Benedict XVI: A Life
Volume One – Youth in Nazi Germany to the Second Vatican Council 1927-1965
PETER SEEWALD
(BLOOMSBURY CONTINUUM, 512 PP, £30)
Tablet bookshop price £27 • tel 020 7799 4064

There have been many biographies of living popes, but never till now one published after the end of a pontificate, but while the ex-pontiff is still alive. For almost 30 years the journalist Peter Seewald has been a trusted channel for Joseph Ratzinger’s self-representation, the friendly interlocutor in book-length interviews designed to counter hostile perceptions, first, of the “panzer cardinal” who was John Paul II’s doctrinal bloodhound and, after 2005, of the first German Pope for 1,000 years, apparently radically unsympathetic not only to the direction of contemporary ­society, but to many of the dominant trends within the Catholic Church itself.

This first instalment of Seewald’s biography of Benedict XVI covers the four decades from his birth in 1927 in small-town Bavaria; through the struggles and dangers besetting the devoutly Catholic family of an anti-Nazi policeman in Hitler’s Germany; the young priest-theologian’s meteoric academic rise in the 1950s; and the crisis which almost derailed it, when a heresy-hunting examiner unexpectedly rejected Ratzinger’s “habilitation” dissertation, the indispensable higher qualification required for professorial promotion. The book’s final section covers Ratzinger’s key role at the Second Vatican Council, as backroom adviser and speechwriter for Cardinal Josef Frings, a former arch-conservative whose surprising interventions in the name of greater collegiality and a pastoral approach to theology did much to ensure the Council’s rejection of the curia’s “cement-hard” agenda.
At one level ,Seewald delivers few total surprises: predictably in an account of a living subject, the basic stuff of critical biography – contemporary letters, diaries and other archival material – is thinly spread, Seewald relying heavily on Ratzinger’s own autobiographical writings, the reminiscences of friends and critics, inevitably shaped by hindsight in the light of his cardinalate and papacy, and the author’s own extensive conversations with his subject. So this is Ratzinger as seen by Ratzinger, the tone by turns celebratory and defensive.