True patriotism; letters, lectures, and notes, 1939-45,

DIETRICH BONHOEFFER was a lecturer in theology at Berlin University when he first made his attack on Hitler's political ideas in 1933. Soon he was forbidden to teach and was banned from Berlin by the Nazi authorities. After spending time outside Germany, Bonhoeffer returned to his homeland at the outbreak of the war to join the Confessing Church and the political opposition to Hitler. He was arrested in April 1943, sent to Buchenwald and executed in 1945. Before Bonhoeffer was hanged in a Nazi prison camp, he sent a message through a fellow prisoner to his old friend, Bishop Bell of Chichester: "Tell him," he said, "that for me this is the end but also the beginning." The same is true of Bonhoeffer's thought, cut short and surviving only in fragments, but of seminal significance. TRUE PATRIOTISM is the colorful story of a churchman's final struggle with his conscience and the demons of the church and the state. These "letters, lectures, and notes" include such items as an outline for a book never published and fragments of a drama never produced. They cover the period in Bonhoeffer's life from the outbreak of the war in 1939 until his death in 1945 and show that the theologian, the conspirator, and the prisoner were all one man, one of the greatest figures of our time. Here are the years of tension and suffering which also issued in creative theological thinking. So Bonhoeffer's remarks on the church were forges in the heat of the controversy between the dissident Confessing Church and the pro-Nazi German Christians. His ethical reflections, which here clarify material published posthumously in ETHICS, were developed in the midst of anxiety over "Operation 7" and his dangerous role as a double agent out to get Hitler. The value of Bonhoeffer's last thoughts lies not so much in the answers they suggest to contemporary problems as in the insights they provide for us in the daily decisions of conscience we all have to face.