Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vol. 12: Berlin: 1932–1933 (review)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer occupies a rare place in history. For example, he was one of the few Christians in Germany never charmed by any portion of what Hitler offered to the beleaguered German people. He, along with the rest of his family, recognized from the start what is acknowleged today—that this regime did not protect but violated moral values. He also occupies a rare place in history as a martyr, executed in April 1945 and now remembered, for example, at Westminster Abbey, where his statue is one of ten in a row of modern martyrs newly placed over the west entrance.

Bonhoeffer also occupies a relatively rare place in publishing, with sixteen thick volumes of his complete works offered to readers of English, thirteen of them now complete. This represents a project of the International Bonhoeffer Society, undertaken to make available in English the sixteen volumes completed in German by 1998. Bonhoeffer is well worth the trouble, on two counts. His life story is one of Christian courage and ethical acumen in response to Hitler and the Holocaust. Nazi horrors were perpetrated by a Christian nation with an extraordinary list of cultural accomplishments. Bonhoeffer’s rare voice in opposition—including, finally, participation in the failed plot to assassinate Hitler—has an important place in the history of that period. Additionally, Bonhoeffer’s writings increasingly became available and grew in stature during the postwar period, so that he now ranks among the most influential Protestant theologians of the twentieth century.

Volume 12 is of special interest, since it represents a crucial year, starting three months before the rise of Hitler. Born in 1906, Bonhoeffer was only in his mid-twenties at the time, but he had packed many accomplishments into his tender years. He completed his doctorate by age twenty-one and his second dissertation, the German Habilitation, at age twenty-four. He then spent 1930–31 at Union Theological Seminary in New York, befriending Reinhold Niebuhr and learning to know and respect the African American experience of worship at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in neighboring Harlem. Bonhoeffer began lecturing at the University of Berlin in 1931 at age twenty-five; this volume tells us much about his ideas, his students, and his unique approach to the trade of the German professor. He stood out for his students in his accessibility, the breadth of his knowledge, the sharpness of his theological insight, and the intensity of his political concerns. Larry Rasmussen, in his very useful introduction to this volume, argues that Bonhoeffer’s lectures on Christology in summer 1933—available only through his students’ notes—establish a foundation for both his theology and politics as they matured over the next twelve years.

During this period, Bonhoeffer also played a part in some of the most important decisions taken by the German Protestant Church, as can be seen in the letters and papers published in this volume. He helped the “Young Reformers” in their unsuccessful effort to thwart the pro-Nazi “German Christians” in the church elections of July 1933. He then worked with Martin Niemöller in developing the Pastor’s Emergency League, a group opposed to “German Christian” attempts to impose the “Aryan Paragraph” in the church. Then he coauthored the Bethel Confession, which became a foundational document for Karl Barth’s Barmen Declaration and the establishment of the Confessing Church. These writings and activities place Bonhoeffer at the heart of questions that remain important to our understanding of Protestants in Nazi Germany. Finally, this volume contains Bonhoeffer’s “The Church and the Jewish Question,” a document not without some controversy, but still a most prescient knife cutting through the anti-Jewish policies of the Nazi program. Published in June 1933, this document challenged the church to question the state “as to the legitimate state character of its actions...