With Bound Hands: A Jesuit in Nazi Germany: The Life and Selected Prison Letters of Alfred Delp (review)

Abstract

Well known in Germany, where numerous streets and schools bear his name, the German Jesuit, Alfred Delp, is known in this country chiefly through Thomas Merton's now largely forgotten collection of Delp's Prison Meditations, published in 1963. Delp was born in 1907 to an unmarried Catholic mother and a Protestant father (they married shortly thereafter). He was raised as a Protestant, receiving Lutheran confirmation in 1921. After a quarrel with his Lutheran pastor, the headstrong teenager sought refuge with the local Catholic priest, who prepared Delp for first communion and confirmation in the Catholic Church. He entered a minor seminary the year following and, at age eighteen, the Society of Jesus.