Julie Bonhoeffer: Badass

“The Jews are our misfortune!”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was greatly influenced by his family, especially his paternal grandmother Julie, who was by all accounts a very feisty woman. When Hitler came to power in Germany, his government's first official act against the Jews was a one-day boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1, 1933. Pickets were placed in front of factories, stores and shops belonging to Jews.

Dietrich's grandmother, Julie Bonhoeffer, at the age of ninety-one(!), boldly walked through a group of Swastika-d Nazi Storm Troopers into a Jewish department store like the one pictured above and made a purchase. "(Julie) said she was not going to be told that she couldn't go inside because the owner was Jewish, so she walked right in and bought the strawberries... They didn't dare take this elderly woman. She was very alert and walked elegantly. So nobody was going to stop her!" Can you picture it! If only so many in the German churches and elsewhere had the courage of this woman to stand up for the Jews, stand up for those who are the marginalized and oppressed--the gypsies and homosexuals among other people, for the Nazis, deemed "impure."

Reminds me of Rosa Parks. Simple acts, taken at great personal risk, by brave women. The stories could be multiplied many times.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I am taking a class at Candler School of Theology this fall on the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. If you don't know, Bonhoeffer was a young German theologian who stood up to Hitler and the Protestant Reich Church that had capitulated to Nazi politics. He studied in the US in the early 30s, and yet chose to go back to Hitler's Germany in 1931, well aware of the danger of this move. He was executed in a concentration camp at the age of 39. And his life and message and call to strongly question any who would equate the Christian Gospel with any one political agenda have carried far beyond the audience he reached during his lifetime.