I believe in the sun even when it is not shining;
I believe in love even when feeling it not;
I believe in God even when he is silent.
— An inscription on the wall of a cellar in Cologne where a number of Jews hid themselves for the entire duration of the war.
UPDATE (4 April 2021): I have found a primary source for this quotation. Be sure to read part V of this series.
In the first of this series of posts, I wrote about the many different ways the quotation above has been attributed. In this second post, I will tell part of the story of my investigation into the origin of the quotation.
If you search for this quotation using Google Books and look for older results, you will notice some variation in its wording. In the line about love, for example, you will find these three versions:
- I believe in love even when it is not apparent.
- I believe in love even when feeling it not.
- I believe in love even when I don’t feel it.
The first of these is the oldest, and in this post I will explore its origin. I’ll recount the history of the other two versions in the next post in this series.
Sometime in the late spring of 1945, the European Service of the British Broadcasting Corporation aired a German-language radio show that included interviews with German prisoners of war.1,2 The BBC released a transcript of that radio show, and one copy was given to Bertha L. Bracey, a Quaker educator and relief worker. Bracey translated the transcript from German into English, and on July 13th, 1945 a portion of the translation appeared on pages 453–455 of The Friend, a weekly magazine published by the Society of Friends in London.
The BBC broadcast focused on the reaction of German Christians to their county’s defeat in the war. One P.O.W., identified only as “Prisoner F. B.”, is quoted as saying the following:
Christianity became the content of my youth in time of peace. The wrongness and hollowness of National Socialism were clear to me in spite of its seeming triumph. Christ remained for me Lord of our days. I did not stand alone in this conviction. I found a youth community which did not consist of unworldly cranks, but had the courage in school, profession and youth organisation with Christian principles to swim against the tide of National Socialism. Many of us went into concentration camps in consequence. More than once was I myself brought up before Gestapo.
Even my five years as a soldier have not been able to shake my resolution but have only deepened and strengthened it. Mountainous difficulties tower up before us, and no amount of goodwill will be able to surmount them, unless this good will is borne up by pure love of our fellowmen and true faith in God.
In a shelter in Cologne, where young Catholics were keeping some Jews in hiding because their lives were threatened, American soldiers found the following inscription :
I believe in the sun—even when it is not shining.
I believe in God—even when He is silent.
I believe in love—even when it is not apparent.
This inscription is only one of those signs which give us cause to believe that Faith and humanity have not died.
This is the earliest published example of the “I believe in the sun” quotation that I have been able to find,3 and since it appeared only four months after the liberation of Cologne, it’s not unlikely that it is the first appearance of the quotation in print. This version of the quotation appeared in number of places over the next 10 or 15 years, before being eclipsed by another version. For example, the Gospel Messenger, published in Elgin, Illinois by the Church of the Brethren, quotes The Friend in their February 15, 1946 issue, as follows:
Found in a cellar in Cologne where German Roman Catholics had been sheltering some Jews
I believe in the sun, even when it is not shining.
I believe in God, even when He is silent.
I believe in love, even when it is not apparent.
—From The Friend
The AFSERCO News, a publication of the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia, gives the same quotation4, identical except for punctuation and slightly more detail in the attribution: “— From The Friend, London.” I was able to find a few other occurrences of this version of the quotation in sources from the 1950s, sometimes with the “cellar in Cologne” story, sometimes without.
What are some of the issues brought up by the article in The Friend?
One observation is that the quotation is significantly different from what is commonly given today. First of all, most of the versions you see after the 1950s say either “I believe in love even when feeling it not” or “[…] even when I don’t feel it” — the variation given here, “[…] even when it is not apparent,” is unusual. But that change in wording is a minor thing compared to the order of the three sentences of the quotation. The quotation in The Friend speaks of the sun, of God, and of love, but all of the more recent versions of the quotation speak of the sun, of love, and of God.5 Changing the order of the three sentences in the quotation completely alters their meaning, because, rhetorically, the first two provide evidence or motivation to support the third. The quotation as commonly given today encourages us to believe in God, just as we believe in the sun and in love. The quotation from The Friend encourages us to believe in love, just as we believe in the sun and in God. We are asked to have faith in humanity, justified by our faith in God, instead of the other way around.
A second issue brought up by the the story in The Friend is the question of how Prisoner F. B. had heard of the story in the first place. How did the story get from the American soldiers in Cologne to a prisoner of war? There must have been several links in the chain, each offering an opportunity for garbling or embellishment. As we saw in Part I, retellings of this story have tended to add details that fit in with the teller’s preconceived notions and stereotypes.
Finally, we should ask ourselves what Prisoner F. B.’s motivations were for telling the story. He was a self-professed Christian. He says that the friends of his youth pushed against the tide of Nazism, and that many of them wound up in concentration camps. But he wound up in the German military, and spent five years as a soldier. Here, at the end of the war, with his country defeated and the horrors of the Nazi regime coming to light, what might he have thought about the friends whose religious beliefs had led them to resist, at great personal cost? Did he regret not having joined them? What might he have thought about his own contribution to the German war machine? Would it have been comforting to him to think of Jews escaping from Nazi persecution? Would it have been comforting to him to think of Jews being protected by Christians? Would it have been comforting to him to think of Jews maintaining faith in God and in love, despite all the harm done to them by the government that he had supported with his actions?
And what would the answers to those questions tell us about how Prisoner F. B. might have — consciously or unconsciously — modified the story?
Of course, there’s no way to know the answers to these questions. But I feel we have to ask them, and wrestle with them, if we want to use the “I believe in the sun” quotation and the story behind it.
If we believe the story as told by Prisoner F. B., and if we want to honor the memory of the anonymous Jew in the cellar who wrote the words, then I feel we are obligated to report the quotation as Prisoner F. B. gives it, with its conclusion not about God, but about love:
I believe in the sun, even when it is not shining.
I believe in God, even when He is silent.
I believe in love, even when it is not apparent.
If we take the history I have described as the origin of the quotation, we have no business changing the words.
But there is another source of the quotation, a source that gives the sentences with God at the end, rather than love. It comes more than a year after the story in The Friend, and in a Jewish context rather than a Christian one, but it introduces some further problems of interpretation. This source will be the subject of the next post in this series.
The posts in this series:
1. Look away
2. The Friend
3. The secrets of tigers
4. Conclusion
Added 4 April 2021:
5. The source
Cover image: “The Cologne cathedral stands tall amidst the ruins of the city after Allied bombings, 1944,” found here. I have been unable to find the original source for this photograph, and I do not know its copyright status.
- I don’t know the date of the broadcast, but (as we shall see) it must have been after the liberation of Cologne on March 5th and 6th, and before the publication of the show’s transcript on July 13th. ↩
- An earlier version of this post said that the POWs interviewed were being held in England. After rereading the source, I feel that this was a misinterpretation. ↩
- Issues of The Friend from the 1940s are not available online. I found the article that included the partial transcript of the BBC broadcast after spending an afternoon in the library of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, skimming through the 1945 issues of The Friend on microfilm. Citations given by the Gospel Messenger and the AFSERCO News, which I had found earlier in online searches, led me to believe that searching through back issues of The Friend would be fruitful. ↩
- Visible in these two snippets. ↩
- One oddball version, from the Journal of the Canadian Dental Association in 1951, speaks of God, love, and the sun, in that order. ↩
The Humanist Seminarian 
This is fascinating. I look forward to the next one. Thanks for sharing!
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Well, I am glad that I stayed with it. For me, god is meaningless, so I am glad to see a version that ends with Love—much more meaningful for me.
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The differences in wording mean nothing since the original was not written in English.
It was Yiddish, or maybe Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Hebrew, or German. The original report would have quoted the original text, in transliteration if it were in Yiddish, because that’s what people do. Without the original report, I don’t know if it were Cologne or not, but I don’t care. The city or town is not what matters.
The second and third versions mean the same and the first is close. It depends on whether it was an easy translation or a word for word translation of some idiom.
2) I’m sure no one knows if the one who wrote it lived or died, whether he was found, killed, and dragged off, or found, dragged off, and killed. But even if he survived, likely he didn’t stay there waiting even after the American (or Russian) army could be heard outside, rumbling through the street perhaps with little or no gunfire in opposition. If and when he thought it was safe, he went out to see them.
But maybe he (or she) was still there when the soldiers entered the basement. They tended to him, or just searched for Germans. They didn’t take time to look at the walls. They were with an army on the move, with snipers to worry about at least some of the places. Later, other soldiers found the words on the wall and they had no idea who wrote them or what happened to hir.
3) Most importantly what was written was not written for us. It was written for the writer, who was near despair. Yes, he believed in G-d, but after months or years of hiding and knowing what would happen if he were caught, and knowing what had happened to so many people he knew or knew of, he had at least moments of doubt. He wrote the 3 lines to remind himself, to convince himself. I hope it helped.
Absolutely the line about G-d came last. He had no doubts about the sun, or about love (since he had loved and been loved by his parents and probably brothers and sisters, and maybe even a wife and children). What might be in question was G-d. Isn’t all this obvious?
And love or the sun was not going to rescue him. He hoped that G-d would do that. Isn’t all this obvious?
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Thanks for your comments; I appreciate your thoughts on the matter.
If there was in fact a text written on a wall somewhere — if in fact it was not something made up by the German POW interviewed by the BBC, or something from the rumor mill that he passed on — then the first reporting that we know of puts the words in a particular order. I don’t see how that can be ignored.
We agree completely on what you say at the beginning of your third point. The words were not written for us. In particular, we should avoid projecting our own beliefs into them. You seem certain of the author’s motives and beliefs. I would simply say: Read “Yossel Rakover’s Appeal to God.” The narrator of Zvi Kolitz’s story is not expecting G-d to save him.
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