Review

Culture

Film & TV

Politics

War & peace

18 December 2024

6 min read

Watching Bonhoeffer from below

Does a new biopic capture a compelling and complex character?

David Emerton

David Emerton is Director of St Mellitus College, East Midlands.

Two men, dressed in the style of the 1940s look around shocked.

Jonas Dassler as Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Angel Studios.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer did not live to see his 40th birthday.

Sentenced to death in a sham trial at Flossenbürg concentration camp, he was stripped naked, led to the gallows, and executed on the direct orders of Adolf Hitler in April 1945, essentially for treason. Ever since, Bonhoeffer’s life and thought has been subject to projects in wish fulfilment. Bonhoeffer has been secularised, liberalised, radicalised, and popularised by people across the religious and political spectrum, and in ways that evidence only casual concern for historical fact and little (or no) comprehension of his literary estate. Most recently and remarkably—in fact, repulsively—Bonhoeffer’s name has even been used by the right-wing Heritage Foundation to denounce the so-called “open-borders activism” and “environmental extremism” of the American Left in its Project 2025 wish list for the presidency of President-elect Donald Trump.

It was with mixed feelings, therefore, that I sat down in a movie theatre in downtown San Diego a few weeks ago to watch the new film Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. Released by the Christian production company, Angel Studios, and written and directed by Todd Komarnicki (producer of Elf and writer of Sully), the film (coming to UK cinemas in early 2025) is trailered thus:

“As the world teeters on the brink of annihilation, Dietrich Bonhoeffer is swept into the epicenter of a deadly plot to assassinate Hitler. With his faith and fate at stake, Bonhoeffer must choose between upholding his moral convictions or risking it all to save millions of Jews from genocide. Will his shift from preaching peace to plotting murder alter the course of history or cost him everything?”

The accompanying image has the pacifist-preaching Bonhoeffer holding a gun.

Like any big-screen biopic, Bonhoeffer mixes fact and fiction with a healthy dollop of artistic and cinematic license. This license is of course necessary for the screenwriting art: time needs compressing; biography needs enlivening; peoples’ character needs demonstrating; ultimately, the film needs watching.

There is no doubt that Bonhoeffer spent time at Union Theological Seminary in New York and that whilst there he bemoaned the state of American theology, actively participated in the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, and became close friends with an African-American student, Frank Fisher.

But learning to play jazz piano at a Harlem nightclub? Being beaten by a racist hotel owner with the butt of a rifle? And becoming an ardent advocate for African-American civil rights?

There is no doubt, too, that, as Hitler rose to power, Bonhoeffer spoke out against the dangers inherent in the Führer concept and that throughout the 1930s he steadfastly critiqued Nazism and national socialist ideology.

But were his words ever these?

“I can’t keep on pretending that praying and teaching is enough.” “Dirty hands ... It’s all that I have to offer.” Or, in response to being asked by his friend and student, Eberhard Bethge, if Hitler is the first evil leader since Scripture was written: “No. But he’s the first one I can stop.”

No one is going to dispute, either, that Bonhoeffer led an underground seminary at Finkenwalde to train future pastors of the Confessing Church in Germany; or that he said, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” (Even if, in German, he more literally said, “Every call of Christ leads into death”).

But what is disputable is that (as the film suggests) Finkenwalde was a safe haven from which a plot to assassinate Hitler was launched, and that Bonhoeffer’s most memorable aphorism of Christian discipleship was intended to be spliced (as it is in the film) into footage of a conspirator preparing a suicide bomb.

And Bonhoeffer certainly did join the German Military Intelligence and act as something akin to a double-double-agent. He certainly did pass information about the conspiracy to international church leaders on his travels outside of Germany. He certainly did know about both “Operation Seven” (a plan to smuggle a small group of Jews and Jewish Christians out of Germany to safety in Switzerland), and the planned plot to assassinate Hitler.

But to suggest (as the film does) that Bonhoeffer was central to these plans and personally involved in them, or that he asked Bishop George Bell to lobby Winston Churchill to supply a bomb that the conspirators could use to kill Hitler, is nothing more than highly contentious, even conspiratorial, conjecture.

In a panoply of embellished facts, the film’s final scenes are in equal measure harrowing, arresting, and deeply moving.

Bonhoeffer’s life and thought is obviously compelling.

It is also complex.

Bonhoeffer left behind an array of books, essays, sermons, unfinished manuscripts, working notes, and letters, all of which are notoriously difficult to interpret, especially in the round. Bonhoeffer rides roughshod over this difficulty and complexity, and thereby trivialises the legacy of a modern-day, martyred Christian saint. It also tells in part an untrue story—the story of a man destined, indeed determined, to disavow a life of prayer, teaching, and diplomacy to become a would-be assassin and engage in violent political espionage and activism at any cost.

This is a (very) far cry from the man who, in 1930, urges American Christians to remember that they have brothers and sisters “in every people,” not just in their own, and that if the people of God were united then “no nationalism, no hate of races or classes can execute its designs and ... the world will have its peace.”

It’s a far cry from the man who, in November 1940, writes that “radicalism,” and “Christian radicalism” in particular, “arises from a conscious or unconscious hatred ... toward the world, whether it is the hate of the godless or of the pious.”

And it’s a far cry from the man who, at Christmas 1942, reflects on the “incomparable value” of having 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.”

Bonhoeffer therefore risks exposing Bonhoeffer’s legacy, as a theologian, pastor, and man of resistance, to yet further abuse. At a time when political and religious discourse is increasingly laced with xenophobic, authoritarian, and nationalistic rhetoric, and at worst Christian nationalistic rhetoric, this is not what is needed. It is not surprising that Bonhoeffer scholars across the world and Bonhoeffer’s own descendants have registered concern.

But is Bonhoeffer nevertheless worth the price of a ticket?

Perhaps surprisingly, I think that it is: if only for its denouement.

In a panoply of embellished facts, the film’s final scenes are in equal measure harrowing, arresting, and deeply moving. Shortly before his execution, Bonhoeffer leads his fellow prisoners in morning prayer, breaking bread and drinking wine with them in commemoration of the death of Jesus Christ. Bonhoeffer then walks to the gallows in peace, knowing that for him, as a disciple of Jesus Christ, his death is but the beginning of life.

It is such steadfast hope, in the face of all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions (to borrow some words from Fyodor Dostoevsky), that the church and our world today is perhaps most desperately in need of.

Bonhoeffer opens in UK and Irish cinemas on 7 March.

Bonhoeffer film web site.

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Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.