Albert Schweitzer
1875 – 1965 · Germany
Known for: Physician, organist and thinker of reverence for life, Nobel Peace Prize of 1952
“I am life that wills to live, in the midst of life that wills to live.”
Biography
Albert Schweitzer was born on 14 January 1875 in Kaysersberg in Alsace, then part of the German Empire, and grew up in the village of Gunsbach, where his father served as the Lutheran pastor and gave him his first music lessons. The medieval parish church there was shared by Protestants and Catholics, who prayed in the same building at different hours, and that early lesson in tolerance stayed with him. He studied the organ with Eugène Munch in Mulhouse, and in 1893 he played for Charles-Marie Widor in Paris, who was so struck by him that he taught the young Alsatian without a fee. From 1893 he read Protestant theology at Strasbourg and took a doctorate in 1899 with a dissertation on the religious philosophy of Kant, and he later added a degree in medicine, completed in 1913.
Two vocations ran side by side. As a musician and scholar he argued that Bach's chorale preludes were pictorial, their figures painting the words of the hymns behind them, an idea he set out in J. S. Bach: Le Musicien-Poète in 1905 and rewrote for a two volume German edition in 1908. His essay of 1906 on organ building launched the Orgelbewegung, which turned organ builders away from romantic excess and back towards baroque principles. In the same year he published The Quest of the Historical Jesus, which unsettled liberal scholarship and church tradition alike by placing Jesus firmly within the apocalyptic expectation of his own age. Then he began medicine, and in 1913 he left with his wife Helene, a trained nurse, for Lambaréné in French Equatorial Africa, in what is now Gabon, to build a hospital in the forest beside the Ogooué river.
The hospital had to be built again after the First World War, during which the couple were interned as German citizens, and he paid for it with organ recitals and lectures across Europe. He worked there for the rest of his life, treating leprosy, dysentery and sleeping sickness, and he formulated the ethic he called reverence for life, the refusal to destroy or injure any living thing without necessity. The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to him for it in 1952, and he spent the prize money on a village for patients with leprosy. In his last years he spoke publicly against nuclear weapons testing. Schweitzer died at Lambaréné on 4 September 1965, at the age of ninety, and was buried beside the river.