weapons, weapons that have come over from england. that is the answer. >> how long did it take you? >> let's see. it was about a year-and-a-half. on up to virginia. a university of north carolina libraries, terrific fascinating. just go over there and read the journals and letters of the soldiers. so fluid in there riding, many of them. put this to shame today. i find it fascinating. just a wealth of material, stuff that i just could not fit into

the book. you have a question? >> obviously casualties at the highest levels. it does seem again and again that they lost critical players. nobody to replace them. at the beginning of the war was their training can malcolm. >> the kind of had that system. regimental commanders moved up to brigade. they just kept promoting people. some really good commanders emerged. for example, on the confederate side john gordon became -- commanded one of lease. he was a warrior.

some people have a military bill that had emerged. there were a lot of failures. people came in from the regular army with some rank. they just were not up to it. there was a real sorting process confederates really felt by the end of the war the attrition of their officers more than union. that was their great advantage at the beginning of the war. they had better leaders. by the end those people, many of them are gone. and so lee took, as i was saying, more and more.

[inaudible conversations] >> oh, i am sorry. >> kind of a silly question. you mentioned the traveler had been injured. tiddle the ever use them again? >> i don't know. but i don't think he was injured he would have been if he would have attacked the taxes brigade. certainly. but, no, i think he survived and moved on a few years. to the grave. and. frankly, i don't know where it came from.

all right. okay. i guess that is it. [applause] i want to thank you. thank you for coming out. >> for more information visit the authors website. >> charles marsh recalls the life of a german theologian, pastor, and dissident up next on book tv. the author recounts his formative education which includes ten months in the united states and his denunciation of the nazi regime. he was executed in a concentration camp in 1945 at the age of 39.

this is about an hour and ten minutes. >> our special guest this evening is from the university of virginia. here to talk about his book. i want you guys to give a very big round of applause. thank you so much for being here. [applause] and thank you so much. what a fun night and thanks to all of you for being here. this card night, art walk in l.a. this is my 20th book talk on a boat to word that is, again, april 22nd in harlem. and i am thrilled to be in los angeles on this warm kind of balmy night to that kind of takes me back to some boat talks that i did in the deep south some time ago. i am thrilled for -- to be here.

it is an exceedingly grateful feeling for the folks. i am here to tell you that independent bookstores in america are making a comeback. ..

in the spring of 2007 during a semester when i had a sabbatical at the university of berlin. i was the dietrich bonhoeffer visiting professor for the spring semester and i know that sounds like a very prestigious title but i should tell you that the fellowship came without any salary, without any travel stipend. i don't think i have access to a printer but i did have a cozy office in the berg strasse and if enough berlin it's across the river sprague from the berlin dome. soon enough i made my trip, my first trip to the beautiful city library of berlin. it's this gorgeous capacious buildings designed by one of these brilliant driven architects named pons sharon. i was given access to the

dietrich bonhoeffer papers and i'm going to sound kind of like a book geek and maybe like you know you're annoying college professor for a minute but i want to tell you that access to these 25 boxes of papers that were just sold to the university library by the family of one of bonhoeffer's best friends approved in my experience deeply transformative transformative. here's the context. 25 years ago this spring i submitted a lumbering 505 page dissertation at the university of virginia on dietrich bonhoeffer's philosophical theology. now i'm not going to read anything from our book tonight but i will tell you that what i began to see when to see when i open these boxes and every morning and that gorgeous light filled almost kind of transcendent space that is the deadly attack were pieces of

paper, writings, photographs, images, notes, entries from journals and diaries that offered in my mind an intriguing very dramatically different image than this brilliant philosophical theologian and sort of martyr of the christian church that many people no dietrich bonhoeffer tv. let me tell you about some things i found in his archives. i i found some gorgeous landscape photographs. bonhoeffer had taken them on his trip to africa and these were gorgeous austere photographs of islamic life in libya and then in morocco. i found a bank statement from a joint bank account that bonhoeffer shared with his best friend and soulmate eberhard baker. i know this may also sound a little obscure to you, but i

didn't know how tall bonhoeffer was until i found a little registration paper for an audi convertible that has bothered the preeminent psychiatrist in berlin gave him in 1936 and i discovered he was 6 feet one inch which is a pretty tall fellow. i found a brief correspondence from 1934 with mahatma gandhi. so it's a very interesting correspondence. bonhoeffer issue now and if you don't i will tell you now, was a german pastor and theologian who in 1933, when hitler was in power and appointed chancellor of germany and the nuremberg laws were passed, bonhoeffer was really a kind of voice crying in

the wilderness. he was one of the first is not the only member of the christian community at that time who spoke with clarity about the emergence of what he would later call the great masquerade of evil that was appearing in this time and in this place. within weeks of the passage of the nuremberg laws in this whole slate of anti-semitic policies bonhoeffer was going on record saying that a response to the rise of nazism. people of faith were not simply obligated to bandage the victims under the wheel but to smash the wheel itself. so this was dietrich bonhoeffer this extraordinary person of faith and in this correspondence with mahatma gandhi one year after the passage of the nuremberg laws bonhoeffer is

beginning to conclude that there is something deeply broken and flawed about the protestant tradition not only in germany but really the protestant tradition as it exists in modern christiandom and he was looking for pockets of spiritual energy and for communities that were clustering around peacemaking and contemplative practices outside of the west. he was invited by gandhi to come live in india. it was a grad that bonhoeffer had. all of his life he was not able to make it to india and instead he went and formed a radical community of peacemaking in northeast germany in this area called pomerania. what else did i i find the maps? i found an inventory of his wardrobe so it turns out that

this great person of conscience, this activist, this brilliant thinker and philosopher was also a bit of a close hound and in his inventory i discovered that bonhoeffer actually kept a very meticulous record of his dress, where he likes to buy his leather shoes and his furs, his favorite haberdasher and all kinds of esoterica of his wardrobe. not so surprising was the meticulous inventory of his library. bonhoeffer at the age of 12 or 13 in a letter to father christmas had asked for the complete writings of immanuel kant so it wasn't particularly surprising that he kept the meticulous record of his wardrobe. in any case, these aspects, the

surprising details began to nudge me not so gently into biography. so i'm going to read a short passage from the first chapter. when he was a young child -- can you hear okay? and his family rented a sprawling villa near the university clinics in breslow dietrich bonhoeffer and his twin sister sabina lay awake at night trying to imagine eternity. the ritual eventually became a game. with each child concentrating on the word to clear the mind of distractions. on funeral days as horse-drawn hearse's approach the cemetery just to the north the twins would watch from their bedroom window.

eternity. sabina found the word very long and gruesome. dietrich founded majestic, an awesome word he called it. sometimes he would picture himself on his deathbed surrounded by family and friends reclining on the threshold of heaven. he knew what his last words would be and sometimes rehearse them aloud though he dared not reveal them to anyone. he hopes to welcome death as an expected guests. he did not want to be taken by surprise. sometimes when he went to bed convinced that death would come that very night, he would grow lightheaded and the walls of his bedroom would reel about as if they were the axis of the carousel.

he imagined himself rushing from sister to brother, from father to mother pleading for help. the prospect of that happening now of its vanishing tonight into the vast mystery and felt so real he had to reassure himself that he was still among the living. but he could still feel mortal pain. when the twins got separate bedrooms they devised a code for keeping up their metaphysical games. dietrich would drone lightly on the wall with his fingers and a monitory knock announcing that it was time to once again ponder eternity. a further tap, and new reflection on the solemn theme and so it went back and forth until one of them discerned the final silence, usually dietrich.

and with the game concluded he lay awake. the only light in his room coming from a pair of candlelit crosses his mother had placed atop the corner table. when at night i go to bed 14 angels round by stead he would hear her sing. he liked the idea very much. one angel, dressed in a little white cloak standing by his bed and others watching over children everywhere. in the decades since bonhoeffer was executed on the direct orders of hitler on the morning of april 9, 1945, for the crime of high treason he has become one of the most influential religious speakers of the modern

period. his life life and legacy have influenced activists to human rights proponents. you hear bonhoeffer's life in his thought echoed in the songs and in the writings of desmond tutu of bonneau and of jimmy carter and angulo merkel and many others. one of the things i loved about bonhoeffer as a religious figure in the modern era is the way his life and his thoughts crossed so many boundaries and bring together so many different kinds of people in admiration of an indisputably authentic witness. liberals and conservatives, protestants and catholics, jewish and christians and muslims, believers and unbelievers alike find places

and aspects of bonhoeffer's stories to connect with and that's exciting to me. i think this gives his life and thought great currency and sort of great significance. some of you know him by his popular writings. his popular works like life together or cost of discipleship. these books have sold in the millions in english. these books make biblical religion sort of accessible to believer and nonbeliever alike. he was an extraordinary person and his story is an extraordinary story. he was born as kind of a golden child into a prodigiously humanist family in breslow and later moved to berlin and the question of how this particular german, this erudite privileged

german was able to see the nazi specter with such clarity and prescience as early as 33 is one of the driving plot lines of my book in addition to the simple and i hope artful explication of character. let me just say before i set up this next reading which will be the only other reading before i turn to questions and answers, let me just give you one of my takes on how he was able to see clearly. late in his life, when he was in prison in a gestapo prison in berlin, bonhoeffer writing to his best friend said you know there've only been two times in my life when i see that i went

through deep and profound transformations. one was under the strong impression of my father, this preeminent psychiatrist, the head of the neurology clinic in the center for nervous disorders at the university of berlin and the other was in my first trips abroad. it was then he said, and i love this phrase, i began to make the turning from that crazy illogical to the real. in these years 1927 to 1933 bonhoeffer's a student and he's a young professor. he has his first doctorate by the age of 21. a second doctorate by the age of 24. he is priming bird life of academic fame and fortune within the very demanding structure of german academe. but he was an extremely restless person and if you look at his notebooks and journals in those years you will see that he is feeling a sense of almost claustrophobia by the kind of

insular, closed-end culture in germany and berlin in the late 20s and he's always looking for an opportunity to leave. between 1927 in 1933 he traveled to rome. he travels to north africa. he travels to paris and barcelona, to morocco or if he goes to london. he comes to the united states. he goes to cuba. he goes to mexico. he takes a road trip across country in 1931 with a frenchman. he has these extraordinary experiences that introduce him to these different cultures and different places in the united states in 1931. he undergoes a six month immersion in the african-american church in harlem and he says that the end of that year i finally heard the voice of jesus preaching and speaking in the church of the

outcast of america of referring to the african-american church in america. so it's 1939. bonhoeffer is now under constant surveillance by the gestapo. his various experiments and hopes of countering hitler through church resistance had failed. he has learned that he is going to receive his draft papers and he has made known that he is not going to serve in hitler's army. there was no conscientious objectors that is in hitler's army. if you refuse you are put in a concentration camp and likely executed. some friends back in new york hurriedly put together a teaching position for him at union theological seminary in new york. they are worried about his fate and they want to find a place for him to come and live in relative security during the years of the war.

bonhoeffer in the summer of 1939 comes to new york and the passage i'm going to read is about that dark night. it's about 12 minutes long so 13 minutes long and then we will have some time for q&a. just to give you a sense of what's coming. on a warm morning in june 1939 bonhoeffer left germany on his second journey to america. i'm flying over the channel in the globe -- glow of pink sunset today the hart on june 4. it's 10:00. it's still very bright. you will be tired and gone to bed now but i am well. after a weeklong layover in england he boarded the bremen

for the five-day ocean voyage to new york. pleased with the spacious cabin and the appointment to the ship he read andy nabbed in a lounge chair on the hardwood deck. he was content to be alone. the weather is wonderful and the ocean is quiet he told a the hart. i will spend a lot of time thinking of you and all the others. today is sunday you know. no worship service here he wrote from the deck of the luxury liner on the second day. the change in timezones had already prevented those taking part remotely in worship as it was happening. the growing distance had our date caused a clear new day to dawn in the mid-atlantic but i'm fully with you. today more than ever. if only the doubts about my own path were overcome.

he found new york much changed since his last visit nearly a decade before it. the new empire state building had transformed the skyline though it stood mostly tenant lists. robert moses titanic public works program is evident with new bridges and roadways. in april the world's fair head open in queens to great fanfare. in the bronx lou gehrig was playing in his last season for the yankees. he would retire midsummer having set the record for consecutive games played. the movie, the "wizard of oz," premiered on august 17 at rose capitol theater almost without judy garland's iconic over the rainbow which the producers feared might slow down the sto story. john steinbeck's "the grapes of wrath" published by viking press won the national book award and the pulitzer prize.

somewhat less conspicuously and unabridged edition of mein kampf appeared for the first time in english. bonhoeffer could not summon the sense of optimism and its venture and wonder that had accompanied his last sojourn in new york. the hard lessons of the previous years had brought him closer to realism and harlem which he had once loved was no longer on his mind. at the world's fair his heart sank to see the temple of religion where under an enormous tent christians and jewish were preaching as if in a circus act. he arrived at union theological seminary in the middle of the summer vacation on the first day of a heatwave. the brick and limestone fortress brawling between broadway and

claremont on the city's upper east side was a world away from the rustic estate where think involve a head's not too long ago flourished even further from the modest parish houses of the collective pastorate. bonhoeffer unpacked his bags and a room for visiting scholars, the profits chamber it was called but what kind of a profit was he? at least he was a profit with plenty of space. and with the temperatures soaring into the high 90s it was impossible to shut the windows and with one giving unto the interior courtyard and the other onto broadway the street noise persisted until late at night, even than abating only a little. the airless mess was enervating. and so was the lack of society. arnold niebuhr had advised him

to come to new york as soon as possible which bonhoeffer took to heart but when he arrived in new york on the morning of june 12 his american host decent and thoughtful people were nowhere to be found. neighbor was still in scotland with his family are paying for the gifford lectures. the convivial layman's paul and mary and were in indiana where paul held summer classes in indiana. he was confessed he was unsure exactly when he and his wife would be back in town. paul tillich who wholeheartedly supported bonhoeffer's -- was sequestered in his main retreat. he passed the time by smoking cigarettes, reading and taking walks. he visited the metropolitan museum where he lingered over el greco's view of toledo and hans memling christ giving his blessing. he tried to catch up on the latest american theology and the

sun through recent issues of the christian century. every few days he rang his brother carl friedrich for a quick chat to us in the final month of the sabbatical year at the university of chicago. he made entries in his brown leather journal a going away present from eberhardt. never one to inventory his material life bonhoeffer was left with few other options amid the shock of separation. later in prison on hot summer days in his stifling so he would tell his parents not to worry about him seeing as how he had survived the heat of italy, africa, spain, mexico and perhaps worst of all new york city july 1939. as a sensitive child he had always been content with small pleasures whether accompanying

his mother as they sang the gerhardt beethoven songs, collecting wildflowers in the glades near his home or reading stories about with his twin subpoena after school in the garden. in new york, he'd drink coffee. he ate moderately. he smokes moderately and sad at his desk with a floor fan taking the little relief it offered. he was able to make contact with a few acquaintances who didn't live according to the academic schedule. paul griswold macy's department store met bonhoeffer on his first night in town for drinks at the parkside hotel. another monied manhattanite henry smith leiper showed him around the church is an entire city block filled with ecumenical and hosted a party at

in midtown restaurant. he invited bonhoeffer to come at him by train to his country house in the berkshires. bonhoeffer told his parents that the connecticut countryside reminded him a little of the area around fredericksburg where the family had a summer home. he breathed a little easier for a time on the porch of the coffins lakeside home with a cold glass of gin and the fresh and looks very and landscape rolling to the horizon. he had never seen fireflies in the eastern hartz mountains of germany that during the evening at the berkshires thousands of fireflies along with flying glowworms flashed against the fading daylight like shooting stars. quite a fantastic site he wrote in his diary.

aiming to lift bonhoeffer's clearly flagging spirits their friends hold dinner parties in their homes are taken to concerts and plays. ultimately however they would fail to relieve him of his apprehension. the best efforts of these energetic man and their fine families could not overcome his acute sense of dislocation. everything now felt freighted with melancholy. a journal entry reads, since yesterday evening my thoughts cannot get away from germany. in the morning a car drive that was in itself beautiful to a woman acquaintance in the countryside in the mountains became almost unbearable to me. one sat for an hour chatted not

at all stupidly bad about matters that were utterly trivial to me about whether proper musical education is possible in new york and raising children etc. etc. and i could only think how much i missed y you. in the evening the cinema, a good film and my thoughts were captured for a while that this inactivity, this pursuit of trivialities is unbearable. i would have liked to have take the next ship back. the situation at home it was now clear had depleted his lifelong love of idle pleasures to a remarkable degree. dietrich had become consuming way serious. amid the outings outing some pleasantries and cocktail hours with the new york summer said he had found no time for vital study and prayer, for meditation or disciplines.

all i need is germany, the brethren. i do not understand why i am here. he proposed to his friend eberhardt that they marked their first sundays apart with the promise that someday, someday we will worship together in eternity. bonhoeffer had already reached the conclusion that a year in america would be too long despite neighboring coffman's hopes that he would stay at least that long. back in manhattan he sought relief from the weight bearing down on him with the assurances of scripture. in the bible's cold sober comforts there were no quick remedies to be found but he wasn't seeking quick remedies. he read lamentations, songs and the hebrew prophets. they spoke to the virtue of patience. it is good that one should wait patiently and quietly for the

lord. as he had done he followed the daily readings of the devotional book of the moravian president and his governess had given him as a child. how excellent were the daily readings he said despite the divide of an ocean leading them in sync with eberhardt sustained a spiritual bond, one to overcome any earthly distance. we are almost there. in the profits chamber, he wrote in fits and starts, over the years he had rarely labored over assignments, sermons, books or letters. writing usually involve the smooth transcription of well organized thoughts. now the subject however seemed more complicated than the mysteries of the incarnate

crucified and risen christ. he was trying to understand himself. is it cowardice and weakness to run away from the here and now? i can hardly tear my thoughts away from germany. i am not quite clear about my motives. is that a sign of uncertainty in her dishonesty or is it a sign that god leads us over and beyond our powers of discernment or is it both? i don't know. introspection, and is pursued for him had reduced him to probing the most elementary matters. i wouldn't have thought it possible that at my age after so many years abroad i could become so dreadfully homesick. it vexes bonhoeffer bonhoeffer too that eberhardt seem not to share his urgency to correspond anti-school that his friend in his own voluminous epistolary

outpourings. acknowledge with gratitude the abundance of letters coming from new york while bonhoeffer complained that he hardly received a thing. i wait for the mail. it can hardly be endured. i will probably not stay. he did not seek out his old classmates although he stopped by the west side ymca on 57th street to which he had been introduced to charles weber social seminary class. he did not worship in abyssinian baptist church. bonhoeffer did ask about race relations mentioning a new conversation with two students from southern states about the problems of blacks and he was saddened to learn that apart from me cast her wegner bill and anti-whingeing bill debated in

both houses of congress in 1934 was filibustered into oblivion. in germany now baptisms routinely concluded with the prayer that this child will grow up to be like adolf hitler. the theology departments now existed for the sole purpose of building a religious foundation for the new nazi ethos. bonhoeffer had provocatively claimed that the german protestant who is not allying with the dissenting confessing church is not a christian. to this martin sassa bishop responded in germany, there is no longer any life except with the führer. the german christians had waged

a seven-year campaign to make the church is safe for the reich winning virtually all the parishioners and all the church people to the nazi cause. pity for him to hitler no longer really cared about the church. by 1939 most high-ranking members of the regime beginning with the führer himself or of the mind that christianity was no different from judaism in its enfeeble in effects on the folk. the religion of jesus, a after all was at last a malignant corrupting influence. bonhoeffer had long argued that christianity and judaism were inseparable. and they and, the nazis would agree although with a

grotesquely different verse. the anti-semitic journal to shermer ran a cartoon of a jewish man raising the head of the christian cleric over his head. there is no question of his race. he is an angular attenuated nose and his bloated form is but for a crest with the star of david. he has also a telling cloven hosts. the church the caption reads under good protection. bonhoeffer would continue to write from new york in fretful revelatory burst, i know longer know why i am here. i cannot believe it is god's will that i should stay on here. i cannot make out why i have calm. when the new visiting scholar first opened the doors of unions

profits chamber at the start of the fall semester he would be taken aback by the mass which no one had yet bothered to clean up after the prior tenant. an ashtray on the desk overflowed with cigarette stubs and burned matches, crumpled writing papers, dozens and dozens of wadded up sheets lined the floor. the young scholar could make out a german word or two. otherwise the handwriting was illegible. had he been able to decipher bonhoeffer's pinched cursive he might've learned the reason for the previous occupants of brock's departure. christians in germany bonhoeffer wrote in his letter to neighbor will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of the nation in order that civilization may

survive or willing the victory of a nation and thereby destroying our civilization. i know which of these alternatives i must choose but i cannot make that choice in security. i have come to the conclusion that i made a mistake in coming to america. within one year he would join the conspiracy in a plot to assassinate hitler and within six years he would be executed by the gestapo in a concentration camp in flossenburg prison. thanks very much. [applause] thank you so much for sitting through that in this warm l.a. july day. we have some time for q&a if you want to talk and c-span and i

are asking that anyone who would like to ask a question or offer a comment, and step in front of this microphone to my left, to your right so that you can be broadcast worldwide, televised. c-span booktv. >> i want to ask about hitler. was he an atheist? >> it's a great question. so he was baptized in the catholic church and had however an exceedingly cynical relationship to the catholic church and christianity in

general and early in his leadership of the reich he worked very hard to bring the protestant and the catholic church into line with nazi policies. the whole swathe of anti-semitic policies that were written in the norberg laws. but by the end of the 30s as i mentioned in that last reading his cynicism really was much more a part of his relationship to religion than really does need to manipulate or exploit the church to his benefit. and in his mind, the christian tradition became just another distraction, just another problem with the attempts to

create a new kind of spiritual ethnic national psychic emotional historical people, this sort of german aryan race that for him was to be altogether different than any of the historical religions particularly judaism and christianity. in some respects he became mildly sympathetic to some of the neopagan movements that were emerging in germany in the late 30s so right around 1933 when hitler came to power, there was one group of dissident christians that formed in a church called the confessing church and they tried for a a while ultimately and sexily sexily to waive opposition to hitler. most of the protestant churches,

the vast majority, all of the theology departments had by 1935 or 1936 become not subside. the crosses were gone. swastikas have been put in their place. it was monstrous. there were some sort of folks in the german church who were so desperate to accommodate hitler that they began drawing on some of this sort of german folk and pagan religions to create what they thought would be a peer aryan religion but ultimately hitler was an interest in not either. it's a really good question, a very good question. he used the church quite shrewdly, ultimately only to reject it as inexplicably jewish and a part of all that he was trying to eradicate.

>> given your long history of stepping bonhoeffer in your intimate knowledge of him, was there anything in those 25 boxes in the archives in berlin that revealed anything new to you about the kind of and depth of relationship that bonhoeffer and net that had? >> about the relationship with eberhardt. that's an interesting question and i will say this, eberhardt vega who you mentioned was bonhoeffer's dearest friend. bonhoeffer matt eberhardt in the summer of 1934 when bonhoeffer was about to launch a seminary in a kind of legal if you will, and underground to be a little dramatic seminary that was wanting to create a generation

of nonnazi, anti-nazi pastors. it was initially up on the baltic sea in this beautiful seaport town and within a few months of move to another part of the baltic seaboard in pomerania. he met this young son of the country person eberhard big and there was a deep friendships formed. within a modern month's bonhoeffer had asked eberhardt to become his confessor and his sort of assistant and in the course of this initially professor teacher complicated confessor, confessed the relationship the two forged a six or seven year partnership

that was a kind of, at least from my estimation of bonhoeffer a kind of spiritual marriage. now it's a complicated relationship because we have to facts that have to be considered in this narrative and i actually think this relationship between bonhoeffer and baka this partnership is one of the most beautiful parts of the book. on the one hand was the fact that bonhoeffer fell in love with eberhardt and aspired for something like a spiritual marriage. they would share a bank account. they would give presence as a couple for christmas and initially this was somewhat surprising to the bonhoeffer

family who is a very liberal open-minded berlin family and they came to love and embrace uncle baka as one of the members of the family. they traveled together and they shared a room. their relationship was centered, i think this is very important to acknowledge, around their intimate devotion to jesus and around their shared practices of prayer, of worship and emotional -- emotional life and on the other hand so you have that is bonhoeffer's commitment to celibacy. we know as he writes in a letter to eberhardt in prison that he died celibate. so given those bookends this relationship to me is not one and in the book i worked very

hard to capture this is biblically, as beautifully and i think ultimately as heartbreakingly as the story plays out. it's not one that lends itself to the kind of identity, identification that we have in our particular public debate about sexual orientation. i am happy for readers to have the conversation. what i was trying to do was to capture that relationship in its exquisite idiosyncrasy and beauty. bethge let me add never reciprocated the intensity of bonhoeffer's attentions. the narrative that i craft here is not simply the conclusion of

their partnership. it's not simply based on the fact that they shared a bank account and gave presents together and travel together. it's hundreds of pages of letters of gorgeous love letters that bonhoeffer wrote over the years. he was aspiring for something like a spiritual marriage, some kind of a partnership that would be consecrated by the sacrament and yet would remain chaste. but it was also -- paul mueller fashioned from bonhoeffer's perspective as well and ultimately it was overwhelming to eberhard who could not reciprocate in the intensity of bonhoeffer's intentions and sometimes the controlling reach of his affections. and so one of the chapters which

takes place in a benedictine monastery and one of the most beautiful chapters in the book takes place in a benedictine monastery. bonhoeffer is on the run and he has now joined a counterintelligence agency working as a double agent as part of a conspiracy to destroy hitler. it's snowing every day. it is a ferocious, ferociously cold and snowy winter and eberhard is back in berlin. bonhoeffer is once again suffering this acute loneliness that he felt in these times without eberhard's company and his writing takes on an urgency and a kind of desperation and in

the course of the letters and exchanges and the actual exchange between eberhard and bonhoeffer it takes place later that year bonhoeffer begins to realize that he's losing eberhard to in fact a woman who was bonhoeffer's nice. within a year of the engagement of bonhoeffer himself is engaged. shortly after bonhoeffer is engaged to a woman who is 17 years younger than he is, his fiancée 16 or 17 years younger than he is shortly after bonhoeffer is engaged, and he's in prison now, he writes to eberhard and this is the last comment on that. he writes to eberhard and he says now that we are both engaged, we can resume a relationship again as it once was. we can leave our wives in berlin

and we can travel to rome and we can travel to the mediterranean. i can show you these places. we can go to india and one singularly fantastic letter he says and we can go to palestine. all these people are moving to palestine. these jewish people in germany are moving to palestine. we can go to palestine where there is sun and sundrenched weather now that we are both engaged. [laughter] >> charles thank you so much for your book and for coming out to the posts of pop will -- post-apocalyptic city read you mentioned him in prison but i'm wondering if it reflects perhaps beyond the work of a biographer to reflect the zero politically

on the contemporary moment from what you see in this prison letters and specifically his theology of prison. i wonder if he saw things such as mass incarceration in the united states from the 80s on, what might he have to say about that from what you have seen? >> yeah it's a really interesting question and i am reluctant to speculate on where bonhoeffer's political sensibilities would fall down in the north american context particularly the u.s. context. in many respects his theology and ethics came to look very similar by 1942 to roman catholic social teachings particularly around the matters

of the sacred character of creative life and issues of bioethics. bonhoeffer when he was in a tall was actually writing to chapters on the integrity of bodily life and unnatural life that were in a profound sense a response to the eugenics and euthanasia laws that were currently underway in germany and which his own father carl bonhoeffer had in some indirect fashion as a consultant in one particular instance made a recommendation that could have been taken and that bonhoeffer did indeed construe as such as a support of the eugenics policy

in the particular case of a disabled person and this outrage the sun and so these writings written in that benedictine monastery were deeply attuned to the integrity and the sacred character of created life. as far as the prison writings go, his last -- the prison writings are fascinating and if you wanted to go buy a book by bonhoeffer after tonight you know i think that you can't put letters and papers in prison are a great way to go. the poems and letters and very ordinary interesting matter-of-fact details really powerful kind of mind-blowing passages about a world come of age, the nonreligious third interpretation of christianity. he is having all these really

very radical new ideas and in some measure that were consistent with what he was talking about throughout his life but nonetheless there is a new pulse in his thought. the last little sketchy was making was a sketch called an outline for a book. use this pastor and theologian. he's writing in a gestapo prison in a nazi prison and he's looking at the ruins of luther luther's -- that has sold its soul to hitler. bonhoeffer is trying to imagine, is there any point in christianity after the holocaust? is there -- and a question that he asked that haunts me to this day is are we still of any use and he's referring not only to people of faith but people of

noble aristocratic humanistic aspirations. are we still of any use in this culture of barbarism and mass stupidity and propaganda and deception and lies. he has this little thing called an outline for a book and he says what's the church going to be in the world, the age? all he is able to do is give three sentences and a something like this. the church will have to sell its buildings and give away all its money and become a purely secular kind of movement. minister should no longer be employed full time. the christian faith must be, a quiet and kind of secret discipline. we must now profess our faith through prayer and righteous action alone. fascinating stuff. plea