I have a custom of always writing down or formulating everything that comes to me from the spiritual world with a pen in my hand, either in words or in some kind of drawing. As a result, my notebooks number in the truckloads. – Rudolf Steiner1
The Rudolf Steiner Archive’s treasure trove of notes is not only made up of truckloads of small and large red, green, black, and purple notebooks but also thousands of individual papers, ranging from small slips to large folded sheets. This rich and manifold treasure has been continuously unearthed, piece by piece, since 2020 and made accessible to the public in an ongoing edition since March 2022. Integrated into the online platform of the Gesamtausgabe [Collected Works], this purely digital publication is breaking new ground for its editor, the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung [Rudolf Steiner Estate Administration], and publisher, the Rudolf Steiner Verlag [Rudolf Steiner Publishing House].
A Wide Range of Notes
Rudolf Steiner recorded all kinds of thoughts in innumerable notebooks, pads, and individual sheets of paper in a wide variety of colors, shapes, and designs. These include individual manuscript pages, fragments, and preliminary versions of essays, as well as drawings, drafts of letters, eurythmy forms, attempts at finding words, appointments, and calculations. In addition to the usual bound and mostly unlined notebooks (such as a series bound in violet wax cloth from 1919/1920), there are also (sometimes self-made) leporellos, ring binders, notebooks, address books, and calendars, as well as unusual extra-long formats and miniature sizes. The entries are usually in pencil, black ink, or purple crayon. The notes are even more individualized; with their different formats, types of paper, and folds, they offer a wide range of design possibilities that Steiner often knew how to exploit extremely creatively. The notes make visible the creative processes of thought (and dead ends) precisely through their material, as evidenced by the notes that former coworkers would salvage from the trash. Even today, you can still see that some of them were crumpled (e.g., NZ 58) or, like NZ 1, folded into an unsuitable miniature format and rolled (maybe simply to stabilize a wobbly table?)
While Rudolf Steiner himself wrote his notes only for the moment and, as he admitted, never looked at them again, these notes give today’s readers unique insights into the history of his thinking, work, and ideas, as well as into his biography and the way he organized his life. They often represent the only evidence of paths of thoughts and events that are no longer visible within the work. As contemporary witnesses, they cast a new, very authentic light on the picture of Rudolf Steiner as a person and his work.
The number of such documents present in the Rudolf Steiner Archive—636 notebooks and approximately 7,500 slips of paper—makes it nearly impossible to prepare the entire complex of notes in a coherent and systemized way and certainly does not offer itself to printed book format, as in the rest of the Collected Works series. A visually fluid and legible text conducive to understanding the content and context is only possible if the original document can also be made visible. The result would be an overwhelming flood of images beyond the possibilities of a printed edition. The overall collation, organization, and contextualizing of the information contained in the notes necessary for readers is also inconceivable without the possibilities offered by today’s digital technology.
A Look Into the Digital Edition
Steiner’s notes are thus presented to the public in a digital edition as eGA 47/48, Notizbücher & Notizzettel [Notebooks & Notes], offering readers an overview and insight into the multitude of Steiner’s notes from their beginning. This volume is embedded in the electronic Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe (GA online) [Collected Works, CW online]. A separate welcome page offers an editorial with information and explanations about the edition and the specific nature and use of the digital edition.
A wide range of selecting, searching, and filtering options help to organize the documents and facilitate a targeted selection. Each individual document begins with a summary of its specific information. The side-by-side presentation of the handwritten facsimile and editorial transcription is linked to various display options, explanations, and indications that can be displayed as desired and minimally interfere with the flow of reading. All this allows twenty-first-century readers to take in Steiner’s nineteenth and early twentieth-century notes as if they were holding them in their own hands or looking over his shoulder as he wrote them down, without having to forego editorial explanations helpful for understanding.
The perpetually growing collection of Rudolf Steiner’s notes available is the result of the extensive indexing, digitization, and editorial processes that began in 20202 in parallel to the publications: day after day, sheet by sheet, all remaining documents continue to be digitized, transcribed, edited, and ultimately published in bi-annual steps.
Documents Already Published
In this way, readers have already been able to gain some insight into Rudolf Steiner’s workshop of ideas on various specialist courses in education, “The Light and Warmth Courses” (Spring 2023), “The Theory of the Senses” (Fall 2023), the doctor’s course “Spiritual Science and Medicine” (Spring 2024), and the large field of “Social Threefolding” (Fall 2024). These themed groupings in no way include all notes within their field since every notebook contains a wide variety of fragments. Aside from these main themes, there are also some interesting idiosyncrasies, for example, a hotel bill became a note (NZ 1691), on the back of which Steiner jotted down his thoughts on his perceptions of the soul. Generally, Steiner’s notes are not diary entries. Notebook NB 34 is an exception.
Rudolf Steiner himself titled it a “travel diary” and used it to document a short trip from Berlin to Austria in August 1901. Here, too, the facts predominate; private or personal thoughts are rarely found there, similar to his other notes. One other exception is notebook NB 37, which dates from the years 1888/89, an eventful time in Rudolf Steiner’s biography. It contains a thoughtful, shorthand draft of a lecture that was to be held on December 29, 1889, in Sibiu, Romania, titled “Die Frau im Lichte der Goetheschen Weltanschauung. Ein Beitrag zur Frauenfrage” [Woman in the Light of Goethe’s Worldview. A Contribution to the Women’s Question] (full lecture published in GA 68c, Goethe und die Gegenwart [Goethe and the Present]). It also contained a sketch of a poem seeming to refer to an early love of Rudolf Steiner’s, as well as another short text passage that appears to be autobiographical, providing insight into the personal soul life and struggles of the time that otherwise we find very little of in Rudolf Steiner’s notes.
The Tip of the Iceberg
Since 2022, the Rudolf Steiner Archive has published a “truckload” of Rudolf Steiner’s notes twice a year (at the end of March and September), forming an ever-growing part of the GA-online. Wherever possible, documents with common themes are grouped together in the waves of publication. The goal of the publication shows us how much more we have in store. Ultimately, the edition will include all 636 notebooks and around 7,500 notes stored in the Rudolf Steiner Archive in Dornach.
This long, laborious, and technically and conceptually challenging project is only possible through the tireless interdisciplinary collaboration of the Rudolf Steiner Estate Administration, the Rudolf Steiner Archive with its editorial and archiving departments, the micrographics department of the Bürgerspital Basel (Basel Civic Hospital) (pictures/digitization), and Zephir Software Design AG (online platform). The actual publication of Rudolf Steiner’s notebooks and notes is just the tip of the iceberg in regards to the indexing of all relevant documents in the Rudolf Steiner Archive. It’s not only the physical documents that undergo a laborious journey before they arrive safely back in their original archive drawers after digitization. Their digital copies also pass through a wide range of processing and control stations, getting equipped with searchable text, navigation data, and research results, to then be made accessible as readable, edited text with images. A large part of the transcription work is done by outside volunteers before the actual professional editorial work begins, which involves checking the transcriptions and providing commentary for every single page.
We can only hope that this volunteer support will continue to help carry the project, along with the institutional contributions and donations that support the archiving and editing team. Only thanks to these extensive efforts can the goal of publishing the large body of Steiner’s notes in their entirety come a little closer in every six-month wave.
Digital Edition
Notebooks & Notes
The digital volume eGA 47/48 is part of GA-Online.
Subscription at steinerverlag.com; if you already have a subscription: Login at steinerverlag.com/login
A more detailed description of the digital edition can be found at rudolf-steiner.com
Translation Joshua Kelberman
