Deitrich Bonhoeffer
Aug. 28th, 2005 10:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lilfluffRecently in my reading I have come across more than one reference to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose posthumous book Letters and Papers from Prison I can remember seeing on the bookshelf as I grew up. Based on the little I have learned of him so far I must say he deserved better than the cite he most recently received in the news.
Growing up seeing that book on the shelf, but never having read it, I never was sure when or where that prison was supposed to be. With the civil rights movement and apartheid being more often in the new I assumed it had been a prison either in the deep south or in South Africa. He had in fact been imprisoned by the Nazi's for participation in a church based underground organization after money that had helped jews flee the country was traced back to him, and later executed for ties to a plot within the abwehr to assassinate Hitler.
In looking up more about him I ran across a quote by Martin Luther King Jr., "If your opponent has a conscience, then follow Gandhi and non-violence. But if your enemy has no conscience like Hitler, then follow Bonhoeffer." I hope in history we shall rarely need to follow Bonhoeffer's lesson's on dealing with the conscienceless.
I am going to have to read more.
Growing up seeing that book on the shelf, but never having read it, I never was sure when or where that prison was supposed to be. With the civil rights movement and apartheid being more often in the new I assumed it had been a prison either in the deep south or in South Africa. He had in fact been imprisoned by the Nazi's for participation in a church based underground organization after money that had helped jews flee the country was traced back to him, and later executed for ties to a plot within the abwehr to assassinate Hitler.
In looking up more about him I ran across a quote by Martin Luther King Jr., "If your opponent has a conscience, then follow Gandhi and non-violence. But if your enemy has no conscience like Hitler, then follow Bonhoeffer." I hope in history we shall rarely need to follow Bonhoeffer's lesson's on dealing with the conscienceless.
I am going to have to read more.
