Contents

• Introduction
• 1 A sense of devotion: from the parsonage to theology (1875 1903)
• A pastor s son in Alsace
• Schooling and early years
• A student of theology, philosophy, and music
• Kant
• Curate, doctoral student, and outsider
• Theologian or mystic?
• 2 Saving the whole: from theology to Bach and then to medicine (1903 1912)
• Bach, or the art of playing the organ
• The path to a decision
• The study of medicine
• The loyal comrade
• 3 The spiritual adventurer: from Strasbourg to the rainforest and back again (1912 1917)
• Departure to equatorial Africa
• Lambarene
• The outbreak of war and deportation
• 4 It is good to preserve life: Albert Schweitzer s philosophy of civilisation
• We are all of us just nothing but epigoni
• Reverence for life
• Philosophy of civilisation and religion
• The importance of animals
• 5 The iron door opens: crisis and breakthrough (1917 1932)
• Return to Alsace
• The lost penny
• Back in Lambarene
• On the right treatment of natives
• 6 With greetings from Central Africa: the time of the Third Reich (1933 1945)
• The calm before the storm
• Lambarene during the war
• 7 Exorcising the ghost of the nuclear war: Schweitzer in the Cold War (1945 1957)
• The greatest man in the world
• The Nobel Peace Prize and its consequences
• Schweitzer, Einstein, and the bomb
• A bell from the German Democratic Republic
• Homo politicus
• 8 How beautiful! The last years (1957 1965)
• Decolonization and criticism
• The ninetieth birthday
• Epilogue: myth and reality
• Timeline
• Explanatory Notes