Entries from Come Sit a While that draw on the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) was born in Breslau, Germany, the sixth of eight children in a cultured Berlin family — his father was a prominent psychiatrist, his mother a gifted educator who taught her children at home. He was restless and precise, and by the age of fourteen he had announced to his family that he intended to become a theologian. They tried to talk him out of it. He went ahead anyway. He completed his doctorate at the University of Berlin at twenty-one and came to New York for a year at Union Theological Seminary, where he attended Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem every Sunday. The experience of Black American Christianity — its sorrow songs, its embodied faith, its refusal to be silent in the face of injustice — stayed with him for the rest of his life. He returned to Germany in 1931 to a nation beginning to come apart at the seams. When Hitler was named Chancellor in 1933, most of the German church fell into line. Bonhoeffer did not. He helped found the Confessing Church — a movement of pastors who refused Nazi control over Christian worship and doctrine. He ran an underground seminary in Finkenwalde, training young ministers in secret. He traveled to England, to America, and back again, each time choosing to return to the country that was hunting men like him. In 1943 he was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned at Tegel Prison in Berlin. He kept writing — smuggling letters, poems, and theological fragments to friends on the outside. Many of those fragments were later collected in Letters and Papers from Prison, one of the most extraordinary documents of the twentieth century. He was transferred to Flossenbürg concentration camp in February 1945. On the morning of April 9, 1945 — three weeks before Germany surrendered — he was led into the camp courtyard and hanged. He was thirty-nine years old. The camp doctor who witnessed the execution wrote afterward that in forty years of practice he had never seen a man meet death with such composure and certainty.
Entries featuring Dietrich Bonhoeffer
- Not to Speak Is to Speak (2026-06-30)
Drawn from 1 entries · refreshed July 24, 2026