Rudolf Steiner

Biography

In 1919, in Stuttgart, Emil Molt, owner of the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory, invited Steiner to lecture to his workers. After those lectures the first Waldorf school opened. The lecturer was fifty-eight, and another life already lay behind him.

He was born in Donji Kraljevec, then part of the Kingdom of Hungary within the Austrian Empire. The date is given differently: most often 27 February 1861, but he himself once gave 25 February. His father, Johann Steiner, was a gamekeeper in a count's service and then a telegraph operator on the Southern Railway: the count had refused permission for him to marry Franziska Blie, and he left his post. The family moved often: Mödling, Pottschach in Lower Austria, from 1869 Neudörfl, from 1879 Inzersdorf. The boy spent part of his schooling at home because of a quarrel between his father and the schoolmaster. From the autumn of 1879, on an academic scholarship, he studied at the Vienna Institute of Technology: mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, botany, and lectures in literature and philosophy. He left the course in 1883 without a final examination. From 1884 to 1890 he lived in Vienna as a private tutor in the Specht family and taught four sons; the youngest, Otto, who was developmentally delayed, he prepared for the ordinary curriculum. This case was later cited as a model for Waldorf education.

The decisive meeting was with the Germanist Karl Julius Schröer. In 1882 he recommended the student to Joseph Kürschner, who was editing Goethe, and Kürschner gave the young man, who had no degree and no publications, the natural science volumes. In 1886 came The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World-Conception. From 1890 Steiner worked at the Goethe and Schiller Archive in Weimar under Bernhard Suphan, for 180 marks a month. His philological work was criticised for carelessness. In 1891 he defended a short dissertation on Fichte at Rostock (graded “rite”, that is, satisfactory), later published as Truth and Knowledge. In 1894 The Philosophy of Freedom appeared, which he regarded as his chief work. It sold poorly and was hardly noticed in the universities. He hoped to submit it as a habilitation thesis, but never obtained a professorship.

In 1896 Steiner visited the ailing Nietzsche in Naumburg, where he was offered a role in organising the philosopher's archive; he soon fell out with Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. His book Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom had come out in 1895, before that meeting.

In 1897 Steiner moved to Berlin and became one of the editors of the journal Magazin für Literatur. Subscribers were put off by his support for Émile Zola in the Dreyfus Affair and by his correspondence with the anarchist John Henry Mackay. In the autumn of 1900 he left the journal. In the same period he taught at a school for workers, and in 1899 he married Anna Eunicke; around 1904 they separated, and in 1911 she died.

Theosophists invited him to a memorial evening for Nietzsche in the autumn of 1900, and soon they became his main audience. In 1900–01 he gave a lecture cycle on the mystics, which was turned into a book. At these lectures he met Marie von Sivers, who became his closest helper and, in 1914, his second wife. In October 1902 he was elected general secretary of the German section of the Theosophical Society. He published Theosophy (1904), How to Know Higher Worlds (1904–05) and An Outline of Esoteric Science (1910), and edited the journal Lucifer. Disagreements with the society's leadership, among them the dispute over Jiddu Krishnamurti, led to a break in 1912–13: Steiner and most of the German members founded the Anthroposophical Society.

For its annual gatherings, at which plays by Édouard Schuré and by Steiner himself were staged, it was decided to build a theatre. In 1913 construction of the first Goetheanum began at Dornach, to his design and largely by the hands of volunteers. With Marie von Sivers he developed eurythmy, and between 1909 and 1913 he wrote four “mystery dramas”. With the sculptor Edith Maryon he made the nine-metre wooden group The Representative of Humanity. After the First World War he proposed a “threefold social order”, in which culture, politics and the economy would be independent of one another; his book Toward Social Renewal (1919) sold about eighty thousand copies in its first year. Then followed the Waldorf school, a laboratory that gave rise to Weleda, biodynamic agriculture, the Christian Community and anthroposophical medicine.

The scientific community does not accept anthroposophy or many of its applications: medicine and biodynamics are called pseudoscience, and his statements about “races” draw criticism. To my mind, one should keep in mind a duality when reading about him: his contemporaries differed radically in their assessments. Right-wing groups moved against him; in 1919 Dietrich Eckart, in 1921 Adolf Hitler. In 1922 a lecture in Munich was disrupted with stink bombs.

On the night of 1 January 1923 the first Goetheanum burned down; police reports pointed to arson. Steiner at once began designing a second building, in concrete, completed in 1928. In 1923 he founded the School of Spiritual Science. From that year his strength declined, and his last lecture took place in September 1924. He died at Dornach on 30 March 1925, still working on his autobiography, The Course of My Life.