This weekend marks the 80th anniversary of US troops capturing the Ludendorff Railroad Bridge, one of the last intact bridges across the Rhine. Although fierce fighting lay ahead, it marked a decisive turning point in the war against Nazi Germany. Tragically, just weeks later in early April, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a 39-year-old German pastor and theologian who had opposed Hitler, was executed by hanging. By early May, Germany had signed an unconditional surrender.
Bonhoeffer remains a figure of fascination to many. How did one relatively young man manage to resist the madness sweeping his country? How did a committed pacifist end up being involved, however peripherally, in a plot to kill Hitler?
The temptation is to simplify Bonhoeffer, to ignore the complexity of his thought and to downplay the real inner turmoil he suffered. He wrote an essay, After Ten Years, in December 1942, some months before he was arrested. He reflects on living when every aspect of life is touched by evil. “Have there ever been people in history who in their time, like us, had so little ground under their feet, people to whom every possible alternative open to them at the time appeared equally unbearable, senseless and contrary to life?”
He asks, almost in despair: are we still of any use? He chose to go forwards, sustained by the belief that “even our mistakes and shortcomings are not in vain and that it is no more difficult for God to deal with them than with our supposedly good deeds”.
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This is not an all-conquering hero but a sensitive, tormented human being radically unsure about how to proceed, but still choosing faith and action over despair. Bizarrely, Bonhoeffer has been claimed by everyone from the 1960s theologians who earnestly embraced the idea that God was dead to Christian nationalists in the US today.
It was with some trepidation, therefore, that I attended a preview of Bonhoeffer, a new biopic written and directed by Hollywood veteran Todd Komarnicki, and filmed in part in Clare, Tipperary and Limerick.
Komarnicki is probably best known as the scriptwriter of Sully and producer of Elf. The US film poster, featuring Bonhoeffer holding a gun and with the tagline “Pastor, Spy, Assassin”, did not inspire confidence.
At the preview, Komarnicki explained that market research shows that when a lead actor is relatively unknown, audience figures improve if he is portrayed carrying a gun in the poster. He was vehemently opposed to and appalled by the decision to portray Bonhoeffer with a gun, given that Bonhoeffer was a noted pacifist who reluctantly took a minor part in a plot to assassinate Hitler. Like many biopics, it conflates some incidents, changes the timeline of others, and omits or downplays some important people in Bonhoeffer’s life, notably Maria von Wedemeyer, his fiancee. (Komarnicki has said he did not want to make a prison movie. Much of the engaged couple’s relationship happened by letter during Bonhoeffer’s imprisonment.)
But the film in no way panders to Christian Nationalists. It makes clear that Bonhoeffer was implacably opposed to the group known as German Christians who enthusiastically embraced National Socialism and so-called Aryan Christianity. The majority of the Evangelical (Lutheran) church’s endorsement of anti-Semitism, to the extent of abandoning the Old Testament and elevating Hitler to quasi-messianic status, filled him with horror.
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Another temptation with Bonhoeffer is to draw simplistic historical analogies with current events. Muiris Crowley, an Irish actor, plays the part of a Sturmabteilung (SA) officer, the infamous Brownshirts.
In his view, while the history of the time offers no easy parallels to individuals today, the psychological reasons prompting Hitler’s success have worrying similarities. After the Treaty of Versailles, Germans felt dispossessed, impoverished and helpless. They were looking for easy scapegoats.
Nazism offered power to a humiliated people, and a version of masculinity celebrating discipline, comradeship and dominance over those deemed weaker or inferior.
In After Ten Years, Bonhoeffer instead suggested the value of the view from below. “It remains an experience of incomparable value that we have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and reviled, in short, from the perspective of the suffering.”
In a similar vein, the film depicts the importance of Bonhoeffer’s African-American friend, Frank Fisher, whom he met during his time at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Fisher had a placement at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, and Bonhoeffer taught Sunday School there.
Bonhoeffer, himself an accomplished musician, learned to love both jazz and negro spirituals. More importantly, his friendship with Fisher deepened his faith and empathy, which fuelled his outspoken opposition both to nazism and the scandalous behaviour of his faith community
The film is currently on release in Irish cinemas and is well worth viewing, particularly if it encourages people to read Bonhoeffer for themselves. He shows us heroism is not some unattainable ideal but can be achieved by fallible people stumbling along, somehow retaining human decency and the willingness to speak out in the face of seemingly invincible evil.
