The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Chapter XIII

[ 1 ] During this time in particular, my external life was a very sociable one. I got together with my old friends a lot. As little as I had the opportunity to speak of the things I have alluded to here, the spiritual and emotional ties that bound me to my friends were intense. I often have to think back to the sometimes endless conversations that took place in a well-known coffee house on Michaelerplatz in Vienna. I had to, especially at the time when the old Austria was splintering after the World War. Because the conditions for this fragmentation were already in place at the time. But nobody wanted to admit it. Everyone had ideas about remedies, depending on their particular national or cultural inclinations. And if ideals that live in rising currents are uplifting, then those that grow out of the decline and want to hold it back are no less tragic. Such tragic ideals were at work in the minds of the best Viennese and Austrians at the time.

[ 2 ] I often aroused displeasure among these idealists when I expressed a conviction that had been forced upon me by my devotion to Goethe's time. I said that a high point in the development of Western culture was reached at that time. It was not held afterwards. The age of natural science with its consequences for human and national life meant a decline. Further progress would require a completely new approach from the spiritual side. It is not possible to continue on the paths that have hitherto been taken in the spiritual realm without coming back. Goethe is a height, but not a beginning, but an end. He draws the consequences from a development that goes as far as him, finds its fullest form in him, but which cannot be continued without going to much more original sources of spiritual experience than are contained in this development. - It was in this mood that I wrote the last part of my portrayal of Goethe.

[ 3 ] I first became acquainted with Nietzsche's writings in this mood. "Beyond Good and Evil" was the first book I read by him. I was simultaneously captivated and repulsed by this way of looking at things. I found it difficult to come to terms with Nietzsche. I loved his style, I loved his boldness; but I did not at all love the way Nietzsche spoke about the deepest problems without consciously immersing himself in them in the spiritual experience of the soul. But it seemed to me again as if he were saying many things that were immeasurably close to my own spiritual experience. And so I felt close to his struggles and felt I had to find an expression for this closeness. Nietzsche seemed to me to be one of the most tragic people of that time. And this tragedy, I believed, must result from the character of the spiritual constitution of the scientific age in the deeper human soul. I spent my last years in Vienna with such feelings.

[ 4 ] Before the end of my first phase of life, I was also able to visit Budapest and Transylvania. The aforementioned friend from Transylvania, who had remained loyal to me all those years, had introduced me to several of his fellow countrymen who were staying in Vienna. And so, in addition to the other very extensive social intercourse, I also had such intercourse with Transylvanians. Among them were Mr. and Mrs. Breitenstein, who became friends with me at the time and have remained so in the most cordial way. They have long held a leading position in the Vienna Anthroposophical Society. The human connection with Transylvanians led me on a trip to Budapest. The capital of Hungary, with its character so very different from that of Vienna, made a deep impression on me. You get there from Vienna on a journey that is completely resplendent in the most charming nature, the most spirited humanity and musical liveliness. When you look out of the window of the train, you get the impression that nature itself becomes poetic in a special way, and that the people, not paying much attention to the poetic nature they are used to, romp around in it according to an often deeply intimate music of the heart. And when you enter Budapest, you hear a world that the members of the other European nations look upon with the greatest interest, but which can never be fully understood. A dark background over which a light shines in a play of colors. To me, this being appeared as if compressed into one for the gaze as I stood before the Franz Deak monument. In this head of the creator of the Hungary that existed from 1867 to 1918 lived a coarse, proud will that grasps heartily, that asserts itself without cunning, but with elemental ruthlessness. I felt how subjectively true for every true Hungarian is the motto I have often heard: "There is no life outside Hungary; and if there is, it is not like this."

[ 5 ] As a child, on Hungary's western border, I had seen how Germans had to feel this rough and proud will; now, in the middle of Hungary, I got to know how this will brings Magyar people into a human seclusion, which, with a certain naivety, cloaks itself in a self-evident splendour that is very keen to show itself to the hidden eyes of nature, but not to the open eyes of man.

[ 6 ] Six months after this visit, the Transylvanian friends arranged for me to give a lecture in Sibiu. It was Christmas time. I drove across the wide open spaces in the middle of which lies Arad. Lenau's longing poetry resounded in my heart as my eyes looked across these expanses, where everything is vast and there is no limit to the wandering gaze. I had to spend the night in a border town between Hungary and Transylvania. I sat in an inn half the night. Apart from me, there was only one table with card players. All the nationalities that could be found in Hungary and Transylvania at that time were there. People were playing there with a passion that always overflowed in half an hour, so that it was like clouds of souls rising above the table, fighting each other like demons and completely devouring the people. What a difference in passionate being was revealed in these different nations!

[ 7 ] I arrived in Sibiu on Christmas Day. I was introduced to the Transylvanian Saxons. It lived there within Romanian and Magyar. A noble nation that wants to preserve itself bravely in the downfall it does not want to see. A Germanness that, like a memory of its life centuries ago in the East, wants to remain faithful to its source, but which in this state of mind has a trait of unworldliness that reveals an acquired joyfulness everywhere in life. I spent wonderful days among the German clergy of the Protestant church, among the teachers of the German schools, among other German Transylvanians. My heart was warmed by these people who, in caring for and nurturing their nationality, developed a culture of the heart, which above all spoke to the heart.

[ 8 ] This warmth lived in my soul when I went on a sleigh ride southwards to the Carpathians (the Transylvanian Alps) with old and new friends, wrapped in thick furs, through the icy cold and crackling snow. A black, wooded mountain face when you approach from afar; a wildly rugged, often eerie mountain landscape when you are there.

[ 9 ] The focal point of everything I experienced there was my friend of many years. He was always thinking up new things to help me get to know Transylvanian Saxon life. He still spent some time in Vienna and some in Sibiu. At that time, he had founded a weekly newspaper in Sibiu for the cultivation of Transylvanian Saxonism. An enterprise that consisted entirely of idealism and not a milligram of practice, but in which almost all of the bearers of Saxonism collaborated. It collapsed again after a few weeks.

[ 10 ] Experiences such as these journeys were brought to me by fate; and through them I was able to train myself to see the outside world, which did not come easily to me, while I lived in the spiritual element with a certain matter-of-factness.

[ 11 ] I made the journey back to Vienna with wistful memories. I soon came across a book whose "intellectual wealth" was talked about in the widest circles at the time: "Rembrandt as an educator". In conversations about this book, which at that time developed wherever one went, one could hear of the emergence of a completely new spirit. It was precisely this phenomenon that made me realize how alone I was with my state of mind in the intellectual life of the time.

[ 12 ] I felt this way about a book that was highly praised by the whole world: it seemed to me as if someone had sat down at a table in a better inn every evening for several months and listened to what the "more outstanding" personalities at the regulars' tables had to say in "spiritual" terms, and then recorded this in aphoristic form. After this continuous "preliminary work", he could have thrown the pieces of paper with the sayings into a container, shaken them up vigorously and then taken them out again. After taking them out, he would then have added one to the other, thus creating a book. Of course, this criticism is exaggerated. But my view of life urged me to reject what the "spirit of the time" at the time praised as a supreme achievement. I found "Rembrandt as Educator" to be a book that remained entirely on the surface of witty thoughts and that did not relate in any sentence to the true depths of the human soul. I felt it painfully that my contemporaries considered just such a book to be the outflow of a deep personality, while I had to think that with such ripples of thought in shallow spiritual waters everything deeply human is driven out of souls.

[ 13 ] When I was fourteen years old, I had to start giving private lessons; for fifteen years, until the beginning of the second period of my life spent in Weimar, fate kept me in this activity The unfolding of the souls of many people in childhood and adolescence combined with my own development. I was able to observe how differently the male and female sex grow into life. In addition to teaching boys and young men, I was also responsible for teaching a number of young girls. Indeed, for a time, the mother of the boy whose education I had taken over because of his pathological condition became my pupil in geometry; at another time, I taught this woman and her sister aesthetics.

[ 14 ] In the family of this boy I found a kind of home for several years, from which I was responsible for teaching and educating other families. Because of my close and friendly relationship with the boy's mother, I was able to fully share in the joys and sorrows of this family. In this woman I was confronted with a peculiarly beautiful human soul. She was completely devoted to caring for the development of her four boys. You could almost study the great style of motherly love in her. Working with her in matters of education was a wonderful part of her life. She had an aptitude and enthusiasm for the musical side of art. As long as her boys were small, she did some of the musical exercises herself. She talked to me about the most varied problems of life with understanding and the deepest interest in everything. She paid the greatest attention to my scientific and other work. It was a time when I had the deepest need to discuss everything that concerned me with her. When I spoke of my spiritual experiences, she listened in a peculiar way. Her mind was sympathetic to things, but it retained a quiet reserve; her soul, however, absorbed everything. She retained a certain naturalistic view of human nature. She thought of the moral constitution of the soul entirely in connection with the healthy or sick constitution of the body. I would like to say that she instinctively thought about people in medical terms, although this had a naturalistic touch. Talking to her along these lines was extremely stimulating. At the same time she faced all external life like a woman who dealt with what happened to her with the strongest sense of duty, but who did not regard most things as belonging to her inner sphere. In many respects she regarded her fate as something burdensome. But she didn't demand anything from life either; she accepted it as it turned out, as long as it didn't concern her sons. She experienced everything with the strongest emotions of her soul towards them.

[ 15 ] I experienced all of this, the life of a woman's soul, her beautiful devotion to her sons, the life of the family within a wide circle of relatives and acquaintances. But it was not without its difficulties. The family was Jewish. It was completely free of any denominational or racial restrictions. But the master of the house, to whom I was very attached, had a certain sensitivity towards all statements made by a non-Jew about Jews. The anti-Semitism that was flaring up at the time had a harsh effect.

[ 16 ] Now I was taking a lively interest in the battles that the Germans in Austria were waging for their national existence. I was also led to concern myself with the historical and social position of Judaism. This preoccupation became particularly intense when Hamerling's "Homunculus" was published. This eminently German poet was portrayed as an anti-Semite by a large part of journalism because of this work, and was even claimed by the German national anti-Semites as one of their own. None of this affected me much, but I wrote an essay on the "Homunculus" in which I spoke, as I believed, quite objectively about the position of Judaism. The man in whose house I lived, with whom I was friends, took this as a special kind of anti-Semitism. It didn't affect his friendly feelings for me in the slightest, but it did cause him deep pain. When he had read the essay, he stood opposite me, completely overwhelmed by deep sorrow, and said to me: 'What you are writing about the Jews cannot be interpreted in a friendly sense at all; but that is not what fills me, but that you, with your close relationship to us and our friends, can only have had the experiences that cause you to write like that about us." The man was mistaken, for I had judged entirely from an intellectual and historical perspective; nothing personal had entered into my judgment. He couldn't see it that way. In response to my explanations, he said: "No, the man who is bringing up my children is not, according to this essay, a 'friend of the Jews'." He could not be dissuaded. He didn't think for a moment that anything should change in my relationship with the family. He saw that as a necessity. I was even less able to take the matter as an opportunity for change. For I regarded the upbringing of his son as a task that had fallen to me by fate. But we both couldn't help but think that there was a tragic element to this relationship.

[ 17 ] In addition to all this, many of my friends had adopted an anti-Semitic nuance in their view of Judaism as a result of the national struggles of the time. They did not look upon my position in a Jewish house with sympathy; and the master of that house found in my friendly intercourse with such personalities only a confirmation of the impressions he had received from my essay.

[ 18 ] The composer of the "Goldenes Kreuz", Ignaz Brüll, belonged to the family circle in which I was so involved. A subtle personality whom I was extremely fond of. Ignaz Brüll had something unworldly and introverted about him. His interests were not exclusively musical; they were devoted to many aspects of intellectual life. He was only able to live out these interests as a "lucky child" of fate, on the background of a family relationship that did not let him be touched by the worries of everyday life, that allowed his work to grow out of a certain prosperity. And so he did not grow into life, but only into music. How valuable or not valuable his musical work was need not be discussed here. But it was delightful to meet the man on the street and to see him awaken from his world of sounds when you spoke to him. He did not usually have his vest buttons buttoned in the right buttonholes. His eyes spoke with mild sensuality, his gait was not firm, but expressive. You could talk to him about many things; he had a delicate understanding of them, but you could see how the content of the conversation immediately slipped into the realm of the musical with him.

[ 19 ] In the family in which I lived like this, I also got to know the excellent physician, Dr. Breuer, who stood together with Dr. Freud at the birth of psychoanalysis. However, he had only participated in this way of looking at things in the beginning and probably did not agree with its later development by Freud. Dr. Breuer was an attractive personality for me. I admired the way he was involved in the medical profession. He was also a man of many interests in other areas. He spoke about Shakespeare in such a way that one received the strongest stimulation from it. It was also interesting to hear him talk about Ibsen or even Tolstoy's "Sonata of the Cross" with his thoroughly medical way of thinking. When he talked about such things with my friend described here, the mother of the children I was raising, I was often most interested. Psychoanalysis had not yet been born at that time, but the problems that pointed in that direction were already there. The hypnotic phenomena had given a special coloration to medical thinking. My friend had been friends with Dr. Breuer since her youth. There is a fact that has given me a lot to think about. This woman thought in a certain direction even more medically than the eminent doctor. She was once a morphinist. Dr. Breuer treated him. The woman once said the following to me: "Think of what Breuer did. He had the morphinist promise him on his word of honor that he would no longer take morphine. He thought he would achieve something by doing so; and he was indignant when the patient did not keep his word. He even said: how can I treat someone who doesn't keep his word? Should one believe - she said - that such an excellent doctor could be so naive? How can one want to cure something so deeply rooted 'in nature' with a promise?" - The woman need not have been quite right; the doctor's views on suggestion therapy may have contributed to his attempt at healing; but one cannot deny that my friend's statement speaks of the extraordinary energy with which she spoke in a strange way out of the spirit that lived in the Viennese medical school at the very time when this school was flourishing.

[ 20 ] This woman was important in her way; and she stands as an important figure in my life. She has now been dead for a long time; among the things that made it difficult for me to leave Vienna was the fact that I had to part from her.

[ 21 ] When I look back on the content of the first period of my life, the following feeling comes to me as I try to characterize it from the outside: fate had led me in such a way that I did not see myself embraced by any external "profession" in my thirtieth year. Nor did I join the Goethe and Schiller Archive in Weimar for a life position, but as a freelance contributor to the Goethe edition published by the Archive on behalf of Grand Duchess Sophie. The report, which the director of the archive had printed in the twelfth volume of the Goethe Yearbook, states: "Rudolf Steiner from Vienna has joined the permanent staff since the fall of 1890. He has been assigned (with the exception of the osteology section) the entire field of 'Morphology', five or probably six volumes of the 'second section', to which highly important material is flowing from the manuscript estate."