A Phrase That Travels on Its Own

Some ideas circulate like worn coins: they pass from hand to hand so many times that no one looks at the minting anymore. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s so-called “theory of stupidity” is one of them. It appears in animated videos, social media threads, opinion columns around the world, and motivational talks, almost always with the same scenery: a Lutheran pastor locked in a Nazi cell, condemned to death, who in his final days discovers that humanity’s worst enemy is not evil but stupidity. The phrase is quoted, shared, and applauded. What is almost never done is to read the text it comes from.

The problem is not a minor one, and it is not merely philological. Viral thought has an economy of its own: it needs a short sentence that can travel without context, a dramatic biography that lends it authority, and a moral lesson that the reader can apply immediately, preferably to others. The prison cell serves the second function: it turns the phrase into a testament, and a testament is not debated. The moral lesson serves the third: stupidity, we are told, is cured by individual courage, by the decision to think for oneself even when the group does not applaud. It is a clean, emotional message, perfectly compatible with the sixty-second format.

The traces of this version are easy to see. Open Culture, one of the most widely read English-language popular culture sites, presents the text as a reflection that Bonhoeffer continued to develop even while imprisoned, and points to the animated video by Sprouts, whose own authors acknowledge having slightly edited Bonhoeffer’s text in order to adapt it. From there, the chain multiplies: summaries that place it in Tegel prison in 1943, quotations that lose words along the way, remedies that the author never proposed. Each copy is a little clearer and a little less true.

The irony is difficult to overstate. Bonhoeffer’s text describes, with a precision that remains unsettling, how people cease to speak for themselves and begin to speak through slogans that have taken possession of them. And that very text now circulates as a slogan, often shared in order to point out the stupidity of others with the satisfaction of someone who knows himself to be on the lucid side. In other words: the diagnosis is used to display the symptom.

This article does the opposite of what the viral version does: it returns to the text. And the text, read in full and in context, turns out to be considerably more uncomfortable than its circulation suggests, in at least three respects. First, it was not written in a prison cell, and that changes its meaning. Second, its central thesis is not psychological but sociological: it does not say that there are stupid people; it says that power produces stupidity. Third, its remedy is not individual courage but a liberation that, in most cases, can only come from outside, and that Bonhoeffer grounds in something the viral version prefers to omit. To this must be added a final warning against contempt for others, a warning that many of those who quote him violate in the very act of quoting him.

The translations from German that follow are my own, based on Eberhard Bethge’s edition of Widerstand und Ergebung (Munich, Chr. Kaiser, 1951). In Spanish, the text can be read in Resistencia y sumisión (Salamanca, Sígueme).

The Myth of the Prison Cell

The passage on stupidity, titled Von der Dummheit in the original, is not a standalone text. It is one of the seventeen sections of Nach zehn Jahren (“After Ten Years”), subtitled “An Account at the Turn of the Year 1943.” A note in the German edition specifies its intended recipients: Bonhoeffer gave it at Christmas 1942 to three people: his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi, General Hans Oster, and his friend Eberhard Bethge. The ten years in the title are those that had passed since January 1933, when Hitler became chancellor.

Bonhoeffer was still free when he wrote it. He was arrested on April 5, 1943, together with Dohnanyi, more than three months after having delivered the text. He spent a year and a half in Tegel military prison, where he wrote the letters that would later make up the rest of Letters and Papers from Prison. After the failed assassination attempt of July 20, 1944, and the discovery of documents implicating the circle of conspirators, his situation worsened: he was transferred to the Gestapo prison, then to Buchenwald, and was hanged at Flossenbürg on April 9, 1945. The manuscript of Nach zehn Jahren survived the war hidden beneath the roof tiles of his parents’ house in Berlin. The confusion has an understandable editorial origin: Bethge published it in 1951 as the opening text of the volume of prison letters, and ever since it has often been read as though it were one of them. But it is not.