Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested in April 1943 by the Gestapo and imprisoned by the Nazis in Berlin-Tegel prison for one and a half years. In 1944 he wrote the poem, “Wer bin ich?” [“Who am I?”], and on July 8, 1944, he sent it to his friend Eberhard Bethge. In October 1944, he was transferred to the Gestapo cellar in Prinz-Albert-Strasse, then in February 1945 to Buchenwald, and in April 1945 to Flossenbürg Concentration Camp. He was sentenced to death on April 8, 1945, and hanged.
A kind friend included my translation in his Christmas Eve sermon in Virginia. He sent it to me when I couldn’t find my version, and I revised it. It has always been special to me, and its relevance is perennial. I began reading Bonhoeffer in the German starting in 1983-1984 when I studied at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg [Heidelberg University] on a Rotary Club Graduate Scholarship. In the original that is handwritten, the first three stanzas are indented some five spaces to the right. Please picture those there, which are in my manuscript, but which the formatting here would not hold.
It is interesting how Bonhoeffer ends his non-rhyming poem with a very meaningful rhyming couplet. During the heinous imprisonment that followed his stand against the Nazi Party, and with honest, authentic emotion and in dialogue with the divine, he laments not only his suffering but the suffering of so many others, and he must also be aware that he represents a loving and inclusive spiritual path not endorsed by political powers (remembering Hitler’s 1920-on racist “Positive Christianity”), as reflected in the then contemporary term “Gottgläubig” (“God-believing”), the Nazi Party’s non-denominational deism. Thus the poem also reminds that the small ego (our facades) can be involved in making a murderous mockery of a faith tradition.
So I was trying to capture some of that in my translation of the last lines. We can hear all the lonely doubt and worry “Einsames Fragen” and mockery / ridicule “Spott” dissolve into the word “Gott.” It’s lovely, and also haunting and ironic in the sense that clearly, in spite of the rhyme, nothing has been resolved in his and the world’s earthly situation. We sense and experience in some small way the tension within which he and so many others live and die. Here are the closing lines: “Wer bin ich? Einsames Fragen treibt mit mir Spott, / Wer ich auch bin, Du kennst mich, Dein bin ich, o Gott.”
Who am I? by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
©Translated by Carmen Acevedo Butcher
Who am I? They often tell me
I step from my cell
calm and cheerful and strong,
like a lord from his castle.
Who am I? They often tell me
I speak with my guards
freely and friendly and frank,
as if I were in command.
Who am I? They also tell me
I bear the days of misfortune
with serenity, smiling and sure,
like someone used to winning.
Am I really what others say of me?
Or am I only what I know myself to be?
Restless, longing, sick, like a bird in a cage,
gasping for breath, as if someone strangled my throat,
starving for colors, flowers, bird songs,
thirsting for kind words, human closeness,
shaking with rage at despotism and the pettiest offense,
haunted waiting for great events to happen,
weak from worrying for friends infinitely far away,
tired and empty at praying, at thinking, at coping,
lifeless, and ready to say goodbye to it all?
Who am I? This person or the other?
Am I one self today and tomorrow someone else?
Am I both at once? Before others a hypocrite,
and before myself a despised, whining weakling?
Or is what’s still in me like a battered army,
retreating in disorder from a victory already won?
Who am I? This lonely question mocks my facade.
Whoever I am, you know me, yours am I, O God!
Credits: I ask that you credit the work of the translator Carmen Acevedo Butcher if you share this translation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “Wer bin ich?” [“Who am I?”] as given in the title here: “Who am I? by Dietrich Bonhoeffer ©Translated by Carmen Acevedo Butcher.”
“Wer bin ich?” is from page 179 in Widerstand und Ergebung: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen aus der Haft, edited by Eberhard Bethge (Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn, 1983). It’s also in Band 8 of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke, edited by Christian Gremmels, Eberhard Bethge, und Renate Bethge, mit Ilse Tödt. (Chr. Kaiser/Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1998).