Page 53 - Mansfield 2019/20

News from the Oxford Adam von Trott Memorial Committee
Mansfield has warmly welcomed its eighth Adam von Trott Scholar, Cécile Pick, for 2020-22. She is reading for an MPhil in European Politics & Society, researching nationalism in post-communist European countries.
On 20 July 2020, we sent
a deeply felt message, read
out at the annual gathering
at Imshausen, Germany, remembering the life and contributions of our alumnus, Adam von Trott zu Solz. It was 76 years ago when he took part in the bomb plot to kill Hitler – and paid the ultimate price.
Our message also contained the promise ‘to work harder’ after Brexit – and indeed after the spread of Covid-19 – to maintain our academic links, continuing:
‘It is something that Adam von Trott would have understood very well, dear friends, we owe it to his memory.’
Unfortunately, after the huge success of our annual lecture last year with Neil MacGregor, former Director of the British Museum, we had to defer 2020’s lecture until 2021. We are also deferring our jointly planned three-day international graduate workshop with the University of Göttingen and the Imshausen Stiftung [trust], on the theme of ‘Civil Resistance’; the bursary scheme run with the University; and an exclusive showing of the film, Resistance in a time of War.
Dr Paul Flather is Chair of the Oxford Adam von Trott Memorial Committee.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Adam von Trott are icons of the anti-Nazi opposition which existed in Germany during the ‘Hitler’ years (1933-45). These two personalities stand out – not least because of their relevance to our own day. They were however far from identical. Bonhoeffer came from a middle-class background whereas von Trott’s roots were distinctly aristocratic. The former was a professional theologian and the latter a diplomat.
Yet despite these differences, they had much in common. Both were well-travelled and highly educated (von Trott studied Theology & Politics at Mansfield in 1929, before reading PPE at Balliol). Both were deeply attached to their native land while steering clear of the ultra-nationalism
that characterised so many of their fellow countrymen. Above all they both heartily detested Hitler and his gang.
Bonhoeffer combined his church and theological activities with being an undercover agent for the Abwehr (German Intelligence). This gave him scope for considerable travel abroad, when he was able to meet with folk such as Willem Visser ’t Hooft, General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, and George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, who was prominent in the search for a negotiated end to the hostilities.
Von Trott was virtually a full-time plotter, taking advantage of a fairly independent desk job in the German Foreign Office where he could and did devise ingenious schemes to undermine Hitler, while superficially seeming to support the regime. Inevitably this pro-Nazi facade wrongly led some at the time and since to think he was not totally on the side of the angels.
Ultimately, Adam von Trott and Dietrich Bonhoeffer got caught up in the unsuccessful July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. Both paid the price and were executed.
Particularly striking for church people is the way in which during their last days, the thinking of both Bonhoeffer and von Trott (for much of his life an agnostic) became
strangely congruent – though by this time, imprisoned in different places, they were certainly not in touch. Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer’s biographer, records that
just before his execution, von Trott talked about the spiritual and religious situation in his country (a sort of ‘Sundays-only affair’ as he saw it), asking ‘Can our childlike Xian faith grow and adapt to the whole weight and intensity of our problems today?’
Bethge observes that what von Trott termed ‘childlike Christian faith’ mirrored the phenomenon that Bonhoeffer disparagingly referred to as ‘religion’. Its ‘growth’ relates to Bonhoeffer’s search for the totality of belief linked to mature responsibility in our contemporary engagement with the world. ‘Adapt’ is similar to what Bonhoeffer described as ‘interpretation.’
So, as they approached their deaths, it seems that both these fine, thoughtful men were spiritually ‘on the same page’, reflecting on how and whether an authentic, all-embracing faith could be evolved in a time of crisis. Some of us are probably still doing something similar, with Brexit, climate change and Covid-19 all upon us.
Here I think we come to the nub of why it is important to remember both of these men. There were other good and brave Germans who opposed Hitler, and we should remember them too – the White Rose group of students in Munich, von Stauffenberg (the key plotter in July 1944). But our two personalities have bequeathed us more than just an indication that not
all Germans supported the Nazis. Their thinking about the future of Europe and indeed of the Church still has much to teach us.
The reputations of both men have
grown steadily in the post-war period – Bonhoeffer’s in relation to the ‘Honest to God’ and ‘New Theology’ debates; Adam von Trott’s through featuring in Robert Harris’s novel Munich and via foundations in Germany and at Mansfield. They bequeathed us all an enduring legacy of religious and political thought, which we ignore at our peril.
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