In February of 1910 the thirty-five-year-old Albert Schweitzer records in a letter to his fiancée, Helene Bresslau, that he attended a lecture in Strasbourg given by Hermann Gunkel, the rising star of Old Testament studies, then in his late forties, on the Psalms. Schweitzer had a conversation with him afterwards on matters to do with the New Testament (Gunkel, after all, had written his first major work on St. Paul and could quite legitimately be called a New Testament scholar too). Schweitzer then continues his letter by recording how wonderful it was to sense the difference between himself and Gunkel, one who to his finger tips was the theology professor, the pure theologian, and Schweitzer, who was so powerfully overtaken by a sense of himself as a person (Mensch). This encounter, which tells us more about Schweitzer's complex mental disposition at the time than anything else, hints, indirectly, at a problem, pertinent to this review of Konrad Hammann's vast and erudite biography of Gunkel, namely the aim of writing a biography about a person who spent much of his life in his study.

Gunkel was born in 1862 in the Lower Saxon town of Lüneberg into a clerical family: his father and grand-father had been Lutheran ministers. After attending the classical Gymnasium, or grammar school, in his hometown, he went on to study at the University of Göttingen and Giessen during which time he met a number of individual who were to influence him, not least of whom was the young Adolf von Harnack, the Old Testament scholars, Bernhard Duhm and Bernhard Stade, and a number of students, including William Wrede, Albert Eichhorn, Wilhelm Bousset and Johannes Weiss. It was during these years that Gunkel joined the ‘Akademisch-Theologischer Verein’. Discussion here and elsewhere with some of those mentioned above would eventually lead to the formation of the Religionsgecshichtliche Schule, which, rebelling against both a Ritschlian approach to biblical study in terms of doctrine and the Wellhausian view of strict literary-critical study of the Old Testament, sought to take more seriously the Bible as a witness to a certain form of religiosity (‘die lebendige Religion in ihrer Tiefe und Mannigfaltigkeit zu erfassen’, as Gunkel was to write), whose roots lay in the ancient Near East and not exclusively within Israel. Undertaking doctoral work in Göttingen, Gunkel produced his first book in 1888, on Paul and the spirit, arguing for the need to attend to the actuality and reality of the spirit in Paul. He then moved to Halle for further study and then on to Berlin as an Extraordinarius. The years at Halle and Berlin (1889–1907) were to see the writing of some his greatest works including Schöpfung und Chaos (1895), and his commentary on Genesis (1901) as well as early works on the Psalms and important books on Jewish apocalyptic. These books were guided by ‘religionsgeschichtlich’ principles and elicited strongly contrasting responses from the scholarly world, with a notoriously negative response to Schöpfung from Wellhausen himself. In 1907, and after a number of attempts to find a position as an Ordinarius, Gunkel moved to Giessen. There he flourished both before, during and after the war, writing a number of important works on the prophets and on the fairy tales in the Old Testament, It was also then that he was chosen to become a major editor of the important encyclopedia Religion in der Geschichte und Gegenwart for which he wrote 342 articles, before moving to Halle in 1920, where, having completed his great commentary on the Psalms in 1926, and edited the second edition of RGG he was to die in 1932, somewhat regretful that he had not had sufficient time to achieve what he had wanted.

Hammann has written a clear, readable and informative book. He has a sound knowledge of the broader intellectual and social background out of which Gunkel emerged and so is able to contextualise the roots of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, explaining its appeal and the opposition that it encountered as well as the wider theological concerns which it embodied. He is also attentive to the importance of various personalities in the theological history of the time and gives arresting sketches of Gunkel's relationships with, amongst others, Albert Eichhorn, Hugo Gressmann and Wilhelm Bousset. Inevitably, the book is dominated by discussions of Gunkel's great books and reaction to them, but Hammann also brings to light other facets of Gunkel's work and character. So he is keen to play up Gunkel's commitment to the wider dissemination of scholarship by showing how often he addressed wider audiences on his research, or Old Testament research more generally, and how he wrote regularly in newspapers and more popular journals, though sometimes out of financial necessity (indeed Gunkel, who during the early part of his career struggled to keep his family in a way of living that they deserved, wrote to Harnack in 1917, just before an operation which he feared that he was not going to survive, that he would have achieved so much more had he not had to earn his bread by means other than straightforward scholarship). Gunkel's desire to engage with a wider audience was also in part a motivating force behind his work for the RGG, which was intended to make religious scholarship available to a wider public (principally from the perspective of the Religionsgeschichtlliche Schule, at least in its first edition; the second edition was avowedly more ‘catholic’ in its approach), including pastors in their parishes, and the educated middle class (this in contrast to the earlier Realenzyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche, written for a specialist audience). While Gunkel's religiosity is a subject of discussion – he was in many ways a classic liberal with his emphasis on the ethical message of Christianity, and this in spite of his sensitive ear for religion as something irrational and ecstatic as well as liturgical (here one thinks particularly of his work on the Psalms with their stress upon their original liturgical settings) - this does not form a central part of the work, not unsurprisingly (in fact Gunkel was keener to write in the popular press than he was to give sermons). Hammann does, however, point up the relationship between Gunkel's scholarly work and his understanding of faith, quite correctly when one thinks of the wider intellectual influences which operated on the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule. Hammann also has interesting discussions of Gunkel's attitude to the First World War, and to the Jews. In the former Gunkel emerges as a nationalist but one of the milder kind, who advocated post-war internationalism, but who was willing to defend the German cause, sometimes strongly (Hammann reproduces a particularly harsh poem about the British and their blockade of German ports). On the Jews Gunkel seems to have moderated his initially quite harsh views, seen in his opinion that Jews in Germany could only be properly integrated into society if they converted, and, in his commentary on Esther, where Gunkel seeks, almost sympathetically, to explain the reaction of Haman to the Jews on the grounds of their religious hauteur. But he was a harsh opponent of anti-Semitic outbursts (here reflecting the opinion of many mildly anti-Jewish liberals like Harnack), and invited Jewish scholars like Ismar Elbogen to contribute the second edition of the RGG; and, despite invoking the wrath of some Jewish scholars for his views about Judaism, he was in fact asked to contribute to the Jüdische Enzyklopädie.

Much else could be highlighted, not least Gunkel's sober participation in the Bibel-Babel Streit of the late 1890s, but what emerges most powerfully from Hammann's labours is Gunkel the assiduous scholar. His erudition, his originality allied to his expansive imagination (he was always to maintain that exegesis was an art, not surprisingly in a man who had started life as a poet and was to write poetry for most of his life) and his enthusiasm (in his days as a student in Göttingen he was known as ‘der lustige Gunkel’). That he was a massively significant figure in the history of Old Testament scholarship, few would doubt. Like his former pupil Bultmann for the New Testament, histories of Old Testament (and indeed New Testament on some subjects) scholarship in a variety of areas will often begin with him, or feature him as a titanic player, and it is striking that a new English translation of Schöpfung und Chaos was published as recently as 2006. But here, I think, we get to the nub of the problem with which I started this review. To what extent is it really helpful to write a biography of such a person as Gunkel whose greatest activity did not take place in a straightforwardly public sphere, or in actions of certain kinds, but almost exclusively within his head? Of course, aspects of his life might be partially illuminated by such a form of writing and it is interesting to learn about Gunkel's personality, though Hammann is clear that our knowledge of the latter is ‘limited’ (‘bedingt’). The reader does gain a general sense of the world out of which Gunkel emerged, of its scholarly networks and personalities; and certain specific moments are illuminated, for example through the contextualisation of the origins of the RGG, or the origins of some of the works which appeared during the First World War. But others are not, or at least any more than they have already been. There is little, for instance, in what Hammann writes, which explains any more clearly than was previously the case why and indeed when the Religiosgeschichtliche Schule emerged, and the reader is left somewhat in the dark about why orientalising views of the origins of Judaism and Christianity were becoming popular at the time (so, for instance, in an understandably Germano-centric bibliography, no mention is made of Suzanne Marchand's ground-breaking German orientalism in the age of empire (Cambridge 2009), which makes a number of references to Gunkel but places him within the context of a wider historical movement). Gunkel may be the product of his time, at least in general terms, but his life was broadly uneventful, and what matters most about him, his marvellous and engaging books, which, as already noted, are the main emphasis of the work, are only very partially illuminated by knowing about that broadly peaceful life.

These are churlish words to end on, however, just as Schweitzer's words about Gunkel can appear churlish. Hammann has brought together a mass of information about a great scholar and in so doing has illuminated an age, the high point of German Bildungskultur. When one reads this work one has a sense of another world where German scholars like Gunkel, who dominated biblical scholarship, could for a number of reasons write a multitude of works of real value in varieties of areas, putting into a shadow, it might seem, the efforts of their more modern followers, often less well-informed, and forced by dint of circumstance, to entertain a more specialised and limited view of their work.