Maria von Wedemeyer-Weller 
(1924–1977)

Brave young fiancée


Dietrich Bonhoeffer first met Maria von Wedemeyer when she was still a girl. Her grandmother, Ruth von Kleist-Retzow, brought Maria on a visit to Finkenwalde, the Confessing Church’s preachers’ seminary.
The grandmother, born the Countess of Zedlitz and Trutzschler, belonged to the landed gentry of Prussia, but she was strongly anti-Nazi and sympathetic to the views of Bonhoeffer. She persuaded him to teach confirmation lessons to young Maria, her brother, Max, and several other children.
Bonhoeffer visited in the von Kleist home many times, especially on holidays during the 1930s. He eventually completed The Cost of Discipleship there in the spring of 1937. In that year Maria was only 13 and Dietrich was 31, but by 1942, she had turned 18. Despite their great difference in age, they fell deeply in love.
Their engagement was bonded early in 1943 (in spite of Maria’s mother’s request that they stay apart for one year). Just three months later, Bonhoeffer was imprisoned. He had agreed with Maria’s mother and her guardian that the engagement would not be made public for some time. But upon his arrest, in a show of support, they publicly announced it.
Maria was permitted to visit Dietrich a number of times while he was at Tegel Military Prison in Berlin. Between visits, letters were exchanged, sometimes smuggled in or out. (The collection of Dietrich’s thirty-eight letters to his young fiancee is housed at Harvard, and at her request they will not be opened to the public until the year 2002.)
In October 1944 Bonhoeffer was moved to the Gestapo prison at Prinz Albrecht Strasse in Berlin. Despite Maria’s frequent attempts, the two never saw each other again.
Following the war, Maria married twice, mothered two sons, and lived out the balance of her years in the United States. A mathematician, she held a position of high rank in her field of engineering at Honeywell.