the Nazis to save his life. At the end of September 1944, the remaining Kreisau prisoners were ordered out of their cells and into the courtyard of the prison. When Protestant pastor Eugen Gerstenmaier saw Delp standing behind him and turned to greet him, he reported that Delp stared through him as if he were a pane of glass.125 Two months of torture and misery had taken its toll. The prisoners were eventually hustled into a truck that took them to Tegel Prison, a jail for ordinary criminals. The Gestapo prison had become too damaged by Allied bombing to hold the prisoners securely.
The surviving members of the Kreisau Circle soon learned that they were all being held in the same area. They were transferred to the cellar of Department 8 of House 1, known as the “House of the Dead” (Totenhaus) because those who were held there were eventually executed. Delp was prisoner number 1442, and he lay in cell 8/313. Gerstenmaier, Moltke, Delp, and Josef Ernst Fugger occupied adjoining cells. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s cell was in another part of the prison, so the surviving members of the Kreisau Circle and Bonhoeffer most likely never met. Tegel was run by ordinary prison staff, who were less abusive than the Gestapo.126
A few days after moving to Tegel Prison, Delp wrote to Marianne Hapig and Marianne Pünder, two social workers who knew him from Munich and were known within various circles of the German resistance movement. He asked for practical items, such as soap and shaving supplies. Delp also asked for hosts and a small bottle of wine so that he could say Mass. The women bribed the guards with cigarettes in order to have the Mass items smuggled into Delp’s cell. On October 1, Delp celebrated his first Mass in his cell. Also through Hapig and Pünder, Delp was able to smuggle out letters through a basket of laundry. With the help of these two social workers, Delp not only sent letters to family, friends, and brother Jesuits but also spiritual reflections on the nature of human existence amid the starkness of his prison conditions.127
The capacity to worship, pray, and spiritually reflect over his existence helped to deepen his faith and to make Delp more available to God. At the beginning of his imprisonment, Delp was afflicted with anxiety. The anguish is evident throughout his letters. He wrote to Luise Oestreicher128 at the end of October 1944:
I do not know anything about anyone except the people here in chains who are getting more wretched every day. “Unicus et pauper sum ego,” or “I’ve become very alone and very forlorn,” it says in a psalm. I’m so grateful for the Host, which I’ve had in my cell since October 1. It breaks the forlornness, although, I am ashamed to admit, sometimes I feel so tired and wrecked that I can no longer grasp this reality at all . . . I cannot write much to you today; it has not been a good day. Sometimes one’s destiny presses itself into a burden and unloads itself on the heart. And, one does not really know how long this heart can be expected to take it . . . I believe in God and life. And whatever we pray for in faith, we will get. Faith is an art. And I do not believe that God will let me suffocate . . . God has profoundly challenged me to honor my words from the past: with God alone one can live and endure one’s destiny.129
In another letter written to Oestreicher around the end of October 1944, Delp conveyed a similar precarious morale. He wrote, “My own strength has gone. ‘God alone suffices.’ I said that once when I was very self-sufficient. And look at me now. I am walking a tightrope in the name of God.”130 Delp’s third letter from Tegel Prison, written in the middle of November to the Kreuser family, his friends from Munich, communicated a corresponding anxiety:
I have learned much in these twelve weeks of bitterness, temptation, and forlornness. And adversity. However, God is good to help me redeem all of this. I still have hope for his help, although in purely human terms, the situation is hopeless . . . Please pray and wait with me, and get the children to pray.131
One detects in these letters the tension between Delp’s affliction with anxiety and his trust in God. It is as if Delp experienced his own “Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane,” wherein, like Christ, he underwent great distress and fear over looming death. Though Delp acknowledged the desperate situation that surrounded him, he communicated a grain of hope. And that hope was linked to God. What Delp was writing ten years ago concerning anxiety in Heidegger and his own three one-act plays has become quite real for him. He was teetering on the abyss toward nothingness and undergoing “a constriction of the throat” or “the oppression of the heart.”132 He could no longer trust in own agency but the mercy of God. Delp wrote the third letter around the time that he received a prayer book that contained prayers and devotions to the Heart of Jesus. Delp would begin his prison mediation on the Heart of Jesus soon afterward.
A letter to Luise Oestreicher, dated November 17, 1944, reaffirmed the tension between Delp’s anguish and his faith in God:
Slowly, the hour of decision will come. . . . This week has in many ways been turbulent. Three of our number have gone the way that remains a bitter possibility for all of us and from which only God’s miracle can spare and protect us. Within me, I have much to do before God, to ask, and to offer up myself completely.133 One thing is clear and tangible to me in a way that it rarely has been: the world is full of God. From every pore of things, God rushes out to us, as it were.134
The phrase “the hour of decision” refers to Jesus’ being handed over to Judas and the authorities. It is important to note that Jesus suffered anxiety in the Garden of Gethsemane as he was forsaken by his disciples and anticipated the destructive evil looming on the horizon. In spite of the anxiety crashing down on him, Delp admitted that people, including himself, were often blind to God’s presence in the world. He wrote, “In both beautiful and evil times, men and women cannot perceive grace. In everything beautiful and every hardship, God wants to celebrate the encounter and asks from us a prayerful response of self-surrender.”135
In the letter, he recognized his prison cell and the upcoming trial as a testing ground for the abyss that lay before him. The way across did not depend on his actions as it might have previously; what was demanded of him was nothing less than a total surrender to the loving mercy of God. He could pinpoint the moment when he first let go of his misery and placed himself into God’s care; it was the day after he had received a beating from the prison guards. That evening in the cell, Delp found comfort meditating on the Gospel figure of St. Peter, who flailed about in the water whenever he relied on his strength and who walked in safety only when he gave himself to the Lord.136
Within Delp, there was a recognition that his words on trust and sacrifice were becoming more real than he could ever imagine. Delp realized that if he saw the world from a purely human perspective, his situation appeared hopeless. To see the world from God’s perspective entailed trusting in Christ:
Oh, how bounded is the human heart in matters of its own ability: in hope and faith. It needs help to come to itself and not to flutter around like some young, partially-fledged birds that have fallen out of their nest. Faith as a virtue is God’s “Yes” to himself in human freedom—I preached that at one time. That’s how it is now—exactly that.137
The love of Christ seemingly overcame the figurative walls surrounding Delp in late November. He had become detached from his strengths and past achievements, and he realized that when the human person turns away from God and trusts only in his talents, he becomes merely an individual like St. Peter sinking in the Sea of Galilee.
In that same November 1944 letter to Luise Oestreicher, Alfred Delp noted that he would like to compose something cohesive—a theological reflection of his Gethsemane-like experience of learning how to trust in God and to discern and follow his will amid the looming danger. Even so, he was afraid that his bound hands would keep him from writing anything more than just letters. Gradually, however, he learned to write sustained meditations with his fastened hands. The meditations helped him come to know himself and to build a spiritual kinship with the people with whom he was imprisoned. Delp’s first two prison meditations are on devotion to the Heart of Jesus.138
