Kurt Bergel and I were scheduled to meet Thursday afternoon at Chapman University's Albert Schweitzer Institute, where he was co-director and his wife, Alice, its most dedicated worker. The university recently had named a room at the institute after the couple and I wanted to learn more about them.
Alice Bergel was suffering from cancer and extremely ill. After learning that, I asked her husband if perhaps we shouldn't reschedule our interview for another time. No, no, he said. He wanted to cooperate. He looked forward to a chance to discuss his wife's work--their work together.
Just 20 minutes before our scheduled interview, Alice Bergel died at their home in Orange. She was 86.
It was the Bergels who helped spur Chapman's interest in Schweitzer, the great theologian and writer who has become its patron saint.
Besides the institute, which houses much Schweitzer memorabilia, there's a large bust of Schweitzer at the entrance to the Argyros Forum, there's the Schweitzer Mall on campus, and the shaded Schweitzer "corners" where students study.
Barbara Mulch, a vice provost at Chapman, says it was the Bergels' "gentle steering" that led to the university's interest in Schweitzer. Each new president would get pressure from the Bergels, both scholars on Schweitzer, to make his philosophy a part of the campus.
"Alice Bergel was a very quiet person, yet very strong and determined in representing Schweitzer, in bringing us at this university that part of our humanity," Mulch said.
In Kurt Bergel's official campus biography, he credits his wife with "fueling his quest to study the life's work of Schweitzer." She had taught Schweitzer to her students at the University of Berlin. Kurt Bergel himself had the chance once to hear Schweitzer lecture and play the organ.
The Bergels, like many other Jews, had fled Nazi Germany in 1938 as Hitler intensified his terror. After two years in England, they made their way to the United States. During the 1940s, they helped raise money here for Schweitzer's hospital in Africa. And in 1949, the Bergels met Schweitzer for the first time at his home in France. That meeting began a friendship that lasted until Schweitzer's death in 1965.
The Bergels spent much of their lives after that collaborating together on translations of Schweitzer's works, his correspondence, or books about him. Marvin Meyer, co-director of the Schweitzer Institute, points to their recent translation of Schweitzer's early memoirs as a great treasure for scholars because it had long been out of print.
