# The Developmental History of Social Opinion

## GA 185a — 15 November 1918, Dornach

### Third Lecture

You have recently seen a eurythmy performance of Fercher von Steinwand's “Choir of Archetypal Dreams” (Choir of Primordial Dreams). Fercher von Steinwand's next poem, which follows on from the “Choir of Archetypal Dreams”, is now being prepared for a eurythmic performance: the “Chor der Urtriebe” (Choir of Primordial Instincts). It is perhaps desirable for you to familiarize yourselves with the ideas of the poem first, because during the eurythmic performance, your attention will be very much taken up by the simultaneous absorption of the eurythmic and the poem. To make it possible for you to familiarize yourself with the text before the eurythmy performance, Dr. Steiner will recite the first and second paragraphs of the Chorus of Primordial Drives before the lecture today and then continue with it tomorrow.

In these reflections, I have tried to tie in a few episodes from the significant developmental events of the present, which should then offer the opportunity to provide further perspectives from our spiritual scientific point of view. Today, I would also like to present one or two more episodes to you with reference to our current events, so that within these three lectures today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, we may be able to arrive at some perspectives that must be important to everyone in the present. I would like to start today with a general observation. Among the many terrible and catastrophic events that have befallen humanity in recent years, two things in particular should be mentioned. One is that a kind of strengthening of humanity in relation to the feeling for actual truth should arise from the observation of what has been experienced. And the second should be: a certain ability to learn from world events, from the world as such, should arise from the tragedy that has taken place and will continue to take place.

These are the two things that should be gained from the observation of the past four and a half years. I said that humanity should develop a feeling for actual truth, for the truth within the world of facts. We have seen, if we wanted to see, if we were concerned to see, that over the years – by which I do not mean that it was not the case to some extent before, only it was not so noticeable – that over more than four years humanity throughout the civilized world has gradually become dulled to the observation of actual reality, of the truth that lives in events. How often is it necessary, within the circle of those who have joined together in our movement, to speak of the significance, the actual significance of truth! On the other hand, how difficult it is to awaken any understanding for the genuine image of truth, in so far as truth is not merely an abstraction but a reality. And how great are the temptations to withdraw from the vision of real truth. Mankind will also want to be informed about the last four years and about what preceded them, because at least out of the chaos something like the urge to get to know the events will develop. Today – I wanted to point this out in particular in the last reflections I made here – today few people really have a need to know the truth about the last few years. But that is not what I mean so much as devotion to reality. People love to live in illusions. Between illusions and untruths there is only a very narrow gulf, and it is very easy to cross over from illusions into the realm of downright falsehood. Whether this lie is conscious or unconscious is of little consequence when it comes to realities. The temptations are simply very great to introduce into one's world of ideas at the point where one should practice devotion to the truth, to switch on the illusion and then very soon just the untruth.

It should now be clear to the spiritual scientist that only a life lived in truth can educate, develop, build up and promote growth, whereas everything that is a life of untruth destroys and isolates. A life of untruth is always connected with selfishness. That which is so obstructive to the penetration of the truth prevailing in the facts is the spinning of one's own subjective comfort, namely, of the life of imagination, but also of the life of feeling. One does not want to rise above the illusions that everything, everything is so that one is relieved of thinking, of natural thinking.

The individual is placed in this mood, which very easily becomes the general mood, and if he has to make use of a certain form in a time that is not very favorable to the truth, he is then understood with great difficulty. Those who have been forced to have one or the other examined by the actual circumstances in the last four years, and who have been forced to take brutal realities into account, have naturally been poorly understood. But how difficult it is to develop this leaning towards the truth in the facts can be seen from the fact that it would have been truly quite uncomfortable for many people to adjust their thinking to something like what was, for example, put forward by me in that Vienna Cycle of lectures, to which I have recently referred here again; who spoke of what has been going on within humanity for decades, as of a carcinoma disease, a cancer disease that takes place in the social life of human beings. And I said at the time: Truly, only the obligation to say something like that can cause one to utter it. But at the same time I said: One would like to shout out to the world what lies within. But it is uncomfortable to hear, and it was uncomfortable for people to hear, before this catastrophe befell them, that it would happen. Of course, it was inconvenient for a large number of people to be made aware, let us say, two years ago, that events could take no other course than the one they have now taken. That this course of events is a very inconvenient one for the so-called Central Powers is already obvious today. That it will be quite unpleasant for the Entente, that will become apparent over the course of a few years, but it is not so obvious today; therefore it is still an inconvenient truth today. Of course, pretty much anywhere in the world today, something unpleasant could happen to the person who would say more clearly than has already been said here what it is all about, just as something unpleasant would have happened to someone in other areas if they had put the worship of Hindenburg and Ludendorff in the right light two years ago.

These are things that only play a role on a large scale. But there are things that occur in human life every day, they show themselves from person to person everywhere. And after all, what takes place on a large scale, what are known as the great events, are nothing more than the accumulation of what takes place on a small scale from person to person every day, in everyday life. For one thing, there is a certain tendency for people not to want to look at the truth. Of course, people talk a lot about truth. But I have never seen greater love for illusion than in those people who use the word truth all the time, just as I have never seen greater egoism than in those people who constantly say that they really only want this or that impersonal thing.

That is one thing: the necessity to develop a sense of truth, insofar as truth lies in facts. The other thing is to learn from world events. One's heart can bleed when one sees the necessity to learn precisely from the events of recent years, and when one sees how relatively little has been learned by people. When one considers things, it often seems as if centuries lie between the year 1914 and the present year, and one can still meet people today who judge exactly the same way today as they judged these or those things in 1914. Of course, a certain basic foundation of things remains untouched, but I am sure you will understand when I say that one must have learned to judge certain things differently. —- One can well understand that the same things are meant that have just come to light through such events as the last four years.

What many people could learn already is the necessity of leaning towards a spiritual view of the world. From all that is happening, especially in the field of social life, from the social complications that have finally emerged from this world catastrophe, and from the social chaos that will develop from this world catastrophe, the necessity for humanity to turn to spiritual, to spiritual world contemplation will arise above all. This is already making itself felt today in that those people who, for some time, will be at the top in this whirling dance that has now begun are the very ones who are most fiercely opposed to all spiritual life, to all spiritual contemplation of the world. But it is precisely in this terrible rejection that the real seed for the evocation of the longing for spiritual world contemplation lies. It will not be possible to achieve a social structure full of light in the future without turning one's gaze to what today's order, today's chaos, has produced. But insight into what has happened – and the present chaos is only the result of what has happened in the course of human development – can only be gained through spiritual science as a source of spiritual light.

In order to gain some control over the great proletarian questions that arise – I am not even talking about being able to solve them – one must ask oneself: What is the significance of the classes to which the proletariat, for example, looks back when it perceives itself as a class: the class of the old nobility, the bourgeoisie, and finally the class of the proletariat itself? — Definitions do not get to the bottom of things. Nor does observing how the aristocratic class behaved over the centuries, what became of it, how the bourgeoisie behaved, how the proletariat came into being. Nor does this alone lead to an understanding of what has flowed into the human social order by drawing its tributaries from other classes, especially from these three classes.

The nobility in its most diverse forms - yes, ultimately one understands what is connected with the nobility as a class only if one is able to shed light on it in a spiritual-scientific way. Only in this way is it possible to say: those people who have developed in the caste of the nobility are, of course, not only those human individuals who descend from certain ancestors according to the continuity of blood and have thereby secured certain privileges in the world on the basis of certain events, which are more or less known to you, but the members of this caste are also souls, at least for the most part souls, who have sought to embody themselves in precisely those bodies that were born into the caste. In the future, we will have to acquire the ability to look at the human being not only as a physical-bodily creature, but also in connection with the spiritual world behind him, in which he has the source of his soul. We will gradually have to develop the feeling that we do not know the human being if we do not grasp his connection with the spiritual world behind him.

One can now really make a spiritual effort to answer the question: Where does it actually come from, what has entered into humanity through the nobility? — Indeed, in the present time one has quite a few opportunities to deal with such questions in a spiritual way; at least one had the opportunity to do so. That will all come to an end now. The world has railed much against so-called Prussian-German militarism; now Prussian Germany itself rails against Prussian-German militarism. The railing may be justified from this or that point of view; the reasons that have been advanced by one side or the other, for and against, have mostly been very ugly and certainly very few true reasons, and still are not. And for the seeker of truth, it depends much more on the reasons than on the abstract vote or non-vote. But much more important than this pro and contra is the fact that eighty percent, actually more than eighty percent, of the commanding positions in the Prussian-German army are occupied by nobles, by good old nobles, leading positions, in the highest leading positions, eighty percent, over eighty percent; so that, without allowing sympathies and antipathies to prevail, one can answer the question of where, for example, what has come into humanity through the nobility comes from. Whether this is an opportunity for humanity to speak in favor or against, I will not go into that, as I said above, but what has happened can be reduced to the question: How does it actually relate to the whole process of evolution, to the whole development of humanity? — For one can, for example, raise the question precisely with regard to this militarism, what has happened through it in the course of the last decades and the last four and a half years, since it is led in its majority precisely by aristocrats. The question that I raised above can be answered: How do the impulses of the nobility relate to the overall development of humanity? And everywhere you look, even spiritually, even if you try to explore the connection between the human soul and the spiritual worlds, everywhere you look, you find that what humanity has experienced anywhere and anytime through its nobility is the effect of an old human karma, the effect of impulses that were once brought into human development by this or that. In order that certain things may befall people because of earlier collective human complications, nobility in this or that field was essentially there for that purpose, now seen spiritually; the effect of old debts, one might say. One must go back into the past everywhere if one wants to understand the impulses that work socially in nobility in terms of their significance for humanity.

Once one has begun a deeper consideration of things at the point where I have indicated it to you, then one is driven to also touch the other pole. And the other pole is the proletariat. Here the situation is reversed. All the difficulties for humanity that are caused by the proletariat, all the complications that are brought into humanity by the proletariat, all this points to the future, gives future karma, and will have to be dealt with by humanity in the future.

The former, that the nobility is, so to speak, the executive power with regard to old guilt, this realization can lead to a feeling of responsibility for what must happen today through the proletariat. After all, what happens through the proletariat is, to a large extent, caused by the bourgeoisie through the detour of the spiritual life. In order to understand the latter thoroughly, one must try to consider the bourgeoisie's middle position between the nobility and the proletariat.

You see, the nobility is usually averse to an actual scientific treatment of world events. They are not averse to knowing something about world events, but they do not want to come to an understanding of world events through scientific research and scientific thought. He would much rather enter the secrets of the world by authority, without the effort of thinking – I say all this without sympathy or antipathy, just to characterize – not through knowledge. There is no doubt that the comfortable way in which people try to enter the secrets of the world through spiritualism, for example, finds numerous followers in aristocratic circles. Well, you may say: of course not only the nobility are spiritualists. — That is really true, but in the other classes there are as many people opposed to the spiritualists who at least have a certain aspiration to enter the spiritual world by applying their own thinking, to do science. Within the nobility, people who are scientifically striving are not on the side of those who want to enter the spiritual world in a spiritualistic or mystical way – well, there are different ways, not all of which need to be characterized. On the other hand, whatever a nobility class somehow claims in the world must always be supported in some military way. A nobility class is inconceivable without military support. These are some examples – there are, of course, many other characteristic peculiarities of the nobility class – but these are the ones that are of radical importance.

As for the bourgeoisie, which stands between the nobility and the proletariat, it can be said that with the bourgeoisie there arises a certain striving to make knowledge scientific, to bring scientific form to the ideas that want to enter the spiritual world. The power of the bourgeoisie is based on the possession of the means of production, the tools and the like. I select individual things to say in order to establish certain prospects for tomorrow or the day after, but you will see that what I select has a certain significance.

What is particularly characteristic is what one class always takes over from the next one up. Thus, for example, the bourgeoisie takes over militarism from the nobility. But the interesting thing is that the bourgeoisie everywhere tends to democratize militarism. The nobleman needs an army at his disposal to keep him. How he achieves this is of no concern to him. The bourgeois, by the very nature of his relationship to his means of living and existence, is also dependent on the support of an army, but he must take this army from the same people that he puts to his means of production. Therefore, he becomes a fan of universal conscription. And, isn't it true, in the time when the bourgeoisie gradually emerged and developed, you were obviously a fool if you couldn't enthuse about universal conscription, because that was simply the greatest advance of the time, universal conscription, the so-called democratization of militarism and so on.

What the proletariat in turn took from the previous class is the science of the bourgeoisie, bourgeois science. The proletarian today – at least insofar as he is scientifically educated, and there are very many of them – he knows how to appreciate certain subconscious or unconscious things in man. He knows well how a certain thinking and a certain form of thinking comes from a person's class or caste. For example, the proletarian knows very well that if you are a member of the nobility, you think differently because you belong to the caste of the nobility than if you are a bourgeois or if you are a proletarian. The entire formation of thought is different, the instincts that flow into the thought forms and form these thought forms are different. Bourgeois science, it takes the standpoint that truth is truth, there can only be one truth, and believes in the absoluteness of its judgments. The proletarian does not do that, because he knows the dependence of what a person thinks on his caste, on his class.

Now, of course, there is also a certain basic foundation of truths that do not depend on caste, for me, certain elementary mathematical concepts and the like. Of course, even purely mathematical-mechanical astronomy is not dependent on caste. But everything that relates to social and historical life, and especially the formation and use of individual scientific ideas, depends on the caste. Proletarian science has seen through this. Proletarian science looks into many of the subconscious thoughts of people. But it takes over, this proletarian science takes over bourgeois thinking, takes over, so to speak, lock, stock, and barrel, what bourgeois education, bourgeois intelligence has conquered, and popularizes it. Exactly as the bourgeoisie has democratized the militarism of the nobility, so the proletariat popularizes bourgeois science, or rather, the bourgeois scientific method, in a completely blind faith.

From this you can already see that the proletariat, with regard to its entire thinking, is the heir to what the bourgeoisie has done with regard to human thought, with regard to human scientific achievements. This will prove to be an extremely important fact in the near future, and it would be extremely necessary to be able to learn to pay attention to such things. Otherwise, people will want to live in comfortable illusions, which are only separated from the lie by a narrow gap, about the most important things that are creeping up.

There is nothing, for example, that is more detrimental to the truth, in the sense in which I spoke of the truth earlier, than nationalism. But nationalism is precisely part of the program that will be seen as a particularly beneficial program in the near future. It belongs to the program of the near future. Therefore, when this nationalism wants to build – for in reality it can only destroy – it will have to be experienced that the illusions, which are separated from the lie by a narrow chasm, will continue to exist. For as much nationalism as arises in the world, so much untruth will there be in the world, especially towards the future. And so there will be many sources of new untruths. Untruth has ruled the world in many respects. But it will not be able to rule once humanity has taken in those impulses, those currents, which today emerge chaotically in the proletarian masses and which, as you have seen - I presented this to you recently from spiritual scientific documents - correspond to one of the three great currents in the development of humanity.

Actual events are essentially connected with these things. But people have been reluctant, especially in recent decades, to look into the world in such a way as to really see what is real. One could only look into the world without looking at the spirit if one did not want to miss what is real. You see, everything that has happened in recent years goes back, basically, to spiritually transparent power dynamics in the civilized world. There was actually nothing more dreadful in the course of these sad events than talking from this or that so-called national or other point of view. Most of the time, people were talking about things that had nothing at all to do with the course of events. The strange thing was that the leading statesmen also spoke in such a way that their speeches had little to do with the course of events. One should not treat so lightly the things that are touched upon here, that is to say, what might be called the fate of human beings, insofar as these human beings are crowded together in groups, in groups of nations, for example. For here one touches on circumstances that are fundamentally and deeply connected with the spiritual, and one should not speak of them as superficially as one often does.

Above all, it should not be overlooked that certain terms mean quite different things in different parts of the world. Just think that people everywhere, let us say, speak of the state. But it is not important to have a certain concept of the state, but rather to associate at least something with this concept of the different emotional nuances that are attached to this state here or there, and above all to get away from the unfortunate amalgamation of state and nation and the people, that unfortunate confusion which is a fundamental characteristic of Wilsonianism, which always confuses the state and the nation and the people, and even wants to found states on nations, thereby perpetuating the lie, at least in certain circles, at least if it were possible.

We must look at the specific, real issues everywhere. In the course of these reflections, I have shown you how a certain configuration of Central Europe is connected with those old suggestions, based on group instincts, that emanated from Roman Catholicism, from Rome. You see, what was the old imperial idea of Central Europe, which died in 1806, was closely connected with this specter of the old Roman Empire, as spiritual science says. Until then, there was more or less, really more or less nominally, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, which only disappeared in 1806. It did not actually disappear, but was only abolished. For this Holy Roman Empire, which more or less favorably or unfavorably held together or divided the various German tribes over long periods of time, this imperial impulse of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation has actually gradually been transferred to the Habsburg power, and that is what has been blessed with the Austro-Hungarian state structure. But a state that existed in the shadow of Habsburg power means something different from a state that, let us say, has developed since the fifteenth or sixteenth century, as it has actually formed as a state more in connection with the people in England or France. Where the state has no real substance, in what was the Habsburg Empire, where different peoples were held together under the aspect of the Habsburg power and this Habsburg power had them like a mantle, like an old treasure, there was something deeply medieval, namely the emperorship from the old Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. What the Habsburgs were was the oldest Middle Ages, and unfortunately also thoroughly connected with the oldest Middle Ages in terms of Romanism, in terms of that Catholicism that had been revived or at least made lifelike by the Counter-Reformation and which has produced all those conditions of which I have already spoken to you here, which has contributed so much to the lulling to sleep, to the dimming, but also to other evil effects within the Central European world.

This Habsburg empire of the oldest medieval type was confronted by a most modern one, which had gradually become completely modern, something of the most modern character: the Prussian-Hohenzollerian empire, that Prussian-Hohenzollerian empire which represented Americanism within the German being, Wilsonianism before Wilson. That is the great, enormous difference: this most modern character of Prussian-Hohenzollern Americanism, masked as an empire, and the medieval Habsburg empire, which was forged together from the outside. It is necessary to study these things if one wants to understand what has happened and what will happen.

What emerged as Hohenzollern-Prussian Americanism had a very specific peculiarity: it developed exactly the same impulses that developed, for example, in the British Empire, but it developed all these impulses in the opposite way. You see, there are three currents, handed down from ancient times, arising in the present: the aristocratic, the bourgeois, and the proletarian. Nowhere else, I might say, have these three currents, the aristocratic, the bourgeois, and the proletarian, developed in such a pure form, side by side, yet separate, as in the British Empire and also within the so-called Germany – which is not an official name, there is no Germany under constitutional law, there never has been under constitutional law – that is, in the so-called German Reich. So in both areas, but in the exact opposite sense, these three currents developed. In the British Empire, it all developed in such a way that the nobility, the bourgeoisie, and the proletariat came together, always striving towards a common tendency. There is good old nobility, but it knew how to balance with the demands of the bourgeoisie, namely with the demands of the material and financial bourgeoisie. You are not only a nobleman, you also become a wealthy nobleman, a rich person in the modern sense. You can have your income from industry and be a good, old, respected nobleman. But you manage everything so that the proletarian in his undertakings does not deviate too much from what the others want. It always comes together in some way.


Within the new German state structure, everything diverged. There were also three currents, but they developed in such a way that they diverged in the following sense: you had industry forming large-scale industry, which had its own current; you had the old nobility in the Prussian landed gentry – the two may have pushed together, but it was also afterwards! the proletariat, which increasingly became the opponent of the bourgeoisie and set itself the task of taking up the class struggle against the bourgeoisie in the most eminent sense. All this developed apart. Anyone who has studied historical events in this respect will find this particularly interesting. And all this within a framework that was bound to burst. For what had been constructed as so-called Germany – as I said, which never existed under constitutional law – bore the stamp of Bismarck, the stamp of a man for whom modern big industry never became a reality, who never knew it, who never reckoned with it, who constructed the framework he constructed to exclude the development of big industry. Now the whole Americanism of big industry developed into it and burst the framework. It was already blown up in itself long before this war catastrophe occurred.


To study these conditions with an unbiased eye, with scientific objectivity, in peace, humanity in the mad whirl in which it had fallen in all possible fields, truly had no peace. Because one is not very inclined to go into realities. One must actually seek to achieve realities. One must have a sense for realities, perhaps not only a sense, but also an instinct for realities; for the trend of the times is to deny realities, not to engage with realities at all. You see, the people who looked at where the Inn flows, the Moldau flows, the Danube flows, the Leitha flows, they did not distinguish much between two fundamentally different things: between the German-Austrian people and the Habsburg Empire. That merged. And again, when people visited Austria, where the German-Austrian people lived, who are now heading towards such a tragic fate – how did they get to know what lives within the actual people? As a traveler to Austria, you got to know – as a writer once stated – the “Aryan” attitude, which was very closely connected with sloppiness. When you arrived at a train station, well, you were instructed to go there because you had a connection. You went there, and if you were supposed to arrive at the right time, you certainly did not arrive at the right time. Not true, you were never sure if you relied on the trains that you would arrive at the right time, but you were, as the person said, safe everywhere you went, that you would get a good cup of coffee. But that is just a superficiality. What was there in this area of Central Europe and from which a certain brutality was to stop, was precisely the possibility of developing strong spiritual individuals from a certain background of nationality.

You see, little was printed by Fercher von Steinwand in the 1880s. I lived in Vienna with some friends, younger writers. Once, the conversation turned to Fercher von Steinwand, and I knew some of his poems. It was around the time when I was editing the “Deutsche Wochenschrift” in Vienna. Hamerling had pointed out Fercher von Steinwand with great understanding and sincere goodwill. Then some friends said to me: Yes, we can find Fercher, Of course, I was quickly willing to find Fercher von Steinwand. You could only find him by going to a secluded restaurant on Singerstraße in Vienna. That is a street that goes from the opera house towards Stephansplatz. Yes, you see, among all kinds of brothers, who you could already call “brothers,” there was Fercher's fine, spiritualized face in the middle. This German from the Carinthian region, entirely descended in terms of the way he forms his thoughts, this German-Austrian area, and yet precisely that connection to the world of ideas, as it is a spiritual connection and as he actually only lives in this way in this way. Fercher von Steinwand also had great political ideas, but he was not suited to somehow put these political ideas into practice according to the practices that took place in such fields. He was not at all. There are such people everywhere, even if they are not as talented as Fercher von Steinwand, who, precisely in this area, are connected to the spiritual world, who have carried within themselves for a long time a certain feeling for impulses that live there. But it was uncomfortable to listen to such people.

I must say that I was often with Fercher von Steinwand. He always seemed to me to be like one of those gypsies who wander around the world, but the aristocrat among gypsies, like their leader, with great ideas in his head, and who spoke of great ideas as if he had been among them himself. One evening, as we were sitting together, I said to him, just as I had just edited the “Deutsche Wochenschrift”: “Tell me, Mr. Fercher, couldn't you give us something that has not yet been printed?” Surely you still have all sorts of poetry that has not yet been printed; I would be happy to publish it in the weekly magazine.” — ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I have all sorts of funny things lying around that I still have.’ And so he gave me this ‘Choir of Primal Instincts,’ which he had had in his desk for a long time and which I published at the time.

This Fercher von Steinwand is one of those individuals who have truly emerged from the folklore of Central Europe. I would like to give you a little insight into the way Fercher von Steinwand was connected to his folklore.

On April 4, 1859, Fercher von Steinwand gave a lecture at the Dresden Antiquarian Society, in the presence of the then Crown Prince Georg (this book still says: present King of Saxony), all ministers and many officers of the highest rank – I ask you to note the latter in particular – in front of all these people, Fercher von Steinwand, so please: in 1859, on April 4, gave a lecture, and on the Gypsies at that. This lecture on the Gypsies contains an extraordinary amount, not so much because of the subtle observations Fercher von Steinwand makes about the Gypsies, but because of the great psychological insights into the psychology of nations that he presents in connection with the Gypsy question. He believes that the gypsies are Indo-Europeans. And now his gaze wanders – as I said, he gave this speech, from which I will now read a piece to you, before Crown Prince Georg of Saxony, before all the ministers and before high military dignitaries – to the Germans, and he said in the course of this speech:

“We Germans, who for a long time did not believe that such a dark genius was possible on earth, had to pay for our bright trust in the world and world order one after the other on inglorious battlefields. We Germans have the unfortunate virtue of respecting a foreign people to the point of foolishly disregarding ourselves, even if they have little or nothing praiseworthy about them, as a striking peculiarity.”

Now I will skip what he says next.

"But our virtue suddenly turns to vice as soon as a great event comes crashing before our doorstep, without stirring up our suffering and troublesome nature and overcoming our ingrained unnatural fear of the divine hint of history, which has often led us to the guillotine of doom. The gods are more hostile to no one than to the Philistine, and nowhere under the sun are there small-time merchants who would not be bullied by a big-time merchant. Like every future, our German future may be a mystery to us. But this one is not as impenetrable as we usually think. We are already coming up with real solutions to this German puzzle, solutions that we can prophetically call prophetic with reference to our homeland.

All this in a speech about the Gypsies. He ties his observations to being a Gypsy, Fercher von Steinwand.

"Let us look a little over the Atlantic Ocean! Let us turn our gaze to São Jorge dos Ilheus or let us travel in our thoughts up the Rio Contas, where we encounter German settlements. “With quiet contempt – so Emperor Max, who is a man of feeling and creative spirit, so something far better than the Emperor of Mexico – ”with quiet contempt, the new shoots look at the old mainland. The gaunt children with the pale, sallow faces, the forget-me-not blue eyes and the straw-yellow, spiky hair particularly caught my eye and vividly reminded me of the descendants of our German villages. I approached two older boys and spoke to them in German; they looked up at me shyly and could not answer me, only uttering their own German names with difficulty. They were children of German immigrants, of whom there are many in Ilheus. Not without a feeling of indignation, I found that even they were complete Brazilians, unable to speak their mother tongue even with their own parents. And then the Germans wonder why they have no independent position anywhere, that they, instead of dominating, are a kind of halfway house between slaves and free people. What a disgrace for German parents to communicate with their children in foreign languages! How the family relationship must suffer when the weak mother must struggle with her own blood in foreign expressions! – This fact, which can be found everywhere, may be a major reason for the gloomy melancholy that weighs heavily and worryingly on the faces and natures of all German colonists. During my trip, I did not see a single cheerful German emigrant; they all bore a secret pain. Sometimes the children benefit from the broken existence of their parents, but their lack of character almost always leads them to abandon the foreign and closed nationalities. This is the pain that weighs on the minds of these strangers. — Two pale men with haggard features were walking along the path; a few German words proved their transatlantic origin. They answered in the language of their homeland, but the sound was no longer full and pure, the dull tone had something tired and sad about it; their figures were also without energy and elasticity, as if they were people who missed their calling, did not feel at home, for whom the French expression dépaysé applies in the fullest sense. Most German emigrants present such a picture of melancholy; the secret worm gnaws at all of them.”

Is that not the air of the gipsies wafting over from the banks of the Rio Contas? And that dreadful Melusine, what whispers she in our ears? A word from our German future, an icy greeting from her for a speedy reunion. Yes, this future is already approaching eerily on our horizon.

This was spoken in 1859!

"Yes, this future is already approaching eerily on our horizon, looking over the banks and mountains into the depths of our lands, gaunt enough, like the genius of death with the pallor of death on its face. We have no right to expect otherwise.

What we say has no marrow; what we do has no core; what we create artistically has neither the sound nor the nobility of the great outdoors. It seems as if we have set ourselves the task of teasing art with barren idiosyncrasy, with sober folksiness, with forced naturalism. What we think or contribute to history has enough room in the hollow cone of a sleepyhead."

Thus spoke that which really spoke out of this folklore. And that is present, that still lives today. It can only be brutalized. That has also been sufficiently brutalized in the course of recent years. It will also have to be conceded at some point what national self-awareness is in select individuals; perhaps it did not live best under the aegis of people like Clemenceau, but perhaps under a different aegis.

From time to time, one must also look at things apart from the phrases that dominate the world, and in world-historical moments this is perhaps also necessary. When Fercher von Steinwand speaks of his people in reference to gypsy characterizations, there is perhaps something melancholically pessimistic about it when it comes out exactly as it did in this speech, but that is not how it is meant, it is truly not meant that way. Something of these “gypsies” must go into world mission. This is rejected today, this is denied today. This denial is closely connected with Wilsonianism, but the facts will teach the world otherwise. And so that from some side there is already protest against what will certainly be connected with much worldly infallibility and much worldly belief in authority in the near future, so that there may be protest against this – perhaps the world will say: Gypsy -Protest is taking place here — I have expressed my wish and my thoughts that this building, as a protest against what will happen in the coming years to all of civilized humanity, so-called civilized humanity, should be called the Goetheanum. This is not just to connect with Goethe in some superficial, easy way, but it is out of the impulse of our time.

We will continue this discussion tomorrow.