“In ordinary life, we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.” These are the words of a vibrant, and gifted young German pastor who spent the last few years of his life in a Nazi concentration camp.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who, under inhuman conditions, with insufficient food and constant brutality, authored one of the great classics of prison literature, Letters and Papers from Prison, written between April 1943 until his execution in April of 1945.
The posthumous compilation of Bonhoeffer’s letters and papers effectively serves as the last will and testament of one of the most important Protestant thinkers of the twentieth century.
Bonhoeffer was a young theologian who took an unshakable stand against surrendering Christian precepts to political ideology. Bonhoeffer’s outspoken political opinions isolated him within his church, and throughout the 1930s many of his activities were focused abroad.
Bonhoeffer’s story seems as vitally relevant, as politically prophetic, and as theologically significant today, as it did three-quarters of a century ago.
Prior to his imprisonment, Bonhoeffer had been teaching young clergy in an “illegal” underground seminary known as the Confessing Church. The German government had banned him from teaching openly. After the seminary was discovered and closed, the Confessing Church became increasingly reluctant to speak out against Hitler.
The fact that moral opposition proved increasingly ineffective, forced Bonhoeffer to change his strategy. Up to this point he had been a pacifist, believing he could oppose Hitler’s National Socialism through religious action and moral persuasion.
Frustrated, Bonhoeffer decided to enlist with the German secret service, intending to serve as a double agent. While traveling to church conferences throughout Europe, where he was supposed to be collecting information about the places he visited, he, instead, helped Jews escape Nazi oppression. It was during this time that Bonhoeffer became a part of a plot to overthrow, and later to assassinate, Hitler.
In his new role, Bonhoeffer became an important contact for church and ecumenical leaders in the United States and Europe, eventually traveling to America to become a guest lecturer. But he couldn’t shake a feeling of responsibility for his country. Within months of his arrival, he wrote theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, “I have made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period in our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.”
Bonhoeffer, though aware of various plots on Hitler’s life, was never at the center of the clandestine plans. Eventually his resistance efforts were discovered and on an April afternoon in 1943, two men drove up in a black Mercedes. The men put Bonhoeffer in the car and transported him to prison.
In its overview of National Book Award-winning author Martin Marty’s book, Lives of Great Religious Books, Princeton University Press comments, “For fascination, influence, inspiration, and controversy, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison is unmatched by any other book of Christian reflection written in the twentieth century.”
Within the overcrowded confines of prison walls, Bonhoeffer reflected passionately and with great insight on the prevailing culture and the importance of standing up for Truth in the face of confusing, chaotic and difficult times. He contends, “We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; we have been drenched by many storms; we have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretenc[s]e; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical. Are we still of any use? What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, and straightforward men. Will our inward power of resistance be strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves remorseless enough, for us to find our way back to simplicity and straightforwardness?
“If we look more closely, we see that any violent display of power, whether political or religious, produces an outburst of folly in a large part of mankind; indeed, this seems actually to be a psychological and sociological law: the power of some needs the folly of others. It is not that certain human capacities, intellectual capacities for instance, become stunted or destroyed, but rather that the upsurge of power makes such an overwhelming impression that men are deprived of their independent judgment, and give up trying to assess the new state of affairs for themselves.”
Wow! Bonhoeffer’s words couldn’t be more timely!
On April 9, 1945, at age thirty-nine, one month before Germany surrendered, Bonhoeffer was hanged with six other resisters, including his brother Klaus Bonhoeffer and his brothers-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi and Rüdiger Schleicher. Max Koegel, described by American historian Todd Huebner as “a vicious martinet” was commandant of the prison at the time of Bonhoeffer’s execution. Ironically, a year later (after the war), Koegel would commit suicide by hanging himself in his prison cell.
A decade later, as recorded in a Christianity Today article, a camp doctor who witnessed Bonhoeffer’s hanging described the scene: “The prisoners … were taken from their cells, and the verdicts of court martial read out to them. Through the half-open door in one room of the huts, I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer, before taking off his prison garb, kneeling on the floor praying fervently to his God. I was most deeply moved by the way this lovable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer. At the place of execution, he again said a prayer and then climbed the steps to the gallows, brave and composed. His death ensued in a few seconds. In the almost 50 years that I have worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.“
Now read the following Bonhoeffer quote in the context of his personal life’s journey …
“I’ve had a remarkable life. I seem to be in such good places at the right time. You know, if you were to ask me to sum my life up in one word …gratitude.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Incredible!
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