by Peter Staudenmaier
Reply to Göran Fant, “The Art of Turning White into Black”
Göran Fant says that he is unable
to recognize the portrait of anthroposophy that I painted in my article Anthroposophy
and Ecofascism.[1]
I am not surprised that he found my portrait hard to swallow, since Fant is
convinced that anthroposophy is by definition anti-racist and opposed to
nationalist and right-wing politics. I cannot argue with Fant’s personal
beliefs, but they are unfortunately incompatible with anthroposophy’s actual
historical record. In the course of the several debates that have ensued since
my article was first published, I have become increasingly aware that
contemporary anthroposophists are often woefully uninformed about the history
of their own doctrine. As odd as it may seem to admirers of Steiner, who are
inclined to view adherents of anthroposophy as authorities on anthroposophy, many
anthroposophists simply do not know very much about Steiner’s teachings or
about the development of the movement he founded. Like Fant, they thus find critical
descriptions of anthroposophy’s history to be unbelievable, indeed virtually
unintelligible. I would like to contribute to a more accurate view by
responding to some of Fant’s claims.[2]
Fant says that anthroposophy is
anti-authoritarian, anti-elitist, anti-racist, and apolitical. He complains
about my article’s supposedly unorthodox method, and offers an alternative
interpretation of the relationship between anthroposophy and Nazism. Let us examine
each of these arguments in turn.
Authoritarianism. Fant’s statements about the character of
anthroposophy are at odds with Rudolf Steiner’s precepts. In order to continue
along the path of spiritual and racial advancement, Steiner taught, individuals
must subordinate themselves to “the great leaders of humankind” (die
großen Führer der Menschheit). If they fail
to obey these leaders, their souls are condemned to spiritual and racial
stagnation.[3] Anthroposophy
is moreover based on an authoritarian epistemology which explicitly denigrates
“criticism” and “judgement” while celebrating “reverent veneration” of
ostensible spiritual virtues, and rejects “intellectual effort” in favor of
“immediate spiritual perception.”[4]
Contemporary anthroposophists’ uncritical attitude toward Steiner’s writings is
further testament to this authoritarian framework. Fant is much too optimistic
about the possibilities for “adapting Steiner’s texts to our time”; short of
schism or apostasy, anthroposophy simply offers no grounds on which its
adherents might coherently revise or refute its inherited doctrines.
Furthermore, what Fant calls “the great, inspiring wholeness” of Steiner’s
teachings depends entirely on anthroposophist credulity toward Steiner’s
methods of occult revelation. Whatever the charms of this version of
esotericism, such methods are irreconcilable with rational evaluation and
independent confirmation.[5]
In a judicious assessment of the anti-rational and authoritarian implications
of the anthroposophic worldview, Sven Ove Hansson writes: “Steiner’s
pronouncements are in practice never questioned in the anthroposophical
movement, and very little of substance has been added to the doctrine after his
death.”[6]
An authoritarian disposition is unavoidable in a movement that considers itself
to be preserving a “secret science” (Geheimwissenschaft), one of Steiner’s original terms for anthroposophy.[7]
Elitism. Anthroposophy’s very
nature as an esoteric worldview is predicated on the distinction between
initiates and non-initiates, as well as on the notion of a ladder of knowledge
which all initiates must climb step by step. These are the characteristic marks
of an elitist mindset. Steiner also held that the German cultural elite,
as the most spiritually advanced segment of the “Aryan race,” had a special
mission to redeem the world from materialism. In his own words, “If one national civilization spreads more readily, and has
greater spiritual fertility than another, then it is quite right that it should
spread.”[8]
His theory of the unique cultural mission of the German people was matched by
an elitist social doctrine. In his economic writings, Steiner emphasized that
all decisions must be made by “the most capable”; his “threefold society” was
to be run not by the “hand-workers” but by “the spiritual workers, who direct
production.”[9] And his
racial theories, needless to say, were rigidly hierarchical and tied to
anthroposophy’s elitist conception of spiritual progress: “Nations and races
are merely the various stages of development toward pure humanity. A nation or
a race stands higher the more perfectly its members express the pure, ideal
human type, the more they have worked their way through from the transitory
physical to the immortal supernatural. The development of humankind through
reincarnation in ever higher national and racial forms is therefore a process
of liberation.”[10] Even
sympathetic observers note that Steiner’s anthroposophy aimed to create a “new
spiritual elite”.[11]
Racism. I do not doubt that many anthroposophists today are
opposed to racist prejudice. But this admirable orientation does not justify
their refusal to confront honestly their doctrine’s thoroughly racist origins.
The entire edifice of anthroposophy is built on the comprehensive
historical-evolutionary-racial typology Steiner laid out in Cosmic
Memory and elsewhere. The key to this
typology is the root-race doctrine, which divides the human family into five
root races (Wurzelrassen,
sometimes also named Hauptrassen
or Grundrassen, principal or primary
races), with two more root races to appear in the distant future. Each root
race is further stratified into sub-races (Unterrassen), a term which eventually gave way, in Steiner’s
writings, to the more recognizable unit of the people or nation (Volk). These categories are biological (Steiner calls
them “hereditary”) as well as spiritual. The racial classifications are not
normatively neutral; they are arranged in ascending order of spiritual
development, with the fifth root race, the “Aryan race,” and within that root
race the “Germanic-Nordic” peoples, at the top of the hierarchy. This
hierarchy, according to Steiner, is an integral component of the cosmic order.
Steiner’s book Cosmic Memory remains to the present day the primary
source for anthroposophy’s cosmology, with no distancing whatsoever toward its
racist elements. The editor’s foreword to the current edition, published in
Dornach, doesn’t so much as mention the book’s racist content, much less try to
explain or minimize it; and the Anthroposophical Society continues to
officially designate the book one of the “fundamental anthroposophist texts.”[12]
Nor did Steiner himself ever renounce it; on the contrary, at the end of his
life he called Cosmic Memory the “basis of anthroposophist cosmology.”[13]
Today the book is still officially recommended for use by Waldorf teachers. Its
racial mythology is elaborated in extravagant detail in many other works by
Steiner published by anthroposophical presses.[14]
Thus
according to both Steiner and his latter-day followers, humanity’s very
existence is structured around the stratified scheme of higher and lower races.[15]
Nor is it the case, as Fant would have us believe, that in Steiner’s view these
racial divisions “will soon totally disappear.” Steiner taught that the “Aryan
race” will reign until the year 7893, six thousand years in the future.
Occasionally he indicated that the final transcendence of racial categories
would happen sooner, in roughly 1500 years – still an extraordinarily long time
to wait for anthroposophy to shed its racial obsessions. The Dutch
anthroposophist commission on “anthroposophy and the race question,” on the
other hand, reports that “according to Steiner, the word ‘race’ will no longer
have meaning in 5,500 years.”[16]
It is also inaccurate and
simplistic to say that Steiner gave the Aryan concept “quite another meaning
than it later acquired in the Nazi era.” From the moment it was invented by
European racial theorists in the nineteenth century, the preposterous notion of
an “Aryan race” was inextricably bound up in the repugnant ideology of racial
superiority. That Steiner himself shared this ideology is obvious from his
contemptuous references to blacks, Asians, aboriginal peoples, Jews, and other
non-“Aryans.” Steiner’s version of Aryanism was in fact strikingly similar,
even in detail, to that of leading Nazi racial theorists. Steiner divided the
Aryan root race into five sub-races: Ancient Indian, Persian,
Egyptian-Chaldean, Greco-Roman, and Germanic-Nordic. By comparison, Nazi ideologist
Alfred Rosenberg included the Indians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Germans and
Scandinavians in the “Aryan race.”[17]
Similarly, Arthur de Gobineau’s version of the “Aryan race” comprised Indians,
Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Chinese, and Germans.[18]
Richard Wagner held that the principal “Aryan” peoples were the Indians,
Persians, Greeks, and Germans, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s conception of
“the Aryans” was substantially similar to Steiner’s as well. Enthusiasts of
anthroposophy would do well to familiarize themselves with the history of the
Aryan myth.[19] Above all,
they would do well to examine more closely the considerable continuities
between Steiner’s description of the “Aryan race” and those put forward by the
leading racists of the nineteenth century and their Nazi inheritors.[20]
In spite of all this evidence and
context, Fant insists that “Steiner’s texts do not express any racism.” The
only conclusions the rest of us can draw are that Fant has not read Steiner’s
writings, or that he has a remarkably limited understanding of racism. The
latter possibility is strongly suggested by Fant’s foolish example of “going
out in the streets and slaughtering immigrants” as somehow typical of a racist
mindset. He appears to believe that “well-meaning” people cannot be racist.[21]
Fant has evidently never examined racism as a belief system or body of ideas.
That these ideas continue to exert a powerful and pernicious influence in
modern societies, without for the most part yielding directly murderous
consequences, seems to have escaped his notice. Today’s naïve anthroposophists
are the kinder, gentler counterpart to xenophobic thugs: not violent, not
overtly discriminatory or prejudiced, indeed seemingly the opposite. That is
why their potential role is so baleful: to make ‘soft’ racism and ‘soft’
nationalism socially acceptable in the heart of a materially comfortable but
ideologically insecure middle class.
<![if !supportEmptyParas]> <![endif]>
Anthroposophy’s
politics. Even if Fant’s claim that
“anthroposophy is apolitical” were believable, it would hardly be reassuring;
it is precisely this sort of naiveté toward the political implications of an
all-encompassing quasi-religious worldview that is most worrisome about
contemporary anthroposophists. Historically speaking, moreover, many of
Steiner’s followers, including prominent and institutionally central
anthroposophists, have been actively involved in fascist politics.[22]
In any case, my article did not argue that all anthroposophists are
enthusiastic activists of the radical right, but that the consistent
connections between anthroposophic beliefs and far-right politics have been
unmistakable since the doctrine first emerged a century ago. This persistent
connection is a mainstay of current research on the European far right. In
addition to the many sources cited in my article, interested readers may
consult the following discussions of Steiner’s radical right followers:
Jonathan Olsen, Nature and Nationalism;
Volkmar Wölk, Natur und Mythos; Peter Kratz, Die Götter des New Age; Reinalter, Petri, and Kaufmann, Das Weltbild des
Rechtsextremismus; Bernice Rosenthal, The
Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture; Jahn
and Wehling, Ökologie von rechts; Udo
Sierck, Normalisierung von Rechts; Gugenberger
and Schweidlenka, Die Fäden der
Nornen: zur Macht der Mythen in politischen Bewegungen; Franz Wegener, Das
atlantidische Weltbild: Nationalsozialismus und Neue Rechte auf der Suche nach
der versunkenen Atlantis; Arn Strohmeyer, Von
Hyperborea nach Auschwitz; Joscelyn Godwin,
Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival; Gugenberger, Petri, and Schweidlenka, Weltverschwörungstheorien:
die neue Gefahr von rechts; Eduard Heller
and Maegerle, Thule: Vom völkischen
Okkultismus bis zur Neuen Rechten; Klaus
Bellmund and Kaarel Siniveer, Kulte, Führer, Lichtgestalten: Esoterik als Mittel rechtsradikaler
Propaganda; Harald
Strohm, Die Gnosis und der Nationalsozialismus; Jutta Ditfurth, Entspannt in die Barbarei: Esoterik, (Öko-)Faschismus
und Biozentrismus; Gerhard Kern and Lee
Traynor, Die esoterische Verführung;
Claudia Barth, Über
alles in der Welt – Esoterik und Leitkultur; and Christiansen, Fromm, and Zinser, Brennpunkt
Esoterik.[23] It is unacceptable to dismiss the virulent, widespread,
and ongoing extreme right variant of anthroposophy as “some Germans from the
thirties” and “a handful of ghosts of modern times.”[24]
Fant
also tries to turn the recently deceased anthroposophist and right-wing
extremist Werner Haverbeck into an enemy of anthroposophy, calling his
adulatory biography of Steiner “a severe attack on anthroposophy” and a “total
rejection of the anthroposophist movement.” This is a purely terminological
argument; Fant presents no evidence for this nonsensical claim, but simply
asserts that since Haverbeck’s views on anthroposophy differ from his own,
Haverbeck must by definition be anti-anthroposophy. More telling still, Fant
claims that Haverbeck’s portrait of Steiner as a committed German nationalist
is “an absurd distortion.” Haverbeck’s book Rudolf Steiner – Anwalt für
Deutschland is indeed politically and
morally appalling, but its depiction of Steiner’s nationalism is entirely
accurate, as the briefest familiarity with Steiner’s published writings plainly
shows.
During his Vienna years, Steiner was an active member of the deutschnational or pan-German movement in Austria. In the last two decades
of the nineteenth century he wrote dozens of articles for the German
nationalist press, which are reprinted in volumes 29, 30, 31 and 32 of his
Collected Works (above all Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kultur- und
Zeitgeschichte and Gesammelte Aufsätze
zur Literatur).[25]
These pan-German publications are politically unambiguous, and they make a
mockery of Fant’s naive assertion that nationalism always “bothered Steiner.”[26]
Steiner’s German cultural nationalism, based on a chauvinist conviction of
superiority and a sense of national mission as well as simple ethnic prejudice,
became frantic with the onset of World War One, as his blustery wartime
lectures testify (collected in Zeitgeschichtliche Betrachtungen and Die geistigen Hintergründe des Ersten Weltkrieges and elsewhere); and he re-affirmed his German nationalist
line in his post-war lectures as well (see, for example, Bewußtseins-Notwendigkeiten für Gegenwart und
Zukunft). Steiner remained unapologetic
about his nationalist engagement to the end of his life, recalling his
pan-German activism in his 1925 autobiography. It may be an uncomfortable fact
for progressive anthroposophists to acknowledge, but the far-right Haverbeck
had a much more accurate understanding of Steiner on this question than the
liberal Fant.
In the period since my original
exchange with Fant, anthroposophy’s politics have not, alas, been clarified.
The far-right inflection of Steiner’s teachings continues to gain adherents and
publicity. The case of Andreas Molau is particularly instructive in
this regard. In the 1990s Molau was a prominent publicist on Germany’s
far-right fringe, and after 2000 became active in the NDP, the major neo-Nazi
party in Germany today. Molau also worked as a history teacher at a Waldorf
school in the city of Braunschweig for eight years. He was fired (or, by some
accounts, resigned) in 2004 when Molau’s official position in the NPD became
public.[28]
The chief concern for the administration of Molau’s Waldorf school was the
possible impact of Molau’s party work on the school’s reputation; as the
school’s principal told the media at the time: “This is a catastrophe for our
image.” Molau’s Waldorf colleagues, meanwhile, claimed to have been unaware of
his political involvements.[29]
Assuming this claim is true, it raises the obvious question of just how Molau’s
fellow Waldorf teachers and staff managed notto know about his far-right affiliations for so long. Molau taught
history and German (not, for example, math or music) at the same Waldorf school
for eight years, and even after the NPD episode erupted into a public scandal,
his Waldorf colleagues said they had viewed him as “left-liberal” and “a
sympathetic oddball”; they were unanimously surprised to learn of his far-right
political activities. But Molau had been a prominent figure on the radical
right for a very long time, since the beginning of the 1990s, writing for a
range of far-right publications under his real name; for several years he was even
culture editor of Junge Freiheit,
one of the most notorious of Germany’s extreme right wing journals (where among
other things he published an article denying the holocaust).[30]
Molau’s openly apologetic biography of Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg was
published in 1993.[31]
Molau was moreover mentioned in readily available sources on the far right,
such as the Handbuch deutscher Rechtsextremismus (handbook on German right-wing extremism) published
in 1996. Yet none of Molau’s fellow Waldorf faculty, staff, or parents was
aware of any of this information whatsoever. The incident speaks volumes about
the level of political obliviousness that is apparently endemic at Waldorf
schools today.
Even after leaving Waldorf
employment, Molau continues to support Waldorf education strongly. In the
immediate aftermath of his departure from the Braunschweig Waldorf school, he forcefully
re-affirmed his ongoing esteem for Steiner and his own unchanged commitment to
Waldorf pedagogy. He has since run in several campaigns as one of the NPD’s
better-known politicians, and his election materials consistently highlight his
experience as a Waldorf teacher. Within the NPD executive, Molau is responsible
for educational policy. In 2005, as an NPD candidate, Molau was invited to speak
at a Waldorf school in Berlin, where he quoted from Steiner’s book on the
Mission of the Folk Souls, and declared that Waldorf pupils are “the ideal
target audience for the NPD, because of Waldorf schools’ natural feeling for
living authority and their cultivated inner connection with German culture.”
The NPD put out a press release celebrating this Waldorf event as a breakthrough
with youth. In 2007, Molau announced his plan to open a Waldorf educational
center under NPD auspices. With this new Waldorf project, the neo-Nazi politician
hopes to show “the connection between the nationalist NPD ideology and the
teachings of the founder of anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner.”
Fant presumably still believes that
such incidents – repeated over and over again in the world of Waldorf, biodynamics,
and anthroposophy – are merely isolated, marginal, insignificant anomalies that
tell us nothing important about the ostensibly “apolitical” nature of anthroposophy.
This is nothing but a pretense, and serves quite simply to protect and promote
the ongoing infiltration of the far right within the anthroposophical milieu.
The Molau case was not a fluke. In late 2004, in the wake of the controversy
over Molau’s Waldorf career, the editor of the anthroposophical journal Info3 reported that “a whole array of private voices”
within German anthroposophical circles had spoken up in support of Molau. In
November 2004, a leading far-right newspaper, the National-Zeitung, published a very sympathetic interview with Molau
conducted by an even more famous right-wing extremist, Gerhard Frey.[32]
Here Molau emphasized the conceptual affinities between anthroposophy and the
contemporary German far right, while citing Steiner’s book The
Philosophy of Freedom and touting the wonders
of Waldorf education. Molau also noted the support and solidarity he had
received from like-minded associates within the Waldorf movement. Molau’s
parting of ways with the Braunschweig Waldorf school, in other words, has
scarcely solved the problem.[33]
Such incidents will continue to recur until anthroposophists finally face their
far-right affiliations head-on.
“Staudenmaier’s
method”. Fant is particularly exercised
about what he calls my article’s method, suggesting several times that I
misquoted my sources and complaining that I focused on topics he considers to
be “peripheral” aspects of anthroposophy. I will gladly let readers draw their
own conclusions about whether anthroposophy’s racial doctrines and its extensive
history of collusion with fascist and neo-fascist politics constitute “peripheral
phenomena.” Fant’s remarks on my use of sources, on the other hand, are nothing
but innuendo; he never once challenges any of my actual citations or quotes.
Indeed, his preoccupation with method is somewhat puzzling, since my article
is, if anything, methodologically boring and conservative. Anthroposophy and
Ecofascism follows the standard procedure
of providing historical background, quoting abundantly from anthroposophist
sources, citing some of the critical literature on anthroposophy, and offering
my own interpretations of the material while noting alternative
interpretations. Readers familiar with these sources will easily recognize that
my article, despite its polemical tone, is notably restrained in its argument.
I deliberately avoided, for example, making extensive use of historian Anna
Bramwell’s prodigious research on anthroposophy’s pro-fascist history, and I
completely excluded all occult sources, including those that are damning toward
anthroposophy. I also explicitly warned against the sort of guilt by
association argument that Fant thinks I have indulged in. Fant’s evident
discomfort with my research stems from its content, not from its polemical
format.[34]
Indeed
Fant appears to be troubled by the very phenomenon of historical analysis itself.
He cannot understand that non-anthroposophists might assess anthroposophist
actions according to criteria different from the anthroposophists’ own
preferred standards. He seems quite unaware of how textual evidence functions
outside of an esoteric framework – yes, Mr. Fant, historians really do need to choose
sources that are “typical and representative,” no matter how
uncomfortable this may be for occultists – and he
cannot fathom how external observers could possibly reach conclusions that
diverge from his own. Fant thus insists that a critical appraisal of
anthroposophy, no matter how copiously substantiated, is automatically suspect.
He says, for instance, that my brief summary of Steiner’s lectures on “Volksseelen” is an “astonishingly unserious distortion.” According to
Fant, these lectures are thoroughly anti-racist and intended to “inspire mutual
understanding between the peoples.” It is difficult to see how any
non-anthroposophist reader of Steiner’s text could agree with this simpleminded
assessment.[35] The book is
an openly ethnocentric argument for all peoples to accept the superiority of
Steiner’s peculiar version of Christianity, refracted through a ‘Nordic’ lens,
and to acknowledge the “future mission of [the] Teutonic Archangel.”[36]
The theme of chapter three is “Formation of the Races,” while the theme of
chapter four is “The Evolution of Races.” But the heart of the book is chapter
six, titled “The Five Root Races of Mankind” (Steiner’s lecture in Oslo from
June 12, 1910). Here Steiner reminds his audience of the racial superiority of
“the Aryans,” helpfully explaining that he means “the peoples of Asia Minor and Europe whom we regard as members
of the Caucasian race” (p. 106) before going
on to discuss “the Caucasian race” for several more paragraphs (p. 107). For
some reason Fant calls this two-page disquisition a “parenthetical passage.”
For anyone who has the opportunity to read the text
itself, with its unsettling references to “the peculiar character of the
Semitic people” and so forth, Fant’s clumsy attempts to distract attention from
the actual content of Steiner’s book are easy to expose. But whatever sense anthroposophists might make of these murky
lectures on “the mission of national souls,” contemporary far-right racists do
not concur with Fant’s reading.[37]
They continue to promote Steiner’s book alongside other Aryan supremacist
literature.[38]
Fant’s insinuations about
my article’s use of sources are especially fatuous in light of his own careless
use of sources. He writes: “Steiner warned already in 1920 about Nazism (GA 199
p. 161).” Here is the quote Fant cites: “This symbol [the swastika] which the
Indian or old Egyptian once looked to when he spoke of his sacred Brahman, this
symbol is now to be seen on the [Russian] ten thousand ruble note! Those who
are making grand politics there know how to influence the human soul. They know
what the triumphal procession of the swastika means – this swastika that a
large number of people in Europe are already wearing – but they do not want to
listen to that which strives to understand, out of the most important symptoms,
the secrets of today’s historical development.”[39]
Steiner denounces the use of the swastika by the Bolsheviks; he makes no
mention at all of Nazism. That is not surprising, since the Nazi party was only
formed a few months before Steiner’s speech, and had at the time a tiny
membership; moreover, the distinctive Nazi swastika banners were not designed
until two years later.[40]
Only in the fertile anthroposophist imagination could this passage count as a
“warning against Nazism.”
Fant employs similar
tactics of avoidance in his discussion of anthroposophist Rainer Schnurre’s
racist statements. He claims that I have presented “false quotations” from
Schnurre, and somehow deduces that my source for these quotations must have
been Jutta Ditfurth. The usual procedure in such cases is to provide accurate
quotes from the figure in question so that readers may judge for themselves.
But Fant gives us no quotes from Schnurre, only his own fanciful aspersions.[41]
Moreover, a brief glance at my article will show that I do not quote or cite
Ditfurth’s excellent work anywhere in connection with Schnurre; rather, as
clearly noted in my article, I quoted Schnurre’s racist nonsense from Oliver
Geden’s fine book Rechte Ökologie.
Fant’s attempt to dismiss Geden as a “critic of anthroposophy” is frivolous;
Geden is in fact a critic of right-wing ecology, and he can hardly be expected
to ignore anthroposophy’s massive contribution to this unfortunate tendency.
His book otherwise has no axe to grind with Steiner. Fant furthermore appears
to believe that anyone who voices concern about the less savory aspects of
anthroposophist politics must be a tool of sinister forces. The conspiratorial paranoia
so typical of anthroposophy has gotten the better of him in this instance; the
suggestion that leftists like Ditfurth and Bierl are secretly in league with
the far-right EAP is laughable. For someone so preoccupied with “method,”
Fant’s own approach is dubious indeed.[42]
Anthroposophy and Nazism. Fant is convinced that “anthroposophy thinks
radically opposite Nazism.” Not only was this view not shared by
anthroposophist Nazis, it is not shared by scholars of the topic. Volkmar Wölk,
for example, writes of Steiner’s root-race theory: “It is a short conceptual
step from this position to the racial doctrine of the Nazis.”[43]
Wölk’s thesis is borne out in detail by James Webb’s pioneering research on
anthroposophy’s relationship to other denizens of the occult-racist underground.[44]
If Fant finds this sort of scholarship too “critical,” he may prefer to consult
the work of historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, who can hardly be suspected of
harboring any bias against Steiner. His respected book The Occult
Roots of Nazism provides significant
evidence of the mutual influence between early anthroposophists and early
Nazis.
Similarly, the critical esotericists Eduard Gugenberger and Roman Schweidlenka,
who are respectful and admiring of Steiner, point out the “decisive influence”
of the root-race doctrine on National Socialism.[46]
Allow me to emphasize again: these are not the conclusions of “critics of
anthroposophy,” but of fair-minded researchers who have carefully examined the
historical record. To deny the ideological parallels between anthroposophy and
National Socialism, particularly its esoteric and environmentalist variants,
can only contribute to ignorance about fascism’s intellectual origins.[47]
I
recognize that Fant’s expertise in the cultural history of the German right is
limited, and I do not mean to reject his views as merely the product of a lack
of familiarity with the relevant scholarship. I think that his perspective is,
rather, the product of a specifically anthroposophist avoidance of
uncomfortable historical facts. Much of what he has to say on the topic of
anthroposophy and Nazism is a caricatured version of the current accepted
wisdom in anthroposophical circles. He appears to have relied exclusively on a
single source, Uwe Werner’s extended apologia for anthroposophist collaborators
with the Third Reich, for all of his concrete assertions. But even Werner’s
patently tendentious volume provides unambiguous evidence that directly
contradicts Fant’s claims.
Fant
writes, for example: “In 1922 the Nazis made an attempt to take [Steiner’s]
life.” No part of that sentence is true. The incident Fant refers to was hardly
an assassination attempt, and the Nazis were not involved in any way. But Fant
need not take my word on the matter; he only needs to consult Werner’s book, which
describes the incident thus: “On May 15, 1922, followers of Ludendorff 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.”[48]
The Ludendorffers were not Nazis, they were rivals to the Nazis.[49]
And a disrupted lecture is a far cry from attempted murder.[50]
Fant
further contends that Werner’s book “shows that the absolute majority of
anthroposophists radically opposed Nazism,” and that those who believed in “a
combination of Nazism and anthroposophy” were “an utterly small number.” In
fact Werner’s book demonstrates the opposite. It lists a range of named
individuals who were both active anthroposophists and members of the Nazi party
and related Nazi organizations, and describes frequent instances of voluntary
collusion with and ardent support for the Nazi regime.[51]
Fant also claims that anthroposophist leaders who “compromised” with Nazi
authorities “were ostracized by their colleagues after the war.” Werner’s book
refutes this claim as well, noting that the most notorious of these figures
continued to be actively involved in anthroposophist institutions, particularly
the Waldorf movement, for decades after the war. Indeed Werner states outright
that post-war anthroposophists, both internally and publicly, “consciously
refused to revive controversies about the behavior of some anthroposophists
during the Nazi period.”[52]
So much for Fant’s reliance on his fellow anthroposophist
Werner. For some reason Fant accuses me of having “read Werner utterly
selectively”; judging from his own arguments, Fant appears not to have read the
book at all. This troubling lack of attention to historical detail is coupled
with an equally troubling lack of concern with the ethical issues involved.
Fant thinks it is “too simple” to say that collaboration with the Nazis was
wrong. He prefers to view the actions of pro-Nazi anthroposophists as a
“survival strategy.” If this is the best Fant can say for his forebears, that
under Hitler they devoted themselves solely to their own survival and that of
their doctrine, then I can add nothing to his verdict.[53]
Fant is also skeptical of my
argument that a section of the Nazi leadership harbored strong sympathies for
anthroposophy. My brief mention of Rudolf Hess seems to have particularly
aroused his ire. He writes: “To describe Hess as a ‘practicing anthroposophist’
is of course absurd. The sources show clearly that even if he encouraged
biodynamic agriculture, he at the same time strongly rejected its
anthroposophical background.” Once again, Fant’s own chosen source provides
evidence to the contrary. Werner’s book reproduces a 1937 memo from Hess’s
associate Lotar Eickhoff (who joined the Anthroposophical Society after the
war) which explicitly states Hess’s conviction that biodynamic farming cannot
be separated from its anthroposophist foundations: “The Deputy of the Führer
[i.e. Hess] is of the opinion that if one wants to preserve one aspect – like
biodynamic agriculture – one cannot in any way separate it from its scientific
basis and its scientific reinforcements, that is, from the work set down in
Rudolf Steiner’s books and the Rudolf Steiner schools.”[54]
Since Hess’s vigorous efforts on behalf of biodynamic agriculture are not in
dispute, Fant’s conclusion that Hess nevertheless “strongly rejected its
anthroposophical background” remains unsupported.
Fant’s view that Hess was not an
anthroposophist himself, however, is one that I have come to share since the
original exchange with Fant. I now think that Fant was right and that I was
wrong on this question. The matter is worth examining in detail. At the time of
the original exchange, I held that Rudolf Hess clearly fulfilled the criteria
of a practicing anthroposophist, according to any but the narrowest definition.
To support this contention, I noted the following points: Hess’s parents
reportedly belonged to the anthroposophist Christian Community.[55]
He structured intimate aspects of his personal life, including his diet and
health care, around anthroposophist beliefs.[56]
He told the British doctor who examined him after his flight to Scotland “that
he had for years been interested in Steiner’s anthroposophy.”[57]
Reports from the German intelligence services described Hess as a “silent
patron and follower of the anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner.”[58]
Above all, Hess consistently used his public position to promote
anthroposophist endeavors, as detailed at length in Werner’s book. A remarkable
range of scholars have explicitly confirmed Hess’s anthroposophist
inclinations.[59]
My current view is that these
factors indicate considerable sympathy on Hess’s part toward anthroposophy, and
a more than passing personal interest in and active engagement with
anthroposophical practices. Nevertheless, I now think that Hess’s personal
preoccupations within the broad spectrum of occult beliefs and practices were
inconsistent and incoherent to such a degree that there is little sense in
affirmatively associating him with one particular esoteric tradition.[60]
Hess’s dedication to biodynamic agriculture, on the other hand, was both
enthusiastic and enduring. Several high-level members of his staff, moreover, had
significant personal connections with anthroposophy. Hess himself is perhaps
better viewed as more or less indiscriminately susceptible to the full range of
Lebensreform, occultist, and völkisch predilections, which is exactly why he found
biodynamics, Waldorf, and anthroposophy so congenial. Quite apart from whatever
personal stake they may believe they have in the matter, I think that
anthroposophists today would do well to acquaint themselves with the historical
research on Hess and his decidedly sympathetic attitude toward anthroposophy.[61]
Overall, however, Fant has avoided
the primary subject of my article almost entirely, and thus he simply ignores
the record of anthroposophist collusion with both National Socialism and
Italian Fascism. History, it seems, has not yet caught up with him. I think our
exchange would have been more productive if Fant had addressed this central
topic. It is scarcely one that concerns only “peripheral” figures within the
anthroposophical movement. Aside from the Italian fascist anthroposophists I
have mentioned above, from Martinoli to Calabrini to Scaligero and so forth, a
remarkable variety of German anthroposophists were both active Nazis and
well-known in anthroposophical circles. Ernst Harmstorf, for example, was an
early and active participant in the anthroposophical movement, since the
beginning of the 1920s (he took part in the famous “Christmas
Conference” in 1923, for example), and a prominent spokesman for anthroposophical
medicine, particularly after 1945. Harmstorf joined both the Nazi party and the
SA in 1933. Heimo Rau was the son of anthroposophists, a Waldorf teacher from
1946 onward, and a respected anthroposophist after WWII. He was also a Nazi
party member. Gotthold Hegele was a prominent anthroposophical physician after
1945. During his time as a medical student in the late 1930s, Hegele was a
high-profile student leader and an active anthroposophist, as well as a Nazi
student official and a member of the SA; in 1937-1938 Hegele was the head of
the Office of Political Education of the National Socialist Student League in
Tübingen. As with Hanns Rascher, Friedrich Benesch, and others, these figures
are celebrated in standard anthroposophical reference works (which do not
mention their Nazi affiliations), and are decidedly not peripheral to anthroposophists’ own self-portrait of
their movement’s history.[62]
But there are many further
examples. For instance, Max Babl was the head of the Anthroposophical Society
branch in the city of Erfurt; he joined the Nazi party in 1933. Hermann Pöschel
was the head of the Anthroposophical Society branch in the city of Plauen; he
also joined the Nazi party in 1933. Otto Feyh was the head of the
Anthroposophical Society branch in the city of Schweinfurt; he joined the Nazi
party in 1940. Otto Thorwirth was head of the Anthroposophical Society branch
in the city of Gotha; he remained a member of the Nazi party throughout the
Third Reich. Hans Pohlmann was a longstanding anthroposophist who had known
Steiner personally; he founded the second Waldorf school in Germany in 1922 in
Hamburg and was also head of the Anthroposophical Society branch in Hamburg and
chairman of the local Waldorf school association. Pohlmann was also a Nazi party
member. Hermann Mahle was a prominent Waldorf official in the 1930s and a
member of the anthroposophical Christian Community. Mahle was also a Nazi party
member, and headed the “National Socialist Parents Group” at the Stuttgart
Waldorf school, which included 53 party members and 22 members of other Nazi
organizations. Carl Grund was an anthroposophist since the 1920s and a
prominent activist in the biodynamic movement. In the 1930s he worked as an
official of the biodynamic farmers league and was one of the foremost spokesmen
for biodynamic agriculture in Germany. Grund joined the Nazi party in May 1933
and joined the SA in November 1933. In 1942 he was made an SS officer, and was
promoted to SS-Obersturmführer in 1943.
These are merely some of the more noteworthy
examples. It is important to keep in mind that Nazi party membership alone is
by no means the sole indication of active and enthusiastic participation in the
Nazi movement. One of the more striking instances is the case of Georg Halbe.
Halbe was a member of the Anthroposophical Society who did not join the Nazi
party, as far as can be determined from the available documents. He was
nevertheless a dedicated Nazi. From 1935 to 1942 Halbe belonged to Minister Darre’s
staff in the Nazi agricultural apparatus, where he was particularly active in
promoting biodynamic agriculture. His tasks included overseeing the “Blut und
Boden” publishing house and helping produce the Nazi journal Odal, the chief mouthpiece for Darre’s blood and soil
ideology. Halbe wrote extensively for other Nazi publications as well,
including the Nationalsozialistische Landpost (National Socialist Rural Press), the journal Wille
und Macht: Führerorgan der nationalsozialistischenJugend (Will and Power,
a periodical of the Nazi youth movement), and the SS journal Das
schwarze Korps. After Darre fell from power
in 1942, Halbe transferred to the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern
Territories, and then in March 1944 he moved to Goebbel’s Propaganda Ministry,
where he continued to work until the end of the war and the destruction of the
Nazi state. It seems to me that anthroposophists today who do not harbor
sympathies for Nazism would be wise to acquaint themselves with this troubled
history.
One final, truly disconcerting note
is Fant’s egregious attempt to rehabilitate the SS functionary Franz Lippert as
a “humanitarian.” I can only attribute this whitewash of Lippert’s activities
at Dachau to a deeply misguided notion of “good Nazis.” Fant quotes several
positive reports about Lippert’s conduct in order to absolve him, but fails to
mention that the sole source for these reports is Lippert’s family. Fant also believes,
incredibly enough, that Lippert was exonerated by “an allied de-Nazification
commission.” This is an astounding misunderstanding, and reveals that Fant is
not only unaware of the facts about Lippert, but even of the most basic facts
about post-war evaluations of Nazi collaborators overall.[63]
Lippert’s post-war hearing, which ended in acquittal in 1948, was not conducted
by an Allied de-Nazification commission. It was instead part of the German
civilian court system, the very same system that produced thousands of
acquittals and absolved an entire generation of Nazi officials and
collaborators.[64] A thorough
and perceptive study of this system is now available: historian Harold
Marcuse’s book Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp (Cambridge 2001), the best single source on the
post-war rehabilitation of Dachau guards and SS staff. Fant would do well to
peruse chapter 3, “Good Nazis”, in particular.[65]
Marcuse describes the ways in which
SS criminals were re-cast as “rescuers” after the war by the exact same
court system that acquitted Lippert (89-94, 104-5). He sharply contrasts these
German civilian courts to the very different de-Nazification courts established
and staffed by the allied authorities. The German civilian juries, known as
“Spruchkammer,” routinely invoked the notion that SS officers who treated
prisoners well were thereby less guilty, and on this basis these courts on
several occasions acquitted defendants who were complicit in multiple murders.
Indeed Marcuse provides an extensive and thoughtful contrast of the two
markedly different de-Nazification procedures on exactly this point: whereas
the Allied-sponsored trials on the Nuremberg model explicitly rejected the
notion that having treated prisoners nicely reduced the guilt of concentration
camp officers, the German civilian courts embraced this notion wholeheartedly.
In the appeals chamber that handled Lippert’s case, SS officers and other Nazi
camp personnel got off very easily. According to Marcuse, “most of them
were let off without so much as a verbal reprimand.” (93) He continues:
“by late 1947 the denazification program was no longer taken seriously
[…] the chambers began rubber-stamping the remaining cases, releasing
thousands of the heavily suspect internees without hearings in early spring
1948.” Marcuse characterizes this as “the wholesale release of
heavily compromised Nazi activists.” (94)[66]
Marcuse’s thorough study of Dachau,
Lippert’s own camp, is hardly the only useful source on the topic Fant chose to
address. Consider the fine analysis by Karin Orth, “The Concentration Camp SS
as a Functional Elite” in Ulrich Herbert, ed., National Socialist
Extermination Policies (New York 2000), pp.
306-336. Orth examines the post-war trials of mid-level SS officers from
various concentration camps, particularly those in Germany proper, mentioning
Dachau specifically (p. 328). Orth perceptively describes “the nimbus of the
“decent” and “correct” SS officer, which was sworn to in
numerous court statements” (328). She continues: “Many surviving inmate
functionaries testified on behalf of the SS men in order to divert attention
from their own involvement in the crimes of the SS.” (328) According to Orth’s
study, some former inmates “believed that a subjective sense of justice
demanded they testify that the indicted commander […] was relatively
“decent” and “correct” in his treatment of them and in
comparison with their respective predecessors” (328). Of the post-war trials of
these SS officers from regular concentration camps, she writes: “only a
fraction concluded with an official conviction.” (329) This sort of basic
historical context is crucial to understanding the case of Franz Lippert.
But perhaps Lippert’s admirer Fant
would prefer to focus on the evidence about conditions for the prisoners forced
to work on Lippert’s biodynamic plantation? There is a wide variety of sources
on this subject as well, many of them first-hand. While these sources do not
tell us anything about Lippert’s personal comportment one way or the other,
they do provide a broader perspective on conditions at the biodynamic
plantation he oversaw. The official history of the Dachau concentration camp
describes the plantation as a place “where so many thousands of prisoners
labored in all weathers, and where a great many of them were shot or drowned in
the ditches” – hardly a “humanitarian” enterprise.[67]
Another thorough source describes the inmates as “slowly wasting away” on the
plantation, and notes their high death rate.[68]
Yet another historical analysis observes that “several hundred prisoners” died
at the Dachau plantation.[69]
Still another recalls the numerous prisoners who “labored and died under the
supervision of brutal SS officers” at the plantation.[70]
Eyewitness testimony from former Dachau
prisoners amply confirms this dire portrait of Lippert’s biodynamic plantation.
These reports are detailed and credible. One memoir by a former Dachau inmate
offers a first-hand and quite harrowing account of work on the plantation.[71]
Another memoir by a former inmate provides an even bleaker depiction of the
plantation, noting that hundreds of prisoners “worked, suffered, and died”
on the “fields of the notorious plantation”.[72]
Yet another calls the plantation a “murder-pit” and “the terror of all the
inmates.”[73] Such
accounts are corroborated by further eyewitness testimony. A representative
memoir by another former inmate states: “In Dachau the clergy were assigned to
one of the hardest commandos, the plantation. Most of those who died in 1942/43
perished from the work methods that were required there.”[74]
Similar conclusions are supported by ex post facto studies as well.[75]
The
evidence against Fant’s version of events, and against his imprudent defense of
Lippert, is simply massive. But the very foundation of Fant’s stance on this
matter is utterly wrongheaded. The desperate search for some sort of excuse for
this anthroposophist SS officer and concentration camp guard is all too
revealing about anthroposophical attitudes toward their own compromised history
during the Third Reich. Contrary to Fant’s imaginative depiction of him as a
selfless protector of Nazism’s victims, Lippert was in fact personally
committed to Nazism. He produced biodynamic pamphlets for the SS.[76]
Even his anthroposophist friends were taken aback by Lippert’s fervent devotion
to the Hitler movement and its ideals.[77]
Since anthroposophists are unable to point to a single figure from their ranks
who actually joined the resistance to Hitler’s regime,[78]
they are reduced to pleading, a half-century after the liberation of the
concentration camps, that at least the anthroposophist Lippert was nice to his
prisoners. Scattered individual testimonies may salve the post-war
anthroposophist conscience, but they cannot distract attention from the central
fact that Lippert’s work was an integral part of the SS’s use of slave labor in
promoting biodynamic agriculture.[79]
Fant’s grievous misjudgement of Lippert is a case study in anthroposophy’s
evasion of its own history.[80]
Much of the rest of Fant’s reply
to my article consists of unconfirmable assertions about the nature of Waldorf
education and the role of various ethnic groups within contemporary
anthroposophy. I do not consider myself competent to judge these claims, but
they strike me as both irrelevant and implausible.[81]
I must on the other hand agree with Fant that, compared to him, I have a
“broad” definition of racism. Fant avers, for example, that “the word negro was
quite neutral” in Steiner’s day. Racial terms are never neutral; when used in
racist contexts, such as Steiner’s diatribes against blacks and other
non-whites, they are terms of abuse and denigration. This is not a matter of
“overinterpreting” Steiner’s unequivocal pronouncements, as Fant thinks, but of
situating them within their historical and ideological context. While much of
Steiner’s writing on racial themes is merely obscurantist pseudo-spiritual
pablum, there is no point in denying that he occasionally reverted to the most
vulgar racism.
Astonishingly, Fant also repeats
as fact the long discredited racist propaganda about “outrages of black
soldiers against German women in the Ruhr.” Aside from mixing up the Rhine and
Ruhr occupations (there were no French colonial troops stationed in the Ruhr),
Fant has been hoodwinked by an eighty-year-old misinformation campaign.[82]
These rumors of “outrages” were not merely “exaggeratedly described,” as Fant
would have it, they were an invention of German nationalist demagogues and were
just as racist as the stories of similar “outrages” in the American South
during the same period.[83]
The patently spurious reports were already exposed in 1921 by German opponents
of the racist propaganda (including feminists, socialists, and others) as well
as by anti-racist journalists in other countries who simultaneously opposed the
occupation.[84] The reports
were investigated thoroughly by the Allied authorities at the time and
explicitly and unequivocally repudiated.[85]
If it is true, as Fant suggests, that the primitive German nationalist propaganda
was the source for Steiner’s unconscionable statements about French colonial
troops, it would scarcely mitigate Steiner’s racism. The most infamous of these
propaganda pamphlets begins by decrying “the defilement of the white woman as
such” and claims that “young girls have been dragged from the street in order
to satisfy the bestial lust of African savages.” The pamphlet appeals to “women
and men of the white race” to protest this “deepest disgrace that can befall a
white woman.” It describes the colonial troops as “colored barbarians” with
“animalistic instincts,” “blacks from the Ivory Coast of Africa whose language
no-one can understand, who have barely learned a few scraps of French, savages
from darkest Africa . . .”[86]
This is the sort of thing that Rudolf Steiner evidently took at face value. It
is doubly disconcerting that his followers continue to do so today.[87]
This last misstep on Fant’s part
encapsulates our entire exchange. Innocent of any historical perspective on the
events he describes, Fant is susceptible to the comforting myths propagated by
his fellow anthroposophists. From his gullible point of view, a skeptical
approach like mine appears as a frontal assault on anthroposophy as a whole.
Yet my article was not an attack on anthroposophy in general, but an inquiry
into the sinister side of its political consequences. The very same historical
arguments that I have put forward about the relationship between anthroposophy
and ecofascism could just as well be advanced from a standpoint sympathetic to
Steiner. Anthroposophy can, after all, be viewed as an attempt to bridge
occultism and rationalism, the esoteric and the practical, mysticism and
humanism. This attempt failed in interwar Germany because it ignored its own
political context, and was consequently drawn into the orbit of mass barbarism.
Anthroposophy’s failure, from this perspective, is an object lesson in the
perils of spiritualized politics. Its latter-day practitioners would do well to
heed this lesson.[88]
For now, however, the lesson
remains unlearned. In historical terms, anthroposophy is a relatively young
body of ideas, one that still jealously guards its cherished self-understanding
as an esoteric doctrine. If anthroposophy is to continue developing as a
worldview and as a movement, then its practitioners will at some point
inevitably have to engage in substantial re-interpretation of its founding
texts. Once this process gets underway, anthroposophists will at last begin
more or less systematically to filter out and neutralize the racism in
Steiner’s works, in the same way that Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and
others have attempted to re-interpret and defang the various narratives of
divinely sanctioned ethnocentric violence that mar so many sacred scriptures.
But anthroposophy has not yet reached this point; it is still in the stage of
simple denial, of self-absorption, of circling the wagons against external
scrutiny. This may be inevitable for esoteric doctrines; perhaps the transition
to a mature, responsible engagement with anthroposophy’s own origins and assumptions
can only take place once the esoteric gives way to the exoteric. In any case,
anthroposophists who sincerely oppose racism would do well to lift their heads
out of the sand and start wrestling with the unpleasant aspects of Steiner’s
work.
Göran Fant is so taken with “the
great, inspiring wholeness” of Steiner’s teachings that he has allowed his
critical faculties to be incapacitated. For him, criticism of Steiner or of
anthroposophy is simply a “smear campaign.” His unwillingness to come to terms
with anthroposophy’s racist, nationalist, and pro-fascist legacy is typical of
far too many contemporary anthroposophists. Indeed this defensive and evasive
attitude seems to be most common among relatively liberal anthroposophists.
There are many readily available sources that describe and analyze
anthroposophy’s reactionary heritage; progressive anthroposophists have no
excuse for continuing to ignore them. Fant’s reply exemplifies not so much the
denial of history as the avoidance of history, the refusal to engage with a
compromised past in a dignified and honest way. Until anthroposophists overcome
this self-exculpatory abdication of moral responsibility, their claims to
represent an enlightened and tolerant doctrine will remain insincere.
Footnotes
Fant’s essay “The Art of Turning White into Black,” a
reply to my article “Anthroposophy and Ecofascism,” can be found here: http://hem.passagen.se/thebee/comments/PS/Fant1-eng.htm This exchange originally appeared in
2001. I revised the text of both “Anthroposophy and Ecofascism” and the present
article in 2007.
[10]Steiner, Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten?pp. 209-210. Here is how the passage appears in the authorized English translation: “For peoples and races are but steps leading to pure humanity. A race or a nation stands so much the higher, the more perfectly its members express the pure, ideal human type, the further they have worked their way from the physical and perishable to the supersensible and imperishable. The evolution of man through the incarnations in ever higher national and racial forms is thus a process of liberation. Man must finally appear in harmonious perfection.” Steiner, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, New York 1961, p. 252. Terms like “higher racial forms” occur throughout Steiner’s writings, always linked to higher spiritual forms. This elitist racial scheme has frequently been adopted wholesale by later anthroposophists. A.P Shepherd, for example, writes that humankind has been “differentiated into races, at different cultural and moral levels.” (Shepherd, A Scientist of the Invisible. An Introduction to the Life and Work of Rudolf Steiner, London 1954, p. 103)
[15]A number of scholarly
analyses of anthroposophical racial doctrine are readily available to
interested readers. See above all Helmut Zander, “Sozialdarwinistische
Rassentheorien aus dem okkulten Untergrund des Kaiserreichs” in Uwe Puschner,
Walter Schmitz, and Justus Ulbricht, Handbuch zur ‘Völkischen
Bewegung’ 1871-1918,
Munich 1996; Zander, “Anthroposophische
Rassentheorie: Der Geist auf dem Weg durch die Rassengeschichte” in Stefanie
von Schnurbein and Justus Ulbricht, Völkische Religion und Krisen der
Moderne, Würzburg 2001; Georg Schmid,
“Die Anthroposophie und die Rassenlehre Rudolf Steiners zwischen
Universalismus, Eurozentrik und Germanophilie” in Joachim Müller, Anthroposophie
und Christentum: Eine kritisch-konstruktive Auseinandersetzung, Freiburg 1995; Peter Staudenmaier, “Race and
Redemption: Racial and Ethnic Evolution in Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy” Nova
Religiovol. 11 no. 3 (2008), 4-36.
[19]There is a very large literature on the topic. For
otherwise opposing viewpoints that both draw attention to the basic conflation
of philology and ethnology that lies at the root of the very notion of an
‘Aryan race’ see Madhav Deshpande, “Aryan Origins: Brief History of Linguistic
Arguments” in Romila Thapar, ed., India: Historical Beginnings and the
Concept of the Aryan(New Delhi
2005), 98-156; and Jim Shaffer and Diane Lichtenstein, “South Asian Archaeology
and the Myth of Indo-Aryan Invasions” in Edwin Bryant and Laurie Patton, eds., The
Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and Inference in Indian History(New York 2005), 75-104. For further context see
among others Thomas Trautmann, Aryans and British India(Berkeley 1997); Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and
Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (New
York 2002); Vasant Kaiwar, “The Aryan Model of History and the Oriental
Renaissance” in Vasant Kaiwar and Sucheta Mazumdar, eds., Antinomies of
Modernity: Essays on Race, Orient, Nation (Durham 2003); Romila Thapar, “The Theory of Aryan Race and India: History
and Politics” Social Scientist24
(1996), 3-29; Peter van der Veer, “Aryan Origins” in van der Veer, Imperial
Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain(Princeton 2001), 134-157; Dorothy Figueira, Aryans,
Jews, Brahmins: Theorizing Authority through Myths of Identity (Albany
2003); Neil Macmaster, Racism in Europe 1870-2000 (New York 2001); George Hersey, “Aryanism in Victorian
England” Yale Review66 (1976),
104-113; Hans Hock, “Philology and the Historical Interpretation of the Vedic
Texts” in Bryant and Patton, eds., The Indo-Aryan Controversy, 282-308; Thomas Trautmann, “Constructing the Racial
Theory of Indian Civilization” in Trautmann, ed., The Aryan Debate(Oxford 2005), 84-105; Romila Thapar, “Some
Appropriations of the Theory of Aryan Race Relating to the Beginnings of Indian
History” in Trautmann, ed., The Aryan Debate, 106-128; Edwin Bryant, “Myths of Origin: Europe and
the Aryan Homeland Quest” in Bryant, The Quest for the Origins of Vedic
Culture (Oxford 2001), 13-45; J. P.
Mallory, “Epilogue: The Aryan Myth” in Mallory, In Search of the
Indo-Europeans(London 1989); Maurice
Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the
Nineteenth Century (Cambridge 1992);
Peter Becker, Wege ins Dritte Reich: Sozialdarwinismus, Rassismus,
Antisemitismus und völkischer Gedanke(Stuttgart 1988); Ruth Römer, Sprachwissenschaft
und Rassenideologie in Deutschland(Munich
1989); Patrik von zur Mühlen, Rassenideologien:
Geschichte und Hintergründe (Bonn 1979).
[20]For more of the substantial research on the history
of the Aryan myth, and its theosophical inflections in particular, see Joan
Leopold, “The Aryan Theory of Race”, Indian Economic and Social
History Review, Vol. 7 (1970),
271-297; Joan Leopold, “British Applications of the Aryan Theory of Race to
India, 1850-1870” English Historical Review89 (1974), 578-603; Peter Pels, “Occult Truths:
Race, Conjecture, and Theosophy in Victorian Anthropology” in Richard
Handler ed., Excluded Ancestors, Inventible Traditions(Madison 2000), 11-41; Gauri Viswanathan,
“Conversion, Theosophy, and Race Theory” in Viswanathan, Outside
the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton 1998), 177-207; Carla Risseuw, “Thinking Culture
Through Counter-culture: The Case of Theosophists in India and Ceylon and their
Ideas on Race and Hierarchy (1875-1947)” in Antony Copley, ed., Gurus
and Their Followers: New Religious Reform Movements in Colonial India(Oxford 2000), 180-205; George Mosse, “The Occult
Origins of National Socialism” in Mosse, The Fascist Revolution(New York 1999); Jeffrey Goldstein, “On Racism and
Anti-Semitism in Occultism and Nazism,” Yad Vashem Studies13 (1979), 53-72; Jackson Spielvogel and David Redles,
“Hitler’s Racial Ideology: Content and Occult Sources,” Simon Wiesenthal
Center Annual3 (1986), 227-246;
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism(New York 1992); Stefan Arvidsson, “Aryan Mythology
As Science and Ideology,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 67, no. 2 (1999): 327-54; Romila Thapar, “The
Historiography of the Concept of ‘Aryan’” in Thapar, ed., India: Historical
Beginnings and the Concept of the Aryan,
1-40; Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth(Chicago 1999), 76-95; Colin Kidd, “The Aryan Moment: Racialising Religion in
the Nineteenth Century” in Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in
the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-2000(Cambridge 2006), 168-202 and 237-246; Leon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth(New York 1974); Stefan Arvidsson, Aryan Idols:
Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science(Chicago 2006). Strangely, Fant himself invokes the
latter book, apparently believing it absolves his own blind spots.
[24]Strikingly, Fant has literally nothing to say about
anthroposophist holocaust denial, a phenomenon he apparently does not find
troubling. For classic instances of anthroposophical holocaust denial,
interested readers may consult Bernhard Schaub, Adler und Rose: Wesen und
Schicksal Mitteleuropas(Aargau 1992)
and Gennadij Bondarew, Anthroposophie auf der Kreuzung der
okkult-politischen Bewegungen der Gegenwart (Basel 1996). This
unpleasant trend is by no means a thing of the past; the online writings of
anthroposophist Willy Lochmann are a very relevant current example. For further
recent instances see the posts on this topic from Robert Mason, Michael Howell,
Stephen Hale, and other anthroposophists to various publicly accessible email
lists such as the “Anthroposophy” list
(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/anthroposophy/messages), the “Anthroposophy
Tomorrow” list (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/anthroposophy_tomorrow/messages),
the “Waldorf Critics” list
https://waldorfcritics.org/discuss/), etc. Anthroposophists’ repeatedly
expressed “doubts” about the holocaust are a significant example of the
“deflective negationism” diagnosed by scholarly analysts of the holocaust
denial movement such as Florin Lobont and Michael Shafir; for background see
Lobont, “Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial in Post-Communist Eastern Europe” in
Dan Stone, ed., The Historiography of the Holocaust, New York 2004, and Shafir, “Denying the Holocaust
where it Happened” in Ronit Lentin, ed., Re-Presenting the Shoah for the 21st
Century, Oxford 2004. The ongoing
open propagation of aggressively antisemitic conspiracy theories and holocaust
denial propaganda under anthroposophist auspices demonstrates the futility of
Fant’s head-in-the-sand approach: Simply ignoring the most disturbing aspects
of the contemporary anthroposophical movement will not magically make them go
away.
[27]In 2000, for example, one of the chief
anthroposophical periodicals, Die Christengemeinschaft, published several articles by prolific far-right
author and holocaust denier Gustav Sichelschmidt, a prominent fixture in
hardline German nationalist circles for many years. Sichelschmidt also
published a number of articles in another central anthroposophist journal, Die
Drei, in the 1960s and 1970s.
Sichelschmidt’s numerous books specialized in xenophobic polemics against
“foreigners” in Germany and vehemently rejected the idea of a multicultural
society, while trumpeting the “mission” of the German people. For examples see
among many others his 1981 book Deutschland in Gefahr, his 1992 book Der ewige Deutschenhaß, or
his 1996 book Tanz auf dem Vulkan.
The latter work, for instance, polemicizes against “obscure internationalists”
who are defiling Germany by promoting “a multiethnic society,” denounces
“foreign groups” and “one-world proponents” as “anti-German forces,” and
insists that “the true mission of the Germans” is to redeem the world. The book
also ridicules “the specter of the so-called holocaust,” which Sichelschmidt
dismisses as a “lie” and mere “anti-German propaganda.” He excoriates “materialism”
and cultural “decadence” in terms quite similar to Steiner’s own while
constantly invoking Goethe, rails against “the Jewish lobby” and the
Americanization of German life, and declares that supporters of western
democracy are “murdering the soul of the German people.” In the same book,
Sichelschmidt vehemently opposes allowing Germany to become a “multiethnic”
country, or even permitting “different ethnic groups” to live in Germany. In
light of all this, anthroposophists might consider asking themselves some
pertinent and long-overdue questions, such as: What is it that made
Sichelschmidt’s work appealing to anthroposophical editors and readers? And
what is it that made anthroposophy appealing to Sichelschmidt? For a helpful
overview in English of Sichelschmidt’s work see Jay Rosellini, Literary
Skinheads? Writing from the Right in Reunified Germany(Purdue 2000), pp. 149-157 and 249.
[41]This facet of the article had a very illuminating epilogue. In 2005 – five years after Anthroposophy and Ecofascismoriginally appeared – Schnurre hired a Swedish attorney to threaten a libel lawsuit against the publishers of the Swedish translation of my article. The lawyer claimed he had “spoken to several persons who were present at the Schnurre seminar,” and they “did not recognize Schnurre’s words” as reported in my article. These supposed eyewitnesses were not only anonymous, their statements came eleven years after Schnurre’s 1994 seminar occurred. The incident is a classic example of anthroposophist attempts to intimidate critical scholars, and it provides among other things a fascinating instance of the gap between historical evidence and legal evidence: in stark contrast to these claimed ex post facto accounts by ostensible eyewitnesses, which suddenly emerged eleven years after the fact, I quoted from the extremely detailed minutes of Schnurre’s 1994 lecture taken directly by an audience member and published in Germany within a month of the lecture itself. Schnurre never challenged those minutes, nor did he challenge three separate books and at least one article subsequently published in Germany which excerpt the published minutes extensively. Thus quite apart from the transparently disingenuous nature of this legal ploy, there are excellent substantive reasons to prefer the minutes as a source to the supposed “witness statements.” Moreover, Fant’s inane notion that the quotes attributed to Schnurre are “quite contradictory to his conception of life” is entirely beside the point; even if this peculiar claim were both true and substantiated by Fant, or for that matter by Schnurre himself, it would plainly have nothing to do with whether Schnurre did in fact make the statements attributed to him, much less with whether those statements are racist. It is scarcely uncommon to find anthroposophists who take their own views to be fundamentally anti-racist, when many non-anthroposophists consider these very same views to be flatly racist. I recommended at the time that Schnurre simply write a brief piece explaining his actual views on race, and then let all readers decide whether they consider these views racist. This recommendation, tellingly, went unheeded.
[47]For much more extensive examination of these issues,
see Peter Staudenmaier, “Occultism, Race, and Politics in German-speaking
Europe, 1880-1940: A Survey of the Historical Literature” forthcoming in European
History Quarterly2008.
[51]My own research has identified many further
anthroposophists who belonged to the Nazi party and its affiliated
organizations. A non-comprehensive list of active anthroposophists who were
members of the Nazi party, the SA, or the SS includes the following figures:
Hanns Rascher, Friedrich Benesch, Franz Lippert, Otto Julius Hartmann, Eugen
Link, Margarete Link, Wolfgang Schuchhardt, Werner Voigt, Udo Renzenbrink, Friedrich
Kipp, Rudolf Kreutzer, Oskar Franz Wienert, Carl Fritz, Hugo Kalbe, Leo Tölke,
Clara Remer, Heimo Rau, Gotthold Hegele, Otto Thorwirth, Ernst Harmstorf, Anni
Müller-Link, Harald Kabisch, Max Babl, Hermann Pöschel, Hermann Mahle, Otto
Feyh, Hans Pohlmann, Friedrich Mahling, Ernst Charrois, Alfred Köhler, Hans
Merkel, Carl Grund. (For archival citations see Peter Staudenmaier,
“Anthroposophen und Nationalsozialismus – Neue Erkenntnisse” Info3July 2007.) Alongside these figures stand a series of
more complicated cases such as Werner Georg Haverbeck, Johannes Werner Klein,
Georg Michaelis, Els Moll, Georg Halbe, Otto Ohlendorf, Alwin Seifert, Albert
Friehe, Renate Riemeck, Hermann Reischle, Werner Priever, Richard Karutz, Josef
Schulz, Lotar Eickhoff, Johannes Bertram-Pingel, Ernst Blümel, Herman
Weidelener, Paul Reiss, Friedrich Böhnlein, Gotthilf Ackermann, Max Rodi,
August Wegfraß, etc. This is not “an utterly small number” of people, and many
of these figures were anything but marginal to the twentieth century
anthroposophical movement.
[62]For reasons I do not fully understand, this aspect of
my original article has been the source of a remarkable level of indignation
and vituperation on the part of anthroposophists, many of whom appear to
believe that if some anthroposophists were Fascists and Nazis, then all
anthroposophists must be Fascists and Nazis. I came to the topic of
anthroposophy via my research on the ‘green wing’ of Nazism, and this
connection was the subject of my article; it is scarcely surprising that
anthroposophist Nazis loom large in such an analysis. Even non-anthroposophist
readers have had difficulty making sense of this. Some took exception to my
claim that anthroposophy’s political outlook has had a decidedly reactionary
cast from the beginning, apparently finding that this claim sits uneasily alongside
the prominent presence of anthroposophists in the Green movement and other
progressive trends. Since this theme goes to the heart of my argument in
“Anthroposophy and Ecofascism,” I will try to re-state my point: I think very
many anthroposophists, today as in the past, are profoundly confused about
politics and routinely mix together left-wing and right-wing viewpoints, and
when they get involved in progressive efforts they often end up representing the
least emancipatory and most conservative elements within those milieus. I
further argue that this pattern is not accidental but flows from Steiner’s own
reactionary political assumptions, outlined at some length in the present
series of articles. Steiner himself is a classic example of the kind of
left-right crossover in modern German culture that I study, which is exactly
how I stumbled onto the topic of anthroposophy in the first place.
[64]The fact that Lippert’s hearing was part of the German civilian court process rather than the Allied de-Nazification proceedings is perfectly clear from Fant’s own preferred source; Werner’s Anthroposophen in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismusrefers repeatedly and unambiguously to a “Spruchkammerverfahren,” the term for the German civilian juries, not to an Allied de-Nazification commission. That Fant mixed up these two starkly contrasting venues is very telling indeed. The distinction is crucial to understanding the whole process of ‘denazification’ and its eventual failure. The Allies took an extremely skeptical view of the “Spruchkammer” and their notoriously lenient approach to figures like Lippert. For context see the chapter “Die deutschen Spruchkammern” in Clemens Vollnhals, Entnazifizierung(Munich 1999), pp. 259-338. For even more detail see the 700 page study by Lutz Niethammer, Entnazifizierung in Bayern(Frankfurt 1972), particularly chapter 5, “Das Spruchkammerverfahren und die Betroffenen”, pp. 538-652.
[69]Walter Wuttke-Groneberg, “Von Heidelberg nach
Dachau,” in Gerhard Baader and Ulrich Schultz, eds, Medizin und
Nationalsozialismus(Berlin 1980),
pp. 113-138; quote at p. 119. See especially the section “Die Heilkräuterplantage
im KZ Dachau” pp. 116-120.
[71]
Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz, Die Mächtigen und die
Hilflosen: als Häftling in Dachau(Stuttgart 1957), pp. 105-108.
[72]Otto Pies, Stephanus Heute(Kevelaer 1951), p. 127.
[73]Jean Bernard, Pfarrerblock Dachau(Munich 1984), pp. 89-90.
[75]For example, Reimund Schnabel’s book Die Frommen
in der Hölle: Geistliche in Dachau(Frankfurt 1966) provides a study of clergy inmates at Dachau, who were
especially frequently assigned to the labor battalion at Lippert’s biodynamic
plantation. Schnabel describes the plantation on pp. 140-142. He notes that for
some inmates the plantation was a relatively preferred work detail, while for
others it was hellish, with dangerous and often deadly working conditions. In
light of conflicting testimony from former prisoners, Schnabel concludes that “both
the descriptions of extremely cruel working conditions and the reports of
relatively comfortable activity are correct.” (p. 141) This is consistent with
evidence from other concentration camps as well.
[83]For an overview of the campaign to circulate these stories see Keith Nelson, “The ‘Black Horror on the Rhine’: Race as a Factor in Post-World War I Diplomacy” Journal of Modern Historyvol. 42 no. 4 (1970), pp. 606-627; Peter Martin, “Die Kampagne gegen die ‘Schwarze Schmach’ als Ausdruck konservativer Visionen vom Untergang des Abendlandes” in Gerhard Höpp, ed., Fremde Erfahrungen, Berlin 1996, pp. 211-224; Gisela Lebzelter, “Die “Schwarze Schmach”: Vourteile – Propaganda – Mythos” Geschichte und Gesellschaft11 (1985), pp. 37-58; Robert Reinders, “Racialism on the Left: E.D. Morel and the “Black Horror on the Rhine“” International Review of Social History 13 (1968), pp. 1-28; Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, ““Tirailleurs Sénégalais” und “Schwarze Schande” – Verlaufsformen und Konsequenzen einer deutsch-französischen Auseinandersetzung (1910-1926)” in Janos Riesz and Joachim Schultz, eds., Tirailleurs Sénégalais, Frankfurt 1989, pp. 57-73; Joachim Schultz, “Die “Utschebebbes” am Rhein – Zur Darstellung schwarzer Soldaten während der französischen Rheinlandbesetzung (1918-1930)” in Riesz and Schultz, Tirailleurs Sénégalais, pp. 75-100; Clarence Lusane, “Black Troops and the Race Question in Pre-Nazi Germany” in Lusane, Hitler’s Black Victims, New York 2002. The definitive study of the topic is Christian Koller, “Von Wilden aller Rassen niedergemetzelt”: die Diskussion um die Verwendung von Kolonialtruppen in Europa zwischen Rassismus, Kolonial- und Militärpolitik (1914-1930), Stuttgart 2001. See also the recent volume by Iris Wigger, Die “Schwarze Schmach am Rhein”: Rassistische Diskriminierung zwischen Geschlecht, Klasse, Nation und Rasse, Münster 2007.
[88]Some readers of Anthroposophy and Ecofascismhave found its lessons difficult to learn because
they apparently mistook it for a scholarly article meant for other historians
rather than a popular treatment written for a lay audience. A word on this peculiar
confusion may be in order here. The difference between scholarly publications
and popular publications can sometimes be decisive, not just in terms of tone but
in terms of content. That a number of anthroposophists took my article to be a
scholarly publication indicates among other things just how far removed
contemporary anthroposophy is from the world of scholarship. The distinctions
between scholarly and popular approaches are central to the purposes my article
was designed to fulfill. Consider a contrasting case: When my students hand in
papers that refer, for example, to “nineteenth century misconceptions about
race,” I will circle such phrases and recommend replacing them with something
along the lines of “the conceptions about race that were predominant at the
time.” This kind of circumspection is important from a historian’s perspective;
it avoids making judgements about the past based on the standards of the
present, and reminds us that present standards are just as open to revision as
past ones were. In popular treatments, in contrast, there is nothing wrong with
offering penetrating criticism of past figures and actions and ideas,
particularly those with some significant connection to present debates; indeed
this sort of criticism is one of the crucial strengths of popular writing. The
widespread allergic reaction to my article among anthroposophists – who were,
after all, hardly its intended audience – indicates that such criticism remains
very much necessary.
