At the end of his life, on Christiane Tietz's telling, Karl Barth had become subdued, sagacious, and even convivial. These benefits were, as Tietz aptly implies in the subtitle of her recent biography, hard won, the deliverances of a life filled with conflict.
None of this will surprise those familiar with Barth's theological project or the history of theology in the 20th century. Many of the details of Barth's personal and professional life have been a matter of public record since Eberhard Busch, Barth's final professional assistant, published a weighty biography of Barth in 1975. Even before his death in 1968, Barth had achieved international renown. With impressive speed Busch produced the biography which has for a half century stood as the standard introduction to Barth's life. In it we encounter Barth largely in his own voice thanks to his prolific letter writing. Busch weaves these sources together with a light touch into something approaching a second-hand auto-biography. Despite Busch's impressive work, the last half century of critical distance allows for us to look again anew at Barth's life and work. Tietz's biography ably takes up this task. In style, Tietz adopts some of Busch's stylistic choices, but in content her biography offers significant improvements, expanding the scholarly scope and humane depth of our understanding of the great Swiss-German theologian. Thanks to Victoria Barnett's skillful translation work, English-speaking readers can now access Tietz's excellent biography.
Like Busch, Tietz typically lets Barth tell us of his life in his own terms through frequent and copious quotes from Barth's correspondence with family, friends, and colleagues, as well as his couple of halting attempts at autobiography. Tietz has also made extensive use of the unpublished holdings of the Barth-Archiv in Basel as well as the critical editions of Barth's literary corpus prepared in German-speaking circles. The result is a text in which Barth's voice and persona come through in living colour, but Barth's perspective is nonetheless left open for question, critique, or reinterpretation. Tietz's editorial interventions offer more of a narrative arch and help to contextualize Barth's voice. She importantly contrasts Barth's own self-understanding at crucial points with the historical record we have from other involved figures. When it comes to Barth's fights with academic colleagues or rival political organizers, for example, Tietz carefully balances the historical record in ways that suggest her admiration for Barth is not without a corresponding acknowledgment of his finitude. Likewise, Tietz pays more careful attention to the drama of Barth's own inner life, offering glimpses of the inner turmoil which often marked Barth's experience of his familial, academic, and political personas. A more tender and tenuous picture of Barth slowly emerges—one marked more by self-doubt, indecision, and depression than the heroic hagiographies of Barth allow. Together, these stylistic improvements offer new and compellingly humane insight into Barth as a human being.
By far, though, Tietz's biography's greatest advancement is its ginger but unflinching attention to the key details left out of Busch's tale. The largest substantial expansions upon Busch's account are also the most sensitive. In the last few decades, the details of the triangular relationship between Barth, his wife Nelly, and his longtime colleague, secretary, and paramour Charlotte (‘Lollo’) von Kirschbaum have increasingly transitioned from rumor to open secret to common knowledge. In the 1990s Barth's family and estate decided to offer gradually more transparency and access to the letters which catalogue especially Lollo's intimate place in the Barth family as well as her status as an essential co-collaborator in Barth's theological career. Still, it took time for the letters exchanged between Karl and Lollo to be published in German. As has been typical of Barth's writing from the beginning, its English translation came at a delay. Only very recently have the letters between Lollo and Karl made their way into English translation, and some of the extant letters remain untranslated. The chapter which bears the bulk of this new material makes for difficult and anxious reading, a mark of Tietz's success in capturing the effect this triangular relationship had not only on Karl, Nelly, and Lollo but also on the rest of the household and their close friends. A further success, the chapter is well-integrated into the biography as a whole and so offers for the first time a complete picture of Barth.
The remaining chapters split their attention between Barth's academic career and central convictions, his early work in the Swiss churches, and his political advocacy, especially his mid-career confrontation with German National Socialism. The chapters on Barth's ecclesial and political work are more historically inclined, though they offer helpful insight into Barth's ecumenical, ecclesial, and political commitments. Barth's interest in, confusion with, and overly critical stance toward Roman Catholicism are well told. The treatments of Barth's encounters with German Nazism are another high point. Tietz tells these stories with an even hand, noting the importance and limits of Barth's efforts to organize Protestant resistance to Nazism's infiltration of the German churches while nonetheless resisting romantic caricatures of Barth's anti-Nazism.
The chapters detailing Barth's academic career contain the usual historiographic details of Barth's appointments, seminar topics, and academic writing. But alongside this, Tietz offers long summaries of Barth's core theological commitments at critical junctures in his intellectual journey. The chapters are somewhat unevenly distributed. Following a now well-established vice in Barth scholarship of over-attending Barth's early career, the two editions of Barth's commentary on Romans each receive a full chapter, while Barth's Church Dogmatics gets just one. But that asymmetry aside, the précis of Barth's thought provided in each of these chapters offer helpful introductions. While they draw on Barth's own idiosyncratic terminology and loquacious, elliptical theological phrasings, they do so in a way that is grounded and inviting, especially—I suspect—for readers new to Barth.
The biography concludes somewhat unusually with an epilogue in which Tietz offers a hopeful and personal appeal for the continued relevance of Barth's theological project. Here Tietz pushes readers to assess anew Barth's place in theology today. She clearly thinks that Barth deserves better than the fringe status he commands in German-speaking theological circles. ‘Despite the majority's return to liberal theology’, she writes, ‘a range of German-speaking theologians continue to find Karl Barth's theological approach seminal. The author of this biography is one of them’ (p.411). In this telling comment, Tietz demonstrates both the promise and limitations of her biography. The Barth one finds there is lively and demanding, and for readers with more than strictly historical interests, there will be no way to avoid asking the question of what to make of him, his life, his work, and his God. In offering her own appeal for Barth, Tietz helpfully demonstrates her own willingness to model an answer to these questions today. And yet, Tietz's own response is narrowly focused on German-speaking circles and neglects the widespread reception Barth's theology has received in the intervening half century especially among Protestant theologians in South Africa and the United States. In this way, Tietz's biography leaves open the door to further historiographic attempts to capture not just the details of Barth's impressive life and work, but their relevance to the quite different ecclesial and theological circumstances from which his readers find themselves encountering him today.
