Looking back on Rudolf Steiner’s marriage to the widowed Anna Eunike, it appears to have partly been an attempt to feel more at home in the earthly and social world.
Anna became his living companion, without the exuberance of a shared worldview or true togetherness, but more a pragmatic partnership, certainly with genuine sympathy and also love. A real tenderness can be felt in their extant correspondence. Nevertheless, Steiner soon had to let her know, with sensitivity but nevertheless clearly that he’s not like other men; he strives for spiritual, not bourgeois ideals. (In a household with Anna’s five children, it was probably difficult for any deeper conversations about his work). In a decisive phase of his life—the transition from searching to finding his purpose—Anna was with him.
Early on and gradually more and more, he felt they were looking for different things in life, striving for different ideals. The couple moved into an apartment together in Berlin-Friedenau, a suburb of Berlin. Quite soon, Steiner was busy in the capital and traveling a lot. It was only three years after he and Anna married that the young Marie von Sivers entered his life. He innocently mentions her to Anna in letters from London, for example from the Theosophical Congress in 1902. He says how much he would like Anna to be with him, but he also writes that he worries about her. These kinds of feelings often arise in relationships when one partner embarks on a path the other will be unwilling or unable to go down themselves.
It pained him that opposites had become a contradiction, an impossibility. Maybe, if she had at least understood that she didn’t understand what he was striving towards when she wished for him “to be happy”… Maybe, if he had kept what he had promised her, even if indirectly: to also understand why he didn’t understand her… and to adapt to her… perhaps… But no, it probably wouldn’t have lasted, even then. He had a task in life. Everything else was subordinate to it. He had no sense of a destiny with Anna. Did she? Alongside a clean home, warm meals, raising children together, stroking each others hair, there would have to be something of a higher order—only that could be a bond for him as marriage, a bond that would unite two people together not only on the Earth, but also above.
Anna Eunike was more than seven years older than him. She experienced a partner who would have been hard for her to fully understand. He spoke with warmth; he supported her and her five children—that was no small thing. But what she wanted in the relationship, what she hoped for—he wanted something else. Still, their reasons for being together were probably mutually beneficial; they did both want to live together. It worked in Weimar, but in Berlin things started to change.
So Anna and Rudolf went through a “phase” of life together. It always sounds a bit cold and sad when we say a relationship was just part of a “phase” of someone’s life. Phases can end abruptly, and memories can be painful—the stages leading up to the separation, the walls and gulfs they could not cross.
Rudolf Steiner did attempt a more gentle transition. Anna and he lived together, now in the city of Berlin proper, with one of her daughters in an apartment on Motzstraße—and with Marie von Sivers. He and Marie were becoming closer and closer. How can we imagine their day-to-day life?
Rudolf and Marie were focused on their theosophical work, founding a journal, and beginning their lively collaboration. The colorful, open city of Berlin was a welcoming place for their work compared to the Thuringian suburb. Anna may have felt a bit alien in this three-person apartment, like a fifth wheel. The loneliness Steiner had felt in the years before—being a stranger, a guest—now Anna perhaps felt. She didn’t stay long; after a few months, she moved out. Rudolf and Anna parted ways. Steiner understood her point of view: “I still really don’t know what I should do about all the gossip mongering… And, my dear Anna, recently you haven’t been able to see everything with a clear view. If you had, you wouldn’t have said that you wished me to be happy. Don’t misunderstand me. I know that’s what you meant. But I’m really not striving for personal happiness. I only want to be understood. As for myself, my person, I really just don’t want people to give it any attention.… I don’t blame you in any way; and I welcome the day when you could be happy with heartfelt joy. But what shall I do?… I don’t mean to be presumptuous, but if I wanted to build a railroad, or manage a factory, or fill a post as a court councillor, my faculty of reason would have been more than sufficient…. I don’t recognize any judge above myself; I know what I’m doing…. Well, dear Anna, nothing should happen but as you want; only it musn’t contradict the task life has set for me. But do want something yourself. Why do you want advice from people who don’t have a spark of understanding for me? From people who just don’t see things clearly, who believe other people are as bad as they would be if they weren’t so cowardly…. If I could drill satisfaction out of the Earth for you, I would. But how? That also depends on you a little.”1
By looking at Steiner’s loving efforts to clarify boundaries, we don’t intend to cast judgement or criticize in any way. We want to see that he also experienced problems, challenges, incompatibilities in affections and relationships just like other people. It’s not for us to judge. It’s not correct to see Steiner as standing between two women. He stood between what for him was a true way of life, a sense of his future, and, on the other side, another way of life. His path of life and his ideals were not entirely distant from Anna. She shared some understanding and was familiar with some aspect of what he was seeking, but Marie lived them. It’s clear that for a while, he tried to forestall the decision to separate, or to unite their two paths that clearly wanted different things. He knew what Anna’s needs were, and his own, and he looked for a solution. But his priority was his work, his life’s task.
In his autobiography, Rudolf Steiner looked back gratefully on his connection with Anna, especially the early days in Weimar: “Life in the Eunike household gave me the opportunity to live undisturbed and grounded, while life was inwardly and outwardly in great activity.”2 Ultimately, Steiner felt he had to keep moving, as many of us have experienced: to follow his inner call.
Anna died in March 1911. Her husband had become a public sensation, and at the time he was giving a series of lectures in Prague. Franz Kafka was in the audience. Kafka also experienced his life’s work, his writing, in conflict with his personal relationships. Ultimately, perhaps out of necessity more than conscious intent, he justified this separation between work and social life. But Kafka struggled with his task. He got engaged, then broke it off (with Felice). His private life, his guilt, he put into his work, artistically and ingeniously veiled in his grand style. At various points, Kafka wrote: everything that’s not literature, that doesn’t relate to it, is a bore, he hates it, it disturbs him, and holds him back. Steiner wrote to Anna on February 14, 1904, “I have never been interested in anything other than what is spiritual.”3 In other places, Kafka writes nearly the same verbatim. They share this unconditional pursuit of creative work.4
In the first third of the twentieth century, it was usually only men who had this privilege. “But then should I be a Philistine imprisoned in a Philistine birdcage, talking to Philistines about Philistines?” Steiner asks Anna in the same letter.5 Back then, women often had to sit and stay in their golden cages. They’d probably have been happy to complain about society and about the economic or personal restrictions that kept them from doing more with their lives, from following their life tasks. “Do want something yourself,” Steiner encouraged Anna—a more positive, more straightforward version than what Kafka said to Felice: promote and admonish yourself with the same breath. Years later, a strong woman with a big personality, journalist Milena Jesenská, asked Kafka for deep and sincere words and decisions: What do you really want? she asked.
In another exchange with Anna, Steiner had answered: I want only to work.
This year, we bring you a series of articles titled “Rudolf Steiner as…” to honor the 100th anniversary of Rudolf Steiner’s death. These articles are sometimes essays, sometimes simply thoughts or reflections—always an aspect of his being.
Translation Joshua Kelberman
Footnotes
- Rudolf Steiner to Anna Steiner (February 14, 1904) in Rudolf Steiner, Sämtliche Briefe [Collected Letters], vol 3: Frühe Berliner Zeit bis zum Ausscheiden aus der Arbeiterbildungsschule 10. Juni 1897—12. Januar 1905 [Early Berlin period until departure from the Workers’ Training School. June 10, 1897—January 12, 1905], GA 38/3 (Basel: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 2024).
- Rudolf Steiner, Autobiography: Chapters in the Course of My Life, 1861–1907 (Great Barrington, MA: SteinerBooks, 2006).
- See footnote 1.
- Franz Kafka, “My Visit to Dr. Steiner,” in The Diaries (New York: Schocken, 2023); cf. Andreas Laudert, “Prag, Viktoriahotel—Eine Gegenbewegung” [Prague, Victoria Hotel—A counter-movement], Die Drei 3–4 (May/June–July/August, 2024).
- See footnote 1.
