The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Chapter XVI

[ 1 ] I must count what I experienced through Gabriele Reuter, whom I was able to get close to through this circle, as one of the most beautiful hours of my life. A personality who carried within her deep human problems and approached them with a certain radicalism of heart and feeling. She stood with all her soul in everything that appeared to her in social life as a contradiction between traditional prejudice and the original demands of human nature. She looked at the woman, who is constrained from the outside by these traditional prejudices through life and upbringing, and who must painfully experience what wants to enter life as "truth" from the depths of the soul. Radicalism of the heart expressed in a calm and intelligent way, permeated by artistic sense and forceful creative power, that is what Gabriele Reuter revealed as greatness. The conversations I had with her while she was working on her book "Aus guter Familie" were immeasurably delightful. I think back and see myself standing on a street corner with her, discussing questions that moved her for more than an hour in the blazing heat of the sun. Gabriele Reuter was able to talk in the most dignified manner, never losing her calm demeanor for a moment, about things that would immediately get others visibly excited. "Rejoicing to the skies, saddened to death" was alive in her feelings; yet it remained in her soul and did not become part of her words. Gabriele Reuter emphasized sharply what she had to say; but she never did it vocally, only emotionally. I believe that this art of keeping the articulation entirely in the soul while keeping the speech flowing evenly is particularly characteristic of her style. And it seems to me that in her writing she has fully developed this characteristic into her charming style.

[ 2 ] There was something unspeakably beautiful about the admiration Gabriele Reuter found in Olden's circle. Hans Olden often said to me quite elegiacally: this woman is great, could I - he added - also rise so courageously to present to the outside world what moves me in the depths of my soul.

[ 3 ] This circle took part in the Weimar Goethe events in its own special way. It was a tone of irony that never mocked frivolously, but was often even aesthetically indignant, judging the "past" as the "present". For days after Goethe meetings, Olden stood at the typewriter to write reports on what he had experienced, which in his opinion were intended to give the verdict of the "child of the world" on the Goethe prophets.

[ 4 ] This tone was soon echoed by another "child of the world", Otto Erich Hartleben. He was present at almost every Goethe meeting. But at first I couldn't quite discover why he came.

[ 5 ] I got to know Otto Erich Hattleben in the circle of journalists, theater people and writers who gathered in the Hotel Chemnitius on the evenings of the Goethe Festivals, separated from the "learned celebrities". I immediately understood why he was sitting there. Because his element was to indulge in the kind of conversations that were held there. He stayed there for a long time. He couldn't leave at all. So I was once with him and others. The rest of us were "dutifully" at the Goethe meeting the next morning. Hartleben wasn't there. But I had already grown quite fond of him and was worried about him. That's why I went to see him in his hotel room after the end of the meeting. He was still asleep. I woke him up and told him that the general meeting of the Goethe Society was already over. I didn't understand why he had wanted to take part in the Goethe Festival in this way. But he replied in such a way that I could see it was quite natural for him to travel to Weimar for the Goethe meeting in order to sleep during its events. Because he slept through most of what the others had come for.

[ 6 ] I came close to Otto Erich Hartleben in a special way. At one of the indicated evening tables, a conversation about Schopenhauer once unfolded. Many admiring and dismissive words had already been spoken about the philosopher. Hartleben had been silent for a long time. Then he said in the midst of wild revelations: "He gets you excited; but he's not for life. " He looked at me questioningly, with a childishly helpless look; he wanted me to say something because he had heard that I was studying Schopenhauer. And I said: "I must think Schopenhauer a narrow-minded genius. " Hartleben's eyes sparkled, he became restless, he finished his drink and ordered a fresh glass, he had taken me into his heart at that moment; his friendship with me was well founded. "Born genius!" He liked that. I could just as well have used it of a completely different personality, he wouldn't have cared. He was deeply interested in the fact that one could have the opinion that a genius could also be narrow-minded.

[ 7 ] The Goethe meetings were exhausting for me. Most of the people in Weimar were either in one circle or the other, in that of the philologists who talked or dined, or in that of the Olden-Hartleben coloration. I had to take part in both. My interests drove me in both directions. This was possible because some held their meetings by day, others by night. But I was not allowed to follow Otto Erich's way of life. I couldn't sleep during the daytime meetings. I loved the variety of life and really enjoyed being with Suphan, who never got to know Hartleben - because it wasn't convenient for him - at lunchtime in the archive circle just as much as being with Hartleben and his like-minded colleagues in the evening.

[ 8 ] The worldviews of a number of people presented themselves to me during my time in Weimar. Because with everyone with whom it was possible to talk about world and life issues, such conversations developed in the immediate vicinity. And many people interested in such conversations passed through Weimar.

[ 9 ] I lived through this time at the age when the soul, according to its inclination, turns intensively to external life, in which it wants to find its firm connection with this life. The world views that presented themselves became a part of the outside world to me. And I had to realize how little I had actually lived with an outside world until then. When I withdrew from the lively traffic, I realized again and again that until then only the spiritual world, which I looked at inwardly, had been a familiar world to me. I could easily connect with this world. And my thoughts at that time often went in the direction of telling myself how difficult the path through the senses to the outside world had become for me during my entire childhood and youth. I always found it difficult to assimilate external data into my memory, which is necessary in the field of science, for example. I had to see a natural object often and often if I wanted to know what it was called, what class it belonged to scientifically, and so on. I may say that the sensory world had something shadowy and pictorial for me. It passed before my soul in images, while the connection with the spiritual had the genuine character of the real.

[ 10 ] I felt all of this most in the early nineties in Weimar. I was putting the finishing touches to my "Philosophy of Freedom". I wrote down, I felt, the thoughts that the spiritual world had given me up to the age of thirty. Everything that had come to me through the outer world had only the character of a suggestion.

[ 11 ] I felt this especially when I talked to other people about worldview issues in the lively discussions in Weimar. I had to respond to them, their way of thinking and their way of feeling; they did not respond at all to what I had experienced and was still experiencing inside. I lived very intensely with what others saw and thought; but I could not let my inner spiritual reality flow into this experienced world. I always had to remain within myself with my own being. It really was my world as if separated from the outside world by a thin wall.

[ 12 ] With my own soul I lived in a world that bordered on the outside world; but I always had to cross a boundary if I wanted to have anything to do with the outside world. I was in the liveliest intercourse; but in every single case I had to enter this intercourse from my world as through a door. This made it seem to me as if I were paying a visit every time I approached the outside world. But that did not prevent me from devoting myself with the most lively interest to the person I was visiting; I even felt completely at home while I was visiting.

[ 13 ] So it was with people, so it was with world views. I liked going to Suphan, I liked going to Hartleben. Suphan never went to Hartleben; Hartleben never went to Suphan. Neither could enter into the other's way of thinking and feeling. I was immediately with Suphan, immediately with Hartleben as at home. But neither Suphan nor Hartleben actually came to me. Even when they came to me, they stayed with themselves. I couldn't experience any visits in my spiritual world.

[ 14 ] I saw the most diverse world views before my soul. The scientific, the idealistic and many nuances of both. I felt the urge to enter into them, to move within them; they did not really shed any light on my spiritual world. They were apparitions that stood before me, not realities that I could have lived into.

[ 15 ] So it was in my soul when life brought world views such as Haeckel's and Nietzsche's closer to me. I felt their relative justification. Due to the state of my soul, I could not treat them in such a way that I said: this is right, that is wrong. I would have had to perceive what lives in them as alien to me. But I did not feel one more alien than the other; for I only felt at home in the spiritual world I looked at, and I could feel "at home" in each other.

[ 16 ] When I describe it like this, it can seem as if I was basically indifferent to everything. But that wasn't the case at all. I had a completely different feeling about it. I felt myself fully involved in the other, because I did not alienate it from myself by immediately bringing my own into my judgment and feelings.

[ 17 ] I had countless conversations, for example, with Otto Harnack, the witty author of the book "Goethe in der Epoche seiner Vollendung" (Goethe in the Era of His Perfection), who came to Weimar a lot at the time because he was working on Goethe's art studies. The man, who later fell into a shattering life tragedy, was dear to me. I could be Otto Harnack when I spoke to him. I accepted his thoughts, settled into them - in the marked sense - as a visitor, but "as if at home". I didn't even think about asking him to visit me. He could only live with himself. He was so wrapped up in his thoughts that he felt everything that wasn't his was foreign. He could only have heard about my world if he had treated it like the Kantian "thing in itself", which lies "beyond consciousness". I felt spiritually obliged to treat his world as one to which I did not have to relate in a Kantian way, but into which I had to lead consciousness.

[ 18 ] I did not live like this without spiritual dangers and difficulties. Anyone who rejects everything that is not in his line of thought is not oppressed by the relative justification that the various world views have. He can unreservedly feel the fascination of what is conceived according to a certain direction. This fascination of intellectualism lives in so many people. They can easily cope with what is conceived differently from their own. But he who has a world of view, as it must be the spiritual one, sees the justification of the most diverse "points of view"; and he must continually defend himself within his soul so as not to be drawn too strongly towards one or the other.

[ 19 ] But one already becomes aware of the "essence of the outer world" when one can be devoted to it in love and yet must always return to the inner world of the spirit. But you also learn to really live in the spiritual world.

[ 20 ] The various intellectual "standpoints" reject each other; the spiritual view sees them as "standpoints". Seen from each of them, the world looks different. It is like photographing a house from different sides. The pictures are different; the house is the same. If you walk around the real house, you get an overall impression. If you are really standing inside it in the spiritual world, then you accept the "right" point of view. One sees a photographic image from a "point of view" as something justified. One then asks about the justification and meaning of the point of view.

[ 21 ] This is how I had to approach Nietzsche, for example, and Haeckel. Nietzsche, I felt, photographed the world from a point of view to which a deeply conceived human being was pushed in the second half of the nineteenth century, when it could live on the spiritual content of this age alone, when the contemplation of the spirit did not want to break into its consciousness, but the will in the subconscious pushed towards the spirit with immensely strong forces. Thus the image of Nietzsche came to life in my soul; it showed me the personality that did not see the spirit, but in which the spirit unconsciously fights against the unspiritual views of the time.