In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf trenchantly reflects on the interrelations of, and disparities within, art, society, and gender. One passage, though a seemingly innocuous aside of a past memory, is particularly insightful to the purposes of this review. Woolf states, “I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in; and, thinking of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and of the poverty and insecurity of the other and of the effect of tradition and of the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer . . . one seemed alone with an inscrutable society” (Mariner Books, 1989 [1929], 24).
Woolf brilliantly holds in suspension the abilities to see into and out of any given society. We stand locked out, locked in, and before the inscrutability of social imaginaries. If there is merit to the reflection that, as Marc Augé put it only slightly differently from Woolf, that we have yet learned to face the world in which we are living (Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity [Verso Press, 1995], pp. 35–36), perhaps it is along these lines where the popularity of—and, indeed, the necessity for—the biographic genre rests. Might the study of lives past open critical tears within our own positionality? And yet, this is the challenge of the genre. There is something about life which appears to protect itself from being wrested from another time and positionality. Life appears wild and reticent. There is no capturing of it; only its form.
Such problematics lend themselves to thinking through the new English translation of Nils Ole Oermann's excellent biography on Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965). (For the original, see Oermann, Albert Schweitzer, 1875–1965: Eine Biographie [C. H. Beck, 2009].) What is there from the life of a largely-forgotten Schweitzer—heralded as “the greatest man in the world” in 1949 by Life Magazine and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952—that might lend itself to the urgencies of our moment? This, again, is a question on the aesthetics of form and representations of life. In the case of Albert Schweitzer, such questions are complicated by the carefully constructed forms he himself lent to his own life: two autobiographies; three collections of stories and memories from a life lived in Lambarene, Gabon; and countless interviews and biopic pieces given to journalists. With the appearance of several volumes of previously unpublished lectures, manuscripts, and letters—sources that Oermann fruitfully interjects into his account of Schweitzer's life with great aplomb—a more complex image of this complicated man emerges (Albert Schweitzer: Werke aus dem Nachlass [C. H. Beck 1995–2006]. See, too, the invaluable letters published as Albert Schweitzer – Helene Bresslau: die Jahre vor Lambarene: Briefe, 1902–1912 [C.H. Beck, 1992]).
In his own carefully constructed visage, there appeared to be an inevitable line—the course of which was stylized in epiphanic fashion which Schweitzer dates to 1896—from a brilliant academic career in philosophy and theology and the European fame of a concert organist, to life lived in the service of others as a jungle doctor in Africa. With the publication of his Nachlaß, however, such an image can no longer be maintained. The road to Lambarene was one which wound, turned, and often laid blocked with a fair share of turning back. None of this was admitted by Schweitzer to anyone with the exception of his “loyal comrade,” Helene Bresslau, in a series of letters now available.
Exploring such cracks in Schweitzer's carefully constructed form is perhaps where Oermann's biography shines brightest with breath-taking economy. The “task of the biographer,” as Oermann sees it, “is to show where his subject has failed to live up to” their own set ideal. This tension is the theme which holds together the gripping narrative of Oermann's prose. Burning within and driving his many talents was the flame of Schweitzer's ethical ideal of reverence for life. This principle was a timeless ethic of envisioning life as a will to live amidst other wills to live. It was not an ethics of practical or utilitarian direction. It was more of an awareness which saw the demands of life constantly placing one before the necessity of making ethical decisions. In light of such an ideal, disturbing incongruities emerge.
Reverence for life was applied to all of life and yet Schweitzer was no vegetarian. Moreover, how can an ideal of reverence for life tolerate silences on the Deutsches Reich or the persecution and execution of the Jews? Such silence is all the more disturbing in light of his “loyal comrade's” Jewish ethnicity. Though Oermann does not go into Schweitzer's silences with much detail, he intriguingly theorizes that it was against the embarrassments and disasters of the World War II that Europe rushed Schweitzer's efforts in Lambarene to the front of its own self-imagination. He was the saint in the jungle that reminded Europe of its greater heritages despite its recent demons. He was the savior which mediated a sense of deplorable guilt.
No one was more famous in Europe nor throughout the world from after the war up until the late 1950s. The world was his stage, and dignitaries and world leaders were in awe of him. This image might have set the stage for Schweitzer's inevitable infamy in many circles in the wake of African decolonialization. The world had moved on from Schweitzer and his backward views of colonialism and the African. He had become Europe's scapegoat. The assessment of Schweitzer and Africa and the legacy of his hospital still merit further investigation. Oermann, for his part, ably situates the well-intended vision of Schweitzer's hospital within the sweeping currents of cultural sea change. And, despite its clumsy incongruities, Oermann judges that the ideal of Schweitzer's ethical vision is more relevant today than it was in Schweitzer's days.
Schweitzer, in many ways, was a man who was both locked in his Enlightenment heritage and out of the pressing realities of his moment. He also stood isolated before an inscrutable Africa. Despite the publication of his Nachlaß, he also remains locked out from our current moment. Oermann's biography, however, ably and admirably wrests the greatness and tragedy of Schweitzer in attractive and tidy compass. His influence remains in some academic realms and in the several hospitals and fellowships devoted to his ethical vision. And now, thanks to Oermann, the life behind that vision may make a bit more sense, too.
