Twisting History: New Biopic Distorts Views of Renowned German Theologian
DIRECTED BY TODD KOMARNICKI/2024
A new biographical film about a mid-20th century icon has me conflicted.
German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s legacy still reverberates among Christians nearly 80 years after his death. His 1937 book “The Cost of Discipleship” remains an influential work regarding what’s required to follow Jesus.
Bonhoeffer helped start the Confessing Church movement in the early 1930s to resist the demands of Nazi leaders to conform religious practices to their ideology. During World War II, he collaborated with individuals conspiring to undermine the Third Reich’s war efforts and help the Western Allies subdue the German military.
One aspect of these plans called for the assassination of Adolf Hitler. While Bonhoeffer was not involved in this plot, he knew people who were. This was an essential part of a larger strategy to overthrow the Nazi regime and end the war.
Bonhoeffer provided information on the German government to Allied officials. Given his contacts in some of these nations, he saw himself as a valuable resource should the coup succeed. He could serve as a conduit between Allied commanders and German authorities in drafting an acceptable truce.
But Nazi officials arrested Bonhoeffer in April 1943 for his participation in various anti-government activities. He remained incarcerated until the Third Reich executed him on April 9, 1945, just a month shy of Germany’s surrender.
Bonhoeffer’s commitment to resist Nazi oppression complemented his writings on Christian discipleship. He would not bend his knee to Hitler or other Nazi leaders, and it eventually cost Bonhoeffer everything.
A new biopic released Nov. 22 examines Bonhoeffer’s life during this period. Distributed by Angel Studios, Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. has renewed a debate over the theologian’s actions and beliefs.
The movie effectively chronicled Bonhoeffer’s relationship with religious leaders in the United States. He come here in 1930 to study at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. During the time he was there, he was drawn to the black church in Harlem and its message.
His experiences with Black Americans sensitized him to issues of social justice. This also made him more cognizant of the oppression that Jews suffered at the hands of Nazis back in Germany and the need to repudiate such barbarity.
The film follows Bonhoeffer’s participation in an underground seminary in Germany (where he hoped to instill in students a genuine teaching of the Gospels) and his involvement with the resistance movement. He manages to be hired by the Abwehr, the German military intelligence agency, and begins spying on the Nazi regime.
He uses this position to compile military information that may prove helpful to Allied commanders. This ultimately leads to his arrest and execution.
As a self-contained story, the movie is very effective. Jonas Dassler does an excellent job portraying Bonhoeffer, and he is surrounded by a superb supporting cast. The narrative moves between Bonhoeffer in prison and flashbacks of various activities throughout his life that resulted in his incarceration.
The storytelling is gripping. Even though I knew in advance what would happen at each stage, the film still held my attention. I could sense the anguish that Bonhoeffer and others felt as they helplessly watched Nazi authorities erode the German church and subsume German society.
However, Bonhoeffer takes disturbing liberties with the facts. The movie may be a well-produced cinematic project, but it grossly twists reality.
Bonhoeffer had adopted pacifism as a Christian philosophy. This would obviously cause the theologian to experience an internal conflict when he became involved with people planning to kill Hitler.
And, indeed, it did. In his Nov. 21 review of the film for The Christian Century, Mac Loftin references numerous instances where Bonhoeffer expressed his belief that he had engaged in sinful behavior with his participation in this conspiracy.
“… Bonhoeffer himself refused to see the plot to assassinate Hitler as morally justified. He insisted that what he was doing, while necessary, was at the same time a grave moral wrong for which he must repent and beg God’s forgiveness. In the hundreds of pages he wrote during his years in the conspiracy, Bonhoeffer adamantly warned that any sense of moral clarity we might feel is always an illusion,” Loftin wrote in his review. “If we trick ourselves into thinking that we have full knowledge of good and evil, that we clearly see right and wrong, then we never have to question the moral purity of our actions. Because we are on the side of good against evil, we think that our actions — and our violence — must therefore be good.”
This movie version of Bonhoeffer, however, easily reconciles this dichotomy. He not only approves of the plan to assassinate Hitler, he undertakes efforts to secure the resources necessary to carry out this plot. An image used to promote the film shows Bonhoeffer holding a pistol.
“The most egregious misreading of the real Bonhoeffer comes in a scene where he makes the fateful decision to join the conspiracy. His brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyi, has just told Bonhoeffer and his student Eberhard Bethge of the secret plan to kill Hitler,” Loftin wrote. “Bethge is shocked at the idea of committing murder and tries to talk Bonhoeffer out of it. He reminds Bonhoeffer that he once said Christians must defeat their enemies with the power of love. ‘That was before Hitler,’ Bonhoeffer glowers. Bethge, despondent, asks, ‘Will God forgive us if we do this?’ Bonhoeffer shouts him down: ‘Will he forgive us if we don’t?’
‘The line gets Bonhoeffer’s thinking about the conspiracy exactly backwards. He was tortured by his decision to violate God’s clear and inviolable commandment not to kill. Everyone, without exception, is beloved of God, and killing is, in every situation, wrong. At the same time, it would be wrong to sit idly by as millions were murdered. No matter what he chose, whether he joined the conspiracy or not, he would be guilty. He had to act, he wrote, ‘in the sphere of relativity, completely shrouded in the twilight that the historical situation casts upon good and evil.’ He joined the plot, but he refused to see his decision as morally justifiable. ‘Here the law is being broken, violated,’ he deplored. It might be true that ‘the commandment is broken out of dire necessity,’ but to say he broke the commandment of necessity is still to say he broke the commandment. Rather than pretend this was some positive moral good, Bonhoeffer instead threw himself at God’s feet and begged forgiveness for the sin he could not but commit. The movie has none of this squishy moral agony.”
For more than a decade, some people have distorted Bonhoeffer’s beliefs to advance Christian nationalism. If they spent any time studying the theologian’s legitimate views on the topic, they’d grasp their errors.
Twisting the truth does not serve history well. A legendary figure’s life should be examined for what it was, not what some partisan ideologues wish it to be.