{"corpus":"steiner","locus":"GA 112/1909-06-25/p010","lang":"en","edition":"English","edition_basis":null,"is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"text":"Consider for a moment what it is that causes this or that event to become what is called history: it may be that certain documents have been preserved relating to some events, while others—and perhaps the most important ones—have been lost. An example will show how unreliable all history can be. Among a number of poems Goethe had planned but did not finish—and for the deeper student these constitute a beautiful supplement to the great and glorious finished works he left us—there is the fragment of a poem on *Nausicaa*. There exist only a few sketches in which Goethe had noted how he intended to deal with this poem. He often worked that way, jotting down a few sentences of which frequently but little is preserved. That was the case with the *Nausicaa*. Now, there were two men who endeavored to complete this work, both of them research men: Scherer, the literary historian, and Herman Grimm. But Herman Grimm was not only a researcher but an imaginative thinker—the man who wrote *The Life of Michelangelo* and the *Goethe*. Herman Grimm went about the task by trying to find his way into Goethe's spirit, and he asked himself: Goethe being what he was, how would he have conceived of a figure like the *Nausicaa* of the Odyssey?—Whereupon, with a certain disregard of that historical document, he created a Nausicaa in the spirit of Goethe. Scherer on the other hand, who always sought what was to be found among the documents in black and white, argued that a Nausicaa begun by Goethe must be completed purely on the basis of the material available; and he, too, tried to construct a *Nausicaa*, but exclusively out of what these scraps of paper had to offer. Of this procedure Herman Grimm remarked: What if Goethe's servant used some of these scraps of paper—perhaps just the ones containing something very important—for Iighting the fire? Have we any guarantee that the surviving scraps of paper are of any value at all compared with those that may have been used for lighting the fire?","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"title":"2. Living Spiritual History","site_heading":null,"date":"1909-06-25","location":null,"word_count":346,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/112/1909-06-25/p010","alignment_confidence":"high","alignment_reason":"beads:length","two_voice_volume":false,"translation_credit":{"scope":"unit","status":"established","translator":"Samuel and Loni Lockwood","identified_edition":"AP1948","book_title":"The Gospel of St. John","publisher":"Anthroposophic Press","publisher_inferred":true,"match_score":1.0,"source_url":"https://www.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA112/English/AP1948/19090625p02.html","evidence":"lecture_page_line","publisher_note":"The publisher is inferred from the edition code in this lecture's source URL, not stated by the source page. The translator IS verified for this lecture: its own source names the translator (evidence: the lecture's page, rsarchive's lecture list, or the cover of the book it was published in), and that page's text was matched against this unit (see match_score and source_url). Cite the translator with confidence; attribute the publisher only as probable."},"edition_coverage":{"de":["original"],"en":["English"]},"available_versions":[{"lang":"de","edition":"original","edition_basis":null,"is_original":true,"is_default_edition":true,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/112/1909-06-25/p010"},{"lang":"en","edition":"English","edition_basis":null,"is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/112/1909-06-25/p010","paragraph_aligned":true}],"record":{"record_type":"unknown","scope":"volume","note":"How this text was taken down (shorthand transcript, listeners' notes or manuscript) is not on record here. Unknown is not an assurance of a stenogram: check the edition's own notes before resting an argument on one word.","evidence":null,"evidence_translation":null,"evidence_source":null},"german_anchor":{"de_prefix":"1909-06-25","de_passages":[{"locus":"GA 112/1909-06-25/p008","url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/112/1909-06-25/p008"},{"locus":"GA 112/1909-06-25/p009","url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/112/1909-06-25/p009"}],"bead_confidence":"high","length_check":{"de_words":550,"en_words":545,"ratio":0.99,"partial":false},"correspondence":"established","note":"English passage numbering is edition-relative, so the same number need not name the same paragraph in the German. The German original passage(s) above are the edition-invariant anchor — fetch them (lang='de') to verify wording before quoting across editions."},"witness_completeness":{"ratio":0.99,"band":"comparable","note":null,"word_count":6326,"original_word_count":6406,"may_be_abridged":false},"witness_quality":{"translator":{"scope":"unit","status":"recorded","translator":"Samuel and Loni Lockwood","identified_edition":"AP1948","book_title":"The Gospel of St. John","publisher":"Anthroposophic Press","publisher_inferred":true,"match_score":1.0,"source_url":"https://www.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA112/English/AP1948/19090625p02.html","evidence":"lecture_page_line","publisher_note":"The publisher is inferred from the edition code in this lecture's source URL, not stated by the source page. The translator IS verified for this lecture: its own source names the translator (evidence: the lecture's page, rsarchive's lecture list, or the cover of the book it was published in), and that page's text was matched against this unit (see match_score and source_url). Cite the translator with confidence; attribute the publisher only as probable."},"entity_parity":{"status":"ok","checked_against":["GA 112/1909-06-25/p008","GA 112/1909-06-25/p009"],"missing_from_translation":[],"present_only_in_translation":[],"bead_confidence":"high","note":"Every load-bearing name in the German counterpart appears in this English passage. That is a check on NAMES only: a translation can keep every name and still reverse who acts on whom, change a number, or soften a claim. Read the German for anything you intend to rest an argument on."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}}