,

Wilhelm Alexander Ruhtenberg

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

/0 Comments/by
,

The Transfiguration on the Mountain (Mat. 17:1-18)

The Transfiguration on the Mountain (Mat. 17:1-18)

Never in the life of Christ on earth was the contrast between height and depth, between light and darkness, greater than at the Transfiguration on the mountain and the drama that followed it.  He had only just appeared in His true form on the mountain when at the foot of the mountain He was confronted with diseased humanity that brought Him to despair.  “How weak are the hearts of men, and how distorted the image of man has become in them.  How long must I still be with you?  How long must I still bear you?”

This shrill contrast is the distinctive hallmark of Christ and of those who want to follow Him.  Church Father St. Augustine once expressed it most succinctly with the words: “The history of Christianity takes its course between the persecutions of the adversary powers and the consolations of God.”  This is true not only for Christians, but also for Christ Himself—to be lurched this way and that between persecution and consolation, between transfiguration and temptation.  Not only is this His destiny, but it is also His self-chosen destiny, no matter now hard that sounds.  For after His resurrection He gives Himself the answer to His desperate question: “How long must I still bear you?”  “I am in your midst all the days until the completion of earthly time.”

In the Consecration of the Human Being we ascend the mountain.  The mountain—that is the altar.  The Latin words alta area mean: raised area for offering.  Even though we do not see it with our eyes, it is the place where Christ appears in His true form,  Every time the bread and wine are raised in His name, Christ is transfigured again.  Every time we receive the holy meal we can say with Peter: “Lord, it is good that we are here.”  And every time the holy act has been fulfilled He descends from the mountain with us, from the consolations of God back to the persecutions of the adversary powers on earth.

 

–Rev. Bastiaan Baan, March 5, 2023

/1 Comment/by
,

Hermann Fackler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

MEMORANDUM

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

Badisch Rheinfelden, February 20, 1922

Hermann Fackler

/0 Comments/by
,

Invisible Assistance

“He will be delivered to the Gentiles, and will be mocked and shamefully treated and spat upon; they will scourge Him and kill Him …” (Luke 18:32)

All of this—it was not only the torture that Jesus underwent.  It is the daily occurring acts by which everywhere on earth people are broken.  History repeats itself countless times.  And always we stand powerless as bystanders, as witnesses and as spectators, as long as we are not involved ourselves as perpetrator or victim.  Perhaps powerlessness is the characteristic of all people of good will.  Evil is as old as the world, and with the best will in the world it cannot be eradicated.

The followers of Jesus were also powerless facing their rulers, who were possessed by evil.  And yet, despite everything, a few of them tried to assist Him to the end: the one disciple who knew what it was to die; the mother whose soul was pierced by a sword; the sinner who bestowed a deed of love on Him by anointing Him.  Those were the only things they could do in their impotence: stand by Him, literally and figuratively.

When you carefully look, you see that evil in the world does not only physically mutilate, but that, even more often, the souls of people are mutilated and broken.  But even then there still is something we can do in our powerlessness.  When we cannot do anything with our hands to effectively help, the only way we have left to help is through our prayer, our intercession, our compassion.  This invisible assistance, no matter how small and elusive, is a counterweight on the scale that threatens to collapse under the burden of evil in the world.  And it alleviates the burden of Him who has to bear all, and who says: “What you did for the least of my brothers, that you did for me.”

–Rev. Bastiaan Baan, February 19, 2023

/0 Comments/by
,

Fritz Blattman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


MEMORANDUM

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

–Heidenheim, February 8, 1922

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

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

The Blattmans

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

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

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

/0 Comments/by
,

Heinrich Rittelmeyer

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

/0 Comments/by

New Year

A new year has begun—but almost everything that comes to meet us is an inheritance from the past.  That is because we are collectively dragging the ballast of unfinished business along with us.  Wherever you look, unresolved conflicts and wars, increasing climate- and environmental crisis, poverty, hunger, and repression.  In countless ways we are entangled in problems.  What is really new in this new year, aside from a new stack of old disorders?

Undoubtedly a large part of the world we have ourselves created is incurably ill.  But even when someone or something is mortally ill we can still do something.  For that is what we do for patients and for people who are dying.  How does something that is old and sick and degenerated become new again?

In some cultures there are expressions for this that are used for the smallest form of community, marriage.  They use the names of substances that show that through mutual fidelity and love the marital bond becomes stronger all the time: the copper, silver, golden, and diamond wedding anniversaries.[1]  And although crisis and conflict are inevitable in practically every marriage, although sometimes love has to come from one side, although the partners only become older, weaker, and more infirm, the alchemy of love makes that the bond is gilded or crystallizes like a diamond.

This is not only true for marriage, but for all forms of community.  Love and fidelity can be practiced anywhere—at work, with your housemates, in the care for humans and animals.  Also when you have been totally thrown back onto yourself, even then it is necessary to remain faithful to the earth, no matter how sick it is.

Alchemy is the art of making something out of nothing, of turning a perishable world into an imperishable work of art.  Alchemy is more than change—it is transformation, transubstantiation.  Ultimately, only love is capable of this.  When everything goes wrong, when nothing can stop the decline of the dying earth existence, love is the only means of creating a way up in the way down.

And when human love is crowned by the love of God, when love comes from two sides, we both begin, imperceptibly, invisibly, to construct a new world: the golden wedding anniversary of heaven and earth.

 

Rev. Bastiaan Baan, January 1, 2023

[1] For resp. the 12½, 25, 50, and 60 year wedding anniversaries.

/1 Comment/by
,

Friedrich Rittelmeyer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

/0 Comments/by