Reinhold Niebuhr

Elisabeth Sifton

Throughout the Great Depression, World War II and the Cold War, Niebuhr was one of the most prominent public voices of his time, probing with singular style the question of how to act morally in a fallen world. This volume, prepared by Niebuhr's daughter, Elisabeth Sifton, collects four indispensable books: Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic (1929), Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1944) and The Irony of American History (1952), along with a selection of essays, sermons, lectures and prayers.

Major Works on Religion and Politics

Fritz Stern

During the twelve years of Hitler’s Third Reich, very few Germans took the risk of actively opposing his tyranny and terror, and fewer still did so to protect the sanctity of law and faith. In No Ordinary Men, Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern focus on two remarkable, courageous men who did—the pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his close friend and brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi—and offer new insights into the fearsome difficulties that resistance entailed. (Not forgotten is Christine Bonhoeffer Dohnanyi, Hans’s wife and Dietrich’s sister, who was indispensable to them both.) From the start Bonhoeffer opposed the Nazi efforts to bend Germany’s Protestant churches to Hitler’s will, while Dohnanyi, a lawyer in the Justice Ministry and then in the Wehrmacht’s counterintelligence section, helped victims, kept records of Nazi crimes to be used as evidence once the regime fell, and was an important figure in the various conspiracies to assassinate Hitler. The strength of their shared commitment to these undertakings—and to the people they were helping—endured even after their arrest in April 1943 and until, after great suffering, they were executed on Hitler’s express orders in April 1945, just weeks before the Third Reich collapsed. Bonhoeffer’s posthumously published Letters and Papers from Prison and other writings found a wide international audience, but Dohnanyi’s work is scarcely known, though it was crucial to the resistance and he was the one who drew Bonhoeffer into the anti-Hitler plots. Sifton and Stern offer dramatic new details and interpretations in their account of the extraordinary efforts in which the two jointly engaged. No Ordinary Men honors both Bonhoeffer’s human decency and his theological legacy, as well as Dohnanyi’s preservation of the highest standard of civic virtue in an utterly corrupted state.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi, Resisters Against Hitler in Church and State

No Ordinary Men

Looks at how a pastor and a lawyer both resisted the Nazi regime from within, how they did so and the price they paid for their honorable actions.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans Von Dohnanyi, Resisters Against Hitler in Church and State

Hitlers «Drittes Reich» war die populärste Diktatur des 20. Jahrhunderts. Millionen Deutsche jubelten, während Zehntausende, dann Millionen und schließlich die ganze Welt litt. Das Regime war gerissen genug, die Menschen mit Versprechungen und Schmeicheleien für sich einzunehmen, und brutal genug, sie mit Terror, Folter und Morden das Fürchten zu lehren. Einem solchen Regime Widerstand zu leisten war selten, und es war gefährlich. Zwei höchst außergewöhnliche Männer, Hans von Dohnanyi und sein Schwager Dietrich Bonhoeffer, haben es dennoch getan. Was sie dazu bewogen hat, warum sie von Anbeginn genau wußten, mit wem sie es zu tun hatten, wie sie den Weg zum Handeln fanden und am Ende für ihre Überzeugungen ihr Leben ließen – dem gehen Elisabeth Sifton und Fritz Stern in diesem tief bewegenden, meisterhaft geschriebenen Doppelportrait nach. Sie setzen zwei Helden gleichermaßen ins Recht, von denen der eine weltberühmt ist, während der andere zu unrecht in seinem Schatten steht. Und sie zeigen, was außergewöhnliche Menschen von gewöhnlichen – damals und immer – unterscheidet.

Elisabeth Sifton

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