The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought

DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

THE GERMAN LUTHERAN pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer first put himself at risk in 1933 by resisting the so-called Aryan Clause, which prohibited Jewish Christians from serving as ministers in Protestant churches. In 1945 he was executed for “antiwar activity.” This included involvement in a scheme to help a group of Jews escape to Switzerland in 1941, and a meeting in Sweden in 1942 with the British bishop George Bell at which he tried to secure Allied support for the planned coup against Hitler now known as the Officers’ Plot. In the years between he helped to create and guide the Confessing Church, a movement of Protestant pastors and seminarians who left the official churches rather than accept their accommodation with Nazism.

Bonhoeffer was the son of a large, affectionate, wealthy, and influential family. He distinguished himself early, being accepted as a lecturer in theology at Berlin University in 1928, at the age of twenty-two. From the first, his lectures attracted students who shared his religious and political views. The divisions in the churches would also have the effect of surrounding him with committed and like-minded people, “the brothers” as he called them, who seem to have answered fairly well to the exalted vision of the church in the world which was always at the center of his theology. In some degree they must have inspired it, having accepted discipleship at such cost. Many of them would be arrested and imprisoned, or be drafted and die in combat.

Bonhoeffer’s family were scholars, scientists, artists, and military officers. His own powerful attraction to “the church” — he might be said always to have used the term in a special sense — is apparent in his earliest writing, and also in his decision to be a pastor rather than an academic. He reacted to the introduction of racial doctrine into the polity of the Protestant churches as heresy and led a revolt against it based on the belief that the so-called German Christians had ceased to be the true church. He was active in European ecumenical circles, with the intention of informing the world about the struggle in Germany and of legitimizing and supporting the dissenters.

By “the church” Bonhoeffer means Christ in this world, not as influence or loyalty but as active presence, not as one consideration or motive but as the one source and principle of life of those who constitute the church. This was the resistance position prepared by the formidable work of the Calvinist theologian Karl Barth, Bonhoeffer’s teacher and mentor and another early leader of the opposition to Nazism. Barth wrote the Barmen Declaration, which rejected the influence in the church of race nationalism together with all other “events and powers, forms and truths” on the grounds that “Jesus Christ, as He is attested to in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God, whom we have to hear and whom we have to trust and obey in life and in death.”

To make exclusive claim to the authority of Christ is the oldest temptation of Christianity, and full of difficulties no matter how sound the rationale behind it or how manifest its rightness in any particular instance. In his theology — that is, in thought and practice — Bonhoeffer corrects against these difficulties with a very strong bias toward grace. Falseness and error and even extremest viciousness are, for him, utterly within the reach of God’s compassion, which is infinite. In Bonhoeffer’s understanding, the otherness of God is precisely this boundless compassion. The failure of the church and the evil of the world are revealed in their perfect difference from this force of forgiveness, which they cannot weary or diminish or evade. Bonhoeffer’s protest, after all, was against exclusivism in the official church, and the church of his contemplation is utterly broad, indefinite in its boundaries. But the basis of his ethics is that Christ wills that the weak and persecuted should be rescued, and he must be obeyed; that Christ is present in the weak and the persecuted, and he must be honored. Bonhoeffer’s magnanimity and his inclusiveness — which governed his life and cost him his life — are profoundly Christ-centered. Characteristically, he wrote, “An expulsion of the Jews from the West must necessarily bring with it the expulsion of Christ. For Jesus Christ was a Jew.”

Bonhoeffer’s life and his thought inform each other deeply. To say this is to be reminded of the strangeness of the fact that this is not ordinarily true. Questions are raised about the consistency of his theology, with the implication that his political activity and his death give his writing a prominence it might not have enjoyed on its own merits. But clearly his experience is the subject of his theology. It is a study of the obedience he himself attempted, together with his students, colleagues, and friends. In 1932 he wrote, “[T]he primary confession of the Christian before the world is the deed that interprets itself.” An obedient act owes nothing to the logic or the expectations of the world as it is, but is affirmed in the fact of revealing the redeemed world. Action is revelation.

As a good Lutheran, Bonhoeffer would object on theological grounds to the suggestion that he earned the grace that seems so manifest in both his life and his writing, but the evidence of discipline, of rigorous reflection, is everywhere, most present in his most personal letters, those written nearest his death. Considering the circumstances of his life, so adversarial and then so besieged, and considering what was taking place in Germany and Europe, it is amazing how little notice he gives to sin or evil, how often he expresses gratitude. The church is described, but not its limits. Grace is described, but not its absence. He will not cease to love the world, or any part of it: “When the totality of history should stand before God, there Christ stands.”

It is obvious from subsequent events that these brave and brilliant spirits did not teach Hitler to fear theology. Nor do they seem to have rescued the honor of the church, which, in popular memory, is at least as roundly blamed as any other institution for the disaster of Fascism. The disappearance of religion in Europe, which Bonhoeffer foresaw, is in fact far advanced — despite him, and, since he has been sentimentalized as a prophet, in some part because of him. The heresies he and Barth denounced now flourish independently of even the culture and forms of Christianity, beyond any criticism they might have implied. And we have not learned the heroic art of forgiveness, which may have been the one thing needful.

It seems to me that the harshest irony of Bonhoeffer’s life and death lies in the use made of him by many who have claimed his influence. Looked at in the great light of his theology, which is an ethics from beginning to end, he is always, and first of all, a man devoted to the church, and to religious arts, forms, and occasions, especially those associated with Lutheran tradition. There can be no doubt that his clarity of purpose, his steadfastness, his serenity, were owed to his very devout habits of mind, and of life as well. Indeed, it is precisely in these habits that his mind and life are least to be distinguished from one another. He prayed and meditated and read and studied Scripture hours every day, looked forward joyfully to the events of the liturgical year, and, in prison, joyfully remembered them. He preached a sermon on the day he died.

Yet because he posed certain thoughts to his friend Eberhard Bethge about the relationship of sacred and secular, the actual example of his life is lost to an interpretation that devalues “religion” in the sense of religious art, discipline, and tradition, and the very comforts and resources of piety to which Bonhoeffer in his life and writing never ceased to bear witness. In a letter from prison in which he insists “my suspicion and horror of religiosity are greater than ever,” he says also, “I have found great help in Luther’s advice that we should start our morning and evening prayers by making the sign of the cross.” The contradiction is not at all intractable. Commenting on his aversion to religiosity he remarks, “I often think of how the Israelites never uttered the name of God.” Religiosity is a transgression against God’s otherness.

“Religion,” in the invidious sense common to Barth and Bonhoeffer, exists when, in Barth’s words, “the divine reality offered and manifested to us in revelation is replaced by a concept of God arbitrarily and wilfully evolved by man.” For Barth, though perhaps not for Bonhoeffer, falseness of some kind is a universal phenomenon of religious consciousness. In any case, the concept is not far from ideas such as hypocrisy or Phariseeism. It is not difficult to understand why this stinging use of the word “religious” would seem appropriate when most of the religious leaders of Germany were eager to embrace National Socialism. But using the word in this sense is a great source of difficulty and confusion, for example in the understanding of Bonhoeffer’s famous phrase “religionless Christianity.”

The evolution of thinking associated with his name makes Bonhoeffer himself seem an archaic figure, enthralled by that very piety we in his “world come of age” have learned to find strange and suspect. To the extent that his inspired obedience to Christ, that is, his humane devotion to justice in this world, drew from his piety, it is a resource lost to many who might earnestly hope to be like him. And yet, while the abrupt ferocity of the modern world has, for now, been epitomized in Nazi Germany, it certainly was not exhausted in it. If being modern means having the understanding and will to oppose the passions of collective life that can at any time emerge to disgrace us and, now, even to destroy us, then one great type of modern man is surely Dietrich Bonhoeffer — more particularly, Pastor Bonhoeffer in his pulpit, Pastor Bonhoeffer at his prayers.

While he never hesitated in his opposition to the National Socialist and anti-Semitic influences in the official churches, at times Bonhoeffer seems to have been uncertain how to respond to them. In April of 1933, he published an article titled “The Church and the Jewish Question” in which he said, “the church has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering of society, even if they do not belong to the Christian community.” This might mean “not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to jam a spoke in the wheel itself. Such action would be direct political action.” In June of 1933, Karl Barth attacked Nazism in a stinging public address, and sent Hitler a manifesto of protest. Bonhoeffer, with Pastor Martin Niemöller, a martyr in his own right, organized the Pastors’ Emergency League to send uncorrupted ministers to serve in parishes whose ministers were influenced by Nazism. About two thousand pastors associated themselves with these initial acts of resistance. If these tempests among the churchmen seem marginal to the events of the time, it should be remembered how alone they were. Bonhoeffer’s article was the first such defense of the Jewish people.

In October of 1933, Bonhoeffer went to England, where he had arranged to serve as pastor to two German congregations. He did not consult with Barth until he had arrived in London, though it had taken him some time to make the arrangements to leave Germany. When he did write to Barth, he very respectfully invited a rebuke, and he got one. Barth told him to return on the next ship, or the one after it. But Bonhoeffer stayed in England for two years. While he was there he made arrangements to go to India to be with Gandhi.

Only by the standards of his subsequent life do these choices seem doubtful. During his time in England he worked to establish support for the religious resistance in Germany, so he had not abandoned his homeland. And it is consistent with the openness of his views that he considered Gandhi’s political actions Christ-like and wished to learn from him. He was a pacifist. He was newly ordained into a tradition he loved deeply and could hardly have wished to attack. His leaving Germany might also be partly explained by church treatment of the Bethel Confession, which he wrote with Martin Niemöller, and which declared, “It is the task of Christians who come from the Gentile world to expose themselves to persecution rather than to surrender, willingly or unwillingly, even in one single respect, their kinship with Jewish Christians in the Church, founded on Word and Sacrament.” The paper had been watered down before it was circulated and signed by the dissenting pastors. He might reasonably have questioned the prospects of the religious resistance in Germany. And in fact, if it were not for Bonhoeffer, his writing, and especially his death, few would remember there had ever been any such resistance.

In 1935, the Confessing Church was founded, the church of the Protestant dissenters. Seminaries were established, and Bonhoeffer returned to Germany to head one of them. Later in the same year, Heinrich Himmler decreed that the church and its seminaries were both invalid and that those involved with them were liable to punishment. Finkenwalde, Bonhoeffer’s seminary, was closed by the Gestapo in September 1937. Twenty-seven former students were arrested. In February of 1938, Bonhoeffer initiated contact with figures in the political resistance to Hitler.

Through all this, Bonhoeffer wrote theology — sermons, lectures, circular letters, and books. In a very great degree his writing is characterized by beautiful iterations of doctrine, a sort of visionary orthodoxy: “History lives between promise and fulfillment. It carries the promise within itself, to become full of God, the womb of the birth of God.” To understand his method, one must remember his circumstances. He is asserting the claims of Christ in all their radicalism in order to encourage and reassure those drawn to what became the Confessing Church. At the same time, he is chastising those who use Christianity as an escape from the evils of the world and from the duties those evils imply, and he is chastising those who have accommodated their religion to the prevailing culture so thoroughly as to have made the prevailing culture their religion. His object is to make core beliefs immediate and compelling, to forbid the evasions of transcendence and of acculturation. He is using the scandal of the cross to discover the remnant church among the multitudes of the religious.

Because of the authority of his example, we look to Bonhoeffer for wisdom and guidance as to the right conduct of life, though he is perhaps more earnest in nothing than in insisting that there is no freestanding code through which goodness can be achieved. In his unfinished late work called Ethics, he says, “The will of God is not a system of rules which is established from the outset; it is something new and different in each situation in life, and for this reason a person must ever anew examine what the will of God may be. The heart, the understanding, observation, and experience must all collaborate in this task. It is no longer a matter of a person’s knowledge of good and evil, but solely the living will of God; our knowledge of God’s will is not something over which we ourselves dispose, but it depends solely upon the grace of God, and this grace is and requires to be new every morning.”

This is an application of the classic Reformation teaching that no one can do the will of God on the strength of his or her own efforts. It is a statement of the faith that God is present and active in the whole of the world — if he were not he would not have a will to be newly expressed in every situation of life. It seems one should be able to extract a secular ethic from the thinking of a man so generous in his views and so positive in his treatment of the secular world as Bonhoeffer, yet to do so is to defeat his clear intention. “Situation ethics” as a form of relativism is obviously not the point, because it is what remains of this idea if the active will of God is factored out of it. Later in the same essay he says, “The world, like all created things, is created through Christ and with Christ as its end, and consists in Christ alone.”

A scholar coming across such language in an ancient text would quite certainly identify it as a fragment of a hymn. Language of this kind pervades Bonhoeffer’s work, which I think may be described as a meditation on it, and a celebration of it. Great theology is always a kind of giant and intricate poetry, like epic or saga. It is written for those who know the tale already, the urgent messages and the dying words, and who attend to its retelling with a special alertness, because the story has a claim on them and they on it. Theology is also close to the spoken voice. It evokes sermon, sacrament, and liturgy, and, of course, Scripture itself, with all its echoes of song and legend and prayer. It earns its authority by winning assent and recognition, in the manner of poetry but with the difference that the assent seems to be to ultimate truth, however oblique or fragmentary the suggestion of it. Theology is written for the small community of those who would think of reading it. So it need not define freighted words like “faith” or “grace” but may instead reveal what they contain. To the degree that it does them any justice, its community of readers will say yes, enjoying the insight as their own and affirming it in that way.

Theology may proceed in the manner of a philosophical treatise or a piece of textual criticism, but it always begins by assuming major terms. And all of them, being imbedded in Scripture and tradition, behave altogether differently from discursive language. To compound the problem, Christian thinkers since Jesus have valued paradox as if it were resolution. So theology is never finally anything but theology, words about God, proceeding from the assumptions that God exists and that we know about him in a way that allows us to speak about him. Bonhoeffer calls these truths of the church “a word of recognition among friends.” He invokes this language of recognition and identification in attempting to make the church real and aware of itself, with all that implied when he wrote. For him, word is act. And, for him, it was.

In a very striking degree, Bonhoeffer’s theology returns to formulations which are virtually credal in their use of imagery taken from the narrative of the sacrifice of Christ. The effect is beautiful, musical. But the language functions not as ornament but as ontology. For him, it makes the most essential account that can be made of Being itself. For example, in a late letter famous for the statement that Christianity must be “demythologized” and biblical concepts reinterpreted in a “worldly” sense, he explains, “What is above this world is, in the gospel, intended to exist for this world; I mean that, not in the anthropocentric sense of liberal, mystic, pietistic, ethical theology, but in the biblical sense of the creation and of the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” Clearly he does not consider such language mythological, and the case could be made that he does not consider it religious either. This fact expresses his belief in the preeminent reality of the cosmic narrative implied in the words Christ, incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. Myth and religion are at the margin. Christ is at the center.

Bonhoeffer invokes such language as the culminating expression of any passionate argument, especially the great Nevertheless, that the world is to be loved and served and that God is present in it. The day after the failure of the attempt to assassinate Hitler, in which he and his brother and two of his brothers-in-law were deeply involved, Bonhoeffer wrote a letter to Bethge about “the profound this-worldliness of Christianity.” He said, “By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world — watching with Christ in Gethsemane … How can success make us arrogant, or failure lead us astray, when we share in God’s suffering through a life of this kind?” These would seem to be words of consolation, from himself as pastor to himself as prisoner. But they are also an argument from the authority of one narrative moment. The painful world must be embraced altogether, because Christ went to Gethsemane.

In 1937, Bonhoeffer published The Cost of Discipleship. He attacked the “cheap grace” of prevailing Lutheran teaching, which seemed merely to make people comfortable with their sins. “Costly grace” (interestingly he does not call it “true” grace, though the implications of the distinction would almost justify the use of that word) carried with it the acknowledged obligation of discipleship, that is, obedience: “It is only through actual obedience that a person can become liberated to believe.” He says that although, as Luther taught, faith is prior to obedience, in effect the two are simultaneous, “for faith is only real when there is obedience, never without it, and faith only becomes faith in the act of obedience.” This argument does not cite Paul’s Epistle to the Romans or otherwise ground itself in authority, though it means to overturn historical consensus about a crucial Reformation doctrine. The writing comes out of the time at Finkenwalde, from his teaching and his preaching to young men who were making a brave attempt at obedience. Their faith was “worldly,” that is, active and costly, not theoretical or doctrinal. He is appealing over the head of conventional theology, to shared experience. This is another form of the “word of recognition among friends,” an appeal to the experience of act as witness and as revelation. Bonhoeffer’s theology is in its circumstance as much as on the page, and this must surely have been his intention. No other method would have been consistent with his theology.

Life Together, Bonhoeffer’s book about Finkenwalde as a model of Christian community, came out two years later. Again, the appeal is to experience, an intuition of how life might be, based on the kind of visionary memory that becomes more important in Bonhoeffer’s writing as his life becomes more isolated and tenuous. The church — the eternal, present, felt being of Christ in the world which had always been at the center of his faith and his religious imagination — was or could be seen or apprehended in Finkenwalde or its like: “We have one another only through Christ, but through Christ we really do have one another. We have one another completely and for all eternity.” The Gestapo, of course, had closed the seminary. His account of it is like mysticism barely concealed or restrained, though all that is being described is a community of the faithful. Visionary memory and anticipation are increasingly the “world” he will cling to until his death. To see divine immanence in the world is an act of faith, not a matter to be interpreted in other than its own terms, if one grants the reasonableness of the perceiver. And Dietrich Bonhoeffer thought and believed his way to a surpassing reasonableness.

In 1939, Bonhoeffer traveled to New York. He had studied there for a year, at Union Theological Seminary, as a young man of twenty-four. He contacted Reinhold Niebuhr, his former teacher, who was then in England, and asked him to arrange an invitation for him to return to the United States. He was at risk of being drafted into Hitler’s army. The invitation was made, and he was offered a teaching post, but he returned to Germany after a month out of homesickness and a feeling that he would lose the right to influence Germany in the period after the war if he stayed in America. He was no longer allowed to teach in Berlin, and he would soon be prohibited from speaking in public and required to report regularly to the police. But his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi was an officer in the Abwehr, the military intelligence, which was a center of covert resistance and which became the nucleus of the Officers’ Plot. Dohnanyi took him on as an agent, an arrangement which kept him unmolested and allowed him to travel to Switzerland and Sweden in behalf of the resistance. In Switzerland he spoke with representatives of the Vatican and in Sweden he described to the English bishop George Bell a plan for simultaneous coups in Berlin and throughout occupied Europe, with support from unions, the military, and the Protestant and Catholic churches. This plan seems to have found no encouragement. During much of this time he lived as a guest in a Benedictine abbey near Munich and worked on the unfinished Ethics.

A few months before his arrest in April of 1943, Bonhoeffer became engaged to Maria von Wedemeyer, with whom, in keeping with the starchy customs of their class, and then with the conditions of his imprisonment, he was never to spend a single moment alone. He was thirty-seven and she was nineteen. Her family disapproved, and only announced the engagement when he was arrested, as a gesture of support. He wrote to her, as well as to Eberhard Bethge, imagining a sweetly ordinary domestic life even as bombs crashed into the prison buildings. His letters to her have long theological passages, too, gentler and more lyrical than those written to Bethge.

The fact that he wrote theology in these circumstances, in letters to dearly loved friends which he could not anticipate would ever be published, illuminates all his earlier work. These letters, too, are meant to actualize the sacred, that is, the relationship of love, the ground of shared understanding. Two ideas are essential to Bonhoeffer’s thinking: first, that the sacred can be inferred from the world in the experience of goodness, beauty, and love; and second, that these things, and, more generally, the immanence of God, are a real presence, not a symbol or a foreshadowing. They are fulfillment as well as promise, like the sacrament, or the church. The mystery of the world for Bonhoeffer comes with the belief that immanence is pervasive, no less so where it cannot be discovered. The achieved rescue of creation brings the whole of it under grace. So moments that are manifestly sacred do not judge or shame the indifference of the world, or its misery or its wickedness. Instead, they imply a presence and an embrace sufficient to it all, without distinction. Bonhoeffer is certainly never more orthodox than in seeing the revealed nature of Christ as depending, one might say, on his making precisely this overreaching claim on recalcitrant humankind.

In The Cost of Discipleship he wrote: “Jesus does not promise that when we bless our enemies and do good to them they will not despitefully use and persecute us. They certainly will. But not even that can hurt or overcome us, so long as we pray for them. For if we pray for them, we are taking their distress and poverty, their guilt and perdition, upon ourselves, and pleading to God for them. We are doing vicariously for them what they cannot do for themselves. Every insult they utter only serves to bind us more closely to God and them. Their persecution of us only serves to bring them nearer to reconciliation with God and to further the triumphs of love.” This is the power of Christ that is the weakness of Christ. He is present even where he is forgotten and efficacious even where he is despised. Such things could not be known about him except in a world like this one. So the secular and the “religionless” are an intrinsic part of divine self-revelation. As, in fact, they were central to the role of Jesus while he lived.

Watching with Christ in Gethsemane, Bonhoeffer worked at loving the world. In a letter to Bethge he wrote: “It is only when one loves life and the world so much that without them everything would be gone, that one can believe in the resurrection and a new world. It is only when one submits to the law that one can speak of grace, and only when one sees the anger and the wrath of God hanging like grim realities over the head of one’s enemies that one can know something of what it means to love them and forgive them.” But these exertions of forgiveness did not change his world. Bonhoeffer was in the hands of the SS. This cannot have been irrelevant to the drift of his thoughts about the future of Christendom, nor can the awareness of atrocities he must have had through Hans von Dohnanyi and others. When he says “the time of inwardness and conscience, which is to say the time of religion” is over, and “we are proceeding towards a time of no religion at all: men as they are now simply cannot be religious any more,” it seems to me fatuous to imagine that he is simply postulating a cultural trend that is to be absorbed like others.

He might well have concluded that there is one thing worse than hypocrisy. Yet clearly he is using “religion” in his usual, Barthian sense, albeit with a certain nostalgia. He suggests that the conception of God among the generality of people, the “religious premise,” might have been historical and temporary. Insofar as it was, he himself would never have hesitated to call it false. The God of revelation, of Barth and Bonhoeffer, is neither an “a priori” nor a creation of culture. These are the humanist views of God they both explicitly reject. But “the church” has always lived within religion, usually indistinguishable from it: “If religion is no more than the garment of Christianity — and even that garment has had very different aspects at different times — then what is a religionless Christianity?” In the course of the paragraph Bonhoeffer works his way back to his most characteristic assertion, that Christ is autonomously present, dependent on no human intention or belief or institution. He cannot answer his own question, but he can say, “God is the ‘beyond’ in the midst of our lives. The Church stands not where human powers give out, on the borders, but in the center of the village.” That “religion” has made inappropriate claims, that God and “the church” should stand in opposition to it, is not a new idea for Bonhoeffer. Surely what is to be noted in all this is Bonhoeffer’s steadfast refusal to condemn the “religionless” world, and his visionary certainty that it is comprehended in the divine presence.

This is Christ-like, only in the manner that the thoughts of a disciple might have been if one of them had watched with him on the night of his betrayal. It is striking how Bonhoeffer insists always on the role of disciple, of one among a company of equals, from which no one must be excluded. Though he was an aristocrat and aloof in his manner, he seems to have had no imagination of beatitude which is not a humanly understandable moment with a beloved friend. To Bethge, he wrote of his imprisonment, “One thing is that I do miss sitting down to table with others. The presents you send me acquire here a sacramental value; they remind me of the times we have sat down to table together. Perhaps the reason why we attach so much importance to sitting down to table together is that table fellowship is one of the realities of the Kingdom of God.”

Neither has he any interest in himself as solitary martyr. He generalizes from his circumstance to the human condition with a consistency that leads commentators to forget how extreme his isolation really was, and how available the idea of martyrdom or abandonment would have been to him, if he had not always transformed his suffering into compassion for humankind, or for God. It is not hard to imagine what dark night might have preceded words like these: “The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34). The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets the divine self be pushed out of the world onto the cross.”

Bonhoeffer’s family arranged to help him escape from prison, but he chose to remain because his brother Klaus, also in prison, might bear repercussions. He was executed in April of 1945, after nineteen months of imprisonment. His brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi died the next day, his brother Klaus and his brother-in-law Rudiger Schleicher within the month. A British prisoner wrote of Bonhoeffer in his last days that he “always seemed to diffuse an atmosphere of happiness, of joy in every smallest event in life, and a deep gratitude for the mere fact that he was alive.” This same prisoner wrote that when he was taken away to his execution, Bonhoeffer said, “This is the end — for me, the beginning of life.”