Bonhoeffer's Restless Weeks in New York

In June 1939, Dietrich Bonhoeffer arrived in New York City with every reason to stay. Friends at Union Theological Seminary had arranged a safe position for him, far from the gathering darkness of Nazi Germany. He had a desk, a library card, invitations to lecture. The war had not yet started, and reasonable people told him he was exactly where he should be.

But something kept interrupting his comfort. During evening prayers at Union, a phrase from Scripture would unsettle him. Walking along Riverside Drive, he would feel a strange urgency he could not name. He wrote in his diary that he could not stop thinking about his students back in the underground seminary at Finkenwalde. He tried to dismiss it as homesickness, as guilt, as nerves.

It took his colleague Paul Lehmann, who knew him well, to say plainly what Bonhoeffer could not yet articulate: "You are not restless because you are ungrateful. You are restless because God is speaking to you."

Within twenty-six days of arriving, Bonhoeffer booked passage back to Germany. He later wrote to Reinhold Niebuhr, "I have come to the conclusion that I made a mistake in coming to America. I shall have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people."