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Eberhard Bethge, friend and biographer of the German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, died at his home in Villiprott, Germany, on 18th March 2000. Along with many others around the world the Journal of Theology for Southern Africa wishes to express its gratitude for his life and work, and especially for his massive contribution to Bonhoeffer scholarship and Christian theology and witness within our own and many other contexts. His death is the passing of an era.
The friendship between Bonhoeffer and Bethge began in 1935, when Bethge became a student at the Confessing Church seminary in Finkenwalde of which Bonhoeffer was director. The friendship deepened over the ensuing years of church struggle against Nazis and the Second World War. During that period, Bethge became a member of the Bonhoeffer family through marriage to Renate Schleicher, Bonhoeffer's niece. It was to Bethge, then a...