Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) was a Berlin theologian, the son of the psychiatrist Karl Bonhoeffer, who earned his doctorate at twenty-one, studied at Union Theological Seminary in New York, and became a leader of the Confessing Church against Nazi control of German Protestantism. He directed the illegal seminary at Finkenwalde, joined the military-intelligence conspiracy against Hitler, was arrested in April 1943, and was hanged at Flossenbürg on 9 April 1945.
Published in Munich in 1937 under the one-word title Nachfolge (following, or discipleship), The Cost of Discipleship is Bonhoeffer's attempt to recover the plain command of Jesus to follow him from a Lutheran church that had, he believed, turned grace into a doctrine requiring nothing. Its first chapter sets the terms for the whole book with the contrast between cheap and costly grace.
1943-1945 (published 1951) · Early 20th Century · Collection
Letters and Papers from Prison was assembled after the war by Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer's closest friend, former student and nephew by marriage, and published in 1951 as Widerstand und Ergebung ('Resistance and Submission'). It gathers what Bonhoeffer wrote during two years of imprisonment by the Nazi state, together with the essay 'After Ten Years', composed at Christmas 1942 as a stocktaking for fellow conspirators.
