Peter
Staudenmaier: „It's the Jews' fault“.
Interestingly, this was sometimes Steiner's position as
well, albeit without reference to the holocaust, which
occurred after Steiner's death. Steiner blamed the Jews
for Christ's death, for example; see Steiner, "Die
Völkerseelen und das Mysterium von Golgatha" (1918), in
Rudolf Steiner, Erdensterben und Weltenleben (Dornach
1967), pp.
158-9.
Steiner also blamed the Jews for antisemitism,
emphasizing that "the Jews have always differentiated
themselves from other people" and have thus "caused
aversion and antipathy" toward themselves: Steiner,
"Vom Wesen des Judentums" (1924), in Rudolf Steiner,
Die Geschichte der Menschheit und die Weltanschauungen
der Kulturvölker (Dornach 1968), p. 188.
Steiner also entertained a variety of conspiracy
theories about Jews, including the standard antisemitic
notions that Jews are to blame for wars and that Jews
are striving for world supremacy. On occasion Steiner's
fantasies along these lines essentially attributed
genocidal intentions to the Jews. According to Steiner,
for example, the ancient Hebrews believed "that the
earth could only become happy if everything else would
die off and only the members of this people would fill
the whole world." Rudolf Steiner, Der innere Aspekt des
sozialen Rätsels (Dornach 1972), p. 56.
Steiner also encouraged, financed, and wrote the
Preface to a major antisemitic work by anthroposophist
Karl Heise: Heise, Entente-Freimaurerei und Weltkrieg
(Basel 1920), which blames World War I on the Jews, as
well as on the perfidious democracies, the conniving
English and French, the soulless Americans, not to
mention the brutish Slavs and so forth.
Steiner's anthroposophist followers often elaborated on
these themes. Leading anthroposophist Helga
Scheel-Geelmuyden, for instance, described the Jews,
who "rejected the Son of the Virgin," as "a scattered
people that appears everywhere as the agent of the
atomistic elements of our intellectual culture"
(Scheel-Geelmuyden, "Die Schöpfung des Menschen im
Nordischen Mythos" published in Die Drei, official
organ of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany,
November 1925, p. 629).
Anthroposophist August Pauli held the Jews responsible
for the "disintegrating effects of intellectualism and
materialism" (Pauli, Blut und Geist, Stuttgart 1932, p.
29). In Nazi Germany in 1933, prominent anthroposophist
Friedrich Rittelmeyer blamed the Jews for "the
egoistic-intellectualistic-materialist spirit" that
plagued humanity (Rittelmeyer, Rudolf Steiner als
Führer zu neuem Christentum, Stuttgart 1933, p. 84).
Anthroposophist Ludwig Thieben developed these themes
at length in his book on "the enigma of Jewry"
(Thieben, Das Rätsel des Judentums, originally
published in 1931 and re-published by Swiss
anthroposophists in 1991). Thieben emphasised "the
momentous difference between the Aryan and the true
Jew" (p. 202) and decried the "manifold harmful
influence of the Jewish essence" (p. 174) while
describing modern Jewry as "the people which like no
other resists Christianity, through the very nature of
its blood" (p. 164), and associated the Jews with all
of the purported evils of modernity: "The rationalism
which pervades all of Jewry is intimately linked to the
Jews' basic heteronomous disposition. This yields an
essential internal correlation to […] modern natural
science, to the capitalist economic forms of
contemporary times as well as to communism and its
materialistic and intellectualistic ideas." (p. 134)
This, alas, is yet another important aspect of what
Steiner has produced.
Peter S.