Review

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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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Politics

8 November 2024

10 min read

How to respond when politicians talk about “our way of life”

Alasdair MacIntyre’s thinking helps us understand what we share across society.

Joel Pierce

Joel Pierce is the administrator of Christ's College, University of Aberdeen. He has recently published his first book.

Four men in suits, sit next to each other smiling, in the House of Commons.

Reform MPs in the House of Commons.

House of Commons, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia.

What is “our way of life”? It’s a phrase which slides easily into the rhetoric of politicians of every stripe. It’s what the Reform Party says is threatened by multiculturalism, but what do they mean by it? What kind of politics is sustained by talk of “our way of life” and is there a better way of thinking about such politics?

This summer, we made an exception to the time limit rule for television in my house, mainly so that I could have the Olympics on from morning to night. It’s a habit I acquired growing up in the United States, where an obsession over the quadrennial medal count is one of the few remaining things which bridges political and regional divides. During the Cold War, the Olympics were a way for Americans to proudly affirm the superiority of our way of life over the rigid training schedules and alien ways of the rival Soviet Union.

Although my memories begin around the fall of the Berlin Wall, old habits die hard, and so the Olympics, to me, was endless coverage of plucky underdog Americans overcoming the odds to defeat the machine-like discipline of a new set of rivals–now Russia and China

I moved to Britain just before the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics at which Britain won exactly one medal. At first I was bemused by the BBC’s coverage, which, of necessity, had to focus on British Olympians with little chance of winning. I was invited to cheer on eighth or ninth place finishers who had committed their life to a craft which would never bring the rewards of lasting fame or financial security. For them the reward was the Olympics themselves, the chance to compete amongst peers, to push themselves to their highest level, enjoying their sport and their performance for what it was, not for any external reward. In the terms of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, what these Olympians displayed was dedication to the internal goods of their sport–those goods that make a particular activity worth doing for its own sake. The Olympics were not about medals for them, but about showing what could be achieved if, as Olympians must do, they made their sport their way of life, dedicating themselves to its unique forms of excellence.

Sports, for MacIntyre, are but one example of a broader category he labels ‘practices’. Although MacIntyre has a technical definition of what counts as a ‘practice’, the general idea can be conveyed through examples he gives such as farming, researching history, architecture, chess, and chemistry. Practices are human activities which are worth doing for their own sake, which require a degree of skill and excellence, and in which what counts as that skill and excellence is, in part, defined and discerned by the people who participate in the practice. This last criterion points at something important about practices for MacIntyre: they are inherently social.

This is obvious in the case of sport. For an individual athlete to compete in a race they need not just other competitors to race against, but also trainers and coaches to prepare them for it, governing bodies to organise it, and, hopefully, spectators to cheer them on. It is, perhaps, less obvious in the case of individual farmer, but even here, one has to be taught to farm and, if one is wise, continues to learn and adapt through consulting with other farmers. A different way of putting this is that practices are the kinds of things which it’s not absurd to call “a way of life”. For an Olympic curler, curling is a way of life, just as much as farming is for a farmer.

There are many ways of life, many modes of being British, as diverse as the professions, hobbies, and passions which we find to have inherent worth.

However, this seems to offer little help in defining “our way of life” if it is being used in the way our politicians like to talk about it. If there’s one thing that I learned from all those BBC features of British Olympians way back in 2010, it was that aside from geographic proximity, there was not much that their way of life had in common with mine. I may be within driving distance of the rink where Winter Olympian Eve Muirhead learned to curl, but my workdays of wrestling spreadsheets and answering emails have little in common with ones spent lifting weights, studying strategy with coaches, and perfecting the just right spin on a stone as it’s released.

And, of course that’s not just true of Olympic athletes. The investment banker who attends our church shares a way of life with his colleagues in Edinburgh, London, and Tokyo, that is completely opaque to my wife and I, immersed as we are in the worlds of ministry and academia. I glimpse some of the internal goods of the practices of our dentist watching her check my daughters’ teeth and our plumber as he fixes our leaking radiators, but their way of life, the rhythms of their days, and what gives them satisfaction in their work as they move from appointment to appointment, eludes my understanding.

Where does this leave the search for a British way of life? If practices are as important to forming us as MacIntyre thinks, then the quest for any singular British way of life will ultimately be fruitless. There are many ways of life, many modes of being British, as diverse as the professions, hobbies, and passions which we find to have inherent worth. And even this characterisation does not go quite far enough, because all of these practices have a way of bursting the boundaries of Britishness if they really are worthwhile. A century and a half ago, football, rugby, and cricket were quintessentially British sports. Now they belong to the world.

Similarly, valuing these practices well within Britain has a tendency to open us to accepting those from outside our borders who can help develop them. The best footballer in Britain is Norwegian. Many of the doctors who ensured my daughters arrived safely after complicated pregnancies were originally from India and Pakistan.

Still, one might wonder if thinking about community through the lens of practices, as MacIntyre does, is too much of a solvent. Isn’t it a way of imagining us living near each other, but not with each other; siloed in our practices, in each of our communities, not understanding what our neighbours are up to? Not necessarily. For MacIntyre, the familiarity that arise from living near someone, hearing their worries at planning permission hearings, arguing with them at the local school’s parent council meetings, organising a community fundraiser together, or, even, being part of a family with them, can help develop an understanding of the internal goods of practices which we do not take part in. I haven’t lifted a brush to paper to since my secondary school art class, but my mother-in-law’s virtuosity with acrylics has led me to acquire an increasing appreciation for painting. Part of what helps facilitate this recognition is that, as MacIntyre argues, although the internal goods and the skills required to achieve them tend to be different for each practice, the virtues which we develop while pursuing them–patience, honesty, courage, self-control–are universal. Part of what helps us recognise others’ activities as practices, as worth doing for their own sake, are the virtues we see them develop as they do them.

This sort of recognition requires familiarity, the sort I might have with my neighbours in our corner of rural Aberdeenshire, but that I am unlikely to have with fellow citizens in Cornwall, Cardiff, London, or Glasgow. How then are we to respond to national politicians talking about “our way of life”? One answer might be: with extreme scepticism. This is MacIntyre’s approach. He rejects the nation-state, which he calls “a dangerous and unmanageable institution”, as a potential channel of communal unity. Instead, he calls on us to admit that modern nation-states exist as a contradiction, being both “a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services” and yet also something treated as sacred, which we are asked, on occasion, to surrender our lives to preserve. He notes with characteristic acerbity, “it is like being asked to die for the telephone company.”

However, here I’d temper MacIntyre’s rhetoric somewhat. While my attachment to bankers in Canary Wharf is largely a happenstance of history, a contingent fact generated by long forgotten necessities of eighteenth century geopolitics, it has nevertheless resulted in both of us being issued the same passport, governed by the same tax regime, and having the same set of regulatory agencies to complain to when things go wrong. Those may be manifestations of what MacIntyre disparages as “a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services”, but they nevertheless do bind us together. As such we both have an interest in making sure this bureaucracy acts as justly as it can, not because it is the embodiment of all that is British, Britain is much too diverse and interesting to be fully embodied in our political institutions, but because we all have an interest in the institutions in which we are enmeshed, British or otherwise, being run as justly as possible.

Surely politics is all about securing as much money and resources as possible for the people most like oneself. That, it seems, is often the unstated assumption when the talk of “our way of life”

Because we find ourselves tied together by these institutions to a diverse collection of people, we have an interest in learning about those with whom we live. Even those who are far away. And to also celebrate when goods and services delivered by our institutions result in success to which we, in a remote way, have contributed. I may not share a way of life with Adam Peaty, but, thanks to the BBC, I can have a glimpse into what his way of life is and can be happy that through my taxes I have contributed, in a small way, to helping him win another medal. Since that 2010 Winter Olympics Britain has come quite a long way and there is nothing wrong with a little vicarious pride in our athlete’s accomplishments.

But I can also be proud of athletes who didn’t win. Ones like BMX rider Beth Shriever who handled her unexpected last place finish in her final with a kind of grace and maturity, the kind of virtue, which someone more dedicated to her practice than to just winning can demonstrate. It is the facilitating of this kind of moral achievement which is more valuable than any medal.

Similarly, I can rejoice when a new hospital gets built in a neglected area in London, or more council housing is supplied to people in need in Edinburgh, hopeful that these lead to my fellow citizens achieving the kind of flourishing lives they deserve. I can be angry, when I discover that the money I’ve paid towards postage has been used to prosecute innocent victims of a computer glitch, and pleased when the opening of a new rail line eases the otherwise stressful commute of tens of thousands in London. The state may be a bit like a telephone company, but a well-run utility can do a lot to supply people with the goods they need to make their lives. As long as I’m a subscriber, as long as I’m tied to people through national institutions like the state, I have a moral duty to ensure that they’re run as well as possible.

This way of thinking about politics may strike some as idealistic, the kind of view only a naive Christian ethicist could endorse. Surely politics is all about securing as much money and resources as possible for the people most like oneself. That, it seems, is often the unstated assumption when the talk of “our way of life” is deployed and why so much coalition building in our politics turns on finding a convenient other against which to define “our” similarity. Take your pick: immigrants, the EU, woke elites, the Tories, or Westminster (among a certain brand of politician here in Scotland).--. Growing up in the USA, the Soviets, and then the Chinese, and now, depending whether one lives in a Republican or Democratic district, the other political party, have served the same purpose. The problem is that we aren’t that similar, we are and always have been a diverse lot with diverse needs. Every nation is. There is no one British way of life and to allow our politicians to try to sustain the fiction that there is lets them off the hook. Solving deep seated economic and social inequality is hard. Blaming immigrants for not embracing our way of life is easy.

So, perhaps the sort of politics that I am talking about here is idealistic, nevertheless it is the only kind that can sustain a just government in the long term. Without acknowledging the importance of goods we only partly understand which are pursued by people whose ways of life are different from our own, we cannot hope to sustain the minor miracle of coordination and mutual aid that history has gifted us with in our united kingdom.