"A Stranger and an Enigma" : The Contexts and Contested Legacy of Albert Schweitzer

This book reexamines the life of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweitzer, reassessing in particular his many identities and his cultural and intellectual background. It presents a complex image of Schweitzer and questions his ongoing relevance in a world very different from the one in which he found fame.

Albert Schweitzer is principally known as a medical missionary who went to the Gabon just before the First World War and ended up winning the Nobel Peace Prize in the early 1950s. In this volume, which consists of a lengthy introductory chapter followed by nine studies, most of which have been published before but appear here in modified form, an attempt is made to show how any assessment of Schweitzer must take into account his varied identities, both geographic and cultural (as an Alsatian born in 1875 and dying in 1965, he spent his first forty three years as a German and his next forty-seven as a Frenchman), and intellectual and aesthetic (in so far as he ever had a properly professional job, he was a theologian, though he thought of himself more as a philosopher, and music, in its varied manifestations, played a vital part in his life). Were these identities properly integrated and can one argue that in some way they came together in his decision to go to the Gabon? In the process of answering this question, others are addressed: why was it that Schweitzer became the icon he did and why he is now so little known except in German-speaking lands? And the extent to which his activities in Africa make him a figure of contested character in a post-colonial age? In the process of answering these and other questions, and drawing upon a wealth of recently published material, both primary and secondary, the volume presents its readers with a more complex and difficult image of Schweitzer, who can appear more distant and alien.