SÖLLE, DOROTHEE. Dorothee Nipperdey Sölle (1929–2003) was born in Cologne, Germany, to a bourgeois family whose religious attitudes were formed by liberal Protestantism. She was a Lutheran and remained a member of the Lutheran Church throughout her life. In her family, culture was defined by familiarity with German philosophers and poets such as Immanuel Kant and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Until the last year of World War II, when food became scarce, Dorothee was preserved from the ugliness of the war. As an idealistic adolescent her deep sense of patriotism was overwhelmed by Germany's defeat. Following the war, she began to read the existentialists, especially Martin Heidegger and Jean Paul Sartre and entered into a period of nihilism. At university she studied post-Enlightenment philosophy. The works of Blaise Pascal, Søren Kierkegaard, and Simone Weil led her to the...