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As the world teeters on the brink of annihilation, Dietrich Bonhoeffer joins a deadly conspiracy to assassinate Hitler, risking his faith and destiny to save millions of Jews from genocide. Niemoeller’s actor August Diehl previously played an SS Gestapo officer in Inglourious 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 protest nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no avail. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be discredited—indeed, the fool can counterattack by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can simply be dismissed as trivial exceptions. Well shot 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 music and jazz. Indeed, his later prison letters reveal the lasting influence of traditional Lutheran chorales and the hymns of Paul Gerhardt on his theology and piety. There is no mention of his engagement to Maria von Wedemeyer (eighteen years his junior), with whom he exchanged dozens of letters during his imprisonment (1943–45), later published as “Love Letters from Cell 92.” It was Maria’s grandmother who financed the Confessing Church seminary at Finkenwalde, where Bonhoeffer advocated a kind of “new monasticism” for seminarians—with traditional chorales and an ordered prayer of the psalms. A storyline that weaved Maria into the end of Bonhoeffer’s life would have raised some compelling questions—such as: Why get engaged if your world is about to end? That said, it is good that a Bonhoeffer film has been made, bringing his story of struggle for truth to a wider audience.
