Book Reviews
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “Letters and Papers from Prison”: A Biography
activities, and from his family and fiancée. But later, thanks to a friendly prison guard, he was able to smuggle out letters, especially to his closest associate Eberhard Bethge. And then, in the period from April to August 1944, he embarked on a voyage of theological exploration, with radically challenging ideas about the future of Christian witness and the role of the church. The texts of these fragmentary letters were to form the bulk of the book at its first appearance. Although his ideas were not fully developed, it is clear that Bonhoeffer hoped they would be the basis for a future book. He therefore asked for them to be securely preserved. Bethge was then serving with the German army in Italy. But he sent the letters back to his wife in Berlin with instructions to bury them in the garden, safe from the Gestapo or air raids. Miraculously they survived. Months later they were disinterred, and the task of deciphering Bonhoeffer’s terrible handwriting began. Thanks to Bethge’s determination, the first selection came to be published in 1951. As Marty rightly comments, “had Bethge not done his storing and editing work, the only Bonhoeffer the larger world would know was the promising (but rather conventional) theologian whose career had been cut short by the war.” Bethge knew that publishing Letters and Papers was a risky business. The majority of the German Protestant clergy
By Martin E. Marty Princeton University Press, 2011 275 pages ISBN 978-0691139210 US $24.95 Princeton University Press is to be commended for launching a new series of biographies, not of well-known authors, but of their well-known books, and also for including Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison in the first group to appear. Equally welcome is the choice as biographer of the eminent Chicago scholar Martin Marty, who has done so much to popularize religious thought in his numerous writings. Essentially Marty gives us a wellinformed survey of Letters and Paper’s reception over the past sixty-five years. He begins by describing the exceptional, almost adventitious, circumstances of how the book was born. Bonhoeffer was arrested in April 1943, and placed in solitary confinement in a dank and fetidsmelling cell in Tegel Prison in Berlin. For months he suffered from being cut off from his former intellectual and pastoral 34