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The complexities of history have always posed problems for commercial cinema. With rare exceptions, mainstream historical films tend to flatten the inconveniently irregular textures of individual biographies and their context into simpler templates of good and evil, valour and villainy.
This is abundantly true of dramatisations of German resistance in the Third Reich. Of course, there can be no overstating the enormity of Nazi crimes, the unquestionable courage of the regime’s all-too-few committed opponents – and the terrible price they almost all inevitably paid. So it’s perhaps understandable that people such as Claus von Stauffenberg (leader of the July 20 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life), or student dissident Sophie Scholl, have been portrayed in fairly one-dimensional ways.
Yet acts of extraordinary courage and integrity are thrown into even sharper relief when we appreciate the flaws as well as the nobility of the people who undertake them. Not to do so risks turning these heroic, yet all too human, people into plaster saints.
Sadly, director Todd Komarnicki’s earnest but painfully reductive new biopic of the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-45) falls into all of these familiar traps.
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Executed in the final days of the second world war, Bonhoeffer’s heroism is beyond question. From the very start of Nazi rule, and fully aware of the likely consequences, he stood in uncompromising, public opposition. He saw Nazi tyranny, above all, as an assault on Christian values.
Bonhoeffer drove a campaign to repudiate the Nazi efforts to co-opt and “Aryanise” mainstream Protestantism. And he helped to establish the dissenting “confessing church”.
Eventually he became a peripheral part of the network seeking to assassinate Hitler, though he was not a prime mover. By the time of the failed July 1944 bomb plot (one of several botched assassination attempts), he was already imprisoned.
The film’s publicity, with its tagline “Pastor. Spy. Assassin” and ludicrous poster image of Bonhoeffer (Jonas Dassler) brandishing a pistol, erroneously implies otherwise.
The real Bonhoeffer
Bonhoeffer’s opposition to Nazism was moral, spiritual and expressed principally in his work as a theologian and teacher.
His posthumously collected writings run to 17 volumes. Yet Bonhoeffer fluffs the essential task of making its hero’s religious faith dramatically compelling.
The film prefers to imagine him as a figure of conventional derring-do, conspiring in cafés, infiltrating Nazi intelligence and personally ferrying Jewish fugitives across the Swiss border.
All these scenes have some minor basis in Bonhoeffer’s biography. But cumulatively they misrepresent the essence of his anti-Nazi dissidence to the point of seriously distorting the historical record.
One glaring example is the film’s depiction of his response to the Holocaust. Bonhoeffer denounced Jewish persecution at Nazi hands earlier, more forcefully and more consistently than almost any of his colleagues. Yet his opposition remained limited and complexly bound up with his Christian convictions.
He was not, as the film suggests, a proto-Schindler rescuer; nor was he, or could he have been, impelled to action by viewing (non-existent) clandestine film of the death camps, as a very ahistorical scene implies.
Bohoeffer imposes a wholly anachronistic modern comprehension of the Holocaust as Nazism’s defining crime, as if this will make its protagonist’s actions more admirable. In doing so, it ends up muffling the more complex particularities of his courage.
Such inaccurate scenes abound. Bonhoeffer is mystifyingly slipshod on basic historical accuracy. Switching confusingly and with inadequate signposting between his final hours and his earlier life, the film includes such howlers as dissidents threatened with transfer to the “eastern front”, apparently in the mid-1930s.
There’s also a cartoonishly lurid depiction of the Nazis’ attempted “Aryanisation” of the church. Swastikas block stained-glass windows and Bibles are swapped for Mein Kampf in pulpits.
Melodrama over history
The film’s portrait of German society during the Third Reich is also grossly misleading. Cadre of uniformed Nazis aside, we encounter barely a single German citizen who supports the regime. Wider German society is represented by the congregation who enthusiastically applaud a (fictitious) anti-Nazi sermon while the SS stage a huffy but mysteriously peaceful walkout.
Again and again, Bonhoeffer substitutes difficult history for conventionalised melodrama. Shortly before his arrest in 1943 the 36-year-old Bonhoeffer became engaged to his former confirmation pupil, a girl of barely 18.
His filmic avatar, by contrast, seems to lack any personal life whatsoever. Beyond, that is, an admittedly endearing affinity for jazz acquired during his seminary studies in New York (though seeing Bonhoeffer replace a Black female pianist onstage at a Harlem club, to apparently universal enthusiasm, leaves a sour taste).
Even Bonhoeffer’s execution – which may have in reality been protracted and excruciating – is rendered as a bloodlessly ethereal affair. The moment is as sentimentally devotional as any studio-era Hollywood hagiography.
Bonhoeffer’s posthumous standing, like that of other German anti-Nazis, has grown immensely. Since 1998, his limestone effigy has stood above Westminster Abbey’s west door as one of ten “modern martyrs.” But Bonhoeffer misses the opportunity to breathe credible dramatic life into this sainted figure.
The Conversation approached the director and writer of Bonhoeffer, Todd Komarnicki, for comment.
He told us that his screenplay was informed by the biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer written in 1966 by Bonhoeffer’s best friend, Eberhard Bethge. As part of a lengthy response, Komarnicki also maintained that the film’s depiction of Bonhoeffer’s involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler is accurate. He also argued that it was reasonable to speculate that Bonhoeffer could have seen the footage from the death camps. While he agreed that Dietrich did not literally take the Jewish prisoners into Switzerland as a proto-Schindler rescuer, he said: “I took the dramatic license in the film to illustrate the fact that his bravery did save actual Jewish lives.”
He continued “Bonhoeffer is not a documentary. I have written many true life movies, and the necessity to alter timelines and to choose metaphor over fact (only when the metaphor supports the fact) comes up now and again … It is the job of cinema to entertain and inspire, to instruct and imagine. That is what the art form requires if it hopes to be any good at all. Every frame of my film tried to honour the man at its centre. And to tell the truth.”
Barry Langford does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
