Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

by Eric Metaxas

With a rawness and power unheard of at the time, the film pulled no punches in portraying the graphic horrors of the war. It won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director, but for its aggressively antiwar stance it caused a firestorm of outrage across Europe. In the opening scene, a wild-eyed old teacher exhorts his young charges to defend the fatherland. Behind him, on the chalkboard, are the Greek words from the Odyssey invoking the Muse to sing the praises of the great soldier-hero who sacked Troy. From the old teacher’s lips comes Horace’s famous line, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (It is a sweet and fitting thing to die for one’s country). The glories of war were for these young men a part of the great Western tradition in which they were being schooled, and en masse they marched off to the mud and death of the trenches. Most of them died, and nearly all of them cowered in fear or lost their minds before doing so. The film is antiheroic and disturbing, and to anyone harboring nationalist sympathies, it must have been at times embarrassing and enraging. It’s no surprise that for the budding National Socialists, the film seemed vile internationalist propaganda, coming from the same places—principally Jewish—that had led to the defeat of Germany in the very war being depicted. In 1933, when they came to power, the Nazis burned copies of Remarque’s book and spread the canard that Remarque was a Jew whose real surname was Kramer—Remark spelled backward. But now, i...