At Christmas 1942 the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote an essay for a small circle, Nach zehn Jahren, After Ten Years. It was meant for his parents, his friend Eberhard Bethge and his resistance colleagues Hans von Dohnanyi and Hans Oster. In it he wrote: “Die letzte verantwortliche Frage ist nicht, wie ich mich heroisch aus der Affäre ziehe, sondern [wie] eine kommende Generation weiterleben soll.”
The ultimate responsible question is not how I heroically extricate myself from the affair, but how a coming generation is to go on living. Bonhoeffer called talk of heroic downfall unheroic, because it did not dare to look into the future.