Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born on February 4, 1906, in Breslau, a German city that is today Wrocław in Poland. He arrived a few minutes before his twin sister Sabine, the sixth and seventh of eight children in a prosperous, intellectually demanding household ^[1]. His father, Karl Bonhoeffer, was one of Germany's leading psychiatrists and neurologists; his mother, Paula von Hase, came from a family of theologians and court preachers and educated the children at home in their early years ^[2].

In 1912 the family moved to Berlin when Karl Bonhoeffer accepted the chair of psychiatry at the university there. The Bonhoeffer home in the Grunewald district placed the children among the capital's academic elite, with neighbors including the historian Adolf von Harnack ^[1]. The First World War cut into this comfortable world: Dietrich's older brother Walter died of wounds in 1918, a loss that marked the family deeply and, by several accounts, shaped the seriousness with which the young Dietrich approached questions of death and meaning ^[2].

At fourteen he announced his intention to become a theologian, a choice that surprised a family more oriented toward science and law. His brothers reportedly told him the church was a feeble institution not worth his talents; he is said to have replied that in that case he would reform it ^[3]. He began theological studies at Tübingen in 1923, then moved to Berlin, where he completed his doctoral dissertation, Sanctorum Communio, in 1927 at the age of twenty-one. The examiners included some of the most prominent liberal theologians of the era, and Karl Barth later praised the work as a theological miracle ^[1].

Anyone tracing who was Dietrich Bonhoeffer before 1933 finds a young academic with unusually wide horizons. After a year as an assistant pastor to a German-speaking congregation in Barcelona in 1928 and 1929, he completed a second dissertation, Act and Being, which qualified him to lecture at Berlin ^[2]. In 1930 he crossed the Atlantic for a postgraduate year at Union Theological Seminary in New York. He found American academic theology thin, but the year changed him in other ways: through his friend Frank Fisher he worshipped regularly at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, where the preaching of Adam Clayton Powell Sr. and the experience of the Black church under segregation gave him a lasting concern for the church's obligation to the oppressed ^[4].

Back in Berlin from 1931, Bonhoeffer lectured in systematic theology, was ordained, and served as a chaplain and youth worker. He also threw himself into the early ecumenical movement, attending international church conferences and building friendships, most importantly with Bishop George Bell of Chichester in England, that would later prove critical to his resistance work ^[3].

Hitler's appointment as chancellor on January 30, 1933, ended any possibility of a quiet academic career. Two days later Bonhoeffer delivered a radio address warning that a leader who makes an idol of himself becomes a misleader; the broadcast was cut off before he finished ^[1]. That April he wrote the essay The Church and the Jewish Question, in which he argued that the church must aid all victims of state injustice, whether Christian or not, and might be called to jam a spoke in the wheel of the state itself. Among German theologians of the moment, that position was radical ^[5].

The struggle inside German Protestantism defined the next phase of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer biography. A pro-Nazi faction known as the German Christians sought to fuse the Protestant church with National Socialist ideology, including the exclusion of pastors of Jewish descent under the so-called Aryan paragraph. Bonhoeffer helped organize opposition, and in 1934 the dissenting pastors and congregations issued the Barmen Declaration, largely drafted by Karl Barth, which asserted that the church owed its allegiance to Christ alone. The movement became known as the Confessing Church ^[2].

From late 1933 to 1935 Bonhoeffer served two German congregations in London, using the post to keep foreign church leaders, above all Bishop Bell, informed about the church struggle in Germany ^[3]. He returned in 1935 to direct an illegal seminary for Confessing Church ordinands, eventually settled at Finkenwalde in Pomerania. There he built a disciplined common life of prayer, study, meditation, and mutual confession that was unusual for Protestant Germany. The experience produced two of his most read books: The Cost of Discipleship (1937), with its attack on what he called cheap grace, and Life Together (1939), a short account of Christian community ^[1].

The Gestapo closed Finkenwalde in September 1937, and many of Bonhoeffer's former students were arrested. He continued training pastors covertly through a system of supervised apprenticeships in rural parishes until the police shut that down as well. In 1936 he had already lost his authorization to teach at Berlin, and by 1940 he was forbidden to speak in public and required to report regularly to the police ^[5].

In June 1939 friends arranged an escape route: a lecture invitation to the United States. Bonhoeffer arrived in New York, and within weeks he decided he had made a mistake. He wrote to Reinhold Niebuhr that he would have no right to help rebuild Christian life in Germany after the war if he did not share the trials of that time with his people. He sailed home on one of the last ships before war broke out ^[4].

His brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi held a senior position in the Abwehr, German military intelligence, which under Admiral Wilhelm Canaris sheltered a circle of officers and civilians plotting against Hitler. From 1940 Bonhoeffer worked for the Abwehr as a civilian agent, a cover that exempted him from conscription and allowed him to travel ^[2]. His real assignments served the conspiracy. In May 1942 he met Bishop Bell in Sigtuna, Sweden, and passed him details of the resistance and the names of leading conspirators, asking whether the Allies would negotiate with a post-Hitler government. The British government declined to respond ^[3].

Bonhoeffer also took part in Operation Seven, a Dohnanyi scheme that smuggled fourteen Jews and people of Jewish descent to Switzerland in 1942 under the pretense that they were Abwehr agents ^[5]. Irregularities in the money used for that rescue drew the attention of investigators. On April 5, 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested at his parents' home in Berlin, along with Dohnanyi and Dohnanyi's wife Christine, Bonhoeffer's sister. During this period he was also wrestling with the ethics of tyrannicide in the unfinished manuscripts published after his death as Ethics, in which he argued that responsible action in an extreme situation may require the acceptance of guilt ^[1].

Bonhoeffer never married, though he came close. In January 1943, three months before his arrest, he became engaged to Maria von Wedemeyer, an eighteen-year-old from a Prussian landowning family whose grandmother had long supported his work. The two conducted their engagement almost entirely through censored prison correspondence, later published as Love Letters from Cell 92 ^[6].

Family and friendship anchored his life. He remained close to his twin sister Sabine, whose husband Gerhard Leibholz was of Jewish descent; Bonhoeffer helped the couple escape to England in 1938 ^[2]. His closest friend and eventual biographer was Eberhard Bethge, a former Finkenwalde student. The letters Bonhoeffer wrote to Bethge from Tegel prison, smuggled past the censors with the help of sympathetic guards, contain his most daring late ideas, including his musings on a religionless Christianity and on the church's need to exist for others ^[1].

Those who knew him described a man of unexpected range: an accomplished pianist from a musical household, a strong athlete, a lover of good food and travel who had spent time in Rome, Cuba, Mexico, and North Africa as a young man. Interpreters of Dietrich Bonhoeffer facts often note the contrast between his privileged, cosmopolitan formation and the austere discipline he chose and taught ^[3].

Bonhoeffer spent eighteen months in the military prison at Berlin-Tegel, where relatively lenient conditions, aided by a family connection to the prison commandant, allowed him to read, write, and counsel fellow prisoners and even guards. Interrogators could prove little beyond his evasion of military service, and for a time his family hoped for release ^[2].

Everything changed after the failed bomb plot of July 20, 1944. In September the Gestapo discovered secret Abwehr files at Zossen documenting the long-running conspiracy, including material that implicated Bonhoeffer and Dohnanyi. In October 1944 Bonhoeffer was transferred to the Gestapo cellar prison on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, and in February 1945 to Buchenwald concentration camp ^[1]. As Allied armies closed in, he was moved south with a group of special prisoners through Regensburg toward Bavaria.

On April 8, 1945, at the village of Schönberg, he had just led a small service for fellow prisoners when guards arrived with orders to take him to Flossenbürg. A hastily convened SS court condemned him overnight, without defense counsel or witnesses, on Hitler's direct instructions to destroy the surviving conspirators. At dawn on April 9, 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged at Flossenbürg concentration camp, alongside Canaris, General Hans Oster, and other resistance figures. He was thirty-nine. The camp was liberated by American troops about two weeks later, and Germany surrendered within a month ^[5]. His brother Klaus and brothers-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi and Rüdiger Schleicher were killed by the regime in the same April ^[2].

Among Dietrich Bonhoeffer achievements, the writings have proved the most durable. The Cost of Discipleship and Life Together remain widely read across denominations, and the posthumous Letters and Papers from Prison, edited by Eberhard Bethge and first published in 1951, became one of the most discussed theological books of the twentieth century. Its fragmentary proposals about a world come of age influenced movements as different as the secular theology of the 1960s and later political theologies ^[1].

His example carried at least as far as his ideas. Figures in the American civil rights movement, opponents of apartheid in South Africa, and dissidents in Eastern Europe and Latin America invoked his witness against state injustice. In 1998 a statue of Bonhoeffer was placed among the ten twentieth-century martyrs above the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey in London ^[7]. Memorials also stand in Breslau, Berlin, and at Flossenbürg, where the site of his execution is marked.

Bonhoeffer's afterlife has not been free of argument. Scholars debate how directly he was involved in assassination planning as opposed to courier and rescue work, and popular biographies have been criticized for enlisting him in contemporary political causes he could not have anticipated ^[4]. The German state formally annulled the SS court's verdict decades after the war, part of a broader rehabilitation of the July 20 resisters. Bethge's massive 1967 biography remains the foundation of scholarship, and the seventeen-volume critical edition of Bonhoeffer's works, completed in German and in English translation, keeps the full record available to readers weighing his life for themselves ^[6].