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10 C. Historians Interpreting Bonhoeffer The Bonhoeffer Legacy as Work-in-Progress: Reflections on a Fragmentary Series Victoria J. Barnett The 2011 conference on which this volume is based examined the numerous aspects of Bonhoeffer’s life and thought that continue to impact Christian life and witness around the world. Yet to a very great extent, future scholarship will be based primarily on the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke / Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works: the sixteen-volume collection of his papers, correspondence, and theological writings. These volumes will remain seminal to any understanding of his work, life, and legacy not only theologically, but historically (for our understanding of Bonhoeffer, his church, and his times, including the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust) and biographically (for our understanding of his person). As the very existence of sixteen volumes shows, Bonhoeffer’s life is an extraordinarily well-documented one, as is the historical period during which he lived. Yet, despite the vast documentation and the countless books that have been written about Bonhoeffer, his life and work remain fragmentary in many ways, and the series illustrates that as well. In this brief essay I wish to discuss the relationship between these fragments and the whole, particularly when we reflect on how Bonhoeffer will be understood by coming generations. The Bonhoeffer legacy is best approached as a work-in-progress. I have spent hundreds of hours in the past years reading through these works, both in German and in our translations. There are thousands of pages, hundreds of letters, seventy-one sermons, Bible studies, lecture notes, and papers he prepared to deliver at international conferences, the polished and finished theological works as well as the countless threads of thought and reflection that appear in the odd letter or draft. Part of this process has entailed understanding 93 the life in German, and then trying to imagine how all this can best be conveyed and understood in English. This is not just a matter of translating the language but of conveying the times, the culture, the church, and most importantly, the ways in which this man understood his faith. The world in which Bonhoeffer lived is gone, and, to a great extent, so is the understanding of church and faith that shaped him and his students. This poses a particular challenge not only to translators but to historians and theologians. There is something both moving and unsettling about the process of reading through someone’s life chronologically, day by day, week by week, year through year. When one is in the thick of this work the big picture vanishes from sight. The Bonhoeffer volumes contain both the grand narrative and the pieces of that narrative, which include the documents that one would expect to be preserved as well as drafts and notes that I suspect he would have thrown away if he had known we would be doing this with them. Early in the process of assembling Bonhoeffer’s writings, Eberhard Bethge made the decision to include everything, from the rough drafts to the polished pieces—the attempts, the successes, the failures. Inevitably one loses sight of the forest and even the trees and is immersed in the microcosmic level. This is where the role of general editor is somewhat unique, because I have been looking not just at entire documents but at sentences and translation choices and the placement of semicolons. It is analogous to when a sharp-edged stone falls into tumbling water and over the course of time is worn down and reshaped. It is the task of the historian, the biographer, and the theologian to describe the stone and the water and the currents that form it and the end result. But in the midst of the actual documents, one is immersed in the process of the changes in the stone. It is here that we can sometimes see the actual moments of change in his life and thought: those moments where a new concept emerged, where he clarified something, or where a decision was made that determined the course of his life. On the level of grand narrative we look for those great turning points: the decision to study theology, the decision to go to London, return to Germany, enter the resistance, or become engaged to Maria von Wedemeyer. Yet up close in these volumes we see how even these major turning points emerge slowly, as they would obviously emerge over the course of a life, as the steady accumulation of small...

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