The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Chapter XIV

[ 1 ] For an indefinite period of time, I was again faced with a task that had not arisen from an external cause, but from the inner development of my world and life views. And this had also resulted in my taking the doctoral examination in Rostock with my essay on the attempt to "communicate human consciousness with itself". External facts only meant that I couldn't do it in Vienna. I had officially completed secondary school, not grammar school, and had also acquired my grammar school education privately by taking private lessons. That ruled out doing a doctorate in Austria. I had grown into "philosophy", but had an official education behind me that excluded me from everything that the study of philosophy puts people into.

[ 2 ] At the end of my first phase of life, I came across a philosophical work that captivated me extraordinarily, the "Seven Books of Platonism" by Heinrich v. Stein, who was teaching philosophy in Rostock at the time. This fact led me to submit my essay to the dear old philosopher, whom his book made very dear to me and whom I had only seen at the exam.

[ 3 ] The personality of Heinrich v. Stein still stands before me quite vividly. Almost as if I had lived through a lot with him. For the "Seven Books of Platonism" are the expression of a sharply defined philosophical individuality. In this work, philosophy as the content of thought is not taken as something that stands on its own two feet. Plato is universally regarded as the philosopher who sought a philosophy that stood on its own feet. What he found on this path is carefully presented by Heinrich v. Stein. In these first chapters of the work, one becomes completely immersed in the Platonic world view. Then, however, Stein moves on to the breaking in of the revelation of Christ into the development of humanity. He presents this real breaking in of spiritual life as the higher thing compared to the working out of a thought content through mere philosophy.

[ 4 ] From Plato to Christ as to the fulfillment of an aspiration, this is how one could characterize what lies in Stein's presentation. He then goes on to trace how Platonism continued to have an effect in the Christian development of world views.

[ 5 ] Stein is of the opinion that revelation from outside has given human worldview striving its content. I could not go along with him on that. It was my experience that the human being could have revelation if it brought itself to an understanding with itself in the spiritually alive consciousness, and that this could then gain existence in the human being in the experience of ideas. But I sensed something in the book that attracted me. The real life of the spirit behind the life of ideas, albeit in a form that was not my own, formed the impulse for a comprehensive historical-philosophical presentation. Plato, the great bearer of a world of ideas awaiting fulfillment through the Christ-impulse; that is the purpose of Stein's book. Despite the opposition I felt towards it, this book was much closer to me than all philosophies that only develop content from concepts and sensory experiences.

[ 6 ] I also missed the awareness in Stein that Plato's world of ideas also leads back to an ancient revelation of the spiritual world. This (pre-Christian) revelation, which has found a sympathetic portrayal in Otto Willmann's "History of Idealism", for example, does not emerge in Stein's view. He does not present Platonism as the remnant of ideas of the original revelation, which then regained the lost spiritual content in a higher form in Christianity; he presents the Platonic ideas as a conceptual content spun out of itself, which then gained life through Christ.

[ 7 ] However, the book is one of those written with philosophical warmth; and its author was a personality who, imbued with deep religiosity, sought the expression of religious life in philosophy. On every page of the three-volume work, one becomes aware of the personality behind it. After reading the book again and again, especially the sections on the relationship between Platonism and Christianity, it was a significant experience for me to come face to face with the author.

[ 8 ] A calm personality in his whole demeanor, of advanced age, with a mild eye that seemed suited to looking gently yet insistently at the development of pupils; a language that carried the philosopher's deliberation in the tone of the words in every sentence. Stein was standing in front of me when I visited him before my exams. He said to me: "Your dissertation is not what is required; one can see that you did not write it under the guidance of a professor; but what it contains makes it possible for me to accept it very gladly. Now I had so much desired to be asked in the oral examination about something connected with the "Seven Books of Platonism"; but no question referred to it; all were taken from Kant's philosophy.

[ 9 ] I have always carried the image of Heinrich v. Stein deeply imprinted in my heart; and it would have been infinitely dear to me to meet the man again. Fate never brought me together with him again. My doctoral examination is one of my fondest memories, because the impression of Stein's personality far outshines everything else connected with it.

[ 10 ] The mood in which I entered Weimar was colored by my previous in-depth study of Platonism. I think that this mood helped me a lot in finding my way around my task in the Goethe and Schiller Archive. How did Plato live in the world of ideas, and how did Goethe? That kept me busy when I was walking to and from the archive; it also kept me busy when I was sitting over the papers in Goethe's estate.

[ 11 ] This question was in the background when, at the beginning of 1891, I wrote about my impressions of Goethe's knowledge of nature (in the essay "Über den Gewinn unserer Anschauungen von Goethes naturwissenschaftlichen Arbeiten durch die Publikationen des Goethe-Archivs" in the 12th volume of the Goethe-Jahrbuch). The majority of people find it impossible to imagine that something for whose appearance subjective conditions are absolutely necessary can nevertheless have an objective meaning and essence. And it is precisely of this latter kind that the 'original plant' is. It is the essential objectively contained in all plants; but if it is to gain apparent existence, it must be freely constructed by the mind of man." Or this one: A proper realization of Goethe's way of thinking "now also provides the possibility of deciding whether it is in accordance with Goethe's view to identify the primordial plant or the primordial animal with any sensory-real organic form that occurred at a certain time or still occurs. The answer to this can only be a decisive 'no'. The 'original plant' is contained in every plant and can be extracted from the plant world through the constructive power of the spirit, but no single, individual form may be addressed as typical."

[ 12 ] I now joined the Goethe and Schiller Archive as an employee. This was the place where philology had taken over Goethe's estate at the end of the nineteenth century. At the head of the archive was Bernhard Suphan as director. I also had a personal relationship with him, I would say from the very first day of my life in Weimar. I was often able to come to his house. The fact that Bernhard Suphan became the successor to Erich Schmidt, the first director of the archive, was thanks to his friendship with Herman Grimm.

[ 13 ] The last descendant of Goethe, Walter von Goethe, had bequeathed Goethe's estate to Grand Duchess Sophie. She founded the archive so that the estate could be placed in the intellectual life in an appropriate manner. Naturally, she turned to those personalities who she assumed would know what to do with Goethe's papers.

[ 14 ] First of all, there was Mr. v. Loeper. He was destined to become the mediator between the Goethe connoisseurs and the Weimar court, which was entrusted with the administration of Goethe's estate. This was because he had attained a high civil servant position in the Prussian House Ministry and was thus close to the Queen of Prussia, the sister of the Grand Duke of Weimar, and he was also the most important contributor to the most famous Goethe edition of the time, Hempel's.

[ 15 ] Loeper was a peculiar personality; a highly likeable mixture of man of the world and eccentric. He had grown into "Goethe research" as an enthusiast, not as an expert. But he had achieved a high reputation within it. In his judgments about Goethe, which emerged so beautifully in his Faust edition, he was thoroughly independent. What he put forward he had learned from Goethe himself. Since he was now supposed to advise who could best administer Goethe's estate, he had to fall back on those whom he had come close to as Goethe connoisseurs through his own work on Goethe.

[ 16 ] The first person to come into consideration was Herman Grimm. Herman Grimm approached Goethe as an art historian; as such, he gave lectures on Goethe at Berlin University, which he then published as a book. At the same time, however, he could consider himself a kind of intellectual descendant of Goethe. He grew out of those circles of German intellectual life that had always preserved a living tradition of Goethe and who could think of themselves as having a personal connection with him. Herman Grimm's wife was Gisela v. Arnim, the daughter of Bettina, the author of the book "Goethe's Correspondence with a Child".

[ 17 ] Herman Grimm judged Goethe as an art enthusiast. As an art historian, he only grew into scholarship to the extent that he was able to do so while maintaining a personally colored position on art, as an art connoisseur.

[ 18 ] I think Herman Grimm was able to communicate well with Loeper, with whom he was naturally friends due to their shared interest in Goethe. I imagine that when the two of them talked about Goethe, human sympathy for the genius was definitely in the foreground, but scholarly contemplation was in the background.

[ 19 ] This scholarly way of looking at Goethe was now alive in Wilhelm Scherer, the professor of German literary history at Berlin University. In him, the two had to accept Goethe's official connoisseur. Loeper did this in a childishly harmless manner. Herman Grimm did so with a certain inner reluctance. For he did not really like the philological approach that lived in Scherer.

[ 20 ] The actual management of the Goethe estate was entrusted to these three personalities. But it slipped heavily into the hands of Scherer. Loeper probably did not think of participating in the task in more than an advisory and external capacity; he had his firm social connections through his position in the Prussian royal household. Herman Grimm did not think about it either. Due to his position in intellectual life, he could only be inclined to provide points of view and guidelines for the work; he could not be responsible for the organization of the details.

[ 21 ] The situation was completely different for Wilhelm Scherer. For him, Goethe was an important chapter in German literary history. New sources of immeasurable importance for this chapter had come to light in the Goethe Archive. The work of the Goethe Archive had to be systematically integrated into the general work of literary history. The plan for a Goethe edition emerged, which was to be designed in the philologically correct sense. Scherer took over the intellectual supervision; the management of the archive was transferred to his student, Erich Schmidt, who at the time held the professorship for modern German literary history in Vienna.

[ 22 ] This gave the work at the Goethe Archive its character. But also everything else that happened in the Goethe Archive and through it. It all had the character of the philological way of thinking and working at the time.

[ 23 ] In Wilhelm Scherer, literary-historical philology strove to imitate the scientific methods of the time. It took the common ideas of the natural sciences and wanted to emulate the philological and literary-historical ones. Where a poet borrowed something from, how the borrowed material was transformed in him, became the questions on which a history of the development of intellectual life was based. The poetic personalities disappeared from consideration; a view of how "materials", "motifs" developed through the personalities emerged. This way of looking at things reached its peak in Erich Schmidt's great Lessing monograph. In this, it is not Lessing's personality that is the main focus, but a very careful examination of the Minna von Barnhelm motif, the Nathan motif, etc.

[ 24 ] Scherer died early, soon after the Goethe Archive was established. His students were numerous. Erich Schmidt was appointed by the Goethe Archive to take his place in Berlin. Herman Grimm then succeeded in ensuring that Bernhard Suphan, rather than one of Scherer's numerous students, became director of the archive.

[ 25 ] The latter had previously been a grammar school teacher in Berlin. At the same time, he had also edited Herder's works. This seemed to have predestined him to take over the management of the Goethe edition.

[ 26 ] Erich Schmidt still retained a certain influence; as a result, Scherer's spirit continued to influence Goethe's work. But Herman Grimm's ideas became more prominent alongside this, if not in the way he worked, then at least in his personal dealings in the Goethe Archive.

[ 27 ] Bernhard Suphan was, when I came to Weimar and entered into a closer relationship with him, a personally hard-tested man. He had seen two wives, who were sisters, sink prematurely into their graves. He now lived in Weimar with his two boys, grieving for the deceased, without any joy in life. His only bright spot was the benevolence shown to him by the Grand Duchess Sophie, his honestly revered mistress. There was nothing of servility in this reverence; Suphan loved and admired the Grand Duchess personally.

[ 28 ] Suphan was loyally devoted to Herman Grimm. He had previously, in Berlin, been regarded as a member of the House of Grimm, had breathed with satisfaction in the intellectual atmosphere that existed in that house. But there was something in him that made him unable to cope with life. It was possible to talk to him about the highest spiritual matters, but something sour, which emanated from his feelings, easily entered into the conversation. Above all, this sourness reigned in his own soul; then he helped himself over this feeling with a dry sense of humor. And so it was impossible to warm to him. He could grasp the big picture quite sympathetically in one breath and, without transition, lapse into pettiness and triviality. He was always sympathetic towards me. He had no sympathy for the intellectual interests that lived in my soul, and sometimes treated them from the point of view of his dry humor; but he took the greatest interest in the direction of my work in the Goethe Archive and in my personal life.

[ 29 ] I cannot deny that I was sometimes quite unpleasantly touched by what Suphan did, how he behaved in the management of the archive and in the management of the Goethe edition; I never made a secret of this. But when I look back on the years I lived through with him, a strong inner sympathy for the fate and personality of this sorely tried man prevails. He suffered from life and he suffered from himself. I saw him, as it were, sinking more and more into a bottomless, insubstantial brooding that rose up in his soul with the good aspects of his character and his abilities. When the Goethe and Schiller Archive moved into the new house built on the Ilm, Suphan said that he felt like one of those human sacrifices that in ancient times were walled in at the gates of sacred buildings for the blessing of the cause. He had also gradually fantasized himself into the role of someone sacrificed for the cause with which he did not feel entirely connected. He felt like a beast of burden in Goethe's work, unable to take pleasure in a task where others could have been most enthusiastic. I later found him in this mood whenever I met him after I left Weimar. He died by suicide in a clouded state of consciousness. Apart from Bernhard Suphan, Julius Wahle was working at the Goethe and Schiller Archive at the time I joined. He had been appointed by Erich Schmidt. Wahle and I had already become close during my first stay in Weimar; a warm friendship developed between us. Wahle was working on the publication of Goethe's diaries. Eduard von der Hellen, who was also responsible for the edition of Goethe's letters, acted as archivist.

[ 30 ] A large part of the German philological world contributed to "Goethes Werke". Professors and private lecturers of philology were constantly coming and going. We also spent a lot of time with them outside the archive hours during their longer and shorter visits. You could completely immerse yourself in the interests of these personalities.

[ 31 ] In addition to these actual collaborators on the Goethe edition, the archive was visited by numerous personalities who were interested in one or other of the rich manuscript collections of German poets. The archive gradually became the collection point for many poets' estates. And other interested parties also came, who initially had less to do with manuscripts, who only wanted to study within the archive rooms in the existing library. There were also many visitors who just wanted to see the archive's treasures.

[ 32 ] It was a pleasure for everyone who worked in the archive when Loeper appeared. He entered with pleasant and amiable remarks. He had his work materials handed to him, sat down and worked for hours with a concentration that you rarely see in a person. Whatever was going on around him, he never looked up. - If I were looking for a personification of amiability, I would choose Mr. v. Loeper. His Goethe research was endearing, every word he spoke to someone was endearing. Particularly endearing was the imprint that his whole mental life had taken on by the fact that he almost always seemed to be thinking only of how to make the world understand Goethe. I once sat next to him at a performance of Faust in the theater. I began to talk about the way the play was presented, about the acting. He didn't even hear what I was saying. But he replied: "Yes, these actors often use words and phrases that are not quite the same as Goethe's. " Loeper seemed even more amiable to me in his "absent-mindedness". When I came to talk about something during the break, where you were supposed to calculate a duration, Loeper said: "So the hour to 100 minutes, the minute to 100 seconds..." I looked at him and said: "Your Excellency, 60." He took out his watch, checked it, smiled warmly, counted and said: "Yes, yes, 60 minutes, 60 seconds." I experienced many similar samples of "absent-mindedness" with him. But I couldn't laugh even at such samples of Loeper's peculiar state of mind, because they seemed to be a necessary addition to the completely pose-less, unsentimental, I would say graceful seriousness of this personality, which at the same time appeared graceful. He spoke in somewhat effervescent sentences, almost without any intonation; but one heard a strong articulation of thought through the colorless language.

[ 33 ] Spiritual nobility entered the archive when Herman Grimm appeared. From the moment I read his Goethe book while still in Vienna, I had the deepest affection for his way of thinking. And since I was allowed to meet him for the first time in the archive, I had read almost everything that had been published by him up to that point. I soon became acquainted with him through Suphan. Once, when Suphan was not in Weimar and he came to visit the archive, he invited me to lunch at his hotel. I was alone with him. He obviously liked the way I was able to respond to his way of looking at the world and life. He became communicative. He spoke to me about his idea of a "history of the German imagination", which he carried in his soul. I got the impression at the time that he wanted to write one. It never came to pass. But he explained to me beautifully how the ongoing stream of historical development had its impulses in the creative popular imagination, which in his view took on the character of a living, active supersensible genius. During this lunch I was completely absorbed by Herman Grimm's explanations. I believed I knew how the supersensible spirit works through people. I had before me a man whose soul's gaze reaches as far as the creative spirituality, but who does not want to grasp the life of this spirituality by recognizing it, but who remains in the region where the spiritual lives itself out in man as fantasy. Herman Grimm had a special gift for surveying major or minor epochs of intellectual history and depicting what he surveyed in precise, witty epigrammatic characteristics. When he described an individual personality, when he described Michel Angelo, Raphael, Goethe, Homer, his depiction always appeared on the background of such overviews. How often have I read his essay in which he characterizes Greekism, Romanism and the Middle Ages in his striking overviews. The whole man was the revelation of a uniform style. When he coined his beautiful sentences in oral conversation, I had the idea that it could be written in exactly the same way in one of his essays; and when, after I had got to know him, I read one of his essays, I thought I could hear him speak. He didn't allow himself any casualness in oral conversation; but he had the feeling that in artistic and literary representation one must remain the person one walks around as in everyday life. But Herman Grimm did not walk around in everyday life like other people. It was natural for him to lead a stylized life.

[ 34 ] When Herman Grimm appeared in Weimar and in the archive, one felt that the estate was connected to Goethe by secret spiritual threads. Not so when Erich Schmidt came. He was not connected to the papers stored in the archive through ideas, but through the historical-philological method. I was never able to establish a human relationship with Erich Schmidt. And so I was quite uninterested in the great admiration for him among all those who worked as Scherer philologists in the archive.

[ 35 ] It was always a pleasant moment when the Grand Duke Karl Alexander appeared in the archive. A noble demeanor, but inwardly true enthusiasm for everything related to Goethe lived in this personality. His age, his long association with many important figures in German intellectual life and his winning amiability made a pleasant impression. It was a satisfying thought to know that he was the protector of Goethe's work in the archive.

[ 36 ] The Grand Duchess Sophie, the owner of the archive, was only seen in it on particularly festive occasions. When she had something to say, she had Suphan called in. Visitors working in the archive were taken to her to be introduced. However, her care for the archive was extraordinary. At the time, she personally prepared everything that was to lead to the construction of a state house in which the poets' estates were to be worthily housed.

[ 37 ] The Hereditary Grand Duke Karl August, who died before he came to power, also visited the archive frequently. His interest in all that was there did not run deep, but he enjoyed talking to us employees. He considered it more of a duty to take an interest in the affairs of intellectual life. Hereditary Grand Duchess Pauline, however, took a warm interest. I was able to have many a conversation with her about things concerning Goethe, poetry, etc. The archive stood between the scientific, artistic and the Weimar court society in terms of its communication. It took on its own social coloring from both sides. No sooner had the door closed behind a catheter man than it opened again for some princely personage who had come to visit the court. Many people from all walks of life took part in what was going on in the archive. It was basically a lively, stimulating life in many respects.

[ 38 ] In the immediate vicinity of the archive was the Weimar Library. It was home to a man with a childlike disposition and an almost unlimited erudition, Reinhold Köhler, as head librarian. The archive staff often worked there. Because what they had in the archive as a literary aid to their work found its important complement there. Reinhold Köhler was uniquely well versed in the creation of myths, fairy tales and legends; his knowledge in the field of linguistics was of the most admirable universality. He knew how to find the most hidden literary references. At the same time, he was touchingly modest and warmly accommodating. He never missed the opportunity to fetch the books you needed from their resting places into the library study where you were working. I once went there and asked to see a book that Goethe had used in his botanical studies. Reinhold Köhler fetched the book, which had probably been stored somewhere upstairs unused for decades. He did not return for a long time. They looked to see where it was. He had fallen off the ladder he had climbed to get the book. A broken femur. The dear, noble personality could not recover from the consequences of the accident. After a long illness, the widely revered man died. I suffered from the painful thought that his accident had happened while I was getting a book for him.