This is the biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor, born in Breslau in 1906 and killed in the Flossenbürg concentration camp in 1945; a testament for those interested in the ecumenical movement, the history of Christianity, and contemporary history.
The book moves readers deeply and challenges them in the way that always happens when we encounter someone who, blessed from childhood with an intuition of faith, spends a lifetime deepening and broadening it, living it out concretely day after day, to its ultimate consequences, and standing ready to die for it. Without entering into the theological debates that occupied much of his life, what strikes us about Bonhoeffer is his steady, persevering faith. Such loyalty and the will to make it fruitful—despite doubt, hardship, and fear—seem to us values that must be reasserted and witnessed to today, precisely now.
For Bonhoeffer, everything we must do rests in this loyalty and this will to live faith in Christ: He is here among us, notwithstanding His transcendence. "He stands beyond in the midst of our life," he writes to his friend Bethge. We know this, but sometimes it is hard to live it out in practice—especially in an age as complex as ours, so full of uncertainty amid contradictory choices. Bonhoeffer calls us to continuity: continuity in meditating on the word of Jesus, in prayer, in solidarity. The books he wrote during the interwar years—Life Together, The Cost of Discipleship, Ethics—along with his articles, sermons, and letters, document a deep faith lived with courage in a society that was disintegrating and seemed to find no reference point outside Nazism and its aberrant claims. Even church leaders and so-called "respectable" or "religious" people fell under its spell. Many in that era felt they had no choice but the one proclaimed by the majority: dictatorship, violence, injustice.
In those tragic moments—Hitler's rise to power, his persecution of Jews, minorities, and anyone who would not openly support him—even the evangelical churches, which had previously made great contributions to ecumenism, split into two large groups: the German Christians Church, which backed Hitler and was the strongest and most numerous, and the Confessing Church, which continued to believe in Christ as the sole Light, Judge, and Model, and represented evangelical resistance against Nazism. Members of the Confessing Church were decimated through arrest, torture, and murder.
Hitler's vast following in Germany and beyond is well known; less known is the hidden, intense work done to advance justice and freedom, and the great number of people who devoted themselves to it, even to the point of death. Bonhoeffer was one of them. His faith and his testimony reach us today to encourage us to continue. His writings bring us close to this brother of ours—the man of prayer, the passionate theologian, the fighter for freedom and justice, the friend and companion of all people.
An eyewitness to his death, a physician at Flossenbürg concentration camp, described his final moments this way: "That morning, between five and six o'clock, the prisoners were taken from their cells and the verdict of the court-martial was read to them. Through the half-open door of a barrack room I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer kneeling on the floor, praying to God with fervor. I was deeply moved by the way this gentle man prayed, so devout and confident that God heard his prayer. At the place of execution he said another brief prayer and then walked up the steps to the scaffold, brave and composed. In almost fifty years of medical practice I have never seen a man die so completely surrendered to the will of God."
- Natalia Livi, 1993