The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Chapter II

[ 1 ] The decisive factor in deciding whether I should be sent to grammar school or secondary school was my father's intention to give me the right education for "employment" on the railroad. In the end, his ideas came to the fore that I should become a railroad engineer. This led to my choice of secondary school.

[ 2 ] First, however, the question had to be decided whether I was ready for one of these types of school when I transferred from the Neudörfl village school to one of the schools in neighboring Wiener Neustadt. I was first taken to the entrance examination for the middle school.

[ 3 ] The processes that were now being initiated for the future of my life proceeded without any deeper interest on my part. At that age, I was indifferent to the nature of my "employment", I was also indifferent to the question of whether it was a middle school, secondary school or grammar school. Through what I had observed around me, what I had conceived within myself, I had vague but burning questions about life and the world in my soul and wanted to learn something in order to be able to answer them. It mattered little to me what kind of school this should happen through.

[ 4 ] I passed the entrance exam to the middle school very well. They had all brought along the drawings I had made with my assistant teacher; and these made such a strong impression on the teachers who examined me that they probably overlooked my lack of knowledge. I got away with a "brilliant" certificate. My parents, the assistant teacher, the parish priest and many of Neudörfl's dignitaries were overjoyed. They were happy about my success, because for many it was proof that the "Neudörfl school could achieve something".

[ 5 ] From all this, my father came to the conclusion that, now that I was ready, I should not spend a year at the middle school, but should go straight to the secondary school. And so, just a few days later, I was taken to the entrance examination. It didn't go as well as before, but I was still admitted. It was in October 1872.

[ 6 ] Now I had to make the journey from Neudörfl to Wiener-Neustadt every day. In the morning I could take the train, but in the evening I had to walk back because there was no train at the right time. Neudörfl was in Hungary, Wiener Neustadt in Lower Austria. So I traveled from "Transleithania" to "Cisleithania" every day. (That was the official name for the Hungarian and Austrian territories.)

[ 7 ] I stayed in Wiener Neustadt during lunchtime. There was a lady who had met me during one of her stops at the Neudörfl train station and had learned that I was coming to school in Wiener Neustadt. My parents had told her that they were worried about how I would get through the midday on my school visits. She agreed to let me eat in her house free of charge and to take me in whenever I needed it.

[ 8 ] The footpath from Wiener Neustadt to Neudörfl is very beautiful in summer; in winter it was often difficult. Before you got from the end of the town to the village, you had to walk for half an hour along a dirt road that was not cleared of snow. I often had to "wade" through snow up to my knees and arrived home as a "snowman".

[ 9 ] I couldn't experience city life in my soul in the same way as I did in the country. I stood dreamily facing what was going on between and in the houses crammed together. Only in front of the bookshops in Vienna-Neustadt did I often stop for a long time.

[ 10 ] Even what was presented at school and what I myself had to do there initially passed by without any lively interest in my soul. I had a lot of trouble keeping up in the first two classes. It wasn't until the second semester of the second year that things improved. By then I had become a "good pupil".

[ 11 ] I had a strong need that dominated me. I longed for people whom I could emulate as role models. There were no such people among the teachers in the first two classes.

[ 12 ] This experience at school was now interrupted by another event that had a deep impact on my soul. The principal had published an essay in one of the annual reports that were issued at the end of each school year: "The power of attraction considered as an effect of movement." As an eleven-year-old boy, I could understand almost nothing of the content at first. Because it started straight away with higher mathematics. But I was able to make sense of individual sentences. A bridge of thought formed in my mind from the teachings on the building of the world that I had received from the priest to the content of this essay. It also referred to a book that the director had written: "The general movement of matter as the basic cause of all natural phenomena." I saved up until I was able to buy the book. It now became a kind of ideal of mine to learn everything as quickly as possible that could lead me to understanding the content of the essay and book.

[ 13 ] It was as follows. The principal considered the "forces" acting from the fabric into the distance to be an unjustified "mystical" hypothesis. He wanted to explain the "attraction" of celestial bodies as well as molecules and atoms without such "forces". He said that between two bodies there are many smaller bodies in motion. These, moving back and forth, collide with the larger bodies. In the same way, these are pushed everywhere on the sides where they are turned away from each other. The impacts exerted on the sides facing away are more numerous than those in the space between the two bodies. This brings them closer together. The "attraction" is not a special force, but only an "effect of motion". I found two pronounced sentences on the first pages of the book: "1. there is a space and in this a movement through longer time. 2. space and time are continuous homogeneous quantities; matter, however, consists of separate particles (atoms)." The author wanted to explain all physical and chemical natural processes from the movements that arise between the small and large parts of matter in the way described.

[ 14 ] I had nothing in me which in any way urged me to profess this view; but I had the feeling that it would be of great importance to me if I could understand what was expressed in this way. And I did everything I could to get there. Wherever I could find mathematical and physical books, I took the opportunity. It went quite slowly. I started reading the essay and the book again and again; it got a little better each time.

[ 15 ] Now something else came along. In the third grade, I got a teacher who really fulfilled the "ideal" that stood before my soul. I was able to emulate him. He taught arithmetic, geometry and physics. His lessons were extraordinarily orderly and clear. He built everything so clearly from the elements that it was extremely beneficial for the mind to follow him.

[ 16 ] A second annual report essay of the school was by him. It was in the field of probability theory and life insurance calculation. I also immersed myself in this essay, although I couldn't understand much of it either. But I soon came to understand the meaning of probability theory. An even more important consequence for me, however, was that I had a model for my mathematical thinking in the exactness with which my beloved teacher had carried out the subject matter. This led to a wonderful relationship between this teacher and myself. I was delighted to have this man as a teacher of mathematics and physics throughout all my secondary school classes.

[ 17 ] With what I learned from him, I came ever closer to the riddle that had been given to me by the principal's writings.

[ 18 ] I only came into a closer emotional relationship with another teacher after a long time. He was the one who taught geometric drawing in the lower classes and descriptive geometry in the upper classes. He was already teaching in the second grade. But it was only during his lessons in the third class that I began to appreciate his style. He was a great constructor. His lessons were also of exemplary clarity and orderliness. Drawing with compasses, rulers and triangles became a favorite pastime of his. Behind what I absorbed from the principal, the mathematics and physics teacher and the geometric drawing teacher, the puzzling questions of natural phenomena now rose up in me in a boyish way. I felt that I had to approach nature in order to gain an understanding of the spiritual world that stood before me as a matter of course.

[ 19 ] I said to myself that one can only come to terms with the experience of the spiritual world through the soul if one's thinking comes to a form that can approach the essence of natural phenomena. I lived with these feelings through the third and fourth year of secondary school. I arranged everything I learned in order to approach the designated goal myself.

[ 20 ] Once I was walking past a bookshop. In the shop window I saw Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" in Reclam's edition. I did everything I could to buy this book as quickly as possible.

[ 21 ] When Kant entered the realm of my thinking at the time, I didn't know the slightest thing about his position in the intellectual history of mankind. What anyone had thought about him, approvingly or disapprovingly, was completely unknown to me. My unbounded interest in the Critique of Pure Reason was aroused by my own personal emotional life. In my boyish way, I strove to understand what human reason was capable of achieving for a real insight into the essence of things.

[ 22 ] The reading of Kant encountered many obstacles in the external facts of life. I lost at least three hours a day due to the long journey I had to make between home and school. I didn't get home before six o'clock in the evening. Then there was an endless mass of schoolwork to get through. And on Sundays I devoted myself almost exclusively to constructive drawing. It was my ideal to achieve the greatest precision in the execution of geometric constructions and impeccable cleanliness in the treatment of hatching and the application of color.

[ 23 ] So I hardly had time to read the "Critique of Pure Reason" at the time. I found the following way out. We were taught the story in such a way that the teacher appeared to be lecturing but was actually reading from a book. We then had to learn from lesson to lesson what was presented to us in this way from our book. I thought to myself that I would have to do the reading from the book at home. I had nothing at all from the teacher's "lecture". I couldn't absorb anything at all by listening to what he was reading. I now separated the individual sheets of the Kant booklet, pinned them into the history book that I had in front of me during the lesson and read Kant while history was "taught" from the catheder. This was, of course, a great injustice to school discipline; but no one minded and it interfered so little with what was required of me that I got an "excellent" grade in history at the time.

[ 24 ] During the vacations, I continued to read Kant eagerly. I must have read some pages more than twenty times in a row. I wanted to come to a judgment about how human thought relates to the creation of nature.

[ 25 ] The feelings I harbored towards these intellectual endeavors were influenced from two sides. Firstly, I wanted to develop thinking within myself in such a way that every thought would be fully comprehensible, that no vague feeling would lead it in any direction. Secondly, I wanted to create a harmony between such thinking and the religious teachings within me. For this also occupied me to the highest degree at that time. We had excellent textbooks in this area in particular. I absorbed dogmatics and symbolism, the description of the cult and church history from these textbooks with real devotion. I lived very strongly in these teachings. But my relationship to them was determined by the fact that I regarded the spiritual world as the content of human perception. It was precisely for this reason that these teachings penetrated so deeply into my soul, because I felt from them how the human spirit can find its way into the supersensible through cognition. My reverence for the spiritual - I know this for a fact - was not in the least taken away from me by this relationship to knowledge.

[ 26 ] On the other hand, I was constantly preoccupied with the scope of the human faculty of thought. I felt that thinking could be developed into a power that really grasps the things and processes of the world within itself. A "substance" that remains outside of thought, that is merely "thought about", was an unbearable thought to me. What is in things must enter people's thoughts, I told myself again and again.

[ 27 ] But what I read in Kant also repeatedly clashed with this feeling. But I hardly noticed this impulse at the time. After all, I wanted to use the "Critique of Pure Reason" to gain solid points of reference to help me come to terms with my own thinking. Wherever and whenever I went on my vacation walks, I had to sit down somewhere quietly and always try to figure out anew how to get from simple, straightforward concepts to ideas about natural phenomena. I was quite uncritical of Kant at the time; but I didn't get any further through him.

[ 28 ] Through all this I was not drawn away from the things that concerned the practical handling of tasks and the training of human skill. It turned out that one of the officials who replaced my father in the service understood bookbinding. I learned bookbinding from him and was able to bind my own school books during the vacations between the fourth and fifth grades of secondary school. I also learned shorthand during the vacations without a teacher. Nevertheless, I took part in the shorthand courses that were held from the fifth grade onwards.

[ 29 ] There were plenty of opportunities for practical work. My parents were allotted a small garden with fruit trees and a small potato field in the vicinity of the Bahrihof. Picking cherries, doing the gardening, preparing the potatoes for sowing, tilling the field, digging up the ripe potatoes - my siblings and I were responsible for all of this. I didn't miss out on shopping for groceries in the village during the time I had off from school.

[ 30 ] When I was about fifteen years old, I was allowed to enter into a closer relationship with the aforementioned doctor in Wiener Neustadt. I had become very fond of him because of the way he spoke to me during his visits to Neudörfl. So I often sneaked past his apartment, which was on a ground floor at the corner of two very narrow streets in Wiener Neustadt. Once he was at the window. He called me into his room. There I stood in front of what I thought was a "large" library at the time. He talked about literature again, then took Lessing's "Minna von Barnhelm" from the book collection and told me to read it and then come back to him. So he kept giving me books to read and allowed me to go to him from time to time. Every time I was allowed to visit him, I had to tell him about my impressions of what I had read. He actually became my teacher in poetic literature. Up until then, I had remained quite distant from it both at home and at school, apart from a few "samples". I got to know Lessing in particular in the atmosphere of the loving doctor, who was enthusiastic about everything beautiful.

[ 31 ] Another event had a profound influence on my life. I became familiar with the mathematical books that Lübsen had written for self-teaching. I was able to acquire analytical geometry, trigonometry and also differential and integral calculus long before I learned them at school. This enabled me to return to reading the books on "The general motion of matter as the basic cause of all natural phenomena". Because now I could understand them better thanks to my mathematical knowledge. In the meantime, the physics lessons had been joined by the chemistry lessons, which added a new set of knowledge puzzles to the old ones. The chemistry teacher was an excellent man. He taught almost exclusively through experimentation. He spoke very little. He let the natural processes speak for themselves. He was one of our most popular teachers. There was something strange about him that set him apart from the other teachers for his pupils. It was assumed that he had a closer relationship to his science than the others. We addressed them with the title "Professor"; him, although he was just as good a "Professor", with "Herr Doktor". He was the brother of the witty Tyrolean poet Hermann v. Gilm. He had a hard look that attracted a lot of attention. You got the feeling that this man was used to looking sharply at natural phenomena and then keeping an eye on them.

[ 32 ] His teaching confused me a little. The abundance of facts he presented could not always hold together my way of thinking, which at that time was striving for unification. Nevertheless, he must have thought that I was making good progress in chemistry. Because he gave me the grade "commendable" right from the start, which I then retained throughout all my classes.

[ 33 ] One day in an antiquarian bookshop in Vienna-Neustadt, I discovered Rotteck's Weltgeschichte. History had previously remained something external to my soul, even though I got the best marks at school. Now it became something internal to me. The warmth with which Rotteck grasped and described historical events swept me away. I did not yet notice his one-sided view. Through him I was then led on to two other historians who made the deepest impression on me through their style and their historical view of life: Johannes von Müller and Tacitus. Under such impressions, it became quite difficult for me to find my way into school lessons in history and literature. But I tried to enliven these lessons with everything I had acquired outside of them. This is how I spent my time in the top three of the seven secondary school classes.

[ 34 ] From the age of fifteen, I gave private lessons, either to fellow pupils of the same year or to pupils who were in a lower year than myself. The teaching staff were happy to arrange this tutoring for me because I was considered a "good student". And it gave me the opportunity to contribute at least a little to what my parents had to spend on my education from their meagre income.

[ 35 ] I owe a lot to this private tuition. By having to pass on the material I had absorbed to others, I woke up to it, so to speak. For I cannot say otherwise than that I absorbed the knowledge passed on to me by the school as if in a lifelong dream. I was awake in what I had gained for myself or what I had received from a spiritual benefactor, such as the aforementioned doctor from Vienna-Neustadt. What I took in as a fully conscious state of mind differed considerably from what passed me by as school lessons in a dreamlike manner. The fact that I had to revitalize my knowledge in private lessons ensured the transformation of this half-awake perception.

[ 36 ] On the other hand, I was forced to occupy myself with practical psychology at an early age. I learned about the difficulties of human soul development from my students.

[ 37 ] I had to do the German essays in particular for my fellow pupils in the same year group that I was teaching. Since I also had to write each essay for myself, I had to find different forms of elaboration for each topic we were given. I often found myself in quite a difficult position. I only wrote my own essay after I had given away the best thoughts for the topic.

[ 38 ] I had a rather tense relationship with the German language and literature teacher in the three upper classes. Among my classmates, he was considered the "smartest professor" and particularly strict. My essays were always particularly long. I had dictated the shorter version to my classmate. It took the teacher a long time to read my essays. When he was "comfortably" together with us students for the first time after the final exam at the farewell party, he told me how annoyed I had become with him because of the long essays.

[ 39 ] Then there was another one. I felt that this teacher was bringing something into the school that I had to deal with. For example, when he spoke about the nature of poetic images, I felt that there was something in the background. After a while I found out what it was. He professed Herbartian philosophy. He himself said nothing about it. But I figured it out. And so I bought an "Introduction to Philosophy" and a "Psychology", both of which were written from the Herbartian philosophical point of view.

[ 40 ] And now a kind of game of hide-and-seek began between this teacher and me through the essays. I began to understand some of the things he put forward in the coloring of Herbartian philosophy; and he found all kinds of ideas in my essays that also came from this corner. But neither he nor I mentioned the Herbartian origin. It was as if by silent agreement. But once I concluded an essay in an incautious manner in relation to this situation. I had to write about some character trait in human beings. At the end I came up with the sentence: "Such a person has psychological freedom." The teacher discussed the essays with us students after he had corrected them. When he came to the discussion of the essay I mentioned, he twisted the corners of his mouth in a thoroughly ironic way and said: "You write something about psychological freedom; there is no such thing." I replied: "I think that's a mistake, Professor, 'psychological freedom' does exist; there is just no 'transcendental freedom' in ordinary consciousness." The lines of the teacher's mouth became smooth again; he looked at me with a penetrating glance and then said: "I have long noticed from your essays that you have a philosophical library. I would advise you not to read them; you will only confuse your thoughts." I could not understand why I should confuse my thoughts by reading the same books from which he had his. And so the relationship between him and me remained a tense one.

[ 41 ] His lessons gave me a lot to do. For in the fifth grade he covered Greek and Latin poetry, samples of which were presented in German translation. It was only now that I sometimes began to feel painfully that my father had not sent me to grammar school but to secondary school. For I felt how little I was touched by the uniqueness of Greek and Latin art through the translations. And so I bought Greek and Latin textbooks and quietly pursued a private grammar school course alongside my secondary school lessons. This took up a lot of time, but it also laid the foundation for my later graduation from grammar school, albeit abnormally, but quite properly. When I was at the university in Vienna, I had to give a lot of extra lessons. I soon had a grammar school student as a pupil. The circumstances, which I will talk about later, meant that I had to guide this pupil through most of grammar school with the help of private lessons. I also taught him Latin and Greek, so that I was able to experience all the details of grammar school teaching in his lessons.

[ 42 ] The history and geography teachers, who could give me so little in the lower classes, became important to me in the upper classes. The very person who had driven me to such a strange reading of Kant once wrote a school program essay on the "Ice Age and its Causes". I absorbed the content with great eagerness and retained a keen interest in the ice age problem. But this teacher was also a good student of the excellent geographer Friedrich Simony. This led him to develop the geological-geographical conditions of the Alps in the upper classes, drawing on the blackboard. I wasn't reading Kant, however, but was all eyes and ears. I got a lot from this side from the teacher, whose history lessons didn't interest me at all.

[ 43 ] In the last year of secondary school, I had a teacher who also captivated me with his history lessons. He taught history and geography. In the latter, Alpine geography was continued in the attractive way that had already been taught by the other teacher. In history, the new teacher had a strong effect on us pupils. For us, he was a personality in his own right. He was a party man, very enthusiastic about the progressive ideas of the Austrian liberal movement of the time. But you didn't notice any of this at school. He didn't bring any of his party views into the school. But his history lessons were very lively due to his involvement in life itself. With the results of my Rotteck reading in my soul, I listened to the spirited historical arguments of this teacher. There was a beautiful harmony. I must regard it as important for me that I was able to absorb modern history in this way.

[ 44 ] I heard a lot of discussion about the Russo-Turkish War (1877/78) in my parents' house. The civil servant who relieved my father on duty every third day was an original person. He always came to relieve me with a huge traveling bag. Inside he had large manuscript packages. They were excerpts from various scientific books. He gave them to me to read one by one. I devoured them. He then discussed these things with me. Because he really had a chaotic but comprehensive view of everything he had written down in his head. - But he politicized things with my father. He enthusiastically took sides with the Turks; my father defended the Russians with great passion. He was one of those people who were still grateful to Russia for the services it had rendered to the Austrians during the Hungarian uprising (1849). My father did not agree with the Hungarians at all. He lived in the Hungarian border town of Neudörfl during the Magyarization period. And there was always the sword of Damocles hanging over his head that he could not be head of the Neudörfl station because he could not speak Magyar. This was quite unnecessary in the original German region there. But the Hungarian government was working to ensure that the Hungarian lines of the railroads were staffed with Magyar-speaking officials, even on private railroads. But my father wanted to keep his post in Neudörfl until I had finished school in Wiener Neustadt. Because of all this, he was not very fond of the Hungarians. And because he didn't like the Hungarians, he loved them in his simple way of thinking: the Russians, who had "shown the Hungarians the Lord" in 1849. This way of thinking was represented extremely passionately, but at the same time in my father's extremely amiable manner towards the "friend of the Turks" in the person of his "successor". The debate sometimes got quite heated. I was very interested in the clash of personalities, their political views almost not at all. At the time, it was far more important to me to answer the question: to what extent can it be proven that the real spirit is what is effective in human thinking?