The Bonhoeffers are proud of their family history. Their roots lay in Holland (van den Boenhoff from Nijmegen) and the Bonhoeffers emigrated in the early 16th century to Schwäbisch Hall, in the present-day state of Baden-Würtenberg. Dietrich’s mother, Paula von Hase, belongs to the Prussian aristocracy. She is college educated and has an independent spirit. Dietrich’s father, Karl Bonhoeffer, is the undisputed patriarch of the family. He is a rational man of science, a psychiatrist and Director of the Berlin Charité university clinic. He is the leading representative of German psychiatry and an internationally recognised authority. In the Bonhoeffer family, intelligence and clear thinking are prized, emotions must be kept firmly under control.
Dietrich with his twin sister, Sabine.
But Dietrich takes after his mother. He is musical, sensitive, interested in people and their stories. He does not look like the other males in the family. As a child, he has long blonde hair, and a pale, girlish face. His mother teaches and encourages him, as she does all her children, in freedom and lively thinking. For Paula Bonhoeffer, emotions and reason belong together. But Dietrich, who clearly has a feminine side, tries all his life to make up for the psychological make-up he has inherited from his mother by means of his father’s rules and standards.
As a teenager, Dietrich adopts his father’s conservative political views. He believes only the old, cultural elite can quell the growing threat of Bolshevism. What a contrast to twelve years later, where Dietrich works alongside Jewish and Socialist friends, establishes the Charlottenburg youth club, and lives in community among the disadvantaged of society.
As Dietrich matures into a young man, he begins to make his own choices. In the last year of school, he makes public his wish to study theology. This surprises and mystifies the Bonhoeffer men - the rationalist Karl and Dietrich’s scientifically minded brothers. Religion of the church-going kind was simply never part of their family life and at best belonged in the world of emotion. Paula, as a pastor’s daughter, had always been deeply religious and instructed the children but even she had decided against sending them to church.
Dietrich in his first year at university.
Dietrich finds himself the outsider in the family. He leaves to study at Tübingen but he is a foreigner in the world of theology and the church. For the first semester he wanders between the world of his family and childhood and the new future he has chosen. It is not until a journey to Rome, Easter 1924, that Dietrich finds a sense of himself and his place as he encounters the Roman Catholic Church and he writes in his Italian Diary -
"The organ began and they sang their vespers with great seriousness, with incredible simplicity and grace. The whole thing was so fresh, and made an unprecedented impression of the deepest piety. When the door was opened again…one had the most splendid view over the cupolas of Rome in the setting sun…It was a splendid day, the first day on which I gained some real understanding of Catholicism…I believe I am beginning to understand the concept of the ‘the church’.”
Dietrich catches a vision that unites the universal church and personal faith, doctrine and life. After continuing his trip to Sicily and Africa, he returns to Berlin in June with a new faith and a new commitment to the Church. It is not long before finds himself again pulled between opposing forces, that of the conservative theology of Adolf Harnack and the radical new ideas of the younger Swiss theologian, Karl Barth. Harnack embodies all the worldly values of Dietrich’s father: middle-class humanistic learning and the reconciliation of theology with empirical science. But now Karl Barth strides across the theological stage. He embodies the Swiss workers’ community and the Social Democrat party. He stands for the existential question of Christian faith and the demarcation between theology, church and bourgeois culture. He accuses the German theologians and their “culture Protestantism” of making false compromises.
Dietrich is impressed with Barth but how can he criticise the culture, science and theology that are the roots of his own world? Dietrich’s doctoral thesis, "Sanctorum Communio – A Dogmatic Investigation of the Sociology of the Church" embodies a compromise between the conflicting theologies of his world. It is very much Dietrich’s independent theological work. Rather than an abstract theological or epistemological problem, he begins with the Church, with a concrete phenomenon that is both sociological and theological. The church does not have its origin in the world, but it does have a worldly social form. For Bonhoeffer, the church is “founded by God and yet is an empirical community like any other.”
Renate Wind writes that Dietrich's thesis is an attempt to reconcile the dialectical theologian and the empirical scientist, the pious rebel and the obedient middle-class son. But the attempt fails as Dietrich finds himself homeless once more. The Barthians cannot understand his thesis because of the sociology and the sociologists because of Barth.
The personal conflict in Dietrich continues through his student days. He is a good dancer and a brilliant conversationalist. But sometimes he simply disappears from a gathering and doesn’t return. While people are drawn to him, Dietrich retreats from intimacy. During the final semesters of his study, he runs a Sunday school class and youth group in the local church. He is very popular, the children and young people flock to him and love him. He discovers then how easily he can form a bond with people, and it frightens and worries him. Eberhard Bethge, his friend and biographer, writes that Dietrich was acutely aware of his power to influence, his power over people. Renate sees this as yet another impetus for continuing tension. “His theological insight that any knowledge of God is not a human achievement but the grace of God clashed with the pride, the ability, the ambition of a young academic.”
Dietrich in Barcelona.
The “young academic” graduates in 1927, aged twenty-one, and he finds himself in Spain for a year, as an assistant pastor to a German congregation in Barcelona. This turns out to be a very interesting encounter with bums, vagabonds, criminals on the run, foreign legionaries, runaways from the circus and dancers – all willing to share their life stories with Dietrich. With this ‘communion of saints’, Dietrich happily returns from the lofty realms of theology back to the reality of the church on earth – in Barcelona, he discovers a “remnant of unrestricted passionate living”.
Dietrich returns to Berlin to finish his habilitation thesis, which would qualify him for a university career. He works hard on his thesis “Act and Being”, finishes his second theological examinations and by the end of July 1930, he gives his inaugural lecture. He is now fully qualified for ordination, save for one small detail – he is too young! He must wait another 18 months before he reaches the prescribed age of twenty-five.
There is no thought of sitting idly by. Instead, Dietrich prepares to travel to America as an exchange student on a scholarship to the famous Union Theological Seminary. This trip will be a pivotal turning point. To date, and certainly during his earlier student years, Dietrich remained unaffected by the political world around him. Neither the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange, nor the appointment of Joseph Goebbels as head of propaganda for the Nazi party affected him in 1929. He was simply not involved politically, neither in right-wing nor left-wing groups. Several years later, he is highly critical of these years, of his un-Christian ambition and his lack of interest in political events.
But now, on the 5th of September, Dietrich sets sail for America. Little does he know now that this trip will challenge his dearly-held assumptions, open his eyes and test his old understandings. The theologian will return to Germany a political activist.
