By Anoop Bose
“You must give something to your fellow man even if it is a little, something for what you have received in return.”
Schweitzer was born in Kaysersberg or “Emperor’s Mountain”, one of the finest wine-growing communes in Upper Alsace (then part of Germany, now part of France), on 14th January, 1875. During that year, his father Louis Théophile Schweitzer, a Lutheran-Evangelical pastor, moved with his family to the picturesque village of Gunsbach, nestled amid the foothills of the Vosges mountains, where he became the vicar at one of the churches.
In Gunsbach, Schweitzer received his first academic schooling. The love of music was handed down in the Schweitzer family from his maternal grandfather, Pastor Jean Jacques Schillinger of Muhlbach, who had been an organist. Schweitzer began studying the piano when he was only five, the harmonium when he was seven and the organ at eight. The organ became his favourite instrument at a time when his feet barely reached the pedals. By the time he was nine, he was sufficiently adept to be able to substitute for the parish organist at church services.
Schweitzer received his first intensive instruction at the Strasbourg Conservatory from Ernest Münch, who was for many years the organist/choirmaster at St. Wilhelm’s Church, Strasbourg, and a passionate admirer of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music. In 1885, he entered the Mülhausen Grammar School, where his music teacher Eugène Münch, the brother of Ernest Münch, first introduced him to the works of Bach.
After he had completed eight years at the Grammar School, his father’s elder brother Karl Schweitzer, the maternal grandfather of the firebrand French philosopher, playwright, novelist, political activist, biographer and literary critic Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre, took him to Paris to meet the titanic French organist Charles-Marie Widor, who was so impressed with the musical acumen of Schweitzer that he immediately decided to teach him gratuitously.
Schweitzer later wrote, “Widor led me on to a fundamental improvement of my technique and made me strive to attain perfect elasticity of playing. At the same time it dawned in me, thanks to him, the meaning of architecture in music.”
In 1893, Schweitzer entered the Kaiser Wilhelm University of Strasbourg as a student of theology, philosophy and musical theory. There he also received instruction in piano and counterpoint from Professor Gustav Jacobsthal, and continued to be closely associated with Ernest Münch.
His studies were briefly interrupted in 1894, when he had to perforce undergo a year’s compulsory military service. This was for him a time for introspection and self-analysis. The moment of awakening came as he was reading the chapter in the Bible that contained Jesus’ injunctions to His Apostles and in particular the one that commanded, “Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils, freely ye have received, freely give!”
Schweitzer returned to the University for continuation of his studies in 1895 and a year later made a silent vow to concentrate his life for the next nine years to science and art and thereafter to dedicate himself to the service of humanity.
Music was not entirely forgotten. In 1896, Schweitzer inaugurated a series of concerts of Bach’s organ music at Strasbourg. That very year, he was at the Paris-Sorbonne University completing his doctoral thesis on the religious philosophy of the great German paradigmatic philosopher Emmanuel Kant.
One year later, at the age of 24, he received his Doctorate in Theology from the University of St. Nicholas in Strasbourg. In 1903, he was appointed the Principal of the Theological College of St. Thomas.
Music continued to be of prime interest for him and he built for himself an enviable reputation as an organ virtuoso and an outstanding exponent of Bach’s music. From 1901 to 1911, he was the organist of both the J.S. Bach Society in Paris and of the Orféo Català in Barcelona.
At Widor’s urging, he wrote a monumental biography of Bach which was published in 1905 as “J.S. Bach: Le Musicien-Poète” or “J.S. Bach — Musician Poet”. Almost at once, Schweitzer was asked to produce a German translation, but instead of doing so, he decided to rewrite it. The result was two volumes entitled “J.S. Bach”, which were published in 1908 and translated into English by the celebrated British musicologist and music critic Ernest Newman in 1911.
In 1906, Schweitzer published his magnum opus “Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung” or “History of Life-of-Jesus Research”, which was first translated into English by the gifted Presbyterian minister and cryptographer Rev. William Montgomery and published in 1910 as “The Quest of the Historical Jesus”.
True to his pledge, Schweitzer turned from music and theology to the direct service of humanity. On 13th October, 1905, he wrote to his parents and friends informing them of his decision to prepare himself for the life of a medical missionary in French Equatorial Africa.
Schweitzer received his medical degree in 1913 with a specialization in tropical medicine and surgery. Meanwhile in 1912, he married his close friend Hélène Mariane Bresslau, the daughter of a Jewish Pan-Germanist professor of history in the University of Strasbourg, who became a collaborator in his medical and literary pursuits.
On Good Friday, 1913, the couple set sail from Bordeaux, France, for Africa, where Schweitzer established a hospital in a disused chicken house on the grounds of the Lambaréné Station of the Paris Missionary Society in French Congo, now Gabon. The news of Schweitzer’s arrival spread like wildfire and sick people came to him from far and wide to receive his healing touch. To them all, his noble spirit of compassion poured out unceasingly. In nine months, he treated over 2,000 men, women and children and came to grips with almost every conceivable tropical disease.
The natives were so thoroughly impressed by the magic of his medicines and the efficacy of his anaesthetics that they started proclaiming, “First he kills sick people, then he cures them, and then he vexes them up.” When darkness fell and his patients had left the hospital, Schweitzer would sit down at his “tropicalized” pedal piano, which had been presented to him by the J.S. Bach Society as a “parting gift”, and peal out in the stillness of the jungle the majesty of Bach’s music.
When the First World War broke out in 1914, Schweitzer and his wife, as German citizens, were interned as Prisoners of War, but were eventually permitted to return to their home in Gunsbach in early 1918. During these war years, he wrote a book on “Africa on the Edge of the Primeval Forest” and two volumes on the “Philosophy of Civilisation”.
On 14th January, 1919, Schweitzer’s daughter Rhena was born in Strasbourg. In 1922, he toured Europe extensively and gave several recitals to raise money for rebuilding his hospital at Lambaréné, which had been razed to the ground during the cataclysmic course of the Great War.
To the hundreds of Europeans who flocked to his recitals, he presented Bach as a religious mystic as cosmic as the forces of nature. His European concerts greatly shaped the interpretation and understanding of Bach’s music.
In 1922, he delivered the prestigious Dale Memorial Lectures at Oxford University, which formed the basis of his great work “The Decay and Restoration of Civilization and Civilization and Ethics”, published a year later.
Schweitzer returned to Lambaréné in 1924 to supervise the construction of a new hospital building. From 1925 to 1928, he was once again in Europe to give concerts in Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Switzerland, Germany and Czechoslovakia to raise money for his hospital.
In 1928, the Municipality of Frankfurt awarded him the coveted Goethe Prize of 10,000 marks, enabling him to build a guest house in Gunsbach to which he retreated from time to time for rest, relaxation and contemplation.
In 1931, he published “Mystik des Apostels Paulus” or “The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle” which was also translated into English by Rev. Montgomery. Whilst in Gunsbach, Schweitzer could often be seen leaving home to slip over to the church to play Bach.
Stephen Zweig recorded: “And in the dark empty church Schweitzer plays his favourite Johann Sebastian Bach — unforgettable experience. Never did I sense the metaphysical might of Bach as I did there in this little Protestant Church, evoked and interpreted in utter devotion by a truly religious man.”
Schweitzer was a large man, six feet tall with a well developed physique and strong muscles. An unmistakable bushy moustache flowed over his fine sensitive lips. He was a simple, almost rustic man, who dressed in ruffled clothing, suffered fools gladly and worked unobtrusively with a do-good paternalism. His tastes were ascetic.
He drank nothing stronger than wine and was a strict vegetarian and used to say simply, “I can’t eat anything that was alive.” His central precept, “Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben” or “Reverence for Life”, became a catch phrase in a century plagued by war, destruction and lack of care for human existence.
Schweitzer remarked that he first conceived the term “Reverence for Life” in September, 1915 at sunset when he was sailing on the Ogooué River, some 48 miles from Lambaréné. And he sincerely believed that “Reverence for life is the highest court of appeal.”
Significantly, Schweitzer’s philosophy of life was influenced by Indian religious thought and in particular the Jain principle of “ahimsa” or “non-violence”. He recognized the Indian influence in his book “Indian Thought and Its Development”:
“The laying down of the commandment to not kill and to not damage is one of the greatest events in the spiritual history of mankind. Starting from its principle, founded on world and life denial, of abstention from action, ancient Indian thought — and this is a period when in other respects ethics have not progressed very far — reaches the tremendous discovery that ethics know no bounds. So far as we know, this is for the first time clearly expressed by Jainism.”
In a letter dated 29th November, 1964 to the then Indian Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, Schweitzer acknowledged his correspondence with several “Indian friends” including Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru through Charles Freer Andrews, the English missionary, educator and social reformer, and stated that his own ideas “are consistent with Indian ideas” and that the ethics of respect for all living beings “existed for Indian thought for more than two thousand years”.
In 1965, four months before he died, Schweitzer wrote to the Asiatic Society in Kolkata — “I studied Indian philosophy early on, when I was attending the University of Strasbourg, Alsace, even though no course was being given on that subject. But then, around 1900, Europe started getting acquainted with Indian thought. Rabindranath Tagore became known as the great living Indian thinker. When I grew conversant with his teachings, they made a deep impact on me…”
“By the time I completed my doctoral examination in philosophy, I was familiar with Indian thought. By then I was teaching at the University of Strasbourg. Focusing as I did on the problem of ethics, I reached the conclusion that Indian ethics is correct in demanding kindness and mercy not only toward human beings but also toward all living creatures. Now the world is gradually realising that compassion for all living creatures is part of true ethics.”
“The Jungle Saint”, as he was popularly called, staunchly supported complete disarmament and a ban on nuclear weapons. On 23rd April 1957, Schweitzer made his famous “Declaration of Conscience” speech over Radio Oslo, in which he forcefully asserted —
“The end of further experiments with atom bombs would be like the early sunrays of hope which suffering humanity is longing for.”
Stephen Zweig spoke of his life as the “biography of a true hero because of his utter dogmatic immolation of the individual to the ideal of the brand of heroism in men like Gandhi, Romain Rolland and Albert Schweitzer bespeaks the glory of our generation.”
Albert Einstein aptly observed, “He [Albert Schweitzer] is the only Westerner who has had a moral effect on this generation comparable to Gandhi’s. As in the case of Gandhi, the extent of this effect is overwhelmingly due to the example he gave by his own life’s work.”
Schweitzer received many honorary degrees and recognitions from a number of governments and learned societies. In 1951, he was elected to the French Academy. And in 1952 came the crowning achievement of his life — the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to improve “the Brotherhood of Nations”! When he went to Oslo to receive the award, King Oscar Fredrik Wilhelm Olaf Gustaf Adolf told him, “It is I who should bow to you.”
The Nobel Prize cheque of 33,840 US Dollars went to his hospital. In 1955, Schweitzer was honoured at Buckingham Palace by Queen Elizabeth II and made an honorary member of the British Order of Merit.
A major German biographical documentary, scripted by Schweitzer himself and directed by the noted American filmmaker Jerome Hill, was released on 22nd November, 1957 and promptly won an Academy Award.
After his wife’s tragic death in 1957, he remained continuously at Lambaréné.
On 28th August, 1964, shortly before Schweitzer’s 90th birthday, Lal Bahadur Shastri wrote, “I gladly associate myself with the felicitations and good wishes that are being offered to Dr. Albert Schweitzer on the occasion of his 90th birthday. Service of mankind, to which he has dedicated his life, and all that he has accomplished by his selfless and sustained efforts in that direction and also for peace, has not only won our admiration but also the gratitude of millions of people all over the world. The best tribute that we can pay to him is to work ceaselessly to bring back to this power-dominated world, which lives in the shadow of nuclear weapons, the spirit of humanism.”
Schweitzer celebrated his 90th birthday in the company of hundreds of natives who had come to felicitate him. He told them, “I feel at home here. I belong to you until my dying breaths.”
The American President Lyndon Baines Johnson in a congratulatory cable said, “In your commitment to truth and service you have touched and deepened the lives of millions you have never met.”
Shortly thereafter, an American film crew visited to record his work and daily life at the hospital. The result was the historic Warner Brothers film “The Legacy of Albert Schweitzer”, narrated by the charismatic American actor Henry Jaynes “Hank” Fonda.
On 28th August, 1965, Schweitzer fell severely ill from exhaustion and his condition worsened steadily. The end came on 4th September, 1965 in a wooden hut in the jungle hospital. “He died,” said the medical bulletin, “quietly in peace and dignity in his bed.” He was buried next to the urn containing the ashes of his wife. The grave was marked by a spartan cross he had made himself.
President Johnson paid tribute: “The world has lost a truly universal figure. His message and his example, which have lightened the darkest years of this century, will continue to strengthen those who strive to create a world living in peace and brotherhood.”
Lord Bertrand Arthur William Russell paid a fitting farewell homage in his own inimitable manner — “Genuinely good and dedicated men are uncommon. Our age is hardly fit to understand them. It certainly does not deserve them.”
Dr. Schweitzer was both a good and dedicated man. Here, the immortal words of the great American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow inevitably come floating to my mind —
“Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime, and, departing, leave behind us, footprints on the sands of time.”