Paul Tillich, His Life and Thought by Marion (Hausner) Pauck ’45 and Wilhelm Pauck. Marion Pauck and her husband had planned a two-volume biography of Tillich, the first to recount the story of his life and the second to describe his thought. Only the first, so far as I can tell, was completed and I surmise that this part was mostly Marion’s work. Marion’s book recounts the life of this renowned theologian and philosopher, who was her professor and her husband’s close friend and colleague. Tillich was born in 1886 and grew up in Germany. He was a chaplain in the trenches during World War I, a place of such misery and death that it marked the rest of his life. In 1933, he was fired from his position as professor at the University of Frankfort for speaking out against the rise of Nazism, and eventually was welcomed at Union Theological Seminary, where he had the unenviable task of mastering a new language and adapting to a new culture. I was particularly interested in this book because my father (a Lutheran minister) got his masters at Union about that time, and the name Tillich (along with Niebuhr and Fosdick) was spoken around our house with near reverence. Tillich found his place in America, teaching for many years at Union and then going to Harvard and eventually to the University of Chicago. As he becomes increasingly well-known, even gracing the cover of Time Magazine, his insecurities are never put to rest. Marion Pauck gives us the full picture of this complicated and brilliant man.
