The Keys I Take with Me: What I Learned Writing about the Bonhoeffer-Haus

By Laura M. Fabrycky 

On my last visit to the Bonhoeffer-Haus in Berlin, Germany, I also returned the key that I had been issued two years earlier to the memorialized home of Dietrich Bonhoeffer—a German pastor and theologian put to death on April 9, 1945, at the age of 39, for his conspiratorial activities against the Nazi regime. The key to that house had always ever been a time-bound gift to me, a cross-cultural exchange of trust and hospitality.

Three years earlier, our family moved to Berlin for my husband’s next diplomatic assignment in the U.S. Foreign Service. Not long after we settled into our permanent residence, I discovered that the home of this remarkable German figure was close to our own. I visited it with my husband and our three kids in the fall of 2016 and returned many more times with visiting friends. I was drawn to the story the guides told at the house which represented the significance and sacrifices Bonhoeffer and his extended family made for their nation. 

After months of scheduling visits to the Haus, I asked if I could become a volunteer too. Though I was an American with an amateur interest in Bonhoeffer’s life, limited to English, the leadership at the Bonhoeffer-Haus agreed. Welcomed in and issued a key to the Haus, I was aware of my responsibilities to faithfully narrate his life to visitors who came. I began studying his life more diligently. I had much to learn and unlearn. 

Today, Bonhoeffer is recognized as a hero around the world for his early and resolute stance against Nazi influence within the German church that, to a depressing degree, largely applauded Hitler’s rise. Later, he supported the July 20, 1944, Abwehr (German military intelligence) assassination and coup attempt, led by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg—the last serious attempt to bring down the Nazi regime from within, which ended in failure. Arrested on a lesser charge before the plot was carried out, Bonhoeffer learned of the plot’s failure in prison. Bonhoeffer was put to death in the Flossenbürg concentration camp on Hitler’s orders, just weeks before Allied forces liberated it. 

He lived with such clarity and courage, which I admired, but none of it easily translated into the contours of my life. His life was not a simple inspirational tale for me to emulate. As I studied to prepare to give tours, I learned that I needed a better set of interpretive lenses to make sense of what his life could teach me. I needed to pay careful attention to how Germans spoke of and wrote about him, and to learn more about German history, narratives, and sense-making, both from my colleagues at the Haus and from Bonhoeffer’s many biographers. 

Slowly, I came to see Bonhoeffer as a man who was formed and sustained by loving relationships within his family and among his friends and collaborators. The more I got to know him in those relationships of human interdependency, the more his life looked like mine, despite our manifest differences. The significance of his Haus grew in my understanding too, and gave meaning to my own places of belonging.

The journey of writing this historically grounded memoir about my time at the Haus was as serendipitous as my coming to volunteer there, one that was also rich in relationship and community. Through a series of interdependencies of my own – happenstance conversations between friends who knew acquisition editors – I signed a contract with an American publishing house that publishes Bonhoeffer’s written works in English.

As I labored at the draft of my book, my learning and unlearning continued, and my tours at the Haus improved. I discovered gaps in my knowledge as I researched for my writing and places in the narrative of my tours that demanded correction. The most humorous correction (and least embarrassing to share publicly) came when one of my Bonhoeffer-Haus colleagues read an early draft of my book. He gently pointed out that although I had waxed poetically about the objects in Bonhoeffer’s top-floor bedroom in the Haus – e.g., his beloved clavichord, his writing desk, his many books and journals – the bed lacked the historical significance I conferred on it. “It’s IKEA!” he reproved. Of course, I immediately deleted that paragraph in the draft and incorporated that story as a self-effacing riposte in my forthcoming tours. 

Some reviewers have described my book, Keys to Bonhoeffer’s Haus: Exploring the World and Wisdom of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as difficult to categorize, inhabiting multiple genres at once. It is my memoir, but I also seek to explore his life within history. It incorporates political and social theory, theology, alongside place-exploration and story-telling. One reviewer recognized rightly that I wrote to spur others to action. My time at the Bonhoeffer-Haus, and in Bonhoeffer’s life, taught me above all that the relationships to which I belong matter to civic life, that I am responsible for showing real love and care in the neighborhoods and nations to which I belong. By writing this book, I gained clarity on what I had learned from Bonhoeffer’s life. Though I surrendering my key to the place, I still hold its “keys” through this book, and hope to hold the door open for others who wish to step inside and explore for themselves.

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Laura M. Fabrycky is an American writer currently residing in Brussels, Belgium. She is author of the recently released Keys to Bonhoeffer’s Haus: Exploring the World and Wisdom of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Fortress/Broadleaf, 2020). (Twitter: @lmfabrycky) An adapted excerpt from the book is available here.

In Keys to Bonhoeffer’s Haus, Laura M. Fabrycky, an American guide of the Bonhoeffer-Haus in Berlin, takes readers on a tour of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s home, city, and world. She shares the keys she has discovered there–the many sources of Bonhoeffer’s identity, his practices of Scripture meditation and prayer, his willingness to cross boundaries and befriend people all around the world–that have unlocked her understanding of her own life and responsibilities in light of Bonhoeffer’s wisdom.

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Category: On Writing