Bonhoeffer's Letters to London
Review of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters to London: Bonhoeffer's previously unpublished correspondence with Ernst Cromwell, 1935-6 . Edited by Stephen J. Plant and Toni Burrowes-Cromwell (SPCK: 2013). This collection of a dozen letters between Bonhoeffer and a young German man living in London may seem at first glance to be slight. But do not be fooled. Whilst this volume will never attain the status of Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison , and does not have the sustained theologizing of his Life Together or Discipleship , it is worth more than a cursory read. It is, unashamedly, peripheral - not a major work, nor letters of great substance. Rather, this is Bonhoeffer in the middle of things, writing to a teenage boy who he has prepared for confirmation. Against the background of Hitler's Germany, these letters bear witness to hope, friendship, joy and love. The correspondence starts at the end of Bonhoeffer's time as a pa...