One year before Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed by the Nazis on the morning of April 9, 1945, he wrote from prison to his friend Eberhard Bethge: “What keeps gnawing at me is the question, ‘What is Christianity, or who is Christ actually for us today?’” To that question we must now pose one of our own: “Who exactly is Dietrich Bonhoeffer for us today?” The answers are as various as the interpreters, and the literature on Bonhoeffer continues to grow with every passing year. Bonhoeffer faced the issue of his own personal identity with unblinkered realism in the poem he wrote in August 1944, “Who Am I?” Although he appeared to his captors, he said, as “calm and cheerful and poised, like a squire from his manor,” in reality he knew himself to be “restless, yearning, sick, like a caged bird. . . . too tired and empty to pray, to think, to work, weary and ready to take my leave of it all.”
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