Eberhard Bethge

Eberhard Bethge met Bonhoeffer at Finkenwalde in 1935 and became the single most important relationship of Bonhoeffer's adult life. Friend, student, theological interlocutor, and eventual family member (he married Bonhoeffer's niece Renate Schleicher in 1943), Bethge was the primary recipient of the prison correspondence that would become Letters and Papers from Prison. He preserved the letters at considerable personal risk — smuggling some past the prison censors, hiding others through the war's final chaotic months — and after 1945 devoted much of his life to their editing and interpretation. His 1967 biography, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, remains the standard scholarly reference and shaped the international reception of Bonhoeffer's thought for generations. He survived the war, served in postwar German Protestantism, and continued writing and teaching about Bonhoeffer until his death in 2000.