The Story of My Life
GA 28
Chapter XXVIII
[ 1 ] At this difficult time of my life the executive committee of the Berlin Workers' School came to me with the request that I should take charge of the courses in history and practice in “speaking” in the school. I was at first little interested in the socialistic connections of the school. I saw the beautiful task offered me of teaching mature men and women of the working class, for few young people were among the “pupils.” I explained to the committee that, if I took over the teaching, I must lecture entirely according to my own views of the course of evolution in human history, not in the style in which this is customary according to Marxism in Social-Democratic circles. They still wished to have me as a teacher.
[ 2 ] After I had made this reservation, it could no longer disturb me that the school was a Social-Democratic foundation of the elder Liebknecht (the father). For me the school consisted of men and women of the proletariat; the fact that the great majority were Social-Democrats did not at all concern me.
[ 3 ] But I obviously had to do with the mental character of the “pupils.” I had to speak in forms of expression to which I had till then been quite unaccustomed. I had to familiarize myself with the forms of conception and judgment of these persons in order to be in some measure understood.
[ 4 ] These forms of conceptions and judgments came from two directions. First, from life. These people knew manual labour and its results. The spiritual Powers guiding mankind forward in history did not enter into their minds. It was for this reason that Marxism, with its “materialistic conception of history,” had such an easy way with them. Marx maintained that the impelling forces in the historic process are merely economic-material forces, those operative in manual labour. The “spiritual factors” are considered merely a sort of by-product which arises from the material-economic factors – as a mere ideology.
[ 5 ] A craving for scientific education had long before grown up among the workers. But this could be gratified only by means of the popular materialistic scientific literature. For this literature alone dealt in the forms of conceptions and judgments known to the workers. Whatever was not materialistic was written in such a way that the workers could not possibly understand it. Thus came about the unspeakably tragic fact that, while the developing proletariat desired knowledge with the most intense craving, this craving of theirs was satisfied only by means of the grossest materialism.
[ 6 ] It must be confessed that half-truths are imbedded in the economic materialism which the workers take from Marxism as the “materialistic conception of history.” And these half-truths are just the thing they easily understand. If I had taught idealistic history to the complete ignoring of these half-truths, the students would have found involuntarily in the lack of these materialistic half-truths the very thing which would have repelled them in my lectures.
[ 7 ] I therefore took as my starting-point a truth which could be grasped by my hearers also. I showed that to speak of a mastery by the economic forces up to the sixteenth century, as Marx does, is nonsense. That from the sixteenth century on the economic first comes into a relationship which can be conceived in a Marxian way; and that this process then reaches its climax in the nineteenth century.
[ 8 ] In this way it was possible to speak quite as a matter of fact of the ideal-spiritual impulses in connection with the preceding periods of history, and to show that in the most recent times these had grown weak in comparison with the material-economic impulses.
[ 9 ] In this way the workers arrived at conceptions of capacities for knowledge, of religious, artistic, and moral impulses in history, and abandoned the habit of thinking these mere “ideology.” It would have been senseless to resort to polemics against materialism; I had to cause realism to arise out of materialism.
[ 10 ] In the “practice in speaking” little could be done in this direction. After I had discussed at the beginning of each course the formal principles of lecturing and speaking, the pupils made practice speeches. Inevitably they then brought forward what was familiar to them from their materialistic nature.
[ 11 ] The “leaders” of the labour unions did not at first trouble themselves at all about the school, and so I had a perfectly free hand.
[ 12 ] It became more difficult for me when the teaching of the natural sciences was annexed to that of history. There it was especially difficult to ascend to true conceptions from the materialistic conceptions dominant in science, especially among its popularizers. I did this as well as I possibly could.
[ 13 ] Now, however, my teaching activity was extended through the sciences among the workers themselves. I was requested by numerous workers' unions to lecture on natural science.
Especially was instruction desired concerning that book then creating a sensation, Haeckel's Welträtsel.1The Riddle of the Universe. In the positive biological third of this book I saw a comprehensive handbook on the metamorphosis of living beings. My general conviction that mankind can be led from this side to spirituality I held to be true also for the workers. I connected my reflections with this third of the book and said often enough that the other two-thirds must be considered worthless and really ought to be cut out of the book and thrown away.
[ 14 ] At the celebration of the Gutenberg jubilee I was entrusted with the festival address before 7,000 type-setters and printers in a Berlin circus. My manner of speaking to the workers must therefore have been found congenial.
[ 15 ] With this activity destiny had once more transplanted me into a piece of life into which I had to submerge myself. I came to see how the single souls among this workers' group slumbered and dreamed, and how a sort of mass-soul laid hold upon men, revolutionizing their conception, judgment, bearing.
[ 16 ] But it must not be imagined that the single souls were dead. In this respect I was able to look deeply into the souls of my pupils and of the whole workers' group. This brought me to the task which I set myself in all this activity. The attitude toward Marxism was not yet what it became two decades later. Marxism was still something which they elaborated with complete deliberation as a sort of economic gospel. Later it became something with which the mass of the proletariat were apparently obsessed.
[ 17 ] The proletariat consciousness then consisted of feelings which manifested themselves like the effect of mass suggestion. Many of the single souls said again and again: “A time must come in which the world shall evolve spiritual interests; but for the present the proletariat must be freed by purely economic means.”
[ 18 ] I found that my lectures wrought much good in their souls. Even that element was taken up which contradicted materialism and the Marxian conception of history. Later, when the leaders learned of my way of working, they fought against it. In a gathering of my pupils one of these “minor leaders” spoke. He made this statement: “We do not wish freedom in the proletarian movement; we wish rational compulsion.” Because of this the desire arose to drive me out of the school against the will of my pupils. This activity gradually became so burdensome to me that, soon after I began my anthroposophic work, I dropped it.
[ 19 ] It is my impression that if the workers' movement had been followed with interest by a greater number of unprejudiced persons, and if the proletariat had been dealt with understandingly, this movement would have developed quite differently. But we have left the people to live in their own class, and we have lived in ours. The conceptions of each class of men held by the others were merely theoretical. There was discussion of wages when strikes and the like forced it; and all sorts of welfare movements were established. These latter were exceedingly creditable.
[ 20 ] But the submerging of these world-stirring questions into a spiritual sphere was wholly lacking. And yet only this could have taken from the movement its destructive forces. It was the time in which the “higher classes” had lost the community feeling, in which egoism spread abroad with it fierce competitive struggles – the time in which the world catastrophe of the second decade of the twentieth century was already being prepared. Side by side with this, the proletariat evolved the community sense in its own way as the proletarian class-consciousness. It took up the culture which had been developed in the “upper classes” only so far as this provided material for the justification of the proletarian class-consciousness. Gradually there ceased to be any bridge between the different classes.
[ 21 ] Thus by reason of the Magazine I was under the necessity of submerging myself in the being of the citizen, and through my activity among the workers in that of the proletariat. A rich field, wherein one could knowingly experience the motive forces of the time.
Chapter XXVIII
[ 1 ] In dieser für mich schweren Zeit trat nun der Vorstand der Berliner Arbeiterbildungsschule an mich heran mit dem Ersuchen, ich solle in dieser Schule den Unterricht in Geschichte und «Rede»übungen übernehmen. Mich interessierte zunächst der sozialistische Zusammenhang, in dem die Schule stand, wenig. Ich sah die schöne Aufgabe vor mir, gereifte Männer und Frauen aus dem Arbeiterstande zu belehren. Denn junge Leute waren wenige unter den «Schülern». Ich erklärte dem Vorstande, wenn ich den Unterricht übernähme, so würde ich ganz nach meiner Meinung von dem Entwickelungsgange der Menschheit Geschichte vortragen, nicht in dem Stil, wie das nach dem Marxismus jetzt in sozialdemokratischen Kreisen üblich sei. Man blieb dabei, meinen Unterricht zu wünschen.
[ 2 ] Nachdem ich diesen Vorbehalt gemacht hatte, konnte es mich nicht mehr berühren, daß die Schule eine sozialdemokratische Gründung des alten Liebknecht (des Vaters) war. Für mich bestand die Schule aus Männern und Frauen aus dem Proletariat; mit der Tatsache, daß weitaus die meisten Sozialdemokraten waren, hatte ich nichts zu tun.
[ 3 ] Aber ich hatte selbstverständlich mit der Geistesart der «Schüler» zu tun. Ich mußte in Ausdrucksformen sprechen, die mir bis dahin ganz ungewohnt waren. In die Begriffs- und Urteilsformen dieser Leute mußte ich mich hineinfinden, um einigermaßen verstanden zu werden.
[ 4 ] Von zwei Seiten her kamen diese Begriffs- und Urteilsformen. Zunächst aus dem Leben. Die materielle Arbeit und deren Ergebnisse kannten diese Leute. Die die Menschheit in der Geschichte vorwärts geleitenden geistigen Mächte traten nicht vor ihre Seele. Deshalb hatte der Marxismus mit der «materialistischen Geschichtsauffassung» so leichtes Spiel. Er behauptete, die treibenden Kräfte im geschichtlichen Werden seien nur die wirtschaftlich-materiellen, die in materieller Arbeit erzeugten. Die «geistigen Faktoren» seien bloß eine Art Nebenprodukt, das aus dem Materiell-Wirtschaftlichen aufsteigt: sie seien eine bloße Ideologie.
[ 5 ] Dazu kam, daß sich damals in der Arbeiterschaft ein Eifer nach wissenschaftlicher Bildung seit lange entwikkelt hatte. Aber der konnte nur in der populären materialistisch-wissenschaftlichen Literatur befriedigt werden. Denn nur diese Literatur traf eben auf die Begriffs- und Urteilsformen der Arbeiter auf. Was nicht materialistisch war, war so geschrieben, daß ein Verständnis für den Arbeiter unmöglich war. So kam die unsäglich tragische Tatsache, daß, als das werdende Proletariat mit höchster Sehnsucht nach Erkenntnis begehrte, ihm diese nur mit dem gröbsten Materialismus befriedigt wurde.
[ 6 ] Man muß bedenken, daß in dem wirtschaftlichen Materialismus, den die Arbeiter durch den Marxismus als «materialistische Geschichte» in sich aufnehmen, Teilwahrheiten stecken. Und daß diese Teilwahrheiten gerade das sind, was sie leicht verstehen. Hätte ich daher mit völligem Außerachtlassen dieser Teilwahrheiten idealistische Geschichte gelehrt, man hätte in den materialistischen Teilwahrheiten ganz unwillkürlich das empfunden, was von meinem Vortrage zurückstieß.
[ 7 ] Ich ging deshalb von einer auch für meine Zuhörer zu begreifenden Wahrheit aus. Ich zeigte, wie bis zum sechzehnten Jahrhundert von einer Herrschaft der wirtschaftlichen Kräfte, so wie dies Marx tut, zu sprechen, ein Unding sei. Wie vom sechzehnten Jahrhundert an die Wirtschaft erst in Verhältnisse einrückt, die man marxistisch fassen kann; wie dieser Vorgang dann im neunzehnten Jahrhundert seinen Höhepunkt erlangt.
[ 8 ] So war es möglich, für die vorangehenden Zeitalter der Geschichte die ideell-geistigen Impulse ganz sachgemäß zu besprechen und zu zeigen, wie diese in der neuesten Zeit schwach geworden sind gegenüber den materiell-wirtschaftlichen.
[ 9 ] Die Arbeiter bekamen auf diese Art Vorstellungen von den Erkenntnisfähigkeiten, den religiösen, den künstlerischen, den sittlichen Triebkräften in der Geschichte und kamen davon ab, diese nur als «Ideologie» anzusehen. Dabei polemisch gegen den Materialismus zu werden, hätte gar keinen Sinn gehabt; ich mußte aus dem Materialismus heraus den Idealismus erstehen lassen.
[ 10 ] In den «Redeübungen» konnte allerdings nur wenig nach der gleichen Richtung getan werden. Nachdem ich immer im Beginne eines Kurses die formalen Regeln des Vortragens und Redens erörtert hatte, sprachen die «Schüler» in Übungsreden. Sie brachten da selbstverständlich das vor, was ihnen nach ihrer materialistischen Art geläufig war.
[ 11 ] Die «Führer» der Arbeiterschaft bekümmerten sich zunächst gar nicht um die Schule. Und so hatte ich völlig freie Hand.
[ 12 ] Schwieriger wurde für mich die Sache, als zu dem geschichtlichen Unterricht der naturwissenschaftliche hinzuwuchs. Da war es besonders schwer, von den in der Wissenschaft, namentlich bei deren Popularisatoren, herrschenden materialistischen Vorstellungen zu sachgemäßen aufzusteigen. Ich tat es, so gut es nur irgend ging.
[ 13 ] Nun dehnte sich aber gerade durch die Naturwissenschaft meine Unterrichtstätigkeit innerhalb der Arbeiterschaft aus. Ich wurde von zahlreichen Gewerkschaften aufgefordert, naturwissenschaftliche Vorträge zu halten. Insbesondere wünschte man Belehrung über das damals Aufsehen machende Buch Haeckels: «Welträtsel». Ich sah in dem positiv biologischen Drittel dieses Buches eine präzis-kurze Zusammenfassung der Verwandtschaft der Lebewesen. Was im allgemeinen meine Überzeugung war, daß die Menschheit von dieser Seite zur Geistigkeit geführt werden könne, das hielt ich auch für die Arbeiterschaft richtig. Ich knüpfte meine Betrachtungen an dieses Drittel des Buches an und sagte oft genug, daß man die zwei andern Drittel für wertlos halten muß und eigentlich von dem Buche wegschneiden und vernichten solle.
[ 14 ] Als das Gutenberg-Jubiläum gefeiert wurde, übertrug man mir die Festrede vor 7000 Setzern und Druckern in einem Berliner Zirkus. Meine Art, zu den Arbeitern zu sprechen, wurde also sympathisch empfunden.
[ 15 ] Das Schicksal hatte mich mit dieser Tätigkeit wieder in ein Stück Leben versetzt, in das ich unterzutauchen hatte. Wie die Einzelseele innerhalb dieser Arbeiterschaft schlummerte und träumte, und wie eine Art Massenseele diese Menschheit ergriff, die Vorstellung, Urteil, Haltung umschlang, das stellte sich vor mich hin.
[ 16 ] Man darf sich aber nicht vorstellen, daß die Einzelseelen erstorben gewesen wären. Ich habe nach dieser Richtung tiefe Blicke in die Seelen meiner Schüler und überhaupt der Arbeiterschaft tun können. Das trug mich in der Aufgabe, die ich mir bei dieser ganzen Tätigkeit stellte. Die Stellung zum Marxismus war damals bei den Arbeitern noch nicht so, wie zwei Jahrzehnte später. Damals war ihnen der Marxismus etwas, das sie wie ein ökonomisches Evangelium mit voller Überlegung verarbeiteten. Später ist er etwas geworden, wovon die proletarische Masse wie besessen ist.
[ 17 ] Das Proletarierbewußtsein bestand damals in Empfindungen, die wie Wirkung von Massensuggestionen sich ausnahmen. Viele der Einzelseelen sagten immer wieder: es muß eine Zeit kommen, in der die Welt wieder geistige Interessen entwickelt; aber zunächst muß das Proletariat rein wirtschaftlich erlöst werden.
[ 18 ] Ich fand, daß meine Vorträge in den Seelen manches Gute wirkten. Es wurde aufgenommen, auch was dem Materialismus und der marxistischen Geschichtsauffassung widersprach. Als später die «Führer» von meiner Art Wirken erfuhren, da wurde es von ihnen angefochten. In einer Versammlung meiner Schüler sprach einer dieser «kleinen Führer». Er sagte das Wort: «Wir wollen nicht Freiheit in der proletarischen Bewegung; wir wollen vernünftigen Zwang.» Es ging das darauf hinaus, mich gegen den Willen meiner Schüler aus der Schule hinauszutreiben. Mir wurde die Tätigkeit allmählich so erschwert, daß ich sie bald, nachdem ich anthroposophisch zu wirken begonnen hatte, fallen ließ.
[ 19 ] Ich habe den Eindruck, wenn damals von Seite einer größeren Anzahl unbefangener Menschen die Arbeiterbewegung mit Interesse verfolgt und das Proletariat mit Verständnis behandelt worden wäre, so hätte sich diese Bewegung ganz anders entfaltet. Aber man überließ die Leute dem Leben innerhalb ihrer Klasse, und lebte selbst innerhalb der seinigen. Es waren bloß theoretische Ansichten, die die eine Klasse der Menschen von der andern hatte. Man verhandelte in Lohnfragen, wenn Streiks u. dgl. dazu nötigten; man gründete allerlei Wohlfahrtseinrichtungen. Das letztere war außerordentlich anerkennenswert.
[ 20 ] Aber alles Tauchen dieser weltbewegenden Fragen in eine geistige Sphäre fehlte. Und doch hätte nur ein solches der Bewegung ihre zerstörenden Kräfte nehmen können. Es war die Zeit, in der die «höheren Klassen» das Gemeinschaftsgefühl verloren, in der der Egoismus mit dem wilden Konkurrenzkampf sich ausbreitete. Die Zeit, in der sich die Weltkatastrophe des zweiten Jahrzehnts des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts schon vorbereitete. Daneben entwickelte das Proletariat auf seine Art das Gemeinschaftsgefühl als proletarisches Klassenbewußtsein. Es nahm an der «Kultur», die sich in den «oberen Klassen» gebildet hatte, nur insoferne teil, als diese Material lieferten zur Rechtfertigung des proletarischen Klassenbewußtseins. Es fehlte allmählich jede Brücke zwischen den verschiedenen Klassen.
[ 21 ] So stand ich durch das «Magazin» in der Notwendigkeit, in das bürgerliche Wesen unterzutauchen, durch meine Tätigkeit in der Arbeiterschaft in das proletarische. Ein reiches Feld, um die treibenden Kräfte der Zeit erkennend mitzuerleben.
Chapter XXVIII
[ 1 ] In these difficult times for me, the board of the Berlin Workers' Education School approached me with the request that I should take over the teaching of history and "speech" exercises at this school. At first I was not very interested in the socialist context in which the school stood. I saw before me the wonderful task of teaching mature men and women from the working class. Because there were few young people among the "pupils". I explained to the board that if I were to take over the lessons, I would present history entirely according to my own opinion of the development of mankind, not in the style that is now customary in social democratic circles according to Marxism. They stuck to wanting my lessons.
[ 2 ] After I had made this reservation, it could no longer affect me that the school was a social-democratic foundation of the old Liebknecht (the father). For me, the school consisted of men and women from the proletariat; I had nothing to do with the fact that the vast majority were Social Democrats.
[ 3 ] But of course I had to deal with the mindset of the "students". I had to speak in forms of expression that were completely unfamiliar to me until then. I had to find my way into the concepts and judgments of these people in order to be understood to some extent.
[ 4 ] These concepts and judgments came from two sides. First from life. These people were familiar with material work and its results. The spiritual powers guiding humanity forward in history did not come before their souls. This is why Marxism had such an easy time with the "materialist view of history". It claimed that the driving forces in historical development were only the economic-material forces that were produced by material labor. The "spiritual factors" were merely a kind of by-product that emerged from the material-economic: they were a mere ideology.
[ 5 ] In addition, a zeal for scientific education had been developing in the working class for a long time. But this could only be satisfied in popular materialistic-scientific literature. For only this literature met the conceptual and judgmental forms of the workers. What was not materialistic was written in such a way that it was impossible for the worker to understand. Thus came the unspeakably tragic fact that when the nascent proletariat yearned for knowledge with the greatest longing, it was satisfied only with the crudest materialism.
[ 6 ] It must be borne in mind that the economic materialism which the workers absorb through Marxism as "materialist history" contains partial truths. And that these partial truths are precisely what they easily understand. Therefore, if I had taught idealistic history with complete disregard for these partial truths, one would have felt quite involuntarily in the materialistic partial truths that which recoiled from my lecture.
[ 7 ] I therefore proceeded from a truth that could also be understood by my listeners. I showed how up to the sixteenth century it was absurd to speak of a domination of economic forces, as Marx does. How, from the sixteenth century onwards, the economy first moves into conditions that can be understood in Marxist terms; how this process then reaches its climax in the nineteenth century.
[ 8 ] So it was possible to discuss the ideational-spiritual impulses for the preceding ages of history quite appropriately and to show how these have become weaker in recent times compared to the material-economic ones.
[ 9 ] In this way, the workers gained an understanding of the cognitive, religious, artistic and moral driving forces in history and moved away from viewing them merely as "ideology". It would have made no sense to become polemical against materialism; I had to let idealism emerge from materialism.
[ 10 ] In the "speech exercises", however, little could be done in the same direction. After I had always discussed the formal rules of presenting and speaking at the beginning of a course, the "students" spoke in practice speeches. They naturally presented what they were familiar with in their materialistic way.
[ 11 ] The "leaders" of the working class didn't care about the school at first. And so I had a completely free hand.
[ 12 ] Things became more difficult for me when science lessons were added to the history lessons. It was particularly difficult then to move on from the materialistic ideas prevalent in science, especially among its popularizers, to more objective ones. I did it as best I could.
[ 13 ] Now, however, it was precisely through natural science that my teaching activities within the working class expanded. I was asked by numerous trade unions to give scientific lectures. In particular, they wanted instruction on Haeckel's book "Welträtsel", which was causing a sensation at the time. I saw in the positive biological third of this book a precise and brief summary of the relationship of living beings. What I was generally convinced of, that mankind could be led to spirituality from this side, I also considered to be correct for the working class. I tied my observations to this third of the book and said often enough that the other two thirds must be considered worthless and should actually be cut away from the book and destroyed.
[ 14 ] When the Gutenberg anniversary was celebrated, I was given the ceremonial address in front of 7000 typesetters and printers in a Berlin circus. My way of speaking to the workers was therefore perceived sympathetically.
[ 15 ] Fate had put me back into a piece of life with this activity, into which I had to immerse myself. How the individual soul slumbered and dreamed within this workforce, and how a kind of mass soul gripped this humanity, embracing imagination, judgment, attitude, that presented itself to me.
[ 16 ] But one must not imagine that the individual souls had died. In this direction, I was able to take a deep look into the souls of my students and the working class in general. That helped me in the task I set myself in this whole activity. The attitude towards Marxism among the workers at that time was not yet the same as it was two decades later. Back then, Marxism was something that they processed like an economic gospel with full consideration. Later, it became something that the proletarian masses were obsessed with.
[ 17 ] The proletarian consciousness at that time consisted of feelings that were like the effects of mass suggestion. Many of the individual souls kept saying: There must come a time when the world will again develop spiritual interests; but first the proletariat must be redeemed purely economically.
[ 18 ] I found that my lectures had many a good effect on souls. It was received, even what contradicted materialism and the Marxist view of history. Later, when the "leaders" learned of my kind of work, they challenged it. One of these "little leaders" spoke at a meeting of my students. He said: "We don't want freedom in the proletarian movement; we want reasonable coercion." This amounted to driving me out of the school against the will of my students. My work gradually became so difficult that I dropped it soon after I had begun to work anthroposophically.
[ 19 ] I have the impression that if a larger number of unbiased people had followed the workers' movement with interest and treated the proletariat with understanding, this movement would have developed quite differently. But people were left to live within their class, and lived within their own. It was merely theoretical views that one class of people had of the other. They negotiated on wage matters when strikes and the like necessitated it; they founded all kinds of welfare institutions. The latter was extremely commendable.
[ 20 ] But all immersion of these world-shaking questions in a spiritual sphere was missing. And yet only this could have taken away the destructive powers of the movement. It was the time in which the "higher classes" lost their sense of community, in which egoism and fierce competition spread. The time in which the world catastrophe of the second decade of the twentieth century was already being prepared. At the same time, the proletariat developed a sense of community in its own way as a proletarian class consciousness. It participated in the "culture" that had formed in the "upper classes" only to the extent that they provided material to justify proletarian class consciousness. There was a gradual lack of any bridge between the different classes.
[ 21 ] Thus, through the "Magazin", I was compelled to immerse myself in the bourgeois character, and through my activity in the working class in the proletarian one. A rich field in which to experience and recognize the driving forces of the time.