In Our Time - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Episode Date: September 27, 2018

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas and life of the German theologian, born in Breslau/Wroclaw in 1906 and killed in the Flossenbürg concentration camp on 9th April 1945. Bonhoeffer developed ideas about the role of the Church in the secular world, in particular Germany after the Nazis took power in 1933 and demanded the Churches' support. He strongly opposed anti-Semitism and, with a role in the Military Intelligence Department, took part in the resistance, plotting to kill Hitler and meeting with contacts in the Allies. Bonhoeffer's ideas on Christian ethics and the relationship between Christianity and humanism spread more widely from the 1960s with the discovery of unpublished works, including those written in prison as he awaited execution.With Stephen Plant Dean and Runcie Fellow at Trinity Hall at the University of CambridgeEleanor McLaughlin Lecturer in Theology and Ethics at the University of Winchester and Lecturer in Ethics at Regent’s Park College at the University of OxfordAnd Tom Greggs Marischal Chair of Divinity at the University of AberdeenProducer: Simon Tillotson

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, Dietrich Bonhofer, 1906 to 1945, was a Lutheran theologian, who stood up to Hitler as he threatened to destroy the core of the German church. The Nazis imposed anti-Semitic rules on their approved Protestant church,

disgusting Bonhofer, as at the very least, this denied the Jewishness of Jesus. He helped set up a breakaway church to keep Christian values alive until the Nazis fell. Bonhofer was executed for conspiring to kill Hitler, but not before setting up his ideas in writing. And with these

and his example, he became, according to at least one of my guests, the most important theologian of the 20th century. With me to discuss the ideas and life of Dietrich Bonhoffer are Stephen Plant, Dean and Ronsieffello at Trinity Hall at the University of Cambridge, Eleanor McLaughlin, lecturer in theology and ethics at the University of Winchester

and lecturer in ethics at Regents Park College at the University of Oxford and Tom Gregg's Marshall Chair of Divinity at the University of Aberdeen. Stephen Plant, what do we need to know about Bonhoeffer's childhood? He was born in 1906 in Breslau, which then was in Silesia in eastern Germany, which is now Vrocklau in Poland. His father was a professor of psychiatry at the university, and Bonhofer with his twin sister were children number six and seven of eight, so a large family and like most middle class families, a family with a lively cultural, social, hinterland, sport, music and so on.

In 1912, the family moved to Berlin, and that's where Bonofer grew up. His father had been appointed professor of psychiatry in Berlin, which was the most prestigious chair in the country, and also ran another prestigious institution, an institution called the Charite, which was a neurology clinic, which brought the family, amongst other things, some foreign income, which insulated them to a certain extent from the troubles that would to follow. Happy childhood, happy family, a family which gave him, as he put it later, ground under his feet, a set of values to work with, and have at least as much to do with explaining the stance he later took as do his theological view. And you've got a very thorough good German education at the time. Extremely thorough.

Most of his brothers went into the law or into engineering, and his decision to study theology looked a bit out of kilter with his brothers, for which he was somewhat teased. But he nevertheless persisted, does he? Yeah, and he decided that at quite a young age that he wanted to do that. And that itself was rather strange, because the family didn't have particularly strong Christian connections. The children were all baptized, and their mother, who was called Paula von Hasse,

was the daughter of a clergyman and said prayers with them most nights. But when they had big events like a baptism, a relative came and did it in their house. The family, like many middle-class Germans in Berlin at the time, were church members, but rather looked down on the church. It seemed to them to be a bit dead, a bit uninteresting. lacking in colour and intelligence. So they took a dim view of it really. And so his decision to become a theologian was, I suspect,

something of a way of making himself stand out from his brothers. He became a Protestant. How significant is that at the time? And what did he join to become a Protestant? Well, the church situation in Germany in the first half of the second century is one which most English people find pretty difficult to get hold of. So let me try and explain it a little bit. There are basically three sorts of church in Germany in the beginning of the 20th century.

There's the Catholic Church, which is mainly in the South, which has a strong national leadership. There are so-called free churches, which are things like the Methodist Church, the Mennonites, the Baptists, which for the purposes of our conversation today are pretty irrelevant to this story. They don't come into the rubric of what was happening in a church struggle. And then there were 28 regional Protestant churches in Germany, and these varied in character and kind quite substantially. Some had a few thousand members and covered a whole city, just a single city like Hamburg. Others, like the church to which Bonifer, in which Bonnevar came a pastor, had something like 20 million members, the old Prussian Union, which covered the whole of the old Prussian kingdom. and that church was complicated even further because that we typically call him a Lutheran theologian.

The Old Prussian Union had been formed in 1817 by King Friedrich Wilhelm III as a united church of both reformed and Lutheran. So he's actually a Protestant in both traditions, though as we'll hear, I suspect he gave most of his attention Theologically to Luther. And to put into the mix, perhaps, to disturb it too much, after the First World War, there was an intense secularisation grew in Germany, is that right? The Weimar constitution in 1990, essentially disestablish the church. And that left all the Protestant churches in Germany looking for an identity, looking for a sense of what their purpose was in German society.

They had supported the war and the popular disillusionment with the empire transferred to the church. which had backed the war effort. And the church looked even more out of sorts than it had before the war. Thank you. Alan McLaughlin, because of his status in Ensign Germany, he had enough money to travel, which was quite rare. He went to Rome, he came to London. But let's talk about when he went to New York in his 20s.

What impacted that up on him? It had a very big impact. So he spent a year studying at Union Theological Seminary in New York. The social impact that that had on him was that he became quickly integrated into the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. And he made that connection through a friend at the seminary called Frank Fisher, who was an African-American. And Bonhoeffer really at this time has his first contact with people who are being marginalized by society and oppressed by the society that surrounds them. and he spent a lot of time getting to know the African American community in Harlem,

spending time in their homes, working at the youth club that the church ran, things like that, so that he became very involved with that community. And this will have a great impact on him, particularly when he comes back to Germany and sees the Jews in Germany becoming marginalized and oppressed.

So it's his first coming into contact with that sort of situation. So because he sees the blacks in high, Harlem being marginalized and depressed and shut outside white dominating society and he finds a similar thing when he goes back to Germany. He's also, one might say, becomes enraptured with spiritual songs and takes a lot of records back to Germany. Absolutely, which he subsequently plays to his somewhat bemused students

at the seminary that he's later going to run. Another encounter that he makes in New York, which will end up being very important for his later thought, is he meets a French pacifist called Jean Lasseur. And this person will introduce the idea that you can't be a Christian and a nationalist at the same time. Those things are not compatible. And that's because if you're a nationalist, you're somehow putting yourself in a superior position or you're willing to try to dominate people from another nation who might also be Christians.

and for Lasser, your participation in the church in Christianity has to come first over and above your participation in your life of the nation. And so this idea that you can't be a nationalist and a Christian will be embedded in Bonhoffa's thought at this point. And he came to London, what if any, influence did that have on him? He actually lived in London for two years between 1933 and 35. He came to be the pastor of two expats. German congregations in London.

And his one impact was that he dealt with a lot of people who were fleeing Germany and coming into England to seek refuge. So lots of German refugees and his parishes dealt with this influx of people. So that was, again, something that he was later to experience in the other direction, if you like. He was helping people flee Germany to London later on in his life. but he also made some crucial contacts while in London. Particularly important is his contact with Bishop George Bell of Chichester,

who's going to be a lifelong friend and a lifelong ally, both in the church struggle, which I think we'll hear a bit more about later, but also in Bonhofer's later life during the war, Bishop Bell will be a key contact for him. Thank you. Tom Greggs, Bonhova's a Lutheran. what were the tenets of that belief and was Lutheranism on the rise at that time? How significant was it? So it's difficult really for us to begin to estimate the extent to which Luther had huge impact upon the shaping of modernity.

Luther, as I'm sure everybody knows, was the proto-reformer, the first person that protested against what he understood to be the excesses of medieval Roman Catholicism, wanting to strip back the Christian faith to its same. central tenets trying to remove ideas like indulgences and purgatory, particularly concerned with issues to do with hierarchy, the utilisation of the state by the church. The central tenets of Lutheranism really rested on a range of solas, these phrases that are utilized in Latin, that come to summarize the central tenets of Lutheran belief, the idea of Soliscriptora, that the only authority that the church has rests upon the Bible only on scripture. The idea of solace Christus, that all of the Christian faith has to be based upon Jesus Christ, that it is only

through grace, solar gratia, that we can come to receive the benefits of Christ, and we receive that solaffide only through faith. Furthermore, that all that the church does has to be only to the glory of God and not to the glory of human beings. So part of the way in which this works itself out is a separation to some degree between state and church, an idea of two kingdoms with different authorities, one which has a spiritual authority and one which has a secular authority. And Bonhover took all of that on, did he, and he acted out of those conditions of belief? Yeah, I mean, as Stephen has said, Bonhofer does grow up in a context where the church is uniting, where other reformed thinkers such as Calvin and Zwingli and Busser all are making their

influences as well. But Bonhofer certainly interacts seriously with the Lutheran tradition that forms him. I guess I would want to think of Bonhoffer as a modern Lutheran as well. He doesn't appropriate this in a simply scholastic way. He thinks about it critically. He thinks about it constructively. What does that lead him to think and do? It leads him, I guess, to engage with the tradition that he's inherited for the context in which he lives, a context where he prophetically speaks of a world come of age, a world where we can't presume that people are religious anymore. It also leads him to form some of his ethical opinions in light of this two kingdom's doctrine and to question, therefore, what we do when we have a situation where there is a tyrant

interfering with the kingdom of the church, interfering with the spiritual kingdom, extending the authority that the Fuhrer has in that context over the church. He was a scholar, he got two degrees and so on. But can we discuss his influence he had on him? Yeah, so Carl Ba'ath is probably the most significant thinker since the Reformation. He is somebody who wrote a huge amount of theological material and somebody who was outspoken against what he saw to be the excesses of the coalescence of the state and the church,

particularly around the justification of the Great War of the First World War. Bart utilises a form of theology called dialectic theology where he thinks about the way in which God says no to the world stands in judgment on the world and judges our religiosity. To my mind, the thing that Bonhofer inherits more than anything else from Bart is the idea that the critique of religion that's offered in the 19th century by people like Feuerbach and Nietzsche and Freud actually provides significant theological resources

in reminding the church that we don't deal with religion and innate religiosity, but instead we deal with Jesus Christ who is a contradiction to religion in many ways, who lives a life which doesn't seem to exist in absolute continuity with religiosity or the idea of spiritual space or anything like that. So there's a great deal of thinking going on, a salmon plant at the time, about a diminishing and increasingly marginal and feeling marginalized church. and can we cut to the setting up of the confessing church in which Bonhoffer played a part

and it was with him until end of his life. In 1933, January, end of January 1933, President Hindenberg appoints Adolf Hitler as Reich Chancellor and an immediate policy goal for the Nazis was to conform all parts of German society to the Nazi Party programme. youth organizations, schools, walking groups, musical groups, everything had to be brought somehow under the aegis of the party and conformed to its goals and character. And that was true to the church. Hitler had grown up a Catholic and had a very clear sense, not least because of the church's struggle with Bismarck in the 19th century, the Catholic Church's struggle with Bismarck in the 19th century, late 19th century.

Hitler had a very clear sense that that needed to be resolved and moved with tremendous sufficiency actually to agree with the Catholic Church something called the Reich Concordat which had the effect of neutering Catholic opposition prior to the Reich Concordat the Catholic Church had banned Catholics from becoming members of the Nazi Party

thereafter they legalised it and crucially for Hitler it removed the Catholic Centre Party which was the only electoral obstacle still in his way. So the Catholic Party was taken off the table. The Catholic Church taken off the table as a source of difficulty for Nazis. In North Germany, however, where the Protestant churches were strong, he had a sense that he had to do something, but his knowledge of the Protestant churches was almost non-existent. He didn't even know that there were 28 of them. He thought that there was a single national church like there was

in the Catholic sense. Fortunately for Hitler, he had someone who volunteered himself to take on the role as his personal representative and to deal with the Protestant problem. And the proposal on the table was basically that the state should take away all 28 churches and form a single national church. My churches, we don't mean buildings. No, we mean these 28, well, they're called Landerskirchen in Germany, 28 regional churches, some of which have maybe 100 congregations, one of which have several, you know, some of which in Prussia had many, many thousands. to conform them into a single national church and to have a Reich bishop,

like there's a Reich Fuhrer, a single leader for the state, there would be a single leader for the Protestant churches, a united Protestant church in Germany. Now this immediately set alarm bells ringing for a minority of Christians in the Protestant churches, who, because of Luther's theology, had a clear sense that the state had a responsibility in relation to the church,

but couldn't take it over and make it an, organ of the state. And a conflict developed in which basically two church parties arose. One group was called the German Christians, and they tended to be sympathetic to the Nazis. And another group was the confessing church. And the confessing church initially had quite a lot of support. So they had the Pastors Emergency League, which was a sort of early incarnation of it, had something like 7,000 pastors, which is about a third of the total. Germany. And they raised funds to support pastors who'd lost their jobs because they were Jewish, for example, and people who've been expelled from their livings. They raised funds to support

their families. And eventually this morphed into a parallel church structure. And the confessing church didn't think of itself as a new church. They asserted that they were the same church, but were remaining loyal to the principles of loyalty to Jesus Christ, and above all. Can you tell us about the importance of the Aryan paragraph? So the state introduced civil service reform, which said that you had to prove you had four German grandparents if you were to hold a civil service position. Well clergy were paid by the state and were civil servants. And so the question popped up into the mind of the church, should we introduce the Aryan paragraph for pastors? That's to say make sure that all our pastors

can show and demonstrate by baptismal records that they have four Aryan, baptized grandparents. And that was one of two issues that were really at stake in the church struggle. The other was the interference or running of the church by the state. That was a big issue, probably the bigger issue of the two actually. But the Aryan paragraph was one on which Bonner was particularly fixed. By no means all people in the confessing church thought that separating Jews from the church was a bad idea. But Bonofer did. And he insisted that if the Aryan paragraph were implemented, an emergency state would immediately arise in which the church was justified in resisting the Nazi state.

Can we take further his relationship with the confessing church? What did he actually do? So Bonhofer was instrumental in writing what was called the Bethel Confession. This is the first document put together by the people that Stephen has just described as becoming the confessing church. Bonhofer was one of the two authors of the first draft of this document, and the document served to articulate the Christian doctrines on which this group was relying, and to contrast these doctrines with the sort of political spin

that was being put on the doctrines by the German Christians. So to take an example, one of the theologians in the ranks of the German Christians was saying that the cross of Christ, in fact, simply symbolises the prioritisation of the public good over the good of the individual. So that's all we see in the cross of Christ. But in the Bethel confession, the authors want to make clear that in Christian terms, the cross of Christ means a lot more than simply a political slogan.

So this document was co-authored by Bonhoeffer and one other person, but later was edited to such an extent that he no longer wanted to put his name to it. But that's his first participation in the formation of the articulation of the theology of the confessing church. He'll continue to have a long connection with the confessing church, and he'll be defending it in the arena of European ecumenicalism as well. How relevant or important do the Confessing Church seem to Hitler and his henchmen? I think where things begin to shift is as the Confessing Church increasingly begins to articulate, opposition. Once you get into a situation which we described before where the state has

overstepped the bounds of its authority interfering with freedom of conscience, with the capacity for people to form churches, defining Christian identity not in relation to the confession of faith, which is a core tenet of Lutheranism, but instead based upon issues to do with ethnicity. So the ethnicity that one has within Germany at this time, trumps the faith or even the baptism that one's gone through. At that point, things begin to shift. And then in 1938, this comes to a bit of a head. While there'd been quiet rumblings against the confessing church,

there'd been an illegal seminary that Bonhofer was the head of in Finkenvalda, which had been set up. And the Gestapo had variously tried to close this. But it comes to a head in 1938 when Hitler desires an oath of personal allegiance for his 49th birthday present from all pastors, within Germany. And at that point, the rubber starts to hit the road because people are having actively to make a decision now to overtly oppose Hitler by not taking this oath of allegiance. And Bonhoeffer does. Take that oath?

This is one of those places where the history is a little bit vague. He doesn't take the oath, and he goes into a situation, therefore, as a result of that, of facing conscription into the army. It's a real Nadee. for the confessing church at this point. It's a real dark point. But he manages to avoid this situation by reaching out, in fact, ironically, to the military intelligence unit, the Abver,

where there was already that Bonhofer knew about through his brother and his brothers-in-law, some degree of opposition. And through his involvement in that, he was able not to take the oath and not to be conscripted at the same time. So he continued being banned from public speaking, being banned at times from Berlin, from publishing, all of these sorts of things,

but managed to get away with it because of his involvement with the military intelligence. So he's ducking and weaving in an extremely difficult situation. Can you briefly tell us, what was he thinking about Christ? Gosh, I mean, Christ marks the centre of all that Bonhoeffer thinks and does. In some ways he is the most Christocentric, the most Christ-centered theologian, perhaps of the 20th century. What's remarkable about the way in which Bonhofer

thinks about Christ is that he doesn't want to prioritize the kind of traditional scholastic metaphysical accounts of who Jesus is, how we account for Jesus as one person in two natures, the hypostatic union of God and man in the one person of Jesus Christ. It's not to

say that he doesn't believe that, but he wants to start with who Jesus is as a person and what therefore that person commands of those who follow him, what it means to be a disciple of this person, rather than following some vague principle of religiosity, some kind of civic religion, what does it mean to actually follow Christ and ultimately to follow Christ to a position of sacrifice or martyrdom or to the cross? What could have been thought, and almost naively following Christ's

footsteps and live for others and so on? Stephen Plant, can you give us a track through Bornhover's resistance to the Nazis in the 1930s? I can. He went through several phases really. In the initial phase, he was very busy campaigning like one might for a political party. So he was organising campaigns, election leaflets, supporting those who were standing for election for the confessing church and so on. It's important to say that he always felt instinctively right from the very beginning, from early 1933, that this phase the church struggle would not succeed. He felt that the confessing church didn't actually have the resources of leadership

to sustain opposition to the state. And he also thought that opposing Nazism was an almost impossible task when the state has at its disposal brown shirt bully boys to duff up any clergyman who opposes them. They have extrajudicial internment in Dachau concentration camp. You can't resist a state for long like that. So Bonneffre always felt that what the church would have to do was to have sort of, I don't know, Christian special forces, if you like,

kind of small monastic communities dedicated confessing clergy who would form the nucleus of groups of Christian prepared to stand up to the Nazis by protecting, particularly by protecting the vulnerable. and as he puts it in one letter to the point of shedding blood by which he means not killing others but by being prepared to be killed to defend the most vulnerable in society. Stand in the place of the victim.

Yeah, that idea is a strong one right from his PhD thesis all the way through to the ethics. I can say a little bit more about that if you like but he essentially thought that one had an obligation to take the place of another and to suffer in their place. And he characterised this, as Tom was saying, through his understanding of the way in which the Christian is formed

as a sort of, like you might form yourself, conform yourself to a character and a story, you conform your life to the life and person of Christ, and that meant being prepared to suffer for the sake of the other. And she's still tracking through. So he's weaving his own way through what he's very conscious of being a marginalised, increasingly irrelevant and perhaps potentially irrelevant. Well, this comes to a head particularly in 1939 when knowing that he is in serious trouble with the state,

he can no longer speak publicly, he can no longer publish. He's not even allowed to visit Berlin unless he gives notice to the Gestapo first and can't attend meetings of more than three people. So all his avenues of opposition have been closed down. And at this point, he's invited by friends in America to the United States. Sorry. Can I ask Anna to take up that story? So it goes to the United States.

And he decides that he can't, in fact, stay in the United States. He's only there for a very short time. What's very short time? A month, hardly. And in July, 1939, he decides to get back on a boat and go back to Germany. and we have a letter that he writes to Reinhold Niebuhr who had helped organize his stay in the United States about why he feels he has to go home. And it links very closely to what Stephen has just been saying,

because in this letter, Donhofer writes that he feels he won't be able to participate in the reconstruction of the church in Germany if he doesn't suffer through the war years with his compatriots. So there's this willingness, almost desire to suffer with other people, alongside other people to sort of be able to participate in what happens next. And his tutor, and to certainly say his mentor, Bart urges him vividly to come back to Germany. Yeah. And regrets having done that ever after. Yeah.

Yeah. But something else that comes up in this decision to go back, as well as being encouraged in both directions, a lot of his American colleagues and friends are encouraging him vociferously to stay safely in the United States at the same time. But something else that comes up in this letter is that he says that he knows that people in Germany are going to have to decide whether they desire the defeat of their own nation so that what he calls Christian civilization can survive or whether they have to desire the victory of their nation, knowing that then Christian civilization will cease to exist. And Bonhova says, I know which way I have to make that call, but I can't. in all consciousness, in all conscience, I can't make that call in security. What, Tom Greggs, what took him into, how did he, and why did he want to go into military intelligence? And what functioned that play in his character and work?

So in part it is... What date are we talking about now, 1939? Well, 1938 makes his initial reach out. 1939, he enters into service directly in that context. Bonhofer was very concerned that, well, for a range of reasons, that the state be opposed. One was that he thought that this would afford opportunity to be involved with a group of people, including people like Schindler, for example, in supporting Jewish people to escape from the Nazi state. So he was directly involved in smuggling Jews out of Germany,

producing fake documentation on the grounds that they were working for the state to smuggle them out. But he also becomes involved with a group called, that are nicknamed the Schweitzer Capella, the black orchestra. They're called by the Gestapo who are very nervous of them as a group, who are trying to bring down the German state from within. They're effectively people in significant military intelligence roles that recognize how dangerous Hitler is and are involved famously in the assassination plots. And as well as that, though, in reaching out to the Allied powers so that, Should they assassinate Hitler, there was opportunity to negotiate and engage with Allied powers as well.

I'm not quite sure what he thinks he's doing in military intelligence. It seems such. We've had the course, well-charted, and now all of a sudden is in military intelligence. Does he go there with a purpose? Did he go there to hide? What? It's not to hide. He gets to the point where he recognises that actually in this situation of a tyrannical overlord,

that actually there might be justification for tyrannicide. He, in fact, shocks people in New York just before he returns by asking them if they would grant absolution to somebody who said that they had murdered a tyrant. So he believes that because the state is so overstepped its authority, because Hitler is so evil, that it might be necessary. In fact, he says famously that it might be necessary to do evil rather than to be evil, that he realizes the limitations of the church struggle

and therefore wants to be involved more directly. And what he can offer in that is the capacity effectively to be a courier to people in the allied powers through the ecumenical relations that he has. So he travels, he's someone that passes messages on. He gets messages back to the British government, in fact, because he's anxious about a situation where if Hitler were to be assassinated, Germany might be subject to the same kinds of conditions that they were at Versailles, and that might lead to another furor.

It's worth, I think, adding that the people with, whom he, as it were, co-conspirators, had a lot in common with him in terms of their family and class backgrounds. They were well-educated Germans and held to the same value systems. So they might not have been Christians as such, necessarily, but they shared the same class. They had a certain amount of trust, a certain amount of cultural affinity. And that also, by the way, takes us into quite a difficult thing about Bonneff, which is that he's not, in fact, in favour very much of democracy. This particular group in which military intelligence was involved wanted to establish something called a Reichstadt, a legal state with a strong hand of government that could take a strong

hand with the German people, not restore press freedom, not introduce enormous freedoms of speech, but keep a firm hand on the German population, at least for a number of years, possibly even decades. And Bonhofer felt that that was the only sort of, he was wrong, I think, about this, as was proved by the success of the Federal Republic. But he didn't think Germans could stand democracy because of his own experience of the failure of democracy

in the Weimar Republic. So what he's working for is a military coup that will lead to a military-led government and not the restoration of democracy which he felt quite skeptical about. And he was arrested for this and put in prison, but

he was given rather a soft ride. He was one of his a cousins or a military man came and offered him champagne with an open door and the prison and everybody thought, oh, he's okay, he's one of them, as it were. So they left him and he wrote, he began to write quite a lot there. Then, about a year after his, 94, he became associated with the conspiracy to kill Hitler.

What part did he play in that? He had a pastoral role more than anything else in that he was a reference person, if you like, for people who wondered whether this was the right thing to do to take part in the conspiracy to kill Hitler. So he was, I want to say almost an ethical reference point for that group. He was prepared to do something much more active should the need arise. It's thought that there might have been as many as 10 to 15 plots to assassinate Hitler over the years, in fact. So although we know famously about the plots that happened in 43 and 44, this group,

within the Abva had in all kinds of different contexts being the military intelligence. This small group inside working from within to bring it down had attempted to assassinate Hitler on a number of occasions and Bonhofer considers all kinds of different avenues in relation to this. He takes very seriously what it means for him as a pastor to be involved effectively in blessing somebody to kill themselves and kill Hitler at the same time and he struggles with that. He thinks in the end and there's a very fascinating part of his ethics where he says that actually the Christian might be called to take the guilt of the world upon themselves, actually to do something which is wrong,

but be prepared to do that and suffer the guilt and consequences for it, for what is ultimately right in the end. In prison, and he began to write, what did he begin to write? Well, he'd been writing before, he published two or three books and so on, but he began to write something which became very important for his future reputation, letters to his, you tell me. He writes a variety of different literary texts, poetry, fiction, he starts writing a play,

but he's most well known from this period for his letters to his friend and former student, Eberhard Bittke, and in these letters, he's developing the theological ideas that are going round and round in his head while he's in his prison cell. And so perhaps most importantly, he develops this idea that we've already referenced

the world come of age, which means that humanity, says Bonhofer, has reached a point of maturity where we don't need God anymore. We don't need God to answer our questions or to rush in and save us when we don't know what to do any longer. So this role of God as a deosex machina no longer is valid. However, that doesn't mean that God is absent at all, but that God is in human existence in a new way. And Bonhofer talks a lot in this part of his writing about a suffering God and a weak God, who suffers alongside humanity

and who calls humanity to suffer alongside him in the world. And from this idea of the world come of age, he also develops this idea of religionless Christianity, which is perhaps his most famous idea from this period. And he thinks that after the end of the war, people won't really be interested in an institutional church. They've seen how the church has been hijacked by the Nazi party and they won't want to have anything more to do with it.

And so Bonhofer suggests in one of his letters that the way that Christians will be able to be Christians in this post-war world will be to pray, meet privately to pray, but not expect to have any public space given to them for that. And to also, he says, to do justice in the world. So we're sort of private religious life linked with public action. Tom, can you tell us how he wrote in this particular prison

and then he was discovered he was associated with the assassination of Hitler and he was moved to far tougher prison and then to a concentration camp in a final concentration camp where he met his death. How did that happen? So following the Wolfsler plot, the famous plot that everybody knows about to assassinate Hitler, documents were found which implicated Bonhofer and several other conspirators. That's at the point at which his left.

and his writing ends as he's transferred, as you say, to a high-security Gestapo prison. And then from there, when the diary of Admiral Canaris, who is the head of the Abver, the head of military intelligence is found, as a result of that, Bonhova is absolutely implicated. And in Floszenberg, he is tried at night in a laundry. He's court-martialed and sentenced to be hanged the next morning, although there's some question about the account of this the next morning he knelt and pray quietly and then is meant to have met his end with tremendous dignity despite having been hanged with Canaris and other fellow conspirators

by the neck on a meethook probably with piano wire and probably took a long time for him to die. Stephen Plant, he wasn't thought of as a great theologian in the 20th century and his ideas took quite a while, quite a while, a dozen or so years to percolate into the later 20th century. How did they reach a wider audience? So for the first 20 years or so,

he was mainly spiritual writing. People thought him as a spiritual writer. And then A. Barthar Baker, this friend, began producing posthumous publications of bigger theological works. And this launched him in the public consciousness, the letters from prison particularly. In England, a chap called Bishop Robinson,

J.A. Robinson, who was a very well-known public figure. Honest to God. Wrote, Honest to God, about a third of which deals with Bonnefer. And that, rather poor, as it happens, reading of Bonofer, sold a million copies in three years, and that became a major launch pad for his reputation in the English-speaking world. Can you briefly summarise the three of you,

where his legacy is now, what impact he has had and continues to have? I don't know. I think people are wary of him still to assess. certain extent because of his link to the death of God movement in the 60s, although that has passed now, but that did taint his reputation somewhat, that the people in the theological movement that were saying that God is dead used some of Bonhofer's ideas, not the whole of his ideas, but used some of his ideas to justify their stance, which made him a bit suspect for a number of years. He's been written about by a wide variety of different people who, who's been, you

have drawn radically different conclusions from his work about what he was trying to say. So he's a very, he's created a lot of confrontational writing in the present day for people trying to interpret him in different ways. Tom Greggs. I think two ideas principally have captivated people's imagination. One is the idea of religionless Christianity. As British society and Western society has become more secularised, Bonhoff's prophetic expression of a Christianity that isn't religious has been an idea that's captured lots of theological imaginations.

And then I think secondly, his influences felt because of the link between his life and work, particularly that work, discipleship, where he talks about the cost of what it might mean to be a Christian. and that linked with the ethics where we see the sense of the way in which it's complex to work out what the life of discipleship might be, especially in a context of resistance, but also in a context of normal, worldly, secular life. I think those two things together, religionist Christianity and the idea of discipleship really have captured people. Finally, Stephen. And I think it's also helped that the last things he wrote were never finished and were fragmentary, which has meant that people have been able to, um, transcribe onto Bonhoff's thought some of their own thinking.

So he's proved a particularly flexible resource for contemporary theology. Well, thank you very much, Stephen Plund, Ellen M. Lockland and Tom Greggs. If you've had topic for us and you think it deserves a big radio audience, please send your ideas through. It's a time on website or Twitter using the hashtag IOT listener week by the 26th of October. One of these will be the subject of our program on the 6th of December. Next week we're discussing Edith Wharton, and her novels, including the novel The Age of Innocence, for which you won the Pulitzer Prize.

Thank you very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. One thing I think we'd probably not done justice to is his friendship with Ava Hart Baker, who we've mentioned a couple of times. Baker began as a student and then became his assistant and was Bonneff's closest relationship other than that with his family. He later became engaged to somebody called Maria von Vezer. But I think his closest relationship was that with Abahart Baker, who became something of a Boswell to Bonhofer as Johnson.

I'm pretty sure that without Baker's efforts, we wouldn't be talking about Bonofer today. In other words, the friendship that Baker had for Bonofer meant that he dedicated most of his working life to putting Bonofer on the map. And actually, that's not a bad tribute, because friendship is a key theme in Bonofer's thought. and it's no bad thing that he's put on the map by those who were his friends. I think that's something that's worth saying. I think it's maybe worth saying a little bit more about the death and some of the dispute around it. Almost immediately Bonhoeff's death was being utilised politically. In fact, one of the main sources that we have that recounts what happened is from the camp doctor,

who was the person that certified him dead and he paints this almost angelic image of Bonhoffer dying. It seems to be, to me, to accord with the man that actually there would have been tremendous dignity, that the influence of Nietzsche through his brothers and his father on Bonhoffer meant that he really disliked the idea of religion being some weak crutch that people utilised. But it may well be that Bonhofer being strangled

was, took about two hours to die because it seems like he went to the crematorium about two hours after he was led out to be hanged. The only real explanation for that in the context would have been that that was the case. And it's very sad when we think that two weeks later Flusenberg was liberated, in fact, by the Allied forces. Three weeks later, Hitler himself had committed suicide, but it was on Hitler's direct order that these co-conspirators

were all executed. It's one of the kind of final acts of the Nazi state. But then immediately the doctor involves starts to try to justify his own roles in it by painting this picture of a very saintly death and downplaying actually the atrocity that it involved. I think something that's also worth mentioning is just the variety of texts

that Bonhofer produced while he was in prison and in particular the fiction. Because in the fiction he's done, depicting the types of questions that he's later going to articulate in his letters to Bittga, but he has his characters discuss these same questions. So he has his characters discuss, you know, the future of society. What will Germany look like after the war? Will we have a democracy or would that be a bad thing?

Should we encourage people to think of themselves as some of them as leaders and some of them as followers? Would that be a better way to structure society? And so throughout his fiction, he's talking through with his characters all these ideas that are going to become some of his most famous ideas in the letters. And in particular, the last piece of fiction that he writes, very oddly for any text by Bonhofer, doesn't contain any reference to the church or to Christ or to religion or anything. And this seems to be his effort at writing for a world come of age,

for a world in which all these references to religious words just don't mean anything to anybody anymore. So he's really trying to write a text about Christ, one of the characters is obviously meant to represent Christ, but told in a way with no religious language that he thinks would fit into the lives of people in this world come of age. I think all that material is really, really stimulating. The bit of Bonhofer, I think, that I wouldn't want to accept

is this idea of an authoritarian regime. And it's tempting to think that people who saw that Nazism was evil had a choice between two extreme possibilities either to cooperate with Nazism or to participate in an assassination attempt. In fact, there were other alternatives. There was somebody else who was associated with the app there. A man called Helmut James von Moltke. And he also had a resistance circle.

but their modus operandi, their way of working, was to think clearly about what should come next. They did not believe the right thing to do was to assassinate Hitler, and they thought that the war would just have to end with the destruction of the old Germany, and they wanted to think about what it would look like. And in fact, it's the Chrysau Circle, whose thinking really guides what then becomes the case in the Federal Republic, a pro-European federal structure with diffused power from the centre to the regions, pro-Europeans are said with strong trade union involvement,

all those are derived from a template that Chrysau and his colleagues had designed. So I'm, you know, for myself, I don't think Bonnefer's decision to participate in the assassination attempt with hindsight. And of course that's important to say. Hindsight can reveal all sorts of things. With hindsight, I'm not sure he took the right decision. Finally, Tom. Tom. I think as well, one of the dangers that we have when we read the life of somebody like Bonhofer is,

that we automatically think of them as a martyr figure and as a saint-like figure. And it's very easy in the course of a conversation to talk about his churchmanship and his faith and the difficulties of his ethical decisions. I mean, Bonhofer was also an extraordinarily worldly person. That for me is one of the things that I find most attractive about him. He considered becoming a professional pianist but didn't pursue that because he said his fingers were too fat. But the whole of his life, he loved music, he loved jazz music, he loved long walks. he had great friendships.

And what you see in Bonhofer is a glimpse of a life lived in complexity in extraordinarily complex times, but trying to be true to the faith that he saw as being the determining feature of everything he did. Well, thank you very much yet again, and the producer is coming in. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. This is a story about a man called Otto von Wechter.

He was Austrian, a lawyer, a husband, a father and a very senior Nazi. It's a story of life and love and of a curious death. You could say it's a sort of mystery story. Otto Wechter is a Nazi you've never heard of because he escaped justice. I'm Philippe Sands and I'm going to take you on an unexpected journey

to find out what actually happened to Otto Wechter. It's a journey that goes right to the heart of something called the Ratline, the Nazi escape route out of Europe that started in 1945. Along the way, we're going to meet an unlikely cast of Nazis, fascists, assassins, spies, sons of spies, lovers, murderers,

and an elderly man who lives alone in a castle steeped in family secrets, who I've come to know rather well. To subscribe, just search for intrigue, the ratline, wherever you get your podcasts.