War and Peace in the face of the life and death of Jochen Klepper, Johanna Stein, and Renate Stein

It is my contention that pacifism lite, a vastly popular position in a number of European countries and in the halls of North American universities and church headquarters, is a symptom of political naiveté. It tends, furthermore, to be founded on an unexamined premise, to wit: that a politically responsible person acquits himself honorably if he, a would-be pundit, plays the part of pacifist-in-chief. As if an opinion defines a person, as opposed to a deed or style of life.

What a responsible life might consist of may be illustrated by that of Jochen Klepper, Johanna Stein, and Renate Stein. A gripping story, full of twists and turns, I briefly retell it in this post. It is not my intention to approve or disapprove of specific choices. I simply wish to claim that, in a context in which, as Goldhagen demonstrated, most Germans were Hitler’s “willing executioners,” this family lived a honorable life.

For the biographical summary, I relied on Heinz Grosch’s biography of Klepper, a number of online resources, and a marvelous Lutheran Wiki I merely reword in many places. The post is long, but you will be glad you read it.

Jochen Klepper was a writer and a poet. Keppler’s German is supple:

Die Nacht ist vorgedrungen,
    der Tag ist nicht mehr fern.
    So sei nun Lob gesungen
    dem hellen Morgenstern.
    Auch wer zur Nacht geweinet,
    der stimme froh mit ein.
    Der Morgenstern bescheinet
    auch deine Angst und Pein.

That is the first strophe of Klepper’s Weihnachtslied, “The night will soon be ending.” Translated by H. G. Stuempfle, it appears in the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod’s new hymnal, Lutheran Service Book (#337). I don’t have access to the service book at the moment, so here is my own translation of the above:

The night will soon be ending,
    the day’s no longer far.
    Let praise be sung and offered
    to the bright and morning Star.
    The one who cries in darkness
    joins joyous voice thereto.
    The morning Star illumines
    your fear and suffering too.

The counterfactual force of Keppler's words, a reflection of a heilsgeschichtliche perpective, is powerful.

Born in 1903, Jochen Klepper was the son of a Silesian Lutheran pastor with roots in Moravian pietism. Jochen studied to become a pastor, under the great Rudolf Hermann, a leader of the Luther Renaissance, and under the New Testament exegete Ernest Lohmeyer, whose philo-Semitic positions may have influenced Klepper’s own.

While a seminary student, Keppler wrote a daring article about suicide. After examining previous Christian thought on the subject, he advocated its possibility under strict conditions. Klepper did not graduate from seminary. He saw himself as unfit for the calling. He worked instead for Protestant print and radio media in Silesia. In 1929, he met Johanna Stein (neé Gerstel), the widowed heiress to a Nuremberg fashion house, who was renting a room to Klepper in her spacious villa. They shared an interest in radio work and fashion.

Johanna was an assimilated Jew in accordance with a cultural template not unusual at the time. They married in a civil ceremony in 1931. The couple and Johanna’s two daughters, Brigitte and Renate, moved to Berlin. In 1932, Klepper began writing a diary he later called his “auto-psychotherapy.” He reflected on the day’s events in light of the word vouchsafed to the believing reader of Scripture.

Klepper, we know from his diary, understood the evil Hitler represented early on. Hardly anyone else in German high society did.

When the National Socialists took over in January 1933, Klepper’s professional and private life was altered forever. The fact that he had been a member of the Social Democratic Party and was married to a Jew made a career in the state-run media impossible. Even privately-owned publishing houses felt compelled to let Klepper go after a time. He was eventually prohibited from publishing anything because, as one living in a “mixed” marriage, he was excluded from the Nazi Reich's Chamber of Publication (Reichsschrifttumskammer) in 1937.

Even so, due to his magnum opus on Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia, Der Vater: Roman des Soldatenkönigs (The Father: A Novel of the Soldier-King), published three weeks before his exclusion from the Reichsschrifttumskammer, and popular among high-ranking army officers, Klepper was granted an exception that allowed him to work as a free-lance writer and poet. Moreover, a collection of spiritual poems, Kyrie (1938, expanded in 1940), struck a chord with a wide public. Many of the poems, including the above-cited Christmas song, were set to music by young composers in the years following, and are used in German Protestant churches to this day.

To the satisfaction and joy of Klepper, who never imposed his views, Johanna asked to be baptized in 1938 (a church wedding ensued), and Renate, in 1940. Brigitte took another path, and via Sweden emigrated to England while that remained an option.

The Kyrie collection led to attempts by the Bekennende Kirche (Confessing Church) to procure Klepper as a writer and speaker for their cause. Klepper refused. He had no sympathies for the Nazi-supporting Deutsche Christen (German Christians), but also had theological qualms about joining the confessional camp. It is often forgotten that opposition to Hitler among Christians in Germany, Protestant and Catholic, took many forms. Klepper belonged to the national conservative Lutheran camp. Friedrich von Bodelschwingh the younger, the Lutheran pietist whose father founded Bethel in Bielefeld and successfully stood up to Hitler, saving the lives of thousands with Down’s syndrome and other mental and physical impairments, belonged to the same camp.

Out of a sense of patriotism and in an attempt to ameliorate the situation for his wife and daughter Renate, Klepper volunteered for the army in 1940 and participated in the Balkans campaign and the beginnings of the campaign against the Soviet Union. In the fall of 1941, he was discharged because he was "jüdisch  Versippte" - related to a Jew.

A night unlike any other night was descending upon Germany. Klepper, as late as 1939, had a hard time understanding what he called the “emigration psychosis” in Jewish circles. Like many others, he did not foresee the worst. Paralyzed by an all-too-gradual recognition of the inevitability of the fate of all Jews within reach of Hitler’s Reich, worn out by constant dealings with a Kafkaesque bureaucracy that was moving slowly but effectively to an awful end – he and his family realized too late that the doors were closed all around them.

In the end, Klepper knew well what lay ahead for Johanna and Renate. I quote from the Lutheran Wiki linked to above:

Klepper’s diary bears witness, not only to the increasing pressure from his hostile environment, but also to the inner struggles Klepper and his wife undergo in view of their planned suicide. On the one hand, they ponder the classical arguments against suicide: it is rebellion against God, a denial of trust in God; it is weightier than murder; it does a disservice to the Christian witness to the gospel and sets a bad example. “But,” as Klepper concludes the summary of a discussion with his wife on 11 January 1942, “it is a sin no different from all other sin. It too cannot separate us from God.” On the other hand, Klepper forbids himself to speak in the church as long as his suicidal thoughts rage in his heart, as he notes on 30 January 1942: “I also believe that my sequestration is not yet ended by God: in no way, so long as the decision to commit suicide is not revoked. How should I work under these circumstances – in the church?!”

On 22 March 1942, his 39th birthday, Klepper notes that his wife had all but abandoned the thought of committing suicide and adds that his daughter was also quite optimistic yet; at the same time, he admits that he, unlike his wife and daughter, has not yet received from God the ability to resign himself “to the most terrible possibilities of life.” While Klepper is plagued by the realization that his hesitation in 1939 probably would cost his second step-daughter her life and wrestles with deriving comfort from death, he is shaken by the fear that he would survive his wife and daughter, which was a realistic fear, given the threat of state-mandated divorces for mixed marriages that Klepper thought was imminent at the end of 1942.

On 8 December, he, reflecting on the appointed “watchword” from 1 Kings 2:2-3, wonders whether this word can still reach him in the “abyss” that opens before him – the abyss being that by now not even the Reich’s secretary of the interior has the power to facilitate his step-daughter’s emigration from Germany; that soon he might be faced with mandatory divorce which would end his wife’s relatively privileged position in a mixed marriage. If Renate’s emigration fails, she wishes to die with the parents; if it succeeds, she wants to remain alive “in all her sadness.” Klepper decides for himself that if only his wife and daughter were safe, e.g., in Sweden, he could endure everything God sends. Yet when contemplating the now very real possibility of their deportation into a German concentration camp, he also confides to his diary his bargaining with God and his being defeated by Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God:”

God knows that I cannot endure it to let Hanni and the child go into this cruelest and most brutal of all deportations. He knows that I cannot promise this to him, as Luther was able to do: “Should they take body, good, honor, child and wife, let it all go –.” Body, good, honor – yes! Yet God also knows that I want to accept everything from him in trial and judgment, if only I know Hanni and the child to be somewhat protected. … If Hanni and the child died, God knows that nothing in me would resist his will. But not this.

On the following day, 9 December 1942, Klepper writes down the results of a meeting with A. Eichmann of the SS who is now to decide whether Renate may leave Germany after Sweden has surprisingly opened its borders. Eichmann stated that he, while he has not agreed, thinks the “matter will work out.” Klepper, “now in the world of my dreams,” also relates that Eichmann flat-out denied a joint emigration of Johanna and Renate; but he is still hopeful (he quotes Ps. 126:1!), while he also has his sister, Hilde, come to finalize their last will and testament. The decisive meeting with Eichmann is scheduled for the next afternoon.

This meeting does not go as hoped. Therefore the last words of his diary, on 10 December 1942, read: “We now die – alas, this too is in God’s hands – Tonight we go together into death. Over us stands in the last hours the image of the Blessing Christ, who struggles for us. In his sight, our life ends.” In fact, with the sculpture of the Blessing Christ standing on the kitchen table, the three were found the next day lying on blankets on the kitchen floor, packages of sleeping pills next to them, gas filling the room.

Once more Keppler’s Christmas hymn:

Gott will im Dunkel wohnen
und hat es doch erhellt.
Als wollte er belohnen,
so richtet er die Welt.
Der sich den Erdkreis baute,
der läßt den Sünder nicht.
Wer hier dem Sohn vertraute,
kommt dort aus dem Gericht.

A rough-and-ready translation:

God wills abide in darkness,
yet pierces it with light.
Because he willed to self lose,
the world does he make right.
The one who made the earth-orb,
he leaves the sinner not.
Who puts his trust in God’s Son
both trial and judge fears not.

 If what matters in life is whether one is a pacifist or a soldier, a national conservative Lutheran or a politically-minded Swiss Reformed (Karl Barth), then God be cursed, because these are matters over which individuals have little or no control. But God be blessed, because we do have the possibility to live honorably, even when the Beast devours. The life and death of the Klepper family witness to that truth.

Comments

[Stephen (aka Q)]

Thanks for sharing Klepper's very moving story.

• If these are the things that matter, then God be cursed.

You're shockingly close to cursing God there. I know, you think you aren't. But you shouldn't have said such an awful thing.

[JohnFH]

You are probably right about the need to remove that phrase, Stephen. If I get one more complaint, it's out.

[Justin (koavf)]

John,

While I don't want to undercut Stephen's legitimate concerns, nor your valid sensitivities, I think you're in the right. These things aren't the things that matter, therefore God would not be cursed. In the same manner that your right hand does not cause you to sin, and therefore you would not cut it off, this language is almost a safeguard against cursing God; it affirms His centrality in human experience.

Or at least that's what I got out of it.

A poignant and moving entry, John.

-JAK

[Sam Norton]

Very moving. Speaking for myself, I don't have a problem with your language in the last paragraph.

I'm gaining a great deal from this series by the way, so thank you.

[Bible]

I like the wonderful phrases under Keppler’s Christmas hymn, I just impressed with your conclusion it matters a lot, thank you for a good conclusion Justin.

[Peter Kirk]

John, I am not going to attempt to carry on a conversation with you while you continue to caricature the kind of position which I hold and use ad hominem epithets like "naiveté", "tawdry" and "self-serving" in a pathetic attempt to discredit what you can't find any convincing proper arguments against.

[JohnFH]

Suit yourself, Peter.

But I would be happier if instead you turned 'round and said, "It is your position which is naive and self-serving, for the following reasons."

As you will have noticed, Jesus also engaged in what you call ad hominem attacks when he thought it necessary (get behind me, Satan; hypocrites).

There is, apparently, more than one way to turn the other cheek. Better put, Jesus himself and people in general have almost always understood the "evangelical counsels" to have less than unlimited scope.

A lot is at stake in these debates, and I will continue to comment and blog on your perspectives on war and peace whether or not you choose to return the favor.

[Peter Kirk]

Well, John, if you are positively asking me to call you naive and self-serving, I will do. You are naive because you fail to understand that at least many "soft pacifists" have genuine convictions on the matter, that they should be in the world, not cutting themselves off from it like some Anabaptists, and witnessing to the truth of Jesus' teaching in the world. You are self-serving because your militarist position is based on the desire to protect yourself and your great American lifestyle from any external threat without considering the effect of your military actions in ruining the lifestyles, and often taking the lives, of innocent people in other countries. I could go into this further, but I won't take the time to do so just now.

[JohnFH]

Thanks, Peter. That's more like it.

We still differ, of course, but at least we both are willing to call a spade a spade from our respective points of view.

[Stephen C. Rose]

I wonder if anyone reading this recalls the joint suicide attempted by Henry Pitney VanDusen and his wife in which only the wife was succcesful leaving Henry injured but conscious after the attempt. VanDusen was the head of Union Theological Seminary when I was a student there and I knew him directly as I had been quite critical of seminary life.

I think there is a world of difference between pacifism as a political position and an individual's voluntary and involuntary decisions relating to violence against others or against oneself. For example I think an individual has the right to do himself in but not to do another in unless it is a matter of so called mercy-killing in which there is conscious agreement.

A socio-political pacifism can be argued in many ways. I would argue that our inherited religion encourages us to go lightly on Biblical strictures not to kill and celebrates a deity who condones armed conflict, giving rise to a counter-hermeneutic which can justly claimed that such narratives are human constructs.

Reason is among the justifications for a pacifist position todayAnd as I have said this hardly precludes individual decisions made in the intimacy of ones relationship to Abba.

[JohnFH]

Thanks for stopping by, Stephen. From your blog it's clear you have a lively mind and keep up on things.

I am very familiar with a certain liberal ethos in which socio-political pacifism as you call it is second nature. 60% of the students in the high school I attended were Unitarians. I know all the right words and even the right gestures. But for a long time it has not been at all obvious to me, as it is to you, that pacifism of this kind is a particularly reasonable position.

Van Dusen was a liberal's liberal and I mean that as a compliment. But the views of the Euthanasia Society of which he was a member have never enjoyed wide currency beyond a few intellectual circles.

I would not hold up Van Dusen as an example (nor am I claiming you were). As a pastor, I have accompanied many people to their deathbed. Some of them knew far more suffering than did Van Dusen (I do not wish to make light of it), but chose a different way.

The person who taught me how to die more than anyone else was a minister I had while still a teenager. A graduate of Boston University who marched with MLK, he was every bit as liberal in the good old-fashioned sense (that is, the kind of liberal that now seems prim and conservative compared to John Shelby Spong) as was Van Dusen (whose respect for Hammarskjold I share). But when he was dying of cancer, he chose to minister to his congregation to the end. His unbreakable spirit and faith touched many in the hospital and he arranged to be taken to speak to his congregation one last time. So they brought him in an ambulance and on a stretcher (how he got permission to do this, I don't know), and wheeled him into fellowship hall. His voice was strong and feeble at the same time. By now he, physically speaking, was nothing more than skin and bones. But with the microphone at full volume his words were clear. I can't remember a single word he said, but I remember the strength and conviction in his voice. He died a few days later. If life is a series of gestures, this gesture was powerful indeed.

Rev. Dale Strong was his name. He chose how he died as well.

[Thomas Renz]

Die Nacht ist vorgedrungen, has long been one of my best-loved hymns. Jochen Klepper may have written it as a Weihnachtslied but it is usually sung during Advent. Johannes Petzold's tune is maybe not "joyful and triumphant" enough for Christmas.

Since you wrote this three years ago, the German essay to which you link has moved to http://www.quatember.de/J1986/q86197.htm

[JohnFH]

Hi Thomas,

Thanks for noting the changed link. I am teaching a class this semester at the UW-O in which I will lecture on "War and Peace" in the Bible and in the world as those who read the Bible see it.

This post will be on the assigned reading list.

[Chariots of Fire 2]

Every time I read or learn about the Nazi's and the genocides I'm still fathomed by the fact that this only took place a mere 60 plus years ago. I think that a lot of families felt this way and I can't even imagine being separated from my family. If I put myself in Klepper's shoes I think I would have the same thoughts. He felt helpless, angry, and powerless to do anything to keep his family together. I'm not saying I agree with what he did, but he knew what was going to happen to his family and he did what he thought was best.

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[Pulp Fiction 5]

The main question that this post brings to my mind is, did Klepper do the right thing by committing suicide? From my understanding of Jochen Klepper and his life, he had two options near the end of his life. He could have stayed alive and almost certainly faced a long and painful death in a Nazi concentration camp, where he and his family would have been separated and never seen each other again. Or he could have done what he did and committed suicide ending life much more quickly and much less painfully. I believe that Jochen did what he did because he loved his family very much and he couldn’t stand to see them suffer in a concentration camp. If you look 1 Corinthians: 13 then you will understand that what he did was most likely the right thing to do. 1 Cor: 13 essentially says that if you do not love then you are and have nothing. This makes me think that what Jochen did was the right thing.

Would it have been better if he had fled the country with his family when he had a chance? I don’t know the answer to that question. I know that he would have most likely survived much longer in life but was it the right thing to do in God’s eyes? Would leaving the country that he obviously loved to save himself and his family been right? I think God would have looked down on that just based on the book of Jonah from the Bible. It seems like the story is similar to Jochen’s situation. Jochen was doing what he could, by staying, to support his country even though he disagreed with the leader. When it comes down to it I believe that Jochen took the lesser of two evils. He did the honorable thing by staying and trying to help the country but he would have done no good by going to a concentration camp with his family.

[Chariots of Fire 1]

It doesn’t make sense to me why they would commit suicide. I understand that they didn’t want to suffer or be separated, but if they struggled that much with the idea of suicide and whether or not God would approve, wouldn’t it make more sense from a spiritual standpoint to NOT commit suicide and just die in the concentration camp and be reunited in heaven? I wouldn’t want to risk it. Plus, they could have looked at going to a concentration camp as an opportunity to share God’s love and forgiveness to the prisoners there. It would have been hard, but they could have spiritually helped people out.

[PrayingWithLior1]

Suicide is a very tough subject. I believe it’s ultimately up to God on whether or not the act was the right thing to do. Klepper was faced with a task that most of us couldn’t imagine and I pray that none of us do. One decision he could have chosen was to watch his family get tortured and finally put to death in a concentration camp. Klepper chose what he thought was the most honorable one and arguably the quickest to an inevitable death. I can’t help but wonder if this was a test for Klepper. I’m not saying he passed or failed, but I believe God tests all of us. Was it likely that they would have been taken to a camp and killed? Yes, but we don’t know for sure what God had in store for them. I feel like suicide is almost not trusting in God to take care of you.

[וכאן]

It is a thrilling story full of twists which briefly describe in this post. I argue that in a situation where, as Goldhagen has shown that most Germans were Hitler's willing executioners, the family lived a decent life.