Al_Staggs

FOR INFORMATION CONTACT:
Al Staggs
408 West Pleasant View Drive, Hurst, Texas 76054
(817) 268-1816

The Legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Al Staggs holds a B.A. from Hardin-Simmons University, an M.R.E. from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, a Th.M. from Harvard Divinity School, and a Doctor of Ministry degree from Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. In 1983 he studied under Harvey Cox as a Harvard University Charles E. Mellow Fellow with a concentration in Applied Theology. Prior to becoming a full-time performance artist, Al served as a congregational Baptist minister for twenty-four years. He presently holds the position as chaplain at Harris Methodist Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas.

"Thank you . . . for the outstanding presentation at our joint-pre-Holocaust commemoration. Your acting was superb and your message was meaningful to both Christians and Jews."
—Richard J. Birnholz, Rabbi
Congregation Schaarai Zedek, Tampa, Florida

"My wife and I were much honored to be with you and to experience your Legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer presentation. We found your character-drama of the final hours and moments of Bonhoeffer’s life very moving and most appropriate for these times. . . ."
—Lewis E. Bogage, Rabbi
Beth Israel Temple, Hazelton, Pennsylvania

"I . . . thank you for your excellent presentation and congratulate you for your understanding of what Bonhoeffer stood for. Your performance . . . was truly memorable."
—Harry James Cargas, Professor
Webster University, St. Louis, Missouri
Author, When God and Man Failed

"Al Staggs brings the story of the Bonhoeffer struggle alive in his dramatic presentation. His sensitive performance focuses the audience on the importance of making choices based on moral and religious conviction. The message is universal and we recommend it strongly."
—Maxine Cohen, Director
Community Relations Council of the Jewish Federation of San Antonio, Texas

"Your presentation following the Kristallnacht observance, the breath-taking dialogue with the clergy over lunch, and your second performance at Indiana University—each was to a different audience, and all benefited from your wisdom and your dramatic presentation."
—Rabbi Morley T. Feinstein
Temple Beth El, South Bend, Indiana

"Your presentation was absolutely extraordinary. Every Jew and Christian who takes religion seriously must witness your portrayal of Dietrich Bonhoeffer."
—Rabbi Ronald M. Golstein
The New Reform Temple, Kansas City, Missouri

"You were true to his life and thought throughout the portrayal. . . . I found your presentation deeply moving."
—Franklin H. Littell, Professor
Temple Univeristy, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

"Rarely has our congregation given a standing ovation at a presentation in our Temple. You received an enthusiastic one and merited it greatly. Thank you for your significant role in advancing interreligious understanding."
—Samuel M. Stahl, Rabbi
Temple Beth El, San Antonio, Texas

Traitor to his nation? Christian martyr? "Righteous gentile"? Who, indeed, was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, subject of Al Stagg’s one-man play, "A View from the Underside"?

The barest details of his demise give pause: a 39-year old Lutheran theologian hanged to death for conspiring to assassinate his elected head of state. But the year was 1945, the head of state was Adolph Hitler, and most of the quarter million Jews of his native Germany - those who had not already fled to safety before the outbreak of World War II - had already been murdered in Nazi concentration camps. Under such circumstances, what do we make of a man of God who plots with others to help kill their own country’s leader?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born on February 4, 1906 to a large and respected family in Breslau, Germany. His father, Karl, was a highly regarded professor of psychiatry and neurology, particularly in the Berlin to which he moved his family in 1912. Dietrich, for his part, chose theology over science, majoring in divinity at the University of Berlin.

Young Bonhoeffer combined his Berlin education with study abroad. He spent 1930-1 in New York City where he enrolled at the Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan. His American sojourn was particularly marked by his experiences in Harlem. There he served as Sunday school teacher at the Abyssinian Baptist Church. In African-American churches, Bonhoeffer was later quoted as saying, he felt that the Gospel was more genuinely preached than in mainstream American churches.

Dietrich was back in Germany as a university lecturer when Hitler came to power in January 1933. Appalled by the anti-Jewish legislation enacted soon thereafter (especially ecclesiastical expulsion of "baptized non-Aryans"), and by his church’s quiescent response, the then 27-year old teacher delivered a controversial lecture, "The Church in the Presence of the Jewish Question." Bonhoeffer was also repulsed by the so-called "German Christian" movement, a pseudo-religious phenomenon which cloaked itself in theological language and liturgy to legitimate Nazi racial policy under the banner of Christianity. Largely to counter this heresy, in 1935 he returned to Germany from a two-year stint in London to join the Confessing Church, a new and "subversive" denomination formed to maintain the integrity of Christianity vis-à-vis both the "German Christian" Nazis and the tacit collaboration of the establishment Protestant churches. Bonhoeffer headed up the Confessing Church’s underground seminary. Anti-Jewish riots of November 9,1938 - Kristallnacht, The Night of [Broken] Glass - unsettled him immensely. His reaction was this: "When today the synagogues are set afire, tomorrow the churches will burn."

Dietrich’s American friends, concerned that his anti-Nazi activities would land him in prison, arranged for him in 1939 to return to the United States on a lecture tour. With war looming, however, Bonhoeffer quickly decided to return home: "I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war," he wrote, "if I do not share the trial of this time with my people."

During the next four years Bonhoeffer agonized over the appropriate mode of political resistence consonant with his position as an ordained minister. The decision he took - resolving competing pressures of patriotism, Lutheran obedience to state authority, and ultimate duty to God - forms the crux of "The Underside." It is also what landed him in a Berlin military prison in April 1943 when his activities as a double agent - under cover of German army counterintelligence - were discovered. (Bonnhoeffer also used his espionage connections to spirit a handful of Jews out of Germany, with the ruse that they themselves would serve the Nazis as double agents.)

From his Berlin cell Bonhoeffer wrote his posthumously published Letters and Papers from Prison (Macmillan 1971). Incarcerated in the Buchenwald concentration camp in February 1945, he was transferred three months later to a Gestapo (secret police) prison in Bavaria. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed for treason after an SS (Nazi "security service") trial on April 9, 1945 - less than one month before Germany capitulated to the Allies.

For decades scholars of the Holocaust have debated Bonhoeffer’s ultimate legacy. A product of conservative Lutheran doctrine, Dietrich Bonhoeffer did leave behind some written passages that, even according to his staunchest defender, "thoughtlessly perpetuated damaging stereotypes of the Jew." (These reflected traditional Church teachings about God’s "curse" upon the Jewish people for having rejected Jesus and an assumption that Christianity is a "replacement" of Judaism.) Yet other scholars, including at least one Orthodox Jewish one, claim that Bonhoeffer’s theology ultimately evolved in a direction parallel to the Torah and Talmud, and that he ought to be regarded as a "pioneer and forerunner of a... re-Hebraisation of the churches." Still others argue that, regardless of his theology, Bonhoeffer’s acts outweighed his words and that his self-sacrificial deeds more than prove his overriding concern for the Jewish people.

Curiously, for half a century after Germany’s defeat and its so-called "denazification," according to West German law Dietrich Bonhoeffer remained a duly condemned traitor. (In contrast, in 1956 the German judiciary ruled that the judge who had sentenced Bonhoeffer to death was not himself subject to legal action.) It was only in August of 1996 that a court in Berlin officially exonerated Dietrich Bonhoeffer of his "crimes" against the state.

William Miles
Professor of Political Science
Stotsky Professor of Historical and Cultural Studies © 2000

Bethge, Eberhard. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Man of Vision, Man of Courage. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. BX 4827.B57B43

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Act and Being. New York: Harper, 1962, c1961. BT 83.B613 1962a

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Christ the Center. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. BT 201.B47

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. The Cost of Discipleship. New York: Macmillan, 1966. BT 380.B66 1966

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. I Loved this People: Testimonies of Responsibility. London: John Knox Press, 1966. BX 8080.B645A53 1966

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. A Testament to Freedom: The essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1990. BR 50.B63 1990

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Writings Selected with an Introduction by Robert Coles. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998. BX4827.B57.A26 1998.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Eberhard Bethge, ed. Ethics. New York: Macmillan, 1955. BJ 1253.B615 1955a

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Eberhard Bethge ed. Letters and Papers from Prison. New York: Macmillan, 1972, c1971. BX 4827.B57A43 1972a

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Edwin H. Robertson, ed. No Rusty Swords: Letters, Lectures, and Notes 1928-1936. New York: Harper and Row, 1965. BX 8080.B645A253

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Edwin H. Robertson, ed. The Way to Freedom: Letters, Lectures, and Notes 1935-1939. London: Collins, 1966. BX 8011.B65 1966b

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Eileen Taylor, ed. Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Selections from his Writings. Springfield, IL: Templegate Publishers, 1992. BV 4832.2.B6513 1992

Bosanquet, Mary. The Life and Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1968. BX 4827.B59B6

De Gruchy, John W. The Cambridge Companion to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. New York: Cambridge University press, 1999. BX4827.B57C36 1999

De Gruchy, John W. Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Witness to Jesus Christ. London; San Francisco, CA: Collins, 1988. BX 4827.B57D393 1988

Feil, Ernst. The Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985. BX 4827.B57F4413 1985

Floyd, Wayne Whitson Jr., ed. Theology and the Practice of Responsibility: Essays on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1994. BX 4827.B57T47 1994

Goddard, Donald. The Last Days of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. BX 4827.B57G58 1976

Wind, Renate. Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Spoke in the Wheel. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1992. BX 4827.B57W55 1992

Woelfel, James W. Bonhoeffer’s Theology: Classical and Revolutionary. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1970. BX 4827.B57W6 1970

Books about Bonhoeffer not presently available at Sloan Library Northeastern University

Kelly, Geffrey, B. Liberating Faith; Bonhoeffer's Message for Today. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1984.

Rasmussen, Larry. Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Reality and Resistance. Nashville: Abingdon, 1972.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer: His Significance for North Americans. Chapter 1 by Renate Bethge. Translated by Geffrey B. Kelly. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1990.

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