the protagonist had to undergo a moral struggle that ended in a noble decision, so the audience would have a model for proper decision making in their own lives. Second, the characters needed to be close to the age and class of the audience, so that they might be better able to understand the struggle. Third, there must be a villain who is punished in the end, so the consequence of the negative moral action can be seen.48
Delp employed two of the three markers. The struggle in the drama involves the decision to seek and encounter a vertical truth—God, who is the source of human flourishing, especially as one is faced with death.
Overall, Delp wanted to his students to make a decision for Christ, to trust that Christ would be there at the end of their life. As such, the characters in the first two plays are young men, full of hopes and aspirations, enabling the student audience to empathize with the struggle. While the obvious villains in these three plays are war, natural calamity, and greed, the ultimate antagonist in all three plays is the decision not to choose God—a fulfillment that undergirds all human existence, even in suffering and death. Since the inter-related themes of God supporting humanity in threatening situations and human freedom accepting God’s love pervaded Delp’s later writings and own witness, these theatrical dramas as Delp’s first published works provide important insight into the origins of his thought.
In The Dead Soldiers, Delp wanted not only to teach his high school students empathy for the enemy but also to stir in their hearts the question of real happiness. Five of the soldiers in this play are teenage, conscripted privates. One young private shoots an enemy combatant, who happens to be a fellow teenager. The sober scene leads the young men to doubt their duty. Subsequently, the veteran member of the sentry unit, a sergeant, urges the young soldiers to do their job without questioning, since the safety and security of their families depend on them. A teenage soldier retorts that the enemy soldiers on the other side of the front care for their families and loved ones as well:
These men, too, care for their mothers, sisters, wives, and children with whom they want to be happy. They also think about building a home and living an ordinary happy life. They lie there and dream and wait and hope [for the end of the war]. They lie there with the cold rifle in their hands or the grenade in their fist, but their hearts yearn for something else . . . They all want to be happy, and they all stretch out their arms and hands for happiness. But nobody fills their empty hands with happiness and peace. On the entire front, on our side and the enemy’s side, and in the entire world, everyone seeks happiness.49
At the end of the play, the sentry unit is overwhelmed by an attack leaving all the men dead. The audience hears the soliloquy of a dead soldier. “Someday a moment will come; a hand will reach in from another life,” he says “It will take all the hands—the ones that sought happiness. It will be the hand of God and yet the hand of a faithful brother.”50
Furthermore, Delp’s The Dead Soldiers challenges his adolescent male students not to fall prey to his country’s burgeoning virile fundamentalism. For over a decade in the Weimar Republic, according to Detlev J.K. Peukert, former soldiers, such as Ernst Jünger, continually put forth an “aggressive apologia for the superior warrior male.”51 They generated disturbing images and roles of “aggressive masculinity” in nationalistic writings. Portrayals of soldierly doubt and empathy for enemies were regarded as weak and effeminate. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they killed the Weimar Republic’s ideals of equality and put forth “the rules of a new world order born of violence.”52 Instead of advancing a fantasy of male violence, Delp, in his first play, portrays men in need of conversion to Christ. Such conversion comes not by a violent storming of the heavens, but instead by an act of humility.
In the second play, much like the first, Delp stirs the imagination of his students concerning the meaning of true fulfillment amid desperate situations. In The Mine Workers, the five miners, including a young apprentice, are trapped in a collapsed mine. In the initial aftermath of the implosion, the miners find themselves staring at the corpse of one their co-workers. The surviving miners mourn their friend’s death, as he now leaves behind a wife and two young boys. A couple of the survivors, who attended the dead man’s wedding, reminisce about how he had dreamt of building a happy home. Subsequently, the apprentice, who lost his father in a previous mine accident, expresses his own desires. He would like to taste his mother’s cooking again and to attend his youth group meeting. The foreman consoles the boy, telling him that it is natural to have desires for things great and small because the yearning for happiness is what makes one alive and human. He states that “we have a heart full of longing and homesickness. Our entire life consists of the search for happiness.”53 As the tunnel suffers another implosion, the foreman tells the boy that ultimately the things of this earth will not satisfy one’s yearning for happiness. He says, “Earthly things do not bring peace to the heart. One day somebody has to come and open all the windows, the doors, and the lock to the human heart with his holy eyes. He touches our hearts with his healing hands.”54 The play ends when the last of the miners’ lights goes out.
In the third play, Delp grapples with the question of social justice for workers against the background of increasing technological industrialization, understood as “rationalization.” This term, according to Peukert, refers to the modernization of the economy, including the introduction of new manufacturing methods based on high technology, resulting in the replacement of manual operations by machine tools. The “surge of rationalization” delivered increased production but brought about “health damages” and reduced “the number of working faces.” Furthermore, in the shadow of economic crises, the increased productivity was not met with a corresponding demand. As a result, the numbers of workers employed dropped sharply. It is also important to highlight that rationalization in an era of economic stagnation caused a more pronounced divide “between the skilled and unskilled; between those in regular work and those casually employed or unemployed. Rationalization mitigated against solidarity.”55
Though he would later address the question of solidarity in a more robust manner, while a member of Kreisau Circle, at that point in his life, Delp attributed the inability to find the shared goodness among persons to the problem of moral failure. The main character in this play is a priest who attempts to mediate the confrontation between a director of a factory and his angry workers, whom he had fired before the Christmas holiday due to their complaints about the lack of safety with the new machinery. When the owner threatens to call the police to disperse the gathering of the revolting workers, the priest steps in from the streets and offers to mediate a truce. The fired workers will not hear of it, accusing the priest of speaking from the position of comfort—in possession of “a warm bed, a full stomach, and no hungry mouths to feed”—whereas they “are thrown into the streets” before Christmas as “worthless and vulnerable” persons.56 They charge him of sermonizing but not advocating for a change of any sort. The priest presses on and calls for common ground, saying that much has to change, but the first change must occur in the human heart. The priest agrees that it is not right to have a class of human beings who live off the labor of another class of human beings. Also, Delp has the priest repeat an insight from the previous play—that one has to feed the hunger or longing in one’s heart. The priest states, “Yes, many things are not just. The outside world has to change, but the first change must come from the person’s interior. Things are corrupt on the outside because things got corrupt in the heart.”57 Nevertheless, one of the workers responds, “However, it is not right to shut the door on us before Christmas. Think of our children. How will they celebrate Christmas?”
The worker’s matter-of-fact question leads the priest into a discussion on the essence of Christmas with the desperate men. He asks them, “How should Christmas be celebrated?” To this question, the men responded that Christmas is celebrated with a party for children full of toys and food. The priest affirms that Christmas does include a celebration with family, food, and presents, but he then rhetorically asks the men, “However, tell me, is this truly Christmas? Is this Christmas? When you hear the
