Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. 2024 HC.DVD9 Download via Magnet
As the world teeters on the brink of annihilation, Dietrich Bonhoeffer joins a deadly plot to assassinate Hitler, risking his faith and fate to save millions of Jews from genocide. Niemöller actor August Diehl previously played an SS officer of the Gestapo in Inglourious Basterds (2009) and a German citizen who resisted enlistment in the German army in A Hidden Life (2019). Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Against stupidity we have no defense. Neither protest nor force can touch it. Reason is useless. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved – indeed, a fool can counteract them by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can simply be dismissed as trivial exceptions. Well filmed and acted. But the film spends a disproportionate amount of time on Bonhoeffer’s 1930 trip to New York and his alleged fascination with gospel and jazz. Indeed, his later prison letters reveal the lasting influence of traditional Lutheran chorales and Paul Gerhardt’s hymns on his theology and piety. There is no mention of his engagement to Maria von Wedemeyer (eighteen years his junior), with whom he exchanged dozens of letters during his imprisonment (1943-45) and later published as Love Letters from Cell 92. It was Maria’s grandmother who financed the Confessing Church seminary in Finkenwalde, where Bonhoeffer preached a kind of “new monasticism” for seminarians — with traditional chorales and the orderly prayer of psalms. A plot thread that weaves Mary into the end of Bonhoeffer’s life would have raised some compelling questions — such as: Why get engaged if your world is going to end? In the end, it’s a good thing that a film about Bonhoeffer was made, so that the story of his fight for truth could be brought to a wider audience.
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