A more intimate portrait of Bonhoeffer

Midcentury biographical conventions encouraged the effacement of women’s lives. Since Eberhard Bethge’s monumental biography, Bonhoeffer’s story has been viewed as unfolding within a male-only world. Details of Con­fessing Church politics and theological analysis have animated decades of Bonhoeffer studies, but few scholars have looked deeply into the emotional, inter-personal, and psychological textures of Bonhoeffer’s life. Diane Reynolds looks beneath the surface.

The book would be worth the purchase price simply for its insistence on noticing the women present at every turn in Bonhoeffer’s life. Two such women are Elisabeth Zinn, Bonhoeffer’s neighbor and colleague in theological studies, and Berta Schulze, his personal and professional assistant in London. Reynolds demonstrates that Zinn and Schulze were genuine theological peers to Bonhoeffer, as Bethge’s biography hinted at. Most accounts of his life treat them (if at all) wrongly as his first fiancée and house-keeper, respectively.

It is, however, in exploring Bon­hoeffer’s relationships with a central triad of women—and, at the center of his life, with Bethge—that Reynolds’s work moves into original interpretive territory. She dives into the theologian’s very close connection with his twin sister, Sabine, his collaboration with and dependence on his benefactor Ruth von Kleist-Retzow, and his puzzling relationship with his fiancée Maria von Wedemeyer.