Saints and Villains

American author Denise Giardina’s novel Saints and Villains (1998) is a speculative retelling of the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor and religious scholar who plotted to assassinate Hitler and was caught and executed at Buchenwald during the final weeks of World War II. The novel explores the complex moral challenge Bonhoeffer grappled with as he balanced his acute awareness of the atrocities the Nazis were committing with his will to stay alive. Though fictional, the novel has been praised for the historical accuracy of its core plot. It won the Boston Book Review’s fiction prize and was nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award.

Saints and Villains makes use of what little information is available about Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life. An outspoken opponent of the Nazi party from its inception, Bonhoeffer was known for his magnanimity and deep love for humanity. The novel begins in his childhood, backgrounding his eventual foray into political activism in his difficult upbringing and family, and rigorous, self-driven education. Rather than depict Bonhoeffer as a model of virtue in the modern world, Giardina shows that he was quite ordinary, yet morally and intellectually complex. Bonhoeffer is often depicted as deeply depressed and full of crippling self-doubt. His story suggests that all people have a capacity to recognize injustice and do great good, showing that no one can claim to have never perfectly obeyed a moral code.

One of the major life events Giardina focuses on is Bonhoeffer’s time on Gauley Mountain, Kentucky, where he worked in the coal mines. During his several-year stint in America, and particularly here, Bonhoeffer saw firsthand the cruelty imposed on African-Americans by white Americans. Though slavery was formally abolished, the hatred and disenfranchisement of blacks continued unabated. Bonhoeffer’s observations strongly influenced the development of his political will: during the Nazis’ anti-Semitic propaganda campaign, he recognized many of the same misinformation strategies and other abuses. Bonhoeffer corresponded frequently with his family members by mail, making clear his anger and frustration with the systematic normalization of white supremacist ideologies, which took ugly forms, including segregation, scapegoating, and lynching.



When Bonhoeffer returned to Germany, he immediately recognized the German nationalism and exceptionalism, anticipating the violence to come. While he had no way to know for sure that the Holocaust would become much more brutal and overt than systemic racism in the United States at the time, Bonhoeffer feared correctly that Jewish segregation in Germany was imminent. The Nazis knew of Bonhoeffer’s dissident political activity throughout his multi-year campaign against them. However, they did not know that Bonhoeffer was plotting to kill Hitler to end the Nazi regime.

Giardina details the many dangerous missions, secret meetings, and stints in prison that Bonhoeffer survived before this decisive, ultimately fatal, moment in his life. His plot failed, and he was hardly given a trial by the Nazis before being sentenced to death. His final days coincided with the end of World War II: the Nazis made sure to execute him, as a symbolic gesture, even as their own demise seemed imminent. Saints and Villains shows that some of the most influential and good figures in human history have not been unambiguously virtuous; rather, they became good through years of mistakes and struggles.