Poetry is often noted as a particularly suitable medium for understanding the connection between theology and biography. This is particularly exciting in the case of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the poems he wrote during his imprisonment by the Nazis.
Although any one of his 10 poems should be read within their respective historical and biographical context, they are also robust, self-sufficient pieces of work that cannot be “explained” by the biographical and theological prose that surrounds them. They rather serve as a creative, and perhaps sometimes even critical, interlocutor to these contexts. This is why the contributors to this volume have not been asked to explain the poems but to facilitate this conversation: the conversation between the individual poems themselves, between the reader and the poems, and between the poems and Bonhoeffer’s life and theology. These poems lend themselves as an entry point into Bonhoeffer’s theology, in that each one resonates with a particular central theological concept that Bonhoeffer was developing during his prison years.
Themes and concepts such as “friendship,” “religion,” “identity,” “freedom,” “representative action” and others are not only represented in these poems but often expressed in the dense and compelling fashion that only poetic language affords. As such, they deserve the thorough and imaginative engagement of the international lineup of first-class theological authors gathered in this book.
