Fifty years ago, April 9, 11 days before U.S. troops liberated
the Flossenbürg Concentra-tion Camp where he was held, Dietrich
Bonhoeffer was executed by his Nazi captors. He and perhaps 5,000
others were put to death in the months before the end of World
War II because of their participation in a plot to assassinate
Hitler. This extra-
ordinary Lutheran minister and theologian lived only 39 years,
the last two years of which he spent in prison. Yet he left behind
sufficient theological reflections to fill 16 volumes.
Still he is not a household name. Last summer at a retreat center
with a religious identity only one of 25 college juniors and seniors
could identify Dietrich Bonhoeffer. They had been asked if they
would like to participate in a Bonhoeffer seminar led by Eberhard
Bethge, Bonhoeffer's student, close friend, and key biographer,
and Renate Bethge, Bonhoeffer's niece and co-trustee of the Bonhoeffer
legacy. (Several did in fact attend.)
It's not something we do well, remembering our "heroes of
conscience." But Dietrich Bonhoeffer deserves to be remembered
and studied as a 20th-century martyr in the same breath with Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr., Archbishop Oscar Romero, and others of
notable achievement who could have honorably stayed above the
battle but chose to risk their lives for what they believed.
His story-unknown to most of the world for several years after
World War II-caught its imagination as more and more of his writings
became available. He grew up in an upper-middle-class family-his
father headed the leading psychiatric institute in Berlin-and,
to the surprise of his family, studied theology, garnering a Ph.D.
by the age of 21. After writing a second doctoral dissertation,
he became a lecturer in theology at the University of Berlin at
the age of 24, a year before he was old enough to be ordained.
But almost immediately his life as an intellectual, his theology,
and his understanding of what it meant to be a Christian were
to be tested by the rise of the Nazis, and their demand that all
institutions pay fealty to the party.
Bonhoeffer's experience was broadened by time in Barcelona, New
York (at Union Theological Seminary), and London. At Union he
was put off by the fascination with the social gospel and the
lack of scholarship in the German tradition. But he spent time
at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, among other places, and
took away black spirituals that he would keep with him the rest
of his life.
He had more than one opportunity to leave Germany-such giants
as Paul Tillich and Karl Barth were pushed out-but he always chose
to return. That is most dramatically captured in the phrases in
a letter to Reinhold Niebuhr (as remembered by Niebuhr) in 1939-when
Bonhoeffer had paid his second visit to the United States, with
a chance to lecture at Union and around the United States. After
several agonizing weeks, he decided to return to Germany, saying,
"I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction
of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the
trials of this time with my people."
BONHOEFFER, CONVINCED sufficiently of the arguments for pacifism
that he arranged to visit Gandhi in the mid-1930s (something he
was unable to do), eventually supported a plot to assassinate
Hitler. He simply could not accept the personal perfection of
withdrawal. In doing that, one "sets his own personal innocence
above his responsibility for [humanity], and he is blind to the
more irredeemable guilt which he incurs precisely in this,"
Bonhoeffer wrote.
Of the elites and never a populist, Bonhoeffer left the immortal
phrase that it was essential "to see the great events of
world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast,
the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the
reviled-in short from the perspective of those who suffer."
Bonhoeffer, from Luther's tradition of justification by faith
alone, warned against "cheap grace...the preaching of forgiveness
without requiring church discipline, communion without confession,
absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without
discipline, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ,
living and incarnate."
In the mid-1930s, Bonhoeffer headed a small seminary of the Confessing
Church-over against the German Church with its Reichsbishop-and
that experience produced his much read Life Together (published
posthumously, 1954) and The Cost of Discipleship (1937),
important to an understanding of Bonhoeffer. The Gestapo closed
the seminary, finally forbade him from speaking or writing in
public, and, after he began to work for the counterintelligence
service loaded with anti-Hitler personnel, arrested him in early
1943. From there came his Letters and Papers From Prison(published
posthumously, 1951), so full of marvelous theological fragments
that continue to inspire and challenge. Then in April 1945 he,
his brother, his brother-in-law, and many comrades were executed.
Within the month Hitler had committed suicide, Berlin had fallen,
and Germany surrendered.
The last words he spoke were: "This is the end, for me the
beginning of life." Ten years later a military doctor reported
witnessing Bonhoeffer's kneeling in prayer before his execution.
"In the almost 50 years I have worked as a doctor, I have
hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will
of God."
It is a great legacy that Bonhoef-fer's life and death, his witness,
offer much for those today trying to be faithful to the gifts
and demands of the gospel. That means a critical engagement with
a man whose influence continues and grows. n
LEON HOWELL lives in Washington, D.C., and is the former editor
of Christianity and Crisis. Bonhoeffer's comment regarding
his future role in the reconstruction of Germany adorned the wall
where Christianity and Crisis' editorial panel met, giving
Howell many spirit-filled moments.
A Martyr's Life
The Cup of Wrath: A Novel Based on Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Resistance
to Hitler. By Mary Glazener. Smyth & Helwys Publishing,
1992.
Mary Glazener's novel (see "An Uncommon Cup," August
1994) is a fine history of the final 10 years of Bonhoeffer's
life. Although it is not a dramatic novel, it provides opportunities
to understand why even some of Bonhoeffer's students were excited
by Hitler's victories, getting the country to stand up after the
humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles. And she, almost alone
among historians, includes a warm portrait of Elenore Nichol,
an ordained minister and compatriot, whom many thought Bonhoeffer
would marry. Apparently his sense of obligation to the cause brought
an end to the relationship.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Life in Pictures. By Eberhard Bethge,
Renate Bethge, and Christian Gremmels. Fortress Press, 1987.
A Life in Pictures is an annotated work by the Bethges, which
offers another dimension into the understanding of the life and
times of Bonhoeffer.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Spoke in the Wheel! By Renate Wind,
translated by John Bowden. W.B. Eerdmanns, 1992.
Renate Wind, a pastor in Heidelberg, Germany, has written an
excellent short biography that serves as a good introduction to
Bonhoeffer.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer: His Significance for North Americans.
By Larry Rasmussen, with Renate Bethge. Fortress Press, 1989.
Union Theological Seminary professor Larry Rasmussen has written
a very interesting book. Especially strong are a section on patriotism
and Bonhoeffer's prison poem called "The Death of Moses,"
in which he speaks of himself: "God I have loved this people./That
I bore its shame and sacrifices/and saw its salvation-that is
enough."
A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writing of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
By Geffrey Kelly and F. Burton Nelson. Harper San Francisco,
1990.
A Testament to Freedom contains not only samples of all his
essential writings, but also a useful biographical introduction
to each section. It also has several of the letters between Bonhoeffer
and Maria von Wedemeyer, who became publicly known as his fiancee
after he had been imprisoned. This book is a good addition to
a church library.
The Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works Translation project is a scholarly
effort to compile his writings, and the German-language version
is almost complete. The next step is to translate into English
several volumes per year, with completion targeted for Decem-ber
2003. This serious werke, as the German has it, will bring
to a single standard all the translations that are now widely
different in quality and completeness, bring out some items never
seen in English, and provide annotations to bridge the gap of
50 years or more in our understanding of the context of his writings.
-LH
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