The International Bonhoeffer Society and Fortress Press earlier this month (Nov. 13-15) marked the upcoming completion of the translations of the entire Dietrich Bonhoeffer corpus into English, with a celebration and conference at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. The conference, "Bonhoeffer for Coming Generations," coincided with the release in English of Theological Education Underground: 1937-1940, volume 15 of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works.
The 16 volumes of the Works include not only the published books, but also letters to and from Bonhoeffer, sermons and notes, underground newsletters, fiction, and poetry. Two more volumes, 11 and 14, are nearing publication. Volume 11, Ecumenical, Academic, and Pastoral Work: 1931-1932 is complete and will be published in spring 2012; Theological Education at Finkenwalde: 1935-1937 will likely be released in fall 2013; and an index of the entire works will follow, according to Susan Johnson, Fortress’s managing editor.
“The end is in sight, and we really are going to pull it off,” said Victoria Barnett, general editor of the series. The English edition has material not in the German volumes, she said, including recently discovered letters and documents and some items considered by the family too personal for publication in Germany.
With the upcoming completion of the series, it’s time to pass the baton to a new generation of writers to continue the exploration of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life and thought, Barnett said. Having the entire translation will make it finally possible for English speakers to evaluate Bonhoeffer’s work as a whole and within the context of an almost day-to-day chronology of his life.
The completed translation also means Fortress can start a new phase of making the 16-volume series available electronically, said William Bergkamp, publisher and managing director of Fortress Press, who said Fortress is committed to releasing the volumes on every possible electronic platform. “It will be difficult now to control interpretation,” he said, because the “primary sources are open to everyone.”
Bonhoeffer continues to be highly popular even 65 years after his death, as attested by the top-selling status of his Letters and Papers From Prison, his Discipleship, and Eric Metaxas’ 2010 biography, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, a book that has caused grumblings about its accuracy among Bonhoeffer scholars but continues to be a bestselling religious biography, according to Amazon.
The meticulous Fortress translations--by a team translating the volumes into English and a second team translating them back into German for comparison with the originals--makes them the most accurate version available, Barnett said.
Bonhoeffer is popular, Berkgamp said, because “his life was real in a way that many of our lives as experienced in these affluent times are not.” He said he expects the Works to act as a corrective to controversies about Bonhoeffer’s life.
Fortress plans further volumes leveraging from the Works, including collected sermons, edited by Isabel Best, to be released in July 2012, and after that a volume of Bonhoeffer poems.
