BIOGRAPHY OF DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

Brief Overview
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) was a German pastor, theologian,
ecumenist, and peace activist. He wrote profoundly about Christian
faith, community, grace, and ethics, centered in one way or another
on the question, who is Christ for us today? The atrocities of the Nazi
Regime, which resulted in unspeakable human suffering, compelled
him to participate in a conspiracy that tried unsuccessfully to
assassinate Hitler and install a new government that would end the
war and those atrocities. Imprisoned during the last two years of his
life, Bonhoeffer was executed just weeks before the end of the war.

Introduction to Dietrich Bonhoeffer

(Excerpt from “Exploring the Life and Theology of Dietrich
Bonhoeffer,” a Westar Institute Webinar, by Lori Brandt Hale,
February 10th, 2021)
Dietrich Bonhoeffer – the well-known theologian, pastor, and Nazi
resister – was born on February 4th, 1906, along with his twin sister,
Sabine, into a large, tight-knit family that was highly educated,
politically engaged, but only nominally religious, though there were
“churchmen” on Paula Bonhoeffer’s (Dietrich’s mother’s) side of the
family, including a court chaplain (Dietrich’s grandfather) and a
theologian (his great-grandfather). Dietrich, however, was a
prodigious pianist, playing chamber music by the age of eight, and
there was some thought that he would pursue a career as a
professional musician. But, in 1918, when Dietrich and Sabine were
twelve years old, their older brothers – Karl-Friedrich and Walter –
left to fight for the monarchy in what would be the last year of the
first world war. Karl-Friedrich returned; Walter did not. He was
wounded, and died, just a few weeks after his departure from home.
His death took an emotional toll on the family and raised deep
existential questions for the young Dietrich – about life, death, and
the nature and impact of violent political realities (see DBWE 9:9).
By age thirteen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer decided and announced that he
would become a theologian. His mother was not surprised, but he
was openly mocked by Karl-Friedrich and his other brother, Klaus,
who found “religion a distraction from the urgent work of promoting
equality and human rights” and “warned that becoming a theologian
would amount to a retreat from reality” (Marsh, Strange Glory, 17).
Bonhoeffer’s theological path would not, in fact, lead him away from
the world, but more deeply and profoundly into it. His execution at
the hands of the Nazis, for his role in opposing them, bears this out.
Famously, he wrote in his “Account at the Turn of the Year 1942-
1943,” which was a letter of encouragement to his co-conspirators,
“The ultimately responsible question is not how I extricate myself
heroically from a situation but [how] a coming generation is to go on
living” (DBWE 8:42). A few pages later, in that same essay,
Bonhoeffer reiterates his commitment to the world. “There are
people who think [optimism] frivolous and Christians who think it
impious to hope for a better future on earth and to prepare for it…
they withdraw in resignation or pious flight from the world, from the
responsibility for ongoing life, for building anew, for the coming
generations. It may be that the day of judgment will dawn tomorrow;
only then and no earlier will we readily lay down our work for a
better future” (DBWE 8:51) From his earliest work on, Bonhoeffer’s
theology and ethics are premised on what he will come to describe
in his Ethics as the irreversible situation in which we always find
ourselves, namely, “we are living” (DBWE 6:246). It is really no
surprise, then, that these early commitments coupled with his
historical context should lead him to explore ideas about a this-
worldly Christianity in his last years, while writing from prison.
There is an old adage among folks pursuing doctoral degrees that the
best dissertation is a finished dissertation. But I contend that Dietrich
Bonhoeffer’s dissertation stands as an exception to that rule. It is not
possible to understand the whole of Bonhoeffer’s theology without a
careful look at his dissertation, or said another way, Bonhoeffer’s key
theological concepts – that he develops over the course of his life –
can be found in the dissertation, Sanctorum Communion: A Theological
Inquiry into the Sociology of the Church, written when he was 21 years
old. The editor’s introduction to the critical English edition is helpful
in laying out these ideas: he “articulates the concept of ‘person’ in
ethical relation to the ‘other,’ Christian freedom as ‘being-free-for’
the other, the reciprocal relationship of person and community,
vicarious representative action as both a Christological and an
anthropological-ethical concept, the exercise by individual persons
of responsibility for human communities, social relations as
analogies of divine-human relations, and the encounter of
transcendence in human sociality” (DBWE 1:1). In other words,
Bonhoeffer determines that his basic existential, ontological,
theological, and ethical questions have an integrated answer, that
“the concepts of person, community, and God are inseparably
interrelated” (DBWE 1:34). Accordingly, when one encounters an
‘other’ that ‘other’ places an ethical demand on me.
After finishing his dissertation in 1927, Bonhoeffer became the
associate pastor of an expatriate German congregation in Barcelona.
In the sermons and lectures he gave that year (it was just a one-year
post), a tension in his theology became quite evident. On one hand,
that ethical imperative to respond to the ‘other,’ derived from his
theology (more specifically, from his Christology), served as a guide
for starting to think about how to act with and for others. On the
other hand, he was still quite sympathetic to German nationalism
and had been shaped by a triumphalist theology. It wasn’t until he
spent a year in New York at Union Theological Seminary (the 1930-
31 academic year) that he would recognize the ways that suffering,
the suffering of real human beings in the world, racialized human
beings, would and could shape his theological understanding.
It would be very difficult to overstate the impact Bonhoeffer’s year
at Union had on his life and thought. Despite the fact that Bonhoeffer
was quite unimpressed, initially, with his course of study, his
experiences (including travel), his observations, and his friendships
were life-changing. From Professor Reinhold Niebuhr, to friends
Paul and Marion Lehmann, Erwin Sutz, Jean Lassere, and Albert
Franklin Fisher, Bonhoeffer was pressed to examine many of his own
assumptions and began to see the events of the world from below,
from the perspective of the marginalized and disenfranchised.
Lassere was a French pacificist who challenged Bonhoeffer’s reading
of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount; he confronted Bonhoeffer with new
ideas about the relationship between the Biblical text, God’s word,
and living out that word as a citizen of the world, taking seriously
Jesus’ peace commandment. By November of 1930, on Armistice
Day, Bonhoeffer preached at a Methodist church in Yonkers, New
York and began to articulate what would become his own
ecumenical, peace ethic: “I stand before you,” he said, “not only as a
Christian but also a German, who loves his home the best of all, who
rejoices with his people and who suffers, when he sees his people
suffering, who confesses gratefully, that he received from his people
all that he has and is… [He went on] You have brothers and sisters in
our people and in every people, do not forget that. Come what may,
let us never more forget, that our Christian people is the people of
God, that if we are in accord, no nationalism, no hate of races or
classes can execute its designs, and then the world will have its peace
for ever and ever” (DBWE 10:581, 584). Lassere reasserted this
sentiment in a book published eight years after Bonhoeffer’s death
when he wrote, “nothing in the Scriptures gives the Christian
authority to tear apart the body of Christ for the State or anything
else… one cannot be Christian and nationalist” (Bethge 154).
Albert Franklin Fisher was an African American student who opened
the doors to Harlem and the Abyssinian Baptist Church for
Bonhoeffer, and opened his eyes to the grave racial inequities and
indignities in the United States. Bonhoeffer taught Sunday School at
Abyssinian, became involved in various church clubs and studies,
collected gramophone records of spirituals, and visited with church
members in their homes. He also read the novels and poetry of many
Harlem Renaissance writers – WEB DuBois, Booker T. Washington,
Alaine Locke, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes – and he concluded
that the mood in this literature indicated that “the race question is
arriving at a turning point. The attempt to overcome the conflict
religiously or ethically will turn in a violent political objection”
(DBWE 10:422). [There is a footnote in the text that says by
“objection” he probably meant “resistance.”]
My friend and Bonhoeffer colleague, Reggie Williams, explores the
impact of this year in New York on Dietrich’s thinking in his 2014
book titled Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an
Ethic of Resistance. Williams writes, “Most white liberals failed to see
white supremacy as a matter for Christian attention, and as a
consequence they ignored the constant dangers of daily life in
America for black people. But avoiding racism was not a choice for
African American Christians; it was a matter of life and death in a
society organized by race and enforced by violence. Consequently,
Bonhoeffer’s friendship with Albert Fisher introduced him to
Christian worship with an inherently different view of society. With
Fisher, Bonhoeffer encountered Christians aware of human
suffering and accustomed to living with the threat of death in a
society organized by a violent white supremacy” (Williams 21-22).
So, Lassere, Fisher, Niebuhr and the others were instrumental in
Bonhoeffer’s move toward ecumenism and internationalism, a move
which came to fruition when he returned to Germany and took on
roles as a youth secretary in both the World Alliance for Promoting
International Friendship through the Churches and in the
Ecumenical Council for Practical Christianity. In the two years after
he returned from Union, Bonhoeffer engaged in this ecumenical
work (which required travel throughout Europe) as well as lectured
as a member of the theological faculty of Berlin University and
served as a student chaplain, delivering sermons and teaching
confirmation class in a working-class neighborhood of Berlin, a
community riddled with unemployment and poverty. He found
himself “moved by these people on the margins, ‘far away from the
masquerade of the “Christian world”’” (Marsh 148). His work in the
church and the community – both in New York and Berlin –
influenced his academic inquiry and teaching. Even in class his
questions were less exercises in academic abstraction and conjecture,
and more existential and urgent questions about life and faith,
eventually leading him to the question: who is Jesus Christ for
us today?
The rise of the National Socialists in Germany had concerned the
Bonhoeffer family since before Dietrich’s return from New York; the
ascent of Adolf Hitler to power at the end of January 1933 brought
their fears to the fore. Two days into his rule, Bonhoeffer delivered
a radio address warning his fellow Germans that to make an idol of
the Führer (the leader) is to make him a misleader… [Moreover] the
leader must radically reject the temptation to become an idol” which
would be to mistake, or misappropriate, the penultimate for the
ultimate. Those who make this misappropriation, who concede
responsibility to a “Superman” will, in the end, be destroyed by him.
(DBWE 12:280-281; see also Marsh 160).
Within months, Hitler opened the first concentration camps, passed
the Aryan paragraph which removed all Jews and persons of Jewish
descent from civil service, and unified twenty-eight independent,
Protestant Landeskirche (regional churches) into a
unified Reichskirche – a single, national, state church – under the
leadership of Nazi sympathizer Ludwig Müller (described in the
Bonhoeffer biography by Charles Marsh as “Hitler’s preening
sycophant” (164)). The newly formed Reich Church adopted the
Aryan paragraph, expelling from the church more than 350,000
Christians of Jewish descent. Bonhoeffer’s attempts – at the synod
gathering – to voice his opposition to this adoption “was ‘met with
jeers and catcalls’” (Marsh 164). So, he protested in a written
statement titled, “The Church and the Jewish Question,” in which he
claimed that the church has the right and responsibility to question
the actions of the state, to aid victims of the state – even if they are
not Christian, and (famously) to jam the spokes of the wheel of the
state, if the state is creating too much or too little law and order.
For Bonhoeffer, the adoption of the Aryan Paragraph by the Reich
Church constituted a status confessionis; in other words, it required a
state or stance of confession because it stood in contradiction to the
gospel itself. In September of 1933, Bonhoeffer – along with Martin
Niemöller and others – formed the Pastors’ Emergency League in
response. An initial confession, the Bethel Confession, was
published, followed soon thereafter by the Barmen Theological
Declaration and the creation of the Confessing Church. Bonhoeffer
had helped draft the Bethel Confession, though refused to sign the
final, watered down version. In both frustration and humility,
Bonhoeffer left for London in October of 1933 to lead two German-
speaking churches to, in his words, “go into the wilderness for a spell,
and simply work as a pastor, as unobtrusively as possible” (DBWE
13:22-23).
Despite his hope to work unobtrusively, Bonhoeffer continued to
pay attention to developments in Germany and reject the idea being
purported by the leadership of the German Christians in Berlin that
the work of the Third Reich was some kind of fulfillment of
scripture, an unholy kairos, if you will. He rejected the words of
Reinhold Krause, who said, “When we draw from the gospel that
which speaks to our German hearts, then the essentials of the
teaching of Jesus emerge clearly and revealingly, coinciding
completely with the demands of National Socialism, and we can be
proud of that” (Tietz 47). Rather, Bonhoeffer preached that
Christians “should read the Bible not only ‘for’ ourselves… but also
‘against’ ourselves” to know and love the world in which we actually
live, even one filled with struggle, poverty, and uncertainty (Best
xxiii-xxiv). He remained active in the ecumenical movement,
discussing developments in Germany with Bishop George Bell and
other leaders, and he reunited with his friend, Jean Lassere, at a
conference in Fanø, Denmark, in the summer of 1934, where
Bonhoeffer insisted that the conference pass a resolution,
proclaiming “we are immediately faced with the decision: National
Socialist or Christian” (DBWE 13:192). It was here that he also issued
a clarion call to peace, noting that peace is not reached by a path of
security, but only with risk. “The hour is late,” he said. “The world is
choked with weapons, and dreadful is the distrust which looks out of
all men’s eyes. The trumpets of war may blow tomorrow. For what
are we waiting?” (DBWE 13:309).
The passage on the flyer advertising today’s event [the Westar
Institute Webinar] comes from a sermon Bonhoeffer gave in
London, on an unknown date in 1934: “Christianity stands or falls
with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness, and
pride of power, and with its plea for the weak” (DBWE 13:402). It is
not a very well-known Bonhoeffer quote, though the sermon – based
on 2 Corinthians 12:9 (“my strength is made perfect in weakness”) –
made it into Isabel Best’s 2012 volume of The Collected Sermons of
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which only includes 31 texts. Best offers some
context; she notes that some of Bonhoeffer’s work with the
Emergency Pastors’ League had taken place at Bethel, a care facility
in Bielefeld, Germany for persons with mental and physical
disabilities. He had been struck by their vulnerability – especially in
the Nazi context – and what he imagined to be their “better insight
into certain realities of human existence” (Best 167). In July of 1934,
he arranged for his congregations in London to send donations to
Bethel. It strikes me that his concerns for these people – lingering
nearly a year after he met them – are resonant with his early
understanding that the “Other” places an ethical demand on me,
calling me to respond; moreover, his concerns for these folks, and
others on the margins, continue to shape his theological thinking
until his last days, when he writes from Tegel prison that “human
religiosity directs people in need to the power of God in the world,
[toward the false concept of] God as deus ex machina. The Bible
directs people toward the powerlessness and the suffering of God;
only the suffering God can help” (DBWE 8:479). This shift in
perspective, he goes on to say, will be the starting point for his
“worldly interpretation” of (Christian) faith (DBWE 8:480).
In the spring of 1935, Bonhoeffer accepted an invitation to direct a
preachers’ seminary of the Confessing Church, first at Zingsthoff,
then at Finkenwalde. His acceptance meant abandoning a planned
trip to India, to study non-violent resistance with Gandhi. At
Finkenwalde, Bonhoeffer tightly structured the days of the
seminarians: time alone, time together, time for study, time for
work, time for prayer, time for play. He was accused of legalism, of
fostering a monastic retreat from the world, when – in fact – his
intention was quite the opposite. His goal was to prepare the students
for the difficult lived reality of life in parish ministry, in opposition
to the Nazi regime. While there, Bonhoeffer wrote Discipleship, an
important (and popular) text, that often gets misread as guide to
Christian spirituality divorced from the world. Even Bonhoeffer,
later – in his Letters and Papers from Prison – warns against reading the
text in this way. Rather, Discipleship – with attention to the Lutheran
concept of grace, developed as costly grace, and a considered reading
of the Sermon on the Mount – is an astute, politically informed, call
to live vicariously and suffer vicariously on behalf of others, in
commitment and obedience to Christ. (To be blatantly obvious,
Bonhoeffer emphasizes obedience to Christ over against obedience
to Hitler.)
The seminary, though often described as illegal and/or
underground, operated without interference from the state, until it
was banned by the head of the SS at the end of August 1937, and
closed by the Gestapo on September 28th, 1937. Bonhoeffer’s
resistance to the Third Reich to this point meant that he had limited
options for work, including publishing and speaking. His friends
abroad were worried for his safety in the increasingly hostile Nazi
environment and, so, in June of 1939 he returned to the United States
with all in order to stay through the pending catastrophe. But
Bonhoeffer never felt settled about his decision to go, and returned
to Germany by the end of July. “Christians in Germany will face a
terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order
that Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their
nation and thereby destroying our civilization,” he wrote to Niebuhr.
“I know which of these alternatives I must choose, but I cannot make
that choice in security” (DBWE 15:210).
“I cannot make that choice in security.” Bonhoeffer knew the weight
of this statement when he made it because his brother-in-law, Hans
von Dohnanyi, a member of the Abwehr, the German Military
Intelligence, had informed him of the coup being planned in that
office, involving Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and General Hans Oster.
Von Dohnanyi was able to secure Bonhoeffer an appointment that
set Dietrich up as a double-agent, ostensibly using his ecumenical
contacts throughout Europe to gather information for the Nazis
when actually he was passing information about the resistance in the
other direction. In this context, he began work on his Ethics, which
he envisioned as his magnum opus. In it, he rejects the idea that ethics
can be universally valid or derived from general principles. Rather,
he advances a Christological understanding of responsibility that is
tied to concrete reality and reiterates his idea that one is called to
respond to an ‘other’ in need:
“Christ was not essentially a teacher, a lawgiver, but human being, a
real human being like us. Accordingly, Christ does not want to us to
be first of all pupils, representatives and advocates of a particular
doctrine, but human beings, real human beings before God. Christ
did not, like an ethicist, love a theory about the good; he loved real
people. Christ was not interested like a philosopher, in what is
‘generally valid,’ but in that which serves real concrete human beings.
Christ was not concerned with whether “the maxim of an action”
could become “a principle of universal law,” but whether my action
now helps my neighbor to be a human being before God. God did
not become an idea, a principle, a program, a universally valid belief,
or a law. God became human” (DBWE 6:98-99).
In letters to his best friend and eventual biographer, Eberhard
Bethge, as well as Paul Lehmann, Bonhoeffer wrote that he found his
work on Ethics “dangerous” and “stimulating.” “Sometimes I think
after this time,” he said, “that Christianity will only live in a few
people who have nothing to say” (DBWE 16:168).
On April 5th, 1943, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested on tenuous
charges – related to his role in the Abwehr, but unrelated to the plot
to kill Hitler. He was sent to Tegel prison in Berlin. While many
readers of Bonhoeffer return again and again to Discipleship or Life
Together (his brief account of life at Finkenwalde), I find myself
drawn to the Letters and Papers from Prison. In fact, before the new
critical editions of Bonhoeffer’s works were published by Fortress
Press, my paperback copy of Letters was bound together with rubber
bands and paper clips. (Two of my students “borrowed” my book, a
dozen years ago, and had it bound for me.) I am drawn to the
questions and conclusions Bonhoeffer reaches in his prison
reflections, even though they are incomplete – questions about the
possibility of a religionless interpretation of Christianity that means
one only “learns to have faith by living in the full this-worldliness of
life… living fully in the midst of life’s tasks, questions, successes and
failures, experiences, and perplexities – then one takes seriously no
longer one’s own sufferings but rather the suffering of God in the
world… this is faith; this is metanoia. And this is how one becomes a
human being, a Christian” DBWE 8:486).
On July 20th, 1944, the final attempt on Hitler’s life failed. Two
months later the Gestapo discovered the files (a secret archive) of the
Resistance. Bonhoeffer was implicated in the planned coup; he knew
he would never be released. In all his theological and ethical work,
he never offered a justification for tyrannicide. He wrote of freedom
and responsibility, and taking on guilt. In that essay written to his co-
conspirators, after ten years of Hitler’s rule, he named the “great
masquerade of evil” that “has thrown all ethical concepts into
confusion” (DBWE 8:38). He wondered “who stands firm?” asserting
that “civil courage can grow only from the free responsibility of the
free man… It is founded on a God who calls for the free venture of
faith to responsible action and who promises forgiveness and
consolation to the one who on account of such action becomes a
sinner” (DBWE 8:40, 41). Bonhoeffer closes that essay with what I
might call the hermeneutical key, the interpretive lens, for the whole
of his work and life. It is a section called “the view from below.” “It
remains an experience of incomparable value that we have for once
learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the
perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the
powerless, the oppressed and reviled, in short from the perspective
of the suffering” (DBWE 8:52).
On April 9th, 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was marched, naked, to the
gallows at Flössenburg Concentration Camp and hanged. He was 39
years old. The camp was liberated a few weeks later. His family and
friends, including his fiancé, Maria von Wedemeyer, did not learn of
his death until the end of June. His brother, Klaus, and brothers-in-
law, Hans von Dohnanyi and Rudiger Schleicher, were all executed
the same week in April as Dietrich.
Works Cited
The Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works in English (DBWE) published by
Fortress Press (Minneapolis, MN) with various editors and
translators, (1996-2014). (This essay cites volumes 1, 6, 8, 9, 10, 13, 15,
16.)
DBWE 1: Sanctorum Communio
DBWE 2: Act and Being
DBWE 3: Creation and Fall
DBWE 4: Discipleship
DBWE 5: Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible
DBWE 6: Ethics
DBWE 7: Fiction from Tegel Prison
DBWE 8: Letters and Papers from Prison
DBWE 9: The Young Bonhoeffer, 1918-1927
DBWE 10: Barcelona, Berlin, New York, 1928-1931
DBWE 11: Ecumenical, Academic, and Pastoral Work, 1931-1932
DBWE 12: Berlin, 1932-1933
DBWE 13: London, 1933-1935
DBWE 14: Theological Education at Finkenwalde, 1935-1937
DBWE 15: Theological Education Underground, 1937-1940
DBWE 16: Conspiracy and Imprisonment, 1940-1945
DBWE 17: Index and Supplementary Materials
Bethge, Eberhard. Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, translated by
Victoria J. Barnett. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000.
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. The Collected Sermons of Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
translated and edited by Isabel Best. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress
Press, 2012.
Marsh, Charles. Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.
Tietz, Christiane. Theologian of Resistance: The Life and Thoughts of
Dietrich Bonhoeffer; translated by Victoria J. Barnett. Minneapolis,
MN: Fortress Press, 2016.
Williams, Reggie L. Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance
Theology and an Ethic of Resistance. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press,
2014.
By Lori Brandt Hale