Goethe: His Personality and His Work

by Albert Schweitzer, Thornton Wilder

The only speech the great humanitarian and scholar ever made in the U.S. Thornton Wilder alternates sentence by sentence with Schweitzer to provide English translation.

Audio CD

First published April 24, 1949

About the author

Albert Schweitzer, M.D., OM, was an Alsatian theologian, musician, philosopher, and physician. He was born in Kaisersberg in Alsace-Lorraine, a Germanophone region which the German Empire returned to France after World War I. Schweitzer challenged both the secular view of historical Jesus current at his time and the traditional Christian view, depicting a Jesus who expected the imminent end of the world. He received the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize in 1953 for his philosophy of "reverence for life", expressed in many ways, but most famously in founding and sustaining the Lambaréné Hospital in Gabon, west central Africa.