Dietrich Bonhoeffer™s Relevance for Post-Holocaust Christian Theology
Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 2/1 (2007): 53-67
Barnett, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Relevance for Post-Holocaust Theology” 53 http://escholarship.bc.edu/scjr/vol2/iss1/art4
Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations
A peer-reviewed e-journal of the Council of Centers on Jewish-Christian Relations
Published by the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning at Boston College
“Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Relevance for Post-Holocaust Christian Theology”
Victoria J. Barnett
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
2/1 (2007): 53-67
http://escholarship.bc.edu/scjr/vol2/iss1/art4
Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 2/1 (2007): 53-67
Barnett, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Relevance for Post-Holocaust Theology” 54 http://escholarship.bc.edu/scjr/vol2/iss1/art4
1. Introduction
In April 2001 I received a request from Dr. Mordecai
Paldiel, Director of the Department for the Righteous at Yad
Vashem, to submit an opinion on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s
qualifications for the honor of being designated a “righteous
gentile.” Dr. Paldiel raised three central questions: 1) the
question of Bonhoeffer’s public opposition to the Nazi anti-
Jewish measures, not just on behalf of those who had
converted to Christianity but on behalf of all Jews; 2) the
question of whether Bonhoeffer ever aided Jews directly;
and 3) the issue of Bonhoeffer’s theological anti-Judaism
and, more specifically, whether Bonhoeffer ever explicitly
repudiated his 1933 writings that reflected this anti-Judaism.
In my reply I deliberately did not take a position on
whether I personally thought Yad Vashem should honor
Bonhoeffer or not. At the risk of sounding disingenuous, I
don’t really have an opinion. There are two reasons. The first
and most important is that I don’t think it is up to us
Christians to decide who is honored by Yad Vashem. That
sacred ground is where the Jewish community, especially
the survivors of the Shoah, honors those who rescued Jews.
The Holocaust was preceded by a long history of anti-Jewish
violence in Christian Europe that was often sanctioned by
the church. Between 1933 and 1945, Christians and their
leaders were all too often apathetic and even complicit in the
Nazi persecution and genocide of the Jews. Christians
should approach this history and its Jewish victims with a
great deal of humility.
The second reason is perhaps more relevant for the
purposes of this paper. My own interest in Bonhoeffer has
never been based upon whether I think he is a hero. The
questions raised by Dr. Paldiel are important ones and they
continue to be debated. As of this writing, a truly thorough
analysis of these points in the entire Bonhoeffer opus in
conjunction with more recent historical research still remains
to be done. Only now are his complete writings appearing in
English, and several recent works offer new documented
evidence that has given more detail about his resistance
activities.1 The Bonhoeffer opus remains one of the most
fascinating, complex, and well-documented historical
examples we have of the intersection of theology and
activism, giving tremendous insight, not only into his times
and into ours, but also into how Christian thought changes in
response to historical events. The iconography of Dietrich
Bonhoeffer actually undermines a serious examination of his
significance.
Thus, in replying to Yad Vashem, I simply outlined what I
considered to be the main historical facts in response to the
questions that had been raised. These are as follows:
In looking for evidence of public opposition to Nazi anti-
Jewish laws, the first piece of evidence would be his
ecumenical activism throughout the period, and here we
1 Publication of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition (hereafter
referred to as DBWE) by Fortress Press is not yet complete, and the
volumes with historical material most relevant to the topic here –
volumes 8, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15 – are still in the editorial process. The
German historian Winfried Meyer’s monumental Unternehmen Sieben:
eine Rettungsaktion für vom Holocaust Bedrohte aus dem Amt
Ausland/Abwehr im Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Frankfurt a. M.:
Verlag Anton Hain, 1993) offers the most thorough documentation of
the resistance circles in which Bonhoeffer moved, with a great deal of
new material, but research remains to be done on some aspects. For
example, a much closer study could be made of the contacts between
Bonhoeffer and Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze, who was deported from
Germany in July 1933 for helping Jews and remained active in the
European rescue network thereafter. (Bonhoeffer first met Siegmund-
Schultze during the 1920s and continued to have contact with him
throughout the period, meeting with him in Switzerland in the early
1940s in the context of his resistance activities).
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Barnett, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Relevance for Post-Holocaust Theology” 55 http://escholarship.bc.edu/scjr/vol2/iss1/art4
must look both at Bonhoeffer’s role and that of the
ecumenical circles in which he moved. The earliest church
protests against Nazi anti-Jewish measures came from
Christian leaders active in the European and North American
ecumenical movement. Many of these protests were
explicitly articulated in terms of civil liberties issues and
focused on the plight of all Jews, not only those who had
converted to Christianity.2 At the September 1933
international meeting of the World Alliance in Sofia, Bulgaria,
Bonhoeffer was a crucial figure in pushing European
ecumenical leaders to condemn the Nazi measures. The
statement issued by this conference explicitly condemned
“the treatment that people of Jewish ancestry and
association have suffered in Germany,” adding: “We
especially deplore the fact that the State measures against
the Jews in Germany have had such an effect on public
opinion that in some circles the Jewish race is considered a
race of inferior status.”3 The wording of the Sofia statement
was particularly striking because it condemned the anti-
Jewish measures in general, not merely in terms of the
attempts to introduce an “Aryan paragraph” into church law.
The Nazi government understood this as a broader political
critique as well: Bonhoeffer’s role in Sofia provoked a written
protest sent by the German Foreign Ministry to the church
leadership in Berlin, charging that the Sofia statement
amounted to international “incitement against Germany”
2 Two early works that documented this were Judaism and Christianity
under the Impact of National Socialism, ed. Otto Dov Kulka and Paul
Mendes-Flohr (Jerusalem: Historical Society of Israel and Zalman
Shazar Center for Jewish History, 1987); and The Grey Book: A
Collection of Protests against Anti-Semitism and the Persecution of
Jews, Issued by Non-Roman Catholic Churches and Church Leaders
during Hitler’s Rule, ed. Johan Snoek (New York: Humanities Press,
1970). Armin Boyens’ two-volume work, Kirchenkampf und Ökumene.
Darstellung und Dokumentation (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1969 and
1973), also gives a great deal of background.
3 Boyens, Kirchenkampf und Ökumene, vol. 2, 68.
(“Verhetzung gegen Deutschland”), which led to a reprimand
for Bonhoeffer.4
The second pivotal action was Bonhoeffer’s activism at
the Berlin Steglitz synod of the Prussian Confessing church
in September 1935, two weeks after the passage of the
Nuremberg laws. In advance of the synod, two resolutions
were circulated among the delegates: one that would have
effectively given church sanction to the Nuremberg laws; the
other a proposal denouncing the church’s silence about the
persecution of Jews (not just “Jewish Christians”) and calling
for the Confessing Church to publicly oppose the Nazi
measures.5 The writers of this second proposal summoned
Bonhoeffer and his seminary students to strengthen their
ranks at the Steglitz synod. Bonhoeffer arrived with the
Finkenwalde seminarians. The group had to sit in the
balcony and was not allowed to speak; by all accounts they
behaved loudly and rambunctiously as the official delegates
debated below. But the statement they came to support was
not even put on the synod agenda for a vote, and once again
the Confessing Church remained silent about the Nazi
persecution of the Jews. Nonetheless, Bonhoeffer and his
allies at the synod did succeed in preventing synodal
affirmation of the Nuremberg laws.6
4 Ibid.
5 See Wolfgang Gerlach, And the Witnesses were Silent: The Confessing
Church and the Jews, translated by Victoria J. Barnett (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 84-85 and 94-99, and Christine-
Ruth Müller, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Kampf gegen die
nationalsozialistische Verfolgung und Vernichtung der Juden (Munich:
Chr. Kaiser, 1990), 210. More recent research has led to a revision of
the historiography of the document presented to the synod and the
synod’s response; see Dietgard Meyer, “Elisabeth Schmitz: Die
Denkschrift ‘Zur Lage der deutschen Nichtarier’”, in Katharina Staritz:
1903-1953, ed. Hannelore Erhart, Ilse Meseberg-Haubold, and Dietgard
Meyer (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1999), 187-273.
6 Gerlach, And the Witnesses, 94-99.
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Barnett, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Relevance for Post-Holocaust Theology” 56 http://escholarship.bc.edu/scjr/vol2/iss1/art4
A third example was Bonhoeffer’s ongoing engagement
on behalf of refugees attempting to flee Nazi Germany. If we
look only at the cases in which Bonhoeffer was approached
directly, we have a paper trail of isolated instances, and it is
often unclear, particularly during his time in London, as to
whether these were Jews who had converted to Christianity
or not.7 There is Bonhoeffer’s letter of July 13, 1934, to
Reinhold Niebuhr in the United States, asking for Niebuhr’s
help for two refugees who wanted to emigrate from Nazi
Germany: a Jewish law student and Social Democrat named
Kurt Berlowitz, and the political dissident Armin Wegner
(who was later honored by Yad Vashem).8 There are
references by Bonhoeffer, George Bell, and others to his
efforts on behalf of refugees during his time in London, from
October 1933 to April 1935. There is the correspondence
from Max-Peter Meyer in 1939 that documents Bonhoeffer’s
role in helping the Meyers reach the United States.9 Finally,
Bonhoeffer was involved in the “Operation Seven” rescue of
fourteen individuals in 1941 who reached Switzerland. Many
of those whom he helped were “non-Aryan Christians”;
others (including three of those rescued in Operation Seven)
were either secular or observant Jews. Bonhoeffer’s
motivation in these efforts is clear in his letter to Reinhold
7 This is significant because the Confessing Church protests against
Aryan legislation were focused almost exclusively on the plight of “non-
Aryan Christians” – i.e., people of Jewish descent who had converted.
As time passed and state pressures on the churches intensified,
Confessing support even for this group diminished. But with very few
exceptions Christians were completely silent about the plight of
religiously observant and secular Jews. Hence the question about
whether Bonhoeffer’s concern extended to all refugees, or only those
who were Christian, is an entirely legitimate one.
8 London: 1933-1935 (DBWE 13), document 1/127, forthcoming
publication spring 2007.
9 Published in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Jahrbuch 2 2005/2006 (Gütersloh:
Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2005), 97-101; it will be included in the
forthcoming Theological Education Underground: 1937-1940 (DBWE
15).
Niebuhr in February 1933, where he wrote: “it would be
precipitous to say even one word about conditions here in
Germany…here, too, we will have to open up a Civil
Liberties Union soon.”10
A fourth and key piece of evidence is the report written
by Bonhoeffer and Confessing Church lawyer Friedrich
Perels in October 1941 at the request of Hans von Dohnanyi
about the deportations of Jews from Berlin.11 This report was
sent to several members of the German resistance, as well
as to ecumenical contacts in Geneva. This report appears to
be part of the series of documents sent abroad at the behest
of Hans von Dohnanyi, beginning in the fall of 1939, which
conveyed very detailed information about German atrocities
against Jews on the eastern front as well as the intensifying
persecution in Germany.12
Thus, there is a fairly detailed record of Bonhoeffer’s
activism and clear opposition against the Nazi anti-Jewish
measures, as well as his commitment to help its victims. As
to the third point raised by Paldiel, however – whether
Bonhoeffer ever repudiated his theological anti-Judaism – I
wrote that this was a question with no definitive answer.
There are certainly indications, which I will mention below,
10 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Berlin, 1932-1933 (DBW 12. German edition pages
nos: 50-51), Letter dated February 2, 1933.
11 Conspiracy and Imprisonment 1940-1945 (DBWE 16), 225-29.
Regarding Dohnanyi's involvement, see Winfried Meyer, Verschwörer
im KZ: Hans von Dohnanyi und die Häftlinge des 20. Juli 1944 im KZ
Sachsenhausen (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1998), esp. 97.
12 See especially Meyer, Verschwörer im KZ; but there is also extensive
material on this in Winfried Meyer, Unternehmen Sieben. See also
Victoria Barnett, “Communications between the German Resistance, the
Vatican and Protestant Ecumenical Leaders: Implications for Interpeting
Bonhoeffer’s Reflections on Civil Society,” in Religion im Erbe: Dietrich
Bonhoeffer und die Zukunftsfähigkeit des Christentums (2002), ed.
Christian Gremmels and Wolfgang Huber, 54-75.
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but they must be gleaned primarily from his writings about
other things, notably his reflections in his prison writings
about Christianity’s potential role in a post-Nazi world.
It is this third point – the issue of the anti-Judaism in
Bonhoeffer’s writings – that is most relevant here, since I am
considering the relevance of Bonhoeffer’s thought for post-
Holocaust Christian theology, which has focused primarily on
the critique of anti-Judaism in Christian theology and a
corresponding reformulation of Christian teachings and
interpretations. My reply to Yad Vashem was complicated
because Bonhoeffer in this regard is an extraordinarily
complicated figure. These complexities have consequences
not only for how we understand Bonhoeffer, but also for our
understanding of a post-Holocaust theology and the Jewish-
Christian relationship. If Bonhoeffer has something to
contribute to our understanding here, it can only be through
a careful examination of the development of his thought in
the context of his times.
But his place in the post-Holocaust conversation is also
contingent, I think, on how narrowly or broadly we define
post-Holocaust theology. Is post-Holocaust theology
confined to the critique and eradication of anti-Judaism from
Christian thought? Or – and this is my position here – does
this critique of anti-Judaism necessarily go hand-in-hand
with a profound rethinking of core Christian understandings
of Christology and ecclesiology, and most particularly with a
self-critique of our privileged understanding of the
relationship between Christianity, culture, and state
authority? It is important to consider this because the failures
of German Protestantism under Nazism were not only due to
antisemitism, but were the outcome of the very long history
in German Protestantism of nationalism, subservience to
state authority, and emphasis on cultural privilege, which in
turn had a profound effect on how church leaders reacted
theologically and ecclesiologically to Nazism. For that
reason, I would argue that a more extensive examination of
Bonhoeffer’s thought that includes these points, particularly
the conclusions he drew in his prison writings, is crucial.
2. Central Issues
Let me begin this analysis with the central issues as I
see them in Bonhoeffer’s work:
A. Traditional Anti-Judaism
We must begin, of course, with the passages containing
traditional Christian anti-Judaism at various points in the
Bonhoeffer opus, including his later writings such as Ethics
(1941). As Stephen Haynes notes in The Bonhoeffer
Legacy: Post-Holocaust Perspectives,13 it is not only the
content of these statements that troubles us (e.g.,
statements about God’s punishment of the Jews or the
pejorative use of the word “Pharisee” to mean hypocrite) but
their impact in their historical context. Christians in Nazi
Germany, even those in the Confessing Church and even
when they were disagreeing with the Nazi state on other
issues, used such rhetoric to position themselves and
protect themselves from the charge that they were
unpatriotic or disloyal. The use of anti-Jewish language at a
time of growing persecution of Jews clearly increased the
vulnerability of Jews and undermined those in solidarity with
them. The open affirmation by some church figures of Nazi
anti-Jewish policies not only attests to the antisemitism that
was widespread throughout the church, but it reminds us of
why the early hagiography of the Kirchenkampf, in which
church leaders portrayed their disputes with the nationalist
Deutsche Christen as anti-Nazi resistance, was so
misleading.
13 Stephen Haynes, The Bonhoeffer Legacy: Post-Holocaust Perspectives
(Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2006).
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Barnett, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Relevance for Post-Holocaust Theology” 58 http://escholarship.bc.edu/scjr/vol2/iss1/art4
Where does Bonhoeffer stand in this regard? It should be
mentioned that there is actually relatively little of this
language throughout the Bonhoeffer opus and it is for the
most part found in theological reflections about other things.
Despite the popular image of Bonhoeffer speaking out
constantly against the Nazi regime and on behalf of the
Jews, there are few writings in which he actually did so
explicitly, and much of his written work during the 1930s
(e.g., sermons, Bible studies, and notes taken by his
students of his lectures) is remarkably circumspect. Most of
his political statements are found in his correspondence,
notably during the period in London where presumably he
was freer to speak his mind.
There are also positive references to Judaism, and
these, too, are striking in their historical context, an era in
which most German Protestants emphasized what they saw
as the irrelevance (or worse) of Jewish texts and the
supersessionist rightness of Christianity over against its
Jewish roots. In contrast, Bonhoeffer seemed to have an
early openness to other religions. As he wrote in 1928, it was
“fundamentally wrong to seek a new morality in Christianity.
In actual practice, Christ offered hardly any ethical
prescriptions not already attested among his contemporary
Jewish rabbis or even in pagan literature … What are we to
make of other religions? Are they nothing compared to
Christianity? The answer is that it is not the Christian religion
itself that, as a religion, is something divine. It is itself merely
one human path toward God, just as is the Buddhist and
other religions, albeit, of course, of a different sort.”14 What
made Christianity distinct, Bonhoeffer argued, was simply its
14 “Das Wesen des Christentums” (“The Essence of Christianity”), in
Barcelona, Berlin, New York: 1928-1931 (DBW 10. German edition
pages nos. 316 and 320). Translation is from the forthcoming English
edition.
belief in Christ as Messiah and the consequent centrality of
the incarnate and risen Christ in the world for Christians.
The only place where Bonhoeffer discussed theological
understandings of Judaism at any length, however, was in
the April 1933 essay “The Church and the Jewish Question”
and the early drafts of the Bethel confession in the fall of
1933. Because of the ongoing debate about Bonhoeffer’s
role in drafting specific passages of the Bethel confession, I
will focus here on the April essay.
As previously mentioned, even in the earliest days of the
Nazi regime we have the evidence that I think is
characteristic both of his early opposition and his eventual
move to the resistance: of a strong civil libertarian streak,
unique within German Protestantism but apparently quite
consistent with his upbringing and the Bonhoeffer family
views. It is in “The Church and the Jewish Question” that we
find these two aspects of Bonhoeffer’s thought joined: a
traditional theological anti-Judaism, juxtaposed with a clear
political conviction that the church must oppose the state’s
measures against its Jewish citizens. The essay is filled with
problematic contradictions.15 It begins with a systematic
15 In her study of Bonhoeffer and the Jews (Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Kampf
gegen die nationalsozialistische Verfolgung und Vernichtung der Juden)
Christine-Ruth Müller contends that these contradictions stem from the
fact that Bonhoeffer here is not expressing his own beliefs (even in the
anti-Jewish passages), but simply setting up certain arguments in order
to then refute them in the passages calling for church opposition to
oppressive state authority. (Müller, 326) The German text can indeed be
read that way, but it is worth noting that even Bethge didn’t offer this
interpretation. Müller’s book is probably the most thorough
documentation to date of the development of Bonhoeffer’s thought on
this issue, but in my own opinion she is too quick to dismiss the
significance of antisemitic statements, including those made by
members of the conspiracy. The other major study is Marijke Smid,
Deutscher Protestantismus und Judentum 1932/1933 (Chr. Kaiser,
1990), which in addition to an excellent extended chapter on Bonhoeffer
offers a detailed historical and theological context of German Protestant
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outline of traditional Lutheran teachings about the respective
roles of the church and the state, and Bonhoeffer then
proceeds to write: “Without doubt one of the historical
problems that must be dealt with by our government is the
Jewish question, and without doubt our government is
entitled to strike new paths in doing so.”16 Bonhoeffer then
goes on to differentiate between the legitimate and the
illegitimate exercise of state authority – the latter arising
when the state oppresses people and treats them unjustly.
While the church, he writes, must respect its clear
boundaries and not interfere with the state’s exercise of its
authority, it does have an obligation to speak up when that
authority exceeds its legitimate bounds. In any unjust
situation the church always has an “unconditional obligation
toward the victims…even if they do not belong to the
Christian community”17 and in extreme situations the church
has the eventual obligation to resist the state. Bonhoeffer
then proceeds to delineate why the “Jewish question”
confronts the church with particular issues, and it is here that
we encounter the familiar and troubling passages:
The conversion of Israel is to be the end of its people’s
sufferings. In our time, the Christian church trembles at
the sight of the people Israel’s history, as God’s own
free, terrible way with God’s own people. We know that
no government in the world can deal with this enigmatic
people, because God has not yet finished with it. Every
new attempt to “solve” the “Jewish question” comes to
attitudes toward Judaism; as the title suggests, however, this study
does not go beyond 1933.
16 Berlin: 1933 (DBW 12. German edition page no. 351). Translation is
from the forthcoming English edition of this volume.
17 Ibid., 353. Translation is from the forthcoming English edition of this
volume.
grief because of the meaning of this people for salvation
history, and yet one has to keep trying.18
This essay contains both traditional theological
explications of the Christian understanding of the role of
Jews in history – in language that dismisses the Judaic faith
and is painful for us to read, particularly given the historical
context in which it was written – and even (in the statement
cited above) appears to defend the state’s right to “deal with”
the “Jewish question.” At the same time it offers a radical
revision of Lutheran teachings about obedience to state
authority by setting the criteria for establishing when
Christians can oppose illegitimate state authority.
This is the essay that gets cited in discussions about
Bonhoeffer and the Jews – in fact it’s often the only thing,
since Bonhoeffer didn’t write much else on this – and it
usually is the case that either the anti-Jewish passages are
cited or the ones about resistance to the state. Taken as a
whole, however, the essay is a call for church intervention on
behalf of the Jews, a stance that is evident elsewhere in
Bonhoeffer’s correspondence.19 Yet in that historical
moment, the theological anti-Judaism clearly undercuts his
call to help the victims and even resist the state.
18 Ibid., 355. Translation is from the forthcoming English edition of this
volume.
19 See, for example, Bonhoeffer’s letter of September 11,1934, to Erwin
Sutz in which he writes about the need to finally break “with our
theologically grounded reserve about whatever is being done by the
state - which really only comes down to fear. ‘Speak out for those who
cannot speak’ (Prov.31:8) - who in the church today still remembers that
this is the very least the Bible asks of us in such times as these?”
London: 1933-1935 (DBWE 13, 1/147), publication forthcoming spring
2007.
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Does he ever repudiate these theological judgments
about Judaism? As I noted previously, not explicitly.20 Among
the writings that deserve the greatest scrutiny here are his
bible studies and lectures to students between 1935-39, both
because these years encompassed the sharp intensification
of the persecution of German Jews and because it was
during this period that he trained Confessing Church
pastors.21 And as I will mention later, his wartime writings
reveal a rethinking of Christianity that implicitly indicates a
new relationship to Judaism.
B. The Ecumenical Network
The second central issue concerns the ecumenical
network of which Bonhoeffer was part, both throughout the
church struggle period of the 1930s and then during his
resistance period.22 After 1939, this ecumenical network
became central in the communications between different
20 The two early drafts of the Bethel confession, written in the summer of
1933, do repudiate the deicide charge very clearly. Berlin, 1932-1933
(DBW 12. German edition pages 386 and 404).
21 An extensive summary of this material, which is found primarily in DBW
volumes 14 (Theological Education at Finkenwalde: 1935-1937) and 15
(Theological Education Underground: 1937-1940), is beyond the scope
of this essay. Documents from these volumes that deserve particular
analysis in this respect, however, include the bible study of King David
from October 1935 (DBW 14. German pages 878-905); Bonhoeffer’s
talk on “The Contemporary Significance of New Testament Texts,” given
to Confessing clergy in August 1935 (DBW 14. German pages 399-
421); and his October 26, 1938 lecture to illegal seminarians, titled “Our
Path According to the Testimony of Scripture” (DBW 15. German pages
407-31).
22 His primary contacts here included Paul Lehmann and Reinhold
Niebuhr in the U.S., and ecumenical leaders throughout Europe,
including Marc Boegner in France, Willem Visser ‘t Hooft in Geneva,
George Bell in London, and Ove Ammundsen in Sweden. The role of
these leaders in helping refugees and particularly in terms of their own
responses to Nazi anti-Jewish measures is documented extensively in
Armin Boyens’ two-volume Kirchenkampf und Ökumene.
resistance movements and in the actual rescue of Jews
throughout Europe.23 Again, whereas the popular portrayals
of Bonhoeffer give him a leading role in this network, he was
one among many. Yet the significance of this network, even
in seemingly singular cases such as Le Chambon and the
White Rose resistance (two groups often portrayed as
isolated examples of resistance), is often overlooked. In
1941 Bonhoeffer and other ecumenical colleagues met in
Geneva with Mayor Charles Guillon of Le Chambon to
discuss visas and other means to help Jews from Le
Chambon reach Switzerland.24 In early 1943 Dietrich and
Klaus Bonhoeffer planned to meet with the Scholls in Munich
– a meeting that never took place because of the arrests and
executions of the White Rose members in February 1943.
This seems to have been linked to the work of Dohnanyi’s
office, for Josef Müller stated that he conveyed information
23 The works that document this most extensively are Boyens,
Kirchenkampf und Ökumene; Jörgen Glenthøj, "Bonhoeffer und die
Ökumene," in Bethge, ed., Die Mündige Welt II (Munich: Kaiser Verlag,
1956); Klemens von Klemperer, German Resistance Against Hitler: The
Search for Allies Abroad 1938-1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992);
Winfried Meyer, Unternehmen Sieben and Verschwörer im KZ; and
most recently Uta Gerdes, Ökumenische Solidarität mit christlichen und
jüdischen Verfolgten: Die CIMADE in Vichy-Frankreich 1940-1944
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005). Because of Bonhoeffer’s
ties to the German resistance figure Gertrud Staewen (and her pivotal
role in several of the rescue networks), a recent biography of Staewen
is worth including in this list: Marlies Flesch-Thebesius, Zu den
Aussenseitern gestellt: die Geschichte der Gertrud Staewen 1894-1987
(Berlin: Wichern Verlag, 2004).
24 Bonhoeffer was in meetings with Mayor Guillon during his visits to
Geneva in March and September 1941. See Conspiracy and
Imprisonment 1940-1945 (DBWE 16), 169, 215, and 681. In addition to
the documents in DBWE 16, the World Council of Churches archives
contain the minutes of a meeting in February 1941 of various people
working with refugees, attended by Bonhoeffer and Guillon. (WCC, GS
42.0016. Folder 5: Cedergren. “Minutes of meeting of Ecco. Febr. 3,
1941).
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about the White Rose group to Rome to be passed on to
England.25
The debate about whether Bonhoeffer was a “rescuer”
has skewed the discussion, I think, because it focuses
primarily on his actual role in the Operation 7 rescue in 1941.
Yet his more significant role is as one figure in this larger
network, and we can trace a clear trajectory from
Bonhoeffer’s early political critique of Nazism, and his call for
church opposition to the Nazi state, to his subsequent
involvement in the ecumenical rescue network and the
German resistance.
C. Christianity in the World
The theological evidence of change that runs
concurrently with this move toward resistance, however, is
most evident in his reflections on the church and the nature
of Christian witness and existence in ideological times. His
primary theological preoccupation during this period remains
what it was from the beginning of his theological work in the
1920s: the identity of the church. That’s what he wrote about
throughout the 1930s, it’s what he preached about, it was
the focus of his teaching to his students between 1935 and
1939. Bonhoeffer’s central point of reference was the
question he posed to his times: Who is Christ for us today?
And what defines the church? Bonhoeffer’s radical
Christology – Christian preaching and witness for him were
incarnational acts – was the means by which he detached
25 The planned meeting with the White Rose group is mentioned in
Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography. Revised and edited
by Victoria J. Barnett (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 1010, note
284. Josef Müller, one of the few survivors of the Dohnanyi circle,
mentioned Bonhoeffer’s attempt to pass this information on to England
in his interview with Harold Deutsch. (Harold Deutsch papers, Carlisle,
Pennsylvania: Interview dated March 24, 1966, p. 6 of transcript.).
his earthly witness as a Christian from the ideological
alliances of Christendom. This was the focus of his teaching
to Confessing Church seminarians.
This – the real-life, real-time emphasis on what it means
to live in the world as a Christian – is what makes
Bonhoeffer so important in Christian theology, and I think it’s
what gives him such universal appeal, both to people
exploring spirituality and to the political theologians, in a
variety of countries and in very different church and
theological traditions. Bonhoeffer’s emphasis to his students
that they were called to follow “Christ alone,” echoing the
second thesis of the Barmen declaration, was a radical
declaration of Christian independence from the Nazi state
and its Führer.
At the same time, this “Christ alone” is clearly an
exclusivist claim that is problematic for Jews. There is no
escaping the fact that Bonhoeffer’s theology and language is
very internal to Christian theology. That, coupled with the
anti-Judaism in some writings, makes the question of
Bonhoeffer’s relevance for post-Holocaust theology an
important one. Is Bonhoeffer relevant for post-Holocaust
theology? If so, what does he bring to it? Does he have
important insights for Christians that help us understand our
religion and its practices better in the wake of the Holocaust?
Does he have anything at all to say to Jews? Picking up on
some of the points I just outlined, I would focus on what I
think are the two most relevant aspects of Bonhoeffer’s
writings for post-Holocaust Christian theology:
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3. Bonhoeffer’s Changed Ideas about Christian Identity
and Witness
From the very beginning – and even before, because
Bonhoeffer’s writings on the church in the late 1920s and
early 1930s set the foundation for this – Bonhoeffer was
clearly concerned about the ideological costs when the
church aligns itself with worldly authority or ideology. He
began to argue with people like Paul Althaus and Emanuel
Hirsch in the early 1930s about nationalist and völkisch
conceptions of Christianity.26 This sets him on a clear
collision course both with the Deutsche Christen and with the
widespread support within the Protestant church for the Nazi
regime.
The early hagiography of the German church struggle
was flawed by the absence of any analysis of Christian
antisemitism, and yet it is equally problematic to analyze this
antisemitism purely as the product of theological anti-
Judaism, without an analysis of how these elements
converged in the German Protestantism of the 1920s and
1930s with an explicitly nationalist, völkisch mentality and a
corresponding understanding of what it meant to be the
church. The political critique of the church that did emerge in
the early period after 1945 (and in Germany it was driven
largely by those who had studied under Bonhoeffer) was one
response to this. By focusing on the Protestant Church’s
alliance with state authority and power, its consequent
nationalism, and hence its profound influence in helping to
shape the culture that succumbed to Nazi ideology, this
critique addressed these deeper ideological strains. Yet this
critique led in many cases to a purely political theology that
failed to address the concrete historical record of the
26 This was at a 1932 ecumenical meeting in Berlin. See Glenthöj,
"Bonhoeffer und die Ökumene," 140-141.
church’s antisemitism. The emergence of post-Holocaust
theology that explicitly confronted anti-Judaism was the
corrective to this – and yet this theology, in turn, often
glossed over the historical and political aspects of the
Christian response to Nazism.
Yet any serious rethinking of Christianity in the wake of
the Holocaust needs to address these aspects together; one
is embedded in the history of the institutional church and the
other in theology. Thus in addition to re-examining our
theology, we need to address the identity of the church,
because that is the primary form in which we act in the
world. Ecclesial traditions, and an understanding of church
as ally of nation and culture, were central factors in the
churches’ failure under Nazism.
Part of the provocative impact of James Carroll’s
Constantine’s Sword27 was that he examined these issues in
conjunction with antisemitism. Carroll, of course, focused on
these issues through the lens of Catholic history, but he
showed the extent to which these two aspects of Christian
history – theology and ecclesiology – have been intertwined
throughout the centuries. Religion is never just about belief
or doctrine. Religion is always simultaneously a social
construct, and theological teachings and interpretations of
text constitute a form of dialogue with the social and political
context in which they occur. Beginning with Constantine,
Christianity and its leaders became aligned with political
power, and that power was deepened by the articulation of
an explicitly Christian culture and the identification of certain
values with Christianity. The foil of theological anti-Judaism
gave this prejudice not only political power but an even
broader cultural power, which is why even after the
emancipation laws in Europe Jews remained vulnerable,
27 See James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews: A
History (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2001).
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viewed as suspect and as “other”, and were immediately
targeted in times of turmoil.
This also helps to explain the insidious staying power of
antisemitism in western society, even to our present day,
and I think this is one reason why it is so difficult for
Christians to acknowledge the real existence of antisemitism
and the role played here not only by Christian interpretations
of scripture, but by Christian history and our understanding
of the church. This is also why the distinction that is often
drawn between antisemitism and theological anti-Judaism is
so problematic. While this distinction is often defensively
invoked to make a distinction between Christianity and
Nazism (and, indeed, the two were not the same thing), the
fact remains (and not just during the Nazi era) that Christian
teachings were cited in support of violence against Jews
throughout the history of Christian Europe.
This is underscored by the fact that for centuries,
Christians in Europe and in this country have been the
majority. Our cultural understanding as Christians, even
when we are critical of our religious history and institutions,
reflects this. Ninety percent of the German population in
1933 was registered with the Catholic or Protestant church.
For that matter, eighty-two percent of the U.S. population
today identifies itself as Christian.28 Christians in western
Europe and North America are accustomed to thinking as a
majority, doing theology as a majority, believing as a
majority, and worshipping as a majority. Inevitably, this
shapes Christians’ self-understanding of their own religion as
normative, as well as their approach to religious minorities.
28 This figure is from page 50 of the 2002 study conducted by the Pew
Forum on Religion & Public Life, “Americans Struggle with Religions
Role at Home and Abroad”, http://pewforum.org/publications/
reports/poll2002.pdf. Jews constitute the second largest single religious
group in the United States – with one percent of the population in 2002.
Looking at this issue in a broad historical context, Carroll’s
book illustrated the closely-woven interrelationship between
anti-Semitism, the individual Christian sense of identity, the
church’s institutional sense of identity – and the resulting
sociopolitical and cultural sense of privilege. This was one
reason that Nazism was able to take hold as it did, and hold
the allegiance of millions of people and receive the sanction
of many in the church.
This is why I believe that a post-Holocaust Christianity
cannot consist only of the critique of theological anti-Judaism
and the rethinking of Christian teachings about the Jews –
as crucial and as central as these tasks are. The other core
element has to be the analysis and challenge to
presumptions about Christian culture and the right to power,
because that has been our Achilles heel through the
centuries, and the response of the German churches to
Nazism is the case study for that.
And this is what Bonhoeffer came to understand – in a
way that virtually no one else at the time, including his
ecumenical colleagues, did. At the heart of his 1933 essay
was his analysis about the criteria for determining what state
authority is legitimate and what is not. He was very clear
about the church’s obligation not only to oppose illegitimate
authority (which in Bonhoeffer’s definition in this essay is
authority that is unjust and oppressive) but to stop it. By
virtue of its inclusion in this essay he is clearly linking this to
the anti-Jewish measures.
His starting point for this critique seems to have been his
strong political clarity, which is in evidence from the
beginning of the Nazi regime. He recognized quite early that
a Christian could not be a Nazi, a sentiment he articulated in
a 1934 letter to Norwegian Bishop Ove Ammundsen: “It is
precisely here, in our attitude toward the state, that we must
speak out with absolute sincerity for the sake of Jesus Christ
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Barnett, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Relevance for Post-Holocaust Theology” 64 http://escholarship.bc.edu/scjr/vol2/iss1/art4
and of the ecumenical cause. It must be made quite clear –
terrifying though it is – that we are immediately faced with
the decision: National Socialist or Christian.”29
In turn, this political clarity shaped his theology.
Particularly during his resistance activities, we can trace how
his theological understanding of Christian identity was
influenced by the political developments around him.
Bonhoeffer’s critique of cultural and nationalist Christianity
was a repudiation of the ways in which his religion had been
hijacked by ideologies – nationalism, militarism, Nazism,
fascism – and had made its peace with them. He understood
the problems of the instrumentalization of Christianity, its
alliance with power, its place in society, better than any other
Christian thinker of his times and better than most since.
Bonhoeffer’s reflections on this and on the moral failure
of “Christendom” became most striking during the early
1940s, when the conversation in many Christian resistance
circles of Europe and the ecumenical world turned to what
would be necessary for the moral reconstruction of
European society after the defeat of Nazism. Virtually all
these documents saw the solution of this question in some
form of “rechristianization” of Europe (as an antidote to
fascism and ideology) or return to explicitly “Christian”
values.30 The values they were upholding, of course, are
naturally not confined to Christianity, and the failure of these
European Christian leaders to acknowledge this, to reflect on
the meaning of “rechristianization” in the context of what had
29 London 1933-1935 (DBWE 13), 1/123; publication forthcoming spring
2007.
30 A detailed description of these documents goes beyond the scope of
this essay, but see von Klemperer’s discussion of this in German
Resistance against Nazism, 264-315. See also Dianne Kirby, “William
Temple, Pius XII, Ecumenism, Natural Law, and the Postwar Peace,”
Journal of Ecumenical Studies (Summer-Fall 1999): 318-39.
happened in the Holocaust, and to reflect on the explicit
failures of Christianity during this period, is striking.
Bonhoeffer’s own wartime reflections on the topic of the
values that would be needed in the aftermath of Nazism are
in stark contrast.31 Bonhoeffer disagreed with the premise of
these ecumenical documents, writing that the remedy to the
moral havoc wreaked under Nazism could not be the
rechristianization of society or the state, but a society in
which Christians and their church would have to assume a
new function.32 In one such example, Bonhoeffer wrote of
the need for a new understanding of civil society, marked by
“a possible and necessary cooperation between Christians
and non-Christians in clarifying certain subjects and in
advancing concrete tasks. Because of their fundamentally
different foundations, the results emerging from this
cooperation have the character not of the proclamation of
the word of God but of responsible deliberation or demand
31 See Barnett, „Communications between the German Resistance“, esp.
67-71. It should be noted that the citations in this 2002 published article
were from the “The Doctrine of the Primus Usus Legis” in the 1963
edition of Ethics. That essay is no longer in the new DBWE edition of
Ethics, since it has been determined that it was not part of Bonhoeffer’s
original Ethics manuscript. The essay can now be found in: Conspiracy
and Imprisonment 1940-1945 (DBWE 16), 584-601, and the citations
here are from this more recent translation.
32 See especially his reflections on the relationship of the church to the
“worldly orders” in the essay on “‘Personal’ and ‘Objective’ Ethics” in
Conspiracy and Imprisonment 1940-1945 (DBWE 16), esp. 547-51.
Other wartime writings that indicate his new thinking about Christianity
(including explicit commentary on the ecumenical position papers about
“rechristianization”) include his position paper on state and church, his
review of William Paton’s The Church and the New Order, and his draft
proposal for reorganizing the church and its constitution after the coup.
These writings can be found in Part 2 of Conspiracy and Imprisonment
1940-1945.
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on the basis of human perception. This distinction must be
preserved under all circumstances.”33
Bonhoeffer’s central concern remained the life of
Christian faith in the world, yet his understanding of
Christianity had been shaken and altered by the failures of
his church under Nazism. In 1942 he wrote of “a
Christendom enmeshed in guilt beyond all measure”34 and
during the same period he wrote:
The church confesses that it has witnessed the arbitrary
use of brutal force, the suffering in body and soul of
countless innocent people, that it has witnessed
oppression, hatred, and murder without raising its voice
for the victims and without finding ways of rushing to help
them. It has become guilty of the lives of the weakest
and most defenseless brothers and sisters of Jesus
Christ.35
By the time of his imprisonment Bonhoeffer had
concluded that Christianity could never again be what it was.
The church, he wrote, had fought under Nazism:
… only for its own preservation, as if that were an end in
itself, and has become incapable of bringing the word of
reconciliation and redemption to humankind and to the
world. So the words we used before must lose their
power, be silenced, and we can be Christians today in
33 Conspiracy and Imprisonment 1940-1945 (DBWE 16), 599-600.
34 In his “Unfinished Draft of a Pulpit Pronouncement following the Coup”,
in Conspiracy and Imprisonment 1940-1945 (DBWE 16), 572.
35 Ethics (DBWE 6), 139.
only two ways, through prayer and in doing justice
among human beings.36
Does any of this, however, indicate a revision of his
attitudes toward Judaism? There is no definitive answer.
Bethge and others have observed that between 1939 and
1945, when Bonhoeffer was engaged in the resistance and
then imprisoned, he was hardly in a position to write at
length about taking a new approach to Judaism. The
historical circumstances under which he was writing must
indeed be taken into account. Bonhoeffer’s thinking and
language remain clearly Christian and his reflections here
are consistent with his understanding of the incarnational
nature of Christianity in the world. At the same time, his
experiences had challenged every aspect of his theology,
and his understanding of Christianity had changed as a
result:
But we too are being thrown back again to the very
beginnings of our understanding. What reconciliation and
redemption mean, being born again and Holy Spirit,
loving your enemies, cross and resurrection, what it
means to live in Christ and follow Christ, all that is so
difficult and remote that we hardly dare speak of it
anymore.37
It was during this period that he began to call for a
“religionless Christianity” in “a world come of age” – a
Christianity that must understand and define itself anew, in
the world that had been altered by Nazism; a Christianity
that has to detach itself from privilege and triumphalism.
36 From “Thoughts on the Baptism Day of Dietrich Wilhelm Rüdiger
Bethge,” Widerstand und Ergebung (DBW 8. German edition page 435.
Translation is by Isabel Best, from the forthcoming English edition.
37 Ibid.
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In Talking with Christians, the Jewish theologian David
Novak argues that Christian-Jewish dialogue needs to go
beyond merely theological conversations, and that the most
important form of commonality between Jews and Christians
must be “the theological-political question: how faithful Jews
and faithful Christians can enter into civil society and survive
there intact.”38 This is the central question that Bonhoeffer
was exploring during the resistance and prison period. His
language remains very much that of the “faithful Christian” –
but the writings are those of someone struggling with the
very meaning of this, of how Christians could not only remain
faithful in civil society, but in a historical period in which they
had profoundly compromised their faith.
4. Bonhoeffer’s Reflections on Guilt and Failure
This second factor is something that, oddly enough, has
been largely overlooked in writings to date about Bonhoeffer.
This may well be due to the hagiographic nature of much of
what has been written about him, but – as the excerpts
above indicate –a dominant theme in Bonhoeffer’s late
writings is his own developing sense of guilt, of failure, and
what this means not only for his life as a Christian but for his
very understanding of Christianity.
Here theology and biography must be understood in
conjunction with one another. This aspect of Bonhoeffer’s
thought cannot be separated from what he was experiencing
in the resistance, beginning in the fall of 1939. While there
remains much that we may never know, it is clear that he
was involved in the resistance circle that was best informed
about the atrocities against the Jews on the eastern front,
38 David Novak, Talking with Christians: Musings of a Jewish Theologian
(Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005), 207.
through his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi.39
Bonhoeffer’s work for the resistance entailed carrying two
kinds of information to ecumenical colleagues abroad: 1) this
information from Dohnanyi, and 2) peace feelers for the
resistance. At least one document – the 1945 memo from
Harold Tittmann about his postwar conversation with Josef
Mueller – suggests that one aspect of the peace feelers may
have been to urge caution in what foreign church leaders
said about Nazi actions, so as not to undermine the
resistance plans.40 Given Bonhoeffer’s knowledge of what
the Nazis were doing, given the repeated delays and failures
of the resistance to overthrow the regime (by all accounts a
source of real anguish to Dohnanyi), it is clear that
Bonhoeffer’s period in the resistance confronted him with
difficult ethical dilemmas.
The reflections on guilt and the very viability of
Christianity that permeate Bonhoeffer’s wartime writings are
evidence of this. His reflections on the changed nature of
ethical thought and human responsibility in history are at the
heart of Ethics, which was written at the height of his
resistance activities. His most famous reflections on these
matters can be found in the short essay “After Ten Years,”
written for his closest friends in the conspiracy in December
1942.41 “One may ask,” he writes here, “whether there have
39 This is extensively documented in Winfried Meyer’s Unternehmen
Sieben and especially Verschwörer im KZ. See also Barnett,
“Communications between the German Resistance,” in Religion im
Erbe, esp. 59-65, which include references to various archival
documents that contain the reports of these atrocities.
40 See Barnett, “Communications between the German Resistance,” in
Religion im Erbe, esp. 59-65. A copy of the Tittmann memo is in the
Myron C. Taylor papers, Library of Congress, Box 2: “Secret. For the
Ambassador. June 4 1945. Memo from Tittmann.”
41 The new translation of this will appear in the forthcoming Letters and
Papers from Prison (DBWE 8). The translation referenced here is from
the translation in Letters and Papers from Prison, (New York: Macmillan
Publishing Company, 1972), 3 – 21.
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ever before in human history been people with so little
ground under their feet – people to whom every available
alternative seemed equally intolerable, repugnant, and
futile...The great masquerade of evil has played havoc with
all our ethical concepts.”42 In the pages that follow he
explores the consequences of this experience for how they
think about faith, solidarity, good, evil, and responsibility.
While his reflections in Ethics on these issues are more
directed at the role of the Christian in society and history, in
“After Ten Years” he confronted them very personally, as a
Christian and citizen, asking: “Are we still of any use?”43
His late writings are marked both by a continuing belief in
grace as well as a profound sense of his own failings, the
failing of his church and his fellow conspirators. Bonhoeffer
witnessed and understood evil, he was part of and
understood compromise with evil, he acknowledged his own
shame and guilt. Between 1933-1945 his writings can be
understood as an unfolding set of reflections on that
experience and what it meant for his faith. And he
nonetheless remained faithful; as he wrote on July 21, 1944
– the day after the failure of the final attempt on Hitler’s life –
“it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to
have faith.”44
5. Conclusion
Does any of this make him relevant in post-Holocaust
Jewish-Christian dialogue? Is his thinking useful or
interesting for Jewish scholars? Or does the combination of
the theological anti-Judaism and his strong Christian focus
make that impossible? I don’t know. But I personally think
that Bonhoeffer’s thought is indispensable for any true post-
42 Ibid., 3 – 4.
43 Ibid., 16.
44 Letters and Papers from Prison, 369.
Holocaust Christian thought – not because of the
development of his thinking on Judaism and the Jews, but
because of the conclusions he drew about the changed
identity of the Church, the necessity for the dismantling of
cultural and political Christendom, and not least because of
his own guilt and shame about the failures of his church and
his country to withstand Nazi evil. He wrote about what it
does to our souls to be complicit, to struggle to be good, to
think differently about good and evil. His writings in their
simplest form are simply the record of the development of
his thinking on these issues.
This, I would argue, is his potential contribution to post-
Holocaust theology. In the long run it may prove to be a
minor one, less important than the work of those pioneers
whose profound rethinking of the Jewish-Christian
relationship is at the heart of such theology. Yet surely his
reflections here are informative for Christians who seek to
rethink and practice their faith in a profoundly different way in
the shadow of the Holocaust, for he leaves us with some
additional tools for seeing our role as Christians and as
citizens in a new light. The insights he drew from his
experience under Nazism can help Christians to encounter
Jews and members of other faiths, not as members of a
majority or dominant religion, not as people who privilege
their faith as the dominant set of values for the culture or
who demand ideological conformity with “Christian” values,
but as people who have sinned profoundly and who accept
their place in civil society as brothers and sisters (and as
citizens) alongside non-Christians, and want to reflect
theologically on what this means for their faith.