PBS stations across the country will be airing Bonhoeffer, “an acclaimed dramatic documentary about theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The documentary “tells the story of the young German pastor who offered one of the first clear voices of resistance to Adolf Hitler and the rise of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party.”

The shows will air on Monday, February 6, celebrating the 100th anniversary of Bonhoeffer’s birth on February 4, 1906. You can check your local listings here for dates and times when the documentary will be showing. Unfortunately, my area station WGVU doesn’t look like it will be airing the documentary (at least in the next two weeks).

One of the first episodes which raised Bonhoeffer’s anti-Nazi profile publicly was his talk, “The Leader and the Individual in the Younger Generation,” (the German for “the leader” is der Führer) given first as a radio broadcast in 1933, two days after Hitler came to power. The talk was interrupted in the middle of the broadcast, but he used the text publicly again in lectures in days following.

Here are a few items from the text:

The Leader must lead his followers towards a responsibility to the orders of life, a responsibility to father, teacher, judge, state. He must radically refuse to e the appeal, the idol, i.e. the ultimate authority of those whom he leads…

the Leader must know that he is most mitted to his followers, most heavily laden with responsibility towards the orders of life, in fact quite simply a servant…

Leaders or offices which set themselves up as gods mock God and the individual who stands alone before him, and must perish. Only the Leader who himself serves the penultimate and the ultimate authority can find faithfulness…

(Quotes taken from No Rusty Swords, pp. 202-204).