Introductory
Remarks
1. Motivation
There is a definite reason for publishing
this study. A number of allegations have recently been publicly
levelled against Rudolf Steiner in Germany; they pertain to his
supposed anti-Semitism and racist attitude. The intention of
these allegations is obvious: they are an attack on Waldorf schools
and other institutions that base their activity on Rudolf Steiner's
teachings, because the necessity is seen to establish "political
correctness" in this sensitive area of society. But Steiner
is not the only target. The Holocaust has sharpened sensibilities
considerably. Other prominent personalities have also been the
addressees of such accusations in recent times: Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe, for example. Goethe, an anti-Semite! A charge of
this sort - which, incredible as it may seem, was actually brought
forth - can be sure to command the attention of the general public.
It will certainly also elicit strong refutations, because anyone
with even an inkling of Goethe's achievements will find this
accusation just too extreme and in complete contradiction to
the man and his work. However, it is possible to find remarks
by Goethe which, if one does not know and take into consideration
their historical background, would seem to corroborate this claim.
If such accusations are levelled against Rudolf
Steiner, it is a good deal more difficult to defend him. His
work is much less well known than Goethe's, and therefore the
accusations appear to be more believable. This makes such claims
harder to refute.
There has been an inflation of allegations
of anti-Semitism in recent years which has not been particularly
conducive to combating real anti-Semitism. Jens Jessen drew attention
to this inflation and its pernicious effect in the German weekly
periodical Die Zeit, No. 49/2000. Only "sophrosyne",
the little esteemed secondary virtue of level-headedness, will
in the end be able to secure the survival of the primary virtue,
the opposition to true anti-Semitism.
And indeed: if Steiner's real intentions were
dealt with and people became sufficiently familiar with them,
that is, if sophrosyne were to hold sway, it is hardly conceivable
that anyone would reap the benefits of sensationalism by accusing
Steiner of being an anti-Semite.
This allegation is contained, for example, in the publication
Rasse Mensch (Race: Human)2,
especially in the contribution of the coeditor Petrus van der
Let entitled Neger, Juden, Frauen und andere Rassen (Negroes,
Jews, Women and other Races). Peter Bierl makes similar allegations
in another book3. The
following authoritative study will refute these allegations levelled
against Rudolf Steiner. They are based on a collage of fragments
from Rudolf Steiner's works attempting to construct an attitude
of racism which does not exist in Anthroposophy. In its very
foundation Anthroposophy is universal, humanistic and emancipatory;
through this collage it is distorted in an unprecedented manner.
On their literary merit alone, the writings of Van der Let, Bierl
and others would deserve to be ignored. Anyone with even a passing
knowledge of Anthroposophy should be able to realise how inappropriate
the charges are. But since, as experience shows, the unsuspecting
reader does not always recognise the slanderous nature of the
allegation of racism, and believes the
fragments to be representative of the views of Steiner, we see
the necessity of refuting these distortions and untruths.
The present study will first discuss and analyse
Steiner's alleged anti-Semitism, as this claim at present enjoys
a certain popularity. A second study will subsequently deal with
remarks by Steiner that some authors consider to be racist. A
Dutch research commission classified them as discriminatory in
its preliminary report Antroposofie en het vraagstuk van de
rassen (Anthroposophy and the Question of Race), of 1998.4 5
Some of these issues have already been discussed
in journals and other publications. But as yet we do not have
a comprehensive discussion of the whole subject. We will endeavour
to incorporate the other investigations into our study through
references and footnotes.
2. The report
of the Dutch Commission
We will begin with some comments on the report
of a Dutch commission on the question of whether an inherent
racism can be found in Anthroposophy.
In Holland, a study was published on April
1, 2000 on the question of the view of different races in Anthroposophy.
The study was conducted under a mandate of the Anthroposophical
Society in The Netherlands by a commission chaired by the anthroposophical
lawyer Dr. Th. A. van Baarda, an expert on discrimination legislation.
The reason for the study was the appearance
of publications in the Dutch media about a supposed racial doctrine
of Rudolf Steiner's and the fear that this doctrine might have
an effect on teaching in Waldorf schools. The key question was
whether Rudolf Steiner taught a racial doctrine, in the sense
of a seemingly scientific theory, on the basis of which the superiority
of one race over others is allegedly legitimised.
The 720-page study is based on an extensive
documented analysis of the issue of racism and a discussion of
245 quotations from Steiner's collected works. The commission
comes to the conclusion that of Rudolf Steiner's complete works,
encompassing 89.000 pages,6
12 quotations7 - taken
in isolation - can be experienced as discriminating according
to present legislation in Holland on discrimination. The commission,
however, also comes to the unambiguous conclusion8
that there principally can be no question of racism in the
works of Rudolf Steiner:
"[...] Steiner emphasises
the importance of the spiritual development of man and mankind,
while the influence of somatic factors (that includes belonging
to a specific race) becomes less and less important in the course
of this development. Because of this, there exists a basic contradiction
between biological racism and the anthroposophical view of man.
According to the anthroposophical view of man, biological characteristics,
that includes biological differences between races, have no influence
on his or her essential being [...] (p. 312 of the German translation,
p. 294 of the Dutch original.)"
"[...] Proportionally
and substantially, the attention that Steiner gives to the theme
of races in his extensive work is so small, that for this reason
alone there can be no question of a racial doctrine. Steiner's
work admittedly contain a view of how differentiations have arisen
during the evolution of humanity. This view is one aspect of
his spiritual scientific research, that contributes to an understanding
of what has evolved, without passing judgement on the value of
different races [...] (p. 312 of the German translation, p. 295
of the Dutch original.)"
With regard to the above mentioned 12 quotes,
which have all been taken out of their context (mainly from the
so-called lectures for workers), the Dutch investigation points
out that "it is methodologically and ethically irresponsible
to take quotes out of their context; for Steiner's works this
is true [...] to an even higher degree". 9
If nevertheless it is still claimed that these remarks might
possibly be discriminatory, this must be understood primarily
in relation to the legal situation in Holland. In this country,
a statement can be classified as "discriminatory" if
a reader or listener feels discriminated against even by an isolated
remark, and even if the person making the remark has no intention
to discriminate and no discriminating objectively can be determined.
It is then up to the person making the remark to disprove the
"assumption" that a discriminatory tendency was intended.
(See p. 311 of the German translation, p. 293 of the Dutch original).
This legal situation in Holland has led to
much confusion and premature judgements about Rudolf Steiner
in Germany. The refutation of the allegation of racism, which
- also in the eyes of the Dutch commission - is not necessary
for Steiner's work as a whole, will still be given in our second
study for the 12 incriminated remarks, even though under German
law this is not necessary. The 12 remarks can only be properly
understood in the context of the printed lecture texts and of
Steiner's teachings as a whole.
The allegations of supposed racism in Steiner's world view and
in Anthroposophy are brought forth from a present day perspective,
but are based on remarks made in the 1920s and earlier. The absurdity
of these imputations is sharply illustrated by the fact that
the investigations of Nazi experts working for the German Secret
Service reached the exact opposite conclusion regarding Anthroposophy.
They had a clearly appropriate answer to the question of whether
Anthroposophy was "potentially racist" or "compatible
with racism": they evaluated it as extremely hostile
to race (racial thinking), as it strove to liberate the human
spirit from race. Professor of Theology Jakob Wilhelm Hauer wrote
the following assessment for the German Secret Service in 1935:
"I consider the anthroposophical
world view, which has in every respect an international and pacifist
orientation, to be absolutely incompatible with National Socialism.
The National Socialist world view is built on the concepts of
blood, race and nation, and also on the idea of the totalitarian
state. Precisely these two pillars of the National Socialist
world view and the Third Reich are negated by the anthroposophical
world view [...]. Every investigation and activity of Anthroposophy
proceeds with necessity from the anthroposophical world view.
For that reason, schools which are based on the anthroposophical
world view and are run by anthroposophists pose a danger for
true German education. [...]."10
Or compare this other report from the Head
Office of the Secret Service of the National Socialists from
May 1936:
"[...] Anthroposophy
separates the spirit from its connection with race and the nation,
and condemns all that is racial and belonging to the nation to
a lower sphere of primitivism, of instincts, of dark urges needing
to be vanquished by the spirit, of primeval time. In this way
it demonstrates that it is closely related to the main currents
of the previous European cultural tradition, especially to the
Enlightenment, to German Idealism, and to the Liberalism of the
last century. In Anthroposophy, the spirit of the French Revolution,
the humanitarian ideal of Freemasonry, out of which Theosophy
arose as the mother organisation of Anthroposophy, has remained
alive. [...]
These basic principles of
the anthroposophical world view have caused it to be open in
a disastrous way to all anti-nationalist, antinational, supranational,
pacifist and especially Jewish influences [...]"11
However distorted this definitive evaluation
of Anthroposophy from the Nazi racist perspective may seem, it
is certainly astoundingly "clairvoyant" in its understanding
of the incompatibility of Anthroposophy with real racism.
3. The Aim
of the Present Study
A further aspect must be mentioned in this
introduction. The following investigation does not aim to confirm
Steiner's ideas through its interpretation. These ideas may appear
to be evident as a basis of a spiritual science or they can be
seen as fruitful "working hypotheses". Other scholars
may reject them. In any case: it is not the intention of this
investigation to defend the substance of Steiner's statements
about a spiritual world view or to justify details. Its sole
aim is, through a serious analysis of the texts, to make clear
what Steiner actually did say, what he clearly wanted to say
and how the isolated statements discussed can be properly understood
based on their context.
4. The Methodological
Problem of Quotations:
Basic Argument and Isolated Statements
Finally, one further comment needs to be made.
Some critics of Steiner and Anthroposophy have at times suggested
that Waldorf educators should finally dissociate themselves from
Steiner and a number of his more extreme ideas and that today
- more than 80 years after the founding of the first Waldorf
school - they should have the courage
to get rid of certain dogmas and throw ideological ballast overboard.
When they have accomplished that, such critics would then deign
to engage in friendly discussions again, having in principle
no serious objections to Waldorf schools.
It is immediately clear to anyone who knows
anything about Waldorf education that such suggestions are based
on superficial preconceptions. It is part and parcel of Waldorf
education that one should not dogmatically cling to purely traditional
habits. The methodological indications and suggestions made by
Steiner must be re-examined on a daily basis. They must all be
repeatedly tested in the daily teaching of ever-new generations
of pupils. Waldorf education with its encompassing knowledge
of man is anything but a fixed canon of pedagogical recipes to
be applied in a ritual way. The co-operation and exchange of
ideas with all productive schools of thought and approaches in
general education today are essential for the existence and development
of Waldorf education. If that were not the case, the public school
system would hardly have taken over and integrated so many ideas
from Waldorf education.
The well-meant suggestions to overcome dogmas
and throw "ballast" overboard have, however, nothing
to do with a request for openness and a constantly renewed attitude
of modernity. These are inherent in Waldorf education anyway.
These "friendly demands" contain a conscious or subconscious
appeal to abandon the inner impulses of Rudolf Steiner's pedagogy
- that is, its basic ideas.
That, however, would mean the loss of the
Waldorf school's true identity.
That does not mean to say that Steiner's work
cannot contain errors in some form. Steiner himself made an unambiguous
statement on this topic:
"To prevent a possible
misunderstanding, I want to say at the outset that spiritual
observations are also not infallible. They can be mistaken, too,
inaccurate, one-sided or wrong. Nobody is free from the danger
of making mistakes in this field, however far he may have progressed
in his development."12
But the central question in this study is
not primarily the possibility of being mistaken or of dissociating
oneself from dogmatism, but that of interpreting Steiner. The
authors hold the view that Steiner's work possesses an inner
consistency, out of which every single part of the work arises
with necessity. Its basic intuition consists in leading modern
man's thinking consciousness to self-knowledge and to a knowledge
of the reality of the spiritual world. This intuition is developed
in different biographical, historical and social contexts.
Separate parts of Steiner's work or single
remarks by him must always be interpreted in relation to this
basic intuition. The language and the concepts used by Steiner
to develop his basic views and arguments belong in a particular
historical context. In this context there also belong certain
questions that Steiner discussed because his audience asked him
to, or because a historical occasion seemed to call for it. The
expressions used by Steiner and certain of his themes occasionally
carry something of the flavour of the time; however, this flavour
never influences the basic concepts of Anthroposophy. The young
Steiner, in particular, used a very pronounced or even polemical
tone in many of his publications, as was usual in the literature
of the time.
Only if one distinguishes in this way between
the intention and the form of the comments, or between the basic
intuition and the form of presentation of Anthroposophy in relation
to the specific contexts, can one appropriately interpret Steiner's
life work and adapt it adequately to the present. Any interpretation
that does not fulfil these hermeneutical demands must of necessity
come to false conclusions, mistakes and misinterpretations. That
is especially true of the topic under consideration.
Such an adequate understanding is not to be
expected from those authors who see themselves as opponents of
Anthroposophy. They tear out parts of an organic whole and present
them for their own ends. They confuse Steiner's intention and
his form of expression. They pin Steiner down to words and refuse
to take into consideration the contexts
that give meaning to the words. For this reason, this study will
hardly change the views of such opponents. A case in point is
the aforementioned Peter Bierl, who has carefully avoided commenting
on the corrections of his distortions and falsifications 13 that have been brought forth
in a preparatory study to this book.14
In his time Steiner considered it futile to
try to refute such opponents: interestingly in a context when
he was not - as today - accused of anti-Semitism, but of the
opposite; journalists from an anti-Semitic Berlin journal had
described him as a "dyed-in-the-wool Jew, closely connected
with Zionists", which was naturally intended as an insult.
Steiner commented on the refutation of the
views of such opponents:
"We have not refuted
anything, as such opponents do not in any sense want to portray
the truth, but want to have as little as possible to do with
the matter as such, and only attempt to slander in any way possible."15
He added a remarkable condemnation of these
opponents' methods which is very revealing for the use of catchy
but misleading phrases, including isolated quotes such as those
that are commented on in this study:
"In such contexts one
chooses slogans, with which one can influence people as much
as possible who in some way listen to such slogans [...] in respect
to such intentions that run counter to all impulses that strive
to further human progress, we still are only at the beginning
and one should really never, without becoming irresponsible,
let one's attention be diverted from all that which [...] opens
up into the future as something radically evil in humanity. The
worst thing that can happen is to listen to mere slogans and
empty phrases, and to think that [...], the sound of the
words expressing old concepts should still today in some way
have something to do with human realities, if you yourself do
not bring forth a new reality out of the sources of the spiritual."16
Rudolf Steiner's
Alleged Anti-Semitism
Van der Let's basic assertion corresponds
in an especially significant way to what, in a similar manner
- more or less clearly or blatantly - is also put forward by
like-minded critics of Steiner and Anthroposophy.
Van der Let describes Rudolf Steiner as having
been, together with Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels and Richard
Wagner, a precursor, spiritual forerunner and main ideologist
of Nazi racism and a theorist of what Hitler and his accomplices
put into practice in the Holocaust. That is almost inconceivably
grotesque. This is not the place to discuss Liebenfels and Wagner,
but as far as Steiner is concerned, the assertion is simply absurd.
One merely needs to mention that in 1905, in the journal Lucifer-Gnosis,
of which he was editor, Steiner described Liebenfels' racial
ideology as a "raw monstrosity" and as a characteristic
example of what a materialistic way of thinking leads to.17 In the following, it will be
shown how Van der Let's assertion, insofar as it concerns Rudolf
Steiner, is a completely unjustifiable insinuation. There is
no connection from Steiner to Hitler, just as little as there
is one to Stalin or Pol Pot. But a spiritual path leads from
Steiner to the great non-violent freedom fighters and men who
realised Christianity in their deeds in the 20th century,
to Mahatma Gandhi and Albert Schweitzer, to Martin Luther King,
Nelson Mandela or also Vaclav Havel. This will be shown in detail
in the following.
In his first independent publication, Grundlinien einer Erkenntnistheorie
der Goetheschen Weltanschauung (The Theory of Knowledge implicit
in Goethe's World Conception) in 1886, Steiner already expressed
his view18 that the dignity
of man resides in his free morality based on self-determination;
that it is inviolable and that all social and political life
must be based on this free self-determination of man. In 1894,
in his Philosophie der Freiheit (Philosophy of Spiritual Activity)
he outlined a philosophical understanding of man which states
that human freedom can only be realised by overcoming biological,
social and collectivist dependencies.
"Man, however, frees
himself from what is generic.[...] If a man has achieved this
emancipation from all that is generic, and we are nevertheless
still determined to explain everything about him in generic terms,
then we have no organ of perception for that which is individual."19
In Steiner's view, individual self-determination
and tolerance are the constitutive factors of the social and
political community:
"Live and let live is
the basic maxim of the free human being"20.
This philosophical world view, based on freedom
and tolerance, does not only relate to the individual human being,
but also to social and political life in its totality. It forms
the basis for what Steiner, after the turn of the century, developed
as a world view by the name of "Anthroposophy". In
1917, he told his audience:
"... nothing will bring
humanity more into decadence, than if racial, nationalist- and
blood ideals continue to hold sway. Through nothing will the
true progress of humanity be hindered more than if the mummified
declamations from earlier centuries about the ideals of the nations
[...] continue to rule over us, whereas the real ideal must develop
from that which cannot be found in the blood, but only in the
purely spiritual world."21
In 1901, Steiner sharply condemned Houston
Stewart Chamberlain as an ideologist of anti-Semitism. 22 Astutely he realised and warned
of the dangerous potential of Chamberlain's work The Foundations
of the Nineteenth Century, published in 1899-1901; the potential
to provoke a "racial struggle" in Europe. Chamberlain
only gained broader influence after the First World War, but
Steiner warned the public about him in 1901 already. For Steiner,
anti-Semitism, being hostile towards "knowledge and education",
was a special form of racism that he condemned as a "mockery"
of "the belief in the ideal of man".
Racism can be understood as an ideology that
seeks to deduce the nature of the human personality from inherited
characteristics. For racism, the individual self-determination
of man, his freedom, is not decisive, but rather his determination
by biological characteristics. These are correlated typologically
to human groups and arranged according to a scale of values.
This description of the concept of racism has the advantage over
most common definitions that it avoids the self-contradiction
that consists in the existence of "racial characteristics"
as a basis for possible discrimination. The motives leading to
the creation of a racist world view are manifold, but a discussion
of them would go beyond the limits of the present study.
Anti-Semitism as we understand it today is
a special form of racism, in which racial antipathy is directed
against the Jewish people - with the intention of pushing back
the Jewish influence in the economy, politics and culture. This
form of anti-Semitism developed towards the end of the 19th
century out of an anti-Judaism that was directed against the
Jewish religion and its representatives and had its specific
motivation in the history of religion. Racial anti-Semitism is
a form of the earlier religious anti-Judaism, taken over and
secularised within the conceptual framework of the natural sciences.
For anyone knowledgeable in Anthroposophy,
it is clear from the central quotations mentioned above from
Steiner's basic works, the Theory of Knowledge [...] and the
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, that Steiner was without any
doubt an opponent of anti-Semitism and consequently also of racism
in general.23 It is therefore
completely inappropriate and objectively unfounded to officially
dissociate oneself from allegedly racist remarks made by Steiner.
On the other hand, from the beginning of his
literary career Steiner commented on the events of his time.
With many of these statements, it is not always immediately clear
if and how they are compatible with other comments of his. The
diversity of comments is connected with Steiner's varying his
viewpoint. This multi-perspective character of Steiner's world
view may give interpreters reason to see contradictions in his
views, especially with regard to such complicated questions as
the status of the Jewish people in modern times.
If you want to avoid the danger of a distorted
evaluation of Steiner from the outset - a danger especially for
those who, for whatever reason, from the start look for something
to criticise in him - you cannot only base your evaluation on
the verbatim quotation in isolated instances, but must come to
an understanding of the context of the respective remark. One
must be careful not to try to derive Steiner's opinion from one
single quotation. Steiner's technique of presentation was to
stress one aspect of a topic sharply at one time, while in another
context again stressing other aspects of the same topic, without
this necessarily being the expression of a contradiction.24
This methodological principle has been very
precisely described by Ralf Sonnenberg:
"Some interpreters also
don't recognise that the Steiner's lectures often display significant
differences in quality and as a consequence do not always meet
scientific requirements. Their content, in terms of didactics
and style, is geared to the mental horizon and expectations of
his respective audience. In addition, this content is usually
in serious need of interpretation, either because of allusions
which for today's reader are often obscure and untraceable, or
else because it consists of invective and caricatured exaggerations
of results of Steiner's spiritual science. But for some interpreters
it makes no great difference whether they are dealing with a
work like Occult Science - an Outline, highly sophisticated
in terms of composition and content, or with oral answers to
questions and lectures given to construction workers at the Goetheanum
during a cigarette break from work. In the second case the conditions
under which the lectures were given, that is the relatively low
standard of presentation and also the unreliability of the shorthand
transcripts, suffice already to raise the justified question
as to whether the content of such reports should be judged by
the level of quality that can be expected of the publications
of Steiner's literary estate".25
It is especially difficult to come to an appropriate
understanding of Steiner's views of Judaism if one includes the
complex history of the rise and diffusion of Zionism. This concept
affected all Jews deeply and split them into camps with conflicting
opinions on the subject.
Non-Jewish publicists also commented on Zionism,
as a phenomenon of the time of general interest, and were naturally
drawn into the conflict when they took a stand. If one takes
certain authors' concrete standpoints on Zionism into consideration,
they will shed a revealing light on the acute evaluations or
allegations of anti-Semitism today. This special aspect, however,
is only to be dealt with later, after the main thrust of Rudolf
Steiner's thinking on this subject has been shown more clearly.
In order to gain a completely lucid understanding of Steiner's
views on anti-Semitism, his various statements on the subject
will now be considered in the order that he made them.
The
Incompatibility of Steiner's "Ethical Individualism"
with Anti-Semitism
As early as 1881, we find Steiner sharply
attacking the anti-Semitism of his time. In letters to his Jewish
friend Rudolf Ronsperger, Steiner characterises Eugen Dühring's
Course of Philosophy as the "worst possible embodiment
of philosophical decline" he even calls Dühring's views
"barbarian" and "hostile to culture". For
Steiner, Dühring's Writings on the Jews26,
wallowing in anti-Semitism, result from "the strictest consequences
of his narrow-minded egotistical philosophy". In Dühring,
Steiner condemned one of the most prominent German anti-Semites
of his time. Dühring tried to substantiate anti-Semitism
philosophically, as well as justify it biologically and historically.
For Dühring, "the Jew" was not only "uncreative",
but also one of the "lowest creations and greatest failures
of Nature" and he was of the opinion that the "Jewish
question", (in 1881, not to forget!) could only be solved
through a common European "cleansing action", "by
a separation of the Jews from all peoples, by revoking their
emancipation, by special legislation, deportations and the foundation
of a Jewish state, where they would then exterminate each other,
if left to their own devices."27
In a letter to Ronsperger, on 26 August 1881,
Steiner again writes about Dühring, and calls his philosophy
"barbarian nonsense" and "rubbish". 28
In the 1890s, Steiner vehemently opposed the "outrageous
excesses of the anti-Semites" and denounced the "raging
anti-Semites" as enemies of the human rights. Against the
rancorous anti-Semitic propaganda he set as his ideal:
"I count it among most
beautiful fruits of human friendship when every trace of mistrust
between a Jew and a non-Jew […] can be extinguished […].
The only thing that should be valued is mutual exchange between
individuals. It is quite unimportant if a person is a Jew or
a Teuton […] That is so simple, that one is almost stupid
to say it. How stupid must one be to say the opposite?"29
As a member of the so-called "Liberal
Camp", Steiner's standpoint was that the only solution to
the then hotly debated "Jewish question" was to give
complete legal, social and political equality to the Jews.
It is completely absurd to deduce, as Julia
Iwersen does, that Steiner was an anti-Semite because he used
the term "Jewish question".30
This term was used by everyone who participated in the discussion
of the status of the Jewish people in the 19th century,
and had nothing of the terrible connotation it later acquired
as a result of the "final solution" ("Endlösung")
under Hitler. Iwersen's essay is an alarming example of the carelessness
with which critical judgements are sometimes presented to the
literary community today, with the expectation of being taken
seriously. She does not even refrain from distorting Steiner
quotations through omissions. Iwersen seems to have forgotten
what she must have read in the book which contains the founding
idea of the modern state of Israel: Der Judenstaat (A State
for the Jews) by Theodor Herzl (1896). Its subtitle reads:
An attempt to achieve a modern solution of the Jewish question.
Herzl writes: "The Jewish question exists. It would be foolish
to deny it."
On 22. July 1893, Steiner wrote from Weimar
to Pauline Specht, the
mother of the Jewish family with which he had lived and whose
children he had tutored between 1884 and 1890. In his letter
on the
parliamentary elections, he deplored "the dilapidated state
of public
debate" and the increasing "coarseness and lack of
understanding of the masses", which were shown by the popularity
of anti-Semitic agitators, Hermann Ahlwardt and Paul and Bernhard
Förster:
"The parliamentary elections
brought some excitement to the otherwise monotonous and calm
life in Weimar. We admittedly do not have an Ahlwardt or a Förster
here, but the election campaign has not exactly generated a multitude
of intelligent comments."31 In general one has to say, having
observed this whole affair in the Holy Roman Empire from within:
through this last election an increase of coarseness and lack
of understanding among the masses has become manifest that I
find truly terrifying. That a man who - apart from everything
else - is boundlessly foolish, who towers above all our Luegers32 in "Lügen - Genie"
("Lying - Genius": a pun in German) has won two seats
in Parliament and innumerable supporters, can only be taken as
a sign of the dilapidated state of politics in this country that
one cannot deplore deeply enough."33
In the Magazin für Litteratur (Magazine
for Literature), whose publisher he was, Steiner wrote in September
1900:
"For me, a Jewish question
has never existed. My own way of thinking also developed in such
a way that when a part of the national student body in Austria
became anti-Semitic, it appeared to me to be a mockery of all
cultural achievements of our time. I have never been able to
judge a person in any other way than on the basis of his individual
personal character as it was revealed to me. It was always completely
uninteresting to me if someone was a Jew or not. And I can say:
I see it in the same way today. I have never been able to see
anti-Semitism as anything except a view that indicates in those
who hold it an inferiority of spirit, a lack of ability to make
ethical judgements and an insipidness […], that is a blow
in the face for every person with a normal way of thinking".34
Here, Steiner calls anti-Semitism "a
mockery of all cultural achievements", an indication of
"spiritual inferiority", a sign of "insipidness"
and the opposite of "the normal way of thinking". But
that is not his only criticism, nor is it his sharpest condemnation
of anti-Semitism.
In a series of essays that he wrote in 1901
for the Berlin Society to Repulse Anti-Semitism (Verein zur
Abwehr des Antisemitismus), he argued against the Germanic
myth of the German racists and their "nonsensical anti-Semitic
chatter"35, in their
Aryan self-conceit he saw an "insulting presumption".36 He compared the special
legislation against Jews in European countries with "statutes
for slavery".37
He described the racial antipathies rampant at that time as expressions
of "musty instincts"38
and declared it to be the duty of every sensible person to unambiguously
take a stand in the struggle against anti-Semitism.39
The Mitteilungen aus dem Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus
(Newsletter of the Society to Repulse Anti-Semitism), which
published Steiner's essays, was, according to George L. Mosse,
"the most prominent Jewish newspaper in the struggle against
anti-Semitism".40
Steiner's clear statements against anti-Semitism
and racism, which run through his whole life's work, cannot be
dismissed as casual, non-committal comments or assertions pretending
to an attitude he did not really have: they arise from the philosophical
foundation of Anthroposophy, "ethical individualism",
as Steiner had conceived it already in the 1880s. This ethical
individualism holds the essence of man to be his self-determining
spiritual individuality, whose freedom consists specifically
in his emancipation from those forms of thinking and living that
have the tendency to see man determined by the peculiarities
of his race and his nation. That has been indicated above already
when Steiner's fundamental work, the Philosophy of Spiritual
Activity, was mentioned.
Anti-Semitism
as a "Danger to Jews and Non-Jews Alike", a Cultural
Illness and a Mockery of all Idealism
Steiner's comments were prophetic at the beginning
of the 20th century, when he described anti-Semitism
as a sign of cultural and political decadence and warned that
it was dangerous. He said that anti-Semitism poisoned the political
culture, it was not only a danger to Jews, but to all people41 because it paved the
way for "musty feelings" to gain power over the thinking
and politics of the time. These are the same musty feelings and
instincts which were articulated in the nationalist and racist
movements and were drawn together by the Nazis, who began their
political struggle against Anthroposophy in 1919 already. Dietrich
Eckart first sounded the attack in his smear-sheet Auf gut
deutsch (Speaking Plain German), calling Steiner a "Jewish
conjuring illusionist". (Dietrich Eckart in Auf gut deutsch,
Munich 1919, p. 322-327. See also further below).
In 1921 Hitler himself spoke up in Der
völkische Beobachter (The Nationalist Observer). He
denounced Anthroposophy as a "Jewish method of destroying
the normal healthy sanity of nations."42.
But the Völkische Beobachter only continued a campaign
which had been started in 1919 by the biggest and most active
anti-Semitic organisation before the rise of the NSDAP (Nazi
party), the Deutsch-Völkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund
(German-Nationalist Union for Defence and Defiance). (See
Uwe Lohalm, Völkischer Radikalismus. Die Geschichte des
Deutsch-Völkischen Schutz-und Trutzbundes 1919-1923 [Nationalist
Radicalism. The History of the German-Nationalist Union for Defence
and Defiance], Hamburg 1970.) In 1920 the editor of an anti-Semitic
Berlin monthly journal called Steiner - as the latter reported
himself - a "dyed-in-the-wool Jew with close connections
to the Zionists ".43
Steiner was also subjected to other similar abuses, such as when
he was attacked because of his "un-Aryan blood" or
because he was a "Galician Jew".44
German nationalistic, anti-Semitic militia troops did not even
refrain from making an assassination attempt on Steiner. On 15.
May 1922, he barely escaped an attack in the Munich Hotel "Vier
Jahreszeiten" ("Four Seasons"), the main headquarters
of the Thule Society.45
Steiner had no illusions about the intentions of Hitler and Ludendorff.
After their attempted coup in Munich in November 1923 he commented
to Anna Samweber:
"If these "gentlemen" take
over the government in Germany, I will
not be able to set my foot on German soil anymore".46
In the series of essays mentioned above, that
Steiner wrote in 1901 for the Newsletter of the Society to
Repulse anti-Semitism (Mitteilungen aus dem Verein zur Abwehr
des Antisemitismus), in which his friend the Jewish poet
Ludwig Jacobowski, also wrote, Steiner continually took a stand
against that "insipid" ideology. In his obituary for
Ludwig Jacobowski in 1901, he wrote:
"Old reactionary powers thought that
their time had come again. Slogans and sinister instincts started
to have an influence on the broader masses in a way that for
a long time one had not thought them capable of. Jacobowski's
attention was especially drawn to one of these sinister instincts,
anti-Semitism. He felt deeply hurt in in his most personal feelings.
Not because he felt bound to Jewry by these feelings. That was
not at all the case. Rather Jacobowski belonged to those who
in their inner development had long outgrown Jewry. But he also
belonged to those who in a tragic way had to experience the doubts,
born of blind prejudice, with which many people disparaged such
an outgrowing."47
In November 1901, Steiner wrote in an essay
that discussed the "shamefaced anti-Semitism" of the
contemporary philosopher Paulsen:
"Anti-Semitism does not
exactly have a great many original thoughts at its disposal,
it does not even have very many witty catchwords and slogans.
You must always listen to the same stale platitudes, when the
adherents of this "view of life" express the musty
sentiments enshrined in their breast."48
In the course of the essay, Steiner also discusses
the political-demagogical effect that the anti-Semitic agitator
of pan-Germanism, Georg von Schönerer, had in Austria. In
him and his adherents Steiner sees:
"… strict logic
eliminated […] from the canon of faculties that should rule
the inner life of man [...] Through anti-Semitism, logic has
been dethroned."49
According to Steiner, Schönerer's adherents
conceal their growing anti-Semitism with empty phrases. In anti-Semitism
he sees a symptom of a spiritual breakdown. On a daily basis
in Vienna, he says he was able to study in anti-Semites the corruption
of thinking by dulled feelings. Political Liberalism, of which
Steiner declared himself an advocate, made it impossible "to
arbitrarily put limits […] on humanity."50
Later in the essay, he rejects the anti-Semitic
stereotype that Jews are unable to assimilate:
"Anyone who views the
present time with open eyes knows that it is incorrect to say
that the solidarity among Jews is greater than their solidarity
with the strivings of modern culture. If it has looked that way
during the last years, this has been caused to a high degree
by anti-Semitism itself. Anyone who has seen, as I have shuddered
to see, what anti-Semitism has induced in the souls of noble
Jews, must come to this conclusion."51
We see that Steiner did not put the blame
for anti-Semitism on the Jews, as has sometimes been insinuated.52 To Steiner, Zionism is
a result of anti-Semitism, and not the other way around. That
is the view that he also expressed in his essay on The Longing
of the Jews for Palestine (Sehnsucht der Juden nach Palästina)
in 1897.
Steiner in 1901 sees the predominance of sullen
instincts in political life and the overwhelming of Liberalism
by strong anti-Semitic emotions as caused by a lack of belief
in ideas. In anti-Semitism, he sees not only a symptom of individual
spiritual breakdown, but also a symptom of a collective pathology,
a cultural disease. Anyone who believes in the ideas of freedom
and human rights must uphold his belief, especially when the
historical or political development runs against these ideas.
He must say to himself:
"Anti-Semitism is a mockery
of all belief in ideas. It is a mockery especially of the idea
that humanity stands higher than any specialised form (tribe,
race, nation), in which this humanity expresses itself."53
To Steiner, anti-Semitism is devoid of ideas
and nothing but an expression of dark racial antipathies. Paulsen
capitulates to nationalist instincts, instead of "criticising
them", which he should have done if he had really been convinced
of his own liberal ideas. But Steiner considers vagueness and
the lack of an identifiable standpoint on this question to be
damaging and demands clear, unequivocal statements against anti-Semitism.
"Nowhere is it more necessary
than in this field, that one document one's belief in ideas through
a decisive, unequivocal standpoint."54
But that is not enough.
"Anti-Semitism is not
only a danger for Jews, it is also a danger for non-Jews. It
arises out of a way of thinking that does not seriously strive
for sound, straightforward judgements. Anti-Semitism promotes
this way of thinking. And anyone who thinks philosophically should
not just observe that passively. The belief in ideas will only
return to prevalence if we oppose the contrary unbelief in all
areas as energetically as possible."55
Anti-Semitism (and with it, of course, racism
in general) is a symptom of spiritual decline, of moral depravity;
it is a symptom of a cultural illness that not only is a danger
to Jews, but to all people. Therefore, it is every person's duty
to oppose it as energetically as possible.
Steiner's essay ends with an appeal and a
call to resist the cultural decline of which anti-Semitism, to
him, is a symptom.
"With no one who participates
in the public discussion should you be in doubt as to how to
understand his opinions on anti-Semitism: that is what this cultural
illness requires of us today."56
Steiner's
Close Relationship to Jewry in his Personal, Everyday Life
Not only did Steiner decisively and from the
beginning profess his uncompromising rejection of anti-Semitism
on a theoretical level; he also practised it consistently in
his everyday life. As a young man, he lived for many years with
a Jewish family as the tutor of their handicapped son, and was
warm-heartedly integrated.57
In his circle of friends, whether in Weimar or during his Berlin
years, he always had close friends of Jewish origin. One of those
who participated in the Berlin group of artists, "Die Kommenden"
("Those of the Future"), in which Steiner also gave
lectures around the turn of the century, was the young Stefan
Zweig. In his autobiography58
which he wrote shortly before his voluntary death in exile in
South America in 1942, he writes with great positiveness and
even admiration of his meeting with Steiner at that time. The
portrayal that this highly sensitive poet of Jewish origin gives
of Steiner indicates that he did not note even the slightest
hint of anti-Semitism in him.
Steiner was also a close friend of many Jewish
personalities, among them the Zionists Ernst Müller and
Hugo Bergman. From 1920 on, Bergman established the Hebrew University
in Jerusalem and became its rector. He founded the peace association
"Brith Shalom", to which later Gershom Sholem and Martin
Buber belonged. Bergman, whose opinion of Steiner's Anthroposophy,
encompassed many facets, campaigned for a realisation of Steiner's
idea of the Threefold Social Order59
in Palestine, as he held a solution to the "Arabian question"
only to be possible through an overcoming of the principle of
the nation-state.60 This
problem has remained acute until today.
Many people of Jewish origin later became
members of the Anthroposophical Society. Important anthroposophical
authors (like Carl Unger, Adolf Arenson and Hermann von Baravalle)
as well as numerous close co-workers of Steiner (physicians,
teachers, artists and others) were Jews. This accumulation of
Jewish followers of Steiner was also noticed by the anti-Semites.
In his periodical Auf gut deutsch (Speaking Plain German), Munich,
11. July 1919, Dietrich Eckart quoted the journal Der Leuchtturm
(The Lighthouse) of Karl Rohm, one of Steiner's most rabid opponents,
with relish:
"Now I come to a special
topic, Jewry in the world of "Steiner"-ing [...] there
has been no dearth of opinions that adamantly claim that Steiner
is a Jew [...] his appearance and his whole way of acting and
teaching indicated that he was a Jew, and also the remarkable
fact that in his society it was notably Jews who were his close,
most intimate and loyal followers and who joined in great numbers,
speaks for this claim [...] As long as the Steiner society belonged
to Annie Besant's Adyar Society and called itself "Theosophical
Society", it was named in theosophical circles, to distinguish
it from other theosophical societies, simply the "Jewish
society".61
The Dreyfus
Affair
An important event which took place in Steiner's
time and which drew a lot of public attention should also be
discussed: the Dreyfus affair in France, in which in 1894 a Jewish
French army officer was accused of having betrayed military secrets.
Like others, Steiner also took a passionate public stand in favour
of Dreyfus, who was rehabilitated in 1898/99,62
as the accusations demonstrably had been based on falsifications.
Steiner's discussion of the Dreyfus affair
referred mainly to Zola. Steiner has been criticised for not
having explicitly mentioned the anti-Semitic aspects of the case,
as they have been shown by a number of historians 63
We can accept this criticism insofar as it shows that Steiner's
judgement was inadequate and unhistorical, seen from the perspective
and the mood of today.64
For at the time these aspects were not even acknowledged by the
French Jews. Laqueur writes on their behaviour:
"The hesitance of French
Jews to take collective action during the Dreyfus trial showed
that they wanted to believe that the affair had no specifically
Jewish aspect."65
The French historian François Caron
writes on the allegedly anti-Semitic character of the Dreyfus
affair:
"The opponents of Dreyfus
avoided this topic in their discussions, the themes of Dreyfusia
nism were created out of an original 'republican mysticism'".66
Caron writes about Maurice Barrès,
who refused to give his signed support for a campaign in favour
of Dreyfus, that he justified his refusal with the comment "that
he followed the 'national instinct as his focus'. This sentence,
was the ultimate expression of anti-Dreyfusianism."67
In the Dreyfus affair, Steiner saw a political and diplomatic
intrigue and in his comments68
he stressed that clear judgement and the love of truth
were being clouded by the appeal to nationalistic instincts.
As in his discussion of Paulsen in the essay "Shamefaced
anti-Semitism", we see that the concept of "nationalistic
instinct" for him also included the anti-Semitic
"instinct". By not discussing the contention of Lazare,
who in a pamphlet published in 1896 had depicted Dreyfus as a
victim of his Jewish faith, the bourgeois press showed that it
was not prepared to take the primitive slogans of the anti-Semites
seriously. Any discussion of anti-Semitism would have lent it
a respectability it did not deserve.
Hannah Arendt, who has investigated the role
of anti-Semitism in the Third Republic thoroughly, points to
two factors that contributed to its development: the - as she
writes - "parasitic" role of Jewish financial advisors
in the Panama scandal (1892), which affected almost all public
institutions, and a Catholic conspiracy, instigated by the Jesuit
Order.69 The restraint
of the French Jews with respect to the specifically French anti-Semitism
was, in Arendt's view, as well as in Laqueur's, founded on the
conviction that it was a temporary anachronistic phenomenon.
"They held political
anti-Semitism [...] to be a residue from the Middle Ages, and
therefore no longer effectual in contemporary politics."70
She emphasises that it "was never clarified",
"if the officers of the General Staff arranged for Bordereau's
forgery (the document that led to the conviction of Dreyfus),
with the sole purpose of finally being able to compromise a Jew
as a traitor of the mother country"71,
or if it was not a case of miscarriage of justice after all.
She also points out that in August 1899, after the trial of appeal
in Rennes, the German Social Democrat Wilhelm Liebknecht, in
contrast to Steiner, still believed in Dreyfus' guilt, "as
he could not imagine that a member of the upper classes could
be convicted unjustifiably."72
Also, it would not have been very appropriate for the family
of Alfred Dreyfus to describe him as a victim of anti-Semitism,
as the family's attitude was itself - anti-Semite! "Les
Dreyfus de 1894 - mais ils étaient antisémites".73
Steiner's Discussion
of Zionism
How did Steiner view Zionism? To begin with,
it must be noted that the emancipatory and liberal tendencies
of the 19th and increasingly in the 20th
century in all of Europe made it, at least in principle, ever
more easy for Jewish citizens to become assimilated. This invitation
from the enlightened European bourgeoisie was answered by the
Haskala, the Jewish Enlightenment, which also facilitated emancipation
and assimilation.
Nevertheless, deeply rooted prejudices from
the past lived on, and repeated violent pogroms against the Jewish
section of the population had been taking
place, especially in the Russian Empire, but also in Rumania
since the 1880s. Thus at the same time a longing for a protected
homeland arose among the Jews who were victimised. In particular
Theodor Herzl, a Jewish Viennese journalist, proclaimed the goal
of founding a state of their own for the Jews in Palestine. Nourished
by the very real hardship caused by these pogroms, but also by
religious motives, the idea of a Jewish state met with increasing
support. (The term "Zionism" comes from the Hebrew
word "Zion", referring to the highest, southwest hill
in the old Jerusalem, the still controversial Temple Mount. The
name is used in a figurative sense for Jerusalem, as well as
for the community of orthodox Jews. The Zionists aspired to found
a national Jewish state in Palestine). But a large proportion
of the Jewish bourgeoisie, especially those who were emancipated
and whose bonds to orthodoxy had loosened, decisively rejected
Zionism. Most of the Western- and Middle-European Jews were not
willing to leave their well-appreciated environment. One only
has to think of the many Jews who during the First World War
volunteered enthusiastically for military service in their respective
nations.
This deeply felt double experience is classically
expressed in a book by Jakob Wassermann (1873-1934), a writer
very much respected in his time. In it, he professes what is
important for him: My Life as a German and a Jew (Mein Weg
als Deutscher und Jude) (published in 1921). Many German
Jews did not take the horrible anti-Jewish diatribes of an Adolf
Hitler in his programmatic work My Struggle (Mein Kampf) seriously,
if they knew about them at all. They were mostly seen as the
obscure rantings of an inferior minority. Only the ever more
acute and tangible wave of hatred in the Third Reich brought
many Jews to a distressful awakening. And only the horrors of
the previously unimaginable Holocaust finally instilled, in almost
all surviving Jews, a positive attitude towards Zionism. Even
such an important poet as Paul Celan (1920-1970), who had grown
up in the German-speaking formerly Austro-Hungarian Bukovina
and bitterly experienced the atrocities of Nazi rule, failed
in his attempt to settle in Palestine at the end of his life.
"Germany" had become an indelible horror experience
for him, but he could only express his poetry in the German language.
This was the conflict that destroyed him.
The Jewish writer Elias Canetti74
(1905-1994) also tells us in his impressive memoirs of a stay
in Bulgaria in 1927, where he had spent a part of his childhood.
On several occasions he was astonished and even indignant about
the rapturous state which some enthusiasts sought to evoke in
their listeners in order to motivate them to emigrate to Palestine.
He asked himself why they did such a thing, as they were respected
and acknowledged citizens in their homeland (Bulgaria), where
they could practice their profession and lived comfortably.
How strange the basic idea of Zionism appeared
to assimilated Jews at the end of the 19th and the
beginning of the 20th century can be seen in thoughts
that Stefan Zweig wrote in his memoirs mentioned above. After
his emigration, he had a number of conversations with Sigmund
Freud in England shortly before the latter's death (1938), in
which both expressed their profound difficulty in understanding
the latest development in the destiny of the Jewish people. He
writes:
"What was most tragic
in this Jewish tragedy of the 20th century was that
those who suffered it could no longer see any meaning in it and
no guilt. All those who had been expelled during the Middle Ages,
all their ancestors, at least they had known what they suffered
for: for their Faith, their Law […] They lived and suffered
in the proud delusion that they, as the chosen people, were intended
by the creator of the world and of man to fulfil a special destiny
and a special mission [...] When they were driven from country
to country, they still had a last home, their home in God, from
which no earthly power […] could drive them. [...] But the
Jews of the 20th century had not been a community
for a long time. They had no common faith, they felt their Jewish
identity to be more of a burden than anything to be proud of
and they were not conscious of any mission [...] To become part
of and integrate into the surrounding peoples, to dissolve into
general humanity was their ever more impatient striving, to gain
peace from all persecutions, a pause in their eternal flight.
In this way, one Jew no longer understood the another, melted
as they were into the other peoples, the French, the Germans,
the English, the Russians, just no longer Jews [...] Now for
the first time in centuries, a community that they no longer
experie nced was forced upon them,
the community that had
returned again and again since Egypt, the community of expulsion.[...]"75
All this must be taken into consideration
if one wants to come to an appropriate evaluation of the opinions
expressed before the Holocaust by many Jews, as also by
others who saw themselves as friends of the Jews. This is also
the case for Rudolf Steiner, for whom all one-sided national
forms of thinking were foreign to his endorsement of ideals for
all of humanity. He was a strict advocate of the conviction that
Jewish creativity, like any other creativity, was an integral
part of the respective society and respective community in which
the individual Jew lived. He also unreservedly supported the
thought of a continuing assimilation of the Jews. If he had had
even the slightest critical reservation, he would have had to
speak out against the integration and assimilation of Jewry,
which he never did. Steiner's view stood in stark contrast to
the racism of National Socialism, which fiercely rejected any
form of assimilation, arguing that the so-called Aryan blood
must not be polluted and that "The Jew" should be radically
expelled and even eliminated.
Steiner's Essay
on Hamerling's "Homunculus"
Steiner's decisive support for emancipation
and assimilation must be
remembered when considering a passage in his essay on Robert
Hamerling's Homunculus, A Modern Epic in 10 Cantos (Homunkulus,
Modernes Epos in 10 Gesängen) (1888), which Steiner
wrote for the Viennese journal The German Weekly (Deutsche
Wochenschrift):
"It cannot be denied
that Jewry still today presents itself as a self-contained entity
and as such has often intervened in the development of our present
conditions in a way that was anything but favourable to Western
cultural ideas. But Jewry as such has outlived itself and has
no justification within the modern life of nations. The fact
that it nevertheless has been preserved is a mistake of world
history which could not fail to have consequences."76
The tone of these remarks was not untypical
for the Steiner of that time, who was then 27 years old. In the
same year he had depicted the rule of the pope in his time as
obsolete and unjustified, because it wanted to force forms of
believing from the "darkest Middle Ages" on mankind
(see p. 101).
Steiner's remarks are contained in an essay
that aspires to defend Hamerling from being "adopted"
by the anti-Semites. These remarks appear to be very disconcerting
at first, when taken out of context. The review also met with
the clear disapproval of the Jewish master of the house, Ladislaus
Specht, in whose family Steiner lived as a tutor at the time.
This is quite understandable. The quoted words can give the impression
that he had fundamental reservations about Jewry.
But that is definitely too short-sighted an interpretation. Only
a more comprehensive look at the context in which the quoted
sentences stand shows that the formulation expresses the exact
opposite.77 Steiner obviously
believed so strongly that the time for complete Jewish emancipation
had come that he himself did not regard the formulation as an
attack on the Jewish existence as such.
The misunderstanding that Steiner himself
tells us about in his autobiography My Life arose because
Specht was not able to properly evaluate what actually was a
polemical remark by Steiner in the light of his own basic attitude
to life. He took the comment personally that Steiner hat written
from the perspective of philosophy and the history of ideas.
The purely human side, the complete recognition of his Jewish
fellow men was totally self-evident for Steiner. The warm personal
understanding between the Specht family and Steiner was in no
way marred by this misunderstanding.78
The whole incident is a concrete example of
what is described in subchapter 4 in the introduction to this
study. We especially see what is meant by the sometimes pronounced
or even polemical tone of the young Steiner.
We must also consider another very important
criterion in assessing Steiner's writings that warrants a fundamental
statement here. There is possibly no other topic besides that
of Judaism and Jewry where it is so important to take into consideration
the difference in time when an event takes place and when it
is evaluated. In concrete terms: the world situation has changed
so radically between the time when Steiner wrote his review of
"Homunculus" at the end of the 1880s and the time of
the Third Reich and especially the Holocaust, that one needs
to be extremely cautious today when looking at things in retrospect.
For example, it is only fair, and should go without saying, to
assume that Steiner, if he were to comment on these issues today,
would not express himself in the same way or with the same words
as in the 1880s.
The following episode can serve to illustrate
this problem. The above mentioned Jewish writer Jakob Wassermann,
who was highly regarded especially in the 1920s, wrote a letter
to a German philosopher in February 1923. He later published
it in his book Lebensdienst (Serving Life)79.
The philosopher, who Wassermann does not
mention by name, had written to Wassermann to thank him for his
work (which includes the novel Kaspar Hauser oder die Trägheit
des Herzens; Caspar Hauser: The Inertia of the Heart). But
he had also asked him to use his great influence to induce the
Jews living in Germany to emigrate to Palestine. In this request,
a continuing prejudice articulated itself: there was a specifically
Christian type of anti-Semitism, which saw in the Jews a "people
who had murdered God"; there existed a feeling of envy in
relation to Jews that was wide-spread but difficult to pin down.
It arose because the Jews with their highly developed talents
could rise to leading positions in all cultural and political
fields; and there also existed a subliminal resentment against
the affluence of Jews in influential economic positions.
This subliminal, and sometimes open aversion
against people of Jewish origin completely ignored the fact that
many of the reservations had their roots in the ghetto situation
into which the Jews had been forced through many centuries, which
prevented them from integrating into society, thereby causing
them to be perceived as Jews in the first place.
With great bitterness Wassermann rejected
the demand of this unknown philosopher, also on behalf of his
friend Walther Rathenau (1867-1922; at the end of his life Minister
of Foreign Affairs of the German Empire), who had been murdered
the year before by nationalist and anti-Jewish fanatics. He reproached
the personality in question for obviously
not having read his (Wassermann's) writings closely enough:
"[...] otherwise you
should know that I have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with
Zionism [...]. On this count, I must disappoint you completely.
And also Walther Rathenau would have had to disappoint you [...]
as he - to the extent that the ideas and goals of Zionism were
not of a purely practical-humanitarian nature - had as little
sympathy for them as I do. Just as I, he saw himself as a German,
and just as I he felt rejected by the Germans, misunderstood
and unrewarded for all his dedication and readiness for sacrifice.
We do not need to talk about his death; it is a part of German
history [...]
As to what you write [...]
about it being time to prepare for the return of the Jews to
the country of their fathers [...] an astonishing demand indeed
[...] and because you also - I can't read it any other way -
more or less openly propose the same to me, I first want to tell
you that my ancestors demonstrably have lived in the Franconian
province of Germany for at least 500 years, and that I would
like to investigate how many who boast to be native Germans,
Saxons, Pommeranians, Rheinlanders, and French emigrants to Brandenburg
can say the same of their families. That the Jews have not succeeded
in incorporating themselves deeper into the body of the nation
is not the fault of the Jews [...]"80
This context helps us to understand what Steiner
meant with his remark that Jewry had long outlived itself, and
that it was a mistake of world history
that it had been preserved. These words strongly express Steiner's
sincerely positive appreciation of Jewry. They also contain the
same bitterness that was expressed by Wassermann about that fact
that the assimilation which was desired by many Jews, especially
the culturally active ones, still had not progressed further,
due to a purely emotional aversion in the German-speaking countries.
Steiner opposes the fixation of contemporary thinking on national
and racist categories and strives to promote the liberation of
the individual Jew from the confinement of the collective, into
which one again wishes to force him, in disregard of all emanc
ipation and assimilation.
Later, in 1924 - around the time that Wassermann
was also writing on the subject - Steiner spoke again, similarly
to 1888, in one of the lectures to construction workers of the
Goetheanum in an extemporised speech (the lecture will be more
closely discussed later in this study):
"And so you can say:
since everything that the Jews have done can could now be done
in a conscious way by all men, for example, the Jews could do
nothing better than to integrate into the rest of humanity,
to intermingle with the rest of humanity, so that Jewry as
a people would simply cease to exist. That is something which
could be an ideal."81 [authors' italics]
These words, rightly understood, express a
deep recognition of what until then had emanated from Judaism
in a cultural sense. Steiner's speaking in the above-mentioned
"Homunculus" review of unfavourable interventions of
the Jewish religion and way of thinking with regard to Western
cultural ideas does not contradict this recognition. The one
is just as true as the other: the efforts to restore a nationality
long since lost demonstrated - in Steiner's view - a negative
side; Jewish striving for emancipation and Jewish liberalism
bear witness to the side which is open to Western cultural ideas.
Now the rest of humanity has also become as advanced as the Jews,
who have fulfilled their task for world history precisely by
overcoming the principle of nationality.
After advocating the integration and assimilation
of the Jews in Europe, Steiner continued in the quoted lecture:
"This still is opposed
by many Jewish habits - and above all by the hatred of other
people. That is exactly what must be overcome" [author's
italics].82
These sentences show that Steiner saw Anti-Semitism
and the hatred that it incited against the Jews as the basic
hindrance for the peaceful coexistence of Jews and non-Jews and
that he held it necessary to overcome this hatred.83
Steiner's essay of 1888 on Hamerling's Homunculus
not only contains the passages in which he speaks against a Jewish
nationalism, as it later appeared in Zionism, but it also contains
a clear rejection of anti-Semitism and the "racial struggle".
He writes literally:
"But the Jews need Europe
and Europe needs the Jews".84
To Hamerling he attributes the attitude of
a "sage", who takes a stance of superior objectivity
in relation to both the "Jews as well as the anti-Semites"85. He accuses Hamerling's
critics of not having the right to immediately accuse "everyone
who does not expressly stress that he sides with the Jews as
being against them"86.
According to Steiner, the critics had drawn Hamerling's work
into the "party struggle", in its most obnoxious form,
that of the "racial struggle".87
By attributing anti-Semitism to Hamerling, they had falsely attributed
"a standpoint to him, that he, because of his spiritual
loftiness, cannot assume"88.
And about the anti-Semites, who wanted to include the poet in
their camp, he says that, apart from their "talent for ranting
and raving", they had nothing more characteristic to offer
[…] "than a complete lack of any thought whatsoever".
89
Steiner did not advocate the separation, but
the integration and emancipation of the Jews in Europe. It would
be completely absurd to insinuate that with the "absorption
(Aufgehen) of Jewry into the rest of humanity" he was referring
to a physical extermination. 90
After all, there were Jewish authors at the end of the 19th
century who wrote down sentences which are almost identical with
the ones just quoted. One extreme representative of this school
of thought is the socialist Moses Hess, born in 1812 in Bonn,
who - after a spiritual transformation that is mysterious even
to Laqueur, the authority on Zionism91
- became a forerunner of Zionism in Germany with his book Rom
und Jerusalem - Die letzte Nationalitätenfrage (The Revival
of Israel - Rome and Jerusalem, the last nationality question)
from 1862. Laqueur writes on Hess in his History of Zionism:
"... like almost all
his contemporaries, Hess turned his back on religion; the Mosaic
religion (as he wrote in his diary) was dead, its historical
role was finished and could no longer be revived. [...]
In his first book (The
Sacred History of Mankind) he said that the people chosen
by their God must disappear for ever, [...]"92
No one would come on the idea
of investigating Hess for a suspected anti-Semitism because of
his unreserved declaration of his belief in the assimilation
of the Jews. And just as little would one accuse the Russian
Zionist (Leo Pinsker) of anti-Semitism, who in 1882 in his book
Autoemanzipation (Autoemancipation) wrote that in the
Jews, the world could observe a people , who resembled a living
dead.93
Steiner advocated
when speaking of the absorption of the Jews in their respective
countries, an enlightened Jewish standpoint, not an anti-Semitic
one, as he has recently been accused of doing, for example by
the public TV-programme ARD REPORT Mainz.94
It is important to consider that emancipation could also mean
integration and assimilation to the Jews living in the ghetto
in the 18th and 19th century, and that
many Jews viewed the assimilation in their respective home countries
and cultures as an ideal to strive for, as they saw the emancipation
also as an emancipation from their own religious and spiritual
tradition. For this reason, Moses Hess in no way belongs to "the
forgotten Jews". His importance for the history of Jewry,
for Socialism and for Zionism is still appreciated today.
An example for this appreciation is Göran
Rosenberg's book The lost country (Det förlorade landet)
from 199895. Rosenberg
points out the dimension of religious and cultural history in
the problem, which was also relevant for Steiner's views on Jewry
that he expressed in his essays on Hamerling's Homunculus
and The Longing of the Jews for Palestine.
In 1837 the Hegelian and Spinozaist
Moses Hess argued for a synthesis of reason and faith, of politics
and ethics, as had been foreseen by Spinoza. Judaism was just
as much a thing of the past as was Christianity. For a young
Jewish intellectual, who within a decade had made his way from
the disputes over interpretations in the Talmud school to the
barricades of the social revolution, the world stood open and
full of promises. He still investigated Jewry, but only in order
to overcome its limitations, to demonstrate how unnecessary it
was. [...] This was how a Jew could write who was convinced that
Jewry could be overcome, and absorbed into something quite different.
"96
Rosenberg writes about the time following
the "edict of tolerance"
of the Holy Roman (Austrian) Emperor Joseph, from 1771 until
the
middle of the 19th century:
In the course of a few decades, the Jews in
countries like Germany and France had not only left the ghetto,
but also to a great extent Judaism itself. Out of the Jewish
masses which until shortly before had been so impoverished, an
intellectual, bourgeois middle class rapidly liberated itself
and it soon did not see any essential difference between Judaism
as explicated by Mendelssohn and Christianity in its declarations
of enlightenment and tolerance. Both could be viewed as collections
of similar ethical principles to which everyone could reasonably
subscribe. [...] the ethical and religious essence of Judaism
was better expressed in the universalism and tolerance of the
developing modern society than in the ethically and ethnically
closed forms of life in the ghetto. The characteristics peculiar
to Judaism had to give way to the universal efforts in support
of human and civil rights, just as some saw the spreading of
ideas such as tolerance and equality as an expression of a specific
Jewish mission."97
Steiner is completely in accordance with this
enlightened perspective that was also professed by Jews, when
he says that "Jewry" has "outlived itself".
That this comment from 1888 was not all he had to say about Jewry
is sufficiently documented by the present study.
In the passage following the quoted sentences
on p. 53 from the Homunculus essay, Steiner continues:
"We do not mean here
the forms of the Jewish religion alone, we especially mean the
spirit of Judaism, the Jewish way of thinking. An impartial observer
would now have thought that the best judges of the poetic form
that Hamerling has given to the fact we have just touched on
would be Jews themselves. Jews who now feel at home in the spirit
of the western cultural process should best be able to recognise
the faults of an ethical ideal which has been transplanted from
grey antiquity into modern times and is here quite useless. The
Jews must be the first to recognise that any isolated ambitions
of theirs must be absorbed by the spirit of the modern times."98
Obviously the "Jewish way of thinking"
means here for Steiner
Jewish religion, but not this alone; it also means the ethical
ideals that this way of thinking has transplanted "from
grey antiquity" into modern times. Condensed to a formula,
this concept of "Jewish thinking" aims at a criticism
of (abstract) monotheism and the Jewish canon of ethical laws.
Steiner does not mean in this passage a Jewish way of thinking
that is Jewish because of some form of determination by race,
but he defines Jewish thinking substantially in accordance with
the Haskala (Jewish Enlightenment) as advocated by Moses Mendelssohn
and the Reformed Jews of the 19th century. Steiner
could just as well have written "Kantian" thinking
or "Catholic" thinking, because, from the perspective
of his radically enlightened standpoint, all three schools of
thought have the same character insofar as they give up their
innate emancipatory elements in favour of normative or collectivist
moral ideals. Steiner's standpoint before the turn of the century
was that of Enlightenment, as was the standpoint of many European
Jews as well. This dimension of cultural history must be taken
into account when judging his views. One could just as well accuse
Steiner's criticism of Christianity of having given up the Christian
spiritual traditions and call him an "anti-Christian".
Bierl and other leftwing pamphleteers of course have no interest
in doing that, as Christianity is not important for them. If
you take all religion to be mythical, you must seek an interpretation
of this mythology that is compatible with enlightened rationality.
You have to ask yourself - as Steiner did
in regard to Christianity and the Jewish religion - why humanity
needs a Law revealed by God if it can give its moral law to itself.
If the "primary foundation of the world" has "completely"
"poured itself out into the world", "in order
to allow everything to depend on Man's will", as Steiner
writes in the Theory of Knowledge [...] in 188699,
then that is something that holds also for the "Jewish"
or the "Muslim" foundation of the world. That means
that the earlier forms of understanding God are, from Steiner's
point of view, obsolete stages in cultural history of the consciousness
of God. Steiner's standpoint itself does not lack a spiritual
perspective, on the contrary, it is open for such a perspective,
as can be seen in his later development.
In his Hamerling essay Steiner saw in Homunculus
a "representative
of modern man", who had as his most outstanding characteristic
a
complete lack of individuality. It is therefore not surprising
that he
preceded it with a contrast: a song of praise for the free individuality.
In contemporary society, he saw a dangerous mechanising tendency
penetrating into all fields of life. He characterised it as hostile
to the individual and soulless. This diagnosis can be read as
a criticism of superficial rationalism and the optimistic belief
in (materialistic) progress. In the increase of spiritual and
social coldness that was connected with this development Steiner
obviously perceived the counterpart to the "stale feelings"
and "instincts" that he saw striving for power in anti-Semitism.
In 1888, he writes in his essay on Homunculus:
"That source of ever
fresh life, which forever allows us to create the new out of
our inner being, so that our feelings and our spirit appear to
possess a certain intrinsic depth that is never fully exhausted,
is in the process of disappearing completely for modern man.
A pronounced individuality is not something which is foreseeable;
because not matter how many ways it has manifested itself to
us, it impossible to create an image of it from which we could
predict the sum of its future activities. Every new action always
receives a new impulse out of the depths of our being, which
shows us new aspects of the individuality. That is what distinguishes
the individuality from a mechanism, which is only the result
of the combined effects of its components. If we know these,
then we also know the boundaries within which its activity is
enclosed. The life of modern man is now becoming ever more machine-like.
Education, forms of society, professional life, everything is
developing in such a way that it eradicates in man what one would
like to call individual life. He is becoming more and more a
product of the social conditions which form him. This soulless,
un-individual man, exaggerated to a caricature, is Hamerling's
Homunculus."
Hamerling's Homunculus figure thus is also
the prototype of the racist or extreme nationalist, who is characterised
by his complete lack of understanding for the individual essence
that lives in every human - albeit in varying degrees of consciousness.
For Steiner, however, upholding spiritually anachronistic ethical
ideals is an expression of "retardation",
leading to "decadence": what once was meaningful and
justified "falls from its heights" and begins to work
against the continuing forces of emancipation. It becomes conservative
and reactionary. Thereby it works in an "undermining, decomposing"
way on the social order.100
By sticking to the old, it destroys this order, which strives
to renew itself. Thus, all reactionary spiritual movements can
be seen as a "decomposing ferment" of the social order.
In reality, it is not only revolutionary currents which work
in an undermining way, because they aspire to realise new ethical
ideals and new social forms, but also the conservative and reactionary
ones, as they endanger the peaceful transformation through their
resistance to the new.
The Longing
of the Jews for Palestine
This was Steiner's basic approach when, in
1897, he commented very critically on Zionism and its leaders
in his essay The Longing of the Jews for Palestine (Die Sehnsucht
der Juden nach Palästina) in the Magazine for Literature
(Magazin für Litteratur).
"Much worse than the
anti-Semites are Mr. Herzel and Mr. Nordau, the heartless leaders
of all the Jews who are tired of Europe. They turn an unpleasant
childishness into a movement of world historic dimensions, they
give a harmless skirmish out as horrible artillery fire. They
are seducers and tempters of their people."101
He came to a similar conclusion in this essay
as most of the Jewish critics of Herzl and Nordau: that Zionism
was "dangerous". At this time, anti-Semitism had lost
political influence and importance. It still existed, but it
was limited to small, political sects, at odds with each other.
In the question of which was worse, Zionism
or anti-Semitism, Steiner - with his decisive support for a positive
assimilation, which did not simply allow the Jewish contribution
to be swept away or disappear, but included it as a productive
cultural factor for the different peoples - stood for an individualistic
humanism, beyond "for" and "against". To
him, this concern seemed endangered by the Zionism of Herzl and
his sympathisers, which declared assimilation to have failed.
Someone not familiar with the context and
concrete situation of the time may be taken aback by some of
the formulations in the essay on Palestine. But when Steiner,
with reference to the first Zionist Congress (1897) in Basle,
spoke of the "impotence of anti-Semitism" and described
it as an "unpleasant childishness", he expressed a
generally held conviction and repeated arguments also used by
Jewish authors.
In Steiner's comments one can even recognise
a direct reference to the opening speech by Max Nordau during
the first Zionist Congress in Basle. In his essay on Palestine
published shortly afterwards, Steiner speaks of
"… the best of the
anti-Semites, who are like children, that want to have something
that they can blame for the grievance that they suffer from."102
During his speech, Nordau had said that "the
anti-Semitic accusations" were not a
"… criticism of
actually observed shortcomings, but resulted from the psychological
law, which says that children, savages and wicked fools make
beings or things, for which they feel aversion, responsible for
their sufferings."103
So for Steiner, "the best among the anti-Semites"
belong to the first of Nordau's categories, the "children".
104 One can continue Steiner's
thought implicit in this comment, that the worse and worst among
the anti-Semites belong to Nordau's "savages and wicked
fools".
This accords with Steiner's opinion expressed
elsewhere, which maintains that anti-Semitism, apart from its
"talent" for ranting and raving, is characterised by
a complete lack of thoughts.
Thus when Steiner describes Zionism as worse
than anti-Semitism, that does not constitute a contradiction
to or reduction of his express rejection of anti-Semitism since
1881. As before, his criticism was directed against the enemies
of Liberalism and against the "reactionaries", amongst
whom he counted the anti-Semites. In an essay105
on Zola's Letter to the Young Generation, written only
some months before the essay on Palestine, Steiner sees in Zola's
appeal the ideals of Liberalism (the ideals of freedom and equality)
expressed in "sentences of monumental magnitude".
According to Steiner, the worst people were
not even those called the "young generation". The greatest
confusion could be found in those who in 1897 were in their thirties,
and who expressed their sympathies for reactionary concepts and
supported the ambitious cliques of "junkers" (Prussian
landed aristocracy), who viewed the liberal thoughts of the 19th
century as "children's diseases", finding that "abstract
freedom" contradicted the "necessities of the state".
Steiner here refers to Maximilian Harden, quoting him in the
following. With the "cliques of "junkers" he is
referring to Prussian "junkers", belonging to the Pan-German
Association (founded in 1891), the German nationalist anti-Semitic
propagandist Georg von Schönerer
and his followers (p. 38), but also the French anti-Semites (one
can recall Steiner's equating Dühring's anti-Semitism with
reactionary philosophy and politics in the letter to Ronsperger).
When Steiner condemned Zionism, he was also
aiming at anti-
Semitism. To him Zionism - in spite of its utopian character
- stood
out as a relapse into the time before emancipation, that distracted
people from their self-realisation as humans by reducing
them to
their national or generic characteristics. And Zionism, in turn,
needed anti-Semitism as a counterpart. Herzl himself stressed
that
repeatedly. And not only that, Zionism even needed a certain
exaggeration of the dangers of anti-Semitism. Rosenberg writes:
"Herzl's Zionism required
a crisis-laden exaggeration. He needed a dramatisation of the
Jewish problem. The promise of a country like all other countries
was not enough to let the masses flow in. The countries in which
they lived had to become uninhabitable. Herzl's Zionism lived
in symbiosis with anti-Semitism and European nationalism."106
Zionism encountered a public mood that did
not correspond to this
need. Walter Laqueur, the historian of Zionism, writes about
this
time:
"But the spirit of the
age was still basically optimistic, and it was commonly assumed
that the appeal of anti-Semitism was bound to
be restricted to the backward
sections of society, in particular to those who had suffered
from the consequences of industrialisation. The reaction against
Enlightenment and liberalism, the new cult of violence, and anti-humanism,
were thought to be transient cultural maladies [...] The anti-Semites,
divided into several factions, lost much of their political influence
after 1895, though they continued to exist as small sects bitterly
fighting against each other. [...]
Nor was there any reason why
the German and Austrian Jews should regard their own position
with any special concern. In Russia and Rumania the situation
was incomparably worse; from 1881 onwards eastern Europe was
plagued by a series of pogroms. Even in France, which had a smaller
Jewish community than Germany, their position was much more precarious.
The French anti-Semitic movement predated Marr, Stöcker
and Dühring; it was more articulate and its influence more
widespread. It was, in fact, the pioneer of modern anti-Jewish
ideology; the German and the Russian anti-Semites frequently
imported their ideas from Paris."107
Zionism also faced an assimilation of Jews
that was already well advanced, at least in Central Europe. In
the process of assimilation Laqueur sees a "natural process"
and not simply a result of feelings
of inferiority or "Jewish self-hatred" that had their
roots in anti-Semitism.108
Assimilation was not restricted to German Jews. It started later
in other parts of Europe, but went further than in Germany. This
was the case in England and Italy. Even in Eastern Europe, before
the pogroms of the 1880s, there were advocates of assimilation,
like the leading Jewish commentator in Russia, I. Orschansky,
who demanded "the complete absorption (Aufgehen)
of the Jews into the Russian nation".109
Laqueur writes in retrospect on the 19th century,
summarising:
"Assimilation was not
a conscious act; it was the inevitable fate of a people without
a homeland, which had been for a long time in a state of cultural
decay and which to a great extent had lost its national consciousness."110
Finally, he also points out to the inherent
anti-racist impulse in the
ideal of assimilation:
"But only very few Jews
accepted the argument of the racist anti-Semites that they could
never be assimilated and had therefore to be ejected from the
body politic of the host people. No one anticipated a relapse
into barbarism, and most Jews continued their struggle for full
civil rights as patriotic citizens of their respective countries
of birth. A retreat from assimilation seemed altogether unthinkable
[...]"111
This is exactly what also seemed unthinkable
to Steiner. Beyond that, he also rejected Zionism as the idea
of a Jewish national state, as such an ideal threatened
to draw European Jewry into imperialistic, and nationalistic,
and possibly even racist entanglements.
Similarly to Steiner and Laqueur, Rosenberg
(1998) also sees in Herzl's Zionism a reflection of European
nationalism and imperialism.
"The step from the idea
that Jews were humans like everybody else to the idea that the
Jews were a separate nation like everybody else was extremely
hazardous [...] The idea of a Jewish homeland presupposed a historical
period when countries and nations actually could be created,
recreated, born and destroyed with the help of gunboats, rulers
and compasses. Consequently, it was an idea that closely followed
the military strategist's way of regarding nations, borders and
territories that was typical for colonialism and imperialism."112
The chief rabbi of Vienna, Moritz Güdemann,
argued against the programmatic book Der Judenstaat (A State
for the Jews) published in 1896. In a pamphlet he described
Herzl's idea as "a cuckoo's egg (that is, a "dangerous
present"; translator's note) for national Jewry" and
declared that the Jews were not a nation; that the only thing
they had in common was their belief in God, and that Zionism
was incompatible with the teachings of Judaism.113
Güdemann, in order to illustrate the danger of nationalism,
countered Herzl's suggested solution with the slogan coined by
the revered Austrian writer Franz Grillparzer: "from humanity
through nationality to bestiality", (with which the latter
wanted to warn of the dangers of German nationalism) and argued
that the Jews should take up the mission of the diaspora and
fight against anti-Semitism in the respective countries in which
it appeared.
Other Jews expressed their rejection of Zionism
much more radically than Steiner. Gabriel Riesser, for example,
a Liberal Jewish politician, voiced his opinion in the middle
of the 19th century that a Jew who preferred a non-existing
state and a non-existing nation (Israel) to Germany should be
taken into police custody, not because his opinions were dangerous,
but because he was evidently insane. Instead he expressed his
dedication to his German homeland in the spirit of assimilation:
"Anyone who disputes
my claim to my German homeland, disputes my right to my thoughts
and feelings, to the language that I speak, to the air that I
breathe, and for that reason I must protect myself against him
as I would against an assassin."114
When Raphael Loewenfels wrote in 1893, the
foundation year of the Central Association of German Citizens
of the Jewish Faith (Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger
jüdischen Glaubens) that "no educated Jew would
be willing to leave his beloved fatherland for a country where
in time immemorial his forefathers had lived", he did not,
according to Laqueur, express "the view of one person",
he "expressed the convictions of a great many Jews".115
When Herzl, the well-known feuilletonist of
the Viennese New Free Press (Neue Freie Presse) drafted
his ideas for Der Judenstaat in 1895, a friend believed
that his mind had become unhinged as a result of overwork and
that he was in need of rest and medical treatment. Laqueur writes
about the reaction of most of the Jews at the time to Herzl's
book:
"What scandalised most
of Herzl's contemporaries in his pamphlet was his flat assertion
that assimilation had not worked. How could an assimila