Review

Culture

Film & TV

Politics

War & peace

7 March 2025

6 min read

Bonhoeffer: how to rouse a deaf world to moral action

Comparing today to the past is risky, a new biopic helps us do it well.

Theodore Brun

Theodore is author of the historical fiction series The Wanderer Chronicles.

A man dressed in 1930s clothing, sits with others at a table looking pensive.

Angel Studios.

Historical analogies are a dangerous, and often inaccurate, way of interpreting the times in which we live. “This is just like that” has a habit of making us react and respond to “that” - which we think we understand so well - when really, we should be taking time to appreciate the nuances of the problems which “this” uniquely poses us now.

That said, I don’t suppose ever, in the last 80 years, have analogies abounded in our media with such ubiquity that we find ourselves in a historical moment facing similar threats to our freedoms and way of life to those arising across Europe in the 1930s.

Thus, the movie Bonhoeffer, Todd Komarnicki’s fantastic new biopic of the dissident German theologian and Christian martyr, appears to come at an opportune moment in our culture.

As writer and director of this two-hour-long epic, Komarnicki’s admiration for his subject shines through like a faithful sun breaking through an overcast sky. And whether you are a Christian or not, there is undoubtedly much to admire in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life and the way he lived it.

It's a story worth hearing - which, given its Christian overtones, still has the power to break out of the boundaries of Christian sub-culture to a wider audience, with its message of courage in the face of overbearing evil.

Born in 1906, Bonhoeffer was still a young man when Hitler and his newly formed Nazi party rose to power. He trained as a Lutheran pastor, was an accomplished theologian, and became a key founding member of the Confessing Church – the remnant of the German church who did their best to withstand Hitler’s ideological take-over. (For which, many paid with their lives.) By the early 1930s, Bonhoeffer had already perceived the dangers which few others in the German church seemed able to see or else willing to call out. And after abandoning a short stint of study in the US, he returned to his native Germany to do what he could to call the church back to herself before it was too late. No easy task.

A close up of a 1930s man wearing wire-rimmed glasses, looking pensive.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (colourised).

One existing photograph of Bonhoeffer shows a young, earnest face in steel-rimmed glasses, an expression of wisdom beyond his years weighing heavy on his brow. But for all the seriousness of his situation, he was, by Komarnicki’s account, an ebullient character. Persuasive, playful and able to find joy even in the darkest of times.

In Bonhoeffer, he is played brilliantly by Jonas Dassler, a native German actor who brings an intensity and intelligence to the role which must be a fair reflection of the man himself, as well as allowing room for a levity of spirit, especially in his friendships and family ties.

There’s a scene early in the film, foreshadowing much that was to come. Dietrich the boy plays the Moonlight Sonata at his older brother Walter’s funeral wake. The piece was Walter’s favourite, but none of the mourners pay the slightest attention. Dietrich slams the piano shut and runs off in frustration. “No one listened,” he tearfully complains to his mother. “No one cared.” This theme of rousing a deaf or unfeeling world to moral action runs through the whole movie.

We can all agree that Bonhoeffer is a man to emulate in our own times. The question is where would his instincts lie in the political and cultural landscape of today.

Komarnicki has done a solid job unfolding Germany’s inexorable descent into darkness, often marking key moments as Bonhoeffer the man makes his stand against the state with actual quotations from his work. The most famous serves as the movie’s strapline:

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. Not to speak is to speak.”

The script is peppered with such exhortations, which seems directed as much to the audience of today as they do to Bonhoeffer’s own, eighty-or-ninety-odd years ago. Such injunctions seem all the more arresting as Bonhoeffer’s story pursues its arc from pastor to martyr, and the noose awaiting him at Buchenwald concentration camp just days before Germany’s final capitulation.

It is no doubt hard to frame a movie around the moral courage and conscientious stand of a single man, however admirable that man may be, particularly when so much of the struggle is happening inside his own head. Perhaps that is why much of the less historically accurate material has been included. The thriller subplot – of Bonhoeffer’s involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler – brings some necessary forward propulsion to the story, but seems the least congruent with what we know of the man. Much of this more thrusting narrative is intercut with scenes of Bonhoeffer’s last days before his execution, the wrestling with his faith and his fate, before a final resolution of peace, even joy in his final moments. “Eternity, eternity, eternity,” he murmurs. A word he used to repeat endlessly with his twin sister as they whiled away the time smoking cigarettes. But a word which ultimately gives him the focus and the spiritual strength to hold his courage to the end. Although slower, these provide a more convincing and compelling portrait of a man who deserves to be remembered as a hero, not only of his own age, but of any age where evil is determined to silence truth at any cost.

As a modern audience, this is where the hazard lies. To return to my original point, it is all too easy to tar one’s political or cultural opponents with the label of “fascist” or “Nazi” – merely because they happen to disagree with you. (And sadly I’ve seen this done by otherwise mild-mannered English theologians over this very film.) Some have said this is akin to shunning another child in the playground because they have “cooties”. It’s over-simplistic and facile. If anything, it reveals the casual propagandising of a suggestible mind.

Few would watch this film and associate themselves with its antagonist (Hitler) over its heroic protagonist. We can all agree that Bonhoeffer is a man to emulate in our own times. The question is where would his instincts lie in the political and cultural landscape of today.

Jesus had harsh words to say to the pharisees and scribes who build tombs for the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous. “You say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partners with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’”

How easy it is to assume we would have been on Bonhoeffer’s team.

And this is my one criticism of the film: its portrayal of the bishops and clergy who did succumb to Hitler’s ideology seems too blunt-edged. They rail from the pulpit in the manner of the Fuhrer himself, marking them as ravening ideologues; they bark out Party platitudes, red in the face. I imagine the reality of how Nazi ideology infiltrated and captured the church – as it did many other institutions – was far more subtle, far more insinuating and insidious. More boiled frog than scalded cat.

So it surely is in our day. While National Socialism has passed away, the totalitarian instinct which animated it has sadly not. My prayer is that we have the wisdom, courage, and above all discernment, to learn Bonhoeffer’s lesson and pass the tests of our time.

Komarnicki’s excellent movie may just help us to do that.

Bonhoeffer is out in UK and Irish cinemas from 7th March 2025. For more information and to book tickets visit the film's site.

Bonhoeffer

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Article

Assisted dying

Care

Culture

Death & life

13 November 2024

8 min read

The deceptive appeal of assisted dying changes medical practice

In Canada the moral ethos of medicine has shifted dramatically.

Ewan Goligher

Ewan is a physician practising in Toronto, Canada.

A tired-looking doctor sits at a desk dealing with paperwork.

Francisco Venâncio on Unsplash.

Once again, the UK parliament is set to debate the question of legalizing euthanasia (a traditional term for physician-assisted death). Political conditions appear to be conducive to the legalization of this technological approach to managing death. The case for assisted death appears deceptively simple—it’s about compassion, respect, empowerment, freedom from suffering. Who can oppose such positive goals? Yet, writing from Canada, I can only warn of the ways in which the embrace of physician-assisted death will fundamentally change the practice of medicine. Reflecting on the last 10 years of our experience, two themes stick out to me—pressure, and self-deception.

I still remember quite distinctly the day that it dawned on me that the moral ethos of medicine in Canada was shifting dramatically. Traditionally, respect for the sacredness of the patient’s life and a corresponding absolute prohibition on deliberately causing the death of a patient were widely seen as essential hallmarks of a virtuous physician. Suddenly, in a 180 degree ethical turn, a willingness to intentionally cause the death of a patient was now seen as the hallmark of patient-centered doctor. A willingness to cause the patient’s death was a sign of compassion and even purported self-sacrifice in that one would put the patient’s desires and values ahead of their own. Those of us who continued to insist on the wrongness of deliberately causing death would now be seen as moral outliers, barriers to the well-being and dignity of our patients. We were tolerated to some extent, and mainly out of a sense of collegiality. But we were also a source of slight embarrassment. Nobody really wanted to debate the question with us; the question was settled without debate.

Yet there was no denying the way that pressure was brought to bear, in ways subtle and overt, to participate in the new assisted death regime. We humans are unavoidably moral creatures, and when we come to believe that something is good, we see ourselves and others as having an obligation to support it. We have a hard time accepting those who refuse to join us. Such was the case with assisted death. With the loudest and most strident voices in the Canadian medical profession embracing assisted death as a high and unquestioned moral good, refusal to participate in assisted death could not be fully tolerated.

We deceive ourselves if we think that doctors have fully accepted that euthanasia is ethical when only very few are actually willing to administer it.

Regulators in Ontario and Nova Scotia (two Canadian provinces) stipulated that physicians who were unwilling to perform the death procedure must make an effective referral to a willing “provider”. Although the Supreme Court decision made it clear in their decision to strike down the criminal prohibition against physician-assisted death that no particular physician was under any obligation to provide the procedure, the regulators chose to enforce participation by way of this effective referral requirement. After all, this was the only way to normalize this new practice. Doctors don't ordinarily refuse to refer their patients for medically necessary procedures; if assisted death was understood to be a medically necessary good, then an unwillingness to make such referral could not be tolerated.

And this form of pressure brings us to the pattern of deception. First, it is deceptive to suggest that an effective referral to a willing provider confers no moral culpability on the referring physician for the death of the patient. Those of us who objected to referring the patient were told that like Pilate, we could wash our hands of the patient’s death by passing them along to someone else who had the courage to do the deed. Yet the same regulators clearly prohibited referral for female genital mutilation. They therefore seemed to understand the moral responsibility attached to an effective referral. Such glaring inconsistencies about the moral significance of a referral suggests that when they claimed that a referral avoided culpability for death by euthanasia, they were deceiving themselves and us.

The very need for a referral system signifies another self-deception. Doctors normally make referrals only when an assessment or procedure lies outside their technical expertise. In the case of assisted death, every physician has the requisite technical expertise to cause death. There is nothing at all complicated or difficult or specialized about assessing euthanasia eligibility criteria or the sequential administration of toxic doses of midazolam, propofol, rocuronium, and lidocaine. The fact that the vast majority of physicians are unwilling to perform this procedure entails that moral objection to participation in assisted death remains widespread in the medical profession. The referral mechanism is for physicians who are “uncomfortable” in performing the procedure; they can send the patient to someone else more comfortable. But to be comfortable in this case is to be “morally comfortable”, not “technically comfortable”. We deceive ourselves if we think that doctors have fully accepted that euthanasia is ethical when only very few are actually willing to administer it.

We deceived ourselves into thinking that assisted death is a medical therapy for a medical problem, when in fact it is an existential therapy for a spiritual problem.

There is also self-deception with respect to the cause of death. In Canada, when a patient dies by doctor-assisted death, the person completing the death certificate is required to record the cause of death as the reason that the patient requested euthanasia, not the act of euthanasia per se. This must lead to all sorts of moments of absurdity for physicians completing death certificates—do patients really die from advanced osteoarthritis? (one of the many reasons patients have sought and obtained euthanasia). I suspect that this practice is intended to shield those who perform euthanasia from any long-term legal liability should the law be reversed. But if medicine, medical progress, and medical safety are predicated on an honest acknowledgment about causes of death, then this form of self-deception should not be countenanced. We need to be honest with ourselves about why our patients die.

There has also been self-deception about whether physician-assisted death is a form of suicide. Some proponents of assisted death contend that assisted death is not an act of deliberate self-killing, but rather merely a choice over the manner and timing of one's death. It's not clear why one would try to distort language this way and deny that “physician-assisted suicide” is suicide, except perhaps to assuage conscience and minimize stigma. Perhaps we all know that suicide is never really a form of self-respect. To sustain our moral and social affirmation of physician-assisted death, we have to deny what this practice actually represents.

There has been self-deception about the possibility of putting limits around the practice of assisted death. Early on, advocates insisted that euthanasia would be available only to those for whom death was reasonably foreseeable (to use the Canadian legal parlance). But once death comes to be viewed as a therapeutic option, the therapeutic possibilities become nearly limitless. Death was soon viewed as a therapy for severe disability or for health-related consequences of poverty and loneliness (though often poverty and loneliness are the consequence of the health issues). Soon we were talking about death as a therapy for mental illness. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then so is grievous and irremediable suffering. Death inevitably becomes therapeutic option for any form of suffering. Efforts to limit the practice to certain populations (e.g. those with disabilities) are inevitably seen as paternalistic and discriminatory.

There has been self-deception about the reasons justifying legalization of assisted death. Before legalization, advocates decry the uncontrolled physical suffering associated with the dying process and claim that prohibiting assisted death dehumanizes patients and leaves them in agony. Once legalized, it rapidly becomes clear that this therapy is not for physical suffering but rather for existential suffering: the loss of autonomy, the sense of being a burden, the despair of seeing any point in going on with life. The desire for death reflects a crisis of meaning. We deceived ourselves into thinking that assisted death is a medical therapy for a medical problem, when in fact it is an existential therapy for a spiritual problem.

We have also deceived ourselves by claiming to know whether some patients are better off dead, when in fact we have no idea what it's like to be dead. The utilitarian calculus underpinning the logic of assisted death relies on the presumption that we know what it is like before we die in comparison to what it is like after we die. In general, the unstated assumption is that there is nothing after death. This is perhaps why the practice is generally promoted by atheists and opposed by theists. But in my experience, it is very rare for people to address this question explicitly. They prefer to let the question of existence beyond death lie dormant, untouched. To think that physicians qua physicians have any expertise on or authority on the question of what it’s like to be dead, or that such medicine can at all comport with a scientific evidence-based approach to medical decision-making, is a profound self-deception.

Finally, we deceive ourselves when we pretend that ending people’s lives at their voluntary request is all about respecting personal autonomy. People seek death when they can see no other way forward with life—they are subject to the constraints of their circumstances, finances, support networks, and even internal spiritual resources. We are not nearly so autonomous as we wish to think. And in the end, the patient does not choose whether to die; the doctor chooses whether the patient should die. The patient requests, the doctor decides. Recent new stories have made clear the challenges for practitioners of euthanasia to pick and choose who should die among their patients. In Canada, you can have death, but only if your doctor agrees that your life is not worth living. However much these doctors might purport to act from compassion, one cannot help see a connection to Nazi physicians labelling the unwanted as “Lebensunwortes leben”—life unworthy of life. In adopting assisted death, we cannot avoid dehumanizing ourselves. Death with dignity is a deception.

These many acts of self-deception in relation to physician-assisted death should not surprise us, for the practice is intrinsically self-deceptive. It claims to be motivated by the value of the patient; it claims to promote the dignity of the patient; it claims to respect the autonomy of the patient. In fact, it directly contravenes all three of those goods.

It degrades the value of the patient by accepting that it doesn't matter whether or not the patient exists.

It denies the dignity of the patient by treating the patient as a mere means to an end—the sufferer is ended in order to end the suffering.

It destroys the autonomy of the patient because it takes away autonomy. The patient might autonomously express a desire for death, but the act of rendering someone dead does not enhance their autonomy; it obliterates it.

Yet the need for self-deception represents the fatal weakness of this practice. In time, truth will win over falsehood, light over darkness, wisdom over folly. So let us ever cling to the truth, and faithfully continue to speak the truth in love to the dying and the living. Truth overcomes pressure. The truth will set us free.