The Bonhoeffer Biopic Overshoots Its Target

Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin.

Directed and written by Todd Komarnicki ◆ Produced by Tharos Films, Crows Nest Productions, Fontana ◆ Distributed by Angel Studios

While Dietrich Bonhoeffer was certainly a pastor, as this film’s subtitle makes clear, calling him a “spy” and an “assassin,” as it further insists, goes too far. The German Protestant theologian was arguably the Protestant faith’s greatest martyr, killed as he was in a Nazi concentration camp. But in the strictest sense, he neither engaged in espionage nor participated in any attempt to kill anyone.

Approaching Bonhoeffer’s story in this way does make for great drama, however, particularly of the kind that introduces a clear and unambiguous existential moral dilemma. It is of a type designed to appeal to American audiences who are sick and tired of Hollywood’s moral failings and seek emotional validation through positive examples.

That goal is the motivating factor for both Bonhoeffer’s director and its conservative, Utah-based film studio. The director is entertainment industry polymath Todd Komarnicki, best known for producing the 2016 film Sully. That was the Tom Hanks-led, Clint Eastwood-directed retelling of the 2009 incident in which airline pilot Chesley Sullenberger heroically saved his passengers and crew following a freak accident after takeoff by performing an emergency landing of his plane in New York’s Hudson River. 

Angel Studios arose from a conservative movement to produce and distribute mass entertainment content outside of Hollywood licentiousness. It poses a challenge to conventional Hollywood, which skews overwhelmingly left, by operating a unique model that allows subscribing members—of whom it has some 400,000 worldwide—to vote on which projects it funds and brings forward. Angel’s most notable content is religious in nature and Christian in spirit. It has produced one especially notable feature film, Alejandro Monteverde’s Sound of Freedom (2023), which tells the story of Tim Ballard, a former Homeland Security agent who founded an organization intended to rescue children from international sex trafficking. While there’s now some doubt about how effective Ballard truly was, and he himself has faced multiple sexual harassment allegations from former employees, nevertheless the film returned over $250 million in revenue on a $14.5 million budget. Angel has also created a popular streaming series, The Chosen, retelling the life and works of Jesus Christ.

Like the studio’s earlier films, Komarnicki’s is a creative and often inspiring biopic. The film dwells in detail on Bonhoeffer’s often neglected time studying in America, where he became acquainted with black churches and civil rights issues as conceived in the 1920s. There seems to be no evidence, however, that he ever led a Harlem jazz ensemble in the orbit of a musician who looks and sounds a lot like Louis Armstrong, or that a racist hotelier beat him up. Those embellishments undermine rather than support the notion that he was personally sympathetic to the black cause. If he was so dramatically invested, why did the issue cease to figure in his thinking once he was back in Germany? If he cared on a pastoral level, it would have been more complimentary to reflect those convictions accurately on screen.

Bonhoeffer, whose beloved elder brother was killed in World War I, became a lifelong pacifist while still a child and leaned toward theology rather than a more practical path of study. Yet, when confronted with the evil of Nazism as a young pastor, he overcame the central tenets of his pacifistic Christian faith to justify violent resistance, up to and including murdering political opponents through involvement in the assassination plot against Adolf Hitler. Or so the film would have us believe.

Indeed, one scene shows Bonhoeffer delivering a sermon about the calling of Christ while the real assassins plant a bomb, implying he had inspired or backed the plot. The association is absurd and even an insult to the man’s true and unsullied commitment to nonviolence. The notion that Bonhoeffer had a crisis of conscience that led him to reject the teachings of Jesus Christ or to rationalize murder is an absolute fantasy. Yet one of the most common images promoting the film shows the deeply contemplative, bespectacled faith leader grasping a pistol—an image about as historically accurate as Mahatma Gandhi brandishing a bazooka.

Similarly, the notion that Bonhoeffer was a “spy” is figurative at best. Posted to German-language churches in the United Kingdom in the 1930s, his role was to seek out interlocutors in the British and international religious establishment who might be sympathetic to a new German government in place of the Nazis. He was unsuccessful, largely because the Allies gave little credence to the notion that a non-Nazi German government would be less of a threat. That hardly qualifies as actual spy work.

The historic Bonhoeffer was a vastly different man. As the film correctly establishes, he was viscerally opposed to the Nazi new order and suffered for it, though he was not provocative enough to be arrested until April 1943, more than 10 years after Hitler came to power. Assigned to duties with German military intelligence, the Abwehr, Bonhoeffer came into
contact with important figures in the anti-Nazi resistance movement who knew about the various attempts to kill Adolf Hitler and seize control of the German government. In the film’s more fantastical interpretation, however, his associations are elevated to make him at least an accessory to the assassination plot despite his deeply held religious convictions prohibiting the use of violence.

As a fictional drama, the turnabout in Bonhoeffer’s convictions is intriguing to watch and raises powerful questions about the potential for elasticity in one’s faith and values in an extreme situation. The historian in me, however, recalls that Bonhoeffer was brought into intelligence work mainly to save him from active service, with the ostensible argument that his international connections in the religious world might ultimately be useful to a post-Nazi government. Once installed, whatever knowledge he had of the assassination plot was incidental, and he neither planned nor participated in it. 

Bonhoeffer’s eventual execution on April 9, 1945—less than a month before the end of war in Europe—came as an unexpected order from an increasingly deranged Hitler, who did himself in just three weeks later. The apparent cause was a mention of Bonhoeffer in the diaries of the Abwehr’s ousted chief, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, who was executed alongside him. The film glosses that history—drama and arbitrary orders issued from a distance rarely coincide—and even botches the details of the execution. Bonhoeffer was hanged in Flossenbürg concentration camp and not in the vicinity of a school, as the film shows. Stripped naked before death, he was denied the dignity he holds in the film, in which he is fully clothed. Eyewitnesses did, however, recall a state of divine grace that came over him in his last moments, a sensibility that the film tries to portray in a cloying way.

As is often the case, the history behind the personal story is more complicated than the art suggests. Bonhoeffer and the other religious leaders who resisted the Nazis were undoubtedly brave men who hazarded serious risk. But the situation of German Protestantism in Nazi Germany was much more complex. The Protestant churches were working under a regime that, for all its ruthlessness and horror, knew it could only go so far in religious policy without alienating its citizenry. And the religion itself was divided between two fringes, one pro- and the other anti-Nazi, competing for the sympathy of a vast noncommittal middle that sought to do its day-to-day work without taking controversial sides.

Historically, about two-thirds of Germany’s approximately 18,000 Protestant pastors fit that middle category, while about 3,000 supported the Nazi regime’s centralized German Evangelical Church, which outspokenly supported Hitler, rejected the Old Testament for its associations with Judaism, willingly purged individuals of Jewish origin from its ranks, and took other positions that caused the larger community to issue an apology after the war. 

This left about 3,000 others who took part in Bonhoeffer’s Confessing Church, which resisted state control of religious doctrine and practice and, as the film shows, suffered significant repression on that count. Surely, the Protestant church’s record was better than that of Nazi Germany’s university professors or orchestral musicians, who did practically nothing to resist the regime’s demands, passively accepted ideological direction from above, and allowed their disfavored colleagues to be removed. 

The casting choices didn’t bolster the film’s authenticity. The German actor Jonas Dassler, touted in his country as a celebrity heartthrob, is about 10 years younger and several trouser sizes smaller than the bookish and introspective Bonhoeffer was at the height of the film’s action. All too often, and despite some very moving speeches and dialogue, Dassler’s performance leaves the cringeworthy impression of a cool guy trying to act like a nerd.

Dassler also was among the film’s actors who have denounced its alleged use by the right to endorse a conservative Christian nationalist philosophy. As Germany struggles with challenges to freedom of speech from its leftist government today, its people might do better to realize that one can be a conservative, a Christian, and a nationalist—and Bonhoeffer was all three—without being a fascist.