Willoughby: Albert Schweitzer — role model for many

If you are an aging senior, you are likely having experiences similar to mine. When I bring up a name of someone famous from my youth, my children and grandchildren have never heard of them. That same information gap may be likely for Aspen’s younger generations when you bring up Albert Schweitzer. One of the problems is that with his hair and mustache, photos of him often connect them to Albert Einstein.

Schweitzer was deemed the world’s expert on Bach’s organ compositions and pipe organs. Schweitzer performed to eager audiences in Europe. He was a Lutheran minister, writing several books on religion including a groundbreaking book, “The Quest of the Historical Jesus.”

One cannot recall the modern history of Aspen without starting with Schweitzer. He was the featured speaker for the 1949 Goethe Bicentennial Celebration, the beginning of Aspen’s cultural component, and the only time he visited America. He was not aware of where he was going, and the high altitude of Aspen caused him some problems. He remarked that, “Aspen is too close to Heaven.”

He delivered his speech twice, once in German — translated by playwriter, novelist, and Pulitzer Prize winner Thornton Wilder — and once in French. There were several well-known philosophers there, including Jose Ortega y Gasset and William Ernest Hocking, who also addressed the audiences, but Schweitzer was considered the expert.

Schweitzer also earned a medical degree and in 1913, after raising his own funding, he established his own hospital in Lambaréné in the jungle of French equatorial Africa (now Gabon). He, with the help of his wife, treated patients, many afflicted with leprosy, for decades with breaks mostly during the two world wars.

My aunts, uncles, and parents volunteered for the events and attended Schweitzer’s speech. During my childhood, when he was featured in articles or the Aspen Institute was a topic of discussion, their admiration of him was evident. 

In the late ’60s, those childhood references prodded me to find out more about him and because college students at the time were also talking about him as a role model. My aunt, Francis Herron, dug out her collection from the Goethe Bicentennial for me. Included were recordings of his speech (with Thornton Wilder translating to English) made by Ed Smart who, like others exposed to Aspen for the first time in 1949, came back and established residency.  

Schweitzer won the Nobel Peace in 1952. Over a decade later, it resonated with my generation, especially his “Reverence for Life” writings. In his autobiography, he recounted his own childhood discomfort when animals needlessly died, and he even extended that to insets. One of the stories I remember reading about him was that, in Gabon surrounding his hospital, there were often army ants, and a sick person lying alone would be carried off by them, and yet he did not want to kill the ants.

Living through two world wars and the introduction of nuclear weapons, Schweitzer’s “Reverence For Life” seemed appropriate in our Vietnam War time. He died in 1965, so media obituaries revived his philosophies. This was also the time when social justice was the focus of some religious denominations. The Peace Corp was a popular choice, and fighting for racial justice at home was necessary. His role model imparted that religion was not something you did for a few hours on Sundays — loving and helping your neighbor should be a mindful element of your existence. 

Because it is often abbreviated, we forget that the original name was: The Aspen Institute For Humanistic Studies. The philosophies of Goethe, as heartened by Schweitzer in words and action, were important underpinnings for its founding. Maybe the next Ideas Conference could be arranged around Goethe and Schweitzer’s world views, as appropriate today as they were in 1949.

As he wrote in 1965, “I am certain, and have always stressed, that the destination of mankind is to become more and more humane. The idea of humanity has to be revived. Without this ideal, we are lost human beings.”