[Vwoolf] Woolf and Bonhoeffer

Diane Reynolds direynolds1502 at gmail.com
Fri Sep 14 10:16:18 EDT 2018


I am very interested in the subject of Asian religion and Orientalism being discussed in relation to Bloomsbury. I have written a blog on Woolf and Dietrich Bonhoeffer: http://janeaustenandotherwriters.blogspot.com/2018/09/dietrich-bonhoeffer-and-virginia-woolf.html <http://janeaustenandotherwriters.blogspot.com/2018/09/dietrich-bonhoeffer-and-virginia-woolf.html>

The blog doesn’t discuss Bonhoeffer’s  interest in things Asian, but George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, whose Labour politics would have made him sympathetic to people like Leonard (did they ever work together?) was a good friend of Bonhoeffer’s during his time in London. Bell got Bonhoeffer an introduction to Gandhi, who invited him to his ashram in early 1935. Bonhoeffer had for some years been wanting to study with Gandhi but choose instead to go back to Germany. Bonhoeffer also had a predilection for eating in Chinese restaurants in London, apparently an avant-garde taste before WWII, and I can’t help but wonder if the Bloomsbury group shared a similar taste for Chinese. :) All this is to say an interest in Asian religion and Orientalism, for lack of a better word, seemed to be in the air. Bell was friends with Eliot, so had at least tenuous ties with Bloomsbury, and commissioned Eliot to write Murder in the Cathedral as an indictment of Nazi politics. 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osu.edu/pipermail/vwoolf/attachments/20180914/12614e98/attachment.html>


More information about the Vwoolf mailing list