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.