Abstract
Two contexts frame this consequential book. There is the narrower issue about how Bonhoeffer's theological writing and political action get interpreted by his growing number of admirers seventy years later. There is also the larger debate between self-proclaimed “pacifists” and “realists” about whether Jesus' call to love one's enemy should be heeded politically or whether recourse to violence is available and necessary for contemporary Christians living through war and other sin.
Far more than an historical example or discrete case study, the question of how one interprets Bonhoeffer has become a litmus test for where one stands on Christian discipleship and political realism. In no other single figure do we have a coherent avowal (see Bonhoeffer's Discipleship) and practiced embodiment (Life Together) of Christocentric pacifism as well as his own later suggestions (in Ethics) that Christian responsibility might accrue guilt, not to mention the standard portrayal of Bonhoeffer's involvement in a plot to kill Hitler, for which, ostensibly, he was hung in retribution. If the three authors of Bonhoeffer the Assassin? read the debate fairly, the realist interpretation has all but won. That Bonhoeffer was an assassin, that he bravely bore the guilt of attempted tyrannicide, has been raised to the status of myth—a story taken as supremely true and so preemptively disarming the pacifist side. Much like the question, “What would you do if a gunman was attacking your daughter?” the rejoinder, “What about Dietrich Bonhoeffer?” (xiii) has been almost enough to silence those with their finger on Matthew 5:44.
Nation, Siegrist, and Umbel write as careful demythologists. Dividing the book into two parts, in the first, “Bonhoeffer's Biography Reconsidered,” the authors examine evidence thought to connect Bonhoeffer to the July, 1944 plot to kill Hitler and find it circumstantial at best. Sounding like defending attorneys, they warn that “we need first to gain clarity about the facts” (82) and assert that there is “not a shred of evidence” linking Bonhoeffer to any assassination plot (86).
Evidence against the historicity of the received myth of Bonhoeffer as assassin include the following:
The fact that Bonhoeffer self-consciously worked for the Abwehr (a German military intelligence agency) in order to gain “uk” status—that is, exemption from military conscription—and he used the position to help at least 14 Jews escape Germany and to prepare for postwar reconstruction.
There is no evidence to suggest that Bonhoeffer supported or helped advance plans to kill Hitler, although we know he knew of them.
Only approximately fifty of the 13,000 working for the Abwehr were connected to the “resistance,” which included sabotage, aiding escapees, and informing international contacts of German war crimes. That Bonhoeffer was involved in this resistance does not imply participation in the smaller subset of resisters involved in assassination plots.
Finally and most demystifying, the final failed plot on July 20, 1944 that precipitated the imprisonment of 7000 and the execution of 4500 was both planned and carried out after Bonhoeffer was imprisoned.
The fact that he was executed after the famous failed assassination attempt means only that Hitler sought vengeance on anyone suspected of resisting his regime, directly or by association. The Nazis were not interested in finding and punishing those and only those directly involved; that Bonhoeffer was executed says nothing about whether he was guilty of tyrannicide—even in the eyes of the Nazis (71–97).
Newcomers to Bonhoeffer may wonder why the book takes such pains to prove Bonhoeffer innocent of “crimes” that most find heroic. It is thus best suited for those already fully invested in the “central question of the applicability of Jesus' teaching in a sinful, violent world” (15) and who understand the consequence of Bonhoeffer's biography for that discussion. Preventing us from making knee-jerk and well-worn inferences, Part 1 works to even the playing field between realists and pacifists. What if Bonhoeffer was pacifist to the end?
The onus of Part 2, “The Development of Bonhoeffer's Theological Ethics,” is to show that there are no major politico-theological reversals from the pacifist book Discipleship (1937) to Bonhoeffer's musings about acting responsibly and becoming guilty in the Ethics manuscript that he drafted from 1940 to 1944 that would parallel or explain the alleged turn from nonviolence to assassin. Although Bonhoeffer famously wrote in 1944 that “today I clearly see the dangers of [Discipleship],” he also adds, “I still stand by it” (161). Bonhoeffer's interpreters, however, have largely followed Larry Rasmussen in emphasizing the discontinuity between the earlier Bonhoeffer and the later (less idealistic, more politically “responsible”) Bonhoeffer who writes Ethics.
Taking such interpretations to task, the authors argue that, if there is any hard break in Bonhoeffer's views about Jesus and violence, it comes between 1928, when he argues that even murder can be justified (104–23, 221), and 1933, when he comes to see Christian pacifism as “self-evident”—a conversion that Bonhoeffer, in his words, “previously fought against with passion” (223, 225). The associated textual break is therefore between Bonhoeffer's earliest “amoral” ethics (101) and the Christocentric pacifism animating Discipleship. Any developments from Discipleship to Ethics are within—not away from—the call to follow a nonviolent Christ.
Although sometimes repetitive, Part 2 will nicely lead even newcomers through the development of Bonhoeffer's theological ethics. If I have one criticism of the book, it is that by arguing so cogently against unfounded inferences about Bonhoeffer's life and reductionist interpretations of his writing, the authors settle at times to deconstruct common readings rather than reconstruct better ones. This shows up especially in the second part when they try to show how Bonhoeffer's comments about accruing guilt and acting responsibly are not incompatible with his peace ethic by showing that the latter is not principled or perfectionistic but Christological. As such, being called to follow a nonviolent Christ might include the bearing of guilt and confession of sin (210–11). Yet their suggestion that a Christ-centered peace ethic is not incompatible with guilt remains far from explaining how the two are compatible. Needed is the further exploration of how Bonhoeffer's Christian pacifism is more—but not less—than a refusal to kill. The book largely clears space for that task, but the task remains ahead.
In fact, on this point Part 1 and Part 2 might be read to work against one another. If Bonhoeffer the man is proclaimed innocent of direct involvement with plots to kill Hitler, then why explore what a non-principled, non-juridical pacifism might look like? Alternatively, if Bonhoeffer the theological ethicist understands “sin,” “guilt,” and “responsible action” to denote not only discrete acts performed by individuals but also the company one keeps and the guilt one takes on through “vicarious representative action”—through solidarity with another's sin—then why go to such pains to show that Bonhoeffer himself never explicitly endorsed or collaborated in assassination plots?
“Peace must be dared,” Bonhoeffer wrote in 1932. “It is the great venture. It can never be safe” (78–79). The real value of this book is in advancing the reconfiguration of Christian peacemaking from a passive purity cautiously protected to a venture that cost Bonhoeffer his life—and perhaps also his moral innocence.