The Janus Face of Anthroposophy
by Peter Zegers and Peter Staudenmaier
Reply to Peter Normann Waage, New Myths About Rudolf Steiner
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“The Steiner I know,” writes Peter Normann Waage, was the nicest guy you ever met.[1] He couldn’t possibly have said and done all those nasty things Staudenmaier and Zegers say he did. It’s just not like him. Why, look at all the other nice things he said! Look at all the wonderful work his followers do! Look at all the nice friends he had!
As frivolous as Waage’s arguments are, they point to a serious issue: the Janus face of anthroposophy. Steiner’s writings are an incoherent mix of contradictory ideas, which allows his epigones to pick and choose those elements that foster the progressive and enlightened image they wish to project. The Janus face of anthroposophy also allows its partisans to deflect any criticism, no matter how copiously substantiated, via the simple method of counter-presentation: when you show them all of the works Steiner produced outlining his esoteric theory of Aryan supremacy, they simply ignore them and point instead to other passages where Steiner preaches brotherhood and tolerance.[2] Although it requires a certain amount of willful naiveté, it is indeed possible to construct a universalist and ‘humanist’ Steiner out of bits and pieces of his pre-anthroposophist works like Philosophie der Freiheit, while ignoring all of the occultist and racist mature works like Aus der Akasha-Chronik, the book which Steiner designated as the "basis of anthroposophist cosmology".[3]
This method of counter-presentation has the unfortunate effect of reducing rational argument to a mere trading of isolated quotations back and forth.[4] Based on a combination of wishful thinking and denial, it leads to a primitive form of argument-by-definition: real anthroposophy is whatever Waage says it is. Myopically fixated on one side of the Janus face, he insists that the dozens of works by Steiner we cited, as well as the numerous other anthroposophist works we drew on, are somehow “atypical and eccentric”. By offering anthroposophists’ own words to readers, we have supposedly obscured “the whole tendency of the movement”. We gladly admit that we are unable to explain Steiner’s incoherence, and we have yet to encounter a defense of anthroposophy that tries to show how the several sides of the Janus face relate to one another. Our task all along has been to analyze and understand the frightening side of anthroposophy’s Janus face, the side which Steiner’s admirers desperately want to keep hidden. Our topic is not, of course, “the Steiner Waage knows,” but rather the Steiner he ought to get to know if he wants to be taken seriously in public discussions of anthroposophy’s politics.
That, after all, has been the subject of our exchange from the beginning. What is at issue is not the Steiner Waage knows, or indeed the romanticized versions of Steiner and his ideas that any given individual anthroposophist knows or imagines. What is at issue is the history of actually existing anthroposophy. Without adding unnecessarily to the rancor of this exchange, it is important to point out that Waage’s competence on this subject is limited – not because of his profession as a journalist and not because of his personal predilections as an anthroposophist, but simply because he has not taken the time to review the available sources. Heedless of this basic disparity between his position and ours, [2]Waage reverses the reality and asserts that, as non-anthroposophists, we are unacquainted with ‘real’ anthroposophy based on the Steiner he knows. What he appears to mean is that we are insufficiently familiar with, not to mention insufficiently respectful toward, an idealized construct of “anthroposophy” as Waage himself envisions it. This may well be true, and is obviously irrelevant. Our arguments are not about Waage’s private conception of what anthroposophy ought to be; they are about what anthroposophy has actually been, as seen from the world outside its own narrow borders. He seems remarkably unwilling to step beyond those borders and look at anthroposophy as a historical phenomenon and an object of study. Waage’s role is that of a Believer railing against external inquiry into his cherished belief system.
Thus Waage, comfortable in his own anthroposophical certitudes and unaccustomed to non-anthroposophical perspectives on anthroposophy, repeats the same old refrain. He insists that we are spreading "myths" about Steiner. In order to tell myths from facts, one needs a basic familiarity with the published works of the figure in question (in this case, the writings and speeches of Rudolf Steiner), a knowledge of their historical context (the occult subculture and the Lebensreform or alternative lifestyles movement), and an understanding of their political affiliations (Austrian and German nationalism). Waage meets none of these requirements. He is ignorant of much of Steiner's written work, as his peculiar claims about that work attest. He appears to know little about either the occult revival or the left-right crossover that characterized 'alternative' circles in turn of the century Central Europe. And he is completely oblivious to the history of German nationalism; Waage believes that the pan-German movement was engaged in "nation building" and that it uniformly advocated "a concentration of all German speaking people in one state".[5] But Waage is not one to be deterred by historical facts; he is simply convinced, as an article of faith, that Steiner rejected nationalism.[6]
This wishful thinking leads Waage to compound the already embarrassing errors from his first reply. He originally claimed that the passage from Steiner's autobiography recalling his pan-German engagement didn't exist. Now that he has finally managed to find this passage, he complains that we have mistranslated it.[7] This complaint is childish; our translation is, of course, entirely accurate, as anyone with access to a German-Norwegian dictionary can readily ascertain.[8] If Waage is still confused on this matter, he might wish to consult other passages where Steiner reminisces about his early pan-German activism, for example this one from 1900: "With even greater enthusiasm we dedicated ourselves to the rising pan-German movement."[9] Or he could consult sympathetic anthroposophical biographies of Steiner which note that he became editor of one of the most militant Viennese pan-German journals, the Deutsche Wochenschrift, in 1888.[10] Or he could simply look up the several dozen articles Steiner published in the radical pan-German press in the 1880's, which are collected in volumes 29, 30, 31 and 32 of the Gesamtausgabe (Waage repeatedly cites the latter two volumes, evidently without having bothered to read them). No-one familiar with these articles could possibly doubt Steiner's wholehearted devotion to what he called "the pan-German cause in Austria." (GA 31, p. 111.) Even if all of these sources had for some mysterious reason been unavailable to Waage, he could simply take a look at the very same sources he himself quotes, for example anthroposophist Christoph Lindenberg’s biography of Steiner, which discusses Steiner’s pan-German activism at length, provides extensive details and citations, and notes that “Steiner himself counted himself a member of this movement,” the pan-German movement in Austria.[11]
Unaware of these basic facts about Steiner's political background, Waage asks: "Is it a crime to be interested in the 'national existence' of a people?" -- referring to the Austro-Germans. We recommend he peek inside a history book to determine whether the German community in Austria actually faced a "struggle for national existence" in the late nineteenth century. Robert Kann, for example, observes that German nationalism in Austria sought “the preservation and enhancement of a privileged position.” (Kann, The Habsburg Empire, New York 1973, p. 19)[12] John Mason writes that the Austro-Germans were "the leading national group in the Empire and exercised an influence out of all proportion to their numbers." He notes that the Habsburg state "was thoroughly German in character", that "[t]he official language of the Empire was German and the civil servants were overwhelmingly German", and concludes: "Not only was the cultural life of Vienna almost exclusively German, but the capitalist class, the Catholic hierarchy and the press were also the preserve of the Austro-Germans." (Mason, The Dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire 1867-1918, London 1997, pp. 10-11)[13] The young Steiner and his pan-German comrades were not engaged in “nation building,” as Waage imagines; they were engaged in an aggressively xenophobic defense of privilege and ethnic purity.[14] While there had been significant democratic impulses in 1848-era Great German nationalism, by the 1880's in Austria these had given way to simple national self-interest and antagonism toward other ethnic groups, particularly the Slav peoples of the empire. Much of the impetus for the middle-class variety of nationalism which Steiner adopted came from a deep sense of cultural superiority and entitlement: Germans in Austria often perceived themselves as the bearers of civilization to their supposedly backward neighbors and fellow citizens. It was this potent sense of the "German mission" which drew Steiner so enthusiastically into pan-German nationalist circles.
Waage is also woefully uninformed about the history of German antisemitism and the variety of responses to it.[15] He thinks that Steiner’s friend Jacobowski was the “leader” of the Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus. In fact Jacobowski was merely an employee of the Verein; his work there was “no doubt more administrative and journalistic, and above all performed in order to support himself.”[16] His personal commitment was quite explicitly and emphatically not to Jewish concerns, but to German nationalism.[17] That is precisely what aroused Steiner’s admiration; in Steiner’s words, Jacobowski had “long since outgrown Jewishness”.[18] Waage also believes that a pro-assimilationist viewpoint was incompatible with outspoken antisemitism.[19] He would do well to acquaint himself with figures such as Stöcker, Treitschke, and Vacher de Lapouge, all of whom were both proponents of Jewish assimilation and vehement antisemites.[20] Unaware of this crucial background, Waage thoroughly misunderstands Steiner’s stance on the “Jewish question.” Indeed he flatly denies that Steiner wished to see the Jewish people disappear, simply ignoring Steiner’s unequivocal, repeated, and very explicit statements throughout his career. Steiner insisted quite emphatically that “the only proper thing would be for the Jews to blend in with the other peoples and disappear into the other peoples.”[21] His position was entirely clear: “the best thing that the Jews could do would be to disappear into the rest of humankind, to blend in with the rest of humankind, so that Jewry as a people would simply cease to exist.”[22] Before his turn to theosophy, Steiner demanded that Austrian and German Jews completely repudiate their Jewish identity in favor of a purely “German spirit” and “German culture,” which he considered superior to all others. In his mature anthroposophist phase, Steiner held that modern Jews were an obsolete remnant of a spiritually superceded race, the descendants of those hapless inhabitants of Atlantis who did not evolve into “Aryans.” He consistently singled out the Jews as his prime example of a people anachronistically attached to ethnic particularity, a stumbling block on the path of spiritual progress toward the “universal human”.[23]
[E]xtra care must be taken that as few of the spirits as possible become enmeshed in the fetters of Race. This is exactly what happened to the spirits reborn in the Jewish Race-bodies. They attached themselves so firmly to the Race that they are drawn back into it in successive births. "Once a Jew, always a Jew" is their slogan. They have entirely forgotten their spiritual nature and glory in the material fact of being "Abraham's seed." Therefore they are neither "fish nor flesh." They have no part in the advancing Aryan Race and yet they are beyond those remnants of the Lemurian and Atlantean peoples which are still with us. They have become a people without a country, an anomaly among mankind.
Because of their bondage to the Race-idea, their one-time Leader was forced to abandon them, and they became "lost." That they might cease to regard themselves as separate from other peoples, other nations were stirred up against them at various times by the Leaders of humanity, and they were led captive from the country where they had settled, but in vain. They stubbornly refused to amalgamate with others. Again and again they returned in a body to their arid land. Prophets of their own Race were raised up who mercilessly rebuked them and predicted dire disaster, but without avail.
-- The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception: An Elementary Treatise Upon Man's Past Evolution, Present Constitution and Future Development, by Max Heindel
Care had to be taken that not everything in man proceeding from the head can become the prey of Lucifer and Ahriman; that not everything shall depend upon head-activity and the activity of the outward-turned senses, for then Lucifer and Ahriman would have been victors. It was necessary that a counterweight should be created in the domain of earthly life, that there should be in the human being something entirely independent of the head. And this was achieved through the work of the good Spirits of Form, who implanted the principle of Love into the principle of heredity on Earth. That is to say, there is now operative in the human race something that is independent of the head, that passes from generation to generation and has its deepest foundations in the physical nature of man.
Everything that is connected with propagation and with heredity, everything that is independent of man in the sense that he cannot penetrate it with his thinking, everything that is the gift of the Moon in the celestial firmament—that, in man, is what has proceeded from the principle of Love permeating the process of propagation and heredity. Hence the violent battle which persists through history, the battle waged by Lucifer and Ahriman against everything that comes from this domain. Lucifer and Ahriman want to force on man the exclusive sovereignty of the head, and they launch their attacks by way of the head against everything that is purely natural affinity. For whatever is hereditary substance on the Earth cannot be wrested away by them. What the Moon is in the heavens, heredity is in men on the Earth below. Everything that is grounded in heredity, everything that is not charged with thought, that is connected intrinsically with physical nature — that is the Jahve-principle. The Jahve-principle unfolds its greatest activity where nature is working as nature; it is there that Jahve has outpoured in greatest measure the Love that is his natural attribute, in order to create a counterweight to the lovelessness, the mere wisdom, of Lucifer and Ahriman.
The Occult Movement in the Nineteenth Century and Its Relation to Modern Culture, by Rudolf Steiner
In both of his replies, Waage assiduously avoids mentioning Steiner’s theory of root races. This is a striking omission, and makes us wonder whether Waage is defending anthroposophy at all, as opposed to Steiner’s pre-anthroposophist individualism. Steiner’s esoteric racial doctrine is an essential element in the conceptual foundation upon which the entire edifice of anthroposophy is built, and latter-day anthroposophists have so far refused to confront it honestly. In particular, Waage seems to have missed the rather central fact that after his theosophical turn, Steiner relegated his earlier individualist position in favor of a comprehensive racial-ethnic-national classification system wherein each individual’s spiritual and cultural capacities are determined by and/or directly correlated to their “root race,” “people,” and “national soul.”
In his pivotal 1909 work Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten? Steiner wrote: “The human individual belongs to a family, a nation, a race; his actions in this world depend on his belonging to such a totality. [. . .] Indeed, in a certain sense individuals are only the executive organs of these family souls, racial spirits, and so forth. [. . .] Every individual gets his tasks, in the truest sense of the word, assigned by the family soul, the national soul, or the racial soul.” (Steiner, GA 10, Dornach 1961, pp. 199-200)[24] Toward the end of his life, Steiner again emphasized this crucial facet of anthroposophic thought: “One can only understand history and all of social life, including today’s social life, if one pays attention to people’s racial characteristics. And one can only understand all that is spiritual in the correct sense if one first examines how this spiritual element operates within people precisely through the color of their skin.”[25] Waage might consider taking at the very least a brief look at the existing scholarship on anthroposophical race theory; he will be surprised at what he’ll find there.[26]
But let us return to the theme that sparked this debate in the first place: anthroposophy’s ambivalent disposition toward German fascism. In his last installment in this exchange, Waage finally comes right out and admits that he simply didn’t realize what the topic of the debate was. He writes: “Staudenmaier/Zegers ask for my comments on the connection between anthroposophy and the "green wing" of German fascism. This is one among many topics I have had to leave out.” Leave out? The connection between anthroposophy and the “green wing” of German fascism was after all the subject of Anthroposophy and Ecofascism, the article to which Waage was ostensibly replying. Was he genuinely confused about this all along? If so, what does it tell us about his obtuse apologia for anthroposophy’s fascist past? More unsettling still, what does it tell us about his vision of anthroposophy’s future?
Instead of addressing in even a cursory way the subject under discussion, Waage likes to keep referring to “the many anthroposophists who resisted Nazism.” In the course of his two replies he has yet to name a single example of an anthroposophist who joined the resistance to Hitler. The historical literature on anthroposophy’s relationship to National Socialism contains no such examples. Anthroposophy’s in-house historian Uwe Werner, who goes to great lengths to excuse anthroposophist collaboration with the Nazi regime, was unable to come up with a single instance of anthroposophists joining the resistance. Jens Heisterkamp, a prominent German anthroposophist, writes that “the anthroposophist movement did not produce any members of the Resistance.”[27] Undeterred by his limited knowledge of the historical context, Waage goes on to reject our characterization of Rudolf Hess as anthroposophy’s chief ally in the Third Reich. But there is no serious dispute on this point even among anthroposophist commentators. Werner’s book itself, which strenuously denies that Hess had any personal interest in anthroposophy, makes perfectly clear that Hess was the foremost protector and patron of anthroposophist activities.[28]
In a last-ditch effort to show that Steiner’s political ideas were “directly opposed” to Hitler’s, Waage points to Steiner’s engagement in Upper Silesia. He couldn’t have chosen a worse example to make his case. Far from revealing Steiner’s universalist side, the anthroposophical intervention in Upper Silesia places Steiner and his followers squarely in the German nationalist camp. What Steiner advocated was temporary autonomy for the ethnically mixed province. While latter-day anthroposophists like to portray this as an anti-nationalist position, both the historical evidence and Steiner’s own pronouncements on the topic show that the very opposite was the case. Historians of the Upper Silesian conflict have long recognized that calls for “autonomy” were merely a smokescreen for nationalist agitation. Hans-Ake Persson writes: "A notion prevalent among both German and Polish nationals was that Upper Silesia should remain intact, since it was quite prosperous and was seen as an economic unit. Both groups were prepared to grant autonomy to the area. Up to this point the national groups were in agreement, yet they became unyielding when Upper Silesia's state affiliation was to be determined. The historical region was to be preserved, while the decisive question was whether Silesia should answer to Berlin or Warsaw." (Persson in Sven Tägil, Regions in Central Europe: The Legacy of History, London 1999, p. 223) And Elizabeth Wiskemann writes: "Many Germans hoped to save Upper Silesia from Poland by granting it autonomy within Germany." However, she continues, "the Allies quickly rejected the autonomy idea -- it would but create a German dependency, they considered." (Wiskemann, Germany's Eastern Neighbours, London 1956, p. 27)[29]
In Steiner’s case, the plea for autonomy was intended to prevent the League of Nations from partitioning the province between Poland and Germany, which would have meant a loss of German territory. His public treatises appealed plaintively to “true German convictions” in Upper Silesia (see the pamphlet Aufruf zur Rettung Oberschlesiens, reproduced in GA 338, pp. 264-5), and his private sessions with Silesian anthroposophists emphasized that the very notion of a Polish state was “impossible” and “an illusion.”[30] Rejecting the internationally sponsored plebiscite as an affront to “the German essence,” Steiner argued that the situation demanded a spiritual solution, not a political solution. And the proper spiritual solution, of course, required “spiritual leaders” (geistige Führer), who could only come from Germany and Austria.[31] It is thus hardly surprising that anthroposophists involved in the Upper Silesian agitation simply assumed a natural German right to the province and lamented the eventual absorption of part of the territory by Poland.[32] In the words of the anthroposophist Karl Heyer, referring to the 1921 plebiscite on the future of Upper Silesia, “for the German there could be no other position than to vote in favor of Germany”.[33] This stance was repeatedly emphasized by anthroposophists and advocates of ‘social threefolding’ at the time.[34]
Waage seems utterly unaware of this rather crucial fact. Once the plebiscite itself was no longer to be averted, Steiner and his followers adopted a very emphatic and forthright position in favor of voting for Germany in the referendum. In the days surrounding the League of Nations plebiscite, the editors of the threefolding newspaper declared unambiguously: “Now that the vote is taking place, the League for Social Threefolding needless to say takes the view that for every German there can be no other position than to vote for Germany.”[35] Two weeks later, the paper’s editors explained that their stance all along was to vote for Germany: “In light of the fact of the plebiscite, the League for Social Threefolding firmly adopted the position of voting for Germany when possible, and the leadership of the League answered categorically every time it was asked that every person eligible to vote in the plebiscite was of course duty-bound to vote and had to vote for Germany.”[36] In the eyes of Steiner and his followers, the anthroposophical approach of social threefolding was most appropriate to maintaining German hegemony in the region. Karl Heyer, for example, wrote in advance of the referendum: “The threefold solution to the Upper Silesian problem is better suited than any other for protecting Germany’s true interests in economic terms as well as in national terms and in state-political terms.”[37] An official statement from the League for Social Threefolding declared that social threefolding was the only way “to make it possible for Germany to escape from being strangled by the West, and to return to Germany its historical prestige.”[38] Similar statements abound within the anthroposophical literature from the period.[39] The League for Social Threefolding even published an announcement in the Frankfurter Zeitung, probably the most prominent newspaper in Germany at the time, on March 12, 1921 under the title “Social Threefolding and Upper Silesia” stating very explicitly that their position was to vote for Germany in the upcoming plebiscite.
Waage apparently believes that Steiner himself opposed this forthright advocacy of a German right to Upper Silesia. He is mistaken. Steiner’s stand on Upper Silesia confirmed his life-long conviction that German spiritual superiority entitled the Germans to territorial hegemony in eastern Europe. The anthroposophical editors of Steiner’s collected works spell this position out clearly, and verify with ample evidence that the position of the threefolding movement during the Upper Silesian campaign was indeed to vote for Germany.[40] Steiner’s followers themselves said the very same thing, quite unequivocally, about Steiner’s own stance at the time.[41] Many of Steiner’s own statements on the matter fully support this. Consider Steiner’s public lecture in Stuttgart about anthroposophy and social threefolding on May 25, 1921, where he once again countered the claims of critics of anthroposophy. Here Steiner said: “When things like this are put forth, it is no surprise to find people claiming that anthroposophy had shown its un-German and un-national aspect in its stance on the Upper Silesian question. Everybody who asked us for advice in that situation was told that whoever stands in our ranks should vote for Germany if the plebiscite comes. We never said anything different. We also said that the point is not this plebiscite, but rather establishing Upper Silesia as an integral territory that is inwardly united with the German spiritual essence.”[42]
All of these facts are accessible to anyone who is willing to take the time to delve into Steiner’s works and place them into their historical context. For better or worse this task has largely been left to non-anthroposophists like us. And the further we explore Steiner’s teachings, the more insidious those teachings become. In the course of looking into Steiner’s paranoid views on World War I as a “conspiracy against German spiritual life,” for example, we came across an astonishing lecture on “the mission of white humankind” in which Steiner predicts “a violent battle of white people against colored people”. In this 1915 lecture to an anthroposophist audience in Stuttgart, Steiner explains that spiritual characteristics are tied to skin color and that non-white skin is a sign of spiritual defects that will be expunged in the coming race war.[43]
Here Steiner contrasts “the European-American essence and the Asian essence,” asking: “How could people fail to notice the profound differences, in terms of spiritual culture, between the European and the Asian peoples. How could they fail to notice this differentiation, which is tied to external skin color!” (p. 35) He goes on to observe that “the Asian peoples” are beholden to the “cultural impulses of past epochs” while “the European-American peoples have advanced beyond these cultural impulses.” He then declares that it is a sign of “an unhealthy soul-life” when Europeans partake of these “lower” Asian impulses (p. 36). Steiner continues that the special role of the “Germanic peoples” is to integrate the spiritual and the physical through a “carrying down of the spiritual impulses” onto the physical plane and into the human body. “This carrying down, this thorough impregnation of the flesh by the spirit, this is characteristic of the mission, the whole mission of white humanity. People have white skin color because the spirit works within the skin when it wants to descend to the physical plane. That the external physical body will become a container for the spirit, that is the task of our fifth cultural epoch.” (p. 37) But when this task is imperfectly fulfilled, it leads to a spiritual defect which is marked by non-white skin. Steiner explains that “when the spirit is held back, when it takes on a demonic character and does not fully penetrate the flesh, then white skin color does not appear, because atavistic powers are present that do not allow the spirit to achieve complete harmony with the flesh.” (p. 38)
In order to prevent the victory of these demonic and atavistic powers that people of color embody, there will have to be a cosmic showdown between white people and non-white people. “But these things will never take place in the world without the most violent struggle. White humankind is still on the path of absorbing the spirit deeper and deeper into its own essence. Yellow humankind is on the path of conserving the era when the spirit will be kept away from the body, when the spirit will only be sought outside of the human-physical organization. But the result will have to be that the transition from the fifth cultural epoch to the sixth cultural epoch cannot happen in any other way than as a violent battle of white humankind against colored humankind in myriad areas. And that which precedes these battles between white and colored humankind will occupy world history until the completion of the great battles between white and colored humankind. Future events are frequently reflected in prior events. You see, we stand before something colossal that - when we understand it through spiritual science - we will in the future be able to recognize as a necessary occurrence.” (p. 38)
But Waage is unconcerned with breathtaking passages such as this, which show that anthroposophy’s racism is not a marginal afterthought but is intimately tied to its pretensions to “spiritual science.” Blissful in his ignorance, Waage continues to pretend that the evidence of Steiner’s racism is “thinner than air.” Instead of grappling with these obviously racist elements of Steiner’s doctrine himself, Waage attempts to shift the burden onto non-anthroposophists.[44] His plaintive remarks about misunderstanding Anthroposophy and Ecofascism, pointless as they may be, raise a genuine concern, one that has bedeviled any number of anthroposophists outraged by our research. Waage writes of us: “If I have misunderstood them, they have to accept the responsibility.” We are glad to accept this responsibility. Anthroposophy and Ecofascism was not written for readers like Waage.[45] It was not written for anthroposophists. It was not written for readers with limited interest in historical context or readers who are easily swayed by appeals to sentiment. It was not written for those who feel compelled to defend Nazi collaborators or who have dedicated their efforts to whitewashing racism and exonerating antisemitism. Those sorts of readers are bound to misunderstand critical arguments about anthroposophy. The article was written instead for other readers. Above all, it was rather obviously written for non-anthroposophists. It was written for readers who understand what racism is and how it functions, who have an interest in informing themselves about the history of Nazism, and who do not find complex analysis of political ideas excessively difficult to follow.
Waage, for whatever reason, has had a notably hard time following our analysis. He thinks we have dismissed Steiner as a racist, and nothing more. He thinks we have labeled Steiner simply an antisemite, and nothing more. He thinks we have collapsed all anthroposophists into Nazis, and all Nazis into proto-environmentalists, and perhaps all environmentalists into esotericists. He thinks we have made claims about topics we have not addressed. He thinks we have failed to address topics on which we have written extensively. For example, he takes us to task for failing to comment on the report of the Dutch anthroposophist commission on Steiner and racism. We did in fact devote several pages to this topic in our original rejoinder, although they were cut from the version printed in Humanist. We very much hope readers will consult the full version of our earlier article for our views on this report and Waage’s reliance on it. But since Waage seems quite fond of the Dutch commission’s report, we are glad to comment further on its findings.[46]
The Dutch report simply asserts that those anthroposophists who have interpreted Steiner’s teachings in a racist fashion have misunderstood Steiner – a convenient excuse which sheds no light whatsoever on the underlying reasons for the ongoing racism within organized anthroposophy. Aside from the irrelevant sections on contemporary discrimination law, the commission’s methodology is purely esoteric, and its annotations of the quotes from Steiner demand of the reader a suspension of critical faculties. Steiner’s supposed clairvoyance and his ideas about karma and reincarnation play an overwhelming part in their appraisal. This should come as no surprise, since all of the members of the commission belong to the Dutch Anthroposophical Society.
What is more seriously troubling is the commission’s insistence on purveying a race theory of their own. According to the Dutch report there are different human races with different physical, mental, cultural and spiritual capacities. The authors posit “great differences between the human races” (p. 206) and state that “people of below average development” must incarnate in “lower races” (p. 207). They also claim, for example, that technology was developed by the “Caucasian race” (p. 210). Moreover, the commission declares more than once that non-anthroposophists and people who do not share a spiritual conception of reality (“materialists” in their vocabulary) are simply incapable of judging Steiner’s work. This absurd stance obviously cancels whatever worth the study might have had for those outside the cult of Rudolf Steiner.
The commission’s own epistemological framework is astonishingly primitive, even by anthroposophist standards. In an effort to turn Steiner’s frequent unintelligibility into a virtue, they inform us that when Steiner contradicted himself over and over again he was simply trying to get at the truth from different angles. This is a foolish pretext for the commission’s failure to do any hermeneutic work of its own. A sympathetic reading of Steiner’s work is one thing, willful ignorance quite another – especially in light of the commission’s notorious ‘argument’ (really a mere assumption) that Steiner’s scattered anti-racist comments both absolve and negate his much more numerous racist remarks. To make this implausible claim stick, they would need to advance some interpretive agenda, some explanatory model for making sense of Steiner’s incoherence. But they never do so, leaving the Janus face entirely intact while simply avoiding one of its several sides.
Nor does the commission fare any better in its examination of the historical context. The Dutch report discusses both Blavatsky and Haeckel, the latter in some detail, and notes that Steiner’s theory of evolution was an amalgam of these two disconcerting pedigrees, but never says a word about either Blavatsky’s or Haeckel’s shameful politics. The continuities between Haeckel’s acute racism and nationalism and Steiner’s variations on the same theme are never addressed. Despite Haeckel’s acknowledged status as Germany’s foremost Social Darwinist of Steiner’s era, the commission claims that Steiner’s own theory is not a form of Social Darwinism because it does not posit a natural mechanism of evolution. Instead Steiner held that racial groups die out because, in the commission’s words, “a further development of the soul was no longer possible.” (p. 98) Why this repugnant version of spiritualized racism should be preferable to Haeckel’s ‘materialist’ version is a question the commission declines to consider. Having endorsed Steiner’s spiritual schema of racial decline and advance, the Dutch report makes various pathetic attempts to explain away even Steiner’s most obviously offensive rantings about “racial odors” or the link between blondeness and intelligence: anyone who considers such abysmal nonsense to be racist, the commission tells us, is simply trapped in materialist thinking.
Undoubtedly the most celebrated of the commission’s findings is that “only” eighty-three quotes by Steiner, out of a total output of 350 volumes, are potentially racist.[47] It goes without saying that a crudely quantitative approach is completely out of place here, but that is hardly the worst of the report’s troubles.[48] Contrary to the repeated implication that these excerpts represent insignificant marginalia, the quotes in question are central passages from Steiner’s principal works, on a crucial aspect of anthroposophy’s cosmology: racial categories as a reflection of spiritual hierarchies. They are also substantial and lengthy passages; a full third of the 147 Steiner quotes that the commission examines in detail are multiple paragraphs or multiple pages. But the most amazing thing about the Dutch report is what it omits. Whereas the commission evidently included every last supposedly anti-racist fragment from Steiner that they could dig up, they deliberately excluded all of his writings on the root-race theory. They justify this incredible step with the absurd presumption that when Steiner wrote about “root races” he really meant chronological epochs, not racial groups, a claim which is immediately belied, on grammatical grounds alone, by every sentence Steiner wrote on the topic.
More striking still is the omission of Steiner’s assorted antisemitic diatribes and his comparable fulminations against the French, English, Slavs, and so on.[49] And although the Dutch report reviews the development of Austrian pan-Germanism, and in the same chapter cites volume 31 of Steiner’s collected works, it never so much as mentions Steiner’s own pan-German propaganda that is so copiously represented in the same volume. Categorically ignoring this unequivocal and massive textual evidence, the commission repeats the ridiculous refrain that Steiner “rejected every form of nationalism.” (p. 93) This sort of conspicuous hypocrisy cannot possibly be due to mere sloppiness or selective reading; it is unmistakable evidence of bad faith and conscious deception. Last but scarcely least, the Dutch report miraculously fails to make any mention of several indisputably racist statements by Steiner that we have stumbled across in our own reading of his collected works, for example his crazed assertion that “concepts hurt the Asian’s brain” or his shocking discourse on non-white skin as a sign of spiritual imperfection and the consequent “violent battle of white humanity against colored humanity” that we quoted above. In both cases the report quotes, several times, the same volumes that contain these extraordinary sentences. How did such unambiguous passages manage to escape the learned commission’s attention?