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Kurt Philippi

Die Gruender der Christengemeinschaft: Ein Schicksalsnetz
By Rudolf F. Gaedeke
Translated by Cindy Hindes

October 16, 1892, Munich – March 19, 1955, Nuremberg

Kurt Philippi was born in Munich on October 16, 1892. His father had a store for shoemaking supplies; his mother was a court actress, first in Darmstadt, then in Munich. In the year after his birth, the young family moved to Teplitz in Bohemia, where his father took over the management of a shoe factory. There, in Teplitz, his siblings Else and Paul were also born. Else died of diphtheria at the age of four.

Kurt Philippi’s early childhood ended in 1899. The family moved to Berlin, where his father became a salesman after losing almost his entire fortune as co-owner of the Teplitz factory.

The boy began his schooling there in Berlin. His last school was the Hohenzollern-Reformgymnasium Schöneberg, which he left in February 1912 with the certificate to study German and new languages. This decision was based on his talent for these subjects and his desire to become a librarian. However, after leaving school, various fateful encounters and experiences led him to study Protestant theology at the University of Berlin in April 1912.

In October 1913, his father died of a stroke. Through iron diligence, supported by Kurt’s mother, who managed the business correspondence, he had created a financial basis again and thus made Kurt’s studies possible.

In February 1915, Kurt Philippi was called up for military service in World War I. He first took part in the Russian campaign and then went to the Western Front in France. He experienced all the phases of positional warfare with their immense human losses in battle until the retreat.

At the beginning of October 1918, Kurt Philippi fell ill with severe influenza on the Western Front and had to be sent to the reserve military hospital in Aschaffenburg. The disease had not yet been overcome when he was released in November. This not fully healed illness continued to make his physical constitution appear fragile. It was certainly a major cause of his many years of suffering and his relatively early death.

He resumed his theological studies in Berlin in the winter semester of 1918/19 and passed his exams in the spring of 1922. However, great doubts of faith had arisen in Kurt Philippi, probably not least due to his war experiences. They made it seem impossible for him to enter a parish office of the regional church. The Protestant doctrine of the sacrament and the administration of the sacrament, in particular, made it impossible for him to cooperate. Therefore, during his last semesters of theology studies, he had already taken up training in the institute of Dr. E. Drach, lecturer for language education and the art of lecturing at the University of Berlin. He completed this one-and-a-half-year course of study with a diploma as a ‘teacher for voice training and performance art, especially for purposes of the German school’.

In his second period of study after the World War, Kurt Philippi became acquainted with Friedrich Rittelmeyer, Emil Bock and the circle that had formed around them and thereby with anthroposophy. Unfortunately, we do not know how these encounters took place. Kurt Philippi only related that he joined everything “with enthusiasm”.

His enthusiasm became even stronger in the preparation for religious renewal. Here it was a matter of a new understanding of the sacraments comprehensible to present-day consciousness and the intention to cultivate a completely renewed form of cultus.

Thus Kurt Philippi became a co-founder of The Christian Community. He reported how much he was touched by Michael Bauer’s visit to Breitbrunn during the preparatory meeting for Dornach. Bauer impressively spoke to the circle that the most important thing for a spiritual aspirant, i.e., a pastor, is “inner composure,” which is true “wood-chopping work,” and yet must proceed without any physical tension.

Emil Bock ordained Kurt Philippi on September 16, 1922, shortly before Kurt’s 30th birthday, as the eighteenth of the whole circle.

He went from Dornach to Magdeburg, where he had already prepared a church foundation. This city of Ottonian Christianity on the Elbe, directed by the Kaiser, did not immediately open up to the newcomer. It was a difficult time. Kurt Philippi soon went to Naumburg-an-der-Saale, where he replaced his Berlin friend Dr. Eberhard Kurras. His time in Naumburg also lasted only briefly – as did his following time in Leipzig. In February 1926, after three-and-a-third years of teaching in three different places, Kurt Philippi came to Nuremberg, the site of the imperial castle.

In Nuremberg, he accomplished his real life’s work; he worked there as a quiet, always active congregational pastor and companion of his fellow pastors Wilhelm Kelber, Karl Ludwig and later Eberhard Kurras. From his marriage in Nuremberg came two sons. He was there when The Christian Community was banned on June 9, 1941, and remained there with his family during the war. He was spared military service for health reasons until the final phase, when he finally had to enlist in the Volkssturm. From 1941 to 1943, he trained as a bookseller at the M. Edelmann company in Nuremberg.

During the four years of the ban, he was the only pastor present in Nuremberg and thus could maintain personal relationships with the parishioners in the hard-hit city. During the war, he accompanied in prayer his friends in the field, especially those who had fallen.

Immediately after the end of the Second World War and the collapse of the Third Reich, he began the work in the community when his colleagues could not yet be back in Nuremberg. At Pentecost 1945, the first Consecration Service after the war was read with congregation members and celebrated soon after.

He prepared confirmands for twenty years, and time and again, he brought a circle of players to impressive performances in the Oberufer Christmas plays.

Kurt Philippi also cultivated contacts with the authorities and thus made it possible to build a community center as early as 1948/49, just outside the old city wall under the Kaiserburg on a partial plot of the Schwanhäußergarten. His quiet manner inspired confidence, and the building was able to come about despite all the adverse circumstances. It was not until 1976 that it had to make way for a much larger church building.

Emil Bock consecrated this first building on December 18, 1949. One year later, Kurt Philippi experienced the same symptoms of illness as in 1918. Recuperation and sanatorium stays were necessary. But the disease (Parkinson’s) could not be stopped. Much patience had to be exercised. A large circle of friends accompanied his time of suffering.

He suffered in full consciousness until shortly before his death on March 19, 1955. He passed away in the sixty-third year of his life, like so many of the founding circle.

Kurt Philippi’s quiet, restrained nature was never forward. Everything that stood out, everything conspicuous, was alien to his nature. In silence, he expressed many things that moved him in the form of poems — without wanting to be a poet. He wrote many such poems, often on current events. His life would be incompletely represented if some of these poems were not considered. The poems “Den Kindern unserer Zeit [The Children of our Time]” he sent to Emil Bock shortly before his death; the second and third probably speak more of his own longing.

 

MEMORANDUM

Inspired by Mr. Klein’s remarks, the following has become clear to me on repeated reflection: If the goal of religious renewal set forth in the Dornach Commitments is to be realized in the foreseeable future, it is necessary that those who wish to work for this goal join together in a community during the Berlin University Week to prepare themselves for their public work as soon as possible in close cooperation under the direction of Dr. Steiner, above all to strengthen the power and purity of the religious impulse within themselves and to acquire pedagogical insights and skills. If possible, public lectures should begin this summer. As desirable as greater inner maturity and, ultimately, the attainment of academic degrees and certificates of competency would be for us, it seems to me at the present time to be incomparably more important that our seeds be sown while the wind is still reasonably calm. So I would urge Dr. Steiner to be helpful to us in our preparation for public activity. I am determined, after such preparation, to devote myself immediately to public activity in the interests of our cause if the Central Office deems the time suitable and me qualified to do so.

Kurt Philippi, Berlin-Friedenau, November 26, 1922

 

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Otto Becher

Die Gruender der Christengemeinschaft: Ein Schicksalsnetz
By Rudolf F. Gaedeke
Translated by Cindy Hindes

OTTO BECHER
January 26, 1891, Holzminden/Weser – July 19, 1954, Pforzheim

When Otto Becher died after a severe operation in Pforzheim on July 19, 1954, another of the founders of our earthly work was lost. He was sixty-three. What he had given shone as a special color in the picture of the first decades.

Otto Becher was born in Holzminden/Weser on January 26, 1891. He grew up in this landscape of old Carolingian spirituality near the Corvey monastery. His mother, Anna, died early. His father Emil was pious, with a personality of positive faith. His son admired him very much, even though later in his studies, Otto Becher belonged to the most radical wing of critical theology.

Something particularly straightforward lived in Otto Becher, in his whole being, but especially in his thinking and judging. “In the service of that which was recognized as true and that which was felt to be sacred, he consumed himself completely with those powers which were at his disposal.” — that was how his friend Rudolf Meyer described it.

Initially, Otto Becher had worked in Leipzig with Wilhelm Wundt in the Psychological Seminar. Then he moved to Göttingen to study the strictly phenomenological direction of Edmund Husserl. Studies in the philosophy of religion and the pedagogical seminar with Professor Arthur Titius revealed Becher’s talents so strongly that Titius invited him to teach with him. But the twenty-four-year-old refused. His honesty in discernment forbade him to pass along what was traditional and dogmatically obscure. But he studied intensively; he received a scholarship and was allowed to live in the Theologischen Stift. His external needs were always modest. When Rudolf Meyer met him in 1915, he was like a monk in his cell—but embracing all cultures in spirit.

During their heated discussions and conversations ‘in his cell’ about Julian the Apostate, the phrase emerged: “What you are looking for could be called, in the sense of Goethe, the cross entwined with roses.”

This appealed to Otto Becher in the depths of his soul, after which the friends sought Goethe’s poem “The Mysteries”; it described how Brother Mark finds the gate of the Brotherhood of the Rosicrucian.

Rudolf Meyer had found his way to anthroposophy in 1916. He had heard that at the first Goetheanum building, a stage curtain was planned to show an image of the motif of Brother Mark finding the Rosicrucian Gate. Otto Becher was horrified that his friend was getting involved in such fantastic things as anthroposophy. Nevertheless, he began to familiarize himself with the new spiritual science and subsequently became a thorough connoisseur and exponent of anthroposophy.

It was clear to Otto Becher that he could not take on any position as pastor or lecturer. So he first worked as a house teacher at the Silesian castle of Lubowitz near Ratibor, from which Josef von Eichendorff came, then with Stegemanns at Gut Marienstein, north of Göttingen. He also worked for a time as an educator with Paul Geheeb at the ‘Odenwaldschule’.

When the very first circle of eighteen students gathered with Rudolf Steiner for the June Course in Stuttgart in 1921, Otto Becher was among them. For him, the consequence was to withdraw from his spiritual-scientific studies and turn to the work of religious renewal. Four months later, he attended the Autumn Course for theologians in Dornach and expressed his will to cooperate, even though he thought he had only weak forces. From May 1922, he prepared the foundation of a congregation in Breslau.

In the Breitbrunn photo, we see him standing in the middle next to Pastor Karl Ludwig. Compared to the youth of most of the participants, both were already more mature professional men. Emil Bock ordained Otto Becher in Dornach on September 16, 1922, the day of The Christian Community’s founding.

After the Dornach events, Otto Becher founded the congregation in Hannover together with Claus von der Decken. But he remained there only a year and then, at Rudolf Meyer’s request, worked in the Görlitz congregation.

This circumstance made it possible for him to attend the conference at Koberwitz Castle near Breslau from June 7-16, 1924, where Rudolf Steiner held the agricultural course that spiritually founded the biodynamic way of farming. A small insignificant episode has come down to us from those days, but it characterizes Otto Becher’s poverty and frugality. On the daily train ride from Breslau to Koberwitz, a lady noticed that Otto Becher was wearing no socks and completely worn shoes despite the wet and cold weather. She immediately made sure that he received what he needed as a gift.

In October 1924, Otto Becher, at the age of thirty-three, took up his work in the Pforzheim community. It had been founded by Walter Gradenwitz, who then worked with him for some time.

For over thirty years, he built up and maintained the congregation in Pforzheim. Of benefit was his comprehensive education in many areas, his pedagogical experience in religious education for children and youth work, but above all, his spiritually clear and modest, engaging, friendly manner.

Although Rudolf Meyer had repeatedly asked him to write, he did not publish any of his work. A wealth of manuscripts were confiscated by the Gestapo when The Christian Community was banned, and he was taken into custody for three weeks. During the time when the Christian Community was banned, he worked as a secretary in Herbert Witzenmann’s metal tube factory.

Apart from Pforzheim, he gave lectures in only a few towns in Baden. According to the judgment of his colleagues, these were true gifts of the spirit.

With his commitment as a member of the board of the school association, he promoted the founding of the Pforzheim Waldorf School. He was wholeheartedly involved in the work of the branch of the Anthroposophical Society. In addition, he was a well-known personality in that town, which on February 23, 1945, had been so severely hit by the war.

So it was natural that at Becher’s death, the mayor wrote a heartily cordial letter and that the newspaper paid detailed tribute to his work in the city.

Perhaps two things characterize Otto Becher best: The topic of his last series of lectures in the congregation was: “The Work of Christ in the Intellectual History of the Occident.” His innermost concern was to trace Christ’s activity discerningly and serve Him in worship. And secondly, he was like a secret knight who sensed his proper hour approaching. Thinking of repeated earth lives, he himself considered his rich working life only as a preparatory incarnation.

He cared for the renewed sacraments as a priest for thirty-three years.

 

226 Otto Becher

MEMORANDUM

For a long time I had the feeling that the will for a religious renewal, which had begun to flow at our first course in Stuttgart in June, had since then increasingly moved from the practical-religious to the theoretical-theological and thus threatened to peter out. Through Mr. Rudolf Meyer and Mr. Borchart, I have now been informed that many of us course participants have become aware of this and have decided to call for the purification of the original impulse through explanations.

I hereby join these rallies. Even if, on the one hand, the whole magnitude and gravity of our task cannot be brought seriously enough into consciousness, and the inadequacy of one’s own powers, measured against the task, is experienced in a particularly deep and painful way, I nevertheless believe that it is precisely the cliff of hidden egoism that is avoided if, trusting in the soul-strengthening and enriching effect of the spiritual knowledge that Dr. Steiner has made accessible to us, one courageously begins with practical religious work. Personal imperfections are certainly best overcome in spiritual-religious action and life itself. It is foreseeable that from the beginning of our practical work, all means will be used to fight against us. However, I now believe that a preceding public theoretical propaganda in the theological world will rather aggravate than alleviate the conflict with it. For the confession of the Spirit is, after all, ultimately a matter of will. Yes, there is a danger that our impulse will be stifled by the agitation of the press if the public learns of our will sooner than it has become action. Furthermore, it should be noted that the economic possibilities of church planting are only getting smaller and smaller, and that the financing of our movement can only really start to flow after the practical work has begun. First the spiritual reality must be really experienced, if Impulse is to awaken in the people, which help to carry and spread the religious movement. The how of starting would have to be clarified quite soon in a meeting and to ask Dr. Steiner to give us further advice in this direction.

On the question of the leadership of our movement, I would only like to emphasize here that the spiritual freedom, the initiative, and the sense of responsibility of the individual co-workers must not be impaired in any way. The ideas of threefolding will have to guide us in this.

Finally, I declare that I am willing to use my weak forces for our practical-religious goals as soon as I am free in my line of work, which will probably be the case at the beginning of June.

Otto Becher

Marienstein, February 22, 1922.

 

TWO TEXTS BY OTTO BECHER

This is the course of the great development of the world and of mankind: The power of the gods slowly becomes – from embodiment on earth to embodiment on earth – the power of the human being himself. Only in the distance from the gods can the human being develop independence, and only here can spiritual love arise from freedom and grow stronger. The earth is the place of the unfolding of the human ego and the human community. The true new community is based on the voluntary sacrifice of the strong. People who have awakened to the “I” are free to unite in the service of hatred and destruction, of the massification and disenchantment of the human being, or for his liberation and exaltation, for true humanity. To this kind of union above the word of Christ applies: “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” And Paul writes to the Colossians “When Christ comes to be revealed, you also will be revealed with him.” Thus the human being experiences himself as a germinating force for a new humanity and a new earth … The development of the will must not take place without transformation and healing; there must be a readiness to receive the divine power of grace, as in the archetype of Mary, but also of Mary Magdalene. Again and again we must become aware that we can “do no works” before God. All talents have an antisocial effect as long as they are not transformed and put at the service of Christ. Not paralysis, but highest increase of impulses is connected with it; now our goals become the world goals, and the world goals become our goals. The spiritual nobility of a true priestly royalty then moves into our souls.

Today, the anxious concern is everywhere: How will a peaceful cultural construction such as this be possible? The right bringers of peace can only be those who are inflamed by true Christian impulses. A true Christian community is called to carry out into the world the new angel’s work: “Peace on earth to men of good will.

 

FROM THE “PFORZHEIMER KURIER” OF JULY 21, 1954:

Pastor Otto Becher died.

The Christian Community of Pforzheim lost its pastor.

Unexpectedly and suddenly, the Christian Community in Pforzheim lost its highly honored pastor, Pastor Otto Becher, after a brief serious illness. On October 31 of this year, it would have been three decades that Pastor Becher had ministered here. Born on 26.1.1891 in Holzminden, he first enjoyed a humanistic education and then studied theology and philosophy in Göttingen and Leipzig. At the age of thirty he came to anthroposophy as a constant seeker, but then found inner clarity and from this became the co-founder of the Christian Community in Germany already one year later. When he came to Pforzheim after another two years, he had soon settled in and devoted himself to this city and the circle of people he pastored with all love and intensity. His greatest and most prominent concern was to work out of silence. For the Pforzheim congregation his passing means an irreplaceable loss, since it revered him not only as a faithful intimate pastor, but also as an outstanding scholar of the humanities, as a joyful, life-loving artist, and as an excellent organizer with a talent for improvisation that was peculiar to him.

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Wilhelm Johannes Salewski

Wilhelm Johannes Salewski

September 20,1889, Chemnitz – 1.2.1950, Unterlengenhardt

 

Four days after his ordination on September 16, 1922, and still during the founding events in Dornach, Wilhelm Salewski reached the age of thirty-three. He thus belonged to the middle-aged founders between the few older ones and the many very young ones. His birthday on September 20 fell on the ninth anniversary of the laying of the foundation stone for the first Goetheanum building.

Wilhelm Salewski was born in Chemnitz in 1889, the first of twelve children – five brothers and six sisters. His father came from a Pomeranian family of farmers and millers and was working in the dairy business at the time of his first son’s birth. Five years later, the family moved to the Vistula lowlands. On various farms in Rospitz and Sedlinen, in the vicinity of the town of Marienwerder, his father tried to earn the bare necessities for the growing family.

The children grew up in this agricultural area. They had to help with all the work. Self-cut willow wood from the banks of the Liebe River and their own peat were the heating material for the harsh winters. The walk to school took an hour. Assaults by the village youth had to be endured.

Wilhelm Salewski was at the top of his class throughout his school years. He passed the Abitur at the grammar school in Marienwerder in 1908. His parents, therefore, wanted him to study despite the lack of money. He was to become a pastor. His father was a strict pietist in the “Community Movement” within the national church. Young Wilhelm became familiar with and enthusiastic about the great epoch of German idealism while still at grammar school. He used the Fichte saying, “To have character – is to be German” as a motto in his graduation speech after leaving school.

Instead of theology, however, Wilhelm Salewski studied philosophy and philology in Greifswald, Marburg, Tübingen, and Berlin. From 1910 onward, the family lived In Dresden, where the father now ran a dairy wholesale business. There, the younger sisters and brothers experienced their big brother playing the piano for them, singing to the lute on hikes in the Ore Mountains, or opening up the world of paintings to them in the Gemäldegalerie [Old Masters’ Gallery] with Raphael’s Sistine Madonna and taking them to the opera.

With the outbreak of the First World War, he volunteered. He went with the ‘Grimma Hussars’ to the battles in Flanders. Later he fought in a machine-gun troop in Hungary, where he was also wounded. At the end of the war, we find him as a lieutenant in the military hospital in Leipzig. His brother Paul was killed in action in 1917.

Unfortunately, it is no longer possible to determine when Wilhelm Salewski became acquainted with anthroposophy, only that it happened through his encounter with the theatre troupe around Gottfried Haaß-Berkow. In any case, the doctoral thesis he submitted in Leipzig in 1919 was not accepted because it contained anthroposophical ideas.

Siblings still remember this time: how they heard their elder brother enthusiastically talking about Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophy. Some sisters later found their way to The Christian Community, and his younger brother Hugo also became one of their priests in 1927. The most profound experience in Wilhelm Salewski’s biography was his participation in the opening weeks of the first Goetheanum building in Dornach, which Rudolf Steiner introduced with the motif in his address that in the future, science, religion, and art must be renewed from the spirit so that they can work together in a renewed way for a future culture. This is what the Goetheanum wants to serve.

The Anthroposophical Society engaged the “Thuringian philosopher” from Leipzig, who was involved there as a speaker in the threefold social order initiative in Elise Wolfram’s branch. Especially in the Ruhr area, he gave lectures to entrepreneurs and proletarians and had conversations with them. When the initiative soon had to be abandoned, Wilhelm Salewski worked as a home teacher in Bremen and also at a rural educational home. But he continued to be active in the anthroposophical movement, especially as a speaker on Goethe. In 1921, an essay by him appeared in the journal Die Tat, which Rudolf Steiner mentioned with praise in one of his lectures (on February 8, 1921, in GA 203, 1978, p. 213). Thus we see him already tried and tested in spiritual work when he came across the circle of founders of The Christian Community and immediately recognized the liturgical work he wanted to take on as the most important means in the struggle to overcome materialism and intellectualism.

From the autumn course in 1921 onwards, he was involved in every step of the founding of The Christian Community. He prepared the founding of the congregation in Düsseldorf but was then active in Karlsruhe for years until he moved to Stettin, where he remained until the Second World War. At a meeting of The Christian Community in Mannheim (October 1927), which Wilhelm Salewski had helped to prepare, he invited Marie Steiner and her Dornach speech choir to participate. These choral performances were the first outside Dornach and marked the beginning of a rich touring activity through many European countries.

He spent the first days of the prohibition period in 1941 in prison. After the Second World War, he worked as a priest in Bayreuth. For many months in 1949, he suffered from a serious illness which brought him to Unterlengenhardt (in the Black Forest) to the Burghalde clinic, where he died on February 1, 1950.

Not particularly tall, he was nevertheless a striking figure, stern-looking, with an eagle’s nose and a slightly melancholy expression around his mouth. His strong soul often seemed inhibited. His unhappy marriage remained without children. Those around him experienced him as somewhat reserved, almost withdrawn, and sometimes even brusque. He pondered a lot about the problem of evil.

Through countless lectures, he had worked for the first foundation of The Christian Community. There is hardly an issue of The Christian Community magazine in which he did not publish an essay, a story, a poem, or a book review. In 1931, Wilhelm Salewski’s only book publication appeared: Die Psychoanalyse Sigmund Freuds, Grundfragen und Konsequenzen – Als Protest gegen den Verleihung des Goethepreises an Sigmund Freud [The Psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, Basic Questions and Consequences – As a Protest against the Awarding of the Goethe Prize to Sigmund Freud]. He self-published “Briefe” (essays) with the overall title Goethes Wesen und Werk [Goethe’s Essence and Work].

Throughout his life, he had felt the mandate to continue to stand up for anthroposophy. In 1948 he wrote to the aged Marie Steiner, whose reply on the relationship between anthroposophy and The Christian Community is an important document: “… That is why your letter touched me. I cannot think that it is still a question of which of our movements will triumph over the other and how we should delimit our fields of work from each other. I think we must seek ways of fusion …. With best regards Marie Steiner. “ [Cf. the book: Marie Steiner und die Christengemeinschaft [Marie Steiner and The Christian Community] by Wolfgang Gädeke (Stuttgart).]

 

On the painting by Rembrandt

“Christ and the Disciples in Emmaus”

How familiar Emmaus is to me. –

I have to paint it again and again.

I saw Him walking with His own

through the evening field and hear His words:

… “suffering in Jerusalem … ”

… “enter into His glory … ”

and my heart burns within me.

 

You earth, shining with dew

golden grain, you silent animals,

how you are one in His peace.

You poor hut, more gloriously adorned

than Solomon’s consecrated temple.

I enter with Him, –

He breaks the bread, –

and flaming, glowing I saw in the hut a sun….

–Wilhelm Salewski

MEMORANDUM

The Dornach theological course gave me the opportunity to recognize the essence of a contemporary liturgy and its absolute necessity for our present. Since the day I understood that intellectualism and materialism could be overcome through a liturgy, I have remained unwavering in my determination to work on the religious renewal of our people in the way that has been shown to us. The deepest essence of all that has been given to us by Dr. Steiner proves itself to me through the daily effect of strength that emanates from it. I hope and long that we will soon have the opportunity to work outwards.

Charlottenburg, March 4, 1922

  1. Salewski

 

 

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Claus von der Decken

October 5, 1888, Preeten Castle – August 24, 1977, Kassel

The midwife had to navigate the flooded Elbe meadows to get to Claus von der Decken’s birth on October 5, 1888, at Preeten Castle near Neuhaus. Claus was the second of four children who were joined by a foster sister. His father, Ernst, from the old Hanoverian landed gentry, was the administrator of various estates. His mother, Anna, was born von Arnswald, whose three sisters were abbesses of the noble convents of Bassum, Medingen, and Ebstorf. Anyone who was brought into a noble convent had to have sixteen full noble great-great-grandparents.

Claus von der Decken was what was then called a country gentleman. But his father, who was actually an artistic man, had an unfortunate hand in his property management. The property, which he had invested in large tenement houses in the early years, brought him losses instead of the profits he had hoped for. Nevertheless, his relatives let him continue to work and helped him.

The last small property his father still had was in Adendorf, not far from Lüneburg. From there, Claus and his two brothers went to school in Lüneburg for a while. At times they also had tutors; the young governesses of the three boys had a lot to put up with.

Claus completed his schooling (around 1904) and then took up voluntary military service with the Saxon Guard Riders in Dresden, which he finished as a lieutenant in 1908. He could then devote himself entirely to his artistic inclinations. He studied painting – especially portraiture – at the art academies in Düsseldorf, Dresden, Munich, and Paris. He also undertook an art trip to Rome during this time.

Claus wrote poetry throughout his life – sometimes up to fifty poems a year, but he also wrote dramas and more. When he studied in Düsseldorf, he was friends with the family of Lory Smits, who later became the first eurythmist. The elder Smits taught Rudolf Steiner a poem by Claus, which he praised. Tradition has it that Claus was sitting in the next room of the Smits house in 1909 when Rudolf Steiner gave the well-known lecture cycle on the angelic hierarchies in the salon. It is certain that Claus had not yet found access to anthroposophy at that time, although his very first encounter with Rudolf Steiner had probably taken place a year earlier.

While still a student, he was secretly engaged to Cécile von Bodenberg. The family of the nobles and freemen of Bodenberg belonged to the so-called dynastic nobility. They had their own vassals, owned land the size of a principality between the rivers Aller and Weser, and naturally belonged to the Guelph party and wanted to see the king reinstated in Hanover.

His father ordered the bride and groom to wait seven years before getting married. Naturally, Claus volunteered for military service in the First World War after finishing his studies. But when his two brothers soon died in the field, Claus was transferred to the rear echelon to spare him as the last scion of his family; then, his father allowed him to marry. The wedding took place on October 3, 1916, in Hudemühlen, ‘Estate Three.’ Back in the military, Claus was constantly commissioned to make portraits of comrades and superiors. He was stricken with typhoid. After the war, he painted some portraits of fallen members of parliament for the Reichstag building in Berlin, but they later fell victim to fire.

During the war, he encountered anthroposophy anew with great intensity. After the end of the war, it was Rudolf Meyer who pushed him hard: “You came through the war alive. You must make yourself available to Rudolf Steiner and the Threefold Movement!” Claus von der Decken did not listen to him.

From January 1918 onwards, the family grew by one child a year until there were seven to feed. They lived in an outlying estate of Hudemühlen, Hademstorf, a rural inn. Claus earned money by painting portraits, some of them quite “lucrative.” Being nobility and recommended in aristocratic circles, he painted on estates as far away as Silesia.

Once again, Rudolf Meyer approached him. It was in summer of 1921; the first steps towards religious renewal in the sense of anthroposophy had been taken. The June Course had taken place. Rudolf Meyer was looking for co-workers and met Claus von der Decken in a confectioner’s shop in Hanover to invite him to join the Autumn Course in Dornach and to help with the future work. Only then had the decision matured to commit himself – thirteen or fourteen years after his first acquaintance with anthroposophy and his first encounter with Rudolf Steiner. Although the family already had three children – a fourth died in the same year – and the economic prospects were very poor, Claus von der Decken decided to take up the priesthood.

On September 16, 1922, he was ordained as a priest by Emil Bock in Dornach. Together with Otto Becher, he founded the community in Hanover. The family could continue to live outside in Hudemühlen (today Hodenhagen/Aller). When money became too tight, the father moved out again, far across the country, to paint portraits.

Martin Schmidt, a rye breeder who later became widely known, had the means at that time, both through the superheated steam machine production in Kassel and through funds from America, to acquire his own farm in 1924, shortly before the Koberwitz course, which established biodynamic agriculture and in which he participated. He bought the Eschenhof in Grammersdorf on Hemmelsdorfer Sea, northeast of Lübeck. This soon became the home of the von der Decken family. From there, Claus von der Decken took over the community work in Lübeck that Joachim Sydow had started from Rostock.

On the Eschenhof, the family had to endure difficult destinies, both humanly and in terms of health. Cécile von der Decken died in 1928, two years after the birth of her seventh child. Four years of family separation followed. The three older children moved with the Schmidt family to Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe to attend the Waldorf School. The three younger children stayed in Lübeck with their father and were looked after by his mother and sister.

On October 5, 1931, Claus von der Decken took up church work in Kassel. In 1932 he entered into his second marriage. Melly von der Decken, née Hegewald, had taken on the difficult task of raising six children as a stepmother under oppressive hardships. Until one month before his death, she faithfully stood by her husband for over forty-five years.

Claus von der Decken worked as a priest in Kassel for over four decades. The ban on the Christian Community (from June 9, 1941) brought better economic times for the family. At last, there were sufficient funds for subsistence because Claus was painting portraits again. On the other hand, a second heavy blow of fate struck the the family when two sons fell in the war.

The priest’s unusual humanitarian commitment had already amazed those around him in Lübeck, where he spoke and prayed with alcoholics about the Blue Cross’s work against alcohol addiction. One of them later had himself married by him. In Kassel, he helped Jewish people to escape during the Nazi era. During the heavy bombing raids, he visited the rubble sites, once rescuing a woman from the flames and giving her shelter with his own family.

He was distinguished by a particularly rich, strong emotional capacity. Unforgettable was his humor that expressed itself so quaintly when he told stories in the Low German dialect. He was an artist and a priest. His poems were published in the magazine The Christengemeinschaft. Of his dramas, Pontius Pilatus was published in 1963. Claus von der Decken experienced a special, humanitarian and amicable fulfillment of his work on the occasion of a series of community camps, which he organized with Wolf-Dietrich von Kurnatowski, Friedrich Gädeke, and other colleagues in the 1950s and 1960s on the Sonnenberg in the Upper Harz, north of St. Andreasberg.

As a poet and painter, he was tirelessly active. His most important works for the priests’ circle are probably the two fine death portraits of Friedrich Rittelmeyer and Emil Bock. But he had been committed to working for a new priesthood ever since he asked Rudolf Steiner: “Can the priesthood be conducive with my artistry?” and the latter had replied: “Yes, your artistry can be conducive to your priesthood.” Many destinies in the priest circle would have been better mastered if this sentence had been taken to heart.

On August 24, 1977,  Claus von der Decken died in Kassel a few weeks before his 89th birthday.

,

Wilhelm Alexander Ruhtenberg

Die Gruender der Christengemeinschaft: Ein Schicksalsnetz
By Rudolf F. Gaedeke
Translated by Cindy Hindes

Wilhelm Ruhtenberg – January 17, 1888, Riga – August 31, 1954, Bensberg

 

Wilhelm Ruhtenberg was born in Riga on January 17, 1888, the fourth of six children. His father ran a large cigarette factory in the former Hanseatic city with worldwide trade relations through the Russian Empire to Vladivostok. The upper-middle-class life of a Baltic family based on traditions formed the framework of the boy’s childhood. In the tenth year of his life, a serious illness forced him to a two-year sickbed. In order to spare him the ancient languages, his father sent him to a secondary school after his recovery. Throughout his life, Ruhtenberg admired his teacher there with gratitude.

Reading a biography of a minister (O. Funke, Die Fußspuren des lebendigen Gottes auf meinem Lebenswege [Footprints of the Living God on My Life Path]) ignited in him the will to become a pastor. The tradition of the merchant family and the unsuitable school education without ancient languages initially stood in the way. But his father allowed him to take private lessons in Latin and Greek so that a special examination would allow him to graduate from secondary school and study theology.

Ruhtenberg studied at the University of Dorpat from the autumn of 1907 until his academic exams with Adolf von Harnack in the autumn of 1914. He spent one semester each in Berlin and Leipzig. His disappointment with the study of theology and its then-common textual criticism of the Bible was so deep that acting as a preacher of the Gospel and pastor was out of the question.

His time in Dorpat, however, brought him a meeting with Nora Umblia, who was born and raised there. Their marriage, celebrated in 1913, brought two children. Without later remembering personally, he also met the student Herbert Hahn in Dorpat.

The First World War isolated the young family in Riga. They had to refrain from traveling abroad or studying. Ruhtenberg became a teacher at a private high school in Riga in 1914, and at the end of 1915, pastor-adjunct at St. Gertrude’s Church until 1917. While he was devoting his time primarily with private philosophical studies, the end of the war came and then that most terrible, inhuman time.

After the serious illness that he had survived in childhood, he now came even closer to death from hunger and months of mortal danger during the occupation. His wife managed to escape with the children. He himself was initially hired under the Bolsheviks as an elementary school lecturer. He had become acquainted with Rudolf Steiner’s writings at a bookseller’s in Riga and had an enduring enthusiasm for Steiner’s Riddles of Philosophy. This presentation rekindled in him a confidence in thinking and thus in the spirit. His audience grew when he treated the ancient Greek thinkers (pre-Socratics) with this background.

But because he was a pastor,  he was suddenly taken to Dünaburg with a penal battalion condemned to death. He survived this time probably only because he had previously trained his body, weakened by hunger, to good performance through much sport. Now, with the help of Jews, and disguised as a Jew, he was able to escape by ship across the Baltic Sea to Lübeck (1919). Behind him, in the east, a world was lost.

He then had the inner certainty that he would have to move to Stuttgart. There the future would show itself; above all, he would meet Rudolf Steiner. So he went to Stuttgart, met his wife and children again and heard a public lecture by Rudolf Steiner for the first time. Soon he became a member of the Anthroposophical Society. Then followed the great years of intensive double activity. First, Rudolf Steiner soon accepted him as a class teacher in the Waldorf School (January 1921). He was exactly 33 years old when this request, which he had made, was granted.

The family lived – always with a few boarding students – in a small wooden house on the school grounds on Uhlandshöhe. A small fortune had been lost to him in the collapse of Futurum A.G. in Switzerland. ( Futurum A.G. was an “Economic Society for the International Promotion of Economic and Spiritual Values”, i.e. a bank-like institute, with headquarters in Dornach existing from 1920 to 1924.)

Before being hired as a teacher, Wilhelm Ruhtenberg had asked Rudolf Steiner if he should take over an offered pastorate. Rudolf Steiner wanted only to answer the question in the affirmative if it would be possible to preach from the pulpit about repeated earth lives—only then would it make sense.

In addition to his work as a classroom teacher, he was soon appointed as a teacher of independent Christian religious education with the task of holding Sunday services as well. His religious groups had over sixty children! During the same period, people repeatedly turned to him – or were sent to him by Rudolf Steiner –requesting baptisms or marriages.

So it happened that he asked Rudolf Steiner for a baptismal ritual and a wedding ritual and received them – with the details for the vestments and other elements of the ceremony. In this way, shortly before the actual founding of The Christian Community, when the nascent circle of priests was just forming, there were six baptisms and one wedding with the same wording as was then handed over to The Christian Community. The rituals were given to Ruhtenberg as an ordained pastor, because he had official authorization to perfom baptisms and weddings.

Then the time came for the immediate founding of The Christian Community. Ruhtenberg took part in all the preparatory courses from the beginning and was ordained a priest in Dornach on September 16, 1922, as the fourteenth member of Emil Bock’s circle. Although he was now also a priest, he continued to work as a teacher at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart until 1930. Then he worked – after a second marriage – from 1933 in the congregations  of Rostock, Leipzig and especially Chemnitz until the ban of The Christian Community in 1941. After the ban and the end of the war, which Wilhelm Ruhtenberg survived in the ‘army post billing center’ in Chemnitz, there was strangely no more permanent parish work. After his escape, we find Wilhelm Ruhtenberg with friends in Überlingen working as a curative teacher in Holstein and finally in Bensberg near Cologne, where he died on August 31, 1954.

His path had led him from east to west. Then came the line added from south to north. His special mission was to be a special link between the school movement and The Christian Community, which he entirely fulfilled in the middle of his life. He embodied a very unique combination of an aristocratic, cosmopolitan attitude of body and mind with a tender ‘eastern’ soul. As a result, he was extraordinarily sensitive and vulnerable. This is how his friend and colleague Herbert Hahn described him from the founding years of the Waldorf School. This tender soul was also evident in his fine translations of the poetry of the Russian Alexander Remisow. (Further details of his biography can be read in Der Lehrerkreis um Rudolf Steiner in der ersten Waldorfschule 1919-1925, 2nd ed. Stuttgart 1978, p. 205ff.)

 

,

Hermann Fackler

Hermann Fackler, March 10, 1886, Lörrach – July 19, 1978, Stuttgart

Hermann Fackler, too, was already a long-serving pastor when The Christian Community was founded. At thirty-six, he belonged to the group of the older ones at that time. Nevertheless, he was still able to serve the movement for over fifty years.

Hermann Fackler was born in Lörrach on April 10, 1886, as the son of a Protestant veterinarian and a Catholic mother from Breisach. He was baptized Catholic. His mother died shortly afterward as a result of the birth, so his father had to place his young son in the care of a loving, simple cobbler family for the first seven years. In the first ten years of his life, the boy was not spared serious childhood illnesses. Due to whooping cough, he suffered a lifelong ear ailment. For the next two and a half years, however, he was healthy and spry, apart from an accident in the icy Sudeten Mountains, which later afflicted him greatly.

When his father married again, this time to a Protestant woman, the boy was allowed to move in with his parents in Donaueschingen in 1893. He attended the humanist grammar school and Protestant religious instruction but also had deep religious experiences when visiting his mother’s relatives in Breisach and Freiburg and attending mass in the cathedrals there.

When his father was transferred to the Ministry of the Interior in Karlsruhe in 1898, his son attended confirmation classes with the city pastor Brückner, who impressed him so much that the boy wanted to become a pastor himself. Immediately after graduating from high school in 1905, he went to Heidelberg University, where he studied philosophy with Wilhelm Windelband, dogmatics with Ernst Troeltsch, and exegesis with Adolf Deißmann. He went to Berlin for two semesters to hear Adolf von Harnack lecture on church history and Reinhold Seeberg on dogmatics. All these professors have gone down in the history of science with their life’s work.

Nevertheless, for the young man, the study was unsatisfactory. It brought a lot of useless head knowledge (textual criticism, for example) and no preparation for religious practice. One learned to preach but not how to pray with people. The theoretical and practical examinations were taken in 1908/09. Then followed vicar positions in Baden, among others in Waldshut on the Rhine, where he met his wife. He received a position as “pastoral chaplain” in Immendingen (Hegau) in 1912. His wife, Getrud, née Leyendecker, had been a deaconess in Freiburg and was able to help him with the care of a large parish area and several military hospitals in the following years during the First World War.

If the discrepancy between studied theology and practiced religion was already difficult for Hermann Fackler, the problems grew even greater when he became intensively involved with the star mythology of Professor Arthur Drews from Karlsruhe during these years (1913-1919). He knew Drews personally from many visits and found access to the cosmic aspect in his book Die Christusmythe [The Christ Myth]. But how could he proclaim death and resurrection if Christ had not lived at all? Even the philosophy of ‘as if’ only helped to reach an insipid compromise.

In 1919 Hermann Fackler became parish administrator in Rheinfelden on the Upper Rhine, not far from Basel. The dean who introduced him invited him to his Freemason lodge because of his inaugural sermon (on 1 Peter 2:5), in which a word about Freemasonry had been spoken. The dean was Master of the Chair. Thus Hermann Fackler became an ‘apprentice’ in the Lodge “Friedrich zur Eintracht” in Lörrach and found cultic brotherly fellowship in which he could feel a remnant of the air of mystery.

In September 1920, a blind man asked Hermann Fackler to come with him to Dornach near Basel to see Rudolf Steiner’s ‘crazy house’ through his eyes. This is how Hermann Fackler found his way to the first Goetheanum and was immediately enthusiastic. He and his wife then went repeatedly to Dornach. They attended eurythmy performances and began to read Rudolf Steiner’s books.

In the autumn of the following year (1921), he took a short holiday with his wife in nearby Waldshut that was broken off after a week due to inner turmoil. At home, a single letter was found that had not been forwarded. It was an invitation from a completely unknown Rudolf Meyer from Stuttgart to come to Dornach for the theology course which was about to begin.

Hermann Fackler immediately arranged everything necessary and commuted daily from Rheinfelden to Dornach to attend the autumn course. There, the true science of God dawned on him when he experienced Rudolf Steiner for the first time and absorbed his lectures. And he immediately committed himself to the movement, which wanted to renew Christian religious practice with liturgical celebrations.

So he resigned from his ministry on July 1, 1922, and later even resigned from the church, for he had now found his spiritual home and his real task, which he was to serve for another half-century.

He was present in Breitbrunn for the preparatory meeting of the founders and was ordained on September 16, 1922, in Dornach at the Goetheanum, to whose forms he owed his first access to anthroposophy. When he asked Rudolf Steiner whether he should begin the congregational work of The Christian Community in Rheinfelden – also because people there had already asked – he did not find it possible. In November 1922 the church began in Constance (until August 1924). This was followed by important years of work in Berlin (1924-1929). In Naumburg/Saale, he then replaced Eberhard Kurras in the activity (1929-1931, until some difficult working years in Göppingen (Württ.) followed (1931–1936), after which Reutlingen became his place of residence for over forty years. (1936–77).

Hermann Fackler survived the ban on community work (1941) smoothly – without imprisonment and almost without theft of books. He then worked as a gardener and in the tax office, and finally as a language teacher with tutoring, before work in the community could begin again after the end of the war in 1945.

In the fifties, it was possible to buy a house and build a community room in Goethean style, which still serves the community today. Beginning with the first volume of The Christian Community magazine, a wealth of essays by Hermann Fackler has appeared, reflecting the breadth of his education and interests. He also published articles in other journals and newspapers, such as Die Kommenden, Blätter für Anthroposophie, Entscheidung, Die Drei, Die Tat, and others. He also wrote poetry and painted. As a lecturer, however, he was less prominent. He worked in silence through many visits and conversations and appeared outwardly closed.

However, he met people with constant friendliness and kindness. Perhaps his quiet manner was also due to his suffering from his ear. Fully aware of this, he continued to work spiritually until he was very old – he translated St Augustine – before ending his final years on July 19, 1978, in the Haus Morgenstern nursing home in Stuttgart.

 

MEMORANDUM

I, the undersigned, born in 1886 and after eight semesters of theological and philosophical studies and active since 1909 in the service of the Protestant Regional Church of Baden, see myself compelled, after conscientious self-examination, to make the following declaration: I became aware of the anthroposophical movement in 1920. After initially reading a few critical writings and systematic presentations of anthroposophy, I soon began to study Dr. Steiner’s writings myself, as far as they were available to me through the book trade. Soon seized by this study, I spent every hour that my ministry allowed me with it. I visited the Goetheanum several times to gain a personal impression of spiritual science and its building in Dornach. So it was with joy that I accepted an invitation to take part in the religious course in Dornach, which took place there from September 26 to October 10 last year under the direction of Dr. Steiner. The impressions I received from what I heard there, as well as in personal contact with the participants in the course, were so profound that even then, the decision matured in me to adjust my life to the new movement, and I signed the pledges made in Dornach. Soon after completing the Dornach course, I was accepted into the Anthroposophical Society, so that Dr. Steiner’s esoteric lecture cycles now became accessible to me, at least in part. The study of these cycles, especially the cycle on the Gospel of John, the inner processing of what I had received in Dornach, the daily practice of meditation, all advanced me inwardly to such an extent that I now feel inwardly impelled to make the following solemn and binding declaration: I am ready and determined to apply for my release from the pastoral ministry as soon as accommodations are available for my family and me in the sphere of activity I have already envisaged, in order then to place myself entirely at the service of the anthroposophical religious movement and to serve the spread of this movement with all my strength. I would gratefully welcome it if Dr. Steiner could give a preparatory course to those who are ready for this life’s work, in which all that is connected with this work would be discussed.

Badisch Rheinfelden, February 20, 1922

Hermann Fackler

,

Fritz Blattman

Die Gruender der Christengemeinschaft: Ein Schicksalsnetz
By Rudolf F. Gaedeke
Translated by Cindy Hindes

October 18, 1882, Barr/Alsace – October 11, 1969, Beddelhausen/Eder

At the time of the founding of the Christian Community in 1922, Fritz Blattmann, at the age of forty, already belonged to the small circle of the oldest ones. He experienced all the events – as someone unknown and silent. Silence was one of his great virtues. After two years, in 1924, while they were preparing for the last meeting with Rudolf Steiner in September in Dornach at the Marienstein estate near Göttingen, the founding circle was not a little astonished when this unknown person told them about his life in a more detailed and coherent way.

He was born on October 18, 1882, as the ninth child of parents from Freiburg im Breisgau. They had founded a merchant’s office in Paris, which they had to give up during the 1870s war. Since they were looking for administrative officials in the new Reich territory of Alsace, his father had himself appointed as a civil servant there. So Fritz was born at the foot of the holy Odilienberg, in Barr in Alsace, near Andlau Castle, and grew up in a beautiful house in the vineyards, not far from the summer residence of the famous writer Édouard Schuré. But his childhood paradise lasted only three years. Then his father died, and his mother, who now had to get by on a very small pension, moved with her flock of children to the gates of Stuttgart to what was then so-called ‘holy’ Korntal. There was a congregation of brothers in Korntal. The ‘Hahn Brothers’ with their ‘Hours’ shaped the pietistic life of the community. There were good and affordable educational opportunities for the children. As a matter of course, Fritz grew up in this unique religious atmosphere, which surrounded him until he was sixteen. At that time, he and his mother, with her daughters, who were still living in the household, moved to Tübingen to enable him to graduate from grammar school and study theology. The  Land Exam there was waived by the King of Württemberg for particularly gifted pupils and entitled them to study theology or jurisprudence with the obligation to become a pastor or administrative official.

After graduating from high school, he underwent basic military training and began his studies in Tübingen. We find nothing more reported about his theological studies, his First Examination, his vicarage in Tuttlingen, and his Second Examination, except that he met the girl he was to marry twenty years later during his vicariate. To avoid getting stuck as a pastor in some village in the Swabian Alb, Fritz Blattmann applied and was accepted as pastor of the German seamen’s home and, at the same time, as vicar for the small Protestant congregation in the French port city of Marseille. During this essentially social activity in the home, where German seamen arrived from all over the world, Fritz Blattmann became increasingly aware that although he did not doubt the content of religion, he himself felt very incapable of communicating it. He was clearly aware that this inability was also due to the state of development of Protestant liberal theology, but he felt it more painfully as his own imperfection and inability. It is a testimony to his honesty and inner ambition that this feeling of inferiority, as he himself called it, also accompanied him later as a pastor in The Christian Community. Naturally, he could not live up to his ideal and the high standards he set for himself.

At that time, a bout of typhoid forced Fritz Blattmann to give up this work in Marseille and freed him to a certain extent from inner distress. On the other hand, this illness led him to the brink of death and let him experience the reality of the spiritual world in his own way. This must have happened around his thirtieth year (about 1912).

After the long period of illness, he reported once again to the Central Seamen’s Mission in Berlin and was sent to Genoa, to a very similar activity as in Marseille. To get to know the living conditions of the seafarers better, he hired himself out incognito — he was known among the German seamen — as a coal trimmer on a passenger steamer for the trip to New York. Because a reporter recognized him and wrote an article on him (“anonymous pastor as coal trimmer”), he sailed from there on another ship.

He returned to Bremen as a dishwasher at Norddeutscher Lloyd. After a further period of work in Genoa, he finally left the service of the Württemberg Regional Church to attend lectures in national economics at the University of Tübingen. A full second degree seemed too long and too expensive, so he looked for a position in a social profession that could sustain him and found it in the small industrial town of Heidenheim at the world-famous Voith company as head of the company health insurance fund and supervisor of other social affairs for the factory workers (1914).

After a short time, this activity was abruptly interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War, which Fritz Blattmann experienced as a reserve officer of an infantry regiment for the entire four years in the heavy battles on the Western Front in the Argonne, in Flanders, and on the Somme. In the middle of these war years (1916) came the event of his engagement to Mathilde Däuble from Blaubeuren and his first acquaintance with Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy through reading the book Theosophy, not long after his thirty-third birthday.

In Heidenheim, the world traveller Alfred Meebold, knowledgable in English-Indian theosophy and a student of Rudolf Steiner, had to enter the management of the second well-known company in Heidenheim, the ‘Württembergische Kattunmanufaktur,’ which his father had co-founded, due to the circumstances of the war. Immediately after the war, Alfred Meebold began intensive public lecturing activities in Heidenheim for anthroposophy and soon also for the threefold movement. In Fritz Blattmann (now thirty-six years old), the conditions had also matured, which made possible his membership in the Anthroposophical Society and full collaboration with Alfred Meebold in the Heidenheim branch and the Threefold Movement work. At that time, the Heidenheim branch had two hundred members, half of whom were industrial workers.

Fritz Blattmann’s situation in life was met with a request from his cousin Dr. Hermann Heisler from Tübingen, whether he would not like to take part in Rudolf Steiner’s planned theology course in Dornach in autumn 1921. Again, the struggle with the social question — similar to and yet again so characteristically different from, for example, Marta Heimeran, Heinrich Ogilvie or Wilhelm Salewski — led to his energetic and sacrificial collaboration in the founding of The Christian Community.


MEMORANDUM

There is agreement on the necessity of religious renewal far and wide in church circles; not so on the way to this renewal. For those who have themselves struggled in vain for living forces in the church, it is clear that the forces of renewal cannot come from the denominations. Church piety cannot stand up to the modern scientific, materialistic worldview. It must give way to it step by step because this piety is itself permeated by a materialistic spirit. Before the war, I was employed as the pastor of the German seamen in Genoa and had the ardent desire to impart to these people, who had been tossed about by life, a strength that would sustain their lives. I failed in this task because I was stuck in the same mindset as those I wanted to help. That is why I gave up my ministry. At that time, I only blamed myself; today, I see that it was just as much the fault of the church, which could not give me the religious strength that is necessary to help others. In the meantime, I have become acquainted with anthroposophy and have gained the certainty that with it, the path is given to the individual as well as to the whole, on which connection can be found again with the spiritual forces of the world. I have unlimited confidence in this path and am convinced that a religious renewal can be initiated with the suggestions Dr. Steiner gave us in Dornach. I am wholeheartedly committed to helping in this renewal. The only concern that always troubles me is my own inability and unworthiness. If there were enough other people to support our cause, I would stand back. But since there are not enough people, I provide what I can. Even if I cannot lead people to the highest peak of the mountain, I can still keep them from the path that will inevitably lead them into the abyss, and I can point the way. From such points of view, I declare myself ready to make myself available for the work of religious renewal. I intend to take up the work here in Heidenheim.

–Heidenheim, February 8, 1922

When Fritz Blattmann was ordained a year later, on September 16, 1922, he was the seventh oldest of the founders. He began his priestly service in full awareness of his inadequate potential, although he was one of the most experienced in the world in the circle of founders. His painfully-experienced inability testifies to his modesty. But the awareness that there was a lack of people who wanted the new also shows his courage, which was perhaps greater than many of the inexperienced, younger co-founders. The relatively large number of members of the Heidenheim branch of the Anthroposophical Society, including so many of the working class, naturally led to the immediate formation of a considerable congregation at the end of 1922, for Fritz Blattmann had been known and appreciated in this circle for years as a speaker and as a person. After all, no one had forbidden anthroposophists to lead a religious life and belong to a religious community. However, there was not sufficient clarity about the need to distinguish between cognitive activity and religious practice, first in consciousness and the social sphere. The situation in Heidenheim at that time was often held up as a negative example of the relationship between the Anthroposophical Society and The Christian Community. One can understand that situation if one knows the special circumstances of that time.

After a year of working for The Christian Community in Heidenheim, Fritz Blattmann left his colleague Wolfgang Schickler in charge and moved to Göppingen for a year, from where he also had to help look after the congregations founded by Dr. Hermann Heisler in Tübingen and Esslingen for some time.

The Blattmans

In 1931 he moved from Göppingen to Mannheim to take care of the existing congregation there; then he and Mathilde could finally marry. They had a son, Georg, who later served as a pastor in The Christian Community. When, in the difficult time of 1933, people gathered in Stuttgart to open the first building for the seminary, and every member of staff was asked to contribute a word to the event,

Fritz Blattmann spoke the terse words so characteristic of him: “Work and do not despair.”

One year before the beginning of the war, the seven years of parish work in Mannheim ended, and Darmstadt became the most important place of his priestly activity for twenty-five years. The ban on The Christian Community on June 9, 1941, also affected him. He had to spend a quarter of a year in prison without trial or conviction and then found a livelihood with the Fissan company in Zwingenberg an der Bergstraße as a company accountant. The family was able to move into a flat in the beautiful town of Zwingenberg and thus survived the war, the severe destruction of Darmstadt, and the post-war years. In the destroyed Darmstadt, it was possible after the war to erect a very simple but small church building of their own, not on their own land, but with only a very small building lease. In 1966, however, the landowner demanded such a high rent that the congregation felt compelled to build its own newly designed church on an overlying plot of land (1966). Fritz Blattmann was able to accompany this phase in the life of the Darmstadt congregation from afar. In 1963, at the age of eighty, he said farewell to being responsible for the work in Darmstadt. He withdrew with his wife to the retirement home of The Christian Community in Beddelhausen in the Sauerland, where he celebrated until a few months before his death. He spent an important last period of his long, rich life as a faithful and silent co-founder and priest of the Christian Community. He died there on October 11, 1969.

,

Heinrich Rittelmeyer

June 20,1879, Schweinfurt – January 19, 1960, Wiesbaden

From Die Gründer der Christengemeinschaft: Ein Schicksalsnetz, by Rudolf Gädeke

 

Heinrich Rittelmeyer was born on June 20,1879, in Schweinfurt. His childhood was marked by illness and physical weakness. Only when he grew up did he become stronger and reach a ripe old age. In the weak child, there lived a strong, irascible soul, which repeatedly flared up until the boy attacked an adult with a knife. This experience frightened him so much that he decided to fight the anger with the power of Christ. For years he struggled in prayer until he had conquered his temper. At thirteen, he told his father: “I want to be a pastor.”

But the confirmand already got into difficulties because he had to profess a faith that would bind him for life. When, in the same year, his brother Friedrich, who was seven years older, traveled home from his intermediate semesters in Berlin and had conversations with the confirmand, further uncertainties arose; years of doubt followed. Yes, Heinrich Rittelmeyer felt himself to be a ‘heretic.’ But he was quite sure: “God is a reality, and the divinity of Christ is a reality because they had brought about the change in my temperament.”

At about eighteen, the student gave a lecture on “Parzival and the Grail.” At twenty-one, he passed his Abitur at the Gymnasium and began studying theology in Erlangen. The course lasted eight semesters, three of which were completed in Berlin. Like his brother, Heinrich Rittelmeyer belonged to the Uttenruchia fraternity. He passed his first examination in 1902 as the third best student and was appointed to the preacher’s seminary in Munich for two years. There he had to preach sermons and give religious instruction in the city and its surroundings.

In 1904, Heinrich Rittelmeyer became a private teacher with the dean in Kitzingen. He gave religious instruction and experienced in a drastic way the untruthfulness with which funeral addresses were given. His difficulties became so great that in 1905 he applied for a leave of absence from the Bavarian church ministry, which was dominated by dogmatism.

From spring to Christmas 1905, he taught at the Protestant Pädagogicum in Godesberg on the Rhine. In addition, he attended lectures in German studies and philosophy in Bonn. The liberal theologian Martin Rade, editor of the journal Die christliche Welt [The Christian World], then found him a position as city vicar in Gotha. There was a free working atmosphere among the very diverse pastors. He was able to pass the Second Theological Examination in 1906 and the philosophical examination at the University of Jena at the end of 1907. Both were not easy to master, as they had to be done in addition to his abundant work at the teacher’s seminary in Gotha. His work as an educator in the subjects of religion, German, and history over eleven years, from 1908 to 1919, filled him completely; it shaped many young people for life.

In Godesberg, Heinrich Rittelmeyer and Änne Kottmann (1884-1967), who had been governess in a German family in Greece for over three years from 1905, became engaged. In April 1908, they celebrated their wedding in Gotha. Two adopted sons grew up in the family. Diverse activities among the educated of the city kept him busy in addition to his teaching activities. He eventually became chairman of the German ‘Sprachverein’ [Language Society]. He now planned to acquire a doctorate in philosophy in Jena. However, he had to abandon this plan when health difficulties made the necessary journeys to the university city (in addition to his work as a teacher) impossible.

About once or twice a year, it was possible to talk personally with the elder brother Friedrich. The latter had become acquainted with anthroposophy in 1910 in Nuremberg through Michael Bauer and had met Rudolf Steiner personally in 1911 in Munich at the last lecture in the series “Wonders of the World, Ordeals of the Soul, Revelations of the Spirit.” He told Heinrich about this afterward. It was not until five years later, in 1916, that Heinrich asked what he should read. The answer was: How to Know Higher Worlds. In spring 1917, Friedrich Rittelmeyer was already working in Berlin when his brother visited him there. A public, so-called Architects’ House Lecture by Rudolf Steiner was announced: “Beyond the Senses and Beyond the Soul” (March 31, 1917, GA 66). Heinrich was the first to hear this lecture. Friedrich then offered him the printed lecture cycles to read, which were still inaccessible to non-members at that time.

Heinrich not only studied them thoroughly on an ongoing basis, but he also excerpted them stenographically, thus acquiring a solid basic knowledge of anthroposophy. Heinrich Rittelmeyer used his understanding of anthroposophy to help a former pupil who had returned from the war with a serious wound and was drawn to spiritualism by questions about the meaning of life. Heinrich intimated to him that anthroposophy was the only sensible thing to do in this situation. To his surprise, this student became a member of the Anthroposophical Society before himself.

Heinrich Rittelmeyer, who had a special relationship with Luther from childhood and had found his personal access to Christ through Lutheranism, gave a lecture in the four hundredth commemorative year of the Reformation, 1917, on Luther’s birthday, which he also had published in print, titled: “Luther, the Prophet of the New Germany.”

In April 1919, Heinrich Rittelmeyer took over the position of vice-principal in the Herford teacher training college. Because of his special interest in Germanic mythology, he applied to the Westphalian Minister of Culture to go to the area where the memory of Germanic history was alive. His professional responsibilities in Herford became even greater.

In the field of anthroposophy, he had now gained so much confidence that he was able to become a member of the Society and the branch in Bielefeld in 1920. From 1921 onward, he publicly advocated for Rudolf Steiner in lectures. From such a lecture on June 28, 1921, came the writing: Was will Dr. Rudolf Steiner? [What does Dr. Rudolf Steiner Want?], which appeared in at least six editions.

The years 1920 and 1921 also enabled him to have two conversations with Rudolf Steiner, which mainly dealt with meditation. In the meantime, Heinrich Rittelmeyer had changed from a person who prayed intensively from his youth, and indeed prayed for many other people throughout his life, to a person who now also meditated energetically. He received many impressions, but he did not like to talk about them. Out of Heinrich Rittelmeyer’s conversations with Rudolf Steiner it is important to note that Steiner’s indication that Luther and Raphael were in Rome at the same time but did not meet in person remained with him for the rest of his life.

He was a particularly quiet and, in a way, sober person in addition to being a teacher.

Now the time was approaching when he learned of the preparations for the founding of The Christian Community. In the spring of 1922, he had decided to place his life in their service, and so he was ordained priest by his brother on September 16, 1922, in Dornach. At the age of forty-three, he was already one of the older ones.

Without his family, who remained in Herford, he founded the three congregations in Karlsruhe, Mannheim, and Heidelberg in the twenty-five months from October 1922 to November 1924.

After working in the twin congregations of Mannheim-Heidelberg and Herford-Bielefeld, he continued his work in Wiesbaden Mainz starting in 1935.

After the banning of The Christian Community on June 9, 1941, Heinrich Rittelmeyer was arrested together with Fritz Blattmann by the Gestapo in Darmstadt on June 12. SS men indiscriminately dragged laundry baskets full of books and manuscripts (even the bride’s letters) from the flat; under threat of punishment, the parents were forbidden to inform their son in the field of this action. After his release from prison on  August 16, 1941, friends found him a job at the Erdal-Werke in Mainz with the task of writing about the historical development of the shoe and its care. After the total bombing in October 1944, Heinrich Rittelmeyer lived with friends in the Taunus until June 1945. Then, after the re-establishment of the Wiesbaden congregation (1945), he worked there until his death on January 19, 1960. After twenty-two years, he followed his brother, under whose importance he had suffered throughout his life, into the spiritual world.

An important teacher of his students, a praying pastor who accompanied all the people of his congregation daily in his consciousness, he also included the deceased in his prayers daily with the help of a little book in which he had entered hundreds of names. He was a humble, faithful minister in the performance of the sacraments, a courageous advocate of anthroposophy, and a quiet meditator: that was Heinrich Rittelmeyer. He rightly wore the ring of the archpriest (see also August Pauli and Rudolf von Koschützki).

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Friedrich Rittelmeyer

Die Gruender der Christengemeinschaft: Ein Schicksalsnetz
By Rudolf F. Gaedeke
Translated by Cindy Hindes

Friedrich Rittelmeyer
October 5th, 1872 in Dillinger/Donau – March 23rd, 1938 in Hamburg

Preview: Rittelmeyer wrested everything he accomplished out of a weak body and a melancholy temperament. He widened his soul in suffering and active service to everything human and divine. His spirit, however, became a potent force that affected those who worked with him, radiating certainty of life and trust in God.

In the spring of 1922 in the New Church—the German or Little Cathedral—in Berlin, Friedrich Rittelmeyer gave four big lectures on the theme “Anthroposophy and Religious Renewal”. This theme describes Rittelmeyer’s most important personal life motif and his objectively historical deed. His struggle for Christian understanding led him to anthroposophy and Rudolf Steiner; His religious quest was led thereby from Jesus to Christ. When these two things are seen against the backdrop of the turn of the 19th century and what was happening in history at that time, particularly now that many decades have passed, we can appreciate his lifetime achievement even more clearly and value it even more highly. Rudolf Steiner’s assessment of Friedrich Rittelmeyer belongs to this appreciation:

“The anthroposophical movement had to see in Rittelmeyer the model of a personality who had united Christianity and anthroposophy in the inner harmony of the heart and in the outer harmony of the work.” (GA 37/2602, 1966, p. 398)

This sketch of his life can in no way replace Friedrich Rittelmeyer’s two autobiographical works: “From My Life” and “Rudolf Steiner Enters My Life.” It means only to mention them, as well as the books by Erwin Schüle, “Friedrich Rittelmeyer – Life and Work,” and Gerhard Wehr, “Friedrich Rittelmeyer.” Despite these works, however, what is still missing today, half a century after his death, is a comprehensive biography and assessment, as well as a representative – if not complete – edition of his works.

Friedrich Karl Robert Franz Rittelmeyer was born on October 5th, 1872, in Dillingen on the Danube, where his French-born father was the Lutheran minister. His mother, who was from Thüringen, had received her teaching degree in Wuppertal. A good year after Friedrich was born, Rittelmeyer’s father was transferred to Schweinfurt am Main, where he later became dean. The couple then had six more children.

Friedrich was a melancholic, solitary child with blond curls and blue eyes, repeatedly weakened by illness, without friends, but highly gifted and thorough in his studies. His parents sent him to school at 5 ½ years-old (1878). In high school and the Abitur (university entrance exam), he was always the top student in his class.

As solitary as he appeared outwardly, even with respect to his father, his inner life kept getting fuller. His astonishingly early memory of his mother at around 14 months, when they were still in Dillingen, already shows a strong, conscious ability to remember events. The death of one of his little sisters allows him to look behind the curtain into another world: an angel experience, which the boy immediately brings as comfort to his grieving mother.

His body is continually beleaguered. A bad case of vaccine poisoning, a life-threatening case of scarlet fever, chronic furunculosis, general weakness, sports injuries, broken arm, broken foot, a weak eye, in short, a constant battle against physical infirmity, but also against a fear of life.

He wanted to become a “minister of God.” High school was all about service. But the 9-year-old schoolboy is reading a 3-volume folkloric world history book and becomes convinced he has already lived through it. The idea of reincarnation begins to dawn in him. From the age of 12, he reads all the German classics and much that is already forgotten today. Whatever he read he retained in his mind; He never read it again – other than Goethe – and yet everything was there, within reach in his memory.

He covered The Iliad and The Odyssey in Greek during one 2-week vacation. The classical world of antiquity, “the clear sky of Greece arched above me in all its serene magnificence,” and “at Plato’s ‘Symposium’ I experienced the celebration of spirit surpassed in all my life only by the Gospel of John.”

But Christianity? Friedrich survived the father’s daily prayers for the entire family, morning and evening, only by sinking into apathy. The confirmation vows (on April 18th, 1886) troubled his conscience: The godless sinner – hoping for grace, certain of grace? – “So, I diligently searched through my life for transgressions.” “The Luther experience, venerably true and deep in itself, is misused punitively to mistreat the sun-thirsty souls of children.” “I wandered through the Christian world for years as a non-believer: And yet, out of a deep inner being, I still always wanted to become a minister.”

Friedrich Rittelmeyer did only what was most necessary for high school. He wanted to remain at the top of the class. Other than that, school was a bitter experience. He passed the Abitur in 1890 with flying colors, but inwardly, the 17-year-old was at the end of his rope. “If only war would happen now so that I could be shot dead with dignity.” He declined an invitation to the Maximilianeum in Munich – a foundation for gifted students created by King Maximilian II – and completed a theology degree (1894) in Erlangen, including two sessions between semesters (1892 and 1892/3) in Berlin.

Rittelmeyer was overfull of human encounters and experiences in Erlangen, Berlin, and in the Uttenruthia student fraternity. Names like Adolf von Harnack, Heinrich von Treitschke, Ernst Troeltsch, and Wilhelm C. Roentgen are just a small sampling. Dealing with students as their spokesperson, taking part in sports, making music on the piano and cello, hiking, theater, concerts, lectures and gatherings in Berlin: he took advantage of all of it, intensively. But the studies themselves did absolutely nothing to fulfill the seeking soul. “What is actually the purpose of your life?” He inwardly asked himself of humanity’s greats: “Which of them could you serve with your life? Whose work could you continue today?” This pondering led him to Jesus. Only to him did he feel obligated. “That’s when I decided to stay alive.”

The 21-year-old had to fight through his existential crisis and then use and fulfill the freedom he achieved. He took the exam (August, 1894). “I had a theology, but no religion, no Christianity.” He had a very good grade, was the best among 50 candidates, but had no content for his sermons.

He was only sure of himself when it came to a spiritual experience. For his 21st birthday on October 5th, 1893, he received a book by Thomas Carlyle (1795-1880) called “Sartor resartus.” He studied it for weeks. This was his introduction to the I-experience, which he then deepened by studying J.G. Fichte. I am – I have a purpose, a goal, and this purpose is eternal, is spiritual, as I am eternal, and thus spiritual. “The kingdom of the I appeared before my soul.” And with it again the experience of having lived on this earth before.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer had 200 Marks of exam prize money at his disposal when, after a stint in the military (1894) cut short for health reasons, he embarked on a month-long trip around Germany. Of the approximately 30 places he visited, he was most impressed with his experiences in the Herrnhut congregation, where the Easter service was being celebrated, Friedrich Naumann’s[1] activities in Frankfurt, and Bodelschwingh’s[2] work in Bethel.

We hear from Friedrich Rittelmeyer about three musical experiences that were important for him. It was a worship service in the “New Church” in Berlin, 21 years before his own sending there. The 100th psalm as scored by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy touched his innermost being. It was a spiritual experience through music, a perception of one’s own higher being.

Based on this experience, Friedrich Rittelmeyer could take the decisive step in cognition. To him is owed the discovery of the I as the fundamental motif of contemporary religious consciousness. For the fundamental motif is no longer the Luther-experience of humankind’s guilt before God, no longer the question: How do I get a merciful God? Human beings in the present time of natural science have lost the awareness of God, no longer know a moral authority, and can barely still think of themselves as “sinners before God.”

The religious experience of the “Consciousness Soul” is pictured in the gospel in the story about The Prodigal Son (Lk. 15), about the human being who comes to himself through the experience of godlessness. Rittelmeyer sees in that a key precondition for theology on the threshold of the 20th century. This is an important point of departure for religious renewal.

Even before Rittelmeyer’s big trip around Germany, he had experienced an inner transformation at the St John Church in Schweinfurt listening to the Brahms Requiem, specifically when a young girl sings the words of Christ “I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy away from you.” In the New Church, this “first greeting from the time of the coming Christ” was strengthened. But the deep thinking theologist spoke up: “I wonder if an angel encounter, if the experience of the higher self could perhaps be conveyed in some other way than through the word, like through music. The spirit blows where and when it will, and the God-less, the free and self-reliant human being, can know through it the true life of God, the Christ. The prodigal son’s father says of his son: “He was dead and is alive again.” Rittelmeyer had felt this in a tender, indisputable way as a blessing, a consecration of the human being. He now knew exactly what Paul had experienced when he said: “Not I, but Christ in me”; he knew what John carried within himself as the word of Christ: “I am the Life.”

Now he could take up his work. His consecration as a human being, as a Christian, had been fulfilled. Rittelmeyer became the vicar of the city of Würzburg, at the age of 23. His weak constitution, however, meant that he was on constant overload with all the tasks at hand. After 2 years on the job, the death of his 13-year-old sister hit him so hard that he fell ill for 9 weeks (1897). Still, it was generally acknowledged that his activities had also started to bear fruit. His sermon preparations, sometimes lasting up to 25 hours, was experienced as substance. He was befriended by philosophy professor Oswald Külpe, who urged him to take on as a doctoral thesis the long-needed epistemological basis for theology. After all, Immanuel Kant and his postulate about the limits of knowledge needed to be overcome. Friedrich Nietzsche was a suitable subject for this work, and Rittelmeyer secured his Ph.D. in 1903 in Würzburg with the doctoral theme “Friedrich Nietzsche and the Knowledge Problem.”

Despite his excessive workload, Friedrich Rittelmeyer completed the Second Theological Exam in Ansbach, from Würzburg, with an overall grade of “outstanding.” In 1901, the 28-year-old met the 16-year-old girl Julie Kerler, who was to become his wife in 1904.

It is impossible to pick out and report here on the important chapters in Rittelmeyer’s autobiography entitled “Confessional Hardships” (Bekenntnisnöte), “Protestant-Catholic,” and “Workings of Destiny” (Schicksalswalten). His application for employment as a pastor found no takers anywhere, not in Vienna, Rome, London, or Berlin. Destiny sent him to fill the position of third pastor at the Holy Ghost Church in Nürnberg, where he was the afternoon preacher. He worked there for 14 years, from 1902 until 1916, when he was called to Berlin.

He had already made the plan in Würzburg to write a book about Jesus at the age of 40. First, however, he had wanted to live with other great minds: Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Buddha, Meister Eckhart, and Johannes Müller, all of whom Rittelmeyer had highly respected at that time in his own way and whose limitations he would only recognize later.

All these works eventually found their written expression, to mixed reviews. There were accolades, but there were also those who called him “The Atheist of the Holy Ghost Church.” His friendship with Christian Geyer, the head preacher at St. Sebaldus, became one of kindred fighters in the spiritual arena. In order to have a positive influence, they put out a collection of sermons together called “God and the Soul” (1906). Its great success provoked the orthodox opponents, and signs of a rift between the many Old Believers and the few progressive priests became clearer. This eventually culminated in the “Nürnberg Church Fight” (1912/13). Rittelmeyer and Geyer, however, continued to work positively. They published a second book of sermons, “Living from God” (1910), and started their own monthly, “Christianity and the Present,” which existed from 1910 to 1923. In 1909, the book “The Pastor” (Der Pfarrer) came out, and in 1912 his life’s plan was truly fulfilled when, at 40, he published the book “Jesus.” “This is now really the best work of which I am capable at present.”

The life plan had left open what the next goal should be. Now the future came knocking. The invitation to give a lecture in Bremen on new religious movements made it clear to Rittelmeyer that he knew nothing as yet about the teaching of the Theosophical Society. He ordered written material. He became acquainted with Michael Bauer, who introduced him to anthroposophy, and he met Rudolf Steiner. That was on Goethe’s birthday, on August 28th, 1911, in Munich. What followed can be read in the valuable book “Rudolf Steiner Enters My Life,” which includes important stages in the collaboration of these two men. His first conversation with Michael Bauer took place in the days between the death and burial of his mother in 1910.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer worked his way into the new world of spiritual science with great energy and critical independence and often spoke openly about it. Now the church leadership could have easily suspended him. Instead, the call went out to him from Berlin in 1916: “Come to Berlin, as you are.” At that time, the nonsensical dogma labeling anthroposophy as “unchristian” had not yet been written in stone. Rittelmeyer’s preaching work in Berlin again took on a larger dimension, both externally and internally. This man, whose personnel file noted: “Not suitable for higher church office,” was now truly a “godly minister,” a sought-out server of the Word with a royal position at The New Church, and he was perfectly aware of what he owed Rudolf Steiner and of how all his listeners were really also guests at the table of anthroposophy.

Outside, the slaughter of World War I raged on. When it started, Rittelmeyer had hoped for an early victory. In 1917, he recognized that war cannot be the means of solving conflicts. Along with other ministers, he crafted a “call” for a ceasefire.

The times brought change, upheaval, revolution. People were stirred up. There was fertile soil in the souls. But Rittelmeyer did not find his way to the question that still needed to be asked and to which Rudolf Steiner had encouraged him. As of 1913, at the latest, it was clear to him that the liturgy, the substance of the ritual, in fact the central practice of religion needed to receive new forms. The riddle in the life of Friedrich Rittelmeyer, who was the classic example of someone striving toward the spiritual reality of Christ in his human activities, remains unsolved: Why could he not ask the question about the ritual? Others had to do so as though in his stead. And it was almost too late.

After working in Berlin for 2 years, Friedrich Rittelmeyer had an accident in French-speaking Switzerland on August 1st, 1918. His son stumbled and fell while hiking near Ebermannstadt. His father tried to catch him and ended up falling himself. A boulder rolled after him, grazing and wounding his head. He had to be hospitalized with a broken leg. Over a year later, after Christmas 1919, delayed repercussions from the head wound showed up. As of May 1920, he was on leave and spent 10 months recuperating on the estate of the von Zastrow family in Birgwitz near Glatz. From there, on the occasion of Rudolf Steiner’s 60th birthday, he produced the most important publication of the time that focused attention on anthroposophy (“From the Lifework of Rudolf Steiner – A Hope for a New Culture”, Munich, 1921).

Meanwhile, the questions to Rudolf Steiner were asked by other people and led to the “June Course” and then to the “Autumn Course” in 1921 (see the narratives on Hermann Heisler, Johannes Werner Klein, Gertrud Spörri, and Gottfried Husemann). Friedrich Rittelmeyer received detailed reports on these courses from Emil Bock. The Berlin students Emil Bock, Eberhard Kurras, Adolf Müller, Richard Gitzke, and Otto Franke had been working with him for a long time on anthroposophy and theology.

Soon after learning about the foundational text of the Act of Consecration of the Human Being as the central new ritual, Rittelmeyer decided to work with the Movement for Religious Renewal as the new true church. “The actual decisive point for me came from an unexpected direction. It was the experience that the living Christ truly comes to humankind in the bread from the altar. He was there, in ineffable purity and light.” (“Rudolf Steiner Enters My Life,” Stuttgart, 10th edition, 1983, p. 143.) The combination of Rittelmeyer’s physical weakness and his painstaking working method came across to the younger founders as hesitant. It was difficult for him to join in with the active initiatives launched by Johannes Werner Klein, Hermann Heisler, and others, all with the steady support of Rudolf Steiner, who was pushing them to get moving: If you waste too much time it could suddenly be too late! Further education and training would have to take place alongside their pastorale work.

How Friedrich Rittelmeyer had hoped his old friend Christian Geyer would be a leading figure in the work of the Christian Community! Without him, the future looked bleak. Geyer’s letter of refusal was lying In Breitbrunn. (The content of a talk between the two friends was often told as an important anecdote with regard to their disagreements: Geyer: “Fritz, if you can prove to me that the Apostle Paul went about preaching in an alb and colored stole, then I’ll join you.” To which Rittelmeyer responded: “Christian, if you can prove to me that the Apostle Paul went about preaching in a cassock and collar, then I’ll stay with you all.”)

There was pain to bear in major new events: Christian Geyer stepped out, Johannes Werner Klein broke his vow (1927), Gerturd Spörri broke hers (1933). As the Erzoberlenker of the newly founded priesthood, Friedrich Rittelmeyer suffered under these wounds to the community.

But the new was stronger: “The divine I of Christ was the most powerful and healing event of my life.” It was the striving for knowledge that resulted in this experience. In that respect, Rittelmeyer was an advanced student on the path of theology and anthroposophy. Now he was to celebrate the renewed form of the ancient holy mass himself and experience the presence of Christ in the bread and wine on the altar. Here his priestly willing and his Christianity found their fulfillment.

It was a group of 45 people, including Rudolf Steiner and 3 witnesses, who were involved in that first Act of Consecration: They were together in Christ’s name. They acted in His name, and he could therefore be in their midst.

After the 1922 founding in Dornach, it was not long before the Rittelmeyer family, with its six children, could move into the newly built Urachhaus in Stuttgart, which had been donated by a Swedish engineer. In Stuttgart, Friedrich Rittelmeyer, together with Emil Bock and Gerturd Spörri, founded the Christian Community, the priest seminary, and the monthly initially called “The Deed of Christianity.” His writing activity often produced several works a year. He was active as a speaker in lectures and on the occasion of many conferences. From 1931 to 1937, he led seven large, unforgettable camps (Freizeiten-retreats). But in the middle of this multi-dimensional work stood the powerful celebrant, the one praying with the congregation, the first priest of a new church.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer had always maintained his independence when it came to judging Rudolf Steiner. He did not hesitate to rebuke the latter in writing for his polemical way of talking about Müller, as his friend Geyer in Nürnberg had heard. On the other hand, he himself had to suffer the pain of being indirectly rebuked by Steiner for having publicly been too kind to an opponent of anthroposophy. (See GA 259, 1991, p. 814ff.)

Rudolf Steiner had provided the circle of priests with only the most essential elements for their social structure. Shaping, broadening, and completing it was up to them. It is understandable that Rittelmeyer declined the one-person job of Erzoberlenker because of his weak constitution and because he wanted to be a brother, not someone special among brothers. But it was spiritually necessary, not as the pinnacle of a pyramid social structure, but as the center, the middle point of the community. Rittelmeyer was spiritually and karmically cut out for the job, for he was not only one of the prominent theologians of the Protestant church, but also one of the most important students of Rudolf Steiner and the representative of anthroposophy – a seasoned fighter for contemporary Christ work in the written and spoken word and an experienced pastor. As it became increasingly clear that all of this was needed in the still small and young circle of priests, Rittelmeyer capitulated to necessity and was inducted as Erzoberlenker on February 24th, 1925.

A few weeks later, Rudolf Steiner died. Friedrich Rittelmeyer was allowed to perform the funeral services in Dornach and Basel on April 3rd.

The following can only hint at the efforts Friedrich Rittelmeyer made as a representative of anthroposophy in his region.  At the East-West Congress in Vienna, so important for the anthroposophical movement, he gave a lecture on “Spirit of Pentecost and Religious Renewal” (June 14th, 1922). He belonged to the Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany as of 1923. Rudolf Steiner appointed him as “Goetheanum Speaker,” one of the few who could speak anywhere on behalf of Rudolf Steiner and of the Executive Council of the General Anthroposophical Society. After Christmas 1925, Rittelmeyer spoke out strongly in favor of Albert Steffen’s not self-evident appointment as First Chairman of The General Anthroposophical Society.

Noteworthy in the years 1928/29 is that the circumstances of The Christian Community in Stuttgart had developed in such a way that plans for a larger church were being considered. A substantial plot of land north of Urachhaus was available. Architects worked on plans and models. Then Marie Steiner in Dornach protested mightily that such a project was even being contemplated when construction of the second Goetheanum had not been completed yet. Rittelmeyer was crestfallen. He stopped work immediately. The piece of land was subdivided and sold, and a donation was sent to Dornach from the proceeds. Only a small pocket of land was retained, on which the priest seminary building was erected a few years later (1932/33. Construction of the second Goetheanum – on the inside – is still not completed today.

Relations with the German Anthroposophical Society developed to the point later that Friedrich Rittelmeyer stepped off the Executive Council in 1933. He had had to write a letter to Albert Steffen in 1931, in which he said: “People are naturally becoming increasingly aware that the news coming out of Dornach does not mention The Christian Community – other than in some book reviews – when something good happens, but only when there is something to criticize, and this criticism does not sound like it comes from a place of goodwill…Many who do not put this in writing, still think that way. And that is not in the interest of the anthroposophical movement.”

Then, two years later, shortly before the grave and far-reaching split in The General Anthroposophical Society and its executive council: “Can you blame me, esteemed Mr. Steffen, if I have the greatest reservations about the “memorandum” because of the way it is representing things that I am in a position to monitor? Can you blame me, if I cannot consider this orientation of The Society – shortly before the general assembly – as the basis upon which such fateful decisions may be taken? … [I must] reject the memorandum before history and must consider it a misfortune for The Society.”

In the same year, 1935, The Anthroposophical Society in Germany was banned by the National Socialists. Friedrich Rittelmeyer repeatedly negotiated with the powers-that-be in Berlin for this ban to be lifted. He also entered such negotiations in 1938, shortly before his death, which also helped stall the ban of The Christian Community.

It sounds strange to our ears today what Friedrich Rittelmeyer said and how he wrote about “Germanness” (Deutschtum). But if you think about how his life theme was the relationship of the human I to the I of God, and how he viewed becoming human and becoming Christian as the task of the Germans, then perhaps some formulations that seem tied to the past become understandable: The “matter” is as current as it was then, and he wanted to serve it with the writings “The German World Task Between Russia and America” (1932), “Rudolf Steiner and Germanness” (1921/23), and “Germanness” (1934).

Twenty-four years after the book “Jesus,” he published its follow-up: “Christ” (1936). He wrote about the most important themes of the new religious work: “Toward Religious Renewal” (1922), “The Christian Community” (1925), “From the Johannine Age” (1925) – almost a book a year, plus his articles in the newspaper “Tatchristentum/Christengemeinschaft” (Deed of Christianity/The Christian Community). His book “Meditation” (1921) is still in demand today; his work “Reincarnation in the Light of Thinking, Religion, Morality” (1931), in contrast, is almost completely forgotten. What a deed it was back then, to bring these themes into public view which are now on everyone’s lips! And finally, the motif “Theology and Anthroposophy” (1930) pointed to a field that is still largely lying fallow today…

Rittelmeyer wrested everything he accomplished out of a weak body and a melancholy temperament. He widened his soul in suffering and active service to everything human and divine. His spirit, however, became a potent force that affected those who worked with him, radiating certainty of life and trust in God.

He died on March 23rd, 1938, in Hamburg: He is the great father figure in the priest circle of The Christian Community – whose work is unjustly forgotten; the religious renewer in his own right, who, as a free and independent student of Rudolf Steiner’s, seized anthroposophy as the helper on his path, and who then as a priest could validly say: “Thus I came to the new Christian Community from out of the very center…It was not Rudolf Steiner who spoke the last word, but someone higher!”

[1] Friedrich Naumann was a German liberal politician and Protestant parish pastor.

[2] Friedrich “Fritz” von Bodelschwingh, also known as Friedrich von Bodelschwingh the Younger, was a German pastor, theologian and public health advocate. His father was Friedrich von Bodelschwingh the Elder, founder of the v. Bodelschwinghsche Anstalten Bethel charitable foundations.

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Hermann Beckh

Die Gruender der Christengemeinschaft: Ein Schicksalsnetz
By Rudolf F. Gaedeke
Translated by Cindy Hindes

Hermann Beckh
May 4, 1875, Nuremberg – March 1, 1937, Stuttgart

 

When Hermann Beckh received a visitor in the last days of February 1937 at his death bed in his parlor in Stuttgart’s Lichtensteinstraße No. 10, he said as a greeting: “…. please be quiet! Dying is happening here.” This saying is characteristic of his life, not only superficially because his utterances were often original, but because a main motif of his being was the search for life beyond death.

This does not seem to be self-evident. At first, his biography predominantly showed the fullness of the original forces of being human. Throughout his life, he was often like a child. Opposing forces fought at the bottom of his soul.

Born on May 4, 1875, into a well-to-do family in Nuremberg, Hermann Beckh grew up together with his younger sister ‘Mariele’ in a carefree childhood. The formative experiences of his first years were shaped by the flowers, the animals and stones, the weather, and the stars. His parents’ travels to the Tegernsee and Berchtesgaden regions and to the Allgäu enabled him to breathe deeply in his childhood soul. In the fourth year of life (1879), this led so far that a rapture state occurred. The impression of the high mountain world near Einödsbach (Allgäu) overwhelmed his consciousness: “I am sure that many people never experience anything of what I experienced there ‘on the other shore of being.’ It was the world of my prenatal existence, … which I had forgotten. ” This is how Hermann Beckh described this experience in his memories of childhood.

When he had to go to school, he felt that this was a ‘violation and deprivation of freedom.’ He didn’t understand why such methods were used when he was able to recite a page-long prose text by heart after reading it once. For years he studied as if in a dream. Languages especially were not difficult for him, so he eventually learned fourteen languages through his later studies. Only in the further school years did the painful necessity arise for him to work more systematically and with diligence. The ‘Gymnasiumabsolutorium,’ the Abitur, was then passed with flying colors. The written examinations had gone so well that oral ones were ordered. This qualified him for a place at the Maximilianeum in Munich.

If the Nuremberg Abitur fell in the year 1893, the study of law, for which Hermann Beckh strangely decided, lasted until 1896 and his time as an assistant judge until 1899. During this time (1899), it happened that he had to sentence a poor married couple with a child for wood theft. Because with a prison sentence, the child would have remained alone, Hermann Beckh sentenced the couple to a fine. But because the couple had no money, Hermann Beckh gave them the sum out of his own pocket after the sentence was passed – and resigned from his post.

Then he began to study anew. To access the sources of human culture, he learned Sanskrit, Tibetan, Indian, Persian, Egyptian, and Hebrew. He studied in Kiel and Berlin, where he received his doctorate from the Humboldt University in 1907 and qualified as a professor in 1908. He became the authority on ancient languages of the Himalayan region and was the first to translate many texts of that region from ancient manuscripts in the Prussian State Library. If he was thus close to the sources and origins of human culture, the second great area of death experience also emerged. He had loved the mountains since his childhood. Once, while hiking in the high mountains, he got caught in a dense fog. He spent a whole night on the edge of a glacier, his feet stuck in his backpack, fighting frostbite. When he was twenty-nine years old, his grandfather died (1904) – the first death in his immediate environment. During the First World War, he only had typing duties in Romania and Bulgaria, also in Kiel and Berlin. Death only really struck him closer when, fifteen years after his grandfather, in 1929, his beloved sister Marie, who had always faithfully accompanied him, died. The mother survived both children and died on May 25, 1943. (No date of the father’s death has been handed down.)

Hermann Beckh

In 1911, when Hermann Beckh was 36 years old, he met Friedrich Rittelmeyer as well as Rudolf Steiner. Since he had already become acquainted with Indian theosophy, he now found in anthroposophy the spiritual bond of all the cultural-historical studies he had pursued up to that time. Now the connection of the history of consciousness of humankind, as it also shows itself in the history of languages, became clear to him. With the two volumes of the Göschen Collection on Buddhism, published in 1916, he began his real life’s work (see the list of writings), which he developed as a speaker, university teacher, and writer.

In addition to his work on the early cultures of humankind, which gave rise to From the World of Mysteries, Hermann Beckh had been deeply involved in music since childhood. At the age of sixteen, he experienced Richard Wagner’s Parsifal in Bayreuth in 1891. The last of Beckh’s works, completed on his deathbed, was Die Sprache der Tonarten (The Essence of Tonality). He had also felt connected to the starry world from an early age. A rich work, “Beiträge zur geistigen Sternenkunde,” (Contributions to Spiritual Astronomy) was dedicated to his fellow pastors in their Rundbrief (newsletter).

The fruit of Beckh’s studies on Buddhism

His two books about the cosmic rhythms in Mark’s Gospel and John’s Gospel should be mentioned especially. They would demonstrate from the spiritual science that the cosmos order and earthly working of Christ belong together.

In Karlsruhe, a philosophy professor, Arthur Drews, had written the book Die Christusmythe (The Christ Myth), in order to show that the Gospels contained nothing but mystical-fairy-tale illustrations of star processes (astral myths). This Arthur Drews belonged to the ‘Combat League against Anthroposophy’ and had expressed: “My I shall be taken by the devil after my death,” and his gravestone read: “Redemption is a detachment from the I.” Against the pantheistic religious philosophy of Arthur Drews, Beckh’s aforementioned works were meant as positive aids to understanding the Gospels.

Hermann Beckh

The always childlike admirer of all that is high and noble, who nevertheless possessed intellectual abilities in abundance, the shrewd jurist, the profound explorer of the word, and the harmonies of the starry and tonal world reaped the fruits of his labor in abundance. Nevertheless, in his opinion, he lacked the real thing. When the preparations for the foundation of the Christian Community had already led to the first two teaching courses with Rudolf Steiner, Professor Beckh had not been asked to collaborate. He had been the anthroposophical speaker at the opening of the first Goetheanum building in 1920. Rudolf Steiner had said of him: “He has done a lot of research that I have not yet come to, although some of it is somewhat speculative.” Hermann Beckh was regarded as an outstanding expert who was not asked for new activity after he had given up his university work to serve Anthroposophy.

He heard about the preparatory group that met in March 1922 in Friedrich Rittelmeyer’s confirmation hall and appeared there with the vehement words: “Now I am here and belong to you; and even if you don’t like it, you won’t get rid of me! ” Thus he became a priest of his own will, a servant of the word in an even more comprehensive sense than before.

As a co-founder of the Christian Community in Stuttgart, he was also its teacher from the beginning. He had become acquainted with anthroposophy in 1911 through an Elijah lecture, but now he himself worked with the firepower of his will for the Word like Elijah. In December 1923, he attended the Christmas Conference for the founding of the General Anthroposophical Society at the Goetheanum in Dornach.

Hermann Beckh

He was also the lovable-scattered, shy, yet child-loving professor who, somehow not quite present, often seemed clumsy and tempted ridicule. He was lonely in the founding community. He remained misunderstood and knew that he had to “persevere in resistant circumstances.” His severe kidney cancer forced his soaring spirit through pain to the body: “dying is happening here.” But looking to the future, he had written in a poem about the New Jerusalem:

“And even if my path still leads over graves,

Even if I must still be a bearer of death,

There  shines on the path from the world’s farthest reaches

the resting star’s holy serious light.”

As a seminary teacher, Hermann Beckh had imparted to a whole generation of priests the enthusiasm for the spiritual work with the word, the language. The Christian Community preserves his work in the cultural sphere, where his renderings of Genesis 1 – “In the Spiritual Thought of the Original Beginning” and of the 23rd Psalm –  “He who speaks the I in me is my shepherd…” – are read again and again on the occasion of larger sermons.

Caption for Picture:

The fruits of Beckh’s studies on Buddhism