Hamburg, Germany. 2025 is the 100th anniversary of Rudolf Steiner’s death. How does he live on in individual people? Birgit Philipp, manager of the Rudolf Steiner bookshop in Hamburg, gives her answers.
Which sentence by Rudolf Steiner has particularly touched you, and why?
“The human soul is a flower of the universe, destined to mature the divine spirit within itself.”1 The sentence addresses an aspect of the human being that is usually only considered in personal emotional life. The fact that it expresses how essential soul development is to allow a divine spirit to mature within oneself raises the question: how does this soul development work? And then we might also be faced with the question: what is anthroposophy? In other words, this sentence raised questions for me, and that touched me.
How do people around you recognize that you are interested in Rudolf Steiner?
Simply put, from the outside, by the fact that I work in an anthroposophical bookshop and also organize events on these topics. But also through conversations, which for some people have intellectual connections that are somewhat different.
Where has anthroposophy irritated you?
Anthroposophy, or rather the engagement with anthroposophy, constantly irritates me. I keep bumping up against it with my usual thinking and understanding. And this bumping into it is irritating at first, because it challenges me and shows me how I have thought up to now, and then, because when I want to understand it more precisely, I realize that it is not what I first thought it was. Then a process of irritation begins.
For which questions of life is anthroposophy particularly important to you?
For all essential questions of life, and occasionally for the everyday issues that one can get lost in. But also for the questions of life that relate to world events.
Where has anthroposophy changed your life?
At a pivotal crossroads in my life, a search for an internship led me to a completely different destination than I had expected, and there I encountered anthroposophy in a significant way once again.
Contact info@rudolf-steiner-buchhandlung.de
Translation Charles Cross
Picture M. Schössler
