A posthumous collection of prison correspondence from the theologian of the German resistance
What the Work Is
Du wartest jede Stunde mit mir is a German-language collection of letters by the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, first published in 2019. The book gathers correspondence written during his imprisonment, and its catalogued subjects — theologians and correspondence — identify it as a documentary volume of letters rather than a work of original theology composed for publication. Bonhoeffer, a leading figure of the Confessing Church and a participant in the German resistance to National Socialism, was arrested on 5 April 1943 and executed two years later at Flossenbürg on the personal order of Adolf Hitler, as one of the last opponents of the regime linked to the assassination attempt of 20 July 1944.
What the Book Is About
The volume presents Bonhoeffer’s prison letters as a body of writing, giving readers direct access to the correspondence of a theologian who continued to think and write under conditions of confinement and impending death. The letters belong to the same period of captivity that produced the influential, if fragmentary, reflections for which Bonhoeffer’s prison writings are known — his thoughts on a future reorientation of the church toward solidarity with those in need, and on a non-religious interpretation of the Bible, church tradition, and worship. Because the sources describe these prison letters as the medium in which those ideas took shape, the collection stands as a primary document of Bonhoeffer’s final intellectual phase: theology written not from a study but from a cell, in correspondence with those closest to him.
Key Ideas and Themes
The ideas carried by this correspondence are inseparable from the situation that produced it. In his prison letters Bonhoeffer developed influential though fragmentary thoughts on how the church should orient itself outward, in solidarity with the needy, and on reading Scripture, tradition, and worship in a non-religious key. These were not abstract speculations: they grew out of a life in which faith and action were held together, a consistency Bonhoeffer practiced personally, above all during the Nazi period.
That unity of belief and deed is the thread running through the letters. Bonhoeffer’s theology emphasized the presence of Jesus Christ in the worldwide community of Christians, the significance of the Sermon on the Mount and of following Christ, and the correspondence between what one professes and how one acts. His earlier work Nachfolge had developed the idea that the church is not merely a community of souls or a place of proclamation but the real body of Christ on earth, and that this entails a genuine, living discipleship regardless of the cost to the individual — what he called costly grace. The prison correspondence extends this same insistence on lived faith into the extreme circumstances of arrest and confinement.
The letters also reflect the wider convictions Bonhoeffer had arrived at through the crisis of the church struggle. He had argued, against the prevailing position of many of his fellow theologians, that defending human rights was a duty of the whole church, and he advocated from the outset on behalf of the entire persecuted Jewish people. His decision to join the military resistance against the Nazi regime was made on his own responsibility, after he recognized that his positions had left him isolated even within the Confessing Church. The prison letters are, in this sense, the record of a man who had already resolved the question of where he stood.
Significance and Influence
The significance of this collection lies in what it preserves: the correspondence of a theologian whose prison writings became a lasting influence on how the church understands its mission and its relationship to a world that no longer speaks the language of religion. Bonhoeffer’s reflections from captivity — on the church’s solidarity with the needy and on a non-religious interpretation of Christian tradition — are described as influential, even if they remained fragmentary. Du wartest jede Stunde mit mir makes that correspondence available as a coherent body of material, allowing the reader to encounter the prison letters as letters: written to particular people, in a particular time, by a man whose thinking and whose life pointed in the same direction.
Bonhoeffer was born in Breslau on 4 February 1906, the sixth of eight children, shortly before his twin sister Sabine. His father was the psychiatrist and neurologist Karl Bonhoeffer; his grandfather the jurist Friedrich von Bonhoeffer, ennobled in 1893. The Bonhoeffer family had been settled in Schwäbisch Hall from 1513 and had produced 78 council members there as well as several mayors and pastors. His mother, Paula Bonhoeffer, née von Hase, a daughter of the Protestant theologian Karl Alfred von Hase and granddaughter of the theologian Karl von Hase and the painter Stanislaus von Kalckreuth, was a teacher. Bonhoeffer grew up in a grand-bourgeois family; his mother taught the children at home in their first years and provided a Christian upbringing, while his father kept his distance from questions of religion, and the family attended church only rarely. In 1912 the family moved to Berlin after the father was appointed director of the clinic and polyclinic for nervous diseases at the Charité Berlin and professor at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität. According to his twin sister, toward the end of the First World War Bonhoeffer began to grapple with questions of death and eternity, prompted by the death of his second-oldest brother Walter as a soldier in April 1918 and his mother’s deep grief. As a schoolboy he read Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Reden über die Religion and Friedrich Naumann’s Briefe über Religion and occupied himself with church history; in the Prima he chose Hebrew as an elective and named Protestant theology as his intended course of study. His family was astonished, having already produced theologians in its line, and supported him. In 1923, at seventeen, he passed the Abitur at the Berlin Grunewald-Gymnasium.
Bonhoeffer began studying theology in Tübingen in the summer semester of 1923, additionally attending lectures in philosophy. He joined the Akademische Verbindung Igel Tübingen, where he met Walter Dreß, who from 1924 was also his fellow student in Berlin and soon one of his closest friends; in 1929 Dreß married Bonhoeffer’s youngest sister Susanne. After a study stay in Rome, Bonhoeffer moved to Berlin in 1924, where he encountered important representatives of liberal theology, among them Adolf von Harnack, who influenced him not insignificantly. This period also saw his independent discovery of dialectical theology and especially of its main representative Karl Barth; Bonhoeffer remained connected to Barth and his theology from then on, while preserving a certain critical distance. At twenty-one, in 1927, he was awarded his doctorate in Berlin summa cum laude for the dissertation Sanctorum Communio, written under Reinhold Seeberg; alongside Barth, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch influenced this theological-sociological reflection. In January 1928 he passed the First Theological Examination before the Evangelical Consistory of the Berlin-Brandenburg provincial church. In 1928, on the advice of Berlin superintendent Max Diestel — who had come to know him in 1925 on the occasion of a substitute preaching engagement and had promoted him since — he went to Barcelona as vicar in the German evangelical congregation. After his return to Berlin, Diestel arranged that he did not have to enter the Berlin Domkandidatenstift as was customary. From 1929 Bonhoeffer was assistant at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin, where at the age of twenty-four he habilitated with the work Akt und Sein on transcendental philosophy and ontology in systematic theology. In 1930 he passed the Second Theological Examination; he had not yet reached the minimum age of twenty-five prescribed for ordination. Max Diestel filed an application for Bonhoeffer’s early ordination with the German Evangelical Church Committee on 13 August 1930, which was unsuccessful; Diestel therefore advised him “to look around further in the world.”
Bonhoeffer went for a year as a scholarship holder to Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he came to know practical pastoral work in the congregations of Harlem and experienced the consequences of the world economic crisis, which hit African Americans and farmers especially hard. Although he was skeptical of American theology, he was influenced by the theology of the Social Gospel, which the assistant professor of the same age, Paul Lehmann, brought close to him. He also formed lasting friendships with fellow students Erwin Sutz and Jean Lasserre; Lasserre’s strict pacifism in particular moved the previously politically reticent Bonhoeffer to engage with the theme of peace.
Teaching, Parish Ministry and Ecumenism
After his return, Bonhoeffer taught as assistant to the systematic theologian Wilhelm Lütgert at Berlin University. In the winter semester 1931/1932 he gave his first lecture on the “History of Systematic Theology of the 20th Century” and a seminar on “The Idea of Philosophy and Protestant Theology.” In 1932 followed a lecture on the “Essence of the Church,” in emphatic demarcation from Harnack’s “Essence of Christianity”; in 1933 he lectured on Christology. His courses were well attended and, unusually for students, opened with a prayer. Bonhoeffer also surprised his listeners, moved by the rising National Socialism, with statements on contemporary events singular among his colleagues: the next war was to be resolutely condemned, “out of obedience to the commandment of God that today strikes us, that war shall no longer be, because it robs the view of revelation.” Otto Dibelius had an Evangelical Student Congregation established at the Technical University of Berlin in 1931 for the first time, entrusting its leadership to Bonhoeffer; it was, however, predominantly rejected by the students and dissolved in 1933. Bonhoeffer took over a confirmand group of the Zion Church in a workers’ district of Berlin-Mitte. In summer 1931 he wrote, with Franz Hildebrandt, a new catechism for his confirmands titled “Glaubst du, so hast du,” in which both spoke out against a holy war and for prayer for peace. In 1932 Bonhoeffer set up a “Jugendstube” for unemployed youths, which was dissolved by the National Socialists in 1933 as “communist.”
On 15 November 1931 Bonhoeffer was ordained as pastor in the St. Matthäus Church in Berlin-Tiergarten. He quickly acquired a reputation beyond the congregation as a good preacher. After twice unsuccessfully attempting to obtain a parish post in eastern Berlin, he took on — promoted by Max Diestel and Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze — the task of an International Youth Secretary of the ecumenical World Alliance for Friendship Work of the Churches (WFK). He held one of three newly created youth secretary positions of the World Alliance and was deputy chairman of the German group as long as possible — until 1942. During a three-week seminar visit in Bonn, Bonhoeffer met Karl Barth personally for the first time. The two met several times afterward and stood in theological exchange; mutual sympathy and a fundamental theological and political closeness were combined in their relationship from the outset with mutual criticism, making the connection theologically very fruitful for both. On weekends Bonhoeffer often withdrew to a Markish youth hostel to meditate and discuss with his students and in 1932 bought a hut for this purpose in Biesenthal on the edge of Berlin. From this informal “Bonhoeffer circle” of young theologians emerged, from 1933, fellow combatants in the church struggle and ecumenical delegations.
The Church Struggle
Contrary to the widespread euphoria among Protestants, Bonhoeffer’s family perceived the National Socialists’ seizure of power on 30 January 1933 very critically; Bonhoeffer’s brother-in-law Rüdiger Schleicher said that evening in Bonhoeffer’s presence: “That means war!” On 1 February 1933 Bonhoeffer gave the radio address “Wandlungen des Führerbegriffes,” in which he demanded a limitation of the total power of the chancellery through constitutional order and the common good; at this point the broadcast was interrupted because of the clear criticism of the National Socialist “Führer principle” and Hitler cult. Through his close friend and fellow pastor Franz Hildebrandt and his brother-in-law Gerhard Leibholz, both of Jewish origin, Bonhoeffer experienced the consequences of National Socialist persecution of Jews from the beginning. He had already said in a sermon in 1932: although Bonhoeffer did not do this immediately, it later moved Barth greatly that he had co-influenced with this reaction Bonhoeffer’s decision to return to Germany, which had his turn to resistance and his martyr’s death as a consequence. In London he came to know George Kennedy Allen Bell, the Anglican Bishop of Chichester, who held high offices in the ecumenical movement and worked strongly for social concerns; Bell became one of his closest friends and partners in the church struggle. For some months Franz Hildebrandt also worked with him in London. Promoted by Bonhoeffer’s engagement, the German foreign congregations in Great Britain and Bell openly opposed the German Christians and demanded the resignation of Ludwig Müller.
On 31 May 1934 the Confessing Church was founded, as an assembly of Protestant Christians unanimously adopted the Barmen Theological Declaration written by Karl Barth after an explanatory presentation by Hans Asmussen and elected a Reichsbruderrat. In the following months, especially the Lutheran regional churches of Thuringia, Schleswig-Holstein, Lübeck, Saxony as well as the church provinces in Old Prussia showed themselves, because of their state-church tradition, unwilling to follow the confession organizationally and to resist their Gleichschaltung resolutely. There, after synodal elections, bishops and jurists who belonged to the German Christians won leadership offices. In this situation Bonhoeffer placed all hope in the young ecumenical movement. In considerable conflicts in the run-up, he attempted to achieve that only supporters of the Barmen Declaration were invited as the German delegation to the youth conference of the World Alliance on the Danish North Sea island of Fanø in August 1934. He himself appeared there both as representative of the Confessing Church and as youth secretary. At the morning devotion on 28 August he gave an introductory presentation before the full assembly under the title “Die Kirche und die Völkerwelt,” which many perceived as a peace sermon. At this time pacifists in Germany were already being terrorized by SA troops and imprisoned in concentration camps. In the following debates, however, it became clear that the delegations from Hungary and Poland, which saw themselves threatened by Germany, did not want to completely exclude war as national resistance.
On 15 April 1935 Bonhoeffer returned to Germany after briefly considering a trip to India to Mahatma Gandhi. For the Confessing Church he took over on 25 April 1935 the training of prospective pastors at the Predigerseminar Zingsthof, which moved in June to Finkenwalde (today part of Stettin) in Pomerania. One of his first students there was Eberhard Bethge, his close friend, later letter partner and biographer. Among the total of 112 candidates trained at the Predigerseminar Finkenwalde were also the later Berlin bishop Albrecht Schönherr, the theology professors Gerhard Ebeling and Gerhard Krause, as well as Werner Koch, Otto Dudzus and Winfried Maechler. In the context of this teaching activity arose the book Nachfolge, which Karl Barth after the war called by “far the best that has been written on this.” Here Bonhoeffer developed his conception that the church is not only a community of souls, not only proclamation, but above all also the real body of Christ on earth; this includes a genuine, living following of Christ, regardless of the costs this has for the individual (“costly grace”). In 1937 the Nazi state closed the Predigerseminar, which was now continued illegally and covered as a “Sammelvikariat” by courageous superintendents and pastors. Bonhoeffer was officially active as assistant preacher with Superintendent Eduard Block in Schlawe. With his support he continued the camouflaged vicar training for the Confessing Church in Köslin and Groß Schlönwitz, later in the Sigurdshof, until the Gestapo intervened here too in March 1940. He reflected his Finkenwalde experiences in his book Gemeinsames Leben.
Resistance
In 1938 the couple Gerhard and Sabine Leibholz, Bonhoeffer’s twin sister, decided to emigrate to England because of the further tightened Jewish legislation; Bonhoeffer used his connections there so that Leibholz could work as an adviser to Bishop George Bell. Through his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi, first contacts arose with Wilhelm Canaris, Hans Oster, Karl Sack and Ludwig Beck. During this time Bonhoeffer attempted to move the Christian churches in the ecumenical movement to act against the ongoing war preparations of the National Socialists. Because of these activities he came to know high church dignitaries throughout Europe. On 10 March 1939 he departed for London for talks with, among others, George Bell, where he again campaigned for recognition of the Confessing Church by the Provisional World Council of Churches. Despite sympathies he could achieve nothing fundamental and returned to Germany in mid-April. On 2 June he followed a second invitation to the USA, but already on 20 June declined the request of his host Henry Smith Leiper to take a position as caretaker of German refugees on behalf of the Federal Council of Churches and thus, like many other German intellectuals, to embark on American exile, since he saw his role in the approaching war in the resistance at home. The aggravated situation in Europe, as he put it, allowed him no retreat from the world, but only a simultaneously this-worldly and otherworldly life. This decision, extremely difficult for Bonhoeffer himself, was of the greatest significance and consequence for his further thinking and life. On the return journey he visited his sister and her family in London. Here he learned of the murder of the pastor of the Confessing Church Paul Schneider in Buchenwald concentration camp. To his nieces Marianne and Christiane he emphasized that Schneider was the first martyr of the Protestant church in the time of National Socialism, whose name they should remember well. Bonhoeffer arrived back in Berlin on 27 July, resumed in the autumn his activity at the Sigurdshof, and now sought contacts with the Amt Ausland/Abwehr in the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht under Admiral Canaris.
After the Gestapo closed the last Sammelvikariat at the Sigurdshof on 17 March 1940 and on 14 July police dissolved a leisure event led by Bonhoeffer, he conducted talks with Hans Oster and Hans von Dohnanyi about an “Unabkömmlichstellung” for Abwehr assignments. He was to use his ecumenical contacts for the conspirators in order to initiate negotiations with the Allies. Bonhoeffer was thus not involved in the planning of Hitler assassinations, but served as a liaison, officially on behalf of the Abwehr. On 22 August 1940 he received a ban on speaking “for the entire Reich territory” “because of his people-subverting activity,” and in March 1941 a corresponding ban on writing. In his parents’ house met some opponents of the Nazi regime with partly high positions in the Abwehr or the Wehrmacht who wanted to kill Hitler by an assassination. Bonhoeffer joined this resistance circle. The question of tyrannicide (may a Christian transgress the commandment “Thou shalt not murder”?), which Bonhoeffer answered with a clear yes for this concrete case, is reflected theologically-ethically in his unfinished main work Ethik, which arose parallel to his engagement in the military-political resistance from 1940 until his arrest in April 1943.
On 30 October 1940 Bonhoeffer was assigned to the Abwehrstelle Munich, thus stood in the service of the Nazi state — with simultaneous ban on speaking and, from March 1941, also ban on writing and publishing. From 17 November he stayed in the Benedictine monastery of Ettal. In 1941/1942 he undertook — among others with Helmuth James Graf von Moltke for the German counterintelligence and at the same time the internal resistance circle — journeys to Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. In Sigtuna and Stockholm he met George Bell on 31 May / 1 June 1942 and handed him secret documents about the circle of resisters and their goals for the British government. Connected with this was the request for a public declaration by the Allies distinguishing between Germans and Nazis after the war. The British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, however, let Bell know that support of the resistance or even merely an answer did not lie in the national interest of Great Britain. Presumably for security reasons Bonhoeffer made hardly any written and only few oral statements about his activity in the service of the Abwehr. Nevertheless, his theological writings that arose during this time, especially the Ethik, are always also to be read as indirect testimonies and reflections of this self-responsible involvement in the dramatic political situation. At the turn of the year 1942/1943 Bonhoeffer wrote a very personal retrospective on the past ten years, in which his resistance against Nazi terror matured and which brought him lasting insights about Christian conduct of life. He addressed civil courage, honesty and the “view from below” from the perspective of the victims of a violent society. In his contemplation of the everyday virtues learnable in resistance it said: .
