letters and papers from prison by dietrich bonhoeffer

For instance, the odor of the whole third floor in which this cell stood, the prisoner’s pen for a year and a half, was barely endurable. Visitors today can still imagine something of what it must have been like for a captive to squirm or pace in its ten-foot by seven-foot floor space.Īll the senses can come into play during such imagining. Guards, who were forbidden to talk to prisoners, could peer in through a slot in the door to view the inmate, who could not see out. We know from other sources than the photograph of the presence of a nearby stool and a bucket, positioned for we-all know-what. A standard-issue plank bed with a blanket drawn tight over it takes up most of the small space in the cell and in the picture, and a board to which one could attach notices is on the unadorned wall. Wan light falls in from a tiny window that is too high for a prisoner to use to take in a landscape, but one who is alert and sensitive might glimpse the upper branches of a high tree or a low hanging cloud, and through that opening, hear a thrush.

Come to the launch of Princeton University Press’s “Lives of Great Religious Books” series on Thursday, March 24, in New York City, hosted by the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU and the SSRC Program on Religion and the Public Sphere.-ed.Īn old photograph provides a glimpse into a dismal cell at a Nazi prison called Tegel. Excerpted from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison: A Biography, published by Princeton University Press © 2011.

Letters and papers from prison by dietrich bonhoeffer