It’s not often we think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Virginia Woolf in tandem, but the two share common ground. Both hail from the educated upper-middle class elite of the pre-World War II era. Both came from large families. Both had ambiguous sexualities. Both were writers. Both were pacifists. Both were fascinated with their families of [...]
The Mysterious Mary Bosanquet
We know very little about Mary Bosanquet, who wrote the first Bonhoeffer biography. Her lively book, The Life and Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, published in 1968, is filled, however, with a rich vein of primary source material. We do know that Bosanquet, writing in the mid-1960s, had earlier become friends with Sabine Leibholz, Bonhoeffer’s twin sister, [...]
Topics:
Women in Bonhoeffer’s Life
Maria von Wedemeyer: Hiding in Plain Sight
While researching Dietrich Bonhoeffer and women, I was tantalized by a line from Maria’s sister Ruth-Alice von Bismarck in Love Letters from Cell 92: The Correspondence between Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Maria von Wedemeyer: 1943-45: “In 1974 … She [Maria] also gave an interview about her relationship with Bonhoeffer for a television documentary.” (354)An interview? Why had [...]
Topics:
Women in Bonhoeffer’s Life
Alice Bond