Born in Berlin, Helene Schweitzer came of age in Strasbourg during a time of great social, architectural, and historical developments. It was in this cultural milieu, as a history professor’s daughter, that Helene met a young pastor named Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) and developed a deep friendship that flourished for a decade before their marriage in 1912. During those years, she served as the first woman Inspector of City Orphanages in Strasbourg, a position she held for four years before becoming a certified nurse. She also edited and proofread a number of Schweitzer’s books in multiple fields as they worked together to realize their shared dream of devoting their lives to humanity. Together in 1913, Albert and Helene Schweitzer founded what is now the longest-running hospital established by Europeans in Africa, the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in current-day Gabon. With her quiet strength, clear sense of purpose, independent spirit, and wide range of skills and talents, Helene was a model for many other women who later served the Schweitzer Hospital. Drawing upon the couple’s lifelong correspondence, as well as Helene’s journals and professional writing, Marxsen reveals a modern woman of courage in dark times whose resilient, optimistic spirit allowed her to leave a lasting legacy that has yet to be fully understood. Helene Schweitzer’s dramatic life reveals deeper questions of how memory is influenced by gender assumptions and how biography is shaped by place and history. By providing a counter-narrative to the traditional image of a frail woman who sacrificed her life to her husband’s genius, this richly detailed chronicle of a little-known figure invites a larger discussion about the meaning of a woman’s life obscured by a partner’s fame.

This book provides the only personal portrait of Schweitzer, here as a young man on a quest to better the lot of humankind, and of the woman who helped to shape that pursuit. Schweitzer was twenty-six and Helene Bresslau twenty-two when they met. He was preparing for an academic life in theology and philosophy, while his skill as a musician supplemented his intellectual work. Helene stepped beyond the conventions of the day by entering the nursing field, by founding a welfare program for single mothers, and fearlessly stating her own opinions. While Schweitzer searched for his path, Bresslau provided the sounding board for many of his ideas.

The second edition of this biography of humanitarian Albert Schweitzer has been updated to include documents discovered since the work was originally written, including the letters between Schweitzer and Helene Bresslau written during the ten years before their marriage. This correspondence tells of a complicated love story and throws a completely new light on Schweitzer's personality and the genesis of his decision to go to Africa. The author's ongoing research has also included more recently released documents from the State Department regarding Schweitzer's battle with the United States Atomic Energy Commission to halt H-bomb tests.

This new biography provides a rich and varied insight into the life, work, and thought of Albert Schweitzer, an individual of mythical stature who was active as a theologian, musician, philosopher, physician, and missionary. Schweitzer's life was not, however, a straight path from his provincial birthplace in Alsace to his university studies in Strasbourg, then leading directly to his missionary work at a jungle hospital in Lambarene and ending with the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. In every life there are detours and setbacks-and Schweitzer's life was no exception. The actual course of Schweitzer's life, however, is barely discernible in his autobiography, Out of my Life and Thought. This idealized life story has been told and retold by biographers and journalists with relatively little critical scrutiny. Drawing on published and unpublished material including newly released personal papers shedding light on Schweitzer's dealings with the East German authorities and his role in the anti-nuclear movement as well as a number of interviews-most notably with his daughter Rhena-Oermann succeeds in creating not only a more realistic, but also a more humane portrait of Albert Schweitzer.

In this book, Nies-Berger, a fellow Alsatian who had known Schweitzer since childhood, chronicles their collaboration during the final decade and a half of Schweitzer's life and presents his candid observations of this extraordinary man and the people around him.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Albert Schweitzer was one of the best-known figures on the world stage. Courted by monarchs, world statesmen, and distinguished figures from the literary, musical, and scientific fields, Schweitzer was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952, cementing his place as one of the great intellectual leaders of his time. Schweitzer is less well known now but nonetheless a man of perennial fascination, and this volume seeks to bring his achievements across a variety of areas—philosophy, theology, and medicine—into sharper focus. To that end, international scholars from diverse disciplines offer a wide-ranging examination of Schweitzer’s life and thought over the course of forty years. Albert Schweitzer in Thought and Action gives readers a fuller, richer, and more nuanced picture of this controversial but monumental figure of twentieth-century life—and, in some measure, of that complex century itself.