This book is a high quality binded and limited edition paperback of 935 pages printed on premium paper.
• The manuscript contains a highly-detailed, well-researched Works Cited and Endnotes section to effectively support author’s work.
• The structure and style is informative, declarative, and strong, with the author’s points and facts supported by cited endnotes.
• The author clearly put a lot of time, energy, and care into this interesting and informative historical work and biography, and it shows. Readers will appreciate the well-researched historical narrative, in addition to the Polish perspective on the anti-Nazi German Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the remarkable Junker matriarch Ruth von Kleist, who came to regard Dietrich as no less than a son.
The book is a compelling German historical biography of faith, framed by religious, political and military conflict, set in the twin cataclysmic backdrop of both world wars, as seen from a fresh Polish perspective. The narrative is enriched with a wide array of compelling and heroic personal stories, including of many extraordinary women, such as the Junker matriarch Ruth von Kleist and her children, in defiance of multiple manifestations of tyranny. The central figure, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, of whom Ruth came to regard like a son, becomes disenchanted with the State Church’s appeasement of the National Socialist agenda, and transitions into a double life as pastor and spy. As the tension builds to the tragic climax, one can draw disturbing parallels with the modern-day subversion of all faiths, Western and traditional, and all other manner of human rights abuses in Xi Jinping’s People’s Republic of China, with tacit approval it seems, from the Vatican in Rome. Moreover, eerie parallels from the death throes of Weimar Germany for America in 2020-21.
The author Vince Barwinski, born in Sydney Australia in 1962, taught English in Taiwan in 2003 and Poland, the land of his paternal ancestors from September 2004 to June 2005. In Taiwan he met his future wife, whom he married on his return to Australia from Poland in October 2005. However, it was in Poland, in February 2005 that he came upon his inspiration for this book. Namely the bronze cross memorial to the German anti-Nazi Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the modern-day Polish city of Wrocław – pre-WWII German Breslau and birthplace of Dietrich in February 1906. It was the dual history of this city and his amateur passion for history, fostered by his father, in particular, WWII history of Europe, that inspired him to write of Dietrich Bonhoeffer from a hitherto, unique Polish perspective, with lessons of history still relevant in today’s world. Not the least of which being, the religious oppression and subversion in Xi Jinping’s China, and the rise of the radical left in America in 2020-21, mirroring in many respects, Hitler’s Reich.