One year into his furlough, Albert learned that he’d been awarded the Goethe Prize for “services to humanity,” for which he received 10,000 Deutsche marks as prize money. It was a great honor. Albert decided to use the money for a project he’d been dreaming of since his father’s death—a permanent home in Gunsbach, not just for himself but as a headquarters for the work in Lambaréné. It would be a place where hospital workers could stay on furlough and where items could be gathered and shipped to Gabon. Emmy Martin, who’d returned from Lambaréné, agreed to run the house and represent the hospital’s needs in France. Albert designed the building himself and took great delight in watching its construction. How much easier it was to get things built in Alsace!
By the end of Albert’s second year of furlough, the Gunsbach house was complete and Emmy had moved in. Rhena was attending a Moravian boarding school nearby, and Albert felt it was time for him to return to Lambaréné, accompanied by his wife. Hélène’s health had been up and down as usual during Albert’s time home, but she was determined to go with him to Africa. In early December 1929, they set sail from Bordeaux for Cape Lopez aboard the Amérique. Traveling with them were nurse Marie Secretan, employed to be Hélène’s traveling companion in case she became sick at sea, and Anna Schmitz, a German doctor who’d volunteered to serve at the hospital. As usual, Albert had writing supplies with him on the voyage so that he could work on the autobiography he’d started writing. So many people had requested it that he felt he should continue working on it.
The voyage south didn’t go well. Hélène became so ill that Albert wondered if he should send her and Marie straight back to Europe. But Hélène had set her heart on seeing the new hospital, and after all the sacrifices she’d made to support it, Albert couldn’t deny her.
The day after Christmas 1929, Albert and Hélène disembarked the riverboat. A large group of cheering Africans and Europeans stood on the riverbank to welcome them back to Lambaréné. They were accompanied up the rise to the dining room, where Albert proudly showed Hélène the way it was designed with ventilation in the rafters. By the time dinner was over, Hélène was tired. She leaned heavily on Albert’s arm as he led her to their new home.
The following morning Albert took Hélène on a detailed tour of the hospital and grounds. He was delighted to see how well things had progressed during his two-year absence. Lilian Russell had done a wonderful job with the gardens, and each day heaping bowls of oranges, grapefruit, tangerines, and pineapple were served at lunch. In addition, the patients and their families were also receiving rice, manioc, and green bananas daily.
Although he was now fifty-four years old, Albert felt invigorated. As he settled back into the hospital routine, Hélène would spend hours sitting on the veranda of their home, spending time with nurses and patients. She also worked diligently editing the pages of Albert’s autobiography. However, after five months at Lambaréné, it was obvious that her health wasn’t improving. The extreme climate caused a resurgence of her tuberculosis. In May 1930 Hélène returned to a sanatorium in Germany to recuperate.
While in Europe, Albert had designed a new hospital operating room, which he began constructing after Hélène’s departure. He had brought back all the necessary medical equipment for it, which had been donated by supporters of the hospital. To Albert this was amazing, given the fact that the United States and most countries in Europe had plunged into an economic depression just prior to his return to Africa.
Albert received regular letters from Hélène throughout her nine-month stay at the sanatorium in the Black Forest near Königsfeld. He was grateful both for her restored health and for her willingness to guide his autobiography to publication. The book was published in 1931 under the title Out of My Life and Thought. And with the book’s publication, more mail began piling up for Albert to answer.
In early January 1932, Albert left Lambaréné once more to return to Europe. He hated the thought of arriving there in midwinter, but he had accepted an invitation to be the keynote speaker on March 22 in Frankfurt, Germany, at the centennial of the death of Goethe, the highly celebrated German literary figure. Hélène and thirteen-year-old Rhena joined him there. At the exact hour of Goethe’s death one hundred years before, Albert began his keynote address.
Two months after the address in Frankfurt, Albert set off for Great Britain, where he was showered with honors. He returned home with four honorary doctorate degrees from the universities at Oxford, St. Andrews, and Edinburgh.
In January 1933, Albert was in Berlin when Adolf Hitler was named chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg. Albert was appalled at this turn of events. As far as he was concerned, Hitler and his Nazi party were bullies who were systematically undermining civil order in Germany. In a letter to Hélène, who was in Gunsbach with Rhena, Albert wrote,
Oh, I suffer terribly from these times, I am completely without hope. What will all of this lead to . . . The situation in France. In Germany Hitler is seizing the reins. They were such dreadful days for me in Berlin. . . . In these days the last chance of improving relations was relinquished . . . God help us out of this. . . . Every day I have to tear myself out of this sadness in order to get to work. . . . Before a new spirit can arise, the madness of these nations will have destroyed everything that still stands.
By now Albert was aware of the Nazis’ hatred for Jews, who had become the scapegoats for everything wrong in Germany. Everywhere he went, he urged Jewish people to find a way to get out of the country. Hélène’s older brother, Ernst Bresslau, was a well-known professor at the University of Cologne, where he had helped found the zoology department. When Ernst was fired from his university position for being Jewish, Albert agreed to help pay the passage to Brazil for Ernst, his wife, and their four children, and to support them once they settled in São Paulo. He was relieved that his brother-in-law and his family were getting out of Germany while they could. He hoped that many other Jews followed.
In March 1933, Albert left France for Africa aboard the M.V. Brazza. His heart was heavy despite all the support and recognition he’d received for the hospital. The events occurring in Germany troubled Albert greatly. He sensed things wouldn’t end well, and feared that Europe might once again be plunged into a bloody war.
Back in Lambaréné, Albert was cheered by the accomplishments of his staff. Each doctor had performed over five hundred surgeries, and donations from Albert’s relatives and a doctor friend had been enough to purchase a gas-powered refrigerator. Now each morning and afternoon, a glass of cold water was delivered to each doctor and nurse to refresh them as they went about their duties. Albert was also delighted to see that seventy breadfruit tree saplings had been planted on the grounds. It would take several years for them to mature, but when they did, their fruit would help feed patients.
However, Albert’s joy over the hospital’s progress was fleeting. He received an urgent letter from Hélène stating that the Nazi party was beginning to tighten control over Jewish people. Although Hélène had converted to Christianity, the Nazis considered her Jewish by birth and blocked her bank account. Also, the Jewish doctor providing her ongoing tuberculosis treatment was fired, and she couldn’t find another doctor in Germany willing to treat her. She could only imagine things getting worse for her, and she informed Albert that she and Rhena were moving to Switzerland at the end of the school year.
The following year, in late 1934, Albert again returned to Europe and based himself in Gunsbach. He visited Hélène and Rhena in Lausanne, Switzerland, and Hélène traveled with him to England and Scotland. In Edinburgh, Scotland, Albert gave a series of lectures that were published in an American magazine. Although the British welcomed Albert warmly, he was saddened that many of his German clergy friends asked him not to visit them. They didn’t want to associate with someone who was speaking out against Hitler and the Nazis. After receiving the letters, Albert vowed never to set foot in Germany again while Adolf Hitler was in power. And when Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, wrote asking Albert to publicly endorse Adolf Hitler, Albert sent back a scathing reply stating all the reasons he would never do such a thing. Given Hitler’s ambitions for Europe and the brutal actions of the Nazis, Albert felt that war and bloodshed in Europe were inevitable, and he wanted to stay as far away from them as possible.
In Switzerland, with great public fanfare, people insisted on celebrating Albert’s sixtieth birthday on January 14, 1935. Albert and Hélène spent a week in a Swiss village on the shores of Lake Geneva before it was time for Albert to return to Lambaréné once more.
In May, back in Lambaréné, Albert learned that tragedy had struck the Bresslau family. Hélène’s older brother, Ernst, had died of a heart attack in Brazil. Albert was convinced that the stress of being fired from his job and having to flee Germany had contributed to his death. Albert sent money he’d earned giving concerts in Europe to Ernst’s family in São Paulo to help with financial support.
In mid-December 1935, Albert was back in England, making a series of organ recordings for Columbia Records. He was playing Bach’s music on the organ at All Hallows by the Tower in London. At first he wasn’t satisfied with the quality of the recordings. Albert felt that the sound was muffled and lacked the musical clarity he sought. To rectify the situation, he suggested the microphones be changed and repositioned. Two small diaphragm condenser microphones were pointed directly away from each other so that the sound information each microphone captured was unique. A large diaphragm condenser microphone was then placed above and pointed directly at the organ. Albert was pleased with the new microphone arrangement, which produced a much clearer sound recording. The sound engineers doing the recording dubbed Albert’s microphone arrangement the Schweitzer Technique.
Over the next three years Albert watched as turmoil grew in Europe and other parts of the world. Hitler gained more influence over Germany, and persecution of Jews there continued to grow. Italy’s brutal invasion and occupation of Ethiopia, an East African country, began in 1935 and continued until May 7, 1936, when Italy annexed the country. In 1936, Italian leader Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler joined together to give their support to Francisco Franco and his Nationalist forces in the civil war that had broken out in Spain. This in turn led to a treaty of cooperation between Italy and Germany on foreign policy. In July 1937 in Far East Asia, Japan invaded China, and on March 12, 1938, Adolf Hitler annexed his home country of Austria into Germany. Several months later, Germany also annexed Sudetenland, the German name for the northern, southern, and western areas of Czechoslovakia inhabited by Germans.
As these events played out, Albert became convinced that another war was coming and that it would be a long one—perhaps seven years in length. As a result, he spent many weeks working on plans to keep the hospital open and supplied with food and medicine. The traders at Cape Lopez believed that if there was another war in Europe, they would still be able to import rice and other goods from China. Because of this, they were willing to sell Albert huge quantities of weevil-infested rice. Albert doubted the traders’ optimism. Things were not particularly stable in Far East Asia. With the Japanese having already overrun China, no one was sure about their intentions for the rest of the region. That was why Albert believed that if war did come, it wouldn’t just be in Europe but across the world. Nonetheless, he bought every grain of rice the traders offered him. Weevil-infested rice might not sound appealing now, but Albert knew that it could be the difference between starvation and survival for many people.
