The Church Times had a very nice review of Schlingensiepen's new Bonhoeffer biography last Friday. It is now available online. I would not have thought that one could cover Boswell and Johnson and also Abaelard and Heloise in a review of a book on Bonhoeffer, but there you go...
"Few people, since the time of Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, have been as fortunate in their biographers as Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Eberhard Bethge. His is, and will remain, the standard life by a friend, a kinsman, and a companion. Still, as he himself admitted, a book of more than 1000 pages is too long for many readers, and in any case perspectives have changed since 1967, new material has come to light, and an author can no longer take for granted an immediate knowledge of the complexities of life in both Church and State in the Third Reich.
The need for a shorter study was met in 1992 by Renate Wind’s A Spoke in the Wheel; and Ferdinand Schlingensiepen now meets our other needs with this equally admirable work. It is a standard biography in 12 chronological chapters, starting with Bonhoeffer’s privileged birth in the noonday of the cultural élite of Wilhelminian Germany, and ending with his horrific death on the gallows in the twilight of a truly evil empire.
It was not only faith in Jesus Christ, but also the inner security that he gained from his family, his education, and his position in society, which gave him the inner strength progressively to detach himself from the particularities of class, nation, and denomination in order to become a “man for others”, and thus to belong to us all as a teacher and martyr of the universal Church.
Bethge was writing when it was still necessary to convince a sceptical German public that the conspirators against Adolf Hitler were not traitors but true patriots. Schlingensiepen emphasises rather the explicit connection that Bonhoeffer made between theology and political action. “It was theological thinking and decisions that made this Confessing Church pastor a member of the Resistance movement.”
He has made excellent use of newly opened archives of both the Resistance and the Confessing Church, on the one hand, and of the various competing, gangsterish institutions of Hitler’s Germany, on the other.
Bonhoeffer’s correspondence with his fiancée, the talented and spirited Maria von Wedemeyer, which was not available to Bethge, deepens and humanises the portraiture. They were never alone together during their engagement, which consisted of “eighteen agonizing farewells”; and yet this is a love-story to set beside that of Hélöise and Abelard."
Read the full review here.
As mentioned yesterday, amazon.com and amazon.co.uk are running a special offer on the book.
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