I’ve been off-and-on reading Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison for a long time now, usually at night. Sometimes I get a couple of letters in, sometimes a couple of paragraphs. But since night reading is nonexistent these days, progress is even slower. Last week I was looking for a particular letter and just poking around old highlights and notables, and this one in a letter from Bethge in May 1944 when he was stationed in Italy stood out:
Many thanks for your long letter. Where do you keep getting such excellent stationery? Renate and I often worry about the shortage, but somehow we always manage to find a bit more. Do you have to listen to these radio broadcasts that stay on all day? Quite often I hear three all at once, and if I’m already feeling rather tired or under emotional pressure they torment me, like dreadful bodily pain or real nausea. Together with the daily stories in the newspapers, which aren’t ashamed of any topic or picture, these broadcasts are all the nourishment that most people get. Everyone here has some nude pinups hanging above his bed, while I have pinned up, over my writing desk, a large picture of a little Italian donkey and next to it a calendar, where I often note quite interesting relationships between my subjective sense of time and objective time. It’s good having this desk job, since I don’t have every noncommissioned officer breathing down my neck, only the company sergeant major, who, since I stay on good terms with him, pays less and less attention as time goes on, and the major who behaves as though he is educated in these things.
On the one hand, this is just a hilarious image and I love the thought of Bonhoeffer getting a chuckle from it. But to me it could be a little more than that. Whether it’s “Wow, how cool is this?” AI use, “Wow, how cool is this?” excitement over the latest iPhone, lazy-and-often-easily-avoidable plastics abuse, lazy-and-often-easily-avoidable battery powered Toys and Things, television consumption, tropical “vacationing,” cosmopolitan snobbery, or profound insistence that only this way of voting will Save the World…
Well, a man conscripted into a world war, sitting with a donkey pinned above his desk, surrounded by What Everyone Is Doing — I feel this image in my bones.