25. Vita

Ich, Rudolf Steiner, Sohn des in Brunn am Gebirge in Niederösterreich wohnhaften Johann Steiner, Beamter der österreichischen Südbahn, bin zu Kraljevec in Ungarn, am 27. Februar 1861 geboren.

After completing elementary school, I entered the Landes-Oberrealschule in Wiener-Neustadt in 1871/2, where I passed my school-leaving examination with distinction in July 1879. I then enrolled at the K.K. Technische Hochschule in Vienna, where I spent eight semesters mathematics, physics, analytical mechanics, zoology, mineralogy, chemistry, botany, geology, literary history and constitutional law, and passed the semester examinations with an average grade of “excellent”, so that on the basis of these I was granted a scholarship of 300 Fforin Austrian currency each year for all four years of study. At the same time, I attended the lectures of Prof. Königsberger on mathematics and those of Professors Zimmermann, Vogt and Brentano on philosophy at the University of Vienna. I was driven from mathematical and scientific studies into philosophy. I became a philosophical writer. My successes in this, my main subject, prove my literary achievements, several of which I enclose here. These have received the recognition of outstanding experts. Mor. Carriere, Conrad Hermann, Max Koch, Schaarschmidt, the literary Centralblatt, among others, have expressed themselves quite favorably about it in their reviews.

On the basis of my literary achievements, I have been entrusted with the publication of part of Goethe's scientific estate for the Weimar Goethe Edition.

Alongside my work, I also gave private lessons. The enclosed certificate of these activities also proves that during my years of study I acquired such a knowledge of Greek and Latin that I was able to teach even more advanced grammar school students. In the past few months, I have been exclusively occupied with the completion of the work I had begun.

Rudolf Steiner currently residing at Junkerstrasse 12, Weimar.