Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Faith in Community

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of religious discrimination.

Though no state church existed in the Weimar Republic, an organization known as the German Protestant Church Confederation united the major Protestant churches (Lutheran, Reformed, and United Protestant) under a single governing body. By 1933, however, this organization had been taken over by Nazi-sympathizers known as “German Christians,” who swiftly rebranded it as the German Evangelical Church, or Reichskirche, and endorsed the Nazi Party; the Reichskirche would become the official church of Nazi Germany.

These events prompted the formation of an opposing church for those who disagreed with Nazi ideology and even found it antithetical to Christian life: the Confessing Church. In June 1935, The Confessing Church opened an underground seminary in Finkenwalde, where Dietrich Bonhoeffer served as the director. They utilized a dilapidated empty house as their headquarters and relied on the generous donations of members of the Confessing Church to furnish it. Bonhoeffer wrote in a letter to Karl Barth, a Swiss theologian, that there were three primary goals for students at Finkenwalde: to learn how to read the Bible, to understand their beliefs and how to defend them, and to learn how to pray (Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. "Letter to Karl Barth." 27 August 1935. No Rusty Swords: Letters, Lectures and Notes 1928-1936. Edited by Edwin H. Robertson, translated by John Bowden and G.B. Kelly, Harper & Row, 1965, pp. 278-281). The seminary provided an alternative institution for Christians in Germany and a community for those who opposed the actions of the Reichskirche. 

Overall, the Confessing Church was a relatively mild critic of the Nazi regime; though many of its members objected to policies such as the persecution of Jews and those with disabilities, its only official statement of condemnation concerned the government’s attempts to coopt and control the Christian faith via the Reichskirche (The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “The German Churches and the Nazi State.” Holocaust Encyclopedia). Nevertheless, the Gestapo shut down the seminary at Finkenwalde on November 30, 1937, and several figures associated with the Confessing Church were arrested. The Confessing Church therefore had to operate largely underground in the following years—a situation that partially inspired Bonhoeffer’s penning of Life Together.