Martin Doblmeier’s recent film Bonhoeffer is a documentary on the life of anti-Nazi Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–45). It shows Bonhoeffer’s transformation from pacifist to conspirator in a plot to kill Hitler. The US film-maker, based in Washington, has mixed together archival footage, interviews with Bonhoeffer’s relatives, contemporary theologians and churchmen, including Archbishop Tutu, and photos from the Bonhoeffer family archive.
The perennial issue of censorship comes up in the opening sequence of the film. Nazi thugs toss books onto a street bonfire. This is contrasted with the genteel and aristocratic atmosphere of an extended family gathering in the Bonhoeffer home. Bonhoeffer was born into a privileged class. His father was Professor of Psychology at Berlin University. This contrast between the family gatherings and Hitler’s night-time ranting, the rallies and torchlight marches sets the mood for the film.
‘We should not harm anyone. But we will not allow anyone to harm us.’ This strike-first policy belongs to Adolf Hitler. Sadly, similar words are heard in our own day to justify pre-emptive warfare. The conflict between good and evil is aptly summed up in the Edmund Burke phrase ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing’.
Doblmeier shows how slow the churches, Protestant and Catholic, were to recognise Hitler for what he was. The most telling image is of Hitler greeting Abbot Schachleitmer and Reichbischof Mueller at a Nuremberg rally. The Catholic bishops were cunningly neutralised by Hitler’s concordat with the Vatican. Bonhoeffer felt betrayed by his own Lutheran Church to such an extent that he became part of a group of dissenting clergy who formed the ‘Confessing Church’. Doblmeier includes footage of Bonhoeffer in New York, where he studied under Richard Niebuhr, influential in the development of US social ethics. There are evocative images of Bonhoeffer at the black Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York (1930–31). There he found exuberant worship and spiritual songs, records of which he brought back to Germany and played for his own students. These experiences undoubtedly influenced him to take a strong stance against the treatment of the Jews in Germany.
Yet the film does not shy away from showing the human side of Bonhoeffer, his doubts and weaknesses, such as giving into fear and not preaching at the funeral of his sister’s Jewish father-in-law, a decision that Bonhoeffer deeply regretted. On his second visit to America, just before the outbreak of