Our embodied existence can also become an inner battleground. It both conditions and empowers us. But who, exactly, is it that has become embodied? Andreas Laudert invites us to interpret the signatures of our incarnation as images.
“Why is youth the most sumptuous time of life? [. . .] Nothing is yet determined, and all is possible—the hand still plays, capriciously, hesitantly, with the lots in the urn of destiny. [. . .] Ah, the life of man, like every river, is at its highest where it begins. It flows on only by falling—we must all flow into the sea—[. . .]” — Heinrich von Kleist.1
Perhaps one day we’ll look back on our time as the era when we became disembodied. At some point, we stopped exchanging goods and began only exchanging data and information; we no longer paid with coins or paper money but via digital transfer; we no longer shook hands but sent each other text messages; we no longer visited each other in a house made of clay, wood, or concrete, but exclusively through our websites; we no longer printed books but uploaded everything to the cloud. And one day, we look down at ourselves in amazement: Was that what we wanted? Had living in a physical body been so exhausting? Then we break into a sweat—finally, again. We want to go back and rewrite history. After all, the Word became flesh not without reason, and it dwelt among us not without purpose, for in it was life, and what mattered was the living; it is what always matters—always and everywhere—whether we are heavenly or earthly, embodied or spiritualized, whether we write books or build houses, prepare a meal or a place to sleep, whether we have a home or no place to lay our heads.
Getting Close with Your Own Physical Body
Everything in the surroundings of my incarnation—the spatial circumstances of my upbringing—was cramped. Our house had small rooms and a narrow stairwell, and the valley of the Rhine, into which our winegrowing village nestled, was so narrow that in winter, not a single ray of sunlight reached the village center where we lived. Time and again, people in the village took their own lives. They would hang themselves in barns or take plant poison. “E605” [parathion] people would whisper. The causes were alcoholism, loneliness, and poverty. It wasn’t until after I left school that I realized I came from a “poor” family. Shortly afterward it came to light that my father—without telling anyone—had accumulated a quarter of a million in debt. He had apparently been, among other things, a dreamer. For decades after, our house belonged to the bank. The lack of possessions, the absence of so-called savings, and the knowledge that I would soon no longer have a parental home, let alone one of my own, affected my physical body and, thereby, my sense of life in the world. I always felt somehow bodiless and homeless, like a perpetual guest, as if I had no identity.
The German word Angst, fear, stems from Enge, tightness or constriction. As a child, I was often afraid of anything corporeal, and that continued into my teenage years. I hated going to the doctor and avoided it whenever possible, which is still the case today. I rarely get sick, but a mixture of constantly “being too late” and “too early”—and the associated anxiety—shaped me from an early age. Socially, I often felt like I was caught in the middle—rarely in a secure, harmonious flow with those around me; outwardly, yes, but not deep down inside. I actually had three siblings, but in the day-to-day reality of my childhood and early adolescence, I was an only child. My mother and father were both nearly forty-five when I was born, and my siblings were born thirteen, fifteen, and seventeen years earlier. By the time I was three, they had all left home. I felt a constant impatience, but, just as much, a strong hesitation. Even the influence of the stars catapulted me symbolically into an everlasting tomorrow. The Waterbearer defines my personality; my sun, ascendant, moon, and Mercury are all in this sign.
Nothing was ever more sacred to me than the feeling of friendship in a deep and loyal sense—human friendship, shared spiritual striving. And yet, this disposition of mine often tore me away from precisely such idealistic connections. The feeling of alienation in my childhood home kept recurring. I felt like a friend and a stranger, like a guest, and yet like someone who was somehow “under scrutiny.” I felt observed but not seen. I felt I belonged, yet remained unconnected. I became a writer—and found that some people perceived my writings as unusually personal—even too personal—especially in anthroposophical circles. On the literary scene, however, people had no problem with such “traces of life,” as a profile in the Süddeutsche Zeitung once put it. Rather, my themes, plots, and characters were perceived as actually impersonal; it was as if the dramaturgs sensed that, in truth, the plays contained something else, something transpersonal that never quite came to the surface. There was something intangible there, something restrained, hidden, something unembodied, something that did not step out of itself; people didn’t know what to make of me, how to categorize me, or perhaps even whether they could trust me.
I was born on Carnival Sunday: the idea of being someone else; the motifs of the mask and split personality were added to the mix. Nature presented itself veiled at my birth; vast amounts of snow fell for days on end, everything was white, and though all life in February was already bustling beneath the ground, it remained concealed and unnoticed. In my youth, I sensed that there was an excess of vitality and energy within me; even my best friend attested to this and seemed to admire it. I like to approach things with an innocent curiosity and agility. But I don’t like to engage with the physical on a meta-level: scientifically, medically, analytically, in relation to nature, craftsmanship, biology, or matter. I deal with earthly matters naively and “soulishly.” I still feel only half on the Earth.
Does My Body Belong to Me?
“How was it with others?” I often wondered. How do they feel in their bodies? How does the garment of their first and last names fit them? How do they move through the landscapes and homes of their childhood; and how do those places smell and taste? What does embodiment feel like to them?
The German prefix “ver–” gives rather varied meanings: I can fall in love [verlieben]; I can make a mistake [vertun]; I can commit crimes [Verbrechen] and acts of betrayal [Verrat]; I can assault someone [vergehen]; and I myself can fall into ruin [vergehe]; I can evoke ecstasy [Verzückung] and mourn losses [Verluste]; I can suffer from my own perishability [Vergänglichkeit] and show understanding [Verständnis]; I can be crazy [verrückt] and reasonable [vernünftig], entangled [verstrickt], and desperate [verzweifelt].
And I can be embodied [verkörpern]. We are embodied beings. I can embody something, and something embodies something else; I have been embodied and yet live autonomously within my body, and when I leave it [verlasse], I become spiritualized [vergeistige]. But in everyday life, being spiritualized also refers to a quality. No one, however, says, “so-and-so seems so embodied.” Rather, being embodied is the self-evident presupposition for my being able to appear spiritualized. Can I also “become soulified”[verseelen]? Why are there only the expressions “ensouled” [beseelt] or “soulless” [seelenlos]?
All embodiment is a form of manifestation. It is only through a physical body that things become visible in space and amenable to discussion. I take my starting point from the body. It’s like a corporate body, the site notice or colophon [impressum] on a website of an enterprise with a tax ID number. And yet, perishability is inherent in all forms of embodiment. The form that a thing has taken on for a time dies, just as the physical body dies. I can keep myself in shape well into old age, and yet the essence of form continues to work upon me.
Everything that has to do with the development of form, change, and perishability is confronted with the question of possession. In my home village, we children were introduced not only as family members but as belonging to our parents or the family in question, “That’s our . . .,” and, in German, girls were “das Anja, das Christine”—objects.2 A demon can take possession of a physical body; in the Gospels, Christ is called upon to cast them out. Christ Jesus himself was also a human body embraced by a divine being, and yet we would never say that Jesus was possessed. I can take spiritual control of the most diverse levels and members of my constitution. I belong to myself. My physical body belongs to me. And my “belonging-to-myself” belongs to the cosmos; it is a quality of the cosmos. I dwell within it and it within me.
Here begins the moral balancing act, for “my body belongs to me” was feminism’s bitter cry in the context of the abortion debate. Young women today explicitly embrace this slogan when, for example, they argue in classroom discussions that, even when it comes to loving relationships (not just in cases of rape), only the woman should ultimately decide whether a child is brought into the world, that is, whether a human being is helped to become embodied—or not. When it comes to the question of embodiment, physical pain plays a profound role, as does, in this case, the perceived injustice that only women have to pay the price of their femininity for half their lives—and, moreover, have had to endure bodily suffering at the hands of male violence for centuries, right up to the present day. This, too, is part of the history of the villages.
Who Becomes Embodied?
The assertion that we undergo embodiment as only either women or men (or even the indication that we alternate between incarnating as women and men) is no longer normative today. It is precisely here, in the earthly realm, that spiritual signatures and earthly labels seem to have become jumbled and shifted for some time now. Some human beings no longer experience the choice of sex made by their physical body as the choice that their soul, their ‘I’, intended to make. They feel as though they are stuck in the wrong body. But who or what, then, determined or chose the constitution of their physical body? Doesn’t the very grammar of the sentence “I have embodied myself” attribute an active, conscious participation of the ‘I’? When I once asked my mother why she had given birth to me so long after her previous child, she thought for a moment and then said, “Oh, you were just supposed to live!” (Or did she say, “You wanted to”?) When friends visited me back then, they often said, “Strange, somehow you don’t really belong here!” But where, then? I thought. What good is the subjunctive? Where would I have belonged? When does my origin bind me, even though I experience it as non-binding, or see myself as not being bound to it?
Talking about one’s own personal embodiment is strange and not easy. One can do so through a posture that Rudolf Steiner designated as belonging to the consciousness soul. This is a way of looking at oneself with a certain sense of wonder and surprise, with the interest of a scientific researcher, and perhaps also with the neutral interest of a writer. In this vein, Nobel Prize-winning author Annie Ernaux describes herself as an ethnologist of her own self. And in like manner the entrepreneur Daniel Häni recently wrote about his impulse to make the ideas of re-embodiment and karma more open to public discussion.3
Perhaps I can start off with my own sense of life. As close as it is to us as individuals, it’s difficult to describe; our words always feel inadequate or too vague, perhaps precisely because it’s so close to us and we hardly ever reflect upon it. Does the way I’ve embodied myself affect my sense of life? How does my incarnation feel? How do I answer the question, “How, or when, do you feel yourself?”
On the Middle Rhine
“From Mainz, I traveled with Ulriken down the Rhine to Koblenz. Ah, what a place, like a poet’s dream; even the most lush fantasy could not conceive of anything more beautiful than this valley, which now opens up, now closes in, now blooms, now lies barren, now smiles, now strikes fear” — Kleist.4
The fact that I grew up on the Middle Rhine has taken on a greater resonance and significance for me over the years. This region is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and countless people have taken the train between Mainz and Koblenz at least once and been impressed by the landscape with its many castles. There’s something enchanting and nostalgic about the Middle Rhine Valley. The white steamboats and the campgrounds across from Loreley Rock are reminiscent of Polaroid-era vacations from the 1970s; the “Residents Only” signs on the dirt roads through the vineyards are yellowing and weathered, the white in the middle is dirty and rusty, and the red circle around it is faint and pale. In the villages, many have lost their property to globalization; others have adapted and brought their wineries in line with the spirit of the times.
I’ve always loved the middle of the Middle Rhine. Even as a child, people would so wonderfully and unquestioningly welcome you into their midst at the festivals in the wine cellars or at the edge of the forest in the nearby Hunsrück, where a path led up into one of the four side valleys in which our village lay. I never really understood this middle; I felt like I was on the outside. But that’s precisely why it felt so good and was perhaps essential for survival. The simple fact that, as a child, you belonged, that everyone knew you and greeted you warmly when you walked through a door, or when you scored a goal in the Upper Valley vs. Lower Valley soccer tournament, or when you had your first girlfriend. The people there always needed that middle position, that longing for harmony, that gift of humor.
True, as is usually the case in the countryside, anything foreign or unusual was initially gawked at or marveled at, but I always found the people of my hometown to be open—always ready to simply wave someone over for a glass of wine in front of the house on summer evenings. I took these people to be like true children who simply wanted to enjoy life, as people who were always more inclined to bridge divides than turn away. They knew that their postwar living room bookcases didn’t hold scholarly books, but rather Der große Brockhaus [standard German encyclopedia], novels by Uta Danella, and the Rhineland-Palatinate regional yearbook. But that didn’t make them hard-headed; instead, they always went on the warm-hearted offensive. Or they were moved when someone said something profound, perhaps even about death—words they might not have fully understood but to which they nodded solemnly, and their solemnity was genuine. In the Middle Rhine region, the Rhine Valley narrows; the river does not continue to flow gently and broadly but winds its way between rugged cliffs, dark and triumphant. The village was like a dark womb where one curls up, drinks schnapps, feels safe, and at the same time heavy and wistful, waiting for birth and for the light of the world, which one also fears at that very moment.
The Activity of Making Yourself at Home
Perhaps this is why the sense of life, especially among artists, is often characterized by a desire to reincarnate a second time in objects, bodies of text, or soundscapes—because life in the physical body, or within their respective societies, overwhelms them. Or because the life task they feel called to pursue must be further worked out from another place. For many writers, their own work was like a surrogate body through which they have made a home in the world for themselves. Making a home for oneself, like the act of ensoulment, becomes an activity, just as the word “embodiment” [verkörpern] can carry that nuance of trafficking or inverting [verkehren]. Many of those who were only suggestively incarnated did not live to old age, such as Novalis and Kleist, who, in his letters, wistfully recalls a few days of his youth in Mainz and describes the Rhine as if it were a human being; or Karoline von Günderrode, who stabbed herself to death on the banks of the Rhine in the Rheingau; or Georg Büchner; or, even to this day, many musicians.
But what does it mean that we are all becoming more or less disembodied today? That we are currently creating—more or less—a digital world that serves as a substitute for the bodily world? After all, the cashless is also the baseless, the bodiless, the immaterial; the digital text that is no longer necessarily published as a paper printout, that no longer needs to have “flesh”; the composition of text messages in any form as already sufficient social contact—do they promote a world that is fleeting? Perhaps the question must remain open. Perhaps it is simply the course of the world’s existence. Nevertheless, there is a meaning and a force of words in “embodiment” that remains indestructible and essential. For whether I do it lightly or intensively, whether I am massive or tender, firm or soft—it is the body alone that gives a thing weight and meaning. Even the soul, the world of the stars, needs a dwelling place within the human being, an astral body, in order to be what it is and to let us feel that we exist.
Live
Pack your bundle of comfort,
the tobacco, the wine, your childhood,
lace up your shoes and live.
Let your love be—let it be.
And the dew on her eyelids, too,
because her sleep drifts in pools of tears,
without rest,
without love—
live.
Entrust your madness to the silence,
don’t reserve it only for words; keep it,
hold on to it.
Pet the dogs in the courtyards;
think of the people who will come—
live.
Pack your bundle of comfort,
the tobacco, the wine,
lace up your shoes and go.
Lebe
Pack dein Bündel Trost,
den Tabak den Wein deine Kindheit,
schnür deine Schuh und lebe.
Lass deine Liebe lass sie sein.
Und auch den Tau auf ihren Lidern,
weil ihr Schlaf in Tränenweihern treibt,
ohn Ruh
ohn Lieb
lebe.
Vertrau deinen Wahnsinn der Stille an,
behalt ihn den Worten nicht vor, behalt ihn,
halt ihn fest.
Streichle die Hunde auf den Höfen,
denk an die Menschen, die kommen werden,
lebe.
Pack dein Bündel Trost,
den Tabak den Wein,
schnür deine Schuh und geh.5
Translation Joshua Kelberman
Footnotes
- Heinrich von Kleist to Adolphine von Werdeck, Paris, July 28 & 29, 1801, in Kleist: Geschichte meiner Seele: Das Lebenszeugnis der Briefe [History of my soul: Testimony of his life in his letters], edited by Helmut Sembner (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1977).
- “Das” is the German neuter definite article (“the”), often used for objects, things, and abstract entities; e.g., das Mädchen, the girl. However, objects may also be designated by the masculine (der) or feminine (die) definite articles—Trans. note.
- Daniel Häni and Enno Schmidt, “Karma for Everyone,” Das Goetheanum: English Edition, 2026/11.
- See footnote 1.
- Andreas Laudert, Gedichte [Poems] (Gifkendorf: Merlin-Verlag, 2003).
