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Bonhoeffer received the Ph.D. at age 21 from the University of Berlin, and he was admitted to that faculty at age 24. Before beginning lecture responsibilities he spent a year, September 1930 to June 1931, as a Sloan Fellow at Union Theological Seminary in New York. He made some new friends, added to his already considerable international perspective, gained a new respect for the social dimension of the Christian gospel, and—most strikingly—in company with an African American friend and fellow student at Union Seminary spent considerable time in Harlem. This picture shows one of Harlem’s store-front churches. Dietrich participated in worship and youth work in the large Abyssinian Baptist church.

He wrote:
For more than six months, I’ve been almost every Sunday lunchtime, about twenty to three, to one of the great Negro Baptist churches in Harlem, … have heard the gospel preached in the Negro churches.

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During the two years 1932-33 Bonhoeffer lectured and conducted seminars at the University of Berlin. It was a large university—including 1,000 theology students--and Bonhoeffer attracted a considerable following for a number of reasons. He was very young; he maintained an independent stance towards the Nazi movement that was especially strong among university students; he combined intellectual rigor with an emphasis on some concrete issues of Christian discipleship, like peace; and he had informal times with his students at evenings in the Bonhoeffer home and with excursions into the country. It was during these informal times that he experimented with ideas and practices of Christian community that he later expressed in his book Life Together (1938). The picture above is of Bonhoeffer with some of his Berlin students during one of their trips into the countryside.