1) Peter Staudenmaier, "Anthroposophy and Ecofascism", Humanist (Oslo) 2/2000; Peter Normann Waage, "Humanism and Polemical Populism", Humanist 3/2000. Readers unfamiliar with the context of this exchange may wish to consult Peter Zegers, "The Dark Side of Political Ecology", Humanist 2/2000, and Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier, Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience, Edinburgh and San Francisco 1995 (Norwegian edition: økofascisme, Porsgrunn 1997).
2) The authorized English translation renders the passage thus: "Now, I took an interested part in the struggle which the Germans in Austria were then carrying on in behalf of their national existence." (Rudolf Steiner, The Course of My Life, New York 1951, 142) Since the article cited the German edition of the book, and since Waage reads German and has access to Steiner's collected works in the original, his insinuation that this quote was concocted strikes us as peculiar, to say the least.
3) Langbehn's book was the bible of the right-wing nationalist völkisch movement, the forerunner to the Nazis, during the period of Steiner's active involvement in pan-German circles. Steiner offers, of all things, a stylistic critique of the book, never once mentioning its aggressive antisemitism or its baleful political and cultural influence within German-speaking Europe. For an overview of Langbehn's impact see Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria, New York 1964, chapter 25.
4) See Rudolf Steiner, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kultur- und Zeitgeschichte 1887-1901, Dornach 1966 (GA volume 31; "GA" refers to the Gesamtausgabe, Steiner's collected works published by the Rudolf Steiner Nachlaßverwaltung in Dornach, Switzerland), pp. 111-120. These early nationalist articles from Steiner's Vienna period are filled with prejudice against what Steiner called "the Slavic enemy" (GA 31, p. 116), and they demand that the political agenda of the Habsburg empire be set by "the exclusively national elements of the German people in Austria," namely "the pan-Germans" (GA 31, p. 143). Waage cited this very same volume in his reply to the article; its contents seem to have escaped his notice.
5) See GA 31, pp. 118-119 and 143-144, among others.
6) See, for example, GA 31 pp. 214-216 and 361-362, as well as the 1898 essay "Über deutschnationale Kampfdichter in Österreich" ("On Pan-German Poets of the Struggle in Austria") in Rudolf Steiner, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Literatur1884-1902, Dornach 1971 (GA 32), pp. 448-449.
7) Waage claims that Steiner's 1916 book Gedanken während der Zeit des Krieges ("Thoughts During Wartime") does not advocate German militarism. In fact this book endorses the belligerent central powers in unambiguous terms: "The Germans could foresee that this war would one day be fought against them. It was their duty to arm themselves for it." (GA 24, p. 321) On several occasions Steiner also spoke on the conspiracy against Germany by international Freemasonry and Theosophy: "I have drawn your attention to the demonstrable fact that in the 1890's certain occult brotherhoods in the West discussed the current world war, and that moreover the disciples of these occult brotherhoods were instructed with maps which showed how Europe was to be changed by this war. English occult brotherhoods in particular pointed to a war that had to come, that they positively steered toward, that they set the stage for." (Zeitgeschichtliche Betrachtungen. Das Karma der Unwahrhaftigkeit. Erster Teil. GA 173, p. 22).
8) See Ernst zu Reventlow, Politische Vorgeschichte des Großen Krieges, Berlin 1919; and Adolf Bartels, Rasse und Volkstum, Weimar 1920, chapter 25: "Die Ideale Mr. Wilsons". This hostility is not surprising, since Wilson's self-determination program presented a serious threat to German territorial claims; the break-up of the Habsburg lands along national lines was the death knell for ethnic German predominance in Eastern Europe. Contrary to Waage's implication, Steiner's invective against Wilson did not put him in pleasant political company.
9) The quoted passage is from the unsigned synopsis of the book which precedes Steiner's text; even if these words are not directly Steiner's own, they clearly express his thinking on the matter.
10) It is strange that Waage chooses to see Steiner's myopic emphasis on German national concerns as an attempt "to preserve a multicultural Central Europe," since Steiner's explicit model was an Austria-Hungary under German domination. Steiner himself was not the least bit shy about his personal allegiance, within the threatening "multicultural" milieu of the Habsburg empire, to what he called his "folk community." He described himself as "German by descent and racial affiliation" and as a "true-born German-Austrian," and explained: "In these decades it was of decisive importance for the Austro-German with spiritual aspirations that - living outside the folk community to which Lessing, Goethe, Herder etcetera belonged, and transplanted into a wholly alien environment over the frontier - he imbibed there the spiritual perception of Goethe, Schiller, Lessing and Herder." (Symptom to Reality pp. 162, 163, 168) This is a conspicuously monocultural viewpoint, indeed a forthrightly ethnocentric one.
11) In our estimation, this is also true of the handful of articles that Steiner wrote for the Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus in 1901, in the aftermath of Jacobowski's unexpected death. See GA 31, pp. 382-420.
12) In a second series of lectures in Oslo in 1921, collected under the title "The Future Spiritual Mission of Norway and Sweden," Steiner explicitly re-affirmed his lectures on "national souls" from eleven years before. He did not in any way modify or repudiate their openly racist content; on the contrary, he renewed his emphasis on the special mission of "the Nordic spirit" (see Steiner, Nordische und Mitteleuropäische Geistimpulse, Dornach 1968).
13) We suspect that this stubborn inability to recognize the plain meaning of Steiner's words is related to Waage's credulousness toward this spiritual huckster. He even takes at face value Steiner's patently insincere disapproval of his followers' "blind obedience." Every third-rate guru makes such cheerful disavowals of personal authority as a matter of course, because they are effective in disarming gullible recruits. More to the point, anthroposophists as a rule vehemently refuse to question their guru's spiritual authority, and regard criticism of his unsavory political views as slander. That Waage should adopt this attitude himself is both unsettling and revealing.
14) Readers familiar with Steiner's epistemology will find this question superfluous, as anthroposophy explicitly denigrates "criticism" and "judgement" while celebrating "reverent veneration" of ostensible spiritual authorities, and rejects "intellectual effort" in favor of "immediate spiritual perception." (See Steiner, Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten? pp. 6, 32; and Aus der Akasha-Chronik p. 3) Short of schism or apostasy, anthroposophy simply offers no grounds on which its adherents might coherently revise or refute its inherited doctrines. For a judicious assessment of the anti-rational and authoritarian implications of Steiner's teachings, see Sven Ove Hansson, "Is Anthroposophy Science?" Conceptus XXV no. 64 (1991). On Steiner's significant contribution to the irrationalist cultural currents of his day, see Paul Forman, "Weimar Culture, Causality, and Quantum Theory" in Russell McCormmach, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences volume 3, Philadelphia 1971, pp. 11-12 and 105.
15) Steiner did on occasion speak derisively of "the old capitalism," especially before proletarian audiences, and he sometimes promoted what he called "true socialism." But he strictly distinguished his own ill-defined notions from the various practical proposals that grew out of the vigorous social struggle against capitalism after the war. Steiner considered such programs for a democratic transformation of economic life to be aberrant forms of "hyper-radicalism, which can only make people unhappy." (Steiner quoted in Karl Heyer, Wer ist der deutsche Volksgeist?, Freiburg 1961, 187) He insisted that anthroposophy alone offered a viable basis for societal reconstruction; indeed "All knowledge, especially social knowledge, must be based on anthroposophical knowledge." (Steiner in ibid. 188)
16) Steiner firmly and repeatedly rejected the notion that the exploitation of labor arises "from the economic order of capitalism"; for him the problem "lies not in capitalism, but in the misuse of spiritual talents." (Steiner, Der innere Aspekt des sozialen Rätsels, Dornach 1972, p. 82) His social vision was worthy of Thatcher or Reagan: "Individuals should gain advantage for themselves in the totally free struggle of competition." (Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kultur- und Zeitgeschichte GA 31, p. 285)
17) Waage fabricated another "quotation" by leaving out three essential words, without ellipsis, from the sentence in the original article. Here is the complete quote with the three words in brackets: Anthroposophy is "en åpenlyst rasebasert lære som foregriper [viktige elementer i] det nazistiske verdensbilde med flere tiår." (Humanist 2/00, p 38). (Anthroposophy is "a blatantly racist doctrine which anticipated [important elements of] the Nazi worldview by several decades".)
18) Volkmar Wölk, "Neue Trends im ökofaschistischen Netzwerk" in Hethey and Katz, In Bester Gesellschaft, Göttingen 1991, 121. See also Wölk's thorough study Natur und Mythos, Duisburg 1992, which examines in detail the relationship between anthroposophy and contemporary neofascist politics in Germany. For additional evidence of the striking parallels between the theosophical root-race doctrine and Hitler's racial views, see Jackson Spielvogel and David Redles, "Hitler's Racial Ideology: Content and Occult Sources" in Friedlander and Milton, Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual volume 3, Los Angeles 1986, and Jeffrey Goldstein, "On Racism and Anti-Semitism in Occultism and Nazism" in Livia Rothkirchen, Yad Vashem Studies XIII, Jerusalem 1979.
19) Regarding Steiner's influence on the present-day extreme right, see Gugenberger and Schweidlenka, p. 245; Peter Kratz, Die Götter des New Age, Berlin 1994, p. 288; and Helmut Reinalter, Franko Petri, and Rüdiger Kaufmann, Das Weltbild des Rechtsextremismus, Innsbruck 1998, p. 207. Alongside such neo-fascist and Aryan supremacist groups there is also the far right wing of contemporary anthroposophy around the recently deceased Werner Georg Haverbeck, for whom Steiner is of course the primary inspiration. For a detailed examination of this ultraright anthroposophist tendency, see Jutta Ditfurth, Feuer in die Herzen, Hamburg 1992, pp. 217-228, and Janet Biehl's essay in Biehl and Staudenmaier, Ecofascism (Norwegian edition: økofascisme: Lærdom fra Tysklands erfaringer).
20) In addition to the half dozen studies cited in the original article and the several quoted here, readers may consult the following: Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik, p. 57; Ulrich Linse, Barfüssige Propheten, p. 84; Martin Geyer, Verkehrte Welt, pp. 311-312; Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, p. 86; Gary Stark, Entrepreneurs of Ideology, p. 74; Richard Noll, The Jung Cult, pp. 50, 65, 77, 230; Puschner, Schmitz, and Ulbricht, Handbuch zur 'Völkischen Bewegung', pp. 127, 608; and Uwe Ketelsen, Literatur und Drittes Reich, p. 105.
21) Guenther Wachsmuth's biography of Steiner provides a less extravagant version of this event. Wachsmuth writes that it was an attempt by "a few hotheads, who had been confused by the usual untrue propaganda of our opponents, to disrupt the lectures with noise, turning out the lights, even personal threats to the speaker - methods which had become typical in that period of political chaos. It was only because he was protected by brave friends, especially [the anthroposophists] Dr. Noll and Dr. Büchenbacher, that Rudolf Steiner was kept safe from physical attack by these nasty fellows at his Munich lecture on May 15." (Guenther Wachsmuth, Rudolf Steiners Erdenleben und Wirken, Dornach 1964, 470) Wachsmuth says nothing about an attempted assassination, and does not associate Steiner's antagonists with the Nazis.
22) In contrast to Waage's account, Uwe Werner writes: "On May 15, 1922, followers of Ludendorff [former general and competitor to Hitler for leadership of the Munich far right] planned to disrupt a lecture by Steiner in the Munich hotel Vier Jahreszeiten and provoke a melee. But Munich anthroposophists became aware of the plans beforehand and were able to react. Steiner was able to finish his lecture, and only afterwards was there a physical confrontation, in which the anthroposophists prevailed." (Uwe Werner, Anthroposophen in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, Munich 1999, p. 8) Werner, chief archivist at the Anthroposophical Society's world headquarters in Switzerland, makes no mention of an assassination attempt or of the Nazis.
23) Aside from the Thule Society, other far-right groups that met at the Vier Jahreszeiten during this period include the pan-German Alldeutscher Verband and the antisemitic Hammerbund. (See Reginald Phelps, "'Before Hitler Came': Thule Society and Germanen Orden," Journal of Modern History (Chicago) volume 25 number 3, p. 252.)
24) See, e.g., Gerhard Wehr, Rudolf Steiner, Freiburg 1982, 327. Wehr also reports a second-hand rumor that Steiner was "eighth or ninth" on a supposed right-wing hit list, but does not attribute these alleged assassination plans to any particular organization.
25) Some historians view anthroposophy as virtually part of the völkisch movement. Helmut Zander, for example, makes a compelling case that anthroposophy represents the chief embodiment within the occult spectrum of "the continuity of völkisch thought" (Zander, "Sozialdarwinistische Rassentheorien aus dem okkulten Untergrund des Kaiserreichs" in Uwe Puschner, Walter Schmitz, and Justus Ulbricht, Handbuch zur 'Völkischen Bewegung' 1871-1918, München 1996, p. 226). We urge readers who find our own arguments too "polemical" to consult Zander's work, a model of scholarly balance which reaches conclusions similar to our own.
26) The quote from 1923, which Waage mistakenly dates to 1920, reads: "On some mountain paths . . . one finds these symbols, swastikas, which are causing so much mischief in Germany these days [mit den heute in Deutschland so viel Unfug getrieben wird]. This swastika is worn by people who no longer have any idea that it was once a symbol which indicated to travelers: here are people who understand these things, who see not only with the physical eye but with the spiritual eye as well." (GA 350 p. 276; speech 10.09.1923) Waage somewhat over-dramatically translates Steiner's reference to "Unfug" as "beastliness"; the German word has a less sinister connotation and is usually translated as "nonsense." Even if Steiner's comment were directed at the Nazis, it would be at most an irritated complaint, not a principled criticism.
27) Here is the full passage: Hitler calls Simons "an intimate friend of the Gnostic and Anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner, a supporter of the tripartite structuring of the social organism and whatever they call all of these Jewish methods for destroying the normal frame of mind of the people" (Hitler, Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905-1924, 350). Simons' biographer has shown that the rumors of Steiner's influence on Simons were based on reports in the Berlin newspaper Vossische Zeitung; see Horst Gründer, Walter Simons als Staatsmann, Jurist und Kirchenpolitiker, Neustadt an der Aisch 1975, p. 64. These reports were officially denied at the time both by anthroposophists (statement by the Bund für Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus in Vossische Zeitung 3.5.1921) and by the Foreign Ministry (see Gründer, p. 64). In fact, Steiner's disciples attacked Simons precisely for his ignorance of Steiner's theories; see Ernst Boldt, Rudolf Steiner: Ein Kämpfer Gegen Seine Zeit, München 1921, p. 188.
28) Hitler's article takes Simons to task for being insufficiently intransigent regarding post-war negotiations over the status of Upper Silesia. Despite Hitler's typically hysterical tone, his attack on Simons amounts to a disagreement over tactics, as the foreign minister was in fact the most hard-line member of the cabinet on the question of Upper Silesia (see Gründer, Walter Simons, pp. 153-156). Steiner's own position was not at all inimical to German national interests in the province, as Peter Bierl's analysis of Steiner's engagement in Upper Silesia demonstrates (see Bierl, Wurzelrassen, Erzengel und Volksgeister, 125). Moreover, at the very same time as Hitler's tirade against the foreign minister, anthroposophists assailed Simons in terms strikingly similar to Hitler's own; see Boldt, Rudolf Steiner, p. 187. Thus Hitler's sole public condemnation of Steiner is not only brief, parenthetical, and rather arcane, it is based entirely on a series of patently false assumptions about Steiner, his followers, and their politics. This does not, needless to say, constitute compelling evidence of either elementary incompatibility or enduring hostility between the Hitlerian and Steinerian visions of Germany's mission.
29) In stark contrast to Waage's evasiveness on the question of responsibility, one of the earliest analyses of Waldorf schools during the Third Reich warns against "dismissing the Waldorf movement's deliberate proximity to National Socialism as a problem of personal mistakes and sympathies" (Achim Leschinsky, "Waldorfschulen im Nationalsozialismus", Neue Sammlung: Zeitschrift für Erziehung und Gesellschaft vol. 23 no. 3, Stuttgart 1983, p. 272).
30) On a personal note, one of us, Peter Staudenmaier, was a student in Catholic schools for twelve years and has several priests in his family. Is he doing harm to himself or his relatives when he points out the various regressive, inhumane, and intolerant aspects of Roman Catholicism? If not, why can't Waage bring himself to take the same simple and decent step?
31) In an odd attempt to provide "objective" confirmation of the Dutch anthroposophists' conclusions, Waage directs our attention to two articles in the anthroposophist periodical Info3. Waage describes the authors, Wolfgang Ullmann and Jörn Rüsen, as "non-anthroposophists." This claim is questionable in the case of Rüsen, who serves on the Advisory Board of the anthroposophist Novalis Institute. But no matter what the ideological orientation of these two expert witnesses for anthroposophy, their analyses of the Dutch report are remarkably naive (both articles can be found in Info3 12/98). Rüsen, who believes that racism is fundamentally incompatible with "the political culture of modern societies" (the world would certainly be a nicer place if that were true), employs the well-worn argument that anthroposophy is "a product of its time." This raises the obvious question of why Rüsen continues to promote an obsolete philosophy. He also praises anthroposophy's "conception of universal-historical development" without mentioning that this conception is explicitly organized along racial lines. Ullmann, for his part, does mention Steiner's root race theory, but nevertheless affirms the Dutch report's claim that anthroposophy contains no racial doctrine. This defies logic; Ullmann must believe either that the root race theory is not a part of anthroposophy, or that it is not a racial doctrine. Ullmann also makes the bizarre accusation that Steiner's critics are trying to prevent a public discussion of anthroposophy, pointing in particular to the Grandt brothers, authors of the ill-fated Schwarzbuch Anthroposophie (The Black Book of Anthroposophy). Ullmann's hypocrisy is breathtaking; it is in fact Steiner's critics who have forced a public discussion of anthroposophy, while anthroposophists have done everything in their power to stifle this discussion. In 1997 Austrian anthroposophists sued the publishers of Schwarzbuch Anthroposophie and succeeded in prohibiting distribution of the book, thus making it completely inaccessible to scholars and the public. This case is merely one of several recent attempts by anthroposophists to use the courts to suppress informed public debate and to intimidate potential critics by driving small publishers to bankruptcy; see the thorough recounting of the various suits by Austrian anthroposophists in Gunnar Schedel, "Die sanften Zensoren," Schwarzer Faden 3/99.
32) According to this reasoning, for example, the 1935 Norwegian sterilization law cannot be condemned, criticized, or lamented because, after all, it was a product of its time. American slavery would be similarly insulated from reproach on this view. Presumably the holocaust itself was merely a product of its time, so we should all just keep quiet about it.