A Hollywood veteran’s biopic about an anti-Nazi resistance martyr, which was nearly engulfed by the Trump-era culture wars during its US release, is on its way to Europe this month, with the director hoping its message against the extreme right lands this time.
The movie Bonhoeffer is based on the true story of pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was executed at the Flossenbürg concentration camp on the orders of Adolf Hitler in April 1945, just weeks before the Nazi leader’s own suicide.
The film has been on a tumultuous journey emblematic of the fraught political moment, with Christian nationalist forces staking dubious but insistent claims to the German preacher’s legacy.
Film-maker Todd Komarnicki, who wrote the script for Clint Eastwood’s Sully starring Tom Hanks, admitted it has been a “heartbreaking” road so far for his years-long project.
“It’s confounding that that people are using Bonhoeffer as a weapon,” he said. “The message part of the movie has become more urgent because of the rise of the far right. So in this time of our need to be against fascism, he’s a lighthouse. He’s not just a man for all time – he’s a man for our time.”
Since the rise of Donald Trump, nationalist ideologues have stepped up efforts to use the pacifist civil rights activist Bonhoeffer as an unlikely touchstone. In the 922-page rightwing governance roadmap Project 2025, a Bonhoeffer quotation, ripped out of context, appears on page 11 to argue for closing US borders to migrants.
The bizarre rewriting of history was spearheaded by Eric Metaxas, a Maga activist, who wrote a 2009 biography called Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy: A Righteous Gentile vs the Third Reich. In it, he argues that Bonhoeffer embodied a kind of Christian holy warrior against injustice.
But while Bonhoeffer agitated against a genocidal regime, Metaxas has equated figures such as Barack Obama and Joe Biden with Hitler and liberal policies with nazism. Opponents say he and his acolytes advance arguments using a perversion of Bonhoeffer’s message that could be interpreted to justify political violence such as the 6 January storming of the US Capitol or the bombing of abortion clinics.
Bonhoeffer, whom Komarnicki describes as “magnetic” and “cocky”, emerged as one of the early dissidents of the Nazi period, having drawn inspiration from Black liberation theology he experienced in Harlem during a pivotal year of study in New York City. That awakening provides some of the most vivid scenes of the two-hour film.
Beginning in 1933, the year Hitler took power, Bonhoeffer warned against the violent oppression of Jews and argued that Christians had an obligation to stand up against the new injustices.
Bonhoeffer fought against Nazi efforts to co-opt the Lutheran church with its racist ideology. The regime would eventually accuse him of aiding a plot to assassinate Hitler – a plan of which he approved although he was not a direct participant. He was arrested in 1943 and hanged two years later, leaving behind stirring texts on morality and resistance, which are still influential. And, Komarnicki notes, which are open to sometimes surreal interpretation.
“People of every political stripe try to claim Bonhoeffer for themselves,” he said. “When there’s a grenade on the deck there’s usually only one person who jumps on it and everybody wishes, in the story of their life, they were the one. Dietrich jumped on the grenade and that’s why his story echoes out.”
However, choices made by the US studio that released Komarnicki’s film in the aftermath of the US election in November, 14 months after the movie was finished, appeared to widen the scope for misappropriation of Bonhoeffer’s story.
“There are two highways that are running at the same time – one is the film which is what it is. You’d be hard pressed to actually watch it and say it’s anything but the anti-fascist film it is,” Komarnicki said. “Dietrich was standing up against the devil and that’s what cost him his life.”
Komarnicki said the “hijacking” of his movie, which portrays its protagonist as a Christ-like figure wrestling with the ultimate sacrifice, was “more along the lines of the narrative around Bonhoeffer and around the marketing of the film” by its US distributor.
Angel Studios, which is primarily known for Christian-themed films and television shows, opted for a title in the US echoing that of Metaxas’s book and used promotional images showing Bonhoeffer toting a pistol – something never shown in the movie.
“There’s no question using ‘assassin’ in the title and putting a gun in Dietrich’s hand in the poster – I was completely and utterly against that and to see that create such negativity was heartbreaking,” Komarnicki said.
The PR campaign also drew the ire of descendants of the Bonhoeffer family in Germany who wrote an open letter condemning any depiction of Dietrich as an evangelical Christian fighter. Bonhoeffer’s legacy, they wrote, is “increasingly being falsified and misused by rightwing extremist anti-democrats, xenophobes and religious zealots”.
Metaxas has refused to back down in the dispute, attacking “Bonhoeffer’s woke relatives” for their protest.
The International Bonhoeffer Society representing research scholars raised its own objections to the studio’s promotional materials for the film that said Bonhoeffer’s life “begs the question, how far will you go to stand up for what’s right?”. It called the slogan “dangerous words” in the “highly polarised climate in the United States”.
The film, an Irish-Belgian production shot in English, stars some of Germany’s top actors including Jonas Dassler, Moritz Bleibtreu and August Diehl, best known to international audiences for roles in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and the Angelina Jolie thriller Salt.
Fearing for the film’s reputation, the cast put out its own letter denouncing any disingenuous spin by the far right.
“In today’s society, populists and nationalists are not afraid of twisting history and in this case a whole man’s legacy to their inhuman worldview,” they wrote.
“This reminds us why we did this movie in the first place: the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer teaches us that it is necessary to speak up against any authoritarian, violent attempt to damage democracy and human rights.”
Komarnicki thinks the controversy “drew a lot of people away” from US theatres because they “assumed it was a certain type of movie when really it’s the opposite of that”. But he admits that can be a downside of the movie business.
“You always have disagreements with the studio,” said Komarnicki, who was also a producer on Will Ferrell Christmas blockbuster Elf.
“That’s normal to be frustrated with the people that are pulling the strings at the top of the corporate ladder.”
He sees the film’s rollout in the UK and the EU as a second chance, with a new, neutral title and a revised poster that drops the gun. He hopes European audiences will bring a deeper comprehension of the roots of fascism and the path to the second world war.
“For us (Americans), the war started, we zoomed in, saved everybody and came home. The narrative that we’re taught has nothing to do with the slow rise of the right and the co-opting of the churches and all the stuff that’s in the movie,” he said.
“So I think this is a moment where the Europeans are going to understand the movie so much more than the American audience.”
The film’s German distributor Kinostar has said it is targeting audiences interested in history and “humanist themes” as well as schools amid a rise in far-right support among younger Germans.
“At a time in which the danger from the right is growing again, it’s an important film, particularly for young people,” said its managing director Michael Rösch.
The head of the Flossenbürg camp memorial, Jörg Skriebeleit, said he didn’t mind the film took creative licence with Bonhoeffer’s biography, as long as it made plain the “deeply Christian, deeply humanist, anti-totalitarian, anti-antisemitic stances for which he was murdered here”.
Source: theguardian.com
