 …
In the meantime we are going to show a
film about a man who has one thing in
common with Henry Kissinger — the
NOBEL PEACE PRIZE!
We think, he should be able to contribute
to the theme „Civilization and
Ethics“.
In addition, he has, as we already heard,
stimulated the German Kissinger-friend
and SPIEGEL-publisher Rudolf Augstein to
go against his conviction and to research
the earthly life of JESUS.
The man had succeeded to receive two
Ph.D.-titles, the first one in
philosophy, the second one in theology,
before he received the third one in
medicine in 1913 based on his doctoral
thesis by the title „The Psychiatric
Study of Jesus“. Certainly a rather
unusual theme for a medical dissertation
…
In this work, he tried to contradict, as
he already had attempted in his
theological dissertation, any effort to
analyze the life of Jesus from a
psychiatric point of view. He maintained
that the life of Jesus must be
interpreted in the light of Jesus’
own convictions, which reflected late
Jewish eschatology; he wrote: „The
Jesus of Nazareth who came forward
publicly as the Messiah, who preached the
ethic of the kingdom of God, who founded
the kingdom of heaven upon earth and died
to give his work its final consecration
never existed.“
… But, the man’s drive was
towards the heathen in Africa! This man’s
attitudes we would like to get to know a
bit better in his worldly context!
CONTROL! START FILM, PLEASE!
 ALBERT SCHWEITZER
Academy Award for Best Documentary
Feature for 1957
Fredric March - Voice of Albert
Schweitzer
Albert Schweitzer - Himself
Phillip Eckert - Young Albert Schweitzer
Adele Woytt - Albert Schweitzer’s
Mother
Burgess Meredith - Narrator
Our culture divides people into two
classes: civilized men, a title bestowed
on the persons who do the classifying;
and others, who have only the human form,
who may perish or go to the dogs for all
the „civilized men“ care.
Oh, this „noble“ culture of
ours! It speaks so piously of human
dignity and human rights and then
disregards this dignity and these rights
of countless millions and treads them
underfoot, only because they live
overseas or because their skins are of
different colour or because they cannot
help themselves. This culture does not
know how hollow and miserable and full of
glib talk it is, how common it looks to
those who follow it across the seas and
see what it has done there, and this
culture has no right to speak of personal
dignity and human rights ...
I will not enumerate all the crimes that
have been committed under the pretext of
justice. People robbed native inhabitants
of their land, made slaves of them; let
loose the scum of mankind upon them.
Think of the atrocities that were
perpetrated upon people made subservient
to us, how systematically we have ruined
them with our alcoholic „gifts“,
and everything else we have done ... We
decimate them, and then, by the stroke of
a pen, we take their land so they have
nothing left at all ...
If all this oppression and all this sin
and shame are perpetrated under the eye
of the German God, or the American God,
or the British God, and if our states do
not feel obliged first to lay aside their
claim to be „Christian“ —
then the name of Jesus is blasphemed and
made a mockery. And the Christianity of
our states is blasphemed and made a
mockery before those poor people. The
name of Jesus has become a curse, and our
Christianity — yours and mine —
has become a falsehood and a disgrace, if
the crimes are not atoned for in the very
place where they were instigated. For
every person who committed an atrocity in
Jesus‘ name, someone must step in to
help in Jesus‘ name; for every
person who robbed, someone must bring a
replacement; for everyone who cursed,
someone must bless.
And now, when you speak about missions,
let this be your message: We must make
atonement for all the terrible crimes we
read of in the newspapers. We must make
atonement for the still worse ones, which
we do not read about in the papers,
crimes that are shrouded in the silence
of the jungle night ...
We are
now welcoming as a German contemporary
witness Herr Werner Möllenkamp, born in
1921. Herr Möllenkamp was brought up in
East Prussia. He was called from the
school bench to military service at the
beginning of World War II sent to fight
at the German Eastern Front.
After war, he studied engineering science
and worked overseas for a German
enterprise …
Herr Möllenkamp, you brought us your
novel …
„Excuse me, I did not call this
‚Attempt to report about a
Mounting-Effort’ a novel!“
Correct,
but one of your reviewers did; he was so
impressed that he wrote …
10
This contemporary novel will become
once a historic novel of a time when the
last products of prosperity have been
dumped at the threshold of another
civilisation, when black people appeared
to us as not inscrutable, although they
had found us inscrutable all the time
… (Bernhard Boie)
Please,
read to us what you felt for Africa
personally — as you scribbled down
your experiences for this tale.
10
Everything in life is farewell,
departure, journey and arrival. Images
and colours make a show along the way, no
face being capable to see all magic of
this earth. Clearness and brightness of
the firmament blind the eyes, songs of
the night befool the ears.
Here in Africa, the stars are more
cheerful, warmer the fires, more rapid
the waters, poorer and richer is man who
passes the surf to set the foot onto the
reddish dust of the savannah. More
pitiless is the animal, more opulent is
nature — or fuller of stones and
more cruel than all cruelty under the
clouds.
Time is passing faster, shorter is the
being, more sudden the death. One moment
still play and movement, the next is
decay, already luring the spotted hyenas.
Vultures accompany the tired wanderer.
Fruit and profit refuse to sprout where
mildness invites to remain and will grow
wildly where the tropical prick targets
the pore.
Africa lifts us up and pushes us down.
Here is fate changing tirelessly, more
unruly, more incomprehensible than
anywhere else under the Southern Cross.
We
look around — white travellers are
nodding, black travellers seem less
impressed by your emotional portrait of
Africa, Herr Möllenkamp ...
Kofi does have an objection? … Oh,
sorry, Kofi! We forgot! You are the third
one in this small league of NOBEL PEACE
PRIZE WINNERS! Hold on — we are
planning another summit as soon as we
have re-arranged our railway-set —
accepted? … Hach, isn’t he a
perfect diplomat? ...
Back to you, Herr Möllenkamp: your book
is not a narration from a
railway-construction-site but from
another project that attempted to bring
modern times to Africa. It tells the
story of the building of a dam …
Never heard the name of this man, Mr.
Rockefeller?
He and his colleagues brought LIGHT to
Africa! German engineers helped to
produce electricity from the power of
water, and Werner Möllenkamp’s
‚Attempt to report about a
Mounting-Effort’ tells us about
trials and errors of these engineers to
mount turbines behind the dam along a
river in Angola at a time when this
territory in Southwest Africa was still
reigned by Portuguese colonialists
against first clusters of liberation
fighters.
Five decades earlier, another engineer,
an „Engineer of the Soul“, did
preach in the St. Nikolai Church of
Strasbourg. It was the 6th of January
1907 — mission-day:
CONTROL! LET ROLL THE TEXT, PLEASE!
… What is on the
mind of our states
once they look across the sea? …
What they can get out of these countries
to their advantage. Where are the
workers, the craftsmen, the teachers, the
scientists, the medical practitioners who
travel to these countries? Is there any
effort by our society in this regard?
Nothing …
In
1912, armed with a medical degree, Albert
Schweitzer made a definite proposal to go
as a medical doctor to work at his own
expense in the Paris Missionary Society’s
mission at Lambaréné on the Ogooué
River, in what is now the Gabon in Africa
and what was then a French colony.
By concerts — he had rapidly gained
prominence as a musical scholar and
organist as well — and by other
fund-raising he was ready to equip a
small hospital. In spring 1913, he and
his wife set off to establish a hospital
near an already existing mission post.
The site was nearly two hundred miles, or
fourteen days by raft, upstream from the
mouth of the Ogooé at Port Gentil which
is now Cape Lopez.
In the first nine months, he and his wife
had about two thousand patients to
examine, some travelling many days and
hundreds of kilometres to reach him.
And you, Herr Möllenkamp, had a chance
to meet him in 1957 in Lambaréné …
10
The observant visitor was immediately
aware that Albert Schweitzer had left
behind the shades of the bush-hospital
and had turned into a World Spirit. But
the appearance of the great old man did
not hint his eighty-three years.
Philosopher, theologian, medical
practitioner and now — since five
years — NOBEL PEACE LAUREATE ...
At the time when we were in Lambaréné
we were lucky enough that there were no
representatives of American women leagues
visiting or the American Vice President
for that matter; so we were honoured to
listen to Dr. Schweitzer during lunch and
dinner.
He talked about the black peoples and the
law of increasing distance between the
proprietors of wealth and the ‚descamisados‘
(lingo from Argentina = ‚Have-nots‘).
About the absence of an ordering power
and the need to establish one for the
world to have reduced the distance, to
find compromises.
Albert Schweitzer talked about his
correspondence with John Foster Dulles
and his efforts to convince him that the
United States of America could not play
such a role, could not play a model-role
on behalf of the free world. In order to
teach tolerance and harmony it may need
the wisdom of an old nation; and after a
moment, he said: „It is astonishing
how progressive the Americans are and how
little they understand of world politics.“
Albert Schweitzer moved his plate aside
and opened the bible; he read a chapter,
then interpreted it. Then he spoke a
prayer, walked over to the piano at the
wall on the right side of the entrance.
He played a church-song and continued
with a Bach-improvisation …
He knew it already then? That the
Americans don’t understand world
politics — in 1957? „The Quiet
American“ had already moved secretly
rail-points in Indochina …
What strumming is coming from outside?
It’s a piano — it’s a
Fugue in E minor!
A what? ... Heavens! There has grown a
huge building next to the platform!
And that strumming comes from there!
Yellow painted walls, red roof-tiles,
gavel-, window-, doorframes hewn from
sandstone, a kind of bell-tower with an
old green copper-roof …
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