My Dearest Dietrich: A Novel of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Lost Love

“Many world leaders, pastors, and individuals have been impacted by the legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but few know of Maria von Wedemeyer–the love of his life and the fiancee whose letters and visits infused hope into the long months of imprisonment. As well as being a theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was also a man…The world knew Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But they did not know him as she had. No one else did. Together, they had shared the most earthly and the most ethereal of emotions. Love.” Love “is a growing seed. It may lie longer and deeper in the soil and need more time to develop into visible beauty, but it will be the stronger and more lasting…Love was like a cord of rope, or the thread in her hands. It wasn’t until that cord was pulled tight and tested that its strength became known. She’d entered into her engagement…without having tested the cord binding them together. Now, she must learn the strength with which it had been wrought.” “War engulfed the world.” Women sacrificed their men on the battlefield, families lost homes in the bombing raids battering Berlin, “railcars stuffed with humanity shipped away never to return. It was an inferno. One none of them could escape. Only endure…The fate of the Jews who still remained alive. The future of Germany. Their own destiny:” All hinge on a conspiracy for the delivery of a bomb to Hitler’s proximity. “The entire fabric of the conspiracy depended upon each playing their part and remaining steadfast under interrogation.” “No longer was she the innocent girl who’d first stirred his heart…an innocent bystander in this thing some called conspiracy, others resistance. By linking herself with Dietrich, she’d become entangled. Involved.” A resistance woman, brave and capable. Amanda Barratt’s My Dearest Dietrich is about an extraordinary engagement to an extraordinary man in extraordinary times. It’s a tale of courage and cowardice, about “the willingness to act, the bearing of responsibility. Above all, the acceptance of consequences. Whenever and however they came.”

It was really hard to get to in the beginning but the more I read it got better. It got me on the edge of my seat at times wanting to know what is going to happen and was just interesting to go back in that perspective then what I am used to reading in that time era.