How the timeline is made
A register of Rudolf Steiner's life, one record per witness, from which the timeline is drawn. It is canonical in one sense only: it is the single register. It is never the settled account.
One record per witness, and nothing adjudicated
Where two sources disagree about a date or a place, both records stand, each naming its witness, joined by a shared conflict key. Nothing is promoted to fact because a second witness repeats it. The birth date is the demonstration case: his own account and the parish records say 27 February 1861; one secondary source says 25 February; the register keeps both. A day that two witnesses place in different cities is marked contested and is given no place.
Who is speaking
Every record carries a tier. The tier grades the witness, never the fact.
| Tier | What it means | Records |
|---|---|---|
| His own account | Steiner's own hand: the autobiography (GA 28), the writings on the Society (GA 37) and the letters to members (GA 26). The only tier whose words the page quotes. | 389 |
| Gesamtausgabe | The collected works as a dated record: a lecture printed under a day puts him in that place on that day. The place is the cycle's, so two volumes can disagree. | 5,654 |
| Eyewitness | Someone who was there. Wachsmuth's chronicle, scored before it was trusted: 87% of his lecture days land on a day the Gesamtausgabe records. | 500 |
| Scholarly | A biography with an apparatus, so a row can be followed to its document. | 24 |
| Secondary | A source without an apparatus. Kept where it disagrees, because the register never adjudicates. | 1 |
The witnesses folded in
| Witness | Source | Covers | Records |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gesamtausgabe | The collected works as a dated record: every lecture printed under a day | 1889 to 1925 | 5,654 |
| Rudolf Steiner | The autobiography (GA 28), the writings on the Society (GA 37), the letters to members (GA 26); German checked byte for byte, English from the named editions | 1861 to 1925 | 389 |
| Guenther Wachsmuth | The Life and Work of Rudolf Steiner (1955), one chapter a year; an eyewitness from 1909 | 1902 to 1925 | 500 |
| Peter Selg | Rudolf Steiner, Life and Work (SteinerBooks); the birth date and the move to Dornach so far | seed records | 23 |
| Robert Powell | The Astrological Revolution; the other birth date | seed record | 1 |
Wachsmuth was scored before he was trusted. He dates lectures by the hundred and every one of those days is independently known from the Gesamtausgabe: 87 percent of his dated lecture days land on a day the collected works record a lecture, against 50 percent for a date drawn at random from the same years. His misses are not refutations: the corpus holds what was taken down and printed, so a day he reports and the Gesamtausgabe does not print is shown as exactly that.
Quotation
Only his own account is quoted. Every quotation on these pages was checked byte for byte against the German text and is shown in English from a named edition, with the German beneath it. A witness on any other tier is paraphrased in the register's own words and cited by edition.
Links
A record links to the document on this site when the resolver reaches it, to the volume when it reaches only the volume that certainly holds it, and otherwise to nothing, with the edition named. A link that looks right and is wrong is worse than none. 5,815 of 6,568 records carry a link, 5,504 of them to the lecture itself. The autobiography is not yet served on this site, so its records cite the edition and link nowhere.
What is thin, and what is not here yet
Before 1900 the register rests on his autobiography, which dates those years to the year from the ages he gives, and on the first lectures the Gesamtausgabe dates. The biographies that date the early years by the day are held and not yet folded in, so the thin decades are thin on the page: an empty year is stated as empty, never skipped.
Moments of the life the register does not yet carry a witness for, listed rather than drawn on trust:
- Marries Marie von Sivers, 24 December 1914: the register holds 1 rows on that date and none names 'Marie' in its event or its place.
Of the 23,409 days of the life, 4,026 have a record dated to the day, 1,952 lie between two dated days in one place at most a fortnight apart (presence inferred, and said so), and the rest are covered only by where he lived. A gap wider than six weeks between two placed days is a silence in the record, not a journey, and is shown as one.
The same records, for agents
Every page is drawn from JSON files beside it: /timeline/data/index.json for the
life, periods, years and moments; /timeline/data/1913.json and its siblings for one
year's records, days and months; /timeline/data/schema.json for the record shape. The
shape is one record for every axis of the timeline, so the dates he names in the lectures and the
days he names them on will join these files under the same schema.