Die Gruender der Christengemeinschaft: Ein Schicksalsnetz
By Rudolf F. Gaedeke published by Urach Haus
Translated by Rev. Cindy Hindes
Images sourced therefrom

Rudolf von Koschützki
April 8, 1866, Tarnowitz/Silesia – March 16, 1954, Stuttgart

In Rudolf von Koschützki, an unmistakable figure of special maturity and humanity entered the founding circle of The Christian Community. At the time of the founding, the “old gray horse,” as his colleagues amicably called him, had already reached an almost patriarchal age of fifty-six. Nevertheless, he was allowed to serve the movement for thirty-two years until he died in Stuttgart in 1954 at eighty-eight.

He has recorded his life story in the book Fahrt ins Erdenland (Journey to the Land of Earth) in a masterly manner, with rich individual descriptions and fine humor. It belongs to the important components in the fate of the founding circle because there a person without any theological education, from his own deep devotion to nature, found the way to spiritual science and, through it to the renewal of the Christian religion.

Rudolf von Koschützki’s ancestors lived in Silesia as owners or administrators of large estates for more than half a millennium. His great-grandfather owned a whole demesne, Auras, which consisted of twelve knight’s estates. But the course of history brought alternating possession and poverty again and again. Koschützki’s father had only slowly worked his way up again to prosperity, favored by the winning of the Prussian wars.

Into the now irretrievably submerged world of the large, rich eastern estates that had come into being with the Christianization of the so-called Slavs and had been run patriarchally since then, Rudolf von Koschützki was born in Tarnowitz on April 8, 1866. He spent his childhood with a younger sister on the estates that his father managed, located in Upper Silesia, where, in addition to agriculture, mining had grown to great importance. Rudolf von Koschützki’s childhood was filled with life in the great outdoors, with the plants and animals of the estates and forests. For him, school was a cross; he felt the schoolwork was a ‘constant deprivation of freedom.’ All this is uniquely written in his autobiography, supplemented by the descriptions of the book Sun on Earth. Of course, he went through an agricultural apprenticeship as well as a period of training on various estates. One day he was supposed to own and run one himself. In Mecklenburg, during a year of practical training, he met the young sister of his principal at the Ruhhof, Martha Cordua, who, significantly, had been given the nickname Titania, abbreviated ‘Titen’ by her siblings. A sporting race later sealed the feeling of togetherness between the two when Rudolf met Titen again at the Ruhhof on his way to a two-year course of studies in Munich. Then it was considered a foregone conclusion that they would spend their lives together.

But even before the wedding, something happened near Kohlfurt in Lower Silesia on October 18, 1891, which forced a complete change of life. From Breslau, Rudolf von Koschützki followed his fiancé to Berlin by night train. He had chosen a different connection than had been planned and also a different compartment from the one he had first boarded. The train sped through the night; suddenly, there was a terrible jolt, a deafening crash, the brief calm of shock, and then the wild screams of the injured and dying rang out. Rudolf von Koschützki was pinned down with all his limbs, unable to move. It took hours before he was rescued from the wreckage, half dead, the only survivor from his car. He had not only looked death in the eye but had spent hours with it, and in the process, had experienced a review of his twenty-five years of life up to that point.

Then, in 1892, ‘Titen’ and Rudolf von Koschützki married; two daughters, Eva and Irmingard, were born of this marriage. A lease of their own was to become the basis for life, but recurring bouts of weakness ruined the plans. “Something had come unglued between soul and body.”

A recuperative trip to Italy and Rome had little success. A nine-week cure with absolute rest in Breslau, followed by a three-year ‘professional ban’ by the doctor, also did not create the hoped-for stability. Three attempts to build up an existence failed, with his parents, in Munich and in South Tyrol, where Titen, suffering from homesickness, finally became deathly ill. An uncle in Munich had the saving idea: Rudolf could become a writer after all – he came to this idea on the basis of the reports in his detailed letters. The family moved to Habelschwert in the Glatzer Bergland in Silesia. The vivid description of these circumstances in the book Fahrt ins Erdenland belies the fact that a great deal that one would like to know is passed over. Apart from the descriptions of some incidents in Habelschwert and the great journey in the summer of 1900 deep into Russia to Prince Dondukoff at his Romanov Castle, nothing else is passed down for 14 years until we find the von Koschützki family in Potsdam in 1914. From there, Rudolf von Koschützki moved to Russia as a war correspondent.

In 1916 he was back in Berlin. There he was made aware of Friedrich Rittelmeyer’s sermons in the New Church. He got to know Friedrich Rittelmeyer personally and, through him, was made aware of Rudolf Steiner. In the spring of 1917, he heard a lecture by Steiner for the first time and thought, “This is either complete madness or the greatest thing that has been experienced for two millennia.” After the railroad accident in 1891, Rudolf von Koschützki had stipulated as compensation from the Reichsbahn that he would be paid throughout his life as much money as a student councilor would have earned. Thus even after inflation and as a pastor, he always lived independently and in adequate circumstances.

After the end of the war and the collapse of the German Reich, he tried once again to establish a small settlement in Liebenburg in the Harz Mountains, after the plan to found a teaching institute for officers who had been wounded in the war in Pomerania had not been realized.

In the early summer of 1921, an anthroposophical conference was announced in Stuttgart. Rudolf von Koschützki was about to finish his book Lebensbilder bedeutender Landwirte. But suddenly he thought he absolutely had to travel to Stuttgart for this conference. He reached his destination by rail, fourth class in passenger trains.

When he arrived, he learned of a meeting of young theologians, up on Kanonenweg, now Haußmannstraße, in the Waldorf School. There the participants of the June course were allowed to use a classroom for further meetings. Once they also met up at the Gänsheide, in the park area of the clinic.

Although Rudolf von Koschützki took part in a meeting of this circle, he thought he had nothing to do with it. When he left, the young Emil Bock put his hand on his shoulder from behind and asked him if he didn’t want to stay because he belonged to it. So it happened that Rudolf von Koschützki also went to Dornach in September for the Autumn Course. There he finally decided that he did not belong. But a dream held him, which he knew for sure concerned his situation. He dreamt he was sitting in the front rows of a theater. A speaker was standing on the stage with his back to him, facing the audience at the back of the stage. He walked backward step by step and finally fell into the orchestra pit. There below, hurrying after the fallen, Koschützki heard the words: ‘Whoever retreats falls into the abyss.’ “There was such a sure and certain guidance in this dream experience that no difficulty of the coming times could mislead me in my decision.”

The first difficulty arose in the coming spring, when a deep disgruntlement threatened to break the circle of the founders. Outwardly, it was the question of whether to start sooner rather later and better prepared. The Berlin group around Friedrich Rittelmeyer felt pressured by Hermann Heisler and a group around him. Rudolf Steiner himself mastered this critical moment when they threatened to quarrel. He energetically took Hermann Heisler’s side. They had to begin; otherwise, it would be too late. He asked each individual to which city he intended to go in order to prepare the church planting … For Rudolf von Koschützki, the situation in the coming months was not easy, especially because his wife could not inwardly say yes to the new things her husband was doing. He had so often started something new in life, and now he wanted to become a priest! After the meeting in Breitbrunn, during the days of the ordinations in Dornach, he decided to accompany the founding of The Christian Community in Breslau.

One of the initially planned collaborators had dropped out at short notice, and so the threesome – the ‘Troika’ – Rudolf von Koschützki, Rudolf Meyer, and Kurt von Wistinghausen, came into being.

Very soon in Silesia, it was possible to celebrate the first Act of Consecration. This was possible at Koberwitz Castle, which was administered by Carl Count von Keyserlingk, who had donated a significant sum of money for the foundation of the movement, even before Rector Moritz Bartsch in Breslau was able to arrange for school rooms, in which a lively congregational life soon developed.

The following year Rudolf von Koschützki was one of the very few priests who attended the Christmas Conference in Dornach for the founding of the General Anthroposophical Society. He was the official representative of Friedrich Rittelmeyer and The Christian Community. His colleagues had to work in their communities, and not even Friedrich Rittelmeyer could be present to give the lecture to which Rudolf Steiner had invited him.

Rudolf von Koschützki was able to witness the next high point in the development of anthroposophy when Rudolf Steiner came to Koberwitz in the Pentecost season of 1924 at the energetic urging of Count Keyserlingk and there laid the foundations for a therapeutic approach to the earth by holding the so-called Agricultural Course. Rudolf von Koschützki became a member of the First Class of the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum on the occasion of these events.

The trained farmer had become a writer. An important book on agriculture, Die Praxis der Landmanns (The Countryman’s Practice), was about to be completed. Then he became a co-founder of The Christian Community, and now he was allowed to become a priestly godfather in the founding of the anthroposophically oriented agricultural movement. This is how it was felt by him and others.

After more than seven years of parish work in Breslau, Rudolf von Koschützki moved to Sieglindestraße in Berlin, where he and his wife founded a small center for the distribution of donated goods to those in need, especially in the parish. He was the “compensation man” who was able to help many people and mediate help.

His descriptions of the journey to Palestine in 1934 complement Emil Bock’s travel

diaries. Bock had asked Rudolf von Koschützki to travel with the group – which also

included Herbert Hahn, the co-founder of the Waldorf School – that brought back so many valuable impressions from the Holy Land for their respective work.

He himself reported on the seizure of power in 1933, the beginning of the war in 1939, and the ban on The Christian Community in 1941. After a three-hour interrogation by the Gestapo in June 1941, Koschützki was allowed to go home again. He was spared imprisonment, but two years later, their apartment burned completely. Once again, he and his family were homeless. In Osterburg an der Biese, in the Altmark, the elderly couple found shelter with their daughter, who was married there. The occupation by the Americans, the British and finally the Russians, all the misery of the looting after the collapse, renewed expulsion, hunger and cold in the post-war period had to be endured until Titen’s strength left her in 1947. She died with the words that had never been spoken before: “I love you very much, that’s what I wanted to tell you at the end.”

Now it was arranged that Rudolf von Koschützki, who was eighty-one years old, would resettle in the western zones. In the summer of 1947, he spent weeks in Leuchtenburg near Bremen as a guest of the Bosse family, who later moved to Güldenholm in Schleswig-Holstein to create a rural center for The Christian Community. In Leuchtenburg, members of the Bremen congregation and the Bremen Youth Circle met repeatedly around Rudolf von Koschützki. One heard from him the story of his life, the story of the founding of The Christian Community and his encounters with Rudolf Steiner.

It was like that again in the summer of 1953 in Stuttgart. Emil Bock had brought him there for the last seven years of his long, great life. The youth conference in the Straßenbahner-Waldheim in the Degerlocher Forest was held under the theme: “Eh’ das Jahrhundert schließt.” (Before the century closes). One thousand six hundred young people led a community life for several days to take up the ideas of anthroposophy and the task of The Christian Community. Rudolf von Koschützki celebrated the Act of Consecration with them. In the evening, casually lifted onto the stage in a wicker chair, he whimsically told of his life, of his encounter with Rudolf Steiner, and of the founding events in the first Goetheanum building. A few months later, on March 16, 1954, he died in Stuttgart. He wanted people to rejoice when he crossed the threshold, and he wanted to report joyfully ‘above’ what was now being done on earth for religious renewal. Like August Pauli and Heinrich Rittelmeyer, he was also a bearer of the Archpriest’s Ring, as a sign of the special recognition he enjoyed among the priests.

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

July 31, 1869, Hernsheim/Franconia – January 6, 1959, Munich

August Pauli, the second oldest of the founding circle, lived through a very similar destiny as did Friedrich Rittelmeyer and brother Heinrich Rittelmeyer, as well as Hermann Heisler and Christian Geyer. Pauli shared his French homeland with Friedrich Rittelmeyer and Christian Geyer and almost the same theological training and ministerial experience with all of them. Hermann Heisler, Heinrich Rittelmeyer, and August Pauli remained individual campaigners, while Christian Geyer and Friedrich Rittelmeyer were united by their unique friendship over many years.

August Pauli was born on July 31, 1869, the second of five children, in the vicarage at Hernsheim in Lower Franconia. The boy spent his first seven years in the natural, purely rural environment of the small village where his father worked as a priest.

His second seven years were marked by a move to Nördlingen and small-town life when his father became dean there. The boy went through elementary and Latin school (1876-1883) until, at the age of fourteen, he entered high school, the Anna-Kolleg in Augsburg, where he passed his Abitur in 1887. His preparation for confirmation and the celebration itself became a particularly profound experience for him in which he learned not only outwardly that the human being partakes in Christ’s grace. The experience opened up inwardly for him: This also means me; I am included in it.

From his entire school years, August Pauli only reported on his history teacher, Professor Metzger, in Augsburg, whose enthusiastic teaching captivated the schoolchildren.

Four semesters of theological studies in Erlangen passed as if without a trace on his soul, and nothing was reported about life in the student fraternity Uttenruthia. It was not until his third year of study in Tubingen that he was forced to follow the students’ example into a more intensive engagement with the study contents. The main occupation involved learning by rote, as it once was at school. The fourth year of study, again in Erlangen, was similar. One of his fellow students was the later famous Ernst Troeltsch; he was followed in the Uttenruthia by ‘the fox’ Friedrich Rittelmeyer, who immediately attracted attention because, as a newcomer, he wanted to give a speech.

Despite his lack of participation, August Pauli passed his first examination in 1891 so well that he was recommended to the Munich seminary. He immediately began his service as a vicar. At twenty-two, he suddenly found himself in the pulpit of his hometown of Nördlingen, substituting for his father, who was seriously ill and soon died. After the third sermon, Pauli thought he had said everything he knew. How was it to continue? The young pastor Dr. Christian Geyer, with whom he had become acquainted as a colleague, provided him with a certain amount of help that his father could no longer give him. From Nördlingen, he then passed the Second Theological Examination in Ansbach.

After three years of this first period of learning, the church leadership transferred him in 1894 as a traveling preacher to the diaspora parishes of Upper Bavaria in Tolz, Miesbach, Holzkirchen, and Tegernsee. In the Catholic area, his activity was quite varied, with constant travelling. The mine workers in Hausham near Miesbach, the immigrant Swabian farmers in Holzkirchen, the bathers in Bad Tolz, and the aristocrats in Tegernsee each formed their own kind of community. And the most diverse acquaintanceships and connections developed – also with “crowned heads.”

In 1897, August Pauli was now twenty-eight and not yet married, when something deeply shocking happened to him; while he himself was in love with a girl, he received a letter from a young man who told him that his sister was devoted to Pauli, and that she was sure he loved her too. This episode, which does not seem to be very significant, awakened a profound problem in August Pauli: Is it permissible for a Christian to experience happiness at the expense of others or alongside the suffering of others? Questions now arose that awakened his own judgements. This struggle gave rise to his first writing:On the Trail of Life – Diary of a Young Theologian. (Auf der Spur des Lebens. Tagebuch eines jungen Theologen.)

The reflections in Schultze Naumburg’s magazine Kunstwart gave rise to interest in and questions about art. Friedrich Naumann, the theologian who became a politician, awakened Pauli’s interest in politics. In theology, which had hitherto been the content of his studies, historical interest in Jesus awoke, and Christ as the Son of God disappeared from consciousness. “At that time, the path had to be taken from the dogmatic Christ, who no longer had any life in him for us, to the historical Jesus.” It was as if, at a later point in the unfolding of his life, something came to light that others had experienced earlier. August Pauli was a loner. He also took his inner steps basically in melancholy solitude and without a friend.

He was strengthened in this by his intensive reading of the writings of Søren Kierkegaard, who had particularly emphasized the importance of the striving single individual and had ultimately given a harsh critique of official church Christianity. August Pauli found in Kierkegaard a precise description of his own stage of development.

Tolzer’s term of office also saw Pauli’s first meeting with Dr. Johannes Müller, who had just moved to Schliersee. August Pauli met him in person. The emphasis on the individual, the single personality, was also the basic motif of Müller’s work, and August Pauli, who was increasingly questioning the fixed forms of the church and church service, found confirmation in the spontaneous, humane nature of Johannes Müller’s work.

At the turn of the century, in 1899, August Pauli became pastor of the small Lower Franconian parish of Westheim. A mere farming village, it was prosperous and knew how to maintain this prosperity with firm social forms, right up to marriage. The parish priest was an integral part, indeed the guarantor and often the enforcer of the customs and laws of old. The new pastor had questions everywhere, challenged the customs: Should this be Christianity? Is it not rather Old Testament, pre-Christian? Is a people’s church at all capable of being Christian? Doesn’t the uniformity of a community contradict spontaneous enthusiasm, the filling of the individual with the spirit? “O could I, like Paul, be a carpet weaver and then, when I wanted to, not if it drove me, if it were an inner necessity for me, help my fellow men come to the truth, to God – would that not be the better, I might say purer in style and therefore a more effective way to serve the cause of Jesus?” Thus wrote August Pauli in his book Im Kampf mit dem Amt. Erlebtes und Geschautes zum Problem Kirche [Struggling with the Office. Experiences and Observations with the Problem of the Church] (1911, p. 47), which was probably significantly influenced by his experiences in Westheim. He could “do nothing but faithfully guard their [the church’s] sleep.”

To vent his soul, he wrote polemical articles in the Pastors’ Correspondence Journal, which soon made him known throughout the country as a ‘highly questionable heretic.’ “By openly and courageously confronting the terrorism of an outdated orthodoxy for the first time, the movement was prepared, which my friends Dr. Geyer and Dr. Rittelmeyer later took into their own hands,” he later wrote.

In 1908, his decision had matured; August Pauli resigned from the service of the Bavarian Regional Church after seventeen years of work. He worked as a freelance speaker in southern Germany and in the summer months at Mainberg Castle, near Schweinfurt, as a private secretary to Johannes Müller. The latter gathered a congregation there near Elmau (1908-1911). During this time, Pauli met his wife, Elsbeth Seydler (October 13, 1881), who came from Königsberg in East Prussia. He also had an important, longer meeting with Christoph Blumhardt in Bad Boll/Württemberg, where he experienced the special, healing presence of the spirit in prayer, with which father and son Blumhardt had been able to work so convincingly.

What is special about August Pauli’s biography compared to that of Hermann Heisler is that he saw himself as able to re-enter the church ministry after a four-year break. In Bavaria, the church did not accept this’ heretic.’ Still in office in Munich was president Bezzel, with whom Friedrich Rittelmeyer had had harrowing experiences.

August Pauli became pastor on the ridge of the Thuringian Forest in Schmiedefeld near Wallendorf. He had also married there at the beginning of August 1914. Despite 4000 members, there was no ‘proper’ congregation among the poor farmers and workers in that harsh climate. People were more or less socialist; there was no religion. On Christmas Day, there was finally time to slaughter a pig; the church was empty – so empty that sometimes no sermon had to be preached. This changed abruptly with the outbreak of the First World War. The church was overflowing, and field services had to be held. Every man wanted to take communion once more – or for the first time – before enlisting: a field of work “calling for a heathen mission.”

From 1916 to 1918, August Pauli worked as a pastor in Weißenfels an der Saale, the place where Novalis died. There, too, his experiences with the Thuringian-Saxon population were not much different from those in Schmiedefeld. He had to administer a “pastoral parish with about 12,000 souls”. There were too many outer obligations, for example, funerals. “I was curious myself when I stepped up to a new grave, what I would say again.” “I had to tell myself that a church that makes its servants accept such things is itself contributing to the complete devaluation of its sacred acts.”

But the political orientation of the church was also intolerable to August Pauli. On the birthday of the emperor (January 27, 1918), the superintendent held the sermon with the theme: “The Hohenzollerns are given to us by God for wisdom and for justice and for sanctification and for salvation.” So his friend Christian Geyer’s offer to take up a pastorate in Nürnberg fell on good ground. But the church leadership did not want to see him in Nürnberg. So he went to Regensburg (December 1918). Even though the people in this southern German city were more accessible and open, church life again shaped itself in the old traditional forms. “I was obviously not yet in the right stream.” In 1921/22, the ‘Leimbach case’ occurred in the Bavarian Regional Church. Pastor Leimbach in Öttingen was a militant advocate of a radical-modern theology. Bavaria’s pastors were divided over him when he was to be suspended. Dr. Christian Geyer, at the head of about fifty modern-minded colleagues, took a six-month leave of absence. In view of the founding of The Christian Community, which Geyer helped to prepare, he hoped to be expelled from the church. This did not happen, and Geyer travelled back to Ansbach to the General Synod instead of Breitbrunn and Dornach.

August Pauli had known about anthroposophy for over a decade through his wife but had not found a special relationship with it. He, too, took a six-month leave of absence because of the Leimbach case. Initially, he had not heard about the preparations for the founding of The Christian Community. Now that he had time, the news came just in time. It became clear to him what had to happen, and he intensively studied the transcripts of the first two so-called ‘theology cycles,’ which Rudolf Steiner had held in the summer and autumn of 1921.

It is pointless to speculate about how many of the fifty progressive pastors around Christian Geyer would have found their way to The Christian Community if he had gone before them. Certainly not very many. It took a deeply personal decision. But August Pauli made this decision. He resigned from the church service for the second time and worked among the founders from the Breitbrunn meeting onward. “Even in my most recent and highest relationships, I bind myself to those who, like me, want to be bearers of the mission of Christ, which we do not receive as individuals, but as a community.”

Rudolf Steiner had explained to him that, actually, only two realizations were necessary for cooperation: That in Jesus, there lived more than a human being and that there must be a new liturgy. Vom Pfarrer der Landeskirche zum Priester der Christengemeinschaft [From Pastor of the National Church to Priest of The Christian Community] is the title of the book August Pauli published in 1928, in which he described the path traced here.

He had walked it in his own way, thoughtfully and thoroughly. The insight that the preaching ministry, as well as the people’s church, urgently needed renewal had already come in 1908, but then fourteen years had passed before he wanted to help build a new church of the future.

As full of pressing questions and deeply moved as the first part of his life had been, he then served the new mission steadily and straightforwardly in the congregation of The Christian Community in Munich, which he founded. In Munich, he began the new work with Gerhard Klein immediately after the ordinations in 1922. In November 1923, Gerhard Klein left Munich, and Hermann Heisler joined Pauli. Seven years younger, he had often taken his steps in life very similarly. But in temperament and style, there had hardly been a greater contrast among the founders of The Christian Community.

Hermann Heisler was a fiery speaker, but August Pauli was always thoughtful and calm, even taciturn, or even aloof, as a friend called it, but always balancing and forming the calming pole in the spiritual discussions of a community that was repeatedly subjected to severe tests.

Probably the most severe of these – besides the ban – was the conflict that broke out in 1933 through Gertrud Spoerri. Hermann Heisler came out sharply against her. August Pauli tried intensively to bring about a mediation. Finally, Friedrich Rittelmeyer travelled from Stuttgart and announced her leave of absence.

The exhilarating time of the beginning of all congregational work for The Christian Community had thus come to an end. The rising power of the National Socialists overshadowed all free spiritual life. Hermann Heisler had to give way to this. He had violated a ban imposed by those in power, and it was necessary for August Pauli to agree to his departure, even though the two men, so different from each other, had become close friends.

Of August Pauli’s two children, his son Reinhold, born in 1915, died in 1938 during a mountain hike at the ‘Totenkirchl’ in the Wilden Kaiser, east of Kufstein. This experience had deeply shaken August Pauli, and Hermann Heisler had been a strong support for him during this most difficult time.

The death of his son unleashed new abilities and possibilities in August Pauli. At almost seventy years of age, he opened his soul to his fellow human beings in radiant mildness, and the refined humor of old-age wisdom met his friends. From that time on, August Pauli was able to perceive clear experiences from beyond the threshold, from the so-called dead, with an alert daytime consciousness. With this ability, he was able to help many people in the following difficult years of prohibition and war.

After the Second World War, August Pauli was the patriarch of the reconstruction phase of the congregation in Munich. He had to cope with the death of his wife Elsbeth in 1955 and another crisis among his colleagues. But then, the almost ninety-year-old was able to experience the consecration of the new church in Munich’s Leopoldstraße, revered and celebrated by the whole congregation. He was rightly one of the few wearers of the golden ring and the title of ‘Archpriest,’ a distinction that has only been awarded to a few priests to this day.

On Christmas Eve 1958, weakness forced him into bed. He died on January 6, 1959. Thus his dying was at the same time a journey through the twelve holy nights and a full awakening to the spiritual reality on Epiphany, the day of the appearance of the light from above.