A literal English translation of the German title is "Edith Stein's Years in Speyer." Fleshing that title out, the author notes that the future martyr and saint spent 1923 - 1931, eight of her 12 years as a Roman Catholic laywoman, in the small but ancient city of Speyer on the Rhine river in the German (Bavarian-ruled) Palatinate.
The book briefly reviews Edith Stein's life: her first 16 years as a member of a large, devout Jewish family in Prussian Breslau (today's Polish Wroclaw), the next 14 as a non-passionate atheist or agnostic, and her final 20 years as a baptized, ardent Christian convert. In 1916 she took a doctoral degree under Phenomenology's founder Edmund Husserl, following a pioneering dissertation on Empathy. Blocked from an academic career in Germany by the double glass ceiling of being a woman and a Jew, Edith Stein came to Christianity after reading the autobiography of 16th-Century Spanish Carmelite nun, Saint Teresa of Avila. As early as her January 1, 1922 baptism, Edith Stein wanted to become a Carmelite nun. But male spiritual advisors found this aspiration premature and potentially crushing for Auguste Stein, her pious Jewish mother, and one, Father Joseph Schwind, helped her find a teaching job for a large 700- year old Dominican nuns' convent in Speyer. There she lived in very close contact with and shared the daily prayer and worship life of the sisters, while, down the years, teaching hundreds of Catholic girls.
Despite her heavy teaching load, Edith Stein also found time to resume a serious intellectual life. She translated into German early letters of the English cardinal John Henry Newman. She translated and commented Saint Thomas Aquinas's de Veritate ("On Truth"). She compared Thomistic and Husserlian approaches to philosophizing. She also made a national and European name for herself as a theoretician of and speaker on Christ-centered education.
The book briefly touches upon the rest of Edith Stein's life after she resigned as a teacher of girls in Speyer for a higher position in Catholic education in Muenster. Also briefly mentioned are final attested encounters with Edith Stein at the train station of Schifferstadt, six miles from Speyer, in August 1942 when Stein and her sister Rosa, and scores of Jewish Catholics arrested in the Netherlands were being transported to Auschwitz, Poland, for extermination.
DIE SPEYERER JAHRE von EDITH STEIN is clearly written, in simple, non-academic German. Stein has been taken to heart by the Carmelite Order in which she was professed and died. Her Order is publishing Stein's own works in English translations and sponsoring a considerable volume of secondary, especially biographic writing. But the Dominican sisters of Speyer took the occasion of her 100th birthday to remind the world that the Saint's first immersion and growth in Christianity was among Dominican teaching nuns in Speyer.
The book deserves translation into English. And the Dominicans of Speyer are open to offers from anyone qualified to do the translating.
-OOO-
Black Mountain, NC, USA
December 06, 2011
TPK