Review: Bonhoeffer (2024)
A biopic about an activist and martyr takes the opposite approach: playing it safe
Bonhoeffer (2024)
Written and directed by Todd Komarnicki
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and theologian executed by the Nazis in the last days of World War II for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler, was anti-semitic.
So was or is the whole Lutheran Church, which officially repented of the anti-semitic teachings and practices that it embraced beginning with its 16th-century founder Martin Luther and extending at least until it officially apologized in 1994.1 (That hasn’t stopped many Lutherans from adopting the Palestinian view of the situation in and around Israel.)
Bonhoeffer’s anti-semitism was not just an attitude absorbed from the church in which he had grown up and was both a pastor and a seminary teacher, but specific and explicit. An informative article from 20162 states:
In April 1933, Bonhoeffer raised the first voice for church resistance to Hitler’s persecution of Jews, declaring that the church must not simply “bandage the victims under the wheel, but jam the spoke in the wheel itself.” In retrospect, his famous speech can be seen as anti-semitic, and playing into the hands of the Nazi regime. He ascribed the suffering of the Jews to God’s righteous punishment for the killing of Jesus. He used the anti-semitic terminology “Jewish problem”, and accepted the authority of the state to deal with the “problem” as it saw fit.
The Bonhoeffer biopic that opened in theaters this week softens this reading. A different character utters the phrase “Jewish problem,” and Bonhoeffer retorts “Why must we say they are a ‘problem?’”
That’s only one way the film strains to make Bonhoeffer palatable for today’s viewers, and in terms of the film’s mission — to re-introduce this historical figure, admirable in many ways but problematic in many others, to today’s mildly religious filmgoers.
I say “mildly religious” because that’s the atmosphere of every film distributed by the Mormon-run Angel Studios, a distribution company which in the last several months released these mildly religious films such as “Sight” and “Cabrini” at the pace of almost one per month. More-than-mildly-religious viewers already know who Bonhoeffer was.
Because Dietrich Bonhoeffer — “Pastor, spy. assassin,” as the film’s subtitle3 has it — is pretty famous in Christian circles. He is known, and widely revered, for his principled-slash-morally ambiguous stands during the Nazi regime, which led him first to resist when Hitler attacked the Jews and Nazified the national German church, and later when he joined in a failed 1943 Hitler assassination plot.4 A pacifist by choice, Bonhoeffer eventually came around to the view that direct action against the Leader was needed to stop both the killing of Jews and others targeted by the Nazis, and the ruination of Germany. His transformation from one viewpoint to the other, from a pacifist to an activist cooperating in an assassination attempt, makes him a dramatic and tragic figure — even a martyr, as many Christians view him today. (He was executed by the Nazi regime just weeks before Germany surrendered.)
Much more important to Bonhoeffer’s intellectual and historic legacy are his voluminous religious writings, the most famous of which is his 1937 book “The Cost of Discipleship.” In this work, Bonhoeffer examines the fundamental doctrine of grace, which states that innately sinful humans can do nothing to deserve salvation, which is not earned but freely offered by God. Bonhoeffer distinguished between “cheap” and “costly” grace. The former was the expectation of forgiveness and justification without doing the hard work of honest self-examination and self criticism, asking for forgiveness, and changing one’s behavior. Performing these acts of sincere repentance is costly, Bonhoeffer argues, but only by taking this difficult route can one become a real follower of Christ.
The 2024 biopic “Bonhoeffer” neglects this most famous and influential of his works in favor of bringing to life the drama of Bonhoeffer’s moral struggle. Of course, dramatizing the internal conflicts of a protagonist is what movies (and all stories) do; dramatizing theology is harder.5 But writer-director Todd Komarnicki — screenwriter of the Tom Hanks film “Sully” and a few others — is hardly up to even the first task.
It may seem strange that a film that goes out of its way to render the pudgy and intellectual Bonhoeffer almost an action hero— as seen in the film’s poster, certainly the grimmest depiction of the man that I’ve ever seen, and one of the most inaccurate, as he was never known to carry a weapon — misses so many chances to show what makes his life meaningful today, even actively misleads viewers about episodes in his life. Yes, every movie depiction of a historical figure exaggerates. But when showing Bonhoeffer’s sojourn in New York, when he was guided to Harlem jazz clubs by a classmate at Union Seminary6, did Komarnicki have to show the German not only enjoying jazz but being invited onto the bandstand by no less than Louis Armstrong to jam with the musicians?
The fact that Bonhoeffer (like Thomas Merton a few years later7) was very unimpressed by American mainline white Protestantism, but embraced and was embraced by the African American church — the film includes a powerful Harlem preacher played by Clarke Peters8, who lends considerable dignity to the film in the role — this fact is far more interesting.
The most important moment in the film — or it should be, for the mildly religious audiences9 who see the movie — is a scene in the Bonhoeffer family home upon his 1933 return to Germany, as his parents and his grown brother and sisters reflect on what it means that Hitler has come to power:
Brother: The Nazis’ rise to power has everyone a little anxious, Dietrich.
Bonhoeffer: The Nazis? They only got, what was it, 18% in 1930. And that was a mirage.
Brother: Well, this year’s “mirage” will double that.10
Bonhoeffer: I don’t believe it!
Father: It's because you were away. While Hitler used the Versailles treaty like his personal weapon. Every11 bad12 thing13 that ever happened in Germany landed at the doorsteps of the Jews14 and the communists15 —and there were enough working people16 begging for bread to believe it.
Bonhoeffer: There's no chance that this loudmouth mouth from Austria will have fooled enough Germans by (this year’s election)?
Father: But Hitler only has to fool the Germans who come out to vote. … The country has grown angrier, and people are falling prey to this nationalism and paranoia.
Brother: And the Nazis feed off that. They've been systematically fighting for every local election, each tiny hamlet -- prying the country from our hands while few were even watching.
Father: I've heard via my office that the Nazis plan to identify and dispose of people with mental disabilities.17
Sister: Father, that can't be true.
Bonhoeffer: You speak nightmares. Surely rumor and rage cannot win the day.
Father: Unless the day is already lost.
The film’s writer-director, Todd Komarnicki, clearly felt he had to include this scene, to establish two things for the viewer: What fascism coming to power meant to ordinary Germans who looked on Hitler and his ilk with reactions ranging from polite distaste to utter rejection; and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s personal and theological reaction. The former is necessary to remind audiences why the Nazis were the bad guys — and it’s astonishing to anyone born during the 20th century that Americans actually now need reminding — and the latter to presage the protagonist’s own moral journey, which is the subject of the whole movie. And the scene accomplishes these goals, to a minimal degree.
But it could have done so much more. First of all, the scene hardly stands out; it’s people sitting around a radio, talking. There’s little tension, and aside from a very quiet ominous musical tone in the background, nothing suggests that the scene foreshadows anything. The director, who chose to spend many minutes on his protagonist’s colorful visit to New York, including the above-mentioned fantastic scene, chose to downplay even the importance of the scene where Bonhoeffer and his family discuss fascism.
But there’s a different, even more important missed chance here. With only a few changes in emphasis and timing, and maybe a few words in the dialogue, Komarnicki could have made explicit the connection between the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s and the rise of fascism here and now.
He doesn’t. Instead, the comparison is not only not acknowledged; in fact, it’s ignored. In other words, you’d have to be one of the millions of Americans who have already identified as fascist the rise of Donald Trump to his second term as president. But those millions aren’t the mildly religious people attending this movie. The attendees are merely nice people who heard about this movie at their mildly religious church, or from a friend, or something. Maybe they’re on the distributor’s mailing list somehow. In any case, they will be blind to the comparison. That’s how this minor, mediocre film sinks to the level of a major disappointment.
“Lutheran Church Formally Rejects Luther’s Anti-semitic Teachings,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, May 6, 1994
“Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, And Spy In Harlem NY 1920’s,“ Harlem World, August 14, 1920
The subtitle helps to differentiate this 2024 movie from the 2023 “Bonhoeffer vs. the Third Reich” and “Bonhoeffer: Holy Traitor,” said to be coming in 2025, as well as previous biopics and documentaries.
The plot that Bonhoeffer was involved in was the von Gertsdorff suicide-vest attempt in 1943, not the more well-known 1944 bombing that Hitler survived. An even-handed perspective on Bonhoeffer’s life, words, and actions can be found on his page at the National Holocaust Museum website.
Of course, even if dramatizing spiritual choices and ethics is a challenging task, many films do it well. One recent work that springs to mind is the Flannery O’Connor biopic “Wildcat,” reviewed here.
It’s true that Frank Fisher, Bonhoeffer’s African American classmate at Union, took him to hear jazz, and that Bonhoeffer brought back to Germany records of jazz and gospel music, which he later played for seminarians at the secret Finkelwald Seminary, as told in “Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, And Spy In Harlem NY 1920’s,“ Harlem World, August 14, 1920. The film’s distributor also has a page on the historical accuracy of scenes in the film.
Merton’s famous autobiography “The Seven-Storey Mountain,” written soon after he entered a monastery in 1941, captured his underwhelmed reaction to Protestantism as he had encountered it thus far. Later, he was much interested in the “ecumenical” movement of the 20th century that built a rapproachement between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism; see “Thomas Merton’s Ecumenical Landscape,” an article available from the Thomas Merton Center website. Merton also wrote extensively on Bonhoeffer in his 1965 book “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.” See "‘Who Stands Fast?’ Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Thomas Merton on Obedience.”
Peters will be familiar as Det. Lester Freamon in “The Wire”
Angel Studios uses a “Pay It Forward” system of heightening word of mouth about the films it releases, and this ensures that mildly religious people send their friends to the movie. (I wrote more extensively about the company and its practices in my review of “Cabrini.”) In addition, the film’s audience will probably also include some Lutherans, for whom Bonhoeffer is the closest figure they have to a Lutheran martyr.