A True Story! Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Plot to Kill Hitler
I had the amazing opportunity in this year’s Siblings’ Book Club to mix two of my absolute favorite genres: Christian biography and graphic novel. The Faithful Spy covers the short yet full life of German pastor and martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It’s an amazingly well-thought-out book geared towards teens and adults alike, and I’m super grateful to my sister-in-law for putting it on my radar.
I recently read and reviewed Eric Metaxas’ 2010 biography Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. It was while reading that much larger volume that I decided to begin reading this as well. Obviously, the information is all historical and is thus the same in both books, yet the two authors’ approaches differ so widely, it was almost like reading about another person.
Hendrix’s artistic style in this book includes way more text than you might find in other graphic novels, and he highlights this text with colors and images that set the mood or further drive the story home. Five artistic tools especially stood out to me.
First, he only uses four colors throughout the book: black, white, red, and teal. Red generally signals evil or darkness, particularly anything related to Hitler and Naziism, while teal signals the opposite, namely goodness or comfort. It was a helpful tool to set the mood on each page, and I particularly liked watching the encroaching danger of Naziism as the pages grew more and more red.
Second, Hendrix describes Hitler as a wolf willing to eat its own young, and he maintains this image throughout the book to convey Hitler and his Nazi war machine as violent beasts. He also uses the German eagle at times and even draws the SS soldiers as rats, which adds yet another layer of disgust to the tale.
Third, he makes good use of maps and graphs throughout the book to help readers understand the Nazis’ advance throughout Europe and to help clarify other statistics that might otherwise go ignored. I particularly appreciated the graph on page 15 that showed the inflation rates of the German Mark: from 75 Marks to $1USD in 1923 to 4,000,000,000 Marks in 1923! It’s unfathomable the straights the Germans were in!
Fourth, Hendrix occasionally highlights key quotations by turning them into full- or half-page works of art. Even though the quotations translated from German are wordy and sometimes unwieldy, his efforts help clarify their meaning and leave these quotations as poignant reminders of the stakes during those difficult years.
Finally, while Hendrix mostly avoids otherworldly stuff in this straightforward Christian biography based on the records of Bonhoeffer’s life, he departs from that focus right at the end, in what I think is a very fitting way. As Bonhoeffer is strangled to death in the German prison camp on April 9, 1945, Hendrix fanaticizes about what he might have felt and seen. Asphyxiation might share the same sensation as drowning, yet Bonhoeffer’s drowning is not what he might have expected, for rather than sinking down into the water, he’s floating up, up, up towards a pair of feet standing on the surface of the sea. It’s a beautiful picture of a terrible event: the pastor murdered by the Nazis yet taken up to meet his Savior!
“This is the end—for me, the beginning of life!” What beautiful final words from a faithful follower of Jesus, and what a beautiful ending to a beautiful book.
I normally like to pass books on when I finish them, but I’d be afraid to loan this one out lest I never get it back! I hope to find more biographies as amazingly captured as this one. This is by far one of my favorite reads of the year. I highly, highly recommend it.
©2023 E.T.
Read More from and about Dietrich Bonhoeffer:
- The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1937)
- God Is in the Manger (2010)
- Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas (2010)
- The Faithful Spy by John Hendrix (2012)