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IN REVIEW

CHRISTIANS STRUGGLED WITH NAZI RISE TO POWER

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

The truth about fascism was difficult to tell in public even for the Christians protected by the church in Germany.

Director Todd Kormarnicki tells the story of Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the direction he took the Lutheran church before he was hung for treason in Bonhoeffer (2024).

The fragmented narrative follows the psychological chaos of the mind of neo-orthodox as he prepares himself to accept his own death on April 9, 1945.

Kormarnicki begins with Dietrich’s childhood in Germany, just before his brother gets sent off to fight in World War I. Walter is meant to return the hero, but in the next scene sequence, which follows with a sense of immediacy as if Walter had never left, he is shown in an open coffin being buried in his uniform.

Jonas Dassler creates a complicated character performance in Bonhoeffer as the Dietrich’s real world learning quickly accelerates from a few moments at peace during his childhood to an educated theologian living and studying with Christians in New York City.

Bonhoeffer learns from a black Christian fellowship in Harlem about a deeper love for Jesus as well as about racial hatred living day to day on the streets of New York City.

The narrative takes a long time, bringing everybody to all the places that shaped Bonhoeffer into the hero he became known as, and how the church, that initially was swayed into silence by Nazism, gradually bends back toward a more honest criticism of Germany under the fascist leadership of Adolf Hitler.

Cinematographer John Mathieson creates a tone and atmosphere that suggests more sinister matters are unfolding. Several scenes are brilliantly dipped in shadow as the protagonists discuss darker subject matters.

Kormarnicki also uses a score, composed by Gabriel Ferreira and Antonio Pinto, that runs in the background behind dialogue scenes, which creates a lot of tension because of the substantive subject matter of the discussions between characters that syncs with the musical composition.

A lot of suspense is developed to get to the point where one of the assassination attempts fails, but the scene sequences disclosing the details about Bonhoeffer’s involvement in the assignation plot never seem to happen in any great substance.

The film is more about the challenges facing heroism in circumstances of great social uncertainty and personal danger. Dassler shows that the good character of the Lutheran pastor is the foundation of his heroism.

Essentially, the Nazis went too far by overwriting the Bible to infuse Arianism and the cult of the personality. This fascist revisionism and anti-Christian teaching about Jesus created a sense of outrage among the Church leaders and congregation, so much so that they began to put their own lives at risk to be able to speak the truth.

The Chistian church also became outraged at the treatment of the Jewish population, eventually gaining the knowledge about the Nazi’s killing the Jews in the concentration camps. At one point, Bonhoeffer is involved in a betrayal of Nazi authority by setting 7 Jews free at the border with Switzerland so that they could tell the world about the unfolding genocide.

A layer of aesthetics also moves scenes put together with various artful compositions, while several camera shots have clearly been inspired by creative forces.

Although there is a need to keep the truth alive, the movie avoids telling another story of Jews being hidden from the Nazis and saved from the gas chambers of the concentration camp system by focussing on the character of the hero that risked his own life to liberate the Jews.

The less obvious overall vision of the film seems to be scenes put together from gentle fragments of memory in which a person being executed the next day might be expected to become consumed.

The narrative is also presented as a metaphor for a Bible Dietrich’s brother gave him, with underlined passages, that mirror the unfolding of Dietrich’s life one select page at a time, as he nears the point that he will join his brother in Heaven.