A famous address

The office of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Brunswick and its archive can be found in the “Church campus” on Dietrich-Bonhoeffer-Straße in Wolfenbüttel.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born in 1906 in Breslau. From 1923 to 1928 he studied theology in Tübingen and Berlin. Later he was awarded a doctorate and qualified as a professor of theology.  Until 1935, he worked in Barcelona, Berlin, New York and London. He then headed the theological seminary of the Confessing Church in Finkenwalde until its closure in 1937.

The National Socialists revoked his authority to teach, and prohibited him both from writing and public speaking. In 1938 Bonhoeffer joined the active resistance against Hitler. Under the fascist tyranny he championed man’s responsibility before God also with respect to his political actions.  In 1943 he was arrested. Shortly before the end of the war, on 9 April 1945, he was executed by the National Socialists at the concentration camp in Flossenbürg.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life story and his theology are intertwined. Their common thread is the truth of Jesus Christ in the maturing world – the secular interpretation of religion. Bonhoeffer wrote: “And I do not mean the faith which flees the world but that which endures the world and which loves and remains true to the world in spite of all the suffering which it contains for us.”

Amongst Bonhoeffer’s best known works are: The cost of discipleship (Nachfolge 1937), Life together (Gemeinsames Leben 1939), Ethics (Ethik 1940) and posthumously, under the title “Letters and Papers from Prison” (“Widerstand und Ergebung” 1951).