Bonhoeffer on what to do in tumultuous times

Bonhoeffer takes the occasion of his godson’s baptism to offer a short treatise on Christian faith and the ways of the world. In it, he expounds on the benefits of a stable family life providing shelter in the midst of a tumultuous and unpredictable world: In the coming years of revolution, the greatest gift will be to know that you are protected in a good home….In the general pauperization of intellectual life, you will find in your parents’ home a palladium of spiritual [geistiger] values and a source of intellectual [geistiger] stimulation. Music, how your parents interpret and cultivate [pflegen] it, will bring your confusion to clarity and purify your character and outlook, and in the midst of worries and sadness will sustain in you a Grundton of joy. It is the practice of music, a prominent element in little Dietrich’s home, that will animate and sustain within him a “Grundton of joy.” The phrase itself is a musical metaphor. Put simply, the Grundton (in English, “tonic” or “key note”) is the “first degree of a major or minor scale”24 or “the main note of a key…after which the key is named.” -Quoted in Robert Smith’s Bonhoeffer and Musical Metaphor