Wolf Krötke - Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theologians for a Post-Christian World

I n 1984 and 1985, I had the remarkable experience of being a guest student at the Sprachenkonvikt (Language House), the seminary of the East German Evangelical Church, in East Berlin.

Over the course of that year, I got to know Professor Wolf Krtke especially well. I attended his seminars on Barth and Kierkegaard, and he asked me to help him learn English (we used a copy of Stanley Hauerwass Peaceable Kingdom that I had brought along from America). He and his family lived in an apartment on the premises, and we regularly met in the cool, dark study that overlooked the courtyard. I had known nothing of him before I cameindeed, at that time I was still at the beginning of my theological studies and knew little about Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or the history of the Confessing Church Struggle ( Kirchenkampf ) against Hitler and National Socialism. But Professor Krtke quickly became one of my principal conversation partners and helped me understand the way of Christians not only in the Third Reich but also in communist East Germany, where the state sought to co-opt them when possible and restrict them when necessary.

All that is now more than thirty years ago. In the meantime, the Berlin Wall has come down, the seminary has been merged into the theological faculty at Berlins state university (the Humboldt University), and Professor Krtke has retired. But our friendship has endured, and over all these years he has continued to write, and I have continued to read what he writes. Nearly a decade ago, I resolved to make his theological work better known to an English-speaking audience. For while Professor Krtke is regarded in Germany as a major theological voice and a superb interpreter of Barth and Bonhoeffer, little of his work has been translated into English. I began with one of his more recent essays. It so inspired me that I resolved to translate his most important essays on Barth and Bonhoeffer, which range in date from the early 1980s to the present. The project turned out to be more demanding than I ever could have imagined, but I am deeply grateful to David Nelson at Baker Academic for his unflagging interest and support.

Wolf Krtke was born in 1938 in an area of Germany that after the Second World War was annexed to Poland. Raised in a Christian family, he studied theology in Leipzig, Naumburg, and Berlin. Soon after beginning his studies in 1958, he was arrested for composing a silly poem that poked fun at Walter Ulbricht, the East German communist leader. For his crime, Professor Krtke spent nearly two years in prison and was later denied the opportunity to travel to Basel to study with Karl Barth. Humboldt University. Since his retirement in 2004, he has remained active as a lecturer and scholar, and he serves as one of the publishers of the Berlin church newspaper Die Kirche .