The Fateful Year of 1923

GA 259 — 27 April 1923, Prague

Working Days in Prague

Report by Dr. Otto Palmer

From No. 6 of “Mitteilungen. Herausgegeben vom Vorstand der Anthroposophischen Gesellschaft in Deutschland,” Stuttgart, July 1923.

For anyone who had the good fortune to be in Prague from April 27 to 30 this year, in the midst of Czech and German friends, these days will be unforgettable in many ways. One must allow the city of Prague itself to take effect and feel something of the occult spiritual currents that permeate the walls in order to understand the impression made by two public and two internal lectures by Dr. Steiner and how the eurythmy performance at the Deutsches Theater, in front of a full house, was also very well received. One newspaper, however, had nothing better to do than to launch into the most crude criticism of eurythmy from the outset, while other papers fully recognized the novelty of the eurythmic art and predicted a bright future for it.

As for the lectures by Dr. Steiner himself, one took place in the Urania hall, which held about 850 people, while the other was held in the Products Exchange hall, where about 1200 to 1500 listeners had gathered, who did not hold back on warm applause at the end. In the first lecture, Dr. Steiner spoke of spiritual scientific research methods in general and introduced the audience to anthroposophy and its intentions in our time. In the second lecture, he spoke about human knowledge and education and developed the developmental problems of the human being based on the practical experiences of the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. In both lectures, which were held jointly for the Czech and German branches and which took place between the two public lectures, what had been said in the public lectures was deepened in every direction. 'e's Our Prague friends, both Czech and German, vied with each other to make the conference a memorable and beautiful one, and also to show the foreign members the beauties of the city and its historical monuments outside the context of anthroposophical ventures.