An Age of Expectation

I am quite sure, my dear friends, that some things might have led me even then to what can be achieved in spiritual science, but not to what our eurythmy presents, if I had not been so close to this spiritual life at the time had I not seen for myself that there was an endeavour, in the way it could be at that time, to evoke something that is spiritual and at the same time really comes to life in the outer world, is really there in the outer world. Of course, all of this is part of a great karmic context, it is no coincidence. There is something like an inner eurhythmy in the way Herman Grimm wanted to live: the way he had the wonderful ability to transform himself as a very young man to take Emerson into German culture in a way that no other country has been taken into, the way he drew attention to the fact that that Emerson should be read more widely because he represented the best side of Americanism, how he resurrected Voltaire, how he resurrected Michelangelo, how he resurrected Raphael, and also Goethe, about whom he gave his wonderful lectures at the beginning of the 1870s at the University of Berlin. There were many things about these lectures that were not quite right for scholars. But in every thought, in every word, in every sentence of these lectures, Goethe lives; he is in them again, is in them with his own spirit. And Herman Grimm really wanted to give something to the life around him with his book “Goethe”. It was a unique event that Goethe, who had been physically dead since 1832 and who had almost been forgotten, was revived in the 1870s by Herman Grimm.