{"id":65694,"date":"2025-05-08T20:27:50","date_gmt":"2025-05-08T18:27:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/?p=65694"},"modified":"2025-05-09T18:17:44","modified_gmt":"2025-05-09T16:17:44","slug":"loving-diversity-on-the-stuttgart-schlossplatz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/loving-diversity-on-the-stuttgart-schlossplatz\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cLoving Diversity\u201d on the Stuttgart Schlossplatz"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Impressions of the festival in Stuttgart celebrating the hundredth anniversary of Rudolf Steiner\u2019s death.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What a picture! In the sunny weather of the last weekend of March, in front of the long, thirty-four column fa\u00e7ade of the neoclassical K\u00f6nigsbaus 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<\/em>]. Like a dozen little harbors, the tents stood in a row alongside the perpetual flow of people on Stuttgart\u2019s main pedestrian artery. Upwards of 10,000 people walk and stroll along this avenue every hour, and\u2014like every shopping boulevard\u2014they\u2019re 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\u2019t want to have<\/em>, but just to be<\/em>. They posted short, innocuous titles, for example: \u201cEmergency Pedagogy,\u201d \u201cWater,\u201d \u201cMeditation.\u201d Matthias Niedermann from the organization team of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany [Anthroposophischen Gesellschaft in Deutschland<\/em>, AGiD] explained: \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cholding the social life\u201d: 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In one tent, Rudolf Steiner\u2019s words were being read aloud. Sometimes ten, sometimes fifty passers-by sat on white cubes listening to the voice of Wolfgang M\u00fcller read from, for example, CW 231 [At Home in the Universe<\/em>]. Rudolf Steiner described that if we stop before reaching the suprasensible, we stop before we reach human self-knowledge. \u201cThen we hold back from understanding what\u2019s most valuable, most worthy in the human being.\u201d While Wolfgang M\u00fcller 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\u2019s words, spoken 102 years ago in The Hague, could embrace your soul and incite a new awakening. Rudolf Steiner\u2019s first sentence in The Threshold of the Spiritual World<\/em> (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 K\u00f6nigsstrasse. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Politics and Eurythmy on the Main Stage<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Things got political at the Omnibus for Direct Democracy [OMNIBUS f\u00fcr Direkte Demokratie<\/em>] and in the panel discussion on the festival stage with Angelika Wiehl (Alanus University), Boris Palmer (T\u00fcbingen), and Gerald H\u00e4fner (Goetheanum). Next up, pupils from the Offenburg Waldorf School played Beethoven\u2019s 7th Symphony, the choir of the Stuttgart Independent Youth Seminar [Freies Jugendseminar<\/em>] sang, and the gestures of the eurythmy performances filled the expanse of the Schlossplatz. The evening performance by Brazilian-German singer B\u00ea 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. B\u00f6rries Hornemann\u2019s film Waldorf, Demeter, Anthroposophie: Sind Rudolf Steiners Ideen noch aktuell?<\/em> [Are Rudolf Steiner\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 2017 Social Future [Soziale Zukunft<\/em>] 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<\/em>] at Hamborn Castle. But these more internal events can\u2019t be compared with the Stuttgart Steiner Jubilee on the Schlossplatz\u2014it 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\u2014not to mention the whole network of anthroposophical associations working together with the AGiD as a support group. Sebastian Knust acknowledged: \u201cWithout this trust, an initiative like this would not be possible!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u201cLoving diversity\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, what kind of effect will emerge from such a festival? \u201cI\u2019m grateful we had the courage to do it,\u201d said Martin Merckens, priest of the Christian Community in Stuttgart. The weekend was, indeed, a training, an \u201cempowerment\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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More<\/strong> 2025 Steiner Festjahr<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Translation <\/strong>Joshua Kelberman
Images <\/strong>from the festivities in Stuttgart. Photos: Wolfgang Held<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Impressions of the festival in Stuttgart celebrating the hundredth anniversary of Rudolf Steiner\u2019s death. What a picture! In the sunny weather of the last weekend of March, in front of the long, thirty-four column fa\u00e7ade of the neoclassical K\u00f6nigsbaus 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9159,"featured_media":64923,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9183,8837,8790],"tags":[11649,11650,8814],"class_list":["post-65694","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general-anthroposophy","category-restrospective","category-society-en","tag-ausgabe-15-2025-en","tag-english-issue-19-2025","tag-musings"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65694","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9159"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65694"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65694\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}