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As the world teeters on the brink of destruction, Dietrich Bonhoeffer joins a deadly plot to assassinate Hitler, risking his faith and fate to save millions of Jews from genocide. Actor Niemoeller 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: We have no defense against stupidity. Neither protest nor force can touch it. Reasoning is useless. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved – a fool can oppose them with criticism, and if they are undeniable, they can simply be dismissed as trivial exceptions. Well shot and acted. But the film spent an inordinate amount of time on Bonhoeffer’s trip to New York in 1930 and his alleged fascination with gospel music and jazz. In fact, his later prison letters reveal the lasting influence of traditional Lutheran hymns and Paul Gerhardt’s hymns on his theology and piety. His engagement to Maria von Wedemeyer (eighteen years his junior), with whom he exchanged dozens of letters during his imprisonment (1943–45) and later published as “Love Letters from Cell 92,” was completely ignored. It was Maria’s grandmother who financed the Confessing Church seminary in Finkenwald, where Bonhoeffer promoted a kind of “new monasticism”; for seminarians, with traditional hymns and an orderly prayer of the Psalms. The storyline that weaved Maria into the end of Bonhoeffer’s life would raise some intriguing questions, such as: Why get engaged if the end/your world is coming? That being said, it’s good that a Bonhoeffer film has been made, bringing his story of fighting for truth to a wider audience.
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