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1 A. Bonhoeffer and Public Ethics in Six Nations, 1945-2010 Inspiration, Controversy, Legacy: Responses to Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Three Germanys Wolfgang Huber I have been invited to present the German case for the influence of Dietrich Bonhoeffer on public ethics. As a German myself, I may seem an obvious choice to interpret Bonhoeffer’s influence from a German perspective. But there is an enormous difference between Bonhoeffer’s time, ending in 1945, and the later contexts of the responses to his life and work. It is true that Dietrich Bonhoeffer cannot be read ahistorically, but this is equally true for the reception of his work. The way Bonhoeffer’s legacy was used in different contexts depended on the respective social circumstances, political developments, and ecclesial preconditions. Our reflection on Bonhoeffer’s influence on public ethics begins with the German case. But there is not a single German case; there are at least three. The response to Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Germany took place in three different arenas. That is due to the political history of Germany after the end of the Nazi regime and the liberation of Germany as well as Europe from the terror of violence and war that originated in Germany, followed by the division not only of this country but of Europe. There were quite different conditions and ways in which Bonhoeffer’s theology was received and interpreted after 1945 in the two parts of Germany, the (old) Federal Republic of Germany in the West and the (former) German Democratic Republic in the East, the one belonging to the political alliance of western democratic countries under the leadership of the United States of America, the other forming a part of the Warsaw Pact under 3 the leadership of the Soviet Union. Now for some twenty years, since 1989/90, we have another Germany—a third Germany—after the opening of the wall on November 9, 1989 and the reunification of the country eleven months later. But even such a distinction between three Germanys includes many problematic simplifications. The predominant challenge for such an approach consists in the fact that the response to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life and work took place from the very beginning in an international framework. In the immediate aftermath of his death as a conspirator and martyr his role was interpreted internationally. Those who heard about him in the first years after the end of World War II had to listen to voices like that of the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, the Anglican bishop of Chichester George Bell from Great Britain, or the General Secretary of the emerging World Council of Churches, the Dutch theologian Willem Visser ’t Hooft. It was in the first instance his personal life story that made Dietrich Bonhoeffer an international figure. His two visits to Union Theological Seminary, in 1930/31 and 1939, played an outstanding role in the international formation of this theologian. But his time as a vicar in Barcelona, his years as a pastor in London, his visits to Sweden or Switzerland, and his participation in many ecumenical conferences in different countries also contributed their part. His plan to visit Mahatma Gandhi in India shows in a nutshell the global perspective in which he understood what we call today public ethics. After 1945 his work therefore found a worldwide resonance and has always had an international dimension. The present discussion will surely give some evidence for that. I shall restrict myself to just one example in this connection, the fact that the very latest piece of research on Bonhoeffer’s peace ethics that has come to my attention was written by a theologian from Rwanda who presented his investigation as a doctoral dissertation at a German university.1 My first impulse is to say that public ethics in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s sense has to be put in an international perspective and cannot be limited to a national horizon. Or, to quote Carl-Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Bonhoeffer understood oecumene “in its original sense as the whole earth populated by human beings,” and “as a modern person he could breathe only with difficulty in the provincialism which he found around himself.”2 However, the following observations concentrate on the impact of Bonhoeffer’s theology for public ethics in the three Germanys after 1945. I shall 1. Pascal Bataringaya, “Impulse der Friedensethik Dietrich Bonhoeffers,” doctoral dissertation, University of Bochum, 2011. 2. Carl-Friedrich von Weizsäcker, “Thoughts of a Non-Theologian on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Theological Development,” The...

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