Although so much of the historiography of the twentieth-century Church still clings doggedly to national categories, the relationship between German Christians inside the Third Reich and their friends and allies in the English-speaking world persists in the minds of scholars in those same countries. This is surely as it should be. These three books present distinctive aspects of the matter. Two are published by that distinctively, and authentically, international house, Peter Lang in Bern.

Ferdinand Schlingensiepen is a German pastor and ecumenist and a leading light in the International Bonhoeffer Society. He spent much of his working life in Bradford and now lives in Düsseldorf. Peter Raina is a German historian who has held down long residences in various British universities. Richard Bonney is a widely-published Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the University of Leicester. All three of them are, in their own fashion, internationalists who continue to cross all kinds of boundaries. Their books show a marriage of long-standing personal convictions with their chosen craft of scholarship. In each case the marriage is a happy one.

Schlingensiepen's biography is firmly embedded in the world retrieved by his friend Eberhard Bethge and it honours eloquently an old understanding between the two men that such a work should be written. But to this entente a long passage of years has yielded a further dimension: this is the publication of the extensive new Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke in Germany (and the completion of its accompanying edition in the United States). The first, German, edition of Schlingensiepen's book appeared in 2006 and Isabel Best, the translator here, has certainly settled to her task with a ready will. The English edition works splendidly well on its own terms. The narrative possesses the virtues of clarity and solidity throughout. The approach confirms that taken by Bethge, regularly fortified by careful advice from that eminent scholar, Ulrich Kabitz. The sources are as one might predict in all Bonhoefferiana, but in the final appendix there is a precious family discovery in a hitherto unknown letter from Captain Payne Best to Gerhard Leibholz.

Peter Raina has nobly maintained the cause of George Bell over a number of years and this new book offers a helpful compendium of many of the most significant of Bell's statements in parliament between his maiden speech there in July 1938 and his farewell motion in January 1958. The introduction is brief and the editorial approach is light. Often sections of speeches are removed in order to focus on others of particular merit. Readers will know for themselves whether they find this helpful or not. Certainly, the book does much to show the breadth of Bell's commitments and sympathies, from German refugees and the many debates about strategy and statecraft during the Second World War to the Schuman Plan, the persecution of Christians in the Eastern Bloc countries and the Central African Federation. Also welcome is a careful setting down of the final parliamentary tributes which this long and controversial public contribution garnered at its close. The addition of the correspondence with Rudolf Hess sits a little surprisingly beside such material, and this too might also have benefitted from a lengthier contextualistion. But the translations are scrupulous and, on its own terms, the section is valuable none the less.

In nearly 600 pages Richard Bonney's edition of the Kulturkampf newsletters makes a striking contribution to our picture of Anglo-German understandings at the pre-war peak of the Third Reich. The purpose of the newsletters was to offer to the English-speaking world a chronicle of the afflictions suffered by both Protestant and Catholic Churches under the Hitler regime. This it achieved by translating a concurrent French publication whose obscurities even now yield few traces, but which was essentially the work of the brilliant, entrepreneurial German exile, Karl Spiecker. What scraps of information exist about the London-based Kulturkampf Association, its patrons, members and allies, are marshalled at the outset in the introduction. Taken as a whole, the newsletters show how possible it was to offer a vivid, sophisticated and sensitive commentary on what was going on across the border. The history of the German Churches during these years is notoriously complicated and a few simple chronological tables might have provided a valuable sense of context, but the source itself maintains a vigorous momentum. Bonney seeks to argue why it still matters, not least in the context of evolving historiographical debates (he is particular conscious of the recent arguments of Richard Steigmann-Gall). A quiet footnote dedicates the introduction to the memory of Markus Huttner, a generous and distinguished young German scholar who made an impressive contribution to this field, and who died in 2006.