A couple of months ago, I had the chance to see Am I a Racist?, conservative commentator Matt Walsh’s hit documentary. It was a fantastic experience — I laughed so hard I could barely breathe. While I thoroughly enjoyed the film, my attention was grabbed even more by a preview for a forthcoming movie: Bonhoeffer, a historical drama written and directed by Todd Komarnicki.
The trailer, which features Disturbed’s hauntingly powerful cover of the Simon and Garfunkel classic “The Sound of Silence,” struck such a chord with me that I watched it a few dozen times on YouTube and shared it with many friends in the lead-up to the film’s Nov. 22 theatrical release.
As that date approached, I was bracing for disappointment, but Komarnicki has delivered a powerful movie that captures the heroism of the German pastor who defied the Nazis, both openly and secretly, even if it misses on some levels.
Komarnicki, who produced Elf (2003) and directed the 2016 Tom Hanks hit Sully, knows cinematography. Bonhoeffer is beautifully shot and contains some of the most memorable and poetic scenes in recent memory.
He also got the most out of his cast. Jonas Dassler plays Dietrich Bonhoeffer with a passion that brings an intensity to each scene, and Flula Borg stands out as Hans von Dohnanyi, the brother-in-law of Bonhoeffer, who used his position in the Abwehr to resist the Nazis from within — and ultimately shared Bonhoeffer’s fate. Nadine Heidenreich and Moritz Bleibtreu also offer memorable performances as Bonhoeffer’s parents.
That said, Bonhoeffer is not a perfect movie. Some scenes are needlessly confusing, such as when Bonhoeffer pledges fealty to the Fuhrer and is forced to pass a “test” that makes little sense. A couple of scenes feel ham-fisted, such as when a shocked Bonhoeffer runs into the street to confront Hitler Youth members. Some scenes suggest that Bonhoeffer did not immediately recognize the Nazis as a serious threat, but this is not true.
Others have pointed out that the film portrays Bonhoeffer as a bit of a political zealot, someone who saw resistance to Adolf Hitler as not just a moral necessity but a political crusade.
Critics have a point. Komarnicki’s Bonhoeffer enjoys near-perfect moral clarity. Things were not always quite so clear for the real Bonhoeffer. On one occasion, he acquiesced to pressure from a bishop who discouraged him from speaking at a funeral for a Jew, a decision he regretted almost immediately. He struggled mightily to resolve the tension between his Christian values and what he eventually felt he must do to stop evil: assist in a plot to assassinate Hitler.
In Bonhoeffer, Dietrich agrees to participate in the plot almost with bravado. In reality, Bonhoeffer was tormented by the moral dilemma and refused to justify the action.
“Here the law is being broken, violated,” he wrote.
This is a nuance missing from the film, which mostly portrays Bonhoeffer as a hero burning with moral passion. Bonhoeffer was a hero, but he was more a cool-headed pastor than a firebrand.
Movies are dramas, of course, and this decision and others by Komarnicki, such as portraying some Nazis as caricatures of evil, are defensible. But the film suffers slightly by denying characters their full dimensions.
That said, Bonhoeffer works. It is a deeply moving film — my wife had tear-soaked cheeks by the end — that reveals the heroism of a man who had the courage to oppose evil at great risk to himself.
It’s important to understand that Bonhoeffer would have been a hero if he had not become a world-famous martyr.
Unlike so many in Germany, Bonhoeffer rejected Nazi statism, nationalism, and militarism from the beginning. As early as the spring of 1933, Bonhoeffer was speaking in defense of German Jews, who were already being targeted by Nazi public orders.
Bonhoeffer’s understanding of Scripture no doubt influenced his thinking.
“There is neither Jew nor Gentile,” Galatians 3:28 declares, “neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
This understanding led Bonhoeffer not just to declare it a responsibility of the church to “aid the victims of state action” but to “put a spoke in the wheel itself.”
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As Eric Metaxas pointed out in Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, the translation for this last phrase is awkward, but the protestant pastor “meant that a stick must be jammed into the spokes of the wheel to stop the vehicle.”
Christian thinkers can take issue with Bonhoeffer’s decision to resort to supporting violence to disrupt the Nazi war machine. Bonhoeffer himself did. But his conflict over the decision does not diminish his heroism — it magnifies it. One might even say it humanizes it, and that’s something I would have liked to see in Bonhoeffer.
Jon Miltimore is a senior editor at the American Institute for Economic Research. Follow him on Substack.