Impressions of the festival in Stuttgart celebrating the hundredth anniversary of Rudolf Steiner’s death.
What a picture! In the sunny weather of the last weekend of March, in front of the long, thirty-four column façade of the neoclassical Königsbaus with the Neues Schloss Palace in the background on the far side of the square, a line of white tents stood along the Schlossplatz for the 2025 Steiner Year of Celebration [Festjahr]. Like a dozen little harbors, the tents stood in a row alongside the perpetual flow of people on Stuttgart’s main pedestrian artery. Upwards of 10,000 people walk and stroll along this avenue every hour, and—like every shopping boulevard—they’re looking out for inspiration, open to new things. But unlike the shopping temples trying to captivate the eye and seduce them from their path, the white festival tents marked themselves discreetly with simple banners and signs. They were unimposing from the outside, as if wanting to commune with the quiet part of the soul, where we don’t want to have, but just to be. They posted short, innocuous titles, for example: “Emergency Pedagogy,” “Water,” “Meditation.” Matthias Niedermann from the organization team of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany [Anthroposophischen Gesellschaft in Deutschland, AGiD] explained: “We wanted to weave together the anthroposophical credo: deep esotericism, broad openness. How else does one display spirituality outwardly than through modesty and quiet? It changes completely once you enter into a direct encounter with another human being.”
The friendly, open atmosphere was evident in many ways throughout the three-day event: in the overall airy design, which featured a playful transformation of the classic anthroposophical Roggenkamp script; in the white peaks of the tents reaching into the sky; and especially in the warmth and closeness of the organizing team. On Friday afternoon, they stood in a circle with all the helpers before the opening ceremony like a soccer or football team huddled in the arms of their team spirit. You could already feel what Sebastian Knust from the AGiD team described as “holding the social life”: every tent team, from the career advice booth to the Demeter or Sonett companies, all took responsibility for their activities. The tent village was led by a consciousness of being with each other and for each other.
In one tent, Rudolf Steiner’s words were being read aloud. Sometimes ten, sometimes fifty passers-by sat on white cubes listening to the voice of Wolfgang Müller read from, for example, CW 231 [At Home in the Universe]. Rudolf Steiner described that if we stop before reaching the suprasensible, we stop before we reach human self-knowledge. “Then we hold back from understanding what’s most valuable, most worthy in the human being.” While Wolfgang Müller read, you could see other people streaming by through the tent’s windows. What an amazing picture of anthroposophy: take one step out of the stream of buying and carrying-on for a moment, and Rudolf Steiner’s words, spoken 102 years ago in The Hague, could embrace your soul and incite a new awakening. Rudolf Steiner’s first sentence in The Threshold of the Spiritual World (CW 17) gives us an appropriate image. He writes that thinking is like an island among the flooding life of the soul. In the storm of passions, calmness arises when the ship of the soul has found its way to the island of thinking. The reading tent was one such island for the soul in the floods of shoppers along the Königsstrasse. Even more intimate, a few meters away from the stream of people, the Christian Community celebrated the Act of Consecration of Man twice in a full tent.
Politics and Eurythmy on the Main Stage
Things got political at the Omnibus for Direct Democracy [OMNIBUS für Direkte Demokratie] and in the panel discussion on the festival stage with Angelika Wiehl (Alanus University), Boris Palmer (Tübingen), and Gerald Häfner (Goetheanum). Next up, pupils from the Offenburg Waldorf School played Beethoven’s 7th Symphony, the choir of the Stuttgart Independent Youth Seminar [Freies Jugendseminar] sang, and the gestures of the eurythmy performances filled the expanse of the Schlossplatz. The evening performance by Brazilian-German singer Bê Ignacio and her band also filled the wide spaces of the public square. No one spoke about their anthroposophical background with more charm and exuberance than she. Throughout the event, panel discussions on health, education, anthroposophy, and business took place in various tents and a pavilion; some guests picked up just a few sentences, while others remained seated for a whole forty-five-minute discussion. Spontaneous communities of knowledge formed together and subsequently dissolved. Börries Hornemann’s film Waldorf, Demeter, Anthroposophie: Sind Rudolf Steiners Ideen noch aktuell? [Are Rudolf Steiner’s ideas still relevant?] was shown on a loop, offering a short but thorough overview. His orange knit hat, donned in the film, was also brightly conspicuous among the waves of people in the crowd.
The 2017 Social Future [Soziale Zukunft] conference in Bochum, Germany, and the follow-up (canceled due to corona) were precursors to this Steiner anniversary, as well as think tanks, along with the 2024 Education Festival [Bildungsfestival] at Hamborn Castle. But these more internal events can’t be compared with the Stuttgart Steiner Jubilee on the Schlossplatz—it definitely blew all previous public anthroposophical events out of the water! The three-day event ran so smoothly that you had to look over at Monika Elbert (General Secretary of AGiD) smiling, astonished, and shaking her head just to begin to imagine the hurdles and resistances the team had to overcome to make it here. The organizers worked with three separate agencies: a design agency, an event agency that usually organizes large bicycle races, and the public relations agency Factum, who worked proactively to communicate a balanced view of anthroposophy to the public. Official approval was long-awaited and only came a few days before the festival. But, whenever resistance arose, Michael Schmock, who helped to initiate the project as former General Secretary of the AGiD, came to the rescue with his calm perseverance—not to mention the whole network of anthroposophical associations working together with the AGiD as a support group. Sebastian Knust acknowledged: “Without this trust, an initiative like this would not be possible!”
“Loving diversity” was the motto of the Steiner Jubilee. Like the festival, the motto brings a lightness of Spring and, in view of advancing anti-diversity politics, there’s also something of our serious call of destiny. According to estimates from some tent directors, about a third of the visitors had little to no prior connection to anthroposophy.
So, what kind of effect will emerge from such a festival? “I’m grateful we had the courage to do it,” said Martin Merckens, priest of the Christian Community in Stuttgart. The weekend was, indeed, a training, an “empowerment” for speaking about anthroposophy in public. The 2025 Steiner Year of Celebration helped to dissipate doubts accumulated during the corona time. And more: It was able to bring anthroposophical cultural work closer to the shared culture of the world.
Translation Joshua Kelberman
Images from the festivities in Stuttgart. Photos: Wolfgang Held
