Hamburg, Germany. 2025 is the 100th anniversary of Rudolf Steiner’s death. How does he live on in specific individuals? Henry Holland, a translator from Scotland, gives his answers.
Where has anthroposophy provoked you?
Anthroposophy does much more than merely “provoke” me. But it’s striking how you just need to drop Steiner’s name in conversation, at least in the German-speaking world, to provoke a series of inflamed reactions—including from people who admit to knowing little about him. Growing up with no contact to anthroposophy, and encountering it at age 21 as a Camphill Community volunteer, I was certainly often bewildered by it. I often picture anthroposophy as a subculture, replete with its own language, behaviors, and signs. Like with any subculture—whether the folk music revival scene, in the early 1960s in the US, or Dada in Zürich in 1916—you can feel stumped before you learn to access the complex linguistic and visual codes that these cultures contain. But in vivid contrast to most 20th and 21st century subcultures, anthroposophy has made persevering and recurringly successful efforts to have a wider reach, to impact daily lives beyond the societal “bubbles” it emerged from. It does this through responses to key societal issues: How should we organize our energy production and supply? How should we farm balanced foodstuffs for growing populations, without ruining water, soil, and air quality, to refute and contradict the interests of what Laleh Khalili calls “extractive capitalism?” In this struggle to build enduring, grassroots alternatives, anthroposophists have occasionally retreated into a stifling orthodoxy, which can irritate. Then I have to think of how utterly unorthodox Steiner was himself.
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