21/41
As the world teeters on the brink of annihilation, Dietrich Bonhoeffer joins a deadly plot to assassinate Hitler, risking his faith and fate to save millions of Jews from genocide. Niemoeller actor August Diehl previously played an SS Gestapo officer in Neglourious Basterds (2009). and a German citizen who resisted conscription into the German army in A Hidden Life (2019).. Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Against stupidity we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved – indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can only be brushed aside as trivial exceptions.. Well filmed and acted. However, the film spent an inordinate amount of time on Bonhoeffer’s 1930 trip to New York and his supposed fascination with gospel and jazz music. In fact, his later prison letters reveal the lasting influence of traditional Lutheran chorales and the hymns of Paul Gerhardt on his theology and piety. There was no mention of his engagement to Maria von Wedemeyer (18 years his junior), with whom he exchanged dozens of letters during his imprisonment (1943–1945), and later published as “Love Letters from Cell 92.” It was Maria’s grandmother who financed the seminary of the Confessing Church at Finkenwalde, where Bonhoeffer advocated a kind of “new monasticism” for seminarians—with traditional chorales and an orderly prayer of the psalms. A plot that entangled Maria until the end of Bonhoeffer’s life would have raised some compelling questions, such as, Why get engaged if your world/world is about to end? All that said, it’s good that a film about Bonhoeffer was produced, bringing his story of the struggle for truth to a wider audience.