The Doubled Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Speaking at seminaries

My book, The Doubled Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is out, and I am the proud recipient of several review copies. Tuesday, I was pleased to be able to talk about the book at Earlham School of Religion  (ESR) and Bethany seminaries in Richmond, Indiana. A short version of my talk is below:

     In the spring of 1939,  Bonhoeffer visited  his twin sister Sabine in London. He took with him his best friend Eberhard Bethge. World War II  loomed, and during idle moments in Sabine’s garden, amid the forsythia and dark mauve lilacs, during what Sabine called  ‘a magical spring,” Dietrich wondered if he should allow himself to be caught in England when the war started. He was, after all, in the company of the two people in the world with whom he felt, as he put it, “in contrast to . . . other people … a remarkable sense of closeness.”
      Although I started with the hypothesis that women were underrepresented in the Bonhoeffer story, even I was surprised to find out the extent to which women populated the  innermost circle of deepest emotional intimacy in his life. Bonhoeffer had a very wide acquaintance and  many, many friends. He was part of the interwar trans-European elite and as the saying goes, he knew almost everybody. He had by all accounts, a self assurance and a perfect command of manners that made him welcome in the highest echelons of society. His aunts were countesses, his circle included aristocrats and top government officials and he counted among his friend Prince Louis Ferdinand, son of the deposed Kaiser Wilhlem II. Yet those few very closest to him were primarily women: his twin, Sabine, his grandmother Julie Tafel, his older friend Ruth von Kleist Retzow and, at the end of his life, if unwittingly, his fiancée Maria von Wedemeyer. The male in this innermost circle was Eberhard Bethge. It was often women that he was closest to and women who sustained him.
   Why does it matter that women are left out of his story? Beyond the almost self-evident idea that we prefer the truth, that we seek an undistorted picture, that if possible, we like to rub some of the fog away from the glass in our prison house of language so that we can see clearly, the women are important because so often in dialogue with them Bonhoeffer hammered out his theology. Further, this man for whom the personal was always the theological and the theological the personal, built up through these women the layers of experience  that helped form his theology. (Men contributed too—but we have that well documented).
     Writing primarily about women thrust me into the genre of women’s writing—because of the lack of  secondary source material, I relied on the letters and memoirs the women produced. These memoirs were a species of women’s writing, often with a strong emphasis on the domestic, versus a highly masculinized biography like Bethge’s, filled as it is with the manifestly important business of church struggle and theology.  In my book, I worked to capture some of the domestic flavor of the women’s writing—and , through writing narrative nonfiction also to provide a sensory context, including what is missing in many accounts of Bonhoeffer,  such the food people ate, the movies they saw, what bombed Berlin looked like, how a cold winter or rationing affected people. One of my favorite parts of the project was getting into the "skin" of the period and trying to envision what characters were seeing and doing as they went about their lives. 
      Finally, it's a concern for me to note that so few of my students under 30 (which is most of my students) have ever heard of Bonhoeffer, even thought the issues he identified and struggled with as important are almost with identical with issues we struggle with today: living in a post-Christian age characterized by declining church membership, the challenges posed by technology and the post-Enlightenment framing of reality, and particularly the new rise of nationalist demagoguery in conditions of anxiety that are not far divorced from the political realities of the 1920s and '30s. Bonhoeffer’s response is important, both because he was ahead of his time and because he was the product of a time that is in some ways the same and some ways apt to differently configure the political divisions and preoccupations of our own.

The Doubled Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, appearing the end of March

My book, The Doubled Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, will appear in print at the end of March. This book focuses on women in the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. As I did my research, even I was surprised at the extent to which women were part of his innermost circle. Dialogue with, concerns for, and tensions with women helped formed the theology of this man for whom the theological and the personal could not be more closely intertwined. 

A short  review of the book appeared in Publishers Weekly. While the finished book has photos (!), including the first-ever published photo of Elisabeth Zinn, sometimes proposed as Bonhoeffer's first fiancee, the uncorrected page proofs sent to the reviewer did not. I have copied the review below. A $9.99 kindle version of the book will be available, I am told, a few weeks after the release of the admittedly expensive print version. And while I love the play on the Star Trek opening in the first line, I wouldn't  say "many" :) have gone here before. The review follows:

PW reviewer and contributor Reynolds ambitiously treads where many have gone before with this biography of 20th-century German theologian Bonhoeffer, whose involvement in anti-Nazi resistance led to his execution in April 1945, three short weeks before Adolf Hitler committed suicide as the Third Reich collapsed. Reynolds focuses on the women in Bonhoeffer's life, who were many and influential; Bonhoeffer had a female twin, a fiancée, and a patron. He also had a close male friend, Eberhard Bethge, who became Bonhoeffer's definitive biographer. Using letters, photos, and published writings, Reynolds studies the social ecology of her subject, placing him in context to show whom he loved and how those relationships mattered. She doesn't argue for a romantic or sexual relationship between Bonhoeffer and Bethge, but makes a convincing case that their special friendship fit no conventional category. Her study also implicitly calls attention to the job and presumptions of any biographer. Given the complexity of the social network in which she locates Bonhoeffer, a list of figures in his life would have been helpful, as would photographs she refers to that are not included. The field of Bonhoeffer studies will benefit from this balanced correction to popular hagiography.

Working on this book was both an adventure and a labor of love as I had the opportunity to delve deeply into Bonhoeffer's life and times. Because of the complexity of his life, a Bonhoeffer biography is not for the faint of heart, but I believe it a testament to the man that I still like and admire him greatly after all the time we have spent together.