Bonhoeffer
Prophet and Martyr
John Henry Queripel
BONHOEFFER
Prophet and Martyr
Copyright © 2016 John Henry Queripel. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
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Dietrich Bonhoeffer
A Life of Witness
The circuitous route taken by Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s captors in the dying days of the Third Reich to his place of execution, from the Gestapo Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse prison in Berlin, to Buchenwald, Flossenburg, Regensburg, Schonberg, and finally back to Flossenburg, was in stark clear contrast to the single-minded clear certainty with which Dietrich Bonhoeffer moved toward his death. On arrival finally at that place, Flossenburg—forever associated with him, though he spent only some twelve hours there—Bonhoeffer was given a summary trial, court martialled on the evening of his arrival, before being crudely executed the following morning, April 9, 1945, only weeks from the war’s end with the guns of the Allies sounding in the distance. Three weeks later, Adolf Hitler, the one who had ordered Bonhoeffer’s execution, was dead by his own hand. A week after that suicide the “thousand-year Reich” was no more.
Why would Hitler have concerned himself with the execution of a Lutheran pastor and why would a pastor be facing a court martial? The answer to those questions is that this pastor was indeed one who was very different. Originally drawn to the idea of non-violent resistance as typified by Mahatma Gandhi, whom he so wished to visit, Dietrich Bonhoeffer had ended up part of military intelligence, the Abwehr, and was even deeply involved in their plot to kill Hitler. The best known of these failed plots, that of July 20, 1944, linked with Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, was the reason why the tyrannical ruler, even in what he should have known to be the final weeks of his rule, found it necessary in an act of vengeance to personally order the execution of all those involved in plots to overthrow the regime. Thus, on that morning Bonhoeffer died in the company of General Wilhelm Canaris, under whose command he had been at the Abwehr, and other conspirators including Major General Hans Oster and Judge Advocate Karl Sack.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was not the only one of his family involved in the conspiratorial plots to kill Hitler. Far from it! Indeed the whole family was involved in opposition to the Nazis with a number actively joining the conspiracy, and for that the family would pay dearly. In martyrdom Dietrich was joined by his brother Klaus and two of his brother-in-laws, Hans von Dohnanyi, who had recruited him to the Abwehr, and Rudiger Schleicher. Given the chaos of the final weeks of the war and those days following immediately after, it was to be a couple of months after his execution that both the parents and also the fiancée of Dietrich Bonhoeffer were to have their worst fears cruelly confirmed. That the parents had Bonhoeffer’s death confirmed from listening to a radio broadcast of a memorial service being held for him in London shows the great esteem in which Dietrich Bonhoeffer was already being held. Of course that estimation has continued to grow over the succeeding years.
That esteem in which Bonhoeffer is held is not only due to his brave martyrdom but also for his brilliant theological mind, and it could fairly be said that much of modern theological thought finds its roots in this man’s writings. Given that he was only thirty-nine when he was executed, one is only left to ponder what brilliant subsequent thought was consigned to the grave with him. The preliminary thoughts of future works he was considering, smuggled from prison, give some indication but also teasingly leave much to conjecture. A couple of those letters in particular addressed to his great friend Eberhard Bethge, in which he spoke of ‘religionless Christianity,’ has led to all sorts of speculation as to where Bonhoeffer’s thoughts were going.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born into a prominent German family with both sides of the family being well connected. His father, Karl Bonhoeffer, a leading psychiatrist, held the foremost chair in the field in Germany at the Berlin University from his appointment in 1912 until his death in 1948, and ironically in that role he would be pressed into service in examining Marius van der Lubbe, the Dutch Communist almost certainly framed by the Nazis, for starting the Reichstag (German Parliament) fire. Bonhoeffer’s mother, Paula von Hase, a teacher, was likewise from a prominent family. Her parents been connected to the emperor’s court at Potsdam, while her grandfather Karl had been a famous theologian and both her father and brother were pastors. It could be argued that the deep religious conviction of Dietrich Bonhoeffer found its genesis on the maternal side of the family while his rigorous questioning found its roots in the more religiously sceptical paternal side of the family. The Bonhoeffer family thus were very much part of the cultural and intellectual elite in Germany, and from such circles, often shocked by the common vulgar brutality of the Nazis, would come much of the opposition to Hitler.
The young Dietrich was intellectually precocious, his reflections made on a trip to Rome when just eighteen on the links between the culture of antiquity of the classical world and that of modern Europe bearing strong witness to that. During that same trip to Italy Bonhoeffer began also to reflect upon the nature of the church, with his narrow nationalist understanding of the church, a view shared by almost all Germans of the time, being challenged by the universal nature of the Roman Church with its huge range of cultures present in the Vatican. This experience largely led to Bonhoeffer’s doctorate, “Sanctorum Communio: A Dogmatic Inquiry into the Sociology of the Church,” along with his post-doctorate, Act and Being. In contrast to the narrow nationalism of the German church, Bonhoeffer’s wider universal view would make him less susceptible later to the propaganda of the Nazis, who, drawing from Luther, equated the Christian message and German nationalism and thus were able to draw the great majority of the German church to their cause.
Bonhoeffer’s doctorate was completed within the highly prestigious theological faculty of the University of Berlin by the time he was just twenty-one. That faculty had as its iconic figure the father of modern liberal Christian thought, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), and still heavily bore his influence. During the time of Bonhoeffer’s studies the faculty head was another paradigmatic figure within liberal Christian thought, Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930). While the liberal views of the faculty may have been met with familial understanding, though much of the family thought Dietrich’s brilliance was wasted in theology, they left Bonhoeffer unsatisfied. While not opposed to Christianity the Bonhoeffer family, as typified by his father Karl, had imbibed deeply from a more empirical scientific source. As Professor of Psychiatry Karl Bonhoeffer was an empiricist with little time for the emerging psychoanalytical movement led by such figures as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Alfred Adler. Family discussions were set by a need to be concise and to have clarity in thinking, with overdone appeals to emotion frowned upon. This environment set the course for the Bonhoeffer siblings, with Dietrich’s brother Klaus choosing a
