Bonhoeffer leaves America
Chooses to return to Nazi Germany
Dietrich Bonhoeffer is in New York City in June 1939 when he realizes he has made a mistake.
His friends have gotten him out of Germany. The situation for the Confessing Church — the movement of German Protestants who have refused to submit to the Nazi-controlled Reich Church — is deteriorating rapidly. Bonhoeffer is on a Gestapo list. He has been forbidden to speak publicly. His friends in America have arranged a teaching position that will keep him safe.
He arrives in New York. He cannot sleep. He writes in his diary: I have made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.
He books a return passage. He is back in Germany by the end of July 1939. The war begins in September.
He knows what he is returning to. He goes anyway.
His reasoning is precisely stated and perfectly clear: the person who avoids the suffering of his community forfeits the authority to speak to that community afterward. You cannot lead people through what you were unwilling to go through with them.
Bonhoeffer returns to Germany and eventually to prison and to a gallows three weeks before the end of the war.
He will have the right to speak. He pays for it with everything.
“I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.”
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, diary, June 1939 AD
“He who is a hired hand, and not a shepherd, who doesn't own the sheep, sees the wolf coming, leaves the sheep, and flees. The wolf snatches the sheep, and scatters them. The hired hand flees because he is a hired hand, and doesn't care for the sheep.”
Bonhoeffer could not sleep in New York because he knew he was in the wrong place.
Not in the sense that New York was bad. In the sense that safety, when your people are in danger, is a kind of abandonment. The shepherd who flees when the wolf comes is not a shepherd — he is a hired hand. He has exchanged his calling for his comfort.
Bonhoeffer went back because he was a shepherd, not a hired hand. Because the authority to rebuild requires the willingness to suffer alongside. Because the voice that will matter after the war is the voice that stayed through the war.
Where are your people? And are you there with them — or somewhere safer, watching from a distance, planning to return when the reconstruction begins?