This volume is a rich collection of letters, lectures, ecumenical documents, reflections on ministry, and sermons from the period between June 1931 and October 1932. This crucial formative period began with Dietrich Bonhoeffer's return to Germany at age twenty-five after a year of study in the United States. This was a remarkably fertile period in Bonhoeffer's life, which took place amid his demanding teaching load as a university lecturer, a leadership role in international ecumenical work, and ministry as an assistant pastor in Berlin and chaplain at the technical college in Berlin-Charlottenburg.

The “Editor's Introduction” to the English Edition and the “Editor's Afterword to the German Edition” offer concise but extremely helpful introductions, providing crucial information to readers who may be less familiar with the details of Bonhoeffer's life or the dire economic realities during the waning days of the Weimar Republic. These essays reveal the contexts that lend intelligibility to these documents.

Volume 11 is organized in three sections. The first includes Bonhoeffer's correspondence with family and friends, as well as documents related to his ministerial responsibilities and ecumenical activities. In his letters, especially his correspondence with Paul Lehmann and Erwin Sutz, who shared his enthusiasm for Karl Barth, we find Bonhoeffer developing his own unique theological voice. We are afforded a glimpse into his growing sense of foreboding about the social and political situation in Germany. In several letters, we witness the heart of a pastor deeply invested in the lives of his adolescent confirmands and acutely concerned about their impoverished economic conditions.

The second section includes reports on ecumenical conferences, notes from university lecture courses, public lectures, and ministerial documents. While we have no surviving manuscripts of Bonhoeffer's own lecture notes, section 2 includes a reconstruction, from extant student notes, of two lecture courses: “The History of Twentieth Century Systematic Theology” (winter semester 1932–33) and “The Nature of the Church” (summer semester 1932). Included among the treasures in this section is a powerful ecumenical address delivered at the International Youth Peace Conference in Czechoslovakia. In several documents in this section, we discover Bonhoeffer's criticism of the ecumenical movement for lack of reflection on the theological foundations for ecumenism, his struggles to overcome resistance within Germany to ecumenical friendship with churches from nations that were signatories to the Treaty of Versailles, and his emphasis on the church's mission to call the nations to peace and disarmament. Also included are a short outline of a lecture delivered to the “Working Group of Theologians and Economists” and Bonhoeffer's preliminary report on a theological conference for ecumenical youth work. These documents display Bonhoeffer's willingness to engage in conflict with the representatives of völkisch theologies associated with the German Christian movement, and his development of the concept of “orders of preservation” as a counter to the theological deployment of the Lutheran tradition's conception of the “orders of creation” in support of German nationalism.

The third section includes Bonhoeffer's sermons from this period. In these intensely powerful sermons, the reader is confronted with the passionate witness to Christ of one whose life was already shaped by the cross. Bonhoeffer's sermons contain a prophetic edge that challenged his original audience, and now his readers, with the call to radical discipleship. His concern for the poor and destitute in a situation of high unemployment and his emphasis upon the responsibility of the Christian for the suffering neighbor are persistent themes. Perhaps his most courageous sermon was delivered on the occasion of Germany's Memorial Day. He insisted that the witness of the church is to preach the gospel of peace and to resist the clamor for war.

This volume is not the best resource for nonspecialists who may be interested in Bonhoeffer's life and thought. Such readers would be better served by biographies and Bonhoeffer's more accessible writings. But for persons with scholarly interest in Bonhoeffer's theology, this collection is a treasure trove. In this volume, we see the development of theological themes that will attain a prominent place in Bonhoeffer's mature thought, such as the responsibility of God's people for victims of injustice, the church as Christus praesens, resistance to National Socialism and völkisch theologies, the church's responsibility to criticize the state, and the quest for concreteness in ethics. Bonhoeffer demonstrates a remarkable prescience. On several occasions, he mentions the possibility that the church may be called to costly witness and martyrdom. In this volume, we witness the final preparations of a young theologian and minister who is soon to embark upon the cruciform path of costly witness and martyrdom.