When anthroposophists hear the name Rudolf Steiner, they probably think of his works and deeds. Non-anthroposophists (in the more amiable cases) think of an unusual man from the beginning of the 20th century who brought concepts of a not-wholly-understandable worldview into something real. In what other ways can we meet him? How might we develop a new closeness to him? A conversation with Martina Maria Sam, who is particularly familiar with the small and often little-known facts of Rudolf Steiner’s life. Questions by Gilda Bartel.
You’ve done an extensive study of Rudolf Steiner as a person. It must have brought you into a special relationship with him. What is that like?
I’ve really grown closer to Rudolf Steiner as a person, as someone in a process of becoming—someone who was always developing throughout his life. By immersing myself in his biography, I’ve also come to understand my own personal development in a new way. This was most noticeable when I studied his childhood and early youth. Now it’s becoming increasingly clear to me how often the examples he gives in his lectures are autobiographical, how they come from his own experiences.
So, you may have discovered where Rudolf Steiner experienced self-doubt, for example?
I don’t know if we can say that he experienced self-doubt. But he did have a crisis in his mid-thirties. On the one hand, he wasn’t entirely sure where his career would go. On the other hand, it was only during this period that he finally realized very clearly that he did not perceive the world the same as other people did and that the sensory world offers something unique that only it can provide. He had his first occult experience around his eighth birthday: he perceived his aunt spiritually just after she had taken her own life. Ever since that experience, he had the ability to see the essence of things beyond the surface of the senses. He once said in a lecture that at an earlier stage of human history, people viewed concepts as entities, as beings. I imagine he experienced something similar: that he looked at a red rose, for example, but didn’t pay attention to the color of the rose, its shape, its petals and sepals. He perceived the plant being, the plant’s essence, as it worked directly in the plant, not so much the rose’s wonderful red color, for example. Not until he was in his thirties did he clearly see that he was missing something. He said that other people looked at a rose three or four times and were then able to describe it. But he had to look at it thirty or forty times in order to memorize the sensory details.
How can we imagine this process?
I imagine it like this: if I wanted to find out something about you, for example, then with this kind of perception, I wouldn’t have to look at you or observe you closely; instead, I would immediately experience the Gilda-essence within me. And then I wouldn’t have to look closely at how you look, speak, move, etc.—how the essence is expressed in the outer world. This is fascinating because Rudolf Steiner brought a lot of attention to Goethe, the man of the senses, the great observer. Goethe would have looked very intently at how Gilda appears in her individual expressions, and through his precise observation, he would learn something about your inner essence and being. For Rudolf Steiner, this vision of the essence was simply given immediately. However, he greatly admired Goethe’s approach, and at 35, he began to gradually develop this ability of exact sensorial observation. I could now imagine that his occasional heavy drinking in Berlin in 1897/98 suppressed his given spiritual ability—the kind of clairvoyance that had been bestowed upon him since childhood by grace—so that he could “work” his way back into the spiritual world in a new and even deeper way. Through various experiences and also through his journey through the sensory world, at the turn of the century, Rudolf Steiner entered a deeper layer of the spiritual world than before. I think that it was only then that he really made Goethe’s method fruitful for himself. I believe he prescribed for himself the practices that he gave later in his lectures on the “Practical Training of Thinking.” These include, for example, looking at the sky at the same time every day without immediately forming an opinion about it, simply perceiving what is there with your senses. He trained himself in this ability of pure observation during those years.
Did he consciously separate himself from his given “experience of unity” in order to see from the realm of the senses, so that the spiritual world could become even clearer to him?
Yes, I believe it was really a matter of giving up what was brought with him to this life in order to acquire this new quality himself.
Did this renewed encounter with the sensory world also change his social life?
If we believe some early eyewitness accounts, it seems he was not particularly attached to his body during that time. It’s said he had a weak constitution—he was rejected by the military as “physically unfit”—and his friend Moritz Zitter once remarked that he had no practical skills. Later, this completely changed. The events of his life around the turn of the century give the impression that he also thoroughly took hold of his body. Many people who knew him later described, for example, his strikingly beautiful, rhythmic gait. We don’t have descriptions like this from his early years. He’d never held a sculptor’s tool before, but was able to work on the group of the “Representative of Humanity” with Edith Maryon and even developed new techniques for working with the wood. So, by that time, he was quite skilled and completely present in his body.
Concerning his social life, Rudolf Steiner was always a very sociable person. He had many friends from a wide variety of circles and professions. He had an incredible ability to take an interest in other people. But in Weimar, after certain inward experiences at the beginning of his time there, he experienced a kind of wall between himself and the world, and he suffered a lot as a result. In his autobiography, The Course of My Life, he describes how he always felt as if he were visiting others, but no one ever came to visit him; no one was interested in his innermost concerns. Despite his outward sociability, we see a strong sense of loneliness. This came to a climax during his Weimar years.
What we know about him as a person always seems to me to be somewhat detached from his work, as if it isn’t necessary for an understanding of anthroposophy. How do you see his personal biography and his own “karmic connections of destiny” in relation to his work and anthroposophy?
In my work, I go through everything he wrote chronologically. Traces of what he was going through are found in nearly everything he wrote and published. We can see his own personal development in these works, but of course, there’s much more in his letters and notebooks. What’s so touching about his early years is that one experiences him so strongly in his humanity, in his struggles. With his initiation process at the turn of the century, he reaches a stage where he completely masters his personal self—in anthroposophical terms, we could say, the everyday or lower ‘I.’ The personal self, the private individual, gradually recedes more and more in his biography. One gets the feeling that he now lives only for his task, in the service of something higher, so to speak. This is what he describes in How to Know Higher Worlds as “inner liberation.” He often describes that when we enter the spiritual world without having overcome our personal nature, we only see what corresponds to our personal limitations and prejudices; we don’t yet see the comprehensive, essential nature of things. Overcoming the personal is a prerequisite for spiritual research.
A wonderful preliminary exercise for this is to put ourselves completely in another person’s shoes and really leave behind what we think and feel, so that we truly try to understand the other person from their own being. Rudolf Steiner practiced this intensively. And we have to go through this to experience all the nuances of being a human being and to then awaken these other aspects of being human in our “true self,” so to speak. This is the moment when we free ourselves from the constraints of the personal, from what we have already brought with us—in Rudolf Steiner’s case: being born an Austrian man in the middle of the nineteenth century, being educated in such and such a way, and so on. These conditions imposed by incarnation limit our view.
Do you think he suffered because of it?
It is already a first step when one realizes this—when we don’t consider our own views to be the center of the universe. Overcoming our personal point of view is an incredibly painful process. We have to practice holding back and listening without immediately reacting emotionally. It is listening in such a way that we create a space in our hearing, a kind of womb for what the other person wants to say. In 1904, Rudolf Steiner wrote that in this process, we must become selfless, even in our most secret thoughts. One of the supplementary exercises is openness. I can only be impartial, open to something that is foreign to me, something new, if I clear this space within myself, which I usually fill with my personal self.
A question for me personally was whether it’s possible to develop a new closeness to Rudolf Steiner. Now I wonder if his biographical development offers a new approach because it draws me in and allows me to compare his experiences with my own. Then there are no other interpreters, just me.
Yes, that’s how I felt. The more I learn about his actual life, the closer he becomes to me as a person. In a way, we then personally experience his career, his joys, and also his failures. When writing his biography, I try to really feel this inside myself, without drawing it into my own personal life. For example, I try to gain an inner image of each of Rudolf Steiner’s friends: what kind of person were they, what was their destiny, what connected them to Rudolf Steiner? This way, I experience Rudolf Steiner as reflected in his fellow human beings and in his development, and this makes me feel closer to him. By accompanying him inwardly throughout his not-so-easy development, including his experiences of suffering, on the one hand, he becomes closer to me as a human being. On the other hand, he becomes ever greater to me because I can better understand what he had to suffer and overcome in order to become the spiritual teacher and spiritual researcher whom we know through anthroposophy.
When we consider this concreteness, it becomes like a phenomenon of the sensory world. We perceive him as sensual and becoming in life, as an incarnated person—a Rudolf Steiner who connects with the world as an evolving being. If we view him like this, does his spirit appear differently to us?
When we understand the process that he himself went through, in a certain way—in my experience—we feel stronger as beings who are going through a process of becoming. Through this awareness, we now gain a different access to his works, we discover new and deeper levels in them, and we feel what he experienced more strongly. One of my first booklets was a collection of short essays about Rudolf Steiner’s struggle to find a new language. He really had to struggle to find a language that could express what he was experiencing spiritually. Around 1900, he was dealing with a language that had already become largely materialistic and carried fixed meaning in its words. He also had to express spiritual ideas in a language that wouldn’t overwhelm people, since spiritual content does this quite easily. So, he had to find linguistic means that would challenge the inward activity of the listener and reader. There is no other way when communicating spiritual content today: if we want to remain free in relation to it, we have to conquer these texts for ourselves. Anthroposophy is always about one’s own activity.
Did Rudolf Steiner have a particular love for life?
Yes, I think so. We know he was very sociable; he loved conversation, and he loved being with people. He was interested in others and in the diversity of life. And there’s also his distinctive sense of humor—his enjoyment of comical situations and jokes.
Does that remain the same after the turning point in life—this initiation—or does something change?
I think he didn’t have the same time available for socializing anymore. But the joy of it is always present. We have some reminiscences from people who say it was important to him to have a warm and friendly coffee with members at Christmas, where they would tell jokes. And there’s the anecdote about an express train that gets stuck at a station for a long time, and a concerned member urges him to get something to eat in the train restaurant. He leaves, but quickly returns with his umbrella full of pretzels, which he proceeds to distribute to his fellow passengers. But he was no longer able to be as carefree as he once was. He was constantly besieged by people who wanted something from him—and he had this crazily full schedule: lectures, meetings, and conversations every half hour. He was always willing to give. Only when he noticed that people were cultivating personal sensitivities and vanities did he react harshly, sharply, and sometimes ironically. His love of humor is also evident in his enjoyment of eurythmy humoresques, which he wanted included in nearly every eurythmy program. The inventiveness he displayed here—the costumes, the forms, the special gestures—that is really a field unto itself.
This makes me wonder again whether this also leads to a new closeness with him. Sometimes I feel the weight of anthroposophy asking so much of me that I’ll never be able to fulfill it. It feels inaccessible. But when we see Rudolf Steiner as a human being going through a development himself, then a new possibility opens to enter into anthroposophy.
Yes, I can understand that. I believe we really miss out on not being able to meet him here and now. He had such a wonderful way of encouraging people. If he’d heard you just now, he’d probably have found a few words to say so that you would have no reason to feel small. We no longer have the opportunity for an in-person encounter with him. But I do believe we can still have an intense, living connection with him. Of course, it’s not as easy as if he were standing right in front of us.
Rudolf Steiner’s own life journey can also teach us to feel our own potential and to look at our own development in a new way. For example, I realized more and more that anthroposophy is about an inverted approach to our biography—the opposite of our usual one. Usually, we feel ourselves in our own past, in what we have become and achieved. We perceive what comes to us from outside as things we didn’t will from out of ourselves; these are often painful experiences like the death of a loved one, a separation, an illness, etc. We usually see these as “accidents,” as something that just happens to us or is imposed on us by the outer world. Why did this happen to me? Rudolf Steiner recommended reversing this way of looking at things. This means looking at the person we’ve become as if they were a stranger and understanding what comes to us from the outer world as something we ourselves, in our true, higher self, actually want—something we send to ourselves in order to grow, even if it initially appears quite different when viewed from outside. He even once said that when we regard destiny in this manner, we begin to become spiritual researchers.
Is this an example of the new perspective that became possible for him through his integration or incarnation into the sensory world?
I think he was consciously aware of these two streams of destiny much earlier, even during his student days. But at the turn of the century, he seems to have learned to accept what came his way with deeper serenity and with real inner peace. Back in 1902, he even planned to write a work on “happenstance.”
How can we learn to talk about such things today?
Since language is, in a certain sense, very “overused,” many things are associated with fixed meanings or clichés and used without any thought. We no longer get to the real word itself. Look at how unconsciously we use words—for example, how often do we write “heartfelt greetings” just as a phrase, without feeling anything? What is our heart? It is the innermost core of our being. When we really take a moment to feel this deeply, then we can connect with our words in a completely different way in our soul and truly send “heartfelt greetings.” This feeling is then there a little more when we use a word this way—it can never be completely empty again.
In the “Swiss Public Speaking Course,” Rudolf Steiner says that language proceeded through certain phases; there have always been different ideals for speech. In ancient times, speech was supposed to be beautiful. Then it was to be correct. Today, it needs to be good. “Good” means that we speak from the whole context. It’s not important to find the most precise, right concept for the idea. That’s no longer the ideal for our time. Instead, the ideal is that our speech is good—that it has a healing effect in each specific context. This actually requires that we always speak differently. Speaking then becomes perception, attentiveness.
In this sense (there they are again, those senses!) I “thank you” with warmth in my heart!
Translation Joshua Kelberman
Image Rudolf Steiner with Anna and Minnie Eunike, ca. 1900 in Berlin. © Rudolf Steiner Archive, Dornach.
