Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A new biography

I am delighted to announce the publication of a major new biography on Dietrich Bonhoeffer this fall. The book was originally published in German by C. H. Beck Verlag in Munich. The author, Dr Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, is one of the founders of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Society. The book was translated by Isabel Best, one of the translators of the "Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works". In his foreword Ferdinand Schlingensiepen explains how he came to write this book and why he thinks there is a need for a new biography now:

"My first encounter with the name Bonhoeffer came in 1948, when I received as a gift the small volume Zeugnis eines Boten [Testimony of a Messenger], edited by W.A. Visser ‘t Hooft of the Netherlands, the first General Secretary of the World Council of Churches. I was fascinated with the way it made Bonhoeffer live for me as a human being. Still, I never thought of asking my father about Bonhoeffer. That my father had not only known him, but that they had once sat together in a green police van having an animated conversation, while under house arrest along with other pastors in Martin Niemöller’s home, I only found out years later. Throughout my university study, Bonhoeffer remained for me a name from the time of the church struggle, to be mentioned respectfully along with the names of Paul Schneider, Lutz Steil, Werner Sylten, Friedrich Weissler and Friedrich Justus Perels, pastors and staff members of the Confessing Church who also were murdered by the SS in its concentration camps.

In 1952 Bonhoeffer’s image changed almost overnight, when his letters from prison were published under the title Widerstand und Ergebung [Resistance and Submission – published in English in 1953 as Letters and Papers from Prison] and became the topic of conversation among us younger people. The generation ahead of us was probably no less fascinated, but almost all older theologians to whom we mentioned the book said that Bonhoeffer’s new theological ideas were ‘too fragmentary’ to be evaluated. They had experienced much of the church struggle in the same way he had, but the last phase of his life, during World War II, had been entirely different for them. This must have caused him to appear suddenly different and strange to them as a theologian.

I feel fortunate to this day that in 1954 I was sent to Bradford, in the north of England, as pastor to a German-speaking congregation, because it was in this way that I got to know Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer’s close friend and first biographer. He was then working in London, and in spite of living relatively far apart we saw each other often. It was not long before I became part of Eberhard and Renate Bethge’s circle of friends. So I was aware of Bethge’s labourious efforts to decipher the manuscripts his friend had left, in order to publish them. Probably he was also already doing preparatory work for the biography; but he gave priority to every theologian who wanted to write something about Bonhoeffer. He photocopied texts for his visitors, counselled them in long conversations, and invited many to stay for meals and overnight. So the first researchers on Bonhoeffer came to see him through the eyes of Eberhard Bethge. This was true for me as well.

To this day, most of what we know about Bonhoeffer comes from Bethge’s long biography of Bonhoeffer which came out in 1967 (in English in 1970). All subsequent biographies, including the present one, have to build upon it. Since Bethge lived through the decisive years at his friend’s side, his work is one of the most important sources on Bonhoeffer’s life. We may admire Bethge all the more that he was nevertheless able to achieve the distance from his subject that every biographer needs.

Even when his biography was first published, Eberhard Bethge had the impression that, with its 1080 pages, it was too long for most readers. He asked me if I would write a shorter version. I set to work eagerly, but had to stop when I accepted a new professional responsibility in 1969. It is only now, in the book that lies before you, that I feel I have finally fulfilled the request of the man whose friendship has meant so much to me. However, a shortened version of Bethge’s work would now no longer meet the need for an up-to-date biography of Bonhoeffer. Bethge himself, in his foreword to the fifth edition of his book in 1983, raised the question whether it wasn’t time to revise the ‘image that was set in 1967’. This question has only become more urgent since then.

We know more today than we did several decades ago about Bonhoeffer’s life and his thinking. For example, the publication in 1992 (in English in 1994) of Love Letters from Cell 92 makes it possible to portray Bonhoeffer’s engagement to Maria von Wedemeyer in more detail than Bethge could do in 1967. At least as significant is the fact that we know, since publication of the complete correspondence between Bonhoeffer and Bethge, how modestly, for decades, Bethge kept himself in the background behind his friend. Yet he was an indispensable dialogue partner for Bonhoeffer, whether in helping him to clarify important ideas or even inspiring them.

When Bethge was writing his book, the Third Reich period was much more clearly present in the consciousness of the German people than it is today. Bethge could assume that people were familiar with experiences in the church and with words that we now have to explain. On the other hand, we today know much more about the Third Reich and the resistance to it than was known in Bethge’s time. But it is especially people’s estimation of the Resistance which has changed fundamentally. It is no longer regarded with suspicion, but rather positively for the most part. Commemorations of the attempted overthrow on 20 July 1944 had been held since 1946, but were still an embarrassment to many politicians in 1967. Adenauer, though he had been consistently opposed to Hitler, never attended these ceremonies. He knew how unpopular it would have been for him as Chancellor to do so. Very few Germans in Adenauer’s time would have mourned Hitler, but scarcely any wanted to confront questions about their own Nazi past, or even worse, to think about what they should have been doing then. So Bethge still had to protect Bonhoeffer against denigration. His biography can also be read as a defence of Bonhoeffer as a member of the Resistance.

Today, in contrast, Bonhoeffer enjoys great respect, not least of all because his opposition to Hitler began even before 1933. The accusation that the nationalist, conservative Resistance didn’t turn away from Hitler until late in his regime does not apply to Bonhoeffer any more than to his brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyi, or the other members of his family, just as it does not apply to Helmuth von Moltke and Adam von Trott. Bonhoeffer no longer needs to be defended.

Glad as one may be of this development, there is also a danger in it. A person whose hundredth birthday is ceremoniously celebrated, who died a martyr sixty years ago, can easily become the focus of universal veneration – all the more when he lived such a life as Bonhoeffer’s, and when he left us a poem such as ‘Von guten Mächten [Powers of Good]’. But Bonhoeffer did not want to be venerated; he wanted to be heard. Anyone who puts him up on a lonely pedestal is defusing that which, to this day, makes a thoughtful encounter with him worthwhile.

This includes the unique connection Bonhoeffer made between theology and political action, which still aroused mistrust during the postwar period. Thus during the first decades after World War II, the Evangelical Church pastor Paul Schneider, murdered in the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1939, was frequently held up as a ‘genuine’ martyr over against Bonhoeffer, who had been ‘liquidated’, not as a confessing Christian, but as a conspirator together with his companions in the Resistance. Hitler himself had given the orders, in his command bunker during the ‘noon meeting’ on 5 April 1945. Bonhoeffer is nevertheless a Christian martyr, because he did not enter into his role as a conspirator by chance; instead, it was theological thinking and decisions that made this Confessing Church pastor a member of the Resistance movement. He had already long been engaged in other ways in the political struggle. And not least of all, his brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyi, and Colonel Oster persuaded him to join the conspiracy.

Bonhoeffer’s attitude towards racism and colonialism was shared by few others in his time and thus remarkably forward-looking. Before 1933 he had experienced, in a black church congregation in the USA, their acceptance of him as an equal in the midst of a racist society. At that time he was hoping to travel to India to learn about the religions in that country shaped by colonialism. When he heard about Gandhi, it seemed to him that here was the quintessential teacher who stood up to the dangers of the time. That Bonhoeffer already had racism and colonialism in his field of vision was not the least of the reasons why he recognised, soon after Hitler came to power in 1933, anti-Semitism driven to the worst excesses as the issue, for church and politics, which would decide the future of Germany. It is this vision, as clear-headed as it was committed, which makes Bonhoeffer interesting to people who want to look beyond the trends and interests of their day and develop their own perception of long-term developments. In September 1941 Bonhoeffer wrote from Switzerland, to his American friend Paul Lehmann, what we today can recognise as an astonishingly prophetic letter: ‘The development that we believe is bound to come in the near future is world domination – if you will forgive me this expression – by America . . . But at any rate the power of the USA will be so overwhelming that hardly any country could represent a counterbalance.’ (DBWE 16, 219, original in English). Bonhoeffer was worried to see this coming, although he felt that ‘world domination by America’ was the only possible solution for the world in which he was then living. But what does this mean, if not that, decades ahead of time, he foresaw problems that have not been solved to this day. What he said about it challenges us to think further. This is also true, not least of all, for his ideas about guilt and how it should be handled. ‘It would really be very interesting to study Islam on its own soil’, he wrote in April 1924, aged 18, to his parents from Tripoli (DBWE 9, 120). Where are the theologians, or persons responsible for educational policy, who are doing this today when it is so urgently necessary? But enough of such examples.

To be able to live, to act and to die as Bonhoeffer did requires traits that even he did not inherit, but rather acquired in youth, in his parents’ home and during his university studies: intellectual curiosity, an incorruptible sense of justice and injustice, and the courage to reach decisions which he himself found uncomfortable or could become dangerous for him. In these ways Bonhoeffer is an example to others, and could even be interesting for people who no longer expect anything from the church. However, they must be prepared – with intellectual curiosity of their own – to be involved with what, for Bonhoeffer, theology was. Bonhoeffer wanted to expose theology to ‘the fresh air of modern thinking’. He insisted that the message of the church must always apply concretely to the reality of the world. Timeless truths he considered useless, for ‘what is always true is precisely what is not true today.’ It is the biographer’s privilege not to need to write treatises on such ideas, but rather to tell a story which takes in all of that, and more."

Düsseldorf-Kaiserswerth, Good Friday 2005

Ferdinand Schlingensiepen

Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945. Martyr, Thinker, Man of Resistance will publish in October 2009

Comments

[Dr Frank Wills]

Dear Sir or Madam,

I have just your interesting piece on the English translation of Ferdinand Schlingensiepen's new biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It doesn't seem to offer any information on how this book can be obtained. Can you possibly give me any further information.

Best wishes, Dr Frank Wills.

[Helen Evison]

I am trying to buy the translation by Isabel Best for my husband. Can I buy it online or must I buy it through a book shop? I want to give it to him on our wedding anniversary next week.

[Nick O'Neill]

The publish date for Schlingensiepen's book on Bonhoeffer has yet to appear in English although publish date was October 2009. When is the book to be available? Nick O'Neill /Skien,Norway

[Tom Kraft]

The book is now out in the UK and will be available in the US in early May. Sorry about the delay!

[Tony Cox]

Friedrich Weissler was the father of my friend and colleague Ollie Weissler. Ollie told me some stories concerning his father but I would love to know more. Can anyone point me to further information about Friedrich Weissler?

Tony Cox