The ancient town of Kaysersberg, in the entrance to the valleys of the Vosges Mountains, Alsace, was the birthplace of Albert Schweitzer.

This is the house where he was born in 1875. But he was so sickly as a baby, yellow and wrinkled, that at first his life was despaired of and his mother wept over him.

Soon after his birth his father, a pastor, moved to Günsbach, higher in the mountains and further south. This is where he was brought up and where the central archive of his life is still kept.

He came of a cultivated family, many of them schoolteachers and pastors. One other member became very famous in the twentieth century, his cousin Jean-Paul Sartre.

Early in life he showed the sensitivity to living things that was a key part of his nature. He had seen the cruelty of nature and of human beings – an old, tired horse being dragged to the knackers, and the bones of rabbits picked clean by foxes and crows. So when he said his prayers he didn’t just include his family and friends but “all things that have breath”.

A crucial event happened about Easter time in his ninth year. The soft snow had melted from the surrounding fields, and now lay only on the high slopes of the mountains. The naked branches were beginning to mist a little with leaf buds. Albert’s friend Henry suggested taking their new catapults up the hill to shoot birds. What happened next is best told in Schweitzer’s own words:

“We got close to a tree which was still without any leaves, and on which the birds were singing beautifully to greet the morning, without showing the least fear of us. Then stooping like a Red Indian hunter, my companion put a bullet in the leather of his catapult and took aim. In obedience to his nod of command, I did the same, though with terrible twinges of conscience, vowing to myself that I would shoot directly he did. At that very moment the church bells began to ring, mingling their music with the songs of the birds and the sunshine. It was the Warning-bell which began half an hour before the regular peal-ringing, and for me it was a voice from heaven. I shooed the birds away, so that they flew where they were safe from my companion's catapult, and then I fled home. And ever since then, when the Passion-tide bells ring out to the leafless trees and the sunshine, I reflect with a rush of grateful emotion, how on that day their music drove deep into my heart the commandment; Thou shall not kill.

From that day onward I took courage to emancipate myself from the fear of men, and whenever my inner convictions were at stake I let other people's opinions weigh less with me than they had done previously. I tried also to unlearn my former dread of being laughed at by my school-fellows.”

But at school Albert was hopeless. All he wanted was to be out on the hillside herding pigs, and he could see no sense in musty books. His father, whose library was stocked with books and who came of a long line of scholars, wasn’t even sure he’d ever learn enough to be the village postman.

“My father’s study was a most uncomfortable place, and I never set foot inside it unless I was absolutely compelled to. The smell of books which pervaded it took my breath away, and that my father should always be at the table studying and writing seemed to me something terribly unnatural. I could not understand how he endured it, and I vowed that I would never become a student and writer like him...”

But there was one thing in which he was better than his schoolteacher – he could improvise harmonies on the piano, and she couldn’t. He described the ecstasy that music gave him when he was a small boy:

“In my second school year we used to have lessons in penmanship from a master whose previous class was giving the big boys singing-lessons. Now it happened one day that we had come over from the infant school too early, so that we had to wait outside the other class-room, and when they began the vocal duet, ‘In the mill by the stream I was sitting in quiet thought,’ followed by ‘Beautiful forest, who planted you there?’ I had to hold on to the wall to prevent myself from falling. The charm of the two-part harmony of the songs thrilled me all over, to my very marrow, and similarly the first time I heard brass instruments playing together I almost fainted from excess of pleasure.”

As soon as his legs were long enough to reach the pedals of the church organ he started to play that, and sometimes even accompanied the services in church.

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