This biography begins with a funeral service in the Berlin-Wilmersdorf crematorium on February 3, 1923. Two days earlier, the Protestant theologian Ernst Troeltsch had died unexpectedly at the age of 57.
He was considered one of the most important scholars of the Wilhelmine Empire far beyond his original subject.
His Berlin professorship for "Religious, Social and Historical Philosophy and Christian Religious History" was outside the Faculty of Theology.
At the latest since the beginning of the First World War, he had also become known to a broader public as a charismatic public speaker and through numerous publications in cultural magazines.
In the turmoil of the revolution and the post-war period, he proved to be an astute political commentator.
He became a leading politician of the left-liberal bourgeoisie, which considered an understanding with the proletarian Social Democracy urgently needed.
When the first Reich President was elected in 1919, the liberal DDP considered nominating Troeltsch as their candidate.
It is therefore no wonder that important politicians were present at the funeral service, as well as the most important representatives of science: Friedrich Meinecke and Otto Hintze, Albert Einstein and Gustav Radbruch, and from the younger generation Erich Auerbach, Paul Tillich and Hans Jonas.
It is all the more surprising that, after his death, Troeltsch was quickly and permanently forgotten outside of theology.
If one compares the history of his impact with that of Max Weber, who was his close colleague and friend, and at times even a housemate, until a dramatic quarrel in 1915, then the contrast becomes obvious.
Today everyone can agree on Weber's importance;
Institutes and funding programs are named after him.
Troeltsch, on the other hand, is often only seen as dependent on Weber, without realizing the radical difference in the interests of knowledge.
The renunciation of historicism in Protestant theology and the gradual development of sociology into a "contemporary science" have marginalized a thinker who was striving for a sociologically enlightened understanding of the history of religion, especially that of Christianity.
This is a serious omission in the history of ideas.
The ambivalences of his war journalism
No one has done as much to overcome it in recent decades as the author of this new biography.
Friedrich Wilhelm Graf is himself known as an extremely productive religious intellectual, but he was always instrumental in editing Troeltsch's writings in a "Critical Complete Edition".
Without the collection of more than 250 reviews from Troeltsch's pen and the political commentaries, often published under pseudonyms, which represent a veritable gold mine, without the new three-volume edition of Troeltsch's thousand-page history of Christianity, which has made the richness of the continuations from the author's personal copy accessible , there would not be the basis for a serious examination of this great thinker today.
Graf's biography will be a standard work for a long time due to its wealth of knowledge and the vividness of its descriptions.
From Troeltsch, Graf adopts the methodological guideline of seeing the development of religious and philosophical ideas in the closest connection with their uses and forms of production.
With great warmth, perhaps even a little without distance, the author first describes the milieu of the Protestant educated middle class, from which the Augsburg doctor's son Troeltsch comes.
Accordingly, he experienced military service after school “as a shocking confrontation with peers who were distant from the church and, in his eyes, amoral”.