known within various circles of the German resistance movement. He asked for practical items, such as soap and shaving supplies. Delp also asked for hosts and a small bottle of wine so that he could say Mass. The women bribed the guards with cigarettes in order to have the Mass items smuggled into Delp’s cell. On October 1, Delp celebrated his first Mass in his cell. Also through Hapig and Pünder, Delp was able to smuggle out letters through a basket of laundry. With the help of these two social workers, Delp not only sent letters to family, friends, and brother Jesuits but also spiritual reflections on the nature of human existence amid the starkness of his prison conditions.127
The capacity to worship, pray, and spiritually reflect over his existence helped to deepen his faith and to make Delp more available to God. At the beginning of his imprisonment, Delp was afflicted with anxiety. The anguish is evident throughout his letters. He wrote to Luise Oestreicher128 at the end of October 1944:
I do not know anything about anyone except the people here in chains who are getting more wretched every day. “Unicus et pauper sum ego,” or “I’ve become very alone and very forlorn,” it says in a psalm. I’m so grateful for the Host, which I’ve had in my cell since October 1. It breaks the forlornness, although, I am ashamed to admit, sometimes I feel so tired and wrecked that I can no longer grasp this reality at all . . . I cannot write much to you today; it has not been a good day. Sometimes one’s destiny presses itself into a burden and unloads itself on the heart. And, one does not really know how long this heart can be expected to take it . . . I believe in God and life. And whatever we pray for in faith, we will get. Faith is an art. And I do not believe that God will let me suffocate . . . God has profoundly challenged me to honor my words from the past: with God alone one can live and endure one’s destiny.129
In another letter written to Oestreicher around the end of October 1944, Delp conveyed a similar precarious morale. He wrote, “My own strength has gone. ‘God alone suffices.’ I said that once when I was very self-sufficient. And look at me now. I am walking a tightrope in the name of God.”130 Delp’s third letter from Tegel Prison, written in the middle of November to the Kreuser family, his friends from Munich, communicated a corresponding anxiety:
I have learned much in these twelve weeks of bitterness, temptation, and forlornness. And adversity. However, God is good to help me redeem all of this. I still have hope for his help, although in purely human terms, the situation is hopeless . . . Please pray and wait with me, and get the children to pray.131
One detects in these letters the tension between Delp’s affliction with anxiety and his trust in God. It is as if Delp experienced his own “Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane,” wherein, like Christ, he underwent great distress and fear over looming death. Though Delp acknowledged the desperate situation that surrounded him, he communicated a grain of hope. And that hope was linked to God. What Delp was writing ten years ago concerning anxiety in Heidegger and his own three one-act plays has become quite real for him. He was teetering on the abyss toward nothingness and undergoing “a constriction of the throat” or “the oppression of the heart.”132 He could no longer trust in own agency but the mercy of God. Delp wrote the third letter around the time that he received a prayer book that contained prayers and devotions to the Heart of Jesus. Delp would begin his prison mediation on the Heart of Jesus soon afterward.
A letter to Luise Oestreicher, dated November 17, 1944, reaffirmed the tension between Delp’s anguish and his faith in God:
Slowly, the hour of decision will come.