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ock, is not exactly an example of the new type of ‘bourgeois bishops
of the 1830s’ (p. 334) who were thrown up by secularization, for he
possessed everything that, even before secularization, would have
smoothed his path to a bishop’s throne via an aristocratic cathedral
chapter.
It is, of course, not only the mass of material that poses problems
for a biographer of Görres. Anyone who takes on such a task will
always be inferior to his subject. �or Görres, the ‘man who consists of
men’, 1 was anything but straightforward as a person. If the art of
biography consists of appropriating the intellectual and experiential
world of one’s subject to such an extent that one sees it not only from
outside, but understands it from inside without forfeiting the necessary
critical distance, then a biographer of Görres must be capable of
thinking and feeling as a Rhinelander, a philosopher, a political
prophet, and, finally, a Catholic. This is hardly possible without losing
one’s own identity. Vanden Heuvel’s biography is that of a scholar
with political interests, and this is the source of both its strengths
and weaknesses. But as a biographer who could empathetically follow
all of Görres’s tracks does not exist, we cannot criticize an author
for his particular point of view and the resulting perspective. Thus
we have here one possible biography of Görres which does not
exclude, but makes desirable, another possible one so that the picture
we have of Görres can be as complete and balanced as possible. �or
this, the author deserves our thanks.
1 Jean Paul to Görres, 16 Aug. 1822, in J. von Görres, Gesammelte Briefe, vol. 3
(Munich, 1874), p. 23.
HEINZ HÜRTEN is Professor Emeritus of Modern and Contemporary
History at the University of Eichstätt. He is the author of
books on military history, Catholicism, and Germans in exile
(1933-45).
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Joseph Görres