Reinhold Schneider—A Note

Extract

On September 23, the annual Peace Prize awarded by the German Book Trade will be presented to Reinhold Schneider at St Paul’s Church in Frankfort on the Main. This prize was founded in 1949/50, and has been given every year to an author of any nationality or religion who by his life and work has contributed to the future peace of the world. Albert Schweitzer and Martin Buber, Hermann Hesse and Carl J. Burckhardt were previous prizewinners. Anyone who knows Reinhold Schneider’s life and work would agree that he deserves the award as fully as his predecessors.

On May 13 of this year Schneider kept his fifty-third birthday; it is also the birthday of the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, one of his favourite historical characters. He was born in Baden- Baden of a Protestant father from the Erzgebirge, and of a Catholic mother from the shores of Lake Constance, he himself being baptized in the Catholic Church.

According to a short sketch in his book Erbe im Feuer (‘Heritage in the Fire’), his childhood was a happy one, although rarely can parents in the twentieth century have shown so little understanding of their son’s vocation and gifts as Reinhold Schneider’s father and mother. Schneider senior was an extremely taciturn man: father and son rarely spoke to one another. When he died rather young of an incurable disease, the author’s mother married a Catholic physician in Baden-Baden with whom Schneider’s relations, although good, have again not been based on any profound understanding on the elder man’s part.