Maria von Wedemeyer Weller

von Wedemeyer's copy of Good Powers.

She was born in 1924 at Pätzig in the Neumark area of Brandenburg to Hans von Wedemeyer, a landowner / gentleman farmer, and his wife Ruth (née Kleist). Maria was the third of their seven children. Relatives came from the Bismarck family and other Prussian noble families. She grew up on her parents' estate at Pätzig.[1]

She first met Bonhoeffer in the urban home of Ruth von Kleist-Retzow, her maternal grandmother, when she was 11 years old. He was conducting confirmation classes for Maria's elder brother and cousins and the grandmother asked if Maria could be included. Bonhoeffer interviewed her and refused to have her join the class due to her "immaturity".

They were reintroduced some seven years later when Bonhoeffer was on a writing retreat at Ruth von Kleist-Retzow's country home, Klein Krössin. Despite the fact that Maria was just 18 years old, and he was 36, they developed a rapport. They became engaged on 13 January 1943.[2]

Less than three months after their engagement, Bonhoeffer was arrested for his activities in resisting the Nazi government. He and Maria corresponded during his imprisonment in Tegel prison and she was permitted to visit him occasionally but, after he was implicated in the plot to assassinate Hitler on the 20th of July 1944, he was transferred to a Gestapo high security prison and was permitted no further contact with her or his family.

He, and most of the other incarcerated members of the 20th of July plot, were ultimately executed just before the end of the war. Bonhoeffer was hanged at the Flossenbürg concentration camp on the 8th of April 1945. Bonhoeffer's remaining possessions from his time in prison were returned to his parents, including the letters that Maria had written to him. His parents returned those letters to Maria and, as result, she possessed their (essentially) complete correspondence.

Following the war, she initially studied mathematics at Göttingen and then, beginning in 1948, on a scholarship to Bryn Mawr College near Philadelphia, which she graduated from with an MA in 1950. In 1949 she returned to Germany to marry Paul-Werner Schniewind (born 1923), son of the theologian Julius Schniewind, and they decided to emigrate to the United States. They had two sons, but the marriage ultimately ended in divorce. She initially found work as a statistician, but soon moved on to writing code (in machine language) at the pioneering computer company, Remington Rand UNIVAC. In 1959 she married the American manufacturer Barton Weller, though this marriage also failed in 1965.

Following her divorce from Weller, she returned to the computer industry, joining Honeywell Information Systems, which was based near Boston, and advanced from being a technical employee to a series of management positions.

In 1966, she donated the Bonhoeffer letters and manuscripts that she possessed (including Faithfully and Quietly Surrounded by Good Powers, Jonah, The Death of Moses and The Past) to the Houghton Library of Harvard University, with access to them restricted until 2002.[3] She published selected excerpts from the letters in 1967 under the title 'The Other Letters From Prison' in the journal of the Union Theological Seminary.[4] The publication of this article resulted in extensive coverage in the media - with articles on the front page of the New York Times, and in TIME, Newsweek and other publications.

In 1974 she gave a talk on the development of the decompiler at the Association for Computing Machinery.[5][6] She died of cancer, in 1977, at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston.[7] Her ashes are buried at the Wedemeyer family gravesite in Gernsbach, Germany, where a memorial tablet to her, created by Andreas Helmling, was placed in the cemetery chapel in September 2009.[8]

Fifteen years after her death the complete correspondence with Bonhoeffer was published by her elder sister, Ruth-Alice von Bismarck (wife of Klaus von Bismarck) as Brautbriefe Zelle 92 - Dietrich Bonhoeffer / Maria von Wedemeyer 1943-1945. This book has subsequently been translated into English, French, Japanese and other languages.

• (in German) "Books on and by von Wedemeyer".{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) in the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek catalogue
• (in German) Ruth-Alice von Bismarck, Urich Kabitz (ed.): Brautbriefe Zelle 92 – Dietrich Bonhoeffer / Maria von Wedemeyer 1943–1945. C.H. Beck, München 1992, ISBN 978-3-406-36795-3.
• (in English) Ruth-Alice von Bismarck, Urich Kabitz (ed.): Love Letters from Cell 92: The Correspondence Between Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Maria Von Wedemeyer
• (in German) Renate Wind: 'Liebe als Produktivkraft.' In: Dietrich Bonhoeffer – Allein in der Tat ist die Freiheit. Publik-Forum Dossier; Publik-Forum Verlagsgesellschaft, Oberursel März 2005.
• (in German) Paavo Rintala: Marias Liebe. Ein biographischer Roman. Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, Leipzig 2006, ISBN 978-3-374-02363-9.
• (in German) Renate Wind: Wer leistet sich heute noch eine wirkliche Sehnsucht? Maria von Wedemeyer und Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Gütersloher Verlagshaus, Gütersloh 2006, ISBN 978-3-579-07124-4.
• (in German) Birgit Schlegel: Maria von Wedemeyer, Nachfahrin Katlenburger Amtmänner und Braut Dietrich Bonhoeffers. In: Northeimer Jahrbuch 82.2017, p. 115–124