Finkenwalde was established in the spring of 1935 on a former estate the Confessing Church had repurposed as an illegal theological seminary, after the Gestapo closed the official Reichskirche seminaries to church dissidents. For two and a half years, Bonhoeffer gathered young seminarians — twenty-three at first, more later — and maintained a form of common life radical by the standards of Protestant Germany. They prayed together, confessed to one another, observed silence, submitted to a daily discipline structured every hour. Not because the structure was comfortable but because it was necessary to form people who could bear the cost of confessing faith in a situation where confession carried consequences. The Gestapo closed Finkenwalde in September 1937. The structure was dissolved. The seminarians were scattered. Many were conscripted, imprisoned, or killed in the following years. The discipline outlived the institution, and the book that records it — Life Together — became one of the twentieth century's most consequential manuals of communal