Dictionary of Literary Influences

Mussolini, Benito Amilcare Andrea

a majority, an international reputation, and was admired not least by Adolf Hitler. By 1926 parliamentary democracy was dead and Mussolini was the Fascist dictator.

The positive side effects included suppression of the Sicilian Mafia while fascism lasted. Despite the dictatorship, freedom of discussion was tolerated, there was a revolution in architecture, emphasis on education, better working conditions, health care, and, so the myth goes, the trains ran on time. But even Mussolini failed to save Italy from the Depression or growing fears of war with Germany. In 1935 Italy invaded Ethiopia despite British opposition. Mussolini’s support against Hitler was more important to Britain than the freedom of Ethiopia or Libya, his imperial plans, or his growing racism. But international pressures, including economic sanctions, forced Mussolini into alliance with Hitler. Convinced that Germany would win, he declared war on the Allies in 1940. When it was clear that Italy would fall to the Allies, Mussolini was overthrown and the Fascist regime fell. In prison, Hitler sent him a copy of Nietzsche’s works. The Germans rescued Mussolini, taking him to Munich. He returned to German-occupied northern Italy, establishing the Italian Social Republic in Salò and denouncing the Savoia monarchy, but he was overpowered by Italian Communist partisans and executed.

Archives

The primary surviving source of archival material by Mussolini is his Opera omnia, 35 volumes edited by Edoardo e Duilio Susmel at the Biblioteca Nazionale in Firenze, 1951–62.

The Archivio Centrale di Stato in Rome, Segreteria Particolare del Duce, contains Mussolini’s office papers and some correspondence, although much was destroyed, probably by Mussolini himself, in 1945.

St Antony’s College, Oxford, has photocopies of other Mussolini papers.

Printed Sources

De Felice, Renzo. Mussolini, 5 vols. (Firenze: Le Monnier, and Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 1975–97).

Gregor, Anthony James. Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).

Mack Smith, Denis. Mussolini (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981).

Pini, Giorgio, and Duilio Susmel. Mussolini: l’uomo e l’opera, 4 vols. (Firenze: Biblioteca Nazionale, 1953–55).

Ridley, Jasper. Mussolini (London: Constable, 1997).

Gillian Fenwick

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NABOKOV, VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH (1899–1977)

Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian-born American writer, playwright, poet, critic, translator, scholar, and lepidopterist, was born in St. Petersburg to liberal aristocrats Elena Rukavishnikov and Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov. Celebrated for his brilliant, self-conscious prose, Nabokov is known best for Lolita (1955), his controversial novel that propelled him to world fame and perhaps cost him the Nobel Prize.

English Arthurian legends awakened Nabokov’s imagination. He composed verse in three languages before enrolling in Tenishev’s progressive school (1910–19). By age 15, he read hundreds of books in the original, including works by Robert Browning, Ivan Bunin (Nobel Prize, 1933), Anton Chekhov, Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, John Keats, Mayne Reid, Arthur Rimbaud, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, William Shakespeare, Lev Tolstoy, Paul Verlaine, H. G. Wells, and by writers who later lost their appeal—Nikolay Chernyshevsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, and Jules Verne. Inspired by first love and Russia’s silver-age poets, Nabokov published his first collection of poetry at age 17.

Fleeing Russia after the revolution (1919), he enrolled in Trinity College, graduating with a degree in romance and Slavic languages (1922). In Cambridge, he read Russian, English, and French classical works, developing an affinity for Russian and French medieval literature. He translated Romain Rolland’s Colas Breugnon, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and published the first of 18 Lepidoptera papers. Devoted to Vladimir Dahl’s Dictionary of the Living Russian Language, The Song of Igor’s Campaign, and Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, he later produced translations of the epic (1960) and the verse novel (1964).

In 1925, Nabokov married Véra Slonim (1902–91), his muse. In 1926, already the author of many short works, Nabokov (pseud. V. Sirin) completed his first Russian novel, Mashen’ka (Mary, 1970). Before leaving for the United States to teach

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Russian literature (1941–59), he wrote his first English novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1938), and produced some two thousand pages of lecture notes.

Essays in The Garland Companion explore Nabokov’s relationship to others, including Chernyshevsky, Dostoyevsky, Franz Kafka, and James Joyce. Nabokov consistently denied outside influences. He attributed his fundamental belief in the existence of a higher order of being to his mother and his moral code, and appreciation of “the thrill of a great poem” to his father, a former member of Alexandr Kerensky’s government and a social critic. He credited his early memories of his idyllic childhood and his passions—butterfly collecting and chess—for shaping his oeuvre, acknowledging only a general debt to Pushkin, Nikolay Gogol, Shakespeare, and Russia’s silver age.

Nabokov considered Alexander Blok the best Russian poet of his time, and

Petersburg (Andrey Bely), Metamorphosis (Kafka), Ulysses ( Joyce), and In Search of Lost Time (Marcel Proust) the greatest twentieth-century novels. He esteemed Vladislav Khodasevich, Alfred Housman, François-René Chateaubriand, Henri Bergson, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jorge Luis Borges, J. D. Salinger, and John Updike; valued Boris Pasternak’s poetry but intensely disliked Dr. Zhivago; admired Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s courage but harshly judged his artistry. He had no use for Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner.

Archives

The Berg Collection in New York’s Public Library, the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., and the Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg hold the largest collections of Nabokov’s papers.

Printed Sources

Alexandrov, Vladimir E. (ed.). The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Garland, 1995).

Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

———.Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). Juliar, Michael. Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973).

———.Vladimir Nabokov: A Descriptive Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1986).

Karlinsky, Simon (ed.). The Nabokov–Wilson Letters, 1940–1971 (New York: Harper & Row, 1979).

Nabokov, Dmitri, and Matthew J. Bruccoli (eds.). Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters, 1940–1977 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989).

Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich. Perepiska s sestroi (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985).

———. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1999).

Ludmilla L. Litus

NADER, RALPH (1934– )

Ralph Nader was born in Winfred, Connecticut, to Lebanese immigrants Nathra and Rose (Bouziane) Nader. The Nader family remained in Winfred throughout Ralph’s childhood. Nader studied at Princeton (1951–55) and then at Harvard Law School (1955–58) where he also served in multiple positions, including editor-in-chief, for the Harvard Law School Record. After graduating from Harvard Law School, Nader served a six-month term with the U.S. Army as a cook at

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Fort Dix, New Jersey. When his term was complete in 1959, he established a law practice in Hartford, Connecticut, and published the article “The Safe Car You Can’t Buy” in Nation. Nader maintained his Hartford practice and traveled throughout the world until accepting a consultant position in 1964 under Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan. In November 1965, Unsafe at Any Speed, a sweeping critique of American automobile manufacturer safety standards, was published, catapulting Nader to national recognition. Buoyed by his accomplishments in bringing automobile safety standards to national attention, Nader branched out and became the nation’s best-known consumer advocate. Since the late 1960s, Nader has formed multiple organizations (including the Public Research Interest Group, Public Citizen, and the Project for Corporate Responsibility), influenced hundreds of pieces of legislation, and recruited hundreds of young lawyers (“Nader’s Raiders”) to follow through on his many efforts. Nader’s activities fall into three basic categories: empowering consumers, fostering mechanisms of government accountability, and promoting the “public interest.” In recent years, Nader has reemerged in the national spotlight, running as the Green Party candidate for president in 1996 and again in 2000, when he visited all 50 states and received over 2,500,000 votes.

Nader’s essential political philosophy seems to be threefold: the public interest comes first; the public is best qualified to determine what its interest is; and the public is the best guarantor that its interest is served. There is much of Thomas Jefferson’s championing of the people here, but the emphasis on protecting the “public interest” has been formulated largely by Nader himself. His most prominent influences, by most accounts, are Nathra and Rose Nader. His parents emphasized hard work and debate and fostered a mentality of putting people first. Nader’s ideas of the power and roles of citizen-consumers and journalists were strongly influenced by the muckrakers Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Upton Sinclair, and George Seldes. Nader’s early emphasis on automobile safety was invigorated by a 1955 Harvard Law Review article by Harold A. Katz and aided by working for Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Archives

Currently there is no archive of Nader’s personal papers.

Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Cambridge: Vincent W. Gillen Papers, 1963–91 (Gillen investigated Nader for General Motors; personal correspondence with Nader is included in his papers).

Printed Sources

Bollier, David. Citizen Action and Other Big Ideas: A History of Ralph Nader and the Modern Consumer Movement (published on the World Wide Web at http://www.nader.org/ history_bollier.html. Last accessed 11 August 2002).

Buckhorn, Robert F. Nader: The People’s Lawyer (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1972).

McCarry, Charles. Citizen Nader (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972).

Nader, Ralph. Crashing the Party: Taking on the Corporate Government in an Age of Surrender

(New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2002).

———.The Ralph Nader Reader (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2000). Collection of articles by Nader.

———.Unsafe at Any Speed. (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1965).

Phil Huckelberry

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NAGY, IMRE (1896–1958)

Imre Nagy was born in Kaposvar, Hungary, to a family of devoted Calvinists. He graduated from high school and worked as a mechanic until World War I (1914–18), when he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army and sent to the Russian front. In December 1944, he reappeared in Hungary to become one of the pillars of the Hungarian Communist Party. Early in 1948, the Communist Party gained full control of Hungary, and the state was proclaimed a People’s Republic in 1949. Nagy, who served as a minister of agriculture, was responsible for gathering peasants onto large, state-supervised collective farms. In 1949, Nagy twice appealed to the Hungarian Central Committee, criticizing the party’s position on the “peasant question” and advocating the delay of collectivization. For this Nagy was dismissed, but one year later was returned to office. By 1953 constant economic difficulties and peasant resentment of collectivization had led to a profound crisis in Hungary. The new set of liberalizing policies of a satellite government that Nagy introduced during his first premiership became known as the “New Course.” Nagy’s New Course de-emphasized forcible collectivization and loosened police controls. Nagy idealized Karl Marx, who was a disciple of G.W.F. Hegel. Marx built on Hegel’s ideas of the class struggle, and Nagy, deeply shaken by past and current events, internalized Marx’s manifesto, “Workers of the World Unite!” which was at the heart of both The Communist Manifesto and of Wage-Labor and Capital. Nagy, deeply devoted to his cause and his faith unshaken, was well aware of all the major works of Marx and Engels, V. I. Lenin, and even Josef Stalin. For example, he referred to Stalin’s article “Workingwomen and Peasantwomen Remember and Carry Out Lenin’s Behests,” published in the magazine Rabotnitsa, No. 1, January 1925, to support his programs. In his manuscript, On Communism: In Defence of the New Course, Nagy lays out his principles, policies, and plans which establish the need for liberalization within a framework of communism. But Marxist dogma, as interpreted by Stalinist bureaucrats, was bound to reject Nagy’s promising, albeit naive perspective. During the revolution of 1956, Nagy emerged as a symbol of liberalism within the Communist Party. During the few days of liberty, political development in Hungary was rapid. Nagy was revered as a national hero, promising free elections and a Soviet withdrawal from Hungary. The fate of Imre Nagy and the revolution of the Hungarian people was sealed by the counterrevolution that took place only a week later. Nagy was arrested by Soviet police and in 1957 was returned to the custody of the new Hungarian regime headed by Janos Kadar. His secret trial and execution were announced in 1958. After many years as a one-party Marxist state, Hungary became a multiparty parliamentary democracy in 1989. In the same year, Imre Nagy was officially rehabilitated and reburied with full honors. Attempts at a historical reconstruction of the events prompted a lawsuit by Imre Nagy’s daughter; however the court refused to express an opinion on matters of history.

Some Nagy files were found in the KGB archives after 1989. As in many cases in which KGB materials were released, it was for a concrete, political purpose. Rumors about Imre Nagy’s affiliation with the Soviet secret police, code-named “Agent Volodya,” have circulated widely. The initial search for Soviet archival materials on Nagy may have been triggered by an inquiry from Hungarian reformist political figures, who requested that all documents pertaining to Nagy’s sentence and his activities while in the Soviet Union be declassified. A number of

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damaging materials were declassified in Moscow in an attempt to compromise Nagy’s importance as a historical symbol. Although it seems that the documents are authentic, they were carefully selected to discredit Nagy and undermine democratic trends in Hungary. Scholars should be cautious when evaluating them.

Archives

Zamchevskii, I. About Imre Nagy and his politics with the Yugoslav leaders, Archive of Foreign Policy of Russian Federation, Arkhiv Vneshnei Politiki Rossiiskoi Federatsii (AVP RF).

Russian Centre for the Preservation of Contemporary Documents, Tsentr Khranenia Sovremennoi Dokumentatsii (TsKhSD).

Printed Sources

Calhoun, F. Daniel. Hungary and Suez, 1956: An Exploration of Who Makes History (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1991).

Gati, Charles. Hungary and the Soviet Bloc (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1986). Nagy, I. On Communism: In Defense of the New Course (New York: Frederick A. Praeger,

1957).

Rainer, M. Janos. Nag y Imre. Politikai eletrajz (Imre Nag y: A Political Biography), Vol. I, 1896–1953 (Budapest: 1956-os Intezet, 1996).

Eva Dobozy

NAIPAUL, VIDIADHAR SURAJPRASAD (1932– )

V. S. Naipaul, the recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature in 2001, has achieved acclaim and attracted some controversy throughout his prolific career as a novelist, essayist, and critic. Born in Trinidad in the Caribbean as the descendant of an Indian indentured laborer, Naipaul first commanded critical attention in 1961 with the publication of A House for Mr. Biswas, a family saga set in Trinidad which some scholars maintain is Naipaul’s finest work. In 1971 he received the Booker Prize for In a Free State. Over the past 30 years, Naipaul has garnered both praise and criticism for his depictions of African and Asian societies, and most recently of Islam in particular, in novels such as A Bend in the River and travel narratives such as An Area of Darkness and Among the Believers. Accused at times of caricaturing nonWestern societies, Naipaul has defended himself with the characteristic acerbity that continues to mark his writing and to attract, in equal measure, both laudatory words and vigorous dissent.

Naipaul has throughout his career identified some important influences on his work. These include Charles Dickens and H. G. Wells, both of whom Naipaul encountered in his boyhood; critics have pointed to these two authors as particularly significant in the creation of A House for Mr. Biswas with its elaborate plotting and familial setting. In his fiction, and especially in his travel writing and criticism, Naipaul has, by his own admission, drawn on other nineteenth-century writers whom he admires for their realism, lack of pretense, and “breakneck prose” (Naipaul 1987, 7). Among them are the Victorian polemicists and essayists William Hazlitt and William Cobbett.

Naipaul’s own life, however, has played the largest role in shaping his work, a fact he has readily acknowledged. An Indian born into the multiethnic Trinidad created by slavery, indentured labor, and imperial rule, Naipaul has consistently marked himself as a product of both a colonial and a postcolonial world in which identities,

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borders, and sensibilities are fluid and unstable. Though resident in Great Britain since the mid-twentieth century, Naipaul still considers himself an exile, someone who remains an outsider, no matter whether he is in Trinidad, Britain, or India. This sense of himself permeates even his most recent work, including the novel The Enigma of Arrival, a meditation on immigration and belonging in modern Britain. Some scholars and reviewers have also pointed to Naipaul’s sense of himself as an observer as the driving force behind the relentless travel which has marked much of his career as well, from the American South to central Africa and southeast Asia.

More controversially, Naipaul has employed his own memories in formulating a sense of a bifurcated world. He has described the Trinidad of his youth, and even today, as a “half-made society,” unlike the fully-evolved Europe where he now lives. This view of postcolonial states as less mature or even childish entities seems to have affected greatly Naipaul’s descriptions of the non-European or non-Western world, leading some prominent critics to see him as a purveyor of old colonial nostrums and stereotypes. Naipaul has in fact modified his own once-derogatory views of India, and some of his depictions of misrule and corruption in postcolonial Africa have unfortunately proved prescient. His recent and highly critical excursions into the Islamic world, however, have not met with much scholarly or literary approval.

In his sense of exile and of being a product of a lesser society, Naipaul has identified himself explicitly with one particular novelist: Joseph Conrad. Naipaul sees the Polish-born Conrad as a forebear and an influence in that Conrad was himself not only born into a “half-made” society, but lived as an exile in Britain and spent years as an itinerant traveler and observer in European colonies in Africa. In this way, Conrad was an exile and a realist; Naipaul defines himself similarly to this day.

Archives

McFarlin Library at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma is the major repository of Naipaul’s letters and papers.

Printed Sources

Hamilton, Iane. “Without a Place: An Interview with V. S. Naipaul” Times Literary Supplement, 30 July 1971, 897–98.

Hammer, Robert (ed.). Critical Perspectives on V. S. Naipaul (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1977).

King, Bruce. V. S. Naipaul (London: Macmillan, 1993).

Mustafa, Fawzi. V. S. Naipaul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Naipaul, V. S. “Conrad’s Darkness,” New York Review of Books, 17 October 1974, 16–21.

———.“On Being a Writer,” New York Review of Books, 23 April 1987, 7.

———.A Way in the World: A Sequence (London: Heinemann, 1994).

Nixon, Rob. London Calling: V. S. Naipaul: Postcolonial Mandarin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

Andrew Muldoon

NEUMANN, JOHN LOUIS VON (1903–1957)

Born in Budapest, Hungary, to Max Neumann, a wealthy Jewish banker who purchased the German honorific title “von” for his sons, János Neumann was called “Jancsi” as a boy, “Johann” early in his career, and “Johnny” after moving to

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America in 1933. He was first educated at home by Max and tutors. Always a voracious reader, Max kept a huge personal library and partially succeeded in conveying this bibliophilia to Jancsi, who, after mathematics and science, loved history best. He read all 44 volumes of Wilhelm Oncken’s Allgemeine Geschichte in Max’s library as a boy, later enjoyed Edward Gibbon, and came to know ancient history and the American Civil War very well. But friends and family recalled his prodigious memory more than the breadth or regularity of his reading. He became proficient in the classics, learning Greek from Max and Latin in school. Except during a brief political exile in Austria in 1919, he attended the academically excellent Lutheran Gymnasium in Budapest from 1914 to 1921, where Laszlo Rácz was among his teachers and William Fellner, Leo Szilard, and Eugene Paul Wigner were among his schoolmates. Because of his obvious genius, he received special tutoring in mathematics from Lipót Fejér, Michael Fekete, Alfred Haar, Joseph Kürschak, Frigyes Riesz, and Gabriel Szego. Sandor Ferenczi, a relative, taught him some psychology. He pondered the philosophical implications of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author.

By the 1920s he was conversant with every strain of mathematics then under discussion, especially the work of Charles Babbage, René-Louis Baire, Émile Borel, Georg Cantor, Torsten Carleman, Arthur Cayley, David Hilbert, Henri Lebesgue, Jules Henri Poincaré, Heinz Prüfer, Bertrand Russell, Hermann Weyl, and Ernst Zermelo. From 1921 to 1923 he studied chemistry at the University of Berlin, where Erhard Schmidt taught mathematics; then from 1923 to 1926 chemical engineering at the Swiss Institute of Technology in Zürich, where he discussed mathematics with George Polya and Weyl. He met Edward Teller in 1925 when both studied under Fejér in Budapest. On the basis of exceptional examination scores and a dissertation about set theory, the University of Budapest awarded him a doctorate in mathematics in 1926, despite his never having taken courses there.

Already world-famous, he studied with Hilbert at the University of Göttingen from 1926 to 1927. Inspired by Borel, he developed minimax theory in the late 1920s. He taught mathematics from 1926 to 1929 at the University of Berlin, from 1929 to 1930 at the University of Hamburg, and in 1929 lectured on quantum physics at Princeton University, at that time probably the world’s most fertile environment for mathematical and scientific research. From 1930 until his death, he taught mathematical physics at Princeton, where he was almost as famous for his parties as for his mathematics. Always a “party boy,” he had frequented the notorious Berlin cabaret circuit throughout the 1920s. Rather than read, he preferred to acquire and test new ideas in conversation. His wild social life also fueled his intellectual achievements.

In 1933 he became one of the five original mathematics professors at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, along with James Waddell Alexander II, Albert Einstein, Oswald Veblen, and Weyl. Among his colleagues there were Alonzo Church, Leon Henkin, Solomon Lefschetz, Oskar Morgenstern, Robert Oppenheimer, Alan Turing, and Wigner. Early in his Princeton career, inspired by Haar, he solved the “compact group problem,” the fifth of twenty-three challenges that Hilbert presented in 1900. In the 1930s and early 1940s he collaborated with Morgenstern and Francis J. Murray. Ulam (1958, 5) reported that von Neumann himself considered Schmidt and Weyl his two greatest influences.

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Archives

Library of Congress. Correspondence, papers, memoranda, journals, speeches, rough drafts, notes, charts, graphs, patents, and family memorabilia, from 1912, but most from 1935 to 1957.

Printed Sources

Macrae, Norman. John von Neumann (New York: Pantheon, 1992). Poundstone, William. Prisoner’s Dilemma (New York: Doubleday, 1992).

Ulam, Stanislaw. “John von Neumann, 1903–1957,” Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 64, 3 (May 1958), 1–49.

Vonneuman, Nicholas A. John von Neumann as Seen by His Brother (Meadowbrook, Pa.: N.A. Vonneuman, 1987).

Eric v.d. Luft

NIEBUHR, REINHOLD (1892–1971)

Reinhold Neibuhr was born in Wright City, Missouri. He attended Elmhurst College, Illinois (1910), Eden Theological Seminary, St. Louis (1910–13), and conducted his postgraduate study at the Yale Divinity School (1914–15). Ordained to the ministry in the Evangelical Synod of North America (later part of the United Church of Christ) in 1915, he accepted a pastorate at the Bethel Evangelical Church in Detroit, where he would grow his small congregation into a large, influential church (1915–28). In 1928 Niebuhr accepted a faculty position as chair of Christian ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York and remained there until his retirement in 1960. A man of vigorous and keen intellect, his life’s calling was the continuing attempt to apply a comprehensive and historical Christian ethic to practical sociopolitical concerns. His view of history emphasized the role of man as a physical and spiritual being. These themes dominated his famous Gifford Lectures in 1939 and constitute the framework of his later writings, namely his greatest works, The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941 and 1943) and Faith and History

(1949).

Niebuhr credited his father with providing him his first formative religious influences, notably introducing him to the thought of the liberal theologian Adolf von Harnack. Seminary influenced his interest in—and understanding of—philosophy and theology, particularly the New Testament and what Niebuhr later in his life referred to as the “ethics of Jesus.” It was, however, the social realities of industrial Detroit, especially his personal involvement with the worker’s plight in the factories of Henry Ford and the outbreak and horror of World War I, that furthered his intellectual development “more than any books which I have read” (Niebuhr quoted in Kegley and Bretall 1956, 5) and undermined his youthful optimism and moralistic idealism. He organized and led the pacifist organization, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and his advocacy of “pragmatic pacifism” reflected the influences of William James and the Social Gospel as propounded by Walter Rauschenbusch. These themes transcend his early writings, specifically Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), which critique secular and Christian liberalism from a dominantly Marxist perspective, a view bolstered by Niebuhr’s reflection that the Depression served as the conclusive refutation of liberal hopes. His tentative Marxist orientation led to his “Christian radicalism” and his involvement in organizing the Fellowship of Socialist Christians in the late 1920s and his unsuccessful congressional

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bid on the Socialist ticket in 1930 (resigning from the Socialist party in 1940). At Union, however, he began an earnest consideration of his theological heritage. In Søren Kierkegaard, Niebuhr discovered a kindred spirit who wrestled with the “paradox” of the Christian message and a form of Christian existentialism. Blaise Pascal’s penetrating critique of the limits of human reason resound in Niebuhr’s work as does Reformation theology as embodied foremost in Martin Luther and John Calvin. The thought of St. Augustine of Hippo, a theologian who Niebuhr credits for answering “so many of my unanswered questions” and finally freeing him from moral idealism (Niebuhr quoted in Kegley and Bretall 1956, 9), drove him on to further studies in the New Testament, Pauline theology and Greek antiquity. His theological pilgrimage produced an understanding of man as fallen and resulted in his philosophy of Christian realism, strongly influenced by the neoorthodoxy of Karl Barth. Juxtaposed with the horror of now two world wars and the idolatries of Nazism and Communism, Niebuhr became increasingly critical of both liberal and Marxist utopianism, as evidenced in The Irony of American History (1952). His final years were marked by the great influence he exerted in the field of international relations and his unceasing polemic against the pragmatism of John Dewey.

Archives

Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Washington D.C.: Niebuhr’s private papers, correspondence, articles, sermons, reviews, lectures, typescripts of books, and biographical material.

Printed Sources

Brown, Charles C. Niebuhr and His Age: Reinhold Niebuhr’s Prophetic Role in the Twentieth Century (Harrisburg, Penn.: Morehouse Publishing, 2002).

Kegley, Charles W., and Robert W. Bretall (eds.). Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social, and Political Thought (New York: Macmillan, 1956).

Rouven J. Steeves

NIEMÖLLER, MARTIN (1892–1984)

Martin Niemöller was born in Lippstadt, Germany. He attended the secondary school in Lippstadt and the gymnasium in Elberfeld, graduating Primus Omnium in 1910. Taught that a good German Protestant is also a citizen and soldier, he entered the German navy as an officer-candidate and served as a U-boat commander in World War I before attending the University of Münster as a theological student (1919–23). He was ordained in 1924 and served for seven years with the Westphalian Inner Mission. In 1931 he became a pastor in the suburb of Dahlem, Berlin, where his religious convictions brought him into ever greater conflict with the rising power of the National Socialists. In 1933 he founded the Pfarrernotbund (Pastors’ Emergency League) and was integrally involved in creating the Confessing Church at the Synod of Barmen (1934) in opposition to the German Christians and their “positive Christianity”—a movement closely allied with the Nazis. In 1937 he was arrested by the Gestapo leading to his imprisonment as “Hitler’s personal prisoner” in Sachsenhausen, Dachau, and Tirol until his liberation in 1945. Niemoller was instrumental in rebuilding the German Evangelical Church, serving as president of the Hesse-Nassau regional church (1947–64) and head of the

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