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.

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, 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

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.