Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s cell at Tegel prison was numbered 92; from it, between April 1943 and October 1944, he smuggled letters that his friend Eberhard Bethge would later assemble as Letters and Papers from Prison (German edition 1951). The book’s reputation rests on theology written without a library, at the rate the censor allowed.
The arrest came on 5 April 1943, at his parents’ house in Berlin. By then Bonhoeffer — a pastor of the Confessing Church, the Protestant remnant that had refused Nazi control of the pulpit — had spent years working inside the Abwehr, German military intelligence, ostensibly as an agent, in fact as a conspirator: his cover travel gave the resistance its courier. The stated grounds for the arrest were thin, and he was held without trial. The thinness did not matter; what mattered was the circle he belonged to, which was trying to remove the government he served on paper.
Tegel was military detention, and its regulations produced the book’s strange form. Letters to his parents moved through the post, read and clipped. Letters to Bethge — the friend, fellow pastor, and eventual biographer who understood what he was writing — went out illegally, carried by sympathetic guards, sometimes inside other letters, sometimes not at all. And alongside the theology ran the engagement: three months before the arrest he had become engaged to Maria von Wedemeyer, and the two correspondences, published separately — hers and his much later, in 1994, as Love Letters from Cell 92 — circle the same walls from opposite sides.
The letters that made the book famous are theological, and the hinge is dated 30 April 1944. There Bonhoeffer puts to Bethge the phrase that translators have kept ever since: religionless Christianity. His question is not whether God exists; it is what remains of faith when the religious casing — the habits, the pieties, the social furniture of Christendom — has become optional, in what he calls a world come of age. He refuses to mourn the casing, and he equally refuses to cheer: the problem, for a pastor, is how to speak of God without props, from below rather than from the balcony. He was drafting an answer for a book he expected to write after the war, and the fragments in the letters are all that exist of it. The same stretch of letters raises a companion question that has aged differently: he asks Bethge about the ancient church’s “arcane discipline” — its practice of keeping the mysteries from casual display — and wonders whether something like it must be recovered for a world that has heard everything and been changed by nothing. It reads, seventy years on, less like a proposal than a diagnosis.
Underneath the argument, plainer than the argument, is the reading. His parents, a short train ride away, sent parcels of books; his scripture stayed at his elbow, and the letters show him at it with an attention freedom had never taught him. His own earlier certainty stands in eerie contrast: The Cost of Discipleship (1937), the book he is still best known for, ends its most-quoted sentence in a place he did not then expect to occupy:
When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.
The prison letters are that sentence reread from inside. In the letter of 16 July 1944, writing to Bethge amid the war’s worst summer, he reaches the line that readers since have carried out of the book before any other:
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Only the suffering God can help.
Four days later, on 20 July 1944, the bomb planted at Rastenburg failed to kill Hitler, and the conspiracy’s protective camouflage began to burn off. In October Bonhoeffer was moved from Tegel to the Gestapo prison in Berlin; in February 1945, to Buchenwald; in April, to Flossenbürg. On the morning of 9 April 1945 he was hanged there with the other members of the broken circle, Admiral Canaris among them. A last message to Bethge was carried out through a fellow prisoner, the British officer Payne Best, and reported after the war: this is the end — for me, the beginning of life.
The book came first in German, in 1951, assembled and edited by Bethge as Widerstand und Ergebung; the English edition followed in 1953, translated by Reginald H. Fuller, and later expanded as the manuscripts surfaced. The survival was itself an operation. The letters existed because guards took risks and relatives hid paper; every copy of the posthumous theology is a conspiracy artifact. Bethge spent the years after the war reconstructing the letters’ order, matching smuggled sheets to dates; his massive biography of Bonhoeffer followed in German in 1967, and the two books have propped each other’s reputation ever since.
The theology is posthumous. Religionless Christianity has been claimed, since, by almost everyone — secularists, death-of-God theorists, evangelicals, liberal Protestants — which is what happens to ideas left in fragments: they fit any hand. But the letters themselves resist the uses made of them, because they are so local. They smell of the cell. They ask a specific question from a specific spring, and they are signed with a date that turned out to be a countdown. The fragments have generated more commentary than the books he finished — which he would have taken as data for, not against, the argument.
The American army reached Flossenbürg on 23 April 1945 — two weeks to the day.