During the early phase of his imprisonment, nothing helped Bonhoeffer more than his acquaintance with the monastic life and his own experience of it in Finkenwalde and Ettal.

A monk also lives in “cell”, and knows life in two modes, the vita activa and the vita comtemplativa, the active life and the life of contemplation and prayer.

Bonhoeffer had been torn from his active life from one day to the next, He had not chosen to live in a cell as he now obliged to do, but he succeeded in transforming the vita comtemplativa that had been forced upon him into one that could affirm with his inner being, and thus overcome the “prison shock”.

(Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945: Martyr, Thinker, Man of Resistance, 325)