From his prison cell, where he awaited execution for conspiring to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Bonhoeffer wrote ten powerful poems, charged with the white-hot emotions and disarming candor of a man who lived and ultimately died by the truth.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Prison Poems
Copyright © 1999 by Edwin Robertson
Requests for information should be addressed to:
Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530
First American edition published as Voices in the Night in 1999.
ISBN-10: 0-310-26704-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-310-26704-1
Cataloging-in-Publication information available from the Library of
Congress.
This edition printed on acid-free paper.
This book was originally published in the UK as The Prison Poems of Dietrich
Bonhoeffer in 1998 by Eagle Publishing, an imprint of Inter Publishing
Service (IPS) Ltd.
Quotations from Bonhoeffer’s letters are taken from:
1. LPP: Letters and Papers from Prison, The Enlarged Edition (London:
SCM Press Ltd., 1971).
2. LLC 92: Love Letters from Cell 92 (London, Harper and Collins, 1994).
3. There are three short quotes (accredited in the text) from J.C. Hampe:
Hampe: Prayers from Prison (London: Collins, 1977). (Pp. 81, 91, 107 of
my manuscript)
4. There is a short quotation, also accredited in the text from the introductory
essay by the editor, from a letter from Otto Dudzus to Bonhoeffer: Dudzus, I:
Predigtn, Auslegungen, Medtationen, Chr (Munchen: Kaiser Verlag, 1985).
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
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mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in
printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Interior design by Beth Shagene
Printed in the United States of America
05 06 07 08 09 10 /?DCI/ 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Vergangenheit
Loss!
VERGANGENHEIT—LOSS!
You walk away—love’s happiness and sore pain.
What name shall I give you? Distress, life, bliss,
part of myself, my heart—times past? All gone?
The door slams shut,
I hear your footsteps slowly die away.
What is left when you are gone? Joy, anguish, longing?
I know only this: you go away—and all is gone.
Can you feel now, how I clutch at you,
how I hold you so tight
that it must hurt you?
How I open the wounds,
that your blood may flow,
only to be sure that you keep close to me,
you, so full of real and earthly life?
Can you sense that I have now a terrible longing
for my own suffering?
That I yearn to see my own blood flow,
only that all may not sink
into times that are gone?
Life, what have you done to me?
Why did you come? Why do you pass away?
Times past, if you flee from me,
are you not still my past, mine?
As the sun sets ever more quickly over the ocean,
sucked into the darkness,
so sinks and sinks and sinks,
relentlessly,
your image into the sea of forgetfulness,
engulfed in a few waves.
As a puff of warm breath
dissolves in the cool air of morning,
so fades your image,
until your face, your hands, your figure
I no longer know.
A laugh, a glance, a gesture appears to me,
then it fades,
disappears,
without comfort, without your nearness,
it is destroyed,
an illusion from the past.
I want to breathe the air of your being,
absorb it, lose myself in it,
as on a hot summer’s day, the heavy blossom
invites the bees,
and intoxicates them;
as the mohawk becomes drunk from the privet;
but a rough wind destroys the fragrance and the
blossom,
and I stand like a fool,
as all vanishes and is gone.
To me, it is as though red-hot pincers
tear pieces from my flesh,
when you, my past life, rush away from me.
Mad defiance and raging anger seize me,
I fling wild and meaningless questions into the air.
Why and why and why? Always the same question.
If my senses cannot hold you,
my vanishing passing life,
I will think and think again
until I find what I have lost.
But something tells me
that all around me, within and without,
laughs at me, unmoved and puzzled
by my useless labors,
snaring the wind,
to win back what is past and gone.
Eye and soul become evil,
I hate what I see,
I hate what moves me,
I hate all that is alive and beautiful,
all that should console me for my loss.
I want my life, I demand my own life back,
my past life,
You!
You! Tears fill my eyes;
perhaps through the veil of tears
I will win you back,
the total vision,
the whole of you.
No! I will not weep.
Only the strong are helped by tears,
the weak are made weaker.
I am tired as evening comes,
welcome is my cell,
which promises forgetfulness
when possession is denied me.
Night, quench the fire that burns,
send to me full forgetfulness,
be kind to me, night, and perform your gentle art,
to you I entrust myself.
But the night is strong and wise,
stronger than the day and wiser than me.
What no earthly power can do,
where thinking and feeling, defiance and tears must
fail,
the night showers its full riches upon me.
Undefiled by hostile time,
pure, free and whole,
the dream brings you to me,
you, from the past, you, my life,
you, from past days and past hours.
By your presence, I am awakened in deepest night,
and cry out—
Vergangenheit—26 Loss!
are you again lost to me? do I seek you ever in vain,
my beloved of past days?
I stretch out my hands
and pray—
and I learn something new:
That which is past will return to you again
as your life’s most living strain,
through thanks and through repentance.
Lay hold on God’s forgiveness in the past,
pray that he will care for you this day and to the
last.
Commentary on
“Vergangenheit”
The first problem with this poem is its title. When Eberhard
Bethge received a copy, he made his usual frank
comments and then added: “I wonder if you ought to
find a more propitious title.” Bonhoeffer had told him
that he was going to send it to his fiancée, but Bethge felt
that it sounded pretty final, as though the whole love
affair was over—Vergangenheit means past and gone.
It was, however, not only his love for Maria that gave
substance to this poem; it was his deep concern about the
possible separation from his own past—had he lost it?
What kind of a person had he become? And was that
person still the one of former times?
In the English version, I have therefore chosen simply
“Loss” as a title. The process of examining what had
happened to his church and those who, like him, had
resisted the evils of Nazism, began well before he was
arrested. A letter sent to some of his friends at the end of
1942 shows that he had already given careful thought to
what they had lost and whether they were of any use for
the rebuilding of the church and nation once the war
ended. Part of that circular letter reads:
We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; we have
been drenched by many storms; we have learned the
art of equivocation and pretence; experience has made
us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful
and open; intolerable conflicts

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Excerpted from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Prison Poems by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Edwin Robertson
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