The Freiburg "Bonhoeffer Circle" (1943) on Theology and Germany's Economic Order

Abstract

When Dietrich Bonhoeffer arrived in the Southern German city of Freiburg on October 9, 1942, he came to relay a most treasonous request. The Nazi regime, arguably at the zenith of its power, had attacked Stalingrad that summer and it would be months of bitter fighting before the pivotal defeat of the German troops in January 1943. Admitting the possibility that Nazi Germany could lose the entire war, let alone planning for the post-war period, was treasonous to the utmost degree; Adolf Hitler and Herman Göring had recently decreed the death penalty for any post-war preparations. Bonhoeffer, at the behest of the Provisional Administration of the Bekennende Kirche (Confessing Church), had travelled to Freiburg to ask a group of local academics connected to the Confessing Church to draw up a blue print for a post-war societal order in Germany. The idea was to "if possible, cover all the principal branches of public life from the viewpoints of Christian social ethics," as recorded in the standard source, A Political Order of Communal Life: Attempting a Self-reflection of the Christian Conscience Facing the Political Calamities of our Times, or, after its German short-title, Denkschrift or memorandum, edited by Helmut Thielicke.