By Sandra Hall
BONHOEFFER
Rated PG
132 minutes
In cinemas March 13
★★★½
In 1914, six-year-old Dietrich Bonhoeffer watches his beloved big brother, Walter, go off to join the German army. It’s the last time young Dietrich will see him alive. As a result, he grows up with a profound aversion to war.
Sadly, the times are against him. A theology student, he travels to New York to finish his studies, returning to Berlin as Hitler is on the rise. By 1934, he has a developing reputation as one of his country’s most outspoken dissidents – a tireless campaigner against the Third Reich’s suppression of his church and everything it stands for.
Jonas Dassler as Dietrich Bonhoeffer.Credit:
Bonhoeffer was written and directed by Todd Komarnicki, something of a specialist in biographical screenplays. He worked on Clint Eastwood’s Sully, about Sully Sullenberger, the airline pilot who made a successful emergency landing in the Hudson River in 2009, and The Professor and the Madman, the controversial Mel Gibson production about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary.
This film, too, has provoked debate, having been criticised for distorting aspects of Bonhoeffer’s life and pacifist convictions. And its embrace by Germany’s right-wing Christian nationalists has displeased caretakers of Bonhoeffer’s legacy.
Before I learnt all this, however, the film seemed anything but controversial – more a solidly researched and justifiably sombre account of a man who refused to compromise his beliefs whatever the risks. If anything, it seemed a bit predictable because Bonhoeffer comes across as such a sunny character. Admittedly, he is troubled by the clash between his pacifism and the need to resist Nazism, but it’s not exactly a major plot point.
The story is told in flashback. It’s 1945 and Germany’s defeat is imminent, but this doesn’t matter to the soldiers transporting Bonhoeffer and other political prisoners across the country in a bus. They don’t know where they’re going, but they fear that once they get there, they’ll be killed. And while they’re on the move, Bonhoeffer is obsessively writing in his journal as he reviews his short but remarkable life.
The most unlikely episode is his period in New York where he discovers both gospel music at Adam Clayton Powell’s Abyssinian Baptist Church and Dixieland Jazz in a club in Harlem. From here, he goes south to Alabama, travelling with a black friend and receiving a potent lesson in the distinctly American brand of racial hatred.
Later, after delivering a fiery anti-Nazi sermon in Berlin, he goes back to New York to spread the news of Hitler’s persecution of the Jews, and friends urge him to stay, but he’s not listening. Instead, he returns home via London, where he writes to Churchill with the same message, and from then on, it’s only a matter of time before the Nazis catch up with him.
The film is at its vaguest when dealing with his connection to the group who plotted to assassinate Hitler – possibly because it’s one of the film’s most contentious episodes. Nonetheless, it’s a rousing tribute to one of Germany’s most admirable war heroes – and a convincing evocation of an era that still has much to teach us.