My objections to the October 2024 Open Letter: “Descendants: Do not distort and misuse Dietrich Bonhoeffer!”
To: Ruggero Schleicher-Tappeser
ruggero@schleicher-tappeser.eu
Friday January 03rd, 2025
Subject: Updated attached message in regard to your open letter “Descendants: Do not distort and misuse Dietrich Bonhoeffer!” and my objections to it.
Dear Ruggero
I have covered three additional points in this updated attachment in regard to your open letter:
“Descendants: Do not distort and misuse Dietrich Bonhoeffer!”
1) On Jordon Trishton Walker,i Director, Worldwide R&D Strategic Operations and mRNA Scientific Planning at Pfizer in New York City in January 2023. Pages 16 to 17.
2) When Senator John Neely Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, in February 2023, briefly but very revealingly grilled two esteemed Climate Change experts; Dr. Robert Litterman, Founding partner Kepos Capital Chair, Climate Related Market Risk Subcommittee U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Dr. Douglas Holz-Eakin, President of The American Action Forum.ii Bottom of Page 30 to 33
3) The awe inspiring speech by the Jewish Holocaust survivor; Vera Sharav in Nuremberg on the 75th anniversary of the Nuremberg Code on the 20th of August 2022iii Pages 22 to 24.
How are you? My name is Vince Barwinski, and I’m the author of the 2021-22 book The Pastor and the Matriarch of the German Underground and Their Times – A Polish Perspective and a Traditional Latin Mass Catholic of Polish descent, who loves Israel and is based in Brisbane Australia.
The central characters of my book are your Great Uncle Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Junker matriarch Ruth von-Kleist who came to regard Dietrich like a son.
The inspiration for my book was one manifested over years but initiated on a miserable winter’s afternoon on February 12th, 2005, as shown on the front cover of my book. Namely the bronze cross memorial to your Great Uncle Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the modern-day Polish city of Wrocław (pronounced “Vrotswav”), but pre-WWII German Breslau and birthplace of Dietrich on February 4th, 1906. Given the centuries of bad blood between Germany and Poland, finding a monument to a German in a modern-day Polish city, was for myself, rather remarkable.
To which, it was only in the wake of the Cold War in the late 1990s, that this monument to Dietrich was erected and unveiled, and it was the dual history of this city and my amateur passion for history, fostered by my autodidact Polish-born father in early December 1923, raised in Weimar Germany and Hitler’s Reich, in particular, his knowledge of WWII history of Europe, that inspired me to write of Dietrich Bonhoeffer from a hitherto, unique Polish perspective, with lessons of history still relevant in today’s world. Not the least of which being, the religious oppression and subversion in Xi Jinping’s China, and the rise of the radical left in America in 2020-21, mirroring in many respects, the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution of Mao Zedong’s Communist China, and most eerily for me, the rise of Hitler’s Reich amidst a crumbling Weimar Germany, to which I devoted my belatedly written Chapter 29 – Dietrich and Ruth and their Times Relevance for America in 2020-21 — Lessons of History.
More than eleven years following my weekend visit to Wrocław, it was in August 2016, I commenced writing my book on Dietrich Bonhoeffer from a unique Polish perspective. Before long, it came to encompass the remarkable Junker matriarch Ruth von Kleist, sharing the same birthday with Dietrich in 1867, who came to regard Dietrich like a son, and her clan. To the best of my knowledge, this is only the second book in English, dealing in depth with Ruth and her brave Prussian Junker clan, and their relationship with Dietrich.
Moreover, as the Junker lands between the wars bordered Poland’s Second Republic, the scope for my Polish perspective was significantly enhanced, adding to the significance of my four Polish WWII Supplemental chapters dealing with the late August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, then on its heels, Hitler’s flimsy but still ultimately effective false flag of the Gleiwitz (Gliwice) Incident for pretext to invade Poland, followed by the Stalinist-perpetrated April-May 1940 Katyń Wood Massacre and finally; “Polish WWII Supplement IV: AK and 1944 Warsaw General Uprising — Stalin’s mass murder by German proxy”. (See my chapter by chapter description. AK was the Polish Armia Krajowa – Home Army – the dominant resistance movement in German-occupied Poland during World War II. It was of course anti-communist and dwarfed the communist Armia Ludowa – “People’s” Army. See page 183 of Rising ’44: The Battle for Warsaw Reprint Edition (October 4, 2005), ISBN-10: 0143035401, ISBN-13: 9780143035404.)
In your co-signed October 2024 letter “Descendants: Do not distort and misuse Dietrich Bonhoeffer!”, you raised issues with Eric Metaxas and his 2010 biography Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy A righteous Gentile vs, the Third Reich, such as it supposedly ignoring the historical context and misrepresenting Dietrich as a fundamentalist Evangelical. You also raised the legitimate objection of the character of Dietrich at one stage in the movie, pointing a gun. Which I have to say, I wholeheartedly agree that such a notion is preposterous.
However, as I wrote from the beginning of Chapter 29 of my book, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, author of Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945: Martyr, Thinker, Man of Resistance, which is one the four premiere sources for my book, wrote an English language article in 2015 on the official Bonhoeffer website titled Making Assumptions About Dietrich: How Bonhoeffer was Made Fit for America. (When I accessed this article in February 2021, it was still available. Curiously however, at the time of writing this letter to you, I could only access it on the Web Archive.)
The title of Ferdinand’s article can perhaps be generalised to: “Made fit for the English Speaking World.” He was born in 1929 and post-war was a close friend of Eberhard Bethge — of whom I imagine, you are more than aware of, was Dietrich’s closest friend. Eberhard died in 2000, but as far as I can tell, Ferdinand is still alive at the time of writing, aged 95. He spent crucial years of his childhood in an illegal Confessing Church seminary that his father led until his arrest.
In Ferdinand’s 2015 article, he is critical of the American conservative author and radio presenter Eric Metaxas, but as well, the liberal author Charles Marsh, a liberal theologian from Virginia and author of Strange Glory, A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer published in 2014. Metaxas’ book is the most prominent source for my book, closely followed by Ferdinand’s book and then Eberhard Bethge’s giant biography. After I found and read Ferdinand’s 2015 article in 2016, I started to thoroughly vet my citations of Eric Metaxas, and in my book, the majority of my citations of Eric Metaxas are accompanied by other sources, often those of Ferdinand or Eberhard. Charles Marsh I never used in my book, and indeed, while Ferdinand was critical of Eric Metaxas, he was even more so for Charles Marsh. To summarise, this is how Ferdinand saw Metaxas and Marsh:
“Marsh and Metaxas have dragged Bonhoeffer into cultural and political disputes that belong in a U.S. context. The issues did not present themselves in the same way in Germany in Bonhoeffer’s time, and the way they are debated in Germany today differs greatly from that in the States. Metaxas has focused on the fight between right and left in the United States and has made Bonhoeffer into a likeable arch-conservative without theological insights and convictions of his own; Marsh concentrates on the conflict between the Conservatives and the gay rights’ movement. Both approaches are equally misguided and are used to make Bonhoeffer interesting and relevant to American society. Bonhoeffer does not need this and it certainly distorts the facts.”
and…
“Unlike Metaxas, Charles Marsh does know some German. He has read Bonhoeffer’s writings in the original and has carried out research in Germany. He served briefly as a ‘Bonhoeffer guest professor’ at Humboldt University in Berlin. Even so, his manuscript needed more substantial corrections than that of Metaxas before being published in Germany.”
In essence, what I am saying, is that one could argue both liberal and conservative agenda driven American books on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, can at the very least, in the eyes of of a German author very close to Dietrich’s best friend Eberhard Bethge, be equally misguided.
However, unlike 2015 when Ferdinand wrote his article, and rather than “democracies” such as the DPRK – Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the former – DDR – Deutsche Demokratische Republik, epitomised by its Stasi secret police, surpassing in sheer size, even the Gestapo of the entire National Socialist Germany of your Great Uncle Dietrich’s time, the American Constitutional Republic – NOT the democracy, from the summer of 2020, was itself was under dire threat. Whereupon disturbing parallels with the death throes of Weimar Germany from Dietrich and Ruth’s time, can be drawn. However, as I will explain, it requires one take off their blinkers in regard to evil perpetrated by the political radical-left. In short, break free from the myopic leftist-Globalist echo chamber promulgated by corrupt agenda driven global-leftist mainstream media, characterised by its deafening silence to violence perpetrated by violent radical-left entities such as Antifa and Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) during the summer of 2020. [Read pages 8, 9 and 10 then see this three minute video. Note the names of Steff Yorek and Jess Sundin from FRSO.]
Yours Sincerely
Vince Barwinski
i The quote of Walker stating this can be found at https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/01/breaking-project-veritas-pfizer-exposed-exploring-mutating-covid-19-virus-via-directed-evolution-continue-profiting-vaccines-video/, while this video, and indeed the subsequent video of Walker’s meltdown with James O’Keefe can be found at https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/conservatives-demand-pfizer-explain-execs-directed-evolution-claims-in-bombshell-project-veritas-video/. As well, the first video of ten minutes containing this quote can be found on RUMBLE at https://rumble.com/v274lsi-pfizer-exposed-for-exploring-mutating-covid-19-virus-for-new-vaccines-via-d.html from about 3 minutes and 30 seconds, and the subsequent ten minute Walker meltdown video on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Project_Veritas/status/1618743338852835329 or the downloadable Walker meltdown video at https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1618736315343724546/pu/vid/1280×720/wmoakWkLq8HRz5pu.mp4.
ii https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/status/1627771639118319617 OR https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/1627767493015248897/vid/852×480/TfH7vfBYeSk2x4Ak.mp4.
iii https://childrenshealthdefense.eu/eu-affairs/vera-sharav-unless-all-of-us-resist-never-again-is-now-75th-anniversary-of-the-nuremberg-code/