But I cannot end this chapter without quoting from Bonhoeffer’s remarkable essay “After Ten Years,” which he wrote for three friends at the end of 1942.148 In it he reflects on ten years of living under the rule of the Nazis. Here is one of his key lessons: “It remains an experience of incomparable value that we have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and reviled, in short from the perspective of the suffering.”
