Dietrich Bonhoeffer - Family and Youth

Family and Youth

Bonhoeffer was born in 1906, shortly before his twin sister Sabine. He was the sixth of eight children of a prominent family in Breslau (Wrocław). His father Karl Bonhoeffer was a distinguished neurologist. In 1912 he moved the family to Berlin to become professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Berlin and director of the psychiatric clinic at Charité Hospital. His mother, Paula von Hase, was a daughter of Klara von Hase, a countess by marriage who had been a pupil of Clara Schumann and Franz Liszt, and a granddaughter of Karl von Hase, the distinguished church historian and preacher to the court of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Paula was a school teacher and home-schooled the children, including Christian instruction, until each was 6 or 7. Nonetheless, the Bonhoeffer family seldom attended church services. Bonhoeffer's second oldest brother Walter was killed in action in World War I in April 1918. His sister Christel married Hans von Dohnanyi, a jurist who later became one of the conspirators against Hitler. His sister Sabine married Gerhard Leibholz, a notable jurist of Jewish descent who had been baptized as a child.

Expected to follow his father into psychiatry, Bonhoeffer surprised and dismayed his parents when he decided as a teenager to become a theologian and later a pastor. When his older brother told him not to waste his life in such a "poor, feeble, boring, petty, bourgeois institution as the church", fourteen-year-old Dietrich replied, "If what you say is true, I shall reform it!"