Charlotte: 

Dear Karl, I should write you one kind word? I cannot. I can only say one thing to you, which perhaps I may not even say: I simply know since last Wednesday that I love you, more than I can comprehend. I do not know whether I didn’t want to know it before or if I have been going through this world with closed eyes. But now it is so and it is hard. Do you now believe that I am no different from all of us?1 

Barth: 

Despite all the gravity and bitterness that now comes, I am even happy about it. Not only for the reason that lies nearest: because . . . now yes, on with it, there’s nothing to do about it, it is simply so: because I love you as well, “more than I can comprehend.” But rather also because I know that I am not alone in my need and can speak very openly to you about the way in which we must now help each other or perhaps moreso, must allow ourselves to be helped. . . . Until last Wednesday I thought (although I have long seen more than you, with shock, how I rejoiced in every trusting word that you said or wrote me), everything could be allowed to develop in the context of a lovely friendship. As it then became so evident in our conversation how unbelievably well and naturally we fit together, all of a sudden the situation appeared so insincere that I had to imply what I saw. And now you see it as well.2 

The aforementioned is correspondence, ‘love letters,’ shared in the very beginning between Karl Barth and Charlotte von Kirschbaum. I cite these from Christiane Tietz’s recently released book: Karl Barth: A Life in Conflict. In 2017 I cited similar things from an essay that Tietz wrote wherein Barth’s relationship with Lollo (aka Charlotte von Kirschbaum) was disclosed through the publication of their love letters. Indeed, my original post on the matter spawned multiple other posts on the matter. I was thrown into a viral swarm by the Barth establishment, for attempting to publicly speak (online) about such sensitive things. In fact, my series of posts, I just recently noticed, was even referenced in an academic essay on the matter.  

As it stands, particularly as I revisit the matter through this particular chapter in Tietz’s book (the total book isn’t about this issue, per se, but does include it), all of the same initial emotions are present once again. The relationship was a forced polyamorous relationship; that is, Barth eventually forced it on his wife, Nelly, and their five children. To the point that in just a few years’ time, from the letters we read above (and there are many!), Barth had Charlotte move into the family dwelling. Barth became Lollo’s provider, as much as he was Nelly’s and their five children. Tietz identifies their relationship as a Ménage à Trois; indeed, it was of sorts, but not willingly so on either Nelly’s or Charlotte’s. The nature of this relationship reveals a Barth who was unwilling to forego a passion that God would have called him to mortify. It reveals a Von Kirschbaum, who equally, was unwilling to find love from a man in a way that would have honored God; indeed, borne witness to the mystery of God’s marriage to humanity through Jesus Christ. Some, Tietz herself (in a recent podcast with reference to her book), attempt to relativize the gravity of this sinful situation through various rationalizations. At base: the relationship between Karl and Charlotte was sinful, and guiltful. Tietz shows how Barth (and Lollo) were both guilty, and felt the tension of their relationship before God; but they went ahead anyway.  

The reality is this (for those of us who are married): we all have potential Karls or Charlottes, respectively, ‘out there.’ We all have the same sinful impulses to indulge. We are all human, and could potentially fall in love with someone other than our spouse. But we must be vigilant; we must guard ourselves and each other from such occasions. And yet at the end of the day Barth and Charlotte happened, and happened until both of their deaths. There is much loss, eternally, associated with their respective choices to indulge in this relationship. Not “loss of salvation,” but loss of reward, and whatever it might look like to enter the heavenly abode in a repentant rather than unrepentant state.  

Personally, it remains exceedingly difficult for me to sit under Barth’s ‘lectern.’ When I read of these improprieties it breaks my heart for Barth’s wife, Nelly, and his five children. Their own report of the fallout produced by their dad’s and Charlotte’s choice to live together, alongside of them, and their mom, is that it was tumultuous and full of carnage for the family. This makes reading Barth’s Church Dogmatics, in particular, very hard to do. You see, Lollo was Barth’s “secretary,” and personal assistant. She had a substantive role in the development and transcription of Barth’s CD, along with many of his other publications and lectureships. It makes being a student of Barth’s rather trying, indeed. Surely, the mass of theologians through Church history have equally disturbing stories, many we will never know of. This doesn’t negate their theological insights, but it most certainly draws their students back, again and again, to the grace and mercy of Christ. It goes to show, one way or the other, that sin and sinful relationships will always leaven, so to speak, any sort of teaching we receive in the Church; and from her ‘doctors.’ But still; dammit.  

1 Letter of February 27, 1926, to Kirschbaum, Briefwechsel Barth-von Kirschbaum I (GA 45), 22 cited by Christiane Tietz, Karl Barth: A Life in Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 179-80 kindle.  

2 Ibid., 180.