Book Review: Saints and Villains by Denise Giardina

Sometimes it requires a work of historical fiction to raise a reader’s awareness to taking on the true history itself. Denise Giardina’s Saints and Villains is a case in point. Based on the short, turbulent adult life of German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Saints and Villains reveals in engaging narrative fashion Bonhoeffer’s secular intellectual/theological development and presents the theologian’s spiritual bildungsroman, transforming from theologian to Christian while attending Union Theological Seminary in New York.

Giardina captures the young pastor’s epiphany that the discrimination of Blacks in America simply mirrored the mistreatment of the Jews in Germany following Hitler’s rise to power in the early 1930s, a discrimination Bonhoeffer felt more malignant in America with the blacks than Germany with the Jews. The effect of this realization is the initiating event in Bonhoeffer’s thought that Christian belief and action go hand-in-hand, solidifying Bonhoeffer’s religio-political vision.

Saints and Villains is a novel depicting events well known and rigorously recorded previously in Eberhard Bethge’s excellent Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theologian, Christian, Man for His Times: A Biography Rev. ed. (Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 2000), Bonhoeffer’s Letter and Papers from Prison (edited by Eberhard Bethge) and his various theological treatises, and smaller biographies in print and on the internet. Anyone familiar with the Bonhoeffer story will know how the story ends. It is getting from point A to point B that leaves the pedestrian Bonhoeffer scholar wanting.

Eberhard Bethge (1909-2000) was a student and friend Bonhoeffer, married to the theologian’s niece. Bethge himself was a fellow resister of the Nazis, editor, and biographer of the great theologian. In a bold and perhaps misguided editorial stroke, Giardina excluded all signs of the biographer from Saints and Villains, reasoning that Bethge entered the Bonhoeffer picture relatively late in the theologian’s life and the inclusion of him as a character would interrupt the natural flow of the narrative. While the wisdom of such an omission is debatable, Giardina’s combination of characters, most particularly coming together in the personage of Bonhoeffer’s brother-in-law Han von Dohnanyi effectively condenses the story to a manageable length.

Additionally, there is the fictional love interest of the Jewish Elisabeth Hildebrandt and their erstwhile physical relationship that some critics claim would have been most unlikely in the environment which produced Pastor Bonhoeffer. I defend this inclusion to illustrate Bonhoeffer’s transformation from academic theologian to Christian and the conflicts that arrive from the blending and ultimately the dilution of the secular in the spiritual. The novel portrays Bonhoeffer as a Theo-Christological work-in-progress that does not achieve completion until his execution at the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp, April 9, 1945, fulfilling the theologian’s most famous and prophetic line from The Cost of Discipleship:

The cross is laid on every Christian. The first Christ-suffering which every man must experience is the call to abandon the attachments of this world. ... we surrender ourselves to Christ in union with His death - we give over our lives to death. ... When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die.

All critical quibbles aside, what Giardina’s historical fiction provides are beautiful period details of the German upper-class before and during World War II held together by the thread of Mozart’s incomplete Great Mass in C minor, whose completed parts, in Latin, introduce the sections of the book. The musical piece also provides Bonhoeffer a work of German art he disdains that is highly valued by the protagonist theologian’s antagonist “doppelganger,” the fictional SS Judge Advocate Alois Bauer (who ultimately imprisons Bonhoeffer). Bauer loves the Mass, longing to possess the original manuscript, which goes missing after the war. This is a keen literary device that draws together all of the consistencies and contrasts presented in this complex modern day morality play.

Article Author: C. Michael Bailey

Arkansas son C. Michael Bailey has been in hiding since he revealed his family's abolitionist position prior to the War Between the States. He is a Senior Reviewer for All About Jazz and publisher of the webblog Kultur. Michael’s day job is spent as a clinical data analyst.
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