In 1906, the German New Testament studies guild suffered a rude shock. The cause was Albert Schweitzer’s academic blockbuster The Quest of the Historical Jesus, in which the Bible-scholar-turned-humanitarian tours the sub-discipline’s history, from Hermann Samuel Reimarus’s first forays into historical criticism to Ernest Renan’s Aryanized Jesus. Schweitzer argued that the Jesuses of history portrayed by nineteenth-century New Testament scholarship were largely psychological projections, Christs made in the image of a self-satisfied liberal Protestant culture. The scholars who took up the quest had stared into the deep well of history and, seeing their own faces reflected in the dark waters, thought they had glimpsed the Lord.
“It was not only each epoch that found its reflection in Jesus,” Schweitzer wrote. “Each individual created Him in accordance with his own character. There is no historical task which so reveals a man’s true self as the writing of a Life of Jesus.” It took a chastened German theological establishment twenty years to begin writing about the historical Jesus again.
In today’s America, however, there is a historical task that rivals life-of-Jesus research for the candidness with which it reveals the character and values of the historian: the life and work of the German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Bonhoeffer was a towering figure of twentieth-century theology whose courage, leadership in the Confessing Church, and ultimate murder in the final days of World War II possess great pathos. Unscrupulous historians have thus been eager to enlist him in service of their pet theologies.
In the 1960s, the Death of God theologians appropriated Bonhoeffer based on selective readings of his enigmatic letters from prison—letters in which he wrote more about the wrath of God than anywhere else. In 2011, Eric Metaxas’s bestselling biography Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy denied Bonhoeffer’s (explicitly espoused) pacifism, simply ignored the prison letters abused by the Death of God movement, and recast Bonhoeffer the German Lutheran as an American evangelical. A few years later, Charles Marsh’s Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer described a Bonhoeffer who had experienced a theological revolution under the tutelage of Reinhold Niebuhr and a sexual awakening under the gaze of another man, his best friend and biographer Eberhard Bethge. In Strange Glory, Bonhoeffer comes out looking like an American progressive; regrettably, it is by far the most responsible American treatment of his life we possess.
The problem is hardly a lack of information. Bonhoeffer was born the same year Schweitzer published his Quest; he was killed in 1945, just eighty years ago. The Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works series, which is available in English, runs a full sixteen volumes. Yet we lack a major American treatment of Bonhoeffer’s life that does not leverage him for a political cause.
The new biopic Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin., written and directed by Todd Komarnicki and starring Jonas Dassler, is no different. Or, rather, it’s worse. One expects a film like Bonhoeffer to take liberties with the historical record to drive the plot forward—and, oh, does this film take liberties. But mutilating the protagonist’s theology into something he would have abhorred is a very different matter.
In a pivotal scene, Bonhoeffer’s brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnányi (Flula Borg), enlists him to take part in the July 20, 1944, plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. “This will take dirty hands,” says Dohnányi. “That’s all I have to offer,” Bonhoeffer replies. Later he goes so far as to say, “The only way to defeat the father of lies is to lie better than he does”—heretical language that the historical Bonhoeffer would have detested. In life, Bonhoeffer believed Christians were called to live by the Sermon on the Mount. The preaching of the gospel was paramount to him. The film’s Bonhoeffer, by contrast, is a pure pragmatist, one for whom politics trumps theology.
This “history-distorting” depiction of Bonhoeffer prompted eighty-six members of the Bonhoeffer family to write an open letter bemoaning the “tasteless trivialization” of their forebear’s legacy. Members of the International Bonhoeffer Society have likewise spoken out against the film. Even the film’s cast members have publicly repudiated “misuses” of their work and Bonhoeffer’s theology.
Metaxas imprudently responded to the Bonhoeffer family’s letter by smearing them as “guaranteed pro-Hamas lunatics” and “Jew-hating lunatics.” The movie’s subtitle echoes his biography’s, but Komarnicki made no direct use of Metaxas’s work.
Why throw up barricades in the public square for a film you didn’t help make? Because both Metaxas and Komarnicki depict Bonhoeffer as a conservative cultural and political pugilist, a wannabe action hero in a clerical collar. For example, Metaxas claimed that “Bonhoeffer’s death sentence was almost certainly by decree of Hitler himself.” Never mind that Hitler presumably had no idea who Bonhoeffer was or that the Reich executed nearly five thousand others after the failure of the July 20 plot. Metaxas needed to increase Bonhoeffer’s credibility as a freedom fighter.
Komarnicki appears to have similar aims. His Bonhoeffer gives an explicitly anti-Hitler sermon from an important Berlin pulpit. While in America, he gets punched for defending the rights of a black friend. He delivers a sermon to British clergy about the dangers of Hitler, and asks them to smuggle explosives. He disrupts Hitler Youth marching in the middle of the street and stands up to three brownshirts at once.
Like Metaxas’s biography, the film bends over backward to make Bonhoeffer sound like an American evangelical. Biblical catchphrases favored by evangelicals—such as “for such a time as this” (Esther 4:14) or “Here am I. Send me!” (Isa. 6:8)—are deployed in the film. The effect is chintzy rather than profound. The latter line is even spoken by Bonhoeffer when he tells Dohnányi that, yes, he will become an assassin.
As far as we know, none of these things actually happened. Yet all ended up in the film. All involve public action directed at the state or perhaps the culture, not at the church. And all involve potential violence.
By contrast, the historical Bonhoeffer’s brand of resistance was nonviolent and rarely directed toward the state. He was almost exclusively occupied by resisting the distortions of the gospel within the German church, many parts of which were pliant to the Nazis’ agenda. For example, Bonhoeffer fought the exclusion of Jewish clergy from the ministry, because on that question hung “the very substance of the Church itself.” The influence within the church of the so-called Führerprinzip angered him because it inspired idolatry.
Bonhoeffer thought Christians must be pacifists, and it’s not clear that he ever abandoned that belief. In fact, a commitment to nonviolence may have played into his decision to avoid the draft and instead associate himself with the Abwehr, military intelligence. Why? The fifth commandment: “Thou shalt not kill.”
This is hardly quietism. Rather, it’s a recognition that the church too has a politics, one that rarely fits the molds created by a state’s political parties. Sometimes those ecclesial politics look relatively normal. In circumstances like Bonhoeffer’s, however, they inevitably appear radical.
Some moviegoers, of course, will care about none of this. They will come to the film with no interest in Bonhoeffer himself, attracted only by the prospect of a wholesome anti-Nazi flick. They could do better than Bonhoeffer. The script is not tightly written, the characters remain underdeveloped, and some scenes are confusing, others jarringly didactic. In a characteristically awkward moment of expositional dialogue, Bonhoeffer is told that “the Nazis’ rise to power has made everyone a little anxious.” Then in the film’s final scene, as he is being hung at the Flossenbürg concentration camp, Bonhoeffer experiences a vision, perhaps of heaven. Unfortunately, the scene is less likely to elicit tears than guffaws.
For those who admire Bonhoeffer, however, the film disappoints less for its artistic inadequacies than for the ways it warps the image of its protagonist. Critical passages in Bonhoeffer’s work and numerous decisions he made in his final years can be interpreted responsibly in divergent ways. But the flexible morality the film attributes to Bonhoeffer has no basis in history. It seems that, like many other interpreters, the filmmakers looked into the depths of the man’s life and saw themselves. In doing so, they pointed their audience away from Bonhoeffer’s faithful witness.
Joel Looper is the author of Bonhoeffer’s America: A Land Without Reformation.
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Image courtesy Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R0211-316 / CC-BY-SA 3.0. Image cropped.
