The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Chapter XXVIII

[ 1 ] In these difficult times for me, the board of the Berlin Workers' Education School approached me with the request that I should take over the teaching of history and "speech" exercises at this school. At first I was not very interested in the socialist context in which the school stood. I saw before me the wonderful task of teaching mature men and women from the working class. Because there were few young people among the "pupils". I explained to the board that if I were to take over the lessons, I would present history entirely according to my own opinion of the development of mankind, not in the style that is now customary in social democratic circles according to Marxism. They stuck to wanting my lessons.

[ 2 ] After I had made this reservation, it could no longer affect me that the school was a social-democratic foundation of the old Liebknecht (the father). For me, the school consisted of men and women from the proletariat; I had nothing to do with the fact that the vast majority were Social Democrats.

[ 3 ] But of course I had to deal with the mindset of the "students". I had to speak in forms of expression that were completely unfamiliar to me until then. I had to find my way into the concepts and judgments of these people in order to be understood to some extent.

[ 4 ] These concepts and judgments came from two sides. First from life. These people were familiar with material work and its results. The spiritual powers guiding humanity forward in history did not come before their souls. This is why Marxism had such an easy time with the "materialist view of history". It claimed that the driving forces in historical development were only the economic-material forces that were produced by material labor. The "spiritual factors" were merely a kind of by-product that emerged from the material-economic: they were a mere ideology.

[ 5 ] In addition, a zeal for scientific education had been developing in the working class for a long time. But this could only be satisfied in popular materialistic-scientific literature. For only this literature met the conceptual and judgmental forms of the workers. What was not materialistic was written in such a way that it was impossible for the worker to understand. Thus came the unspeakably tragic fact that when the nascent proletariat yearned for knowledge with the greatest longing, it was satisfied only with the crudest materialism.

[ 6 ] It must be borne in mind that the economic materialism which the workers absorb through Marxism as "materialist history" contains partial truths. And that these partial truths are precisely what they easily understand. Therefore, if I had taught idealistic history with complete disregard for these partial truths, one would have felt quite involuntarily in the materialistic partial truths that which recoiled from my lecture.

[ 7 ] I therefore proceeded from a truth that could also be understood by my listeners. I showed how up to the sixteenth century it was absurd to speak of a domination of economic forces, as Marx does. How, from the sixteenth century onwards, the economy first moves into conditions that can be understood in Marxist terms; how this process then reaches its climax in the nineteenth century.

[ 8 ] So it was possible to discuss the ideational-spiritual impulses for the preceding ages of history quite appropriately and to show how these have become weaker in recent times compared to the material-economic ones.

[ 9 ] In this way, the workers gained an understanding of the cognitive, religious, artistic and moral driving forces in history and moved away from viewing them merely as "ideology". It would have made no sense to become polemical against materialism; I had to let idealism emerge from materialism.

[ 10 ] In the "speech exercises", however, little could be done in the same direction. After I had always discussed the formal rules of presenting and speaking at the beginning of a course, the "students" spoke in practice speeches. They naturally presented what they were familiar with in their materialistic way.

[ 11 ] The "leaders" of the working class didn't care about the school at first. And so I had a completely free hand.

[ 12 ] Things became more difficult for me when science lessons were added to the history lessons. It was particularly difficult then to move on from the materialistic ideas prevalent in science, especially among its popularizers, to more objective ones. I did it as best I could.

[ 13 ] Now, however, it was precisely through natural science that my teaching activities within the working class expanded. I was asked by numerous trade unions to give scientific lectures. In particular, they wanted instruction on Haeckel's book "Welträtsel", which was causing a sensation at the time. I saw in the positive biological third of this book a precise and brief summary of the relationship of living beings. What I was generally convinced of, that mankind could be led to spirituality from this side, I also considered to be correct for the working class. I tied my observations to this third of the book and said often enough that the other two thirds must be considered worthless and should actually be cut away from the book and destroyed.

[ 14 ] When the Gutenberg anniversary was celebrated, I was given the ceremonial address in front of 7000 typesetters and printers in a Berlin circus. My way of speaking to the workers was therefore perceived sympathetically.

[ 15 ] Fate had put me back into a piece of life with this activity, into which I had to immerse myself. How the individual soul slumbered and dreamed within this workforce, and how a kind of mass soul gripped this humanity, embracing imagination, judgment, attitude, that presented itself to me.

[ 16 ] But one must not imagine that the individual souls had died. In this direction, I was able to take a deep look into the souls of my students and the working class in general. That helped me in the task I set myself in this whole activity. The attitude towards Marxism among the workers at that time was not yet the same as it was two decades later. Back then, Marxism was something that they processed like an economic gospel with full consideration. Later, it became something that the proletarian masses were obsessed with.

[ 17 ] The proletarian consciousness at that time consisted of feelings that were like the effects of mass suggestion. Many of the individual souls kept saying: There must come a time when the world will again develop spiritual interests; but first the proletariat must be redeemed purely economically.

[ 18 ] I found that my lectures had many a good effect on souls. It was received, even what contradicted materialism and the Marxist view of history. Later, when the "leaders" learned of my kind of work, they challenged it. One of these "little leaders" spoke at a meeting of my students. He said: "We don't want freedom in the proletarian movement; we want reasonable coercion." This amounted to driving me out of the school against the will of my students. My work gradually became so difficult that I dropped it soon after I had begun to work anthroposophically.

[ 19 ] I have the impression that if a larger number of unbiased people had followed the workers' movement with interest and treated the proletariat with understanding, this movement would have developed quite differently. But people were left to live within their class, and lived within their own. It was merely theoretical views that one class of people had of the other. They negotiated on wage matters when strikes and the like necessitated it; they founded all kinds of welfare institutions. The latter was extremely commendable.

[ 20 ] But all immersion of these world-shaking questions in a spiritual sphere was missing. And yet only this could have taken away the destructive powers of the movement. It was the time in which the "higher classes" lost their sense of community, in which egoism and fierce competition spread. The time in which the world catastrophe of the second decade of the twentieth century was already being prepared. At the same time, the proletariat developed a sense of community in its own way as a proletarian class consciousness. It participated in the "culture" that had formed in the "upper classes" only to the extent that they provided material to justify proletarian class consciousness. There was a gradual lack of any bridge between the different classes.

[ 21 ] Thus, through the "Magazin", I was compelled to immerse myself in the bourgeois character, and through my activity in the working class in the proletarian one. A rich field in which to experience and recognize the driving forces of the time.