I am in the middle of reading the book entitled Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet and Spy by Eric Metaxas in which the author referred to a speech that Bonhoeffer gave right after Hitler was elected Chancellor. The description of his speech piqued my curiosity so much that I just had to look for the entire speech on the internet. I found it quite fascinating. In his speech he defines and lays out what he calls the Leadership Principle. But before his description of the leadership principle he talks about the differing generations, their thought processes, and how the younger generation had a lack of unity back then compared to the older generation. Since the anniversary of D-Day was yesterday I began contemplating how our different generations have changed over the years and asked the question: With all the political correctness and feminization of men that has occurred in our country over the past few decades could this country even handle another D-Day type of event? My suspicions are probably not due to the political correctness, feminization of men, and how the media interferes and gives away certain information which hinders the surprise effect of military operations. The part of Bonhoeffer’s speech on the leadership principle in relation to the Youth Worker Movement in Germany in some ways seems to parallel how the youth of today view Obama as “The One” or the Obamessiah.
Here is the excerpt of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s speech which focuses on the Leadership Principle:
The concept of the leader in its new form has for the first time been spread throughout Germany with the post-war youth movement. That was its first creative action, with which it also stirred up its older brethren; the younger ones were creative for the older ones. Of course there have always been leaders. Where there is community there is leadership. But we are concerned here only with the strange form which the concept of ‘the Leader’ had assumed in the youngergeneration. One thing is above all characteristic of this new form: whereas earlierleadership was expressed in the position of the teacher, the statesman, the father,in other words in given orders and offices, now the Leader has become an independentfigure. The Leader is completely divorced from any office; he is essentially and only the Leader. What does that signify? Whereas leadership earlier rested on commitment, now it rests on choice. That is understandable, because precisely those commitments from which at some earlier time leadership might derive, had become nonexistent. And as a result, the problem of leadership, which is as old as any problem of society, specifically became the problem of the Leader. With both parties concerned, leadership remained something neutral, not to say objective; the Leader involves the persons of both parties concerned.
Leading comes about through superiority in something neutral, through office, knowledge, ability; in the case of the Leader, the essential thing is the supremacy of his person. In both cases a power-relationship is involved; in leadership the important thing is the superiority of something neutral and objective, in the case
of the Leader it is the superiority of his person. It is therefore self-evident that leadership is more capable of rational judgement than the Leader. It is virtually impossible to give a rational basis for the nature of the [p. 196→] Leader. That is its strength and at the same time its limitation.
Leadership isessentiallyconcernedwith the object, the Leader with the person; the focus of leadership is the person being led, the line of vision goes from above downwards, while the focus of the Leader is the Leader himself and the line of vision goes from below upwards. Hence a new and sociologically interesting phenomenon had entered the structure of authority. The Leader as an independent figure has his own peculiar sociological standing. And our line of thought will come to an end in defining systematically the sociological position of the Leader in the modern sense of theword. The concept of the Leader has been subject to essential changes above allin the historical development of the past decade, and we will have to examine these.
The Leader as understood by the youth movement emerged from a small group. He was not someone set over it; he was chosen by the group. It was the good man, the inwardly noble man who was to be raised and commissioned by the group in this way. The group is the womb of the Leader. It gives him everything, even his authority. It is his person to which all the authority, all the honour and all the glory of the group is transferred. The Leader holds no office independent of the group. The group which produced him now sees him already bathed completely in the light of its ideals. It sees him, not in his reality but in his vocation. It is essential for the image of the Leader that the group does not see the face of the one who goes before, but sees him only from behind as the figure stepping gout ahead. His humanity is veiled in his Leader’s form.
Now this Leader in the youth movement should be really man; support and fulfilment for disintegrating personal life is sought in his ideal humanity. The Leader should at the same time be the loved and honoured friend for whom everything has been sacrificed. He should be what has been sought in vain in the father [p. 197→] and in the teacher. This is already to mention the two factors with which any concept of the Leader has to compete, the teacher and the father, in this case the given, already existing offices. The problem symptomatic of the youth movement was the father and son problem. It was here that the inflammable matter exploded time and again. The father was replaced by the Leader, the authority of the father was denied for the sake of the authority of the Leader; the Leader was set above the father; the father can only have authority if he himself becomes the young man’s Leader. Thus the individual is freed from his ties to the given order, he becomes free to make his own choice, free for himself.
The leadernow becomes — and in the youth movement became in a very special way—the Leader of his own, hitherto undiscovered, better self. In choosing a Leader theindividual freed himself for himself. Being led he now saw in the Leader his own,ideal, human ego. In the youth movement the group and the Leader are basically still no more than extensions of the personal ego; all seeking for community and authority is essentially a matter of the person’s own soul, which now immerses itself in what it considers the other person and yet everywhere finds only a mirror image of itself. The sociological categories of the individual in his unsurmountable, invincible, eternal solitude and the sociological categories of the father, i.e. of the existing order, are by the discovery of the idea of the Leader entangled in a widespread, extended new individualism. Hence the concepts of responsibilityand order are dissolved into those of the free individual, who is a law unto himself. In the whole of the youth movement, it may be said today that the basic concern is simply that for a new, individual soul; the Leader of the youth movement was the Leader in fulfilling the soul and the humanity of the individual. And precisely through this vocation the fate of the Leader again and again became tragedy. Men continually wanted to see the Leader, with all his ideal humanity, face to face. They did not want to be able only to see his back as he went forward.
But now, when the Leader is to be Leader in the total human [p. 198→] sense and when he himself understands his task as purely personal, ad not objective, it cannot be long before both Leader and led realise the illusion of such unbounded Leadership. The secret of his authority is revealed and destroyed, and Leader and led separated into naked humanity. Authority collapses, and with it, faithfulness and allegiance. There remains only a romantic recollection.
The youth movement in which the war and post-war generation was involved was divorced from the third, at present the youngest, generation at the time when its members had to enter civil professions. These young men, originally endowed with a stronger sense of reality than their older brothers and full of a greater sense of purpose, saw the lack of meaning and the lack of outlook for their own future and that of their own fellow-countrymen exclusively in the political crisis. Thus the aim of this new youth group was essentially more definitely and more sharply outlined than that of the older men, and now the lack of authority in political thought and action is felt more strongly than before to be the final cause of all misfortunes. But even here, in view of the apparent complete failure of all previous orders and institutions, the call for political authority had to become the call for the great man, for the political Leader. And in this call the difference between generations among the youth all at once disappeared completely, indeed the ‘father and son problem’, which was a point of prime importance for the youth movement, moved completely into the background; men no longer boasted of their differences, but of their common duty. The figure of the political leader was stripped of his familiarity, comradeship took the place of friendship, obedience the place of sacrifice. The individualistic remnants of the youth movement have been done away with. Or rather we must say that a remarkable transfer of individualistic forces has taken place. The individual knows that he is committed to the Leader in unconditional obedience. He really obliterates himself, he is an instrument in the hands of the Leader, it is not he, but the Leader, who is responsible, and in his [p. 199→] faith in the Leader he surrenders ultimate responsibility completely to him in the same way as for the Catholic faith in his church includes faith in the justice of its commandments and in its claims on his obedience. Individualism is indeed really done away with in this subjection, this exclusion of the individual, but yet it now breaks out again in this form of transference. Everything which the individual must renounce is now transferred by every individual together to the figure of the one who is the Leader. The individual abdicates for the sake of the Leader. The Leader is what no other person can be, an individual, a personality. The relationship between those led and their Leader is that the former transfer their own rights to him. It is this one form of collectivism which turns into intensified individualism. For that reason, the true concept of community, which rests on responsibility one to another, finds no fulfilment here.
But we have still to complete the description of this concept of the Leader. The Leader is set at a tremendous distance from those whom he leads, but — and this is the decisive factor — he is Leader only as the one chosen by those whom he leads; as the one who has grown from among them, he receives his authority only from his followers, from below, from the people. The spirit of the people – so one imagines — summons the Leader from its metaphysical depths and raises him to the heights. This Leader, deriving from the concentrated will of the people, now appears as longingly awaited by the people, the one who is o fulfil their capabilities and their potentialities. Thus the originally matter-of-fact idea of political authority has become the political, messianic concept of the Leader as we know it today. Into it there also streams all the religious thought of its adherents. Where the spirit of the people is a divine, metaphysical factor, the Leader who embodies this spirit has religious functions, and is I the proper sense the messiah. With his appearance the fulfilment of the last hope has dawned. With the kingdom which he must bring with him the eternal kingdom has already drawn [p. 200→] near. Could one ally the religious attitude of the group towards its Leader in the youth movement with the pietistic ideal of community, the political, messianic idea of the leader would lie in the line of the ideal of a universal kingdom of God on earth as it was striven for in the religious movements summed up under the title ‘Enthusiasm’, and in the French Revolution, and later take up again and again. But precisely this idea is decisively rejected quite widely among the younger generation. Despite all the agreement in the call for political authority, the deepest opposition opens up when this authority comes to be defined more closely. This opposition can be summed up in the question, ‘The authority of the leader or the authority of an office?’ And here we have reached the burning question of the present day. The Leader has authority from below, from those whom he leads, while the office has authority from above; the authority of the Leader depends on his person, the authority of an office is suprapersonal; authority from below is the self-justification of the people, authority of an office is a recognition of the appointed limits; authority from below is borrowed authority, authority of an office is original authority. The slogan of the authority of the Leader is ‘The Reich’, the slogan of the authority of an office is ‘the state’. For the problem of the individual, this implies: In the authority of an office, the individual feels the restrictions which always stand in the way of his own will, his place in the world with well defined areas over which he has no control. He knows that he himself is controlled, he feels his limitations, and at the same time he feels his responsibility towards this position which has fallen on him. The authority of an office implies the curbing of the individual in his freedom as an individual, his restriction, the need to be aware of other people, of reality. The authority of the Leader means for the individual the free choice of obedience, radical renunciation of his right as an individual and yet immeasurable, boundless freedom of the individual in accordance with the law of transference. But of course neither the limited [p.201→] nor the limitless individual is as such the individual in his indestructible unity and responsibility, and neither obedience towards a father nor subjection to
the Leader can lay the foundations of a community in which the I and the Thou have a genuine relationship one to the other. Neither the office nor the Leader are as such the ultimate factor.
The following must, however, be said about this dispute. The concept of ‘authority’ implies its derivation from the concept of ‘authorship’. Authority is more original than the one for whom it is authority. I can therefore only recognise authority as an authority set over me. The authority which I accord to another
person over me is ultimately only my own authority. Therefore the one is genuine, limited authority while the other is borrowed and in danger of becoming unlimited authority. Therefore in the one authority I am subdued, in the other I merely free myself afresh, set myself up in authority. There is a decisive difference between the authority of the father, the teacher, the judge and the statesman on the one hand, and the authority of the leader on the other. The former have authority by virtue of their office and by virtue of that office alone; the Leader has authority by virtue of his person. The authority of the former can be attacked and maimed, but it still remains; the authority of the Leader is utterly at the risk of every moment; it is in the hands of his followers. I choose my Leader, but I cannot choose my father and my teacher. I subordinate myself to the authority of the Leader, I stand under the authority of father and teacher.
The father, the teacher and the statesman are not leaders by nature, but stewards of their office.Anyone who expects otherwise is not looking at reality, he is dreaming. Now without doubt the concept of the Leader points to a historical necessity, to a necessity which is felt particularly by the youth. There remains only the ultimate, basic question, that of the place which the ‘Leader’ — in the pregnant sense of the word — occupies in the structure of authority, and of the place which as a result is occupied by the individual. Men, and [p. 202→] particularly young men, will feel the need to give a Leader authority over them so long as they themselves do not feel mature, strong, responsible enough themselves to realise the claim misplaced in this authority. The Leader will have to be conscious of this clear limitation of his authority. If he understands his function in any other way than as it is rooted in fact, if he does not continually tell his followers quite clearly of the limited nature of his task and of their own responsibility, if he allows himself to surrender to the wishes of his followers, who would always make him their idol — then the image of the Leader will pass over into the image of the misleader, and he will be acting in a criminal way not only towards those he leads, but also towards himself. The true Leader must always be able to disillusion. It is just this that is his responsibility and his real object. He must lead his following away from the authority of his person to the recognition of the real authority of orders and of offices. The Leader must lead his followers towards a responsibility to the orders of life, a responsibility to father, teacher, judge, state.
He must radically refuse to become the appeal, the idol, i.e. the ultimate authority of those whom he leads. He must limit himself to his task with all soberness. He serves the order of the state, of the community, and his service can be of incomparable value. But only so long as he keeps strictly in his place. Temporarily, the Leader takes over responsibility from the individual, but he must always understand this as being temporary, and must always draw the attention of his followers to this. He may accept this self disenfranchising, self-submission of the individual only on the realisation that he has to lead the individual into his own maturity. Now a feature of man’s maturity is responsibility towards other people, towards existing orders. He must let himself be controlled, ordered, restricted. It is thus really the case that the Leader takes over the responsibility which his followers are incapable of bringing to the orders and offices of life, and discharges it for them. Whereas those who are led think and wish that their Leader is simply the autonomous man, the master-man, [p. 203→] who is completely free, the Leader must know that he is most deeply committed to his followers, most heavily laden with responsibility towards the orders of life, in fact quite simply a servant. It is quite clear that here neither the idea of the community nor the idea of the individual reach their fulfilment, but that here they stand in a historically and psychologically necessary, but nevertheless penultimate stag of their development. The Leader serves his office. But this service of his office is itself only penultimate. The individual experiences in the authority of an office his commitments, his restrictions, but at the same time his responsibility. Even here, however, man is not yet seen as he is. Only when a man sees that office is penultimate authority in the face of an ultimate, indescribable authority, in the face of the authority of God, has the real situation been reached. And before this authority the individual knows himself to be completely alone. The individual is responsible before God. And this solitude of man’s position before God, this subjection to an ultimate authority, is destroyed when the authority of the Leader or of the office is seen as ultimate authority. The irrefutable sign of man’s individuality is that he must die alone, that he must bear his body for himself, that he must bear his suffering and his guilt as an individual. Alone before God, man becomes what he is, free and committed in responsibility at the same time. He becomes an individual. And this individual now knows himself to be set under other individuals, he knows himself to be committed to them, he knows himself to be in community. Community is between individuals, with no blurring of the boundaries of I and Thou, with the strictest separation from and therefore strictest responsibility for one another. Community is only where a man becomes an individual before God, and men; it is a community of suffering, of guilt, of death and of life. The fearful danger of the present time is that above the cry for authority, be it of the Leader or of an office, we forget that man stands alone before the ultimate authority and that anyone who lays violent hands on man here is infringing eternal laws and [p. 204→] taking upon himself superhuman authority which will eventually crush him. The eternal law that the individual stands alone before God takes fearful vengeance where it is attacked and distorted. Thus the Leader points to the office, but Leader and office together point to the final authority itself, before which Reich or state are penultimate authorities. Leaders or offices which set themselves up as gods mock God and the individual who stands alone before him, and must perish. Only the Leader who himself serves the penultimate and the ultimate authority can find faithfulness.
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