The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Chapter XX

[ 1 ] I found a social accommodation of the most beautiful kind in the family of the archivist at the Goethe and Schiller Archive, Eduard von der Hellens. This personality was in a peculiar position alongside the other employees of the archive. He had an extraordinarily high reputation in specialist philological circles thanks to his extraordinarily successful first work on "Goethe's part in Lavater's physiognomic fragments". With this work, von der Hellen had achieved something that every specialist immediately took as "full". Only the author himself did not think so. He saw the work as a methodical achievement whose principles could be "learned", while he wanted to strive for an inner spiritual fulfillment with spiritual content on all sides.

[ 2 ] So, when there were no visitors, the three of us sat for a while in the old staff room of the archive, as it was still in the palace: von der Hellen, who was working on the edition of Goethe's letters, Julius Wahle, who was working on the diaries, and I, who was working on the scientific writings. But it was precisely Eduard von der Hellen's intellectual needs that gave rise to conversations between work about the most diverse areas of intellectual and other public life. However, those interests that were related to Goethe were given their due. From the entries that Goethe made in his diaries, from the passages in Goethe's letters that sometimes revealed such high points of view and broad perspectives, observations could arise that led into the depths of existence and the vastness of life.

[ 3 ] Eduard von der Hellen had the great kindness to further develop the relationships that had resulted from this often so stimulating archive correspondence by introducing me to his family circle. The fact that Eduard von der Hellen's family also frequented the circles that I have described as those around Olden, Gabriele Reuter and others was a wonderful addition to our social life.

[ 4 ] I always had particularly vivid memories of the deeply sympathetic Frau von der Hellen. A thoroughly artistic nature. One of those who, had it not been for other obligations in life, could have achieved great things in art. As fate had it, as far as I know, this woman's artistic talent was only in its infancy. But every word we were allowed to speak to her about art had a beneficial effect. She had a restrained tone, always cautious in her judgment, but deeply sympathetic in a purely human way. I rarely went away from such a conversation without carrying around in my mind for a long time what Mrs. von der Hellen had suggested rather than said.

[ 5 ] Mrs. von der Hellen's father, a lieutenant-general who had served as a major in the Seventies War, and his second daughter were also very amiable. When one was in the company of these people, the most beautiful aspects of German spirituality came to life, that spirituality which flowed from the religious, aesthetic and popular-scientific impulses, which for so long were the true spiritual essence of the German, into all circles of social life.

[ 6 ] Eduard von der Hellen's interests brought the political life of the time to my attention for some time. His dissatisfaction with philology threw von der Hellen into the lively political life of Weimar. This seemed to open up another perspective in life for him. And the friendly interest in this personality made me, too, take an interest in the movements of public life without taking an active part in politics.

[ 7 ] A lot of the things that today have either shown themselves to be impossible or have produced absurd social forms in terrible metamorphoses were in the making, with all the hopes of a working class that had received the impression from eloquent, energetic leaders that a new time of social organization must come for humanity. More prudent and quite radical elements in the working class made themselves felt. It was all the more impressive to observe them because what was emerging was like a bubbling of social life in the underground. At the top there lived what dignified conservatism could only have developed in connection with a court that thought nobly and was energetic and insistent in favor of everything humane. In the atmosphere that existed there sprouted a reactionary party that took itself for granted and also what was called national liberalism.

[ 8 ] Finding his way through all this in such a way that a fruitful leadership role would emerge for him through the confusion was how one had to interpret what Eduard von der Hellen was now experiencing. And one had to witness what he experienced in this direction. He discussed all the details he was working on for a brochure with his friends. One had to be as deeply interested as Eduard von der Hellen himself in the concepts of the materialist view of history, class struggle and surplus value, which at that time were accompanied by completely different feelings than now. One could not help but attend the numerous meetings at which he appeared as a speaker. He thought of contrasting the theoretically educated Marxist program with another, which was to sprout from the good will for social progress among all workers' friends of all parties. He thought of a kind of revitalization of the middle parties with the inclusion of such impulses in their programmes, through which the social problem could be overcome.

[ 9 ] The matter proceeded without effect. The only thing I can say is that without my participation in Hellen's endeavor, I would not have experienced public life in that period as intensively as I did through it.

[ 10 ] This life came to me from a different direction, but far less intensely. Yes, it turned out that I developed quite a bit of resistance - which was not the case with von der Hellen - when political matters approached. There was a liberal politician living in Weimar at the time, a follower of Eugen Richter and also politically active in his spirit, Dr. Heinrich Fränkel. I became acquainted with the man. It was a brief acquaintance that was then broken off by a "misunderstanding", but one that I often think back on fondly. For the man was extraordinarily likeable in his manner, had an energetic political will and thought that with good will and sensible insights, people could be inspired to take the right path of progress in public life. His life was a string of disappointments. It was a pity that I had to cause him one myself. During the time of our acquaintance, he was working on a pamphlet for which he was thinking of mass distribution on a grand scale. For him it was a matter of working against the result of the alliance between big industry and agrarianism that was germinating in Germany at that time and which, in his opinion, would later develop into devastating fruit. His brochure bore the title: "Emperor, get tough." He thought he could convince the circles around the Emperor of what he considered to be harmful. - The man did not have the slightest success. He saw that the party to which he belonged and for which he worked did not have the strength to provide a basis for the action he had in mind.

[ 11 ] And so one day he became enthusiastic about reviving the "Deutsche Wochenschrift", which I had edited for a short time in Vienna a few years ago. He wanted to create a political current that would have led him away from the "Freisinn" of the time and into a more nationalist, free-spirited activity. He thought I could do something with him in this direction. That was impossible; I couldn't do anything to revive the "Deutsche Wochenschrift" either. The way I communicated this to him led to misunderstandings that quickly destroyed the friendship.

[ 12 ] But another thing came out of this friendship. The man had a very dear wife and dear sister-in-law. And he also introduced me to his family. She in turn brought me to another family. And that's where something happened that was like a mirror image of the strange coincidence of fate that had once befallen me in Vienna. I had been intimate with a family there, but in such a way that the head of the family had always remained invisible, yet had become so close to me spiritually and emotionally that after his death I gave the funeral oration as if for my best friend. The whole spirituality of this man stood before my soul in full reality through the family.

[ 13 ] And now I entered into almost exactly the same relationship with the head of the family, into which I had been introduced in a roundabout way by the free-minded politician. This head of the family had recently died; the widow lived reverently in memory of the deceased. It so happened that I moved out of my previous Weimar apartment and rented a room with the family. There was the library of the deceased. A man interested in many spiritual directions, but like the man who lived in Vienna, averse to contact with people; living in his own "spiritual world" like the deceased; taken by the world as an "eccentric" like the deceased. I felt that the man was like the other, without being able to meet him in physical life, as if he were walking through my fate "behind the scenes of existence". In Vienna, such a beautiful bond developed between the family of the well-known "unknown" and me; and in Weimar, an even more meaningful one developed between the second "known" and his family and me.

[ 14 ] If I must now speak of the two "unknown acquaintances", I know that what I have to say will be described by most people as wild fantasy. For it refers to how I was allowed to approach the two human souls in the world realm in which they were after they had passed through the gate of death.

[ 15 ] Everyone has the inner right to remove statements about this area from the circle of what interests him; but to treat them as something that can only be characterized as fantastic is something else. If someone does this, then I must assert that I have always sought the sources of that state of mind from which one may assert something spiritual in such exact branches of knowledge as mathematics or analytical mechanics. So I cannot be reproached for speaking carelessly, without responsibility for knowledge, when I say the following.

[ 16 ] The spiritual powers of perception that I carried in my soul at that time made it possible for me to have a closer connection with the two souls after their death on earth. They were of a different nature than other deceased people. After their death on earth, they first go through a life which, according to its content, is closely connected with life on earth, which only slowly and gradually becomes similar to that which a person has in the purely spiritual world, in which he spends his existence until the next life on earth.

[ 17 ] The two "unknown acquaintances" had now become quite thoroughly acquainted with the thoughts of the materialistic age. They had conceptually assimilated the scientific way of thinking. The second, whom Weimar brought to me, was even well acquainted with Billroth and similar scientific thinkers. On the other hand, both had probably remained far removed from a spiritual view of the world during their life on earth. They would probably have rejected anyone who could have confronted them at that time, because "scientific thinking" must have appeared to them as the result of the facts, according to the character of the thinking habits of the time.

[ 18 ] But this attachment to the materialism of the time remained entirely in the world of ideas of the two personalities. They did not go along with the habits of life that followed from the materialism of their thinking and which were the prevailing habits of all other people. They became "eccentrics before the world", living in more primitive forms than was customary at the time and than would have been appropriate for them according to their level of wealth. Thus they did not carry over into the spiritual world that which a connection with the materialistic will values could have given to their spiritual individualities, but only that which the materialistic thought values had transplanted into these individualities. Of course, for the souls this took place for the most part in the subconscious. And now I could see how these materialistic thought-values are not something that alienates man from the divine-spiritual world after death; but that this alienation only occurs through the materialistic will-values. Both the soul that had come close to me in Vienna and the one that I got to know spiritually in Weimar were, after death, gloriously luminous spiritual figures in whom the soul's content was filled with the images of the spiritual entities that underlie the world. And their acquaintance with the ideas, through which they thought through the material more precisely during their last life on earth, only contributed to the fact that they were also able to develop a judgment-based relationship to the world after death, as it would not have become for them if the corresponding ideas had remained alien to them.

[ 19 ] In these two souls, beings had inserted themselves into my path of destiny, through which the meaning of the scientific way of thinking was revealed to me directly from the spiritual world. I could see that this way of thinking need not in itself lead away from a spiritual view. In the case of the two personalities this had happened during their life on earth because they found no opportunity to raise their scientific thinking into the sphere where spiritual experience begins. After their death they accomplished this in the most perfect way. I saw that one can also bring about this upliftment if one musters the inner courage and strength to do so in earthly life. I also saw, through a co-experience of meaningful things in the spiritual world, that mankind had to develop into the scientific way of thinking. Earlier ways of thinking could connect the human soul with the spirit of the supersensible world; they could lead man, if he entered upon self-knowledge (the basis of all knowledge) at all, to know himself as an image, or even a member of the divine-spiritual world . but they could not lead him to feel himself as an independent, self-contained spiritual entity. Progress therefore had to be made towards grasping a world of ideas that is not inspired by the spirit itself, but by matter, which is spiritual but not of the spirit

[ 20 ] Such a world of ideas cannot be stimulated in man in the spiritual world, in which he lives after death or before a new birth, but only in earthly existence, because only there does he face the material form of being.

[ 21 ] So what man gains for his entire life, including the spiritual life, after death, through being interwoven with the scientific way of thinking, I was able to experience in the two human souls. But I could also see in others, who had grasped the consequences of the will of the mere scientific way of thinking in earthly life, that they alienated themselves from the spirit world, that they, so to speak, come to an overall life that with the scientific way of thinking represents less the human being in his humanity than without it.

[ 22 ] The two souls have become "eccentrics before the world" because they did not want to lose their humanity in earthly life; they have fully embraced the scientific way of thinking because they wanted to reach the spiritual stage of humanity, which is not possible without it.

[ 23 ] I would probably not have been able to gain these views of the two souls if they had confronted me as physical personalities during my earthly existence. In order to see the two individualities in the spirit world, in which their essence and many other things were to be revealed to me through them, I needed that tenderness of the soul's vision in relation to them, which is easily lost when what is experienced in the physical world obscures, or at least impairs, what is to be experienced purely spiritually.

[ 24 ] I therefore already had to see something in the peculiarity of the appearance of the two souls within my earthly existence that was destined for my path of cognition.

[ 25 ] But anything directed towards spiritualism could not come into consideration in this relationship with souls in the spiritual world. For me, nothing else could ever be valid for the relationship to the spiritual world than the truly spiritual view of which I later spoke publicly in my anthroposophical writings. Incidentally, both the Viennese family in all its members and the Weimar family were far too healthy for mediumistic communication with the deceased. I have always been interested in such a search for human souls, as it appears in Spiritism, wherever this came into question. The spiritualism of the present day is the deviation of such souls from the spiritual, who also want to seek the spirit in an external - almost experimental - way, because they can no longer feel the real, the true, the genuine in a spiritual way. It is precisely those who take a completely objective interest in spiritualism, without wanting to explore anything through it themselves, who can see through the right ideas about the intentions and misguided paths of spiritualism. - My own research always took a different path than Spiritism in any form. - It was also possible to have interesting contact with spiritualists in Weimar, because for a time this kind of searching attitude towards the spiritual was very much alive among artists.

[ 26 ] But my contact with the two souls strengthened my "philosophy of freedom". What I am striving for in this philosophy is, firstly, a result of my philosophical paths of thought in the eighties; secondly, it is also a result of my concrete general insight into the spiritual world. Thirdly, however, it was reinforced by the co-experience of the spiritual experiences of those two souls. In them I had before me the ascent that man owes to the scientific world view. But in them I also had before me the fear of noble souls of living into the will element of this world view. These souls trembled before the ethical consequences of such a world view. In my "Philosophy of Freedom" I have now sought the force that leads from the ethically neutral scientific world of ideas into the world of moral impulses. I have tried to show how man, who knows himself to be a self-contained, spiritual being because he lives in ideas that no longer flow from the spirit but are inspired by material being, can also develop intuition for the moral from his own being. As a result, the moral shines forth in the freed individuality as individual ethical impulsiveness in the same way as the ideas of the view of nature.

[ 27 ] The two souls had not penetrated to this moral intuition. Therefore, they (unconsciously) trembled before life, which could only have been held in the sense of the not yet expanded scientific ideas.

[ 28 ] I spoke at that time of "moral imagination" as the source of morality in human individuality. I certainly did not mean to refer to this source as something that is not fully real. On the contrary, I wanted to characterize in "imagination" the power that helps the true spiritual world to break through in the individual human being in all areas. However, if a real experience of the spiritual is to occur, then the spirit-like powers of cognition: imagination, inspiration, intuition must come into play. The first ray of a spiritual revelation to the individually cognizant human being, however, occurs through the imagination, which can be observed in Goethe in the way in which it distances itself from everything fantastic and becomes an image of the spiritually real. I lived with the family that the Weimar "unknown acquaintance" had left behind for most of the time I spent in Weimar. I had part of the apartment to myself; Mrs. Anna Eunike, with whom I soon became close friends, took care of everything for me in the most self-sacrificing way. She attached great importance to my helping her with the difficult tasks of bringing up the children. She had been left a widow with four daughters and a son after Eunike's death.

[ 29 ] I only saw the children when the opportunity arose. That happened often, because I was considered part of the family. With the exception of the morning and evening meals, I ate out.

[ 30 ] Where I had found such a nice family connection, I certainly didn't feel comfortable on my own. When the younger visitors to the Goethe Society meetings from Berlin, who had become closer to me, wanted to be "among themselves" in a very cozy atmosphere, they came to me in Eunike's house. And judging by the way they behaved, I have every reason to believe that they felt quite comfortable there.

[ 31 ] Otto Erich Hartleben also liked to spend time there when he was in Weimar. The Goethe-Brevier, which he published, was compiled by both of us in just a few days.

[ 32 ] Of my own major writings, the "Philosophy of Freedom" and "Nietzsche, a Fighter against his Time" were written there. And I think many a Weimar friend also enjoyed spending an hour - or even several - with me in Eunike's house.

[ 33 ] I am thinking above all of Dr. August Fresenius, with whom I had a genuine friendship and love. He had, from a certain point in time, become a permanent employee at the archive. He had previously edited the "Deutsche Literaturzeitung". His editorial work was generally regarded as exemplary. I had a lot on my mind against philology as it was then, especially under the leadership of the Scherer supporters. August Fresenius disarmed me again and again with the way he was a philologist. And he never for a moment made a secret of the fact that he wanted to be a philologist and only a true philologist. But for him philology was really the love of the word, which filled the whole man with vitality; and the word was for him the human revelation in which all the laws of the universe were reflected. Anyone who wants to truly understand the secrets of words needs insight into all the secrets of existence. The philologist can therefore do no other than cultivate universal knowledge. Properly applied philological methods can shed powerful light on vast and meaningful areas of life, starting from the very simple.

[ 34 ] Fresenius demonstrated this at the time with an example that intensely captured my interest. We talked a lot about the matter before he published it in a short but serious miscellany in the "Goethe-Jahrbuch". Until this discovery by Fresenius, all those who had concerned themselves with the explanation of Goethe's "Faust" had misunderstood a statement Goethe had made to Wilhelm von Humboldt five days before his death. Goethe had made the statement: "It is over sixty years since the conception of Faust was clear to me in my youth, but the extended sequence was less detailed. Those who explained it had taken "from the outset" as if Goethe had had an idea or a plan for the whole Faust drama from the beginning, into which he had then more or less worked the details. My dear teacher and friend, Karl Julius Schröer, was also of this opinion.

[ 35 ] Think about it: if this were correct, then in Goethe's "Faust" we would have before us a work that Goethe would have conceived as a young man in the main course. One would have to admit that it would have been possible for Goethe's state of mind to work out of a general idea in such a way that the work in progress could have taken sixty years once the idea was established. Fresenius' discovery showed quite irrefutably that this was not the case. He showed that Goethe never used the word "from the outset" in the way that those who explain it ascribe it to him. He said, for example, that he had read one book "from the outset", but not the next. He used the word "from the outset" only in the spatial sense. This proved that all those who explained "Faust" were wrong and that Goethe had said nothing about a plan for "Faust" that existed "from the outset", but only that the first parts were clear to him as a young man and that here and there he had carried out something of what followed.

[ 36 ] Thus, through the correct application of the philological method, a significant light was thrown on the whole of Goethe's psychology.

[ 37 ] I was only surprised at the time that something which should have had the most far-reaching consequences for the conception of Goethe's mind, after it had become known through publication in the "Goethe-Jahrbuch", actually made little impression on those who should have been most interested in it.

[ 38 ] But it was not just philological matters that were discussed with August Fresenius. Everything that was going on at the time, everything that interested us in Weimar or beyond, was the subject of our long conversations. Because we were together a lot. We sometimes had heated discussions about some things, but everything always ended in complete harmony. After all, we were mutually convinced of the seriousness of our views. It is all the more bitter for me to have to look back on the fact that my friendship with August Fresenius also suffered a rupture in connection with the misunderstandings that followed my relationship with the Nietzsche Archive and with Dr. Förster-Nietzsche. The friends could not get a picture of what was actually going on. I could not give them a satisfactory one. Because nothing had actually happened. And everything was based on misunderstood illusions that had taken root in the Nietzsche archive. What I was able to say is contained in the articles I later published in the "Magazin für Literatur". I deeply regretted the misunderstanding, because my friendship with August Fresenius was deeply rooted in my heart.

[ 39 ] I became friends with Franz Ferdinand Heitmüller, who had also, later than Wahle, v. d. Hellen and I, joined the circle of archive staff.

[ 40 ] Heitmüller presented himself as a fine, artistically sensitive soul. He actually decided everything through his artistic sensibility. Intellectuality was far removed from him. Through him, something artistic came into the whole tone in which people spoke in the archive. He wrote subtle novellas at that time. He was by no means a bad philologist; and he certainly did the work he had to do for the archive no worse than anyone else. But he was always in a kind of inner opposition to what was being worked on in the archive. Especially to the way this work was perceived. Through him, it came about that for a time it stood quite vividly before our souls how Weimar was once the place of the most intellectually lively and distinguished production; and how one was now satisfied with pursuing what was once produced in a word-believing manner, "ascertaining readings" and at most interpreting them. Heitmüller wrote anonymously what he had to say about it in novella form in S. Fischer's "Neue Deutsche Rundschau": "Die versunkene Vineta." Oh, how hard it was to guess who had turned the once intellectually flourishing Weimar into a "sunken city".

[ 41 ] Heitmüller lived with his mother, an exceptionally dear lady, in Weimar. She was friends with Mrs. Anna Eunike and liked to spend time in her house. And so I had the pleasure of often seeing the two Heitmüllers in the house where I lived.

[ 42 ] I must remember a friend who came into my circle quite early during my stay in Weimar and who remained on friendly terms with me until I left, even when I later came to visit Weimar from time to time. It was the painter Joseph Rolletschek. He was a German Bohemian and had come to Weimar, attracted by the art school. A personality who was thoroughly amiable and with whom one gladly opened one's heart in conversation. Rolletscheck was sentimental and slightly cynical at the same time; he was pessimistic on the one hand and inclined to hold life in such low esteem on the other that it did not seem worth his while to evaluate things in such a way as to give cause for pessimism. When he was present, there had to be much talk about the injustices of life; and he could rage endlessly about the injustice that the world had committed against poor Schiller compared to Goethe, who had already been favored by fate.

[ 43 ] Despite the fact that daily intercourse with such personalities kept the exchange of thought and feeling constantly lively, it was not characteristic of me in this Weimar period to speak in a direct way of my experience of the spiritual world, even to those with whom I was otherwise intimate. I believed that it had to be understood how the right path into the spiritual world first leads to the experience of pure ideas. This was what I asserted in all forms, that just as man can have colors, sounds, qualities of warmth, etc. in his conscious experience, he can also experience pure ideas, uninfluenced by all external perception and with a complete life of their own. And in these ideas is the real, living spirit. All other spiritual experience in man, I said at the time, must arise in consciousness from this experience of ideas.

[ 44 ] The fact that I initially sought spiritual experience in the experience of ideas led to the misunderstanding of which I have already spoken, namely that even intimate friends did not see the living reality in ideas and took me for a rationalist or intellectualist.

[ 45 ] A younger personality, Max Christlieb, who often came to Weimar, was the most energetic in his understanding of the living reality of the world of ideas. It was quite at the beginning of my stay in Weimar that I often saw this man who was searching for spiritual knowledge. At the time, he was preparing to become a Protestant pastor, had just completed his doctorate and was preparing to go to Japan on a kind of missionary service, which he soon did.

[ 46 ] This man saw - I may say enthusiastically - how one lives in the spirit when one lives in pure ideas, and how, since in the pure world of ideas the whole of nature must light up before knowledge, one has only appearance (illusion) before oneself in all matter, how through ideas all physical being reveals itself as spirit. It was deeply satisfying for me to find in a personality an almost complete understanding of the spirit being. It was an understanding of spirit-being in the ideal. There, however, the spirit lives in such a way that spirit-individualities which are not yet sentient and creative detach themselves from the sea of general ideal spirit-being for the perceiving gaze. I could not yet speak of these spirit-individualities to Max Christlieb. That would have been too much for his beautiful idealism. But one could talk to him about genuine spiritual being. He had thoroughly read everything I had written up to that point. And at the beginning of the nineties I had the impression that Max Christlieb had the gift of penetrating the world of the spirit through the living spirituality of the ideal, which I considered to be the most appropriate way. The fact that he later did not fully adhere to this orientation, but took a somewhat different direction, is no reason to discuss it here.