Martin Borchart
June 3, 1894, Berlin – December 19, 1971, Stuttgart

 

Martin Borchart, a philosophy student in Marburg, together with his wife Elisabeth, née Pappe, created the conditions for an initial inquiry to Rudolf Steiner in 1920, resulting in the founding of The Christian Community.

Martin Borchart was born in Berlin on June 3, 1894, the second son of his parents. His brother Walter was three years old at the time, and from his father’s first marriage, there was a stepsister twenty years older. His father, a principal at Berlin elementary schools, was the 39th schoolmaster of his relatives, who came from the Brandenburg area. Martin’s mother was also a teacher. She came from a Silesian estate.

Martin Borchart experienced his school days as dreary and hardly stimulating. But the buildings and schoolyards, including the school gardens, were the playground for him and his three cousins, with whom he was constantly together. His father’s school and official residence were located at Jannowitzbrücke, later at Schlesischer Bahnhof in eastern Berlin. Martin attended the Realgymnasium after elementary school. He received private lessons in Latin from a candidate of theology whom he had met in 1911 on the occasion of a summer stay on the North Sea island of Wangerooge. This was Rudolf Bultmann, the demythologizer of the Bible, who later became famous. He suggested that Martin Borchart study later in Marburg.

From his childhood, Martin Borchart reported a ‘waking dream’ in which demonic beings with frightening grimaces appeared and beset him, as he later found depicted on Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altar in Colmar in the picture of the Temptation of St. Anthony. In 1913 he passed the Abitur, which he attributed, among other things, to the fact that he had previously dreamed the subject of the German essay – “Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht” (“World History is the World Judgment”).

Although a third kind of dream was later to play an important role in his life, Martin Borchart was not a dreamer; rather, throughout his life, he maintained a particularly spiritual openness, with all alertness. His gentle humor and his fine smile were visible signs of this.

After graduating from high school, one year before the beginning of World War I, he studied theology for two semesters in Berlin. He caught up on the humanistic baccalaureate (with Greek and Hebrew). He then summed up his experience of these studies in the devastating verdict: when you become a pastor, “you take with you into practical work what you have already brought to the university in terms of religiousness, minus what you have been deprived of by studying theology.”

Right at the beginning of the First World War, he volunteered for the military, for the 4th Guards Regiment. Very soon, he suffered at the front — where he had once, as it was later discovered, been very close to Emil Bock — a first wound at Langemarck. Both legs were shot through.
Later, in Russia, he was shot through the thigh. Because of, but also despite, such weakened legs, he reported for pilot training in 1916 and was accepted. In Gotha and then in Böblingen near Stuttgart, he learned to fly the small, still rather primitive, open fighter planes, whose machine guns had to be set so that they shot precisely between the rotating propeller blades, which was not always the case.

How delightfully Martin Borchart could tell about the training flight whose goal he had determined as the place of residence of the lady who was one day to become his wife. On the flight from Böblingen to Heidenheim, he did not find the previously determined topographic landmarks in the actual landscape below. He had ‘flown astray’ and now tried to read the place name in a low-level flight over a train station; instead, he read Platform 1 and, on the next approach, Platform 2. After landing among fruit trees, he received information from a farmer that this was Goeppingen. The flight was continued, ending in Heidenheim, but because of adverse wind conditions, he landed on a field in whose immediate vicinity much later The Christian Community’s church was to be built. The couple in the house near the emergency landing site told him that Miss Poppe had unfortunately just left. They asked whether he knew, by the way, that she was an anthroposophist. While the housewife was already on the next topic — the abominable new invention of chewing gum in America, with which one could pull long strings out of the mouth— the master of the house enlightened the guest who had landed so rudely from the sky, “… the anthroposophists believe in the astral body”. The merchant and world traveler Alfred Meebold had written a book about it, The Path to the Spirit.

From his experiences in the war as a reconnaissance pilot (from Metz), there is nothing to report further here. In January 1918, the engagement was celebrated; then, on June 18, his wedding with Elisabeth Poppe. Three children were born to the couple. Through his wife, he found access to anthroposophy. She had already, at the age of twenty-one, been accepted as a member of the Theosophical Society by Rudolf Steiner in 1912. After Martin and Elisabeth Borchart had rented a six-room apartment in Marburg/Lahn in the old town (at Marktgasse 18),  lively work with like-minded people could be established in its rooms. First, they founded a local group of the League for Threefolding together with the German-American Friedrich Oehlschlegel, who was soon appointed as one of their first teachers at the newly founded Stuttgart Waldorf School. When seven people were together, they founded a branch of the Anthroposophical Society. Martin Borchart became the branch leader.

A Düsseldorf lawyer’s son and student of painting, later of theology, from Munich contacted him. It was Johannes Werner Klein with whom the following events were to take place. Both students had switched to philosophy out of disappointment in their theology studies. Together they eagerly studied Rudolf Steiner’s lectures. On Friday, January 30, 1920, in the middle of the semester, Elisabeth Borchart woke up her husband in the morning: They had to go to Dornach on Monday to visit the first Goetheanum because there could be a train accident. Since her husband hesitated, she said that he could ask Mr. Klein if he wanted to go with them. This request was made in front of the College, and afterward, Johannes Werner Klein agreed to go along; the next day Margarete Deussen joined him.

The trip was delayed. Because of incipient inflation, money had to be obtained. They took along some items for sale in Switzerland. Equipped with a membership card of the “Johannes [Goetheanum] Bau-Verein” and some issues of the house magazine of the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart, the four travelers identified themselves at the consulate in Frankfurt, saying that they were welcome as students in Dornach.

A week after the idea of going to Dornach to visit the Goetheanum emerged, the four travelers had reached their destination and found that a lecture by Rudolf Steiner had been announced for the evening. (Today, this lecture of February 6, 1920, can be read in GA 196). Rudolf Steiner spoke several times about the necessity of the renewal of Christianity; that one must learn to think and act humanely, not bound to nation or tribe, as before. And then: “These things can inspire you to the question: But then what should the individual do?”

Now, in retrospect, it may seem as if those words had been spoken specifically for the new young guests from post-war Germany. In any case, Johannes Werner Klein felt inspired to ask Rudolf Steiner for an appointment, which took place on Sunday, February 8 [compare the chapter on J. W. Klein]. Rudolf Steiner noticed during this conversation that Johannes Werner Klein had not quite understood him and therefore asked for his companion, Martin Borchart; if he had a question, he would be available for him. Martin Borchart knew nothing of the content of the conversation that had just taken place between Rudolf Steiner and Johannes Werner Klein and had no question of his own. Borchart had already discussed his doctoral thesis with Rudolf Steiner and had also received a topic for it, which unfortunately has not been passed down; it did not materialize later because of the founding of The Christian Community.

However, the question about the third church, about Johannine Christianity and its religious form, was raised by Johannes Werner Klein (following the thoughts of the philosopher F.W. Schelling in his Philosophy of Revelation). This was followed up on later. Almost a year and a half had to pass before, again with Martin Borchart’s help, the correctly formulated request of a group to Rudolf Steiner made possible the promise of a first course oriented toward religious renewal. At that time, on May 22, 1921, when they were struggling for the right formulation of this request, Martin Borchart had just the day before acquired a newly published lecture cycle by Rudolf Steiner. During the night, he immediately studied the first three lectures (“Cosmic and Human Metamorphosis,” today in the Complete Edition Nr. 175: Building Stones to a Knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha). More than four years earlier, on February 20, 1917, Rudolf Steiner had stated in Berlin, in the presence of Friedrich Rittelmeyer, the necessary distinction between spirit-cognition (anthroposophy) and religious practice. Spirit-consciousness is kindled through religious practice, and spirit-knowledge is acquired through anthroposophy. Martin Borchart spontaneously grasped this distinction at that time. He conveyed this quotation to Gottfried Husemann, who then succeeded in formulating the question about new forms of Christian religious practice. Thus, also through Martin Borchart’s contribution, the “June Course” for the preparatory group of eighteen students in Stuttgart became possible. From then on, he was a witness at all stages of the founding of The Christian Community.

On September 16, 1922, at the age of twenty-eight, he was ordained to the priesthood by Emil Bock. He actually wanted to go to Bremen, where he had hoped for help from an uncle to found a congregation there. However, he left this city to his friend Johannes Werner Klein and became the founder of the congregation in Dresden (1922), then in Bayreuth (1924), before becoming pastor in the Stuttgart congregation in 1925, where he found the center for all his further activities.

From then on, Martin Borchart worked as a priest in the Stuttgart congregation with Kurt von Wistinghausen, Erwin Schühle, Arnold Goebel, Friedrich Rittelmeyer, Emil Bock, Hermann Beckh, and many other colleagues who were only active there for a short time. In 1933 he was able to live with his family in the newly built seminary house. In 1940, however, human relations with Mr. and Mrs. Husemann, who lived in the seminary, made it seem more favorable for him and his family to move into the parish house in the Werfmershalde, into the apartment above the consecration room. From 1937 on, he suffered from the consequences of a motorcycle accident.

In 1938, after Friedrich Rittelmeyer’s death, Martin Borchart was appointed Lenker for Stuttgart and the Württemberg Swabian communities. This was followed by the banning of The Christian Community by the National Socialists on June 9, 1941, and several weeks of imprisonment in the Welzheim concentration camp. During the prohibition period, he prepared for an interpreter’s examination in English and Russian in Heidelberg but, for unknown reasons, did not take the final examination. Instead, in October 1942, he joined the Stuttgart office of the Central Dairy Kuhn, Rottenburg/Neckar, as office manager, personnel supervisor, and public relations officer. During the fire in the community center in 1944, he contracted severe smoke poisoning; from then on he suffered from respiratory problems.

In former times, he had been called ‘the handsome Martin.’ The tall, slender figure, leaning a little on his cane with the silver knob, a fine smile on his face: this is how the Stuttgart community experienced him as their priest for many decades.

A special concern of his was the annual conference of the Swabian communities. The people should get together from many places and experience The Christian Community. On the occasion of such a conference in 1965, the Swabian Building Fund was founded, a free economic association of the congregations for the financing of church buildings. Thus, for example, the congregations in Esslingen, Ulm, Murrhardt, Tübingen, Stuttgart, and Überlingen were able to build their churches. Thanks to this joint institution, many church centers have been built to this day.

Within the circle of priests of his lenkership and under his free and benevolent gaze, a fraternal common ground around the need for Honorarium requirements was able to unfold in the form of the first salary network in The Christian Community. From this side, the germs of new social forms were sown.

For decades Martin Borchart had to bear the brunt of the character of his founding colleague Gottfried Husemann, who died remarkably close to him. Martin was almost always silent, rarely and only quietly voicing his opinion. He lives in memory with the smile of a mildness that only borne pain makes possible; he could rejoice royally over what his pastor colleagues achieved, especially the younger ones.

Thus, in the last years of his life, he could often be heard saying gratefully and joyfully: “Lord, now you let your servant go in peace.” He died on the fourth Sunday of Advent, December 19, 1971, in Stuttgart, a few months after the death of his son Heinz, who had also become a priest. His crossing of the threshold led him directly into the days of the Christmas events. The Christian Community owes to his selflessness the decisive act of mediation in the hour of its foundation.

MEMORANDUM

The realization that a renewal of religious life was necessary for the salutary progress of humankind, and the will to help in this, brought together the participants of the Stuttgart Theology Course in June 1921. These young theologians were of the opinion that the theological faculty could not give them a fruitful preparation for their goal, and a state-church office could not give them the right field for their work. Therefore they turned to Dr. Steiner to receive from him what anthroposophy could give them to prepare them to found viable Christian communities. Practically, the work of financing was immediately set in motion at that time, which was to create a basis for making the spiritual work possible. Since a certain financial basis now seems to have been created which could support our work in the beginning, and since many signs in the present seem to me to indicate that we would be fulfilling a time requirement if our work were to begin now, and that perhaps the appropriate period could be missed by prolonged hesitation, it seems to me necessary that those should come together who are willing to put their full strength into it at once. An educational course led by Dr. Steiner, seems to me to be an indispensable prerequisite. I can overcome the consciousness of my inadequacy and unworthiness only by hoping to grow through the great cause. And so I now want to stand up for it completely, giving up my previous work.

-Martin Borchart

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

 

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

 

 

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.)

 

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.

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.