The name of Ernst Lohmeyer has not figured prominently in histories of the German Churches of the early twentieth century, nor yet in studies of the universities of that country. Lohmeyer has remained a name for the New Testament specialists: much of his reputation has rested on biblical commentaries and on his unfinished study of the Lord's Prayer, which was edited by Rudolf Bultmann and translated into English by John Bowden in 1965. James R. Edwards first encountered Lohmeyer in a mysterious reference in a later edition of his commentary on the Gospel of Mark. It was enough to set him on a life-long trail to learn more. This book is both a biography of Ernst Lohmeyer and the story of an academic quest of many decades.

Lohmeyer was certainly no dry academic or intellectual obscurity but a figure of history whose costly life and brutal death spoke cruelly of the tumult of his age. Born into a pastor's family and a world of learning and music he was, even as a boy, prodigiously gifted in ancient languages. By the time that he became a university student at Tűbingen he was confident in Latin and Greek and already intent on studying Assyrian, Babylonian and Aramaic. In Berlin he studied with Adolf Deissmann and Reinhold Seeberg. He also met Amalie Seyberth, whom he would marry. Across the rest of his life the two wrote to each other, often several times a day, creating an immense archive of shared experiences and understandings.

All of this might have suggested a future well set on a sure foundation but much of what Ernst Lohmeyer accomplished would emerge in conditions of severe instability and even terrible danger. A soldier throughout the First World War, he was seriously wounded and was fortunate to survive. Even in these circumstances he continued to study daily: a Greek New Testament would be his constant companion to the very end of his days. Peace brought a return to academic life, first in Heidelberg and then in Breslau, where he succeeded Bultmann. These would be years of flourishing in which he gave himself devotedly to his studies and to the university. He turned to the social settings of early Christianity and Christian martyrdom and forged an enduring alliance with the publishing house, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. His was a distinctive voice; his prose even offered a poetic quality which must have seemed rare indeed.

Lohmeyer was very much a university figure, but he had little taste for politics. When he became President of the University of Breslau at the age of forty the appointment owed more to his principled belief in the university as an institution and to the respect of colleagues than any obvious ambition or desire for authority. But then came the first of many collisions with the burgeoning power of National Socialism. When the first threats of dismissal broke out Lohmeyer did not hesitate to intervene. When Gerhard Kittel engaged in a public exchange with a courteous Martin Buber Lohmeyer wrote to Buber as a brother, acknowledging ‘the spiritual bond that I feel with you’ (p. 119). Other Jewish scholars, many of them close friends like Richard Hönigswald, would be forced out of office and into emigration. On one occasion students broke into the theological library to carry off books for burning: Lohmeyer confronted them himself with a stern warning and turned them away. He was an early supporter of the Pastors’ Emergency League and, though it is seldom acknowledged, he played a purposeful part in the Confessing Church. All this time enemies were gathering against him in the background. It was by a ‘disciplinary transfer’ that Ernst Lohmeyer was removed from Breslau. Now he came to the university with which his name would be lastingly associated, in Greifswald. Some thought that Lohmeyer had grown silent in these years, but Edwards shows that he remained very much himself. He certainly produced some of his finest work. He was forty-nine when war broke out again and he was not too old to be conscripted again into the Wehrmacht. Lohmeyer's experiences in Russia brought him into the bleakest realm that he had yet known. His war record, excavated by Edwards with scrupulous care, showed him clinging to his principles and doing what he could to mitigate the terrible realities in which he found himself. In these years he still managed, astonishingly, to write much of the text of the Lord's Prayer.

In 1945 Lohmeyer returned home, a shadow of his former self, to a shattered family and to a university which needed to be rebuilt, but in the context of Soviet occupation. He threw himself into this task with zeal. When he lectured it was about freedom, placing Jesus in the company of Bach, Goethe, Hölderlin, Dickens and Tolstoy. Evidently some of his students viewed him with devotion although there are few student memories here. He was also attacked by ideologues and careerists and disparaged as a philosophical idealist, even a mystic. Then he was denounced. Hours before he gave his inaugural address as President of the university he was taken away by a troika of NKVD men. Only one letter now reached home. The rest was silence. A credible reconstruction of what happened to Ernst Lohmeyer has in the following decades involved many hands, above all in the family that he left behind. In this Edwards himself has played a noble part. So now we discover that there was a trial of a kind, in which Lohmeyer found himself accused of crimes which he did not commit and implicated in atrocities in which he had taken no part. He wrote an appeal which was never heeded and was probably not even read. It appears that Ernst Lohmeyer was shot, in or near Greifswald, on 19 September 1946. His body was never found.

This is an important book because the life and death of Ernst Lohmeyer matters to history. Some readers, intent on the subject himself, may occasionally find the ongoing counterpoint with the author's own experiences digressive. A few may find the style too approachable, or too clearly directed at an American audience. Some analogies and comparisons in the text may work better than others; it may be that the historical landscapes are at times too lightly sketched. But then we have at last been given the first English-language biography of a brilliant, courageous and significant figure and it is a work of tenacious research, clear judgement and, at the last, profound compassion. Altogether much, very much, is owed.