March 30, 2025 marks the centenary of the death of Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy and Waldorf education. His legacy is an enormous body of work that continues to challenge and inspire many people to this day, arousing deep admiration in some and being rigorously rejected by others. This work consists of around 30 writings, numerous essays and meditation texts, thousands of lecture notes and many works of art from the fields of architecture, painting, sculpture, costume and stage design as well as instructions on eurythmy and the art of recitation. The publication of Rudolf Steiner's legacy in a complete edition (GA) should be largely completed by the end of the centenary of his death and will thus have taken around 64 years – just as long as the human life of its creator.
Target: around 450 volumes
In 1943, Marie Steiner von Sivers, Steiner's partner and wife since 1914, entrusted this task to the Association for the Administration of the Literary and Artistic Estate of Dr. Rudolf Steiner, which was founded specifically for this purpose. Four years later, shortly before her death, she also transferred her rights to the intellectual and physical property of her husband's works to the Association. This act sparked a storm of outrage in the anthroposophical community, as they did not want to see Steiner's work administered outside the Goetheanum in an association. A court case lasting several years resulted in the estate association being vindicated. Planning for the Complete Edition began in the 1950s, and in 1961, the centenary year of Steiner's birth, Hella Wiesberger, the so-called architect of the Complete Edition, published an edition plan according to which Steiner's works are still published today. This plan has been expanded many times since then. At the time, it was thought that the works could be published in 330 volumes, but by 2026 this will have increased to around 450 volumes, not including the digital publication of around 640 notebooks and around 7,000 notepads. This will take several more years beyond 2025. It was thanks to Marie von Sivers, who later became Mrs. Doctor Steiner, that Rudolf Steiner agreed to become General Secretary of the German section of the Theosophical Society at the beginning of the 20th century, a movement that initially seemed highly suspicious to him. This laid the foundations for the emergence of anthroposophy, which developed out of the theosophical milieu. As early as 1907, Steiner bequeathed his work to Marie von Sivers in his will and in 1908 she founded a publishing house in which she published his works for 40 years until her death at the end of 1948. Due to the estate conflict in the 1950s, the publication of the complete edition could no longer take place in this publishing house, which was connected to the Goetheanum. This led to the creation of today's Rudolf Steiner Verlag, where the GA is published.
Marie Steiner's organizational talent
In Marie Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy had found a person in whom he could place not only his deep personal affection but also his complete trust. She was extremely disciplined and structured, taking care not only of the publication of his works, but also of the affairs of the Theosophical Society, and later the Anthroposophical Society, as well as organizing his numerous lecture tours throughout Europe. As he writes in his autobiography, he particularly appreciated the fact that she was not sentimental, that she was able to remain sober and objective about the esoteric content, and that she was able to integrate the anthroposophical ideas into general cultural life instead of trying to sectarianize them. However, this was precisely what Steiner severely criticized about many members of his movement. His aim was not to found a new religious community, but to stimulate the social and spiritual life of his time with new impulses. Marie Steiner was committed to the principle of publicity. Steiner's «fragmented, scattered» work was to be restored «in its totality». It was to be published as an «orderly, chronologically, technically and content-wise structured whole» so that future generations could gain an overview of it. Even though she herself had to admit that it would probably take «three lives» to work through the wealth of Steiner's thoughts.
Estate with enormous scope
In addition to the task of publishing Steiner's written and artistic work, the founding statutes of the estate association, which was transformed into a foundation with the same name and identical mission in 2015, also state the «care, administration and preservation» of the same. As this work comprises over a thousand shelf meters of written material, more than a thousand large-format wall panel drawings, various models, pieces of furniture, gems and other objects, one can imagine what a structural and conservational challenge this presents. Especially as the archive has to finance itself exclusively from private donations and foundation funds.
Although financial resources were often very limited, the archive has done a great deal of work over the past decades. In the second half of the last century, the publication of the GA was actively tackled. In the 1990s and 2000s, the blackboard drawings that Steiner created to accompany his lectures traveled around the world and captivated an international audience. Under David Marc Hoffmann, the current director, the archive has been expanded into an open house with a public reading room, with the focus on completing the GA by 2025. When the GA will soon be complete and the baton will have been passed to the new team leader, the archive will be faced with completely new tasks. On the one hand, research into Steiner's written and artistic legacy can then really get underway, and on the other, there is still a lot to do in the area of indexing the archive materials. And a permanent exhibition is to be created in Haus Duldeck, where it will be possible to encounter the works of the scholar and artist all year round. In addition, there are plans to organize events that will provide low-threshold access to Steiner's cosmos of thought, as well as events that will bring together experienced scientists from various specialist fields. And young people are to be encouraged to delve deeper into the work of the founder of anthroposophy through research grants. In short, the archive is to be developed into a research and meeting place where a lively exchange and open approach to Steiner's ideas can take place.
New opportunity for scientific work
An important task in the near future will be to continuously inventory and catalog the archive's holdings and record them in an archive database so that they can be made available to the public for research purposes. There is still a lot of work to be done here, which will take years, if not decades. To date, there is no digital record of the holdings that would allow users to search for, request or even view the material they need online. In each individual case, a personal request and then often a visit is necessary to view the material on site in the public reading room. Once the digital edition of the notebooks and notepads has been completed, further material not included in the GA – such as letters to Rudolf Steiner or book pages he underlined and annotated – will therefore be accessible online. A further field of activity in the coming decades could be the preparation of annotated historical-critical supplementary volumes to the existing GA or at least the academic groundwork for a future edition of Steiner's work in this sense. Up to now, the GA has primarily been conceived as a reading edition; detailed commentaries, references to the intellectual environment, the sources and the history of individual concepts as well as the presentation of lines of development within Steiner's work have been largely dispensed with. The suggestion for a historical-critical edition of his written works was made by Steiner himself in his autobiography a few weeks before his death. Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, a German-American anthroposophist and natural scientist, had published a corresponding edition plan while Marie Steiner was still alive and called on anthroposophists to tackle this enormous task together. And in recent years, individual study editions with variant comparisons and detailed commentaries have already been produced as part of the GA. Since 2013, the 16-volume “SKA”, the critical edition of Steiner's writings, has also been published. This series, published by Christian Clement at frommann-holzboog, provides an annotated comparison of variants of the various editions of Steiner's writings. However, the Steiner Archive has reserved the right of first publication for the manuscripts and corrected printing proofs.
Procurement in the 21st century
In any case, there will continue to be new editions of out-of-print volumes from the GA in the future, which will have to be reviewed and, depending on the state of the edition, fundamentally revised and brought up to today's standards. And finally, the fundamental question arises as to how the ideas of a man who died a hundred years ago and who spoke and wrote in a language that is only partially accessible to us today can be conveyed in the 21st century. How can his thoughts, which certainly bear the coloring of his time, continue to have a stimulating effect and inspire contemporaries to find individual answers to the problems and crises of our time? The authentic transmission of his words, the disclosure of his struggle for knowledge and for a meaningful impact in the world as well as the encounter with the inspiring power of his creations seem to me to be the best way to make this possible.
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