Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged by the Nazis in 1945, two weeks before his fellow prisoners were liberated from the Flossenbürg concentration camp, which doesn’t do much for one’s sense of justice. Neither does the postscript to Todd Komarnicki’s “Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin” informing us that the “German church” apologized after World War II for having deified Hitler. One of the things that this highly uneven but righteously indignant film has us pondering is who, in the future, will be issuing similar mea culpas.
The ostensible value of Third Reich stories and Holocaust films is their cautionary nature, which may be noble, but the fact is they are usually exploitative, unintentionally but unavoidably trivializing their subjects. This is true even when celebrating the period’s few heroes—Oskar Schindler, Miep Gies, Raoul Wallenberg and even Bonhoeffer, who used his pulpit to rail against the evils of Nazism when the church around him was acquiescing. (He became, with others, a founder of the schismatic Confessing Church.)
What separates “Bonhoeffer” from the myriad instructive Holocaust biographies and melodramas is its timing: American audiences have never before watched a movie about World War II-era Germany with the knowledge that a majority of their own electorate has voted in favor of fascism. It changes one’s entire outlook on the genre, never mind one’s fellow man.
At the outset, when it is being purely biographical, “Bonhoeffer” is earnest, too solemn or too jolly, and transparent about its messaging—all mortal sins of cinema. Young Dietrich was precocious, a twin, a piano prodigy who lost his beloved older brother to World War I. He studied at Union Theological Seminary in New York, was greatly influenced by the energy of African American spirituality and allied himself with the Abyssinian Baptist Church. Did he actually sit in with what looks suspiciously like Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five at Smalls Paradise in Harlem? Even if the scene actually happened, it’s a laughable misfire, a classic of Hollywood-style bowdlerized biography.
No, only when “Bonhoeffer” becomes an adventure—with Dietrich heroically throwing himself across the theological line of fire between the teachings of Christ and the teachings of Mein Kampf—does the film gain traction and become not just a celebration of conscience and courage but a thriller. (My confession: Before the movie got to about 1933, I wanted to abandon ship.) Given a passionate portrayal by Jonas Dassler, Dietrich makes a personal journey that takes him from conventionality to rebellion to insurrection to assassination: Bonhoeffer’s part in the plot against Hitler, which ultimately led to his arrest and imprisonment, is justified by him as being the lesser sin than letting a genocidal dictator live. “The word of God is that men should defeat their enemies by loving them,” one of his comrades says, throwing Dietrich’s own words back at him. David slew Goliath, Dietrich answers. “Is Hitler the first evil ruler since Scripture was written?” the same comrade asks, to which Dietrich says no. “But he’s the first one I can stop.”
It is into this moral morass that Mr. Komarnicki (the film’s writer and one of its many producers) marches forthrightly, and with convincing arguments. Although he made his film well before this month’s elections—and it is, in the end, a period piece—there is little point in ignoring how it serves as a mirror to our own time and place. Will Evangelical America be apologizing in five years? Will high-ranking members of the Catholic clergy be seeking absolution for ignoring the designs of would-be despots, never mind their personal histories? “Bonhoeffer” may be more than a lesson. It may be an elegy.
