Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Faith in Community

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of religious discrimination.

Though no state church existed in the Weimar Republic, an organization known as the German Protestant Church Confederation united the major Protestant churches (Lutheran, Reformed, and United Protestant) under a single governing body. By 1933, however, this organization had been taken over by Nazi-sympathizers known as “German Christians,” who swiftly rebranded it as the German Evangelical Church, or Reichskirche, and endorsed the Nazi Party; the Reichskirche would become the official church of Nazi Germany.

These events prompted the formation of an opposing church for those who disagreed with Nazi ideology and even found it antithetical to Christian life: the Confessing Church. In June 1935, The Confessing Church opened an underground seminary in Finkenwalde, where Dietrich Bonhoeffer served as the director. They utilized a dilapidated empty house as their headquarters and relied on the generous donations of members of the Confessing Church to furnish it. Bonhoeffer wrote in a letter to Karl Barth, a Swiss theologian, that there were three primary goals for students at Finkenwalde: to learn how to read the Bible, to understand their beliefs and how to defend them, and to learn how to pray (Bonhoeffer, Dietrich.