It remains an experience of incomparable value that we have learned to see the great events of world history also from the perspective of those who are excluded, suspected, mistreated, powerless, oppressed, and mocked, in short, from the perspective of the suffering. May bitterness or envy not consume our hearts in this time, so that we can see with new eyes the great and the small, happiness and unhappiness, strength and weakness, so that our view, for greatness, humanity, justice, and mercy becomes clearer, freer, incorruptible; yes, so that personal suffering becomes a more suitable key, a more fruitful principle for contemplative and active accessibility to the world than personal happiness. Now it depends on this perspective from below not to favor those who are perpetually discontent, but rather that we grant life (1) in all its dimensions based on a higher satisfaction, which is actually based outside of "above" or "below," and thus we affirm it.
(1) “to be just” to life, a phrase that has almost disappeared today, meaning to justly give, acknowledge what belongs to life, to live fully justly in the given situation, to be perceptively and sensitively bound to what obliges us. (note from the editor)
(Dietrich Bonhoeffer /1906–1945/,
unfinished sketch for the text Reflections at the threshold of 1943,
written for the tenth anniversary of Hitler's rise to power;
quoted according to the book Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Resistance and Submission, Letters from Prison. Kalich 2023)
