Dietrich Bonhoeffer Considered Suicide in Prison

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s early days in prison were fearful for him as he contemplated what could happen to his family, friends and him.  Bonhoeffer would write things down on pieces of paper…

Among notes scribbled on scraps of paper during the first days appears the sentence: “Suicide, not from a sense of guilt, but basically I am already dead.  Full stop.  The end.”

“Not from a sense of guilt”.  As he sat in prison he was once more involved in the interior struggle which was the background to his part in the resistance.  “At first,” he wrote, in his first letters to Bethge, “I wondered a great deal whether it was really for the cause of Christ that I was causing you all such grief.”

And finally the awful oppression of the world of evil against which Bonhoeffer and so many others had been struggling, weighed upon him in his cell without relief.

(Mary Bosanquet, The Life and Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 248)