Dealing with the forces of evil
On the final day of the Christmas Conference of 1923/1924 Rudolf Steiner said, ‘Looking out into the world today we realize the enormous destructive potential that has been around for years. The forces that are at work there foreshadow the abysses that Western civilization is heading towards’ (GA 260, evening of 1 January 1924).
The confrontation with the forces of evil pervades Steiner’s entire work but culminated in 1923 after the destruction of the Goetheanum, the political radicalization of Germany and the rise of National Socialism. ‘It is possible, my dear friends, that in 1933 the earth and everything living on it will perish,’ Rudolf Steiner said as early as September 1924 in his last lectures (GA 346, 20 September 1924). ‘With reference to the Apocalypse one would have to say: before the etheric Christ can be perceived in the right way, humanity must first overcome the beast that will rise in 1933’ (ibid.).
Study of National Socialism
One of the tasks of the General Anthroposophical Section at the Goetheanum is to explore many of the questions associated with this. For 2023 I will only briefly mention four aspects: a study trip to Weimar and Buchenwald (DE), the historical research into the behaviour of anthroposophical physicians under National Socialism, a monograph on the subject of Anthroposophy and Antisemitism and Jacques Lusseyran’s testimony of life.
In April 2023 we spent three days in Weimar with the students of the international anthroposophy course (see p. 8) and visited the memorial of Buchenwald concentration camp, where more than a quarter of a million people from 26 nations were imprisoned between 1937 and 1945, one in five of whom died. Among other things we asked how it was possible for evil to take hold so close to Weimar, a place from which such essential humanist forces had radiated out – and we reflected on Rudolf Steiner’s warnings and his initiatives against such a development.
A scientific study carried out at the Ita Wegman Institute into the behaviour during National Socialism of the anthroposophical physicians and the pharmaceutical companies Weleda and Wala will be published in three comprehensive volumes by Schwabe (Basel, CH) in 2024/2025. The first volume with over 900 pages will come out in the spring of 2024; there are plans for a media conference in Berlin (DE).
The book on Anthroposophy, Judaism and Antisemitism published by the General Anthroposophical Section in autumn 2023 and compiled in collaboration with Udi Levy and Iftach Ben Aharon, was introduced in Anthroposophy Worldwide 11/2023. Udi Levy’s autobiographical contribution to this volume is highly relevant.
Forces arising from anthroposophy
On 17 April 1970 the Buchenwald survivor Jacques Lusseyran spoke in the Goetheanum’s main auditorium about the courage to survive that he found in forces he drew from anthroposophy. At the age of 17, the blind writer began to set up the resistance organization Volontaires de la Liberté (volunteers of liberty) with pupils of the Paris colleges Louis le Grand and Henry IV and students from the Sorbonne (FR).
I hope that my small commemorative book Der Mut des Überlebens. Jacques Lusseyran in Buchenwald [The courage to survive. Jacques Lusseyran in Buchenwald] which was published at Michaelmas will be translated into all languages of the world, in honour of Jacques Lusseyran and for the sake of the future.