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Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born in Breslau, Prussia, 4 February 1906. Son of Karl Bonhoeffer, Professor of Psychiatry at Berlin. Decided when he was 16 that he wanted to study for the ministry. Influenced by Karl Barth, he finished his first doctoral dissertation in theology by the time he was only 21 years old. He was a perfectionist in everything, from academics to sports. One of his friends said that he always gave the impression that he was savoring good food. His teachers thought he was a genius, and they expected him to become one of the foremost Christian theologians of his generation.
He thought the Lutheran religious community in Germany was too narrow in its focus, not engaged enough with the world at large, and so in 1930, he hopped a ship for New York City to study at the Union Theological Seminary. He had a maverick professor there who taught theology by way of the Harlem Renaissance, assigning books by Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, and James Weldon Johnson. Bonhoeffer was inspired to start attending the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, where he began to teach Sunday school, witnessing his church's struggle against racism. He also travelled to Cuba and Mexico.
In 1931, when Bonhoeffer returned to Berlin, he suddenly saw the anti-Semitism that had been brewing in his county with a new clarity. When Hitler took power in 1933, other pastors and theologians in Germany chose to ignore it, but Bonhoeffer made a speech on the radio denouncing fascism that was cut off by the authorities before he'd finished speaking. After being banned from preaching in 1936, he published his book ''The Cost of Discipleship'' (1937), which became one of the most influential works on the theology of social justice.
Bonhoeffer was lecturing in New York when Germany invaded Poland in 1938, but returned to his homeland immediately. He been active in the anti-Nazi Confessing Church and, since 1938, the Abwehr resistance, which culminated in the attempted assassination of Hitler in 1944. Bonhoeffer had already been arrested the year before for helping German Jews escape to Switzerland. He said, "Will the church merely gather up those whom the wheel has crushed or will it prevent the wheel from crushing them?"
Just before he was arrested, he became engaged to a young woman named Maria von Wedemeyer. They'd met through each other's families. Bonhoeffer had proposed to her through her grandmother. According to the social custom of the era, they had never been alone together. Maria later said she's fallen in love with him because of the way his hand looked on the couch next to her. They began a correspondence while he was in prison, and it was to her that he wrote many of his final thoughts about theology and life.
Bonhoeffer and Maria also discussed ordinary things in their letters. She asked him if he liked dogs. He asked her if she liked skiing. They made plans for their wedding and picked which flowers they might use at the ceremony. She told him that she had drawn a chalk line on the floor around her bed the size of his prison cell, so she could imagine she was with him.
In his final letter to her, Bonhoeffer wrote, "I have often found that the quieter my surroundings, the more vividly I sense my connection with you..." He was executed a few months later. The correspondence between him and Maria were collected in the book Love Letters From Cell 92 (1994).
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, "Love is not something in its own right, it is what people are and have become."
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