Albert Schweitzer

Abstract

contribution in this area). 3 Against such a background, the appearance of Nils Oermann's book is to be welcomed, not least because it is able to take into account a plethora of unpublished material written by Schweitzer, and published over the past decade and a half, 4 including letters, lectures and unfinished academic tomes. Educated as a theologian, philosopher and as an historian of colonial Africa, Oermann is the best qualified individual to have written about the multi-dimensional Schweitzer. Oermann's biography follows chronological lines. Schweitzer was born in Alsace in 1875, at the time a recently annexed part of the new German state, and a borderland, culturally, between France and Germany. At home Schweitzer's family spoke patois (Elsässisch) but wrote to each other in French, and generally presented themselves to the world as Francophile (at the time of the annexation Schweitzer's two uncles chose to adopt French nationality, both residing in Paris). Schweitzer was neverthless later to assert that he found writing in German easier than writing in French (almost all his extant works are in German). Schweitzer's background was strongly clerical (both his father and his maternal grandfather were Lutheran pastors, as was his uncle after whom he was named and who had died in 1871, before Albert's birth), and theologically liberal, a notable tradition within Alsace and one which in a distinctive way Schweitzer was to represent throughout his life. Oermann is good at picking out events from Albert's early life which show signs of later aspects of his personality, whether it be his desire to stand out from others, his dreaminess, manifested in a highly developed ethical sensitivity, or his controlled passion. Of course, Aus meiner Kindheit und Jugendzeit, the work written in 1924, and the endpoint of a number of interviews with Oskar Pfister, the well-known Freudian psychoanalyst and Lutheran pastor, has to be read with a little scepticism-it is, after all, the reflections of a mature and self-conscious man on an early life which he obviously sees as portending later facets of his character, and from which he wishes to draw some general observations. 5 Oermann's discussion of Schweitzer's time as a student at the University of Strasbourg is illuminating. He is good on the general background, making plain the excellent standing at the time of the recently re-founded university. He describes Schweitzer's many activities, philosophical, theological, musical and, finally medical, at some length. Amongst a number of intriguing 3