If this peculiar cosmology sounds eerily similar to the teutonic myths of Himmler and Hitler, the resemblance is no accident.  Anthroposophy and National Socialism both have deep roots in the confluence of nationalism, right-wing populism, proto-environmentalist romanticism and esoteric spiritualism that characterized much of German and Austrian culture at the end of the nineteenth century.  But the connection between Steiner’s racially stratified pseudo-religion and the rise of the Nazis goes beyond mere philosophical parallels.  Anthroposophy had a powerful practical influence on the so-called “green wing” of German fascism.  Moreover, the actual politics of Steiner and his followers have consistently displayed a profoundly reactionary streak. 2

Why does anthroposophy, despite its patently racist elements and its compromised past, continue to enjoy a reputation as progressive, tolerant, enlightened and ecological?  The details of Steiner’s teachings are not well known outside of the anthroposophist movement, and within that movement the lengthy history of ideological implication in fascism is mostly repressed or denied outright.  In addition, many individual anthroposophists have earned respect for their work in alternative education, in organic farming, and within the environmental movement.  Nevertheless, it is an unfortunate fact that the record of anthroposophist collaboration with a specifically “environmentalist” strain of fascism continues into the twenty-first century.

Organized anthroposophist groups are often best known through their far-flung network of public institutions.  The most popular of these is probably the Waldorf school movement, with hundreds of branches worldwide, followed by the biodynamic agriculture movement, which is especially active in Germany and the United States.  Other well-known anthroposophist projects include Weleda cosmetics and pharmaceuticals and the Demeter brand of health food products.  The new age Findhorn community in Scotland also has a strong anthroposophist component.  Anthroposophists played an important role in the formation of the German Greens, and Germany’s former Interior Minister, Otto Schily, one of the most prominent founders of the Greens, is an anthroposophist.

In light of this broad public exposure, it is perhaps surprising that the ideological underpinnings of anthroposophy are not better known. 3 Anthroposophists themselves, however, view their highly esoteric doctrine as an “occult science” suitable to a spiritually enlightened elite.  The very name “anthroposophy” suggests to many outsiders a humanist orientation.  But anthroposophy is in many respects a deeply anti-humanist worldview, and humanists like Theodor Adorno and Ernst Bloch opposed it from the beginning. 4 Its rejection of reason in favor of mystical experience, its subordination of human action to supernatural forces, and its thoroughly hierarchical model of spiritual development all mark anthroposophy as inimical to humanist values.

Who was Rudolf Steiner?

Like many quasi-religious groups, anthroposophists have a reverential attitude toward their founder.  Born in 1861, Steiner grew up in a provincial Austrian town, the son of a mid-level railway official.  His intellectually formative years were spent in Vienna, capital of the aging Habsburg empire, and in Berlin.  By all accounts an intense personality and a prolific writer and lecturer, Steiner dabbled in a number of unusual causes.  Around the turn of the century, he underwent a profound spiritual transformation, after which he claimed to be able to see the spirit world and communicate with celestial beings.  These ostensible supernatural powers are the origin of most anthroposophist beliefs and rituals.  Steiner changed his mind on many topics in the course of his life; his early hostility toward Christianity, for example, later gave way to a neo-christian version of spiritualism codified in anthroposophy; and his viewpoint on theosophy reversed itself several times.  But a preoccupation with mysticism, occult legends and the esoteric marked his mature career from 1900 onward. 5

In 1902 Steiner joined the Theosophical Society and almost immediately became General Secretary of its German section.  Theosophy was a curious amalgam of esoteric precepts drawn from various traditions, above all Hinduism and Buddhism, refracted through a European occult lens. 6 Its originator, Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891), was the inventor of the “root races” idea; she declared the extinction of indigenous peoples by European colonialism to be a matter of “karmic necessity.”  Theosophy is built around the purported teachings of a coterie of “spiritual masters,” otherworldly beings who secretly direct human events.  These teachings were interpreted and presented by Blavatsky and her successor Annie Besant (1847-1933) to their theosophist followers as special wisdom from divine sources, thus establishing the authoritarian pattern that was later carried over to anthroposophy.

Steiner dedicated ten years of his life to the theosophical movement, becoming one of its best-known spokespeople and honing his supernatural skills.  He broke from mainstream theosophy in 1912, taking most of the German-speaking sections with him, when Besant and her colleagues declared the young Krishnamurti, a boy they “discovered” in India, to be the reincarnation of Christ.  Steiner was unwilling to accept a brown-skinned Hindu lad as the next “spiritual master.”  What had separated Steiner all along from Blavatsky, Besant, and the other India-oriented theosophists was his insistence on the superiority of European esoteric traditions.

In the wake of the split, Steiner founded the Anthroposophical Society in Germany.  Shortly before the outbreak of world war one he moved the fledgling organization’s international headquarters to Switzerland.  Under the protection of Swiss neutrality he was able to build up a permanent center in the village of Dornach.  Blending theosophical wisdom with his own “occult research,” Steiner continued to develop the theory and practice of anthroposophy, along with a steadily growing circle of followers, until his death in 1925.

The centerpiece of anthroposophical belief is spiritual advancement through karma and reincarnation, supplemented by the access to esoteric knowledge available to a privileged few.  According to anthroposophy, the spiritual dimension suffuses every aspect of life.  For anthroposophists, illnesses are karmically determined and play a role in the soul’s development.  Natural processes, historical events, and technological mechanisms are all explained through the action of spiritual forces.  Such beliefs continue to mark the curriculum in many Waldorf schools.

Steiner’s doctrine of reincarnation, embraced by latter-day anthroposophists the world over, holds that individuals choose their parents before birth, and indeed that we plan out our lives before beginning them to insure that we receive the necessary spiritual lessons.  If a disembodied soul balks at its own chosen life prospects just before incarnation, it fails to incarnate fully—the source, according to anthroposophists, of prenatal “defects” and congenital disabilities.  In addition, “the various parts of our body will be formed with the aid of certain planetary beings as we pass through particular constellations of the zodiac.” 7

Anthroposophists maintain that Steiner’s familiarity with the “astral plane,” with the workings of various “archangels,” with daily life on the lost continent of Atlantis (all central tenets of anthroposophic belief) came from his special powers of clairvoyance. Steiner claimed to have access to the “Akashic Chronicle,” a supernatural scripture containing knowledge of higher realms of existence as well as of the distant past and future.  Steiner “interpreted” much of this chronicle and shared it with his followers.  He insisted that such “occult experience,” as he called it, was not subject to the usual criteria of reason, logic, or scientific inquiry.  Modern anthroposophy is thus founded on unverifiable belief in Steiner’s teachings.  Those teachings deserve closer examination.

Anthroposophy’s Racialist Ideology

Building on theosophy’s postulate of root races, Steiner and his anthroposophist disciples elaborated a systematic racial classification system for human beings and tied it directly to their paradigm of spiritual advancement.  The particulars of this racial theory are so extraordinary, even bizarre, that it is difficult for non-anthroposophists to take it seriously, but it is important to understand the pernicious and lasting effects the doctrine has had on anthroposophists and those they’ve influenced. 8

Steiner asserted that “root races” follow one another in chronological succession over epochs lasting hundreds of thousands of years, and each root race is further divided into “sub-races” which are also arranged hierarchically.  By chance, as it were, the root race which happened to be paramount at the time Steiner made these momentous discoveries was the Aryan race, a term which anthroposophists use to this day.  All racial categories are arbitrary social constructs, but the notion of an Aryan race is an especially preposterous invention.  A favorite of reactionaries in the early years of the twentieth century, the Aryan concept was based on a conflation of linguistic and biological terminology backed up by spurious “research.”  In other words, it was an amalgamation of errors which served to provide a pseudo-scientific veneer to racist fantasies. 9

Anthroposophy’s promotion of this ridiculous doctrine is disturbing enough.  But it is compounded by Steiner’s further claim that—in yet another remarkable coincidence—the most advanced group within the Aryan root race is currently the nordic-germanic sub-race or people.  Above all, anthroposophy’s conception of spiritual development is inextricable from its evolutionary narrative of racial decline and racial advance: a select few enlightened members evolve into a new “race” while their spiritually inferior neighbors degenerate.  Anthroposophy is thus structured around a hierarchy of biological and psychological as well as “spiritual” capacities and characteristics, all of them correlated to race. The affinities with Nazi discourse are unmistakable. 10

Steiner did not shy away from describing the fate of those left behind by the forward march of racial and spiritual progress.  He taught that these unfortunates would “degenerate” and eventually die out.  Like his teacher Madame Blavatsky, Steiner rejected the notion that Native Americans, for example, were nearly exterminated by the actions of European settlers.  Instead he held that Indians were “dying out of their own nature.” 11 Steiner also taught that “lower races” of humans are closer to animals than to “higher races” of humans.  Aboriginal peoples, according to anthroposophy, are descended from the already “degenerate” remnants of the third root race, the Lemurians, and are devolving into apes.  Steiner referred to them as “stunted men, whose descendants still inhabit certain parts of the earth today as so-called savage tribes.” 12

The fourth root race which emerged between the Lemurians and the Aryans were the inhabitants of the lost continent of Atlantis, the existence of which anthroposophists take as literal fact.  Direct descendants of the Atlanteans include the Japanese, Mongolians, and Eskimos.  Steiner also believed that each people or Volk has its own “etheric aura” which corresponds to its geographic homeland, as well as its own “Volksgeist” or national spirit, an archangel that provides spiritual leadership to its respective people.

Steiner propagated a host of racist myths about “negroes.”  He taught that black people are sensual, instinct-driven, primitive creatures, ruled by their brainstem.  He denounced the immigration of blacks to Europe as “terrible” and “brutal” and decried its effects on “blood and race.”  He warned that white women shouldn’t read “negro novels” during pregnancy, otherwise they’d have “mulatto children.”  In 1922 he declared, “The negro race does not belong in Europe, and the fact that this race is now playing such a large role in Europe is of course nothing but a nuisance.” 13

But the worst insult, from an anthroposophical point of view, is Steiner’s dictum that people of color can’t develop spiritually on their own; they must either be “educated” by whites or reincarnated in white skin.  Europeans, in contrast, are the most highly developed humans.  Indeed “Europe has always been the origin of all human development.”  For Steiner and for anthroposophy, there is no doubt that “whites are the ones who develop humanity in themselves. [ . . . ] The white race is the race of the future, the spiritually creative race.” 14

Anthroposophists today often attempt to excuse or explain away such outrageous utterances by contending that Steiner was merely a product of his times. 15 This apologia is triply unconvincing.  First, Steiner claimed for himself an unprecedented degree of spiritual enlightenment which, by his own account, completely transcended his own time and place; he also claimed, and anthroposophists believe that he had, detailed knowledge of the distant past and future.  Second, this argument ignores the many dedicated members of Steiner’s generation who actively opposed racism and ethnocentrism.  Third, and most telling, anthroposophists continue to recycle Steiner’s racist imaginings to this day.

In 1995 there was a scandal in the Netherlands when it became publicly known that Dutch Waldorf schools were teaching “racial ethnography,” where children learn that the “black race” has thick lips and a sense of rhythm and that the “yellow race” hides its emotions behind a permanent smile.  In 1994 the Steinerite lecturer Rainer Schnurre, at one of his frequent seminars for the anthroposophist adult school in Berlin, gave a talk with the rather baffling title “Overcoming Racism and Nationalism through Rudolf Steiner.” According to a contemporary account, Schnurre emphasized the essential differences between races, noted the “infantile” nature of blacks, and alleged that due to immutable racial disparities “no equal and global system can be created for all people on earth” and that “because of the differences between races, sending aid to the developing world is useless.” 16

Incidents such as these are distressingly common in the world of anthroposophy.  The racial mindset that Steiner bestowed on his faithful followers has yet to be repudiated.  And it may well never be repudiated, since anthroposophy lacks the sort of critical social consciousness that could counteract its flagrantly regressive core beliefs.  Indeed anthroposophy’s political outlook has had a decidedly reactionary cast from the beginning.

The Social Vision of Anthroposophy

Steiner’s political perspective was shaped by a variety of influences.  Foremost among these was Romanticism, a literary and political movement that had a lasting impact on German culture in the nineteenth century.  Like all broad cultural phenomena, Romanticism was politically complex, inspiring both left and right.  But the leading political Romantics were explicit reactionaries and vehement nationalists who excluded Jews, even baptized ones, from their forums; they became bitter opponents of political reform and favored a strictly hierarchical, semi-feudal social order.  The Romantic revulsion for nascent “modernity,” hostility toward rationality and enlightenment, and mystical relation to nature all left their mark on Steiner’s thought.

Early in his career Steiner also fell under the sway of Nietzsche, the outstanding anti-democratic thinker of the era, whose elitism made a powerful impression.  The radical individualism of Max Stirner further contributed to the young Steiner’s political outlook, yielding a potent philosophical melange that was waiting to be catalyzed by some dynamic reactionary force. 17 The latter appeared to Steiner soon enough in the form of Ernst Haeckel and his Social Darwinist creed of Monism. 18 Haeckel (1834-1919) was the founder of modern ecology and the major popularizer of evolutionary theory in Germany.  Steiner became a partisan of Haeckel’s views, and from him anthroposophy inherited its environmentalist predilections, its hierarchical model of human development, and its tendency to interpret social phenomena in biological terms.

Haeckel’s elitist worldview extended beyond the realm of biology.  He was also “a prophet of the national and racial regeneration of Germany” and exponent of an “intensely mystical and romantic nationalism,” as well as “a direct ancestor” of Nazi eugenics. 19 Monism, which Steiner for a time vigorously defended, rejected “Western rationalism, humanism, and cosmopolitanism,” and was “opposed to any fundamental social change.  What was needed for Germany, it argued categorically, was a far-reaching cultural and not a social revolution.” 20 This attitude was to become a hallmark of anthroposophy.

In the heady turn-of-the-century atmosphere, Steiner flirted for a while with left politics, and even shared a podium with revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg at a workers’ meeting in 1902.  But Steiner consistently rejected any materialist or social analysis of capitalist society in favor of “looking into the soul” of fellow humans to divine the roots of the modern malaise.  This facile approach to social reality was to reach fruition in his mature political vision, elaborated during the first world war.  Steiner’s response to the war was determined by the final, decisive component in his intellectual temperament: chauvinist nationalism.

By his own account, Steiner actively took part in Viennese pan-German circles in the late nineteenth century. 21 He saw World War One as part of an international “conspiracy against German spiritual life.” 22 In Steiner’s preferred explanation, it wasn’t imperialist rivalry among colonial powers or national myopia or unbounded militarism or the competition for markets which caused the war, but British freemasons and their striving for world domination.  Steiner was a personal acquaintance of General Helmuth von Moltke, chief of staff of the German high command; after Moltke’s death in 1916 Steiner claimed to be in contact with his spirit and channeled the general’s views on the war from the nether world.  After the war Steiner had high praise for German militarism, and continued to rail against France, French culture, and the French language in rhetoric which matched that of Mein Kampf.  In the 1990’s anthroposophists were still defending Steiner’s jingoist historical denial, insisting that Germany bore no responsibility for World War One and was a victim of the “West.”

In the midst of the war’s senseless savagery, Steiner used his military and industrial connections to try to persuade German and Austrian elites of a new social theory of his, which he hoped to see implemented in conquered territories in Eastern Europe.  Unfortunately for Steiner’s plans, Germany and Austria-Hungary lost the war, and his dream went unrealized.  But the new doctrine he had begun preaching serves to this day as the social vision of anthroposophy. Its economic and political principles represent an unsteady combination of individualist and corporatist elements.  Conceived as an alternative to both Woodrow Wilson’s self-determination program and the bolshevik revolution, Steiner gave this theory the unwieldy name “the tripartite structuring of the social organism” (Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus, often referred to in English-language anthroposophist literature as “social threefolding” or “the threefold commonwealth,” phrases which obscure Steiner’s biologistic view of the social realm as an actual organism). 23 The three branches of this scheme, which resembles both fascist and semi-feudal corporatist models, are the state (political, military, and police functions), the economy, and the cultural sphere. 24 This last sphere encompasses “all judicial, educational, intellectual and spiritual matters,” which are to be administered by “corporations,” with individuals free to choose their school, church, court, etc. 25

Anthroposophists consider this threefold structure to be “naturally ordained.” 26 Its central axiom is that the modern integration of politics, economy and culture into an ostensibly democratic framework must falter because, according to Steiner, neither the economy nor cultural life can or should be structured democratically.  The cultural sphere, which Steiner defined very broadly, is a realm of individual achievement where the most talented and capable should predominate.  And the economy must never be subject to democratic public control because it would then collapse.  Steiner’s economic and political naiveté are encapsulated in his claim that capitalism “will become a legitimate capitalism if it is spiritualized.” 27

In the aftermath of the bloody world war, at the very moment of great upheavals against the violence, misery, and exploitation of capitalism, Steiner emerged as an ardent defender of private profit, the concentration of property and wealth, and the unfettered market.  Arguing vehemently against any effort to replace anti-social institutions with humane ones, Steiner proposed adapting his “threefold commonwealth” to the existing system of class domination.  He could scarcely deny that the coarse economic despotism of his day was enormously damaging to human lives, but insisted that “private capitalism as such is not the cause of the damage”:

“The fact that individual people or groups of people administer huge masses of capital is not what makes life anti-social, but rather the fact that these people or groups exploit the products of their administrative labor in an anti-social manner. [ . . . ]  If management by capable individuals were replaced with management by the whole community, the productivity of management would be undermined.  Free initiative, individual capabilities and willingness to work cannot be fully realized within such a community.  [ . . .]  The attempt to structure economic life in a social manner destroys productivity.” 28

Though Steiner tried to make inroads within working class institutions, his outlook was understandably not very popular among workers.  The revolutionaries of the 1919 Munich council republic derided him as “the soul-doctor of decaying capitalism.” 29 Otto Neurath condemned ‘social threefolding’ as small-scale capitalism. Industrialists, on the other hand, showed a keen interest in Steiner’s notions.  Soon after the revolutionary upsurge of workers across Germany was crushed, Steiner was invited by the director of the Waldorf-Astoria tobacco factory to establish a company school in Stuttgart.  Thus were Waldorf schools born.

Anthroposophy in Practice: Waldorf Schools and Biodynamic Farming

The school in Stuttgart turned out to be the anthroposophists’ biggest success, along with the nearby pharmaceutical factory that they named after the mythical Norse oracle Weleda.  Waldorf schools are now represented in many countries and generally project a solidly progressive image.  There are undoubtedly progressive aspects to Waldorf education, many of them absorbed from the intense ferment of alternative pedagogical theories prevalent in the first decades of the twentieth century.  But there is more to Waldorf schooling than holistic learning, musical expression, and eurythmy.

Classical anthroposophy, with its root races and its national souls, is the “covert curriculum” of Waldorf schools. 30 Anthroposophists themselves avow in internal forums that the idea of karma and reincarnation is the “basis of all true education.” 31 They believe that each class of students chooses one another and their teacher before birth. The task of a Waldorf teacher is to assist each pupil in fully incarnating. Steiner himself demanded that Waldorf schools be staffed by “teachers with a knowledge of man originating in a spiritual world.” 32 Later anthroposophists express the Waldorf vision thus:

“This education is essentially grounded on the recognition of the child as a spiritual being, with a varying number of incarnations behind him, who is returning at birth into the physical world, into a body that will be slowly moulded into a usable instrument by the soul-spiritual forces he brings with him.  He has chosen his parents for himself because of what they can provide for him that he needs in order to fulfill his karma, and, conversely, they too need their relationship with him in order to fulfill their own karma.” 33

The curriculum at Waldorf schools is structured around the stages of spiritual maturation posited by anthroposophy: from one to seven years a child develops her or his physical body, from seven to fourteen years the etheric body, and from fourteen to twenty-one the astral body.  These stages are supposed to be marked by physical changes; thus kindergartners at Waldorf schools can’t enter first grade until they’ve begun to lose their baby teeth. In addition, each pupil is classified according to the medieval theory of humors: a Waldorf child is either melancholic, choleric, sanguine, or phlegmatic – the categorization is in part based on the child’s external physical appearance – and is treated accordingly by the teachers.

Along with privileging ostensibly “spiritual” considerations over cognitive and psycho-social ones, the static uniformity of this scheme is pedagogically suspect.  It also suggests that Waldorf schools’ reputation for fostering a spontaneous, child-centered and individually oriented educational atmosphere is undeserved. 34 In fact Steiner’s model of instruction is downright authoritarian: he emphasized repetition and rote learning, and insisted that the teacher should be the center of the classroom and that students’ role was not to judge or even discuss the teacher’s pronouncements.  In practice many Waldorf schools implement strict discipline, with public punishment for perceived transgressions.

Anthroposophy’s peculiar predilections also shape the Waldorf curriculum. Jazz and popular music are often scorned at European Waldorf schools, and recorded music in general is frowned upon; these phenomena are considered to harbor demonic forces. Instead students read fairy tales, a staple of Waldorf education. Some sports, too, are forbidden, and art instruction often rigidly follows Steiner’s eccentric theories of color and form. Taken together with the pervasive anti-technological and anti-scientific bias, the suspicion toward rational thought, and the occasional outbreaks of racist gibberish, these factors indicate that Waldorf schooling is as questionable as the other aspects of the anthroposophist enterprise.

Next to Waldorf schools, the most widespread and apparently progressive version of applied anthroposophy is biodynamic agriculture.  In Germany and North America, at least, biodynamics is an established part of the alternative agriculture scene.  Many small growers use biodynamic methods on their farms or gardens; there are biodynamic vineyards and the Demeter line of biodynamic food products, as well as a profusion of pamphlets, periodicals and conferences on the theory and practice of biodynamic farming.

Although not a farmer himself, Steiner introduced the fundamental outlines of biodynamics near the end of his life and produced a substantial body of literature on the topic, which anthroposophists and biodynamic growers follow more or less faithfully.  Biodynamics in practice often converges with the broader principles of organic farming.  Its focus on maintaining soil fertility rather than on crop yield, its rejection of artificial chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and its view of the whole farm or plot as an ecosystem all mark the biodynamic approach as an eminently sensible and ecologically sound method of cultivation.  But there is more to the story than that.

Biodynamic farming is based on Steiner’s revelation of invisible cosmic forces and their effects on soil and flora.  Anthroposophy teaches that the earth is an organism that breathes twice a day, that etheric beings act upon the land, and that celestial bodies and their movements directly influence the growth of plants.  Hence biodynamic farmers time their sowing to coincide with the proper planetary constellations, all a part of what they consider “the spiritual natural processes of the earth.” 35  Sometimes this “spiritual” approach takes unusual forms, as in the case of “preparation 500.”

To make preparation 500, an integral component of anthroposophist agriculture, biodynamic farmers pack cow manure into a steer’s horn and bury it in the ground.  After leaving it there for one whole winter, they dig up the horn and mix the manure with water (it must be stirred for a full hour in a specific rhythm) to make a spray which is applied to the topsoil.  All of this serves to channel “radiations which tend to etherealize and astralize” and thus “gather up and attract from the surrounding earth all that is etheric and life-giving.” 36

Non-anthroposophist organic growers are often inclined to dismiss such fanciful aspects of biodynamics as pointless but harmless appurtenances to an otherwise congenial cultivation technique.  While this attitude has some merit, it is not reciprocated by biodynamic adherents, who emphasize that “The ‘organic’ farmer may well farm ‘biologically’ but he does not have the knowledge of how to work with dynamic forces—a knowledge that was given for the first time by Rudolf Steiner.” 37 For better or worse, biodynamic farming is inseparable from its anthroposophic context.

Enthusiasm for biodynamics, however, has historically extended well beyond the boundaries of anthroposophy proper.  For a time it also held a strong appeal for others who shared anthroposophists’ nationalist background and occult interests. Indeed it was through biodynamic farming that anthroposophy most directly influenced the course of German fascism.

Anthroposophy and the “Green Wing” of the Nazi Party

The mix of mysticism, romanticism, and pseudo-environmentalist concerns propagated by Steiner and his cohorts brought anthroposophy into close ideological contact with a grouping that has been described as the green wing of National Socialism. 38 This group, which included several of the Third Reich’s most powerful leaders, were active proponents of biodynamic agriculture and other anthroposophist causes. The history of this relationship has been the subject of some controversy, with anthroposophists typically denying any connection whatsoever to the Nazis. To understand the matter fully, it is perhaps best to set it in the context of anthroposophy’s attitude toward the rise of fascism.

As the extremely thorough research of independent scholar Peter Bierl demonstrates, there was considerable admiration within the ranks of anthroposophists for Mussolini and Italian fascism, the precursor to Hitler’s dictatorship. 39 Moreover, several leading Italian anthroposophists were vocal Fascists and actively involved in promoting Fascist racial policy. 40 But it was the German variety of fascism which most prominently shared anthroposophy’s preoccupation with race. During the 1920’s and 1930’s the leading anthroposophist writer on racial issues was Dr. Richard Karutz, director of the anthropological museum in Lübeck. 41 Karutz wanted to protect anthropology as a discipline from what he termed “the sociological flood of materialist thinking,” favoring instead a “spiritual” ethnology based on anthroposophical race doctrine. 42 Flatly denying the anthropological research of his own time, he insisted on the cultural and spiritual superiority of the “Aryan race.”

Karutz was more openly antisemitic than many of his anthroposophist colleagues. He denounced the “spirit of Jewry,” which he described as “cliquish, petty, narrow-minded, rigidly tied to the past, devoted to dead conceptual knowledge and hungry for world power.” 43 During the last decade of the Weimar republic, Karutz and other anthroposophists had to contend with the growing notoriety of Nazi “racial science.” Karutz criticized the Nazis’ eugenic theories for their biological, as opposed to “spiritual,” emphasis, and for neglecting the role of reincarnation. But he agreed with their proscription against “racial mixing,” especially between whites and non-whites.

In 1931 the foremost anthroposophist journal published a positive review by Karutz of Walther Darré’s book Neuadel aus Blut und Boden (‘A New Nobility out of Blood and Soil’). Darré, a leading “racial theorist” and pre-eminent figure in the Nazis’ green wing, was soon to become Minister of Agriculture under Hitler. 44 This cozy relationship with major Nazi officials paid off for Steiner’s followers once the party took command of Germany. According to numerous anthroposophist accounts of this period, the Nazis hounded the Steinerites from the beginning of the Third Reich. But this self-serving tale is much too simple; the historical record reveals a considerably more complicated reality.

Immediately after the Nazi movement attained state power in early 1933, the leaders of organized anthroposophy took the initiative in extending their support to the new government. In June of that year a Danish newspaper asked Günther Wachsmuth, Secretary of the International Anthroposophic Society in Switzerland, about anthroposophy’s attitude toward the Nazi regime. He replied, “We can’t complain. We’ve been treated with the utmost consideration and have complete freedom to promote our doctrine.” Speaking for anthroposophists generally, Wachsmuth went on to express his “sympathy” and “admiration” for National Socialism. 45

Wachsmuth, one of three top officers at anthroposophy’s world headquarters in Dornach, was hardly alone among Steiner’s followers in his vocal support for the Hitler dictatorship. The homeopathic physician Hanns Rascher, for example, proudly proclaimed himself “just as much an anthroposophist as a National Socialist.” 46 In 1934 the German Anthroposophic Society sent Hitler an official letter pointing out anthroposophy’s compatibility with National Socialist values and emphasizing Steiner’s “Aryan origins” and his pro-German activism. 47

At the time Wachsmuth gave his interview, thousands of socialists, communists, anarchists, union members, and other dissidents had been interned or exiled, the Dachau and Oranienburg concentration camps had been established, and independent political life in Germany had been obliterated. But for years most anthroposophists suffered no official harassment; they were accepted into the compulsory Nazi cultural associations and continued to pursue their activities. The exception, of course, was Jewish members of anthroposophist organizations. They were forced, under pressure from the state, to leave these institutions. There is no record of their gentile anthroposophist comrades protesting this “racial” exclusion, much less putting up any internal resistance to it. In fact some anthroposophists, like the law professor Ernst von Hippel, endorsed the expulsion of Jews from German universities.

Despite this extensive public support by anthroposophists for the nazification of Germany, a power struggle was going on within the byzantine apparatus of the Nazi state over whether to ban anthroposophy or co-opt the movement and its institutions. This struggle was primarily conducted between Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy and a personal sympathizer with anthroposophical practices, and Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS and devotee of the esoteric and occult who viewed anthroposophy as ideological and organizational competition to his own pseudo-religion of Nazi paganism. 48 It was not until November 1935, long after most other independent cultural institutions had been destroyed, that the German Anthroposophic Society was dissolved on Himmler’s orders.

The ban, signed by Himmler’s lieutenant Reinhard Heydrich, cited anthroposophy’s “international orientation” and Waldorf schools’ “individualistic” education. Nazi opponents of the party’s green wing, such as Heydrich, disliked anthroposophy because of its “oriental” origins; there was also a certain populist resentment of anthroposophy’s elitism involved. But even after the ban there was no general persecution of anthroposophists. The anthroposophical doctors’ association received official recognition and support, joining the Nazi organization for ‘natural healing.’ Many anthroposophical publishing activities continued uninterrupted; anthroposophist professors, teachers and civil servants kept their jobs; Waldorf schools and biodynamic farms continued to operate. Most Waldorf schools were eventually shut down in the course of the later 1930’s, despite the pro-anthroposophist intervention of influential Nazis like SS war criminal Otto Ohlendorf. 49 But the final blow didn’t come until 1941 when Hess, anthroposophy’s protector, flew to Britain. After that point the last Waldorf school was closed for good, biodynamic farming lost its official support, and several leading anthroposophists were imprisoned for a time.

The Weleda factories, on the other hand, continued to operate throughout the war and even received state contracts. In fact Weleda supplied naturopathic materials for ‘medical experiments’ (i.e. torture) on prisoners at Dachau. 50 Weleda’s longtime head gardener, Franz Lippert, asked to be transferred to Dachau in 1941 to oversee the biodynamic plantation that Himmler had established at the concentration camp. 51 Lippert became an SS officer, as did his fellow biodynamic leader, anthroposophist Carl Grund. Thus anthroposophist collaboration with the Nazi vision of a new Europe persisted until the bitter end of the Third Reich.

Much of this sordid history is substantiated, albeit with a very different interpretive accent, in the massive 1999 book on anthroposophists and National Socialism by Uwe Werner, chief archivist at anthroposophy’s world headquarters in Switzerland. 52 But even this revealing work presents anthroposophist behavior under the Nazis as merely defensive and thus absolves Steiner’s followers of any measure of responsibility for Nazi Germany’s myriad crimes. Many other postwar attempts by anthroposophists to come to terms with their history of compromise and complicity with the Third Reich are embarrassingly evasive and repeat the underlying racism which united them with the Nazis in the first place. The prevailing explanations are thoroughly esoteric, portraying the Nazis as manipulated by demonic powers or even as a necessary stage in the spiritual development of the Aryan race. 53

The Biodynamic movement and its Nazi admirers

More striking still than such mystifications of Nazism is the refusal within anthroposophic circles to acknowledge their doctrine’s influence on the Nazis’ green wing. The anthroposophist inflection of German ecofascism extended well beyond high-profile figures such as Darré and Hess. 54 Powerful Steinerite Nazi functionaries and supporters of biodynamic agriculture included SS officer and anthroposophist Hans Merkel, a leading figure in the SS Main Office for Race and Settlement; anthroposophist Georg Halbe, an influential official in the Nazi agricultural apparatus; Merkel’s and Halbe’s colleague Wilhelm Rauber; and Nazi party Reichstag member Hermann Schneider. 55 Other regional and local officials of the biodynamic farmers league belonged to the Nazi party, including Carl Grund, Albert Friehe, and Harald Kabisch. 56 A further central member of the green wing with strong ties to anthroposophy was Alwin Seifert, whose official title was Reich Advocate for the Landscape. 57 Leading figures in the biodynamic movement, meanwhile, such as Franz Dreidax and Max Karl Schwarz, worked closely with various Nazi organizations.

What distinguished the motley band of fascist functionaries known collectively as the green wing of the Nazi movement was their allegiance to the anti-humanist “religion of nature” preached by National Socialism. 58 Reviving Haeckel’s blend of Social Darwinism and ecology, they embodied a historically unique and politically disastrous convergence of otherworldly ideology with worldly authority. In the green wing of the Nazi party, nationalism, spiritualism, esoteric racism and eco-mysticism acceded to state power. 59

The green wing’s guiding slogan was ‘Blood and Soil,’ an infamous Nazi phrase which referred to the mystical relationship between the German people and its sacred land. Adherents of Blood and Soil held that environmental purity was inseparable from racial purity. This dual concern made them natural consociates of anthroposophy. The principal intermediary between organized anthroposophy and the Nazi green wing was Erhard Bartsch, the chief anthroposophist official responsible for biodynamic agriculture. Bartsch was on friendly personal terms with Seifert and Hess and played a crucial role in persuading the Nazi leadership of the virtues of biodynamics. He constantly emphasized the philosophical affinities between anthroposophy and National Socialism. Bartsch edited the journal Demeter, official organ of German biodynamic growers, which praised the Nazis and their courageous Führer even after the start of the war. Bartsch also offered his services to the SS in their plan to settle the conquered territories of Eastern Europe with pure Aryan farmers. His early and wholehearted engagement for the Nazi cause is testimony to the political precariousness of the biodynamic model. 60

Many other powerful Nazi authorities supported biodynamic farming. These included, in addition to Ohlendorf, Hess, and Darré, the Nazi Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, Nazi leader of the German Labor Front Robert Ley, and chief Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, all of whom were visitors to Bartsch’s biodynamic estate, the headquarters of the biodynamic farmers league, and expressed their encouragement for the undertaking. Two further extremely important figures, especially after 1941, were the high SS commanders Günther Pancke and Oswald Pohl. Pancke was Darré’s successor as head of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office and drew on Bartsch’s assistance in planning a biodynamic component to the Nazi settlement of ethnically cleansed territories in Eastern Europe. Pohl, a friend of Seifert’s, was the administrator of the concentration camp system. He took a special interest in biodynamics and had his own estate farmed biodynamically. He established and maintained the ring of biodynamic farms at concentration camps, which continued to operate until the final defeat of Nazism in 1945.

Alongside these figures stood lesser-known Nazi leaders who actively supported the biodynamic cause, including a variety of other SS officers such as Heinrich Vogel, who coordinated the SS network of biodynamic plantations at concentration camps. Hanns G. Müller, the principal advocate of Lebensreform or ‘lifestyle reform’ views within the Nazi movement, was another longstanding sponsor of biodynamic agriculture. In 1935 the biodynamic farmers league officially joined Müller’s Nazi organization, the “Deutsche Gesellschaft für Lebensreform,” a collection of ‘alternative’ cultural groups dedicated to alternative health, nutrition, farming, and so forth, with an explicitly and fervently Nazi commitment. The organization’s journal Leib und Leben published dozens of articles by biodynamic enthusiasts as late as mid-1943. Müller’s Nazi party colleague Herman Polzer, another leading figure in Nazi Lebensreform circles, was a particularly vocal proponent of biodynamic agriculture. The coterie of “landscape advocates” working under Seifert, a long-time practitioner and advocate of biodynamics, also included a number of active anthroposophists, most prominently Max Karl Schwarz, a major leader in the biodynamic movement. 61

Nazi Minister of Agriculture and “Reich Peasant Leader” Walther Darré was initially skeptical toward biodynamic farming but became an enthusiastic convert in the late 1930’s. 62 He bestowed on Steiner’s version of organic cultivation the official label “farming according to the laws of life,” a term which highlights the natural order ideology common to all forms of reactionary ecology. In mid-1941 Darré was still heavily promoting state support for biodynamics, and his biographer claims that “one third of the top Nazi leadership supported Darré’s campaign” on behalf of biodynamics at a time when all varieties of anthroposophy were officially out of favor. 63 Indeed Nazi government encouragement of biodynamic farming had a long history: “There were two thousand bio-dynamic farmers registered in the Nazi ‘Battle for Production’, probably an understatement of the real figure.” 64

The green wing of the Nazis represents the historical fulfillment of the dreams of reactionary ecology: ecofascism in power. The extensive intertwinement of anthroposophic belief and practice with actually existing ecofascism should not be judged as an instance of guilt by association. Rather it ought to be occasion to reflect on the political susceptibilities of esoteric environmentalism. Even the anthroposophist author Arfst Wagner, who spent years compiling documentation on anthroposophy in the Third Reich, came to the uncomfortable conclusion that “a strong latent tendency toward extreme right-wing politics” is common among anthroposophists both past and present. 65

The Continuing Legacy of Steinerite Reactionary Ecology

The calamitous experience of Nazism failed to exorcise the right-wing spirits that haunt anthroposophy. Steiner’s dictum that social change could only be the result of spiritual transformation on an individual level lead to a marginalization of sober political analysis among his followers. This left anthroposophy wide open to the same regressive forces that had surreptitiously animated it all along.

Of course there were also personal continuities between the Nazi green wing and post-war anthroposophy. While Hess was inaccessible in Spandau prison, Darré’s judges at Nuremberg imposed a relatively short sentence, with the help of Merkel, his anthroposophist attorney. Darré studied Steiner’s writings during his imprisonment, and after his release from prison resumed his friendly contacts with anthroposophists until his death in 1953. Seifert returned to his professorship of landscape architecture in Munich and in 1964 was elected honorary chair of the Bavarian League for Nature Conservation. Darré’s biographer also notes admiringly “the brave handful of top Nazis” who had refused to cooperate with the 1941 purge of anthroposophists and “had their children educated and cared for by Anthroposophists after the Second World War.” 66

The second generation of radical right-wing anthroposophists was represented above all by Werner Georg Haverbeck, a leader of the Nazi youth movement during the Third Reich and an associate of Hess. After the war he became pastor of an anthroposophist congregation and founded the far-right World League for the Protection of Life (WSL in its German acronym). 67 The WSL, which has played an influential role in the German environmental movement, is anti-abortion, anti-immigration, and pro-eugenics. It promotes a “natural order of life” and opposes racial “degeneration.” As aggressive nationalism gained ever more ground in German public discourse through the 1980’s and 1990’s, Haverbeck and the WSL were instrumental in linking it to ecological issues. 68

In 1989 Haverbeck authored a biography of anthroposophy’s founder under the title Rudolf Steiner – Advocate for Germany. 69 The book portrays Steiner, accurately enough, as a staunch nationalist, and even uses Steiner’s work to deny the facts of the holocaust. Haverbeck’s fellow long-time anthroposophist and WSL leader Ernst Otto Cohrs is another active holocaust denier. Cohrs, who made his living in the 1980’s and 1990’s selling biodynamic products, has also published works such as “There Were No Gas Chambers” and “The Auschwitz Myth.” A further prominent Steinerite on Germany’s extreme right is Günther Bartsch, who describes himself as a “national revolutionary.” Along with his neo-Nazi comrade Baldur Springmann, an organic farmer, WSL member, and founder of the Greens, Bartsch developed the doctrine of ‘Ecosophy.’ A mixture of anthroposophy with reactionary ecology and teutonic mysticism, ecosophy is yet another vehicle for promoting far right politics within the esoteric scene.

The persistent connection between Steiner’s worldview and neofascist politics is not restricted to a few fringe figures. Throughout the past two decades, well-known anthroposophists have been a common presence in Germany’s far right press, while anthroposophist publications often enough opens their pages to right-wing extremists. One anti-fascist researcher reports that “leading figures in the extreme right and neofascist camp are ideological proponents of biodynamic agriculture.” 70 Anthroposophists themselves occasionally admit that within their own organizations a “right-wing conservative consensus” remains “absolute.” 71 In Italy, meanwhile, the foremost post-war anthroposophist, Massimo Scaligero, was also a leading figure in neo-fascist circles, as was his pupil and colleague, anthroposophist Enzo Erra. 72 Steiner’s work has numerous far-right Italian fans. 73

Many contemporary anthroposophists nonetheless maintain that figures like Haverbeck are marginal to their movement. This argument overlooks the fact that several of Haverbeck’s books are published by the largest anthroposophist publisher in Germany, and ignores the substantial overlap between Haverbeck’s positions and those of Steiner and classical anthroposophy. More important, mainstream anthroposophists continue to repeat the mistakes of the past, as if Nazi tyranny and genocide had never taken place. Günther Wachsmuth, for example – as mainstream an anthroposophist as one might find – published a purportedly scientific book in the 1950’s called The Development of Humanity which recapitulated the racist nonsense of pre-war anthroposophy. 74 Even more aggressively racist post-war anthroposophical works are not difficult to find. 75 In 1991, in the midst of an intense debate within Germany about restricting immigration laws, an anthroposophist journal ran an article with the title “Deutschendämmerung” (‘Twilight of the Germans’) which offered an ‘ecological’ version of neo-malthusian propaganda and anti-immigrant hysteria.

Mainstream anthroposophy also still has a Jewish problem. Perhaps this is not surprising in a movement whose founder blamed the historical persecution of Jews on their own “inner destiny” and proclaimed that “the Jews have contributed immensely to their own separate status.” 76 In 1992 a Swiss Waldorf teacher published a book claiming there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz; a leading Russian anthroposophist followed suit in 1996 with another book denying the holocaust; in 1995 a prominent anthroposophist periodical carried an article on “Jewish-Christian Hostility” which recycled the old myth of Jews as Christ-killers; in 1998 an anthroposophist from Hamburg wrote to another Steinerite journal claiming that “from 1933 to 1942 any Jew could leave the Nazi dictatorship with all of his property, and even be released from a concentration camp, as long as he went to Palestine.” 77 In 1991 and again in 1997 Swiss and German anthroposophists re-issued the 1931 book Das Rätsel des Judentums (‘The Mystery of Jewry’) by Ludwig Thieben, one of Austria’s leading anthroposophists in Steiner’s day. Jewish organizations and civil rights groups protested this ugly tract, which decries the “far-reaching negative influence of the Jewish essence,” alleges that Jews have “an anti-christian predisposition in their blood,” and holds Jews responsible for the “decline of the West.” 78 The anthroposophist publisher threatened the protesting organizations with a lawsuit.

The repeated occurrence of incidents such as these ought to be of considerable concern to humanists and people who envision a world free of racist ignorance. Even when approached with skepticism, anthroposophy’s consistent pattern of regressive political stances raises troubling questions about participation in anthroposophist projects and collaboration with anthroposophists on social initiatives. Those anthroposophists who are actively involved in contemporary environmental and social change movements frequently personify the most reactionary aspects of those movements: they hold technology, science, the enlightenment and abstract thought responsible for environmental destruction and social dislocation; they rail against finance capital and the loss of traditional values, denounce atheism and secularism, and call for renewed spiritual awareness and personal growth as the solution to ecological catastrophe and capitalist alienation. Conspiracy theory is their coin in trade, esoteric insight their preferred answer, obscurantism their primary function.

With a public face that is seemingly of the left, anthroposophy frequently acts as a magnet for the right. Loyal to an unreconstructed racist and elitist philosophy, built on a foundation of anti-democratic politics and pro-capitalist economics, purveying mystical panaceas rather than social alternatives, Steiner’s ideology offers only disorientation in an already disoriented world. Anthroposophy’s enduring legacy of collusion with ecofascism makes it plainly unacceptable for those working toward a humane and ecological society.

Notes:

1. See Rudolf Steiner, Die Mission einzelner Volksseelen im Zusammenhang mit der germanisch-nordischen Mythologie, Dornach, Switzerland 1994. These lectures are available in English under the title The Mission of the Individual Folk Souls in Relation to Teutonic Mythology, London 1970, republished 2005. The “Nordic spirit” of Scandinavia continues to fascinate European anthroposophists; see, for example, Hans Mändl, Vom Geist des Nordens, Stuttgart 1966, and Gundula Jäger, Die Bildsprache der Edda: Vergangenheits- und Zukunftsgeheimnisse in der nordisch-germanischen Mythologie (Stuttgart 2004).

2. For more thorough discussion of anthroposophical race doctrines see Sven Ove Hansson, “The Racial Teachings of Rudolf Steiner”: http://www.skepticreport.com/newage/steiner.htm as well as Helmut Zander, “Anthroposophische Rassentheorie: Der Geist auf dem Weg durch die Rassengeschichte” in Stefanie von Schnurbein and Justus Ulbricht, Völkische Religion und Krisen der Moderne, Würzburg 2001, and Peter Staudenmaier, “Race and Redemption: Racial and Ethnic Evolution in Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy” Nova Religio vol. 11 no. 3 (2008), pp. 4-36.

3. One crucial stumbling block for English language readers is the anthroposophical tendency to delete racist and antisemitic passages from translated editions of Steiner’s publications. For examples see www.chaseuk.info and for context see www.easeonline.org

4. See the incisive passages on Steiner and anthroposophy in Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, Berkeley 1991, as well as Adorno’s “Theses against occultism” in Adorno, Minima Moralia, London 1974.

5. Readers of German can now consult a superb account of Steiner’s intellectual development and a comprehensive history of anthroposophy’s early years: Helmut Zander, Anthroposophie in Deutschland: Theosophische Weltanschauung und gesellschaftliche Praxis 1884–1945, Göttingen 2007.

6. On the connections between theosophy and the Nazis, see George Mosse, “The Occult Origins of National Socialism” in Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism, New York 1999.

7. Stewart Easton, Man and World in the Light of Anthroposophy, New York 1975, p. 164.

8. Steiner’s racial teachings, a crucial element of the anthroposophic worldview, are spread throughout his work. For a concise overview in English see Janet Biehl’s section on Steiner in Biehl and Staudenmaier, Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience, San Francisco 1995, pp. 42-43 (Norwegian edition: Økofascisme: Lærdom fra Tysklands erfaringer, Porsgrunn 1997). Major statements by Steiner himself include Rudolf Steiner, Cosmic Memory: Prehistory of Earth and Man, New York 1987; Steiner, Universe, Earth and Man, London 1987; Steiner, “The Manifestation of the Ego in the Different Races of Men” in Steiner, The Being of Man and His Future Evolution, London 1981; Steiner, “Die Grundbegriffe der Theosophie. Menschenrassen” (Basic concepts of Theosophy: The races of humankind) in Steiner, Die Welträtsel und die Anthroposophie, Dornach 1985; Steiner, “Farbe und Menschenrassen” (Color and the races of humankind) in Steiner, Vom Leben des Menschen und der Erde, Dornach 1993. Although this latter book, a collection of Steiner’s lectures from 1923, has been published in English, the translation omits the chapter on race.

9. For background on the notion of an “Aryan race” see Leon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, New York 1974; Stefan Arvidsson, Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science, Chicago 2006; and Colin Kidd, “The Aryan Moment: Racialising Religion in the Nineteenth Century” in Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-2000, Cambridge 2006.

10. Wolfgang Treher makes a compelling case that Steiner’s racial theories, especially the repeated scheme of a small minority evolving further while a large mass declines, bear striking similarities even in detail to Hitler’s own theories.  He concludes: “Concentration camps, slave labor and the murder of Jews constitute a praxis whose key is perhaps to be found in the ‘theories’ of Rudolf Steiner.” Wolfgang Treher, Hitler Steiner Schreber, Emmingden 1966, p. 70.

11. Steiner, Vom Leben des Menschen und der Erde, p. 61. Elsewhere Steiner writes that the decimation of American Indians was due to their “racial character” (The Mission of the Folk Souls p. 76).

12. Rudolf Steiner, Cosmic Memory, New York 1987, p. 45.

13. Rudolf Steiner, Faculty Meetings With Rudolf Steiner pp. 58-59; Vom Leben des Menschen und der Erde p. 53; Gesundheit und Krankheit p. 189. Steiner’s typical remarks on Asian mental passivity, French decadence, and Slavic primitiveness are of similar caliber.

14. Steiner, Vom Leben des Menschen und der Erde 59, 62, 67.

15. Anthroposophical race thinking was hardly a personal idiosyncrasy of Rudolf Steiner. Racist theories abound within twentieth-century anthroposophical literature. Among many other examples see the following: Guenther Wachsmuth, editor, Gäa-Sophia: Jahrbuch der Naturwissenschaftlichen Sektion der Freien Hochschule für Geisteswissenschaft am Goetheanum Dornach, Stuttgart 1929, volume III: Völkerkunde; Wolfgang Moldenhauer, “Der Mensch vor und neben den grossen Kulturen”, Das Goetheanum February 13, 1938; Karl Heise, “Ein paar Worte zum Dunkelhaar und Braunauge der Germanen”, Zentralblatt für Okkultismus July-November 1914; Hans Heinrich Frei, “In Vererbung wiederholte Menschenleibes-Form und in Schicksalsgestaltung wiederholte Geisteswesens-Form”, Anthroposophie August 14 1927; Valentin Tomberg, “Mongolentum in Osteuropa”, Anthroposophie February 22 1931; Harry Köhler, “Menschheits-Entwickelung und Völkerschicksale im Spiegel der Historie”, Das Goetheanum August 21 1932; Wolfgang Moldenhauer, “Die Wanderungs-Atlantier und das Gesetz des Manu”, Das Goetheanum June 26 1938; Elise Wolfram, Die germanischen Heldensagen als Entwicklungsgeschichte der Rasse, Stuttgart 1922; Elisabeth Dank, “Die Neger in den Vereinigten Staaten” Die Christengemeinschaft September 1933; Ernst von Hippel, Afrika als Erlebnis des Menschen, Breslau 1938; as well as the substantial works on racial themes by leading anthroposophists Ernst Uehli and Richard Karutz. Italian anthroposophists also made significant contributions to the canon of racist publications; see e.g. Massimo Scaligero, “Razzismo spirituale e razzismo biologico”, La Vita Italiana July 1941; Scaligero, “Per un razzismo integrale” La Vita Italiana May 1942; Ettore Martinoli, “L’importanza di Trieste per l’ebraismo internazionale”, La Porta Orientale December 1942; Ettore Martinoli, “Gli impulsi storici della nuova Europa e l’azione dell’ebraismo internazionale”, La Vita Italiana April 1943.

16. Schnurre quoted in Oliver Geden, Rechte ökologie, Berlin 1996, p. 144.

17. For a fine critical study of Stirner’s influence on Steiner and others see Hans Helms, Die Ideologie der anonymen Gesellschaft, Cologne 1966.

18. On Steiner’s correspondence with Haeckel and his intense commitment to Monism around the turn of the century, see Anthroposophie vol. 16 no. 2 (January 1934), pp. 137-148.

19. First two quotes from Daniel Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League, New York 1971, pp. 16-17; third quote from George Mosse, Toward the Final Solution, Madison 1985, p. 87. Haeckel’s virulent racism is also extensively documented in Richard Lerner, Final Solutions: Biology, Prejudice, and Genocide, Philadelphia 1992; cf. also Jürgen Sandmann, Der Bruch mit der humanitären Tradition: die Biologisierung der Ethik bei Ernst Haeckel und anderen Darwinisten seiner Zeit, Stuttgart 1990.

20. Gasman, p. 31 and 23. See also the classic account from an anthroposophist perspective: Johannes Hemleben, Rudolf Steiner und Ernst Haeckel, Stuttgart 1965. For context see Gasman, Haeckel’s Monism and the Birth of Fascist Ideology, New York 1998, and for critical views on Gasman’s work see Richard Evans, “In Search of German Social Darwinism: The History and Historiography of a Concept” in Manfred Berg and Geoffrey Cocks, Medicine and Modernity: Public Health and Medical Care in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Germany, Cambridge 1997.

21. Rudolf Steiner, The Course of my Life, New York 1951, p. 142.

22. Rudolf Steiner, Die geistigen Hintergründe des Ersten Weltkrieges, Dornach 1974, p. 27. For context see Ulrich Linse, “Universale Bruderschaft oder nationaler Rassenkrieg – die deutschen Theosophen im Ersten Weltkrieg” in Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Dieter Langewiesche, eds., Nation und Religion in der deutschen Geschichte (Frankfurt 2001); and Herman de Tollenaere, The Politics of Divine Wisdom: Theosophy and Labour, National, and Women’s Movements in Indonesia and South Asia, 1875-1947 (Nijmegen 1996), pp. 156-160.

23. Steiner wrote that “the social organism is structured like the natural organism” in his nationalist pamphlet from 1919, “Aufruf an das deutsche Volk und an die Kulturwelt.” The pamphlet is quoted extensively in Walter Abendroth, Rudolf Steiner und die heutige Welt, Munich 1969, pp.122-123. Consider also this passage: “Every person must find the place where his work may be articulated in the most fruitful way into his people’s organism. It must not be left to chance to determine whether he shall find this place. The state constitution has no other goal than to ensure that everyone shall find his appropriate place. The state is the form in which the organism of a people expresses itself.” Steiner, Goethe the Scientist, New York 1950, 164.

24. For background see Ralph Bowen, German Theories of the Corporative State, New York 1947.

25. Quotes from Steiner as cited in Christoph Lindenberg, Rudolf Steiner, Hamburg 1992, pp. 111-112. For a comprehensive critique of ‘social threefolding’ see Ilas Körner-Wellershaus, Sozialer Heilsweg Anthroposophie: eine Studie zur Geschichte der sozialen Dreigliederung Rudolf Steiners unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der anthroposophischen Geisteswissenschaft (Bonn 1993).

26. Abendroth, Rudolf Steiner und die heutige Welt, p. 120.

27. Steiner quoted in Thomas Divis, “Rudolf Steiner und die Anthroposophie” in ÖkoLinx  #13 (February 1994), p. 27.

28. From a Steiner lecture manuscript reproduced in Walter Kugler, Rudolf Steiner und die Anthroposophie, Cologne 1978, pp. 199-200.

29. Cited in Peter Bierl, Wurzelrassen, Erzengel und Volksgeister: Die Anthroposophie Rudolf Steiners und die Waldorfpädagogik, Hamburg 1999, p. 107. A revised and expanded edition of Bierl’s excellent book was published in 2005.

30. See Charlotte Rudolph, Waldorf-Erziehung: Wege zur Versteinerung, Darmstadt 1987. Cf. Susanne Lippert, Steiner und die Waldorfpädagogik. Mythos und Wirklichkeit, Berlin 2001; Paul-Albert Wagemann und Martina Kayser: Wie frei ist die Waldorfschule? Munich 1996; Peter Bierl, “Der braune Geist der Waldorfpädagogik” in Ganzheitlich und ohne Sorgen in die Republik von Morgen: Dokumentation zum Kongress gegen Irrationalismus, Esoterik und Antisemitismus, Aschaffenburg 2001; Sybille-Christin Jacob and Detlef Drewes, Aus der Waldorf-Schule geplaudert: Warum die Steiner-Pädagogik keine Alternative ist, Aschaffenburg 2001; Juliane Weibring, Die Waldorfschule und ihr religiöser Meister: Waldorfpädagogik aus feministischer und religionskritischer Perspektive, Oberhausen 1998.

31. From an international Waldorf teachers conference in 1996, cited in Bierl, Wurzelrassen, Erzengel und Volksgeister p. 204.

32. Rudolf Steiner, The Spiritual Ground of Education, London 1947, p. 40.

33. Easton, Man and World in the Light of Anthroposophy, p. 388.

34. For thorough critical studies of Waldorf pedagogy see Heiner Ullrich, Waldorfpädagogik und okkulte Weltanschauung, Munich 1991, and Klaus Prange, Erziehung zur Anthroposophie: Darstellung und Kritik der Waldorfpädagogik, Bad Heilbrunn 2000.

35. Lindenberg, Rudolf Steiner, p. 134.

36. Steiner, Lecture Four from the 1924 Course on Agriculture.

37. Easton, Man and World in the Light of Anthroposophy, p. 444.

38. I have borrowed the phrase “green wing of the NSDAP” (the German acronym for the Nazi party) from Jost Hermand; see his Grüne Utopien in Deutschland, Frankfurt 1991, especially pp. 112-118. The term is not meant to suggest an identifiable faction within the party; rather it refers to a tendency or shared ideological and practical orientation, common to many activists and leading figures in the Nazi movement, the main outlines of which are recognizably environmentalist by today’s standards. For a much fuller treatment of this tendency see my “Fascist Ecology: The “Green Wing” of the Nazi Party and Its Historical Antecedents” in Biehl and Staudenmaier, Ecofascism. For critical discussion of the concept see Franz-Josef Brüggemeier, Mark Cioc, and Thomas Zeller, eds., How Green were the Nazis?: Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich, Athens 2005; Frank Uekoetter, The Green and the Brown: A History of Conservation in Nazi Germany, Cambridge 2006; Joachim Radkau and Frank Uekötter, eds., Naturschutz und Nationalsozialismus, Frankfurt 2003; and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, “Naturschutz und Nationalsozialismus: Darstellungen im Spannungsfeld von Verdrängung, Verharmlosung und Interpretation” in Gert Gröning and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, eds., Naturschutz und Demokratie, Munich 2006, 91-113.

39. See Bierl, Wurzelrassen, Erzengel und Volksgeister pp. 135-138. For a sympathetic overview of the Italian anthroposophical movement in the Fascist era see Michele Beraldo, “Il movimento antroposofico italiano durante il regime fascista” in Dimensioni e problemi della ricerca storica  no. 1, 2002.

40. For extensive examples see http://groups.yahoo.com/group/waldorf-critics/message/579 and http://groups.yahoo.com/group/waldorf-critics/message/43 On the collaborationist role of the Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in Italy and fervent Fascist Ettore Martinoli in antisemitic measures see Michael Wedekind, Nationalsozialistische Besatzungs- und Annexionspolitik in Norditalien 1943 bis 1945, Munich 2003, pp. 358-360, 385-386; and Silva Bon, La persecuzione antiebraica a Trieste (1938-1945), Udine 1972.

41. For examples of Karutz’s anthroposophical racial theories, see Richard Karutz, Rassenfragen, Stuttgart 1934; Karutz, “Zur Rassenkunde” Das Goetheanum January 3, 1932: Karutz, Von Goethe zur Völkerkunde der Zukunft, Stuttgart 1929.

42. Karutz quoted in Bierl, Wurzelrassen, Erzengel und Volksgeister p. 129.

43. Karutz, Von Goethe zur Völkerkunde der Zukunft, p. 57. Steiner himself was ambivalent toward Jews. In an 1897 polemic against zionism he compared antisemites – at the time a well-organized, active and very popular presence in Central Europe – to harmless children, and argued that zionists and “the heartless leaders of the Jews who are tired of Europe” were “much worse” than the antisemites (Steiner, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kultur- und Zeitgeschichte p. 199). On the other hand he actively supported the right side in the Dreyfus affair, albeit largely out of hostility toward the French republic. Steiner publicly rejected antisemitism, aligning himself instead with what he called the “idealistic German nationalist tendency” which opposed the “materialist” antisemitism of other pan-German agitators. For a detailed analysis see Peter Staudenmaier, “Rudolf Steiner and the Jewish Question,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book vol. 50 (2005), pp. 127-147.

44. Darré was himself influenced by Steiner’s ideas; see Heinz Haushofer, Ideengeschichte der Agrarwirtschaft und Agrarpolitik im deutschen Sprachgebiet, volume II, Munich 1958, pp. 269-271.

45. The Wachsmuth interview is reprinted in Dokumente und Briefe zur Geschichte der anthroposophischen Bewegung und Gesellschaft in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, edited by Arfst Wagner, Rendsburg 1993, vol. I pp. 40-41.

46. Rascher quoted in Bierl, Wurzelrassen, Erzengel und Volksgeister p. 140.

47. For a partial list of anthroposophists who were members of the Nazi party, the SS, and the SA, see Peter Staudenmaier, “Anthroposophen und Nationalsozialismus – Neue Erkenntnisse” Info3 July 2007, pp. 42-43. The article is available online at: http://www.anthro-net.de/ycms/artikel_1775.shtml An English version is available at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/waldorf-critics/message/531

48. In an earlier version of this article I characterized Hess as an anthroposophist, based on the extent to which he structured his personal dietary and health choices around anthroposophical beliefs. I now think that description was mistaken. My current view is that Hess’s occult interests were too nebulous to be specifically identified as anthroposophical, and that he is better seen as a sympathizer of anthroposophy and the major sponsor of anthroposophical activities during the Nazi era, but not as an anthroposophist himself.

49. For a detailed overview of Waldorf schools in Nazi Germany see Achim Leschinsky, “Waldorfschulen im Nationalsozialismus,” Neue Sammlung: Zeitschrift für Erziehung und Gesellschaft 23 (1983). For extensive background in English on the history of the Waldorf movement during the Third Reich, see http://www.egoisten.de/files/tag-staudenmaier.html and  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/waldorf-critics/message/3188

50. See Geden, p. 140. Weleda maintains that their staff was unaware of how its products were used. This response is plausible, but obscures the more significant fact that Weleda had ongoing business relationships with the SS and the Wehrmacht during the war.

51. On the network of SS biodynamic plantations at various concentration camps, see Wolfgang Jacobeit and Christoph Kopke, Die Biologisch-dynamische Wirtschaftsweise im KZ, Berlin 1999.

52. Uwe Werner, Anthroposophen in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus 1933-1945, Munich 1999. The book is based in part on internal anthroposophist records not available to other scholars.

53. See, for example, Jesaiah Ben-Aharon, The Spiritual Event of the Twentieth Century, London 1996.

54. The most extensive study of Darré’s support for biodynamic agriculture is the work of historian Anna Bramwell. See Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century, London 1989, chapter ten on the green wing of the Nazis, entitled “The Steiner Connection,” as well as her earlier book Blood and Soil: Walther Darré and Hitler’s ‘Green Party’. Both are important sources of material on the topic. Bramwell’s work, however, is often unreliable and always tendentious and should be consulted with caution.

55. In an earlier version of this article, I named two further Nazi officials as supporters of biodynamics: Antony Ludovici and Ludolf Haase. This claim was based on Anna Bramwell’s statements about both men. In addition to archival sources, Bramwell’s work cites her own interviews with unnamed “Anthroposophist members of Darré’s staff” as a source on “relations between followers of Steiner and the regime” (Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century, p. 270), and I adopted her claims about Ludovici and Haase despite my expressed reservations about her work. I now think those claims are mistaken. After an extensive search of both archival documents (including those cited by Bramwell) and contemporary published sources from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, I have been unable to find any corroboration for sympathies toward biodynamic agriculture on the part of either figure. Bramwell furthermore appears to have confused Ludovici with Nazi agricultural specialist J. W. Ludowici.

56. Carl Grund, for example, an anthroposophist since the 1920s, worked as an official of the biodynamic farmers league throughout the 1930s and was one of the foremost spokesmen for biodynamic agriculture in Nazi Germany. Grund joined the Nazi party in May 1933 and joined the SA in November 1933. In 1942 he was made an SS officer, and was promoted to SS-Obersturmführer in 1943. Within the SS he was a specialist for agricultural questions.

57. On Seifert’s relationship to anthroposophy see especially Charlotte Reitsam, Das Konzept der “bodenständigen Gartenkunst” Alwin Seiferts, Frankfurt 2001.

58. See Robert Pois, National Socialism and the Religion of Nature, London 1985.

59. On the continuing reverberations of this political tradition within North American contexts today see Rajani Bhatia, “Green or Brown? White Nativist Environmental Movements” in Abby Ferber, editor, Home-Grown Hate: Gender and Organized Racism, New York 2004.

60. The fact that the biodynamic movement influenced Nazi agricultural policy is hardly news; it has been recognized in mainstream scholarship for some time. For one example see Judith Baumgartner,  Ernährungsreform – Antwort auf Industrialisierung und Ernährungswandel: Ernährungsreform als Teil der Lebensreformbewegung am Beispiel der Siedlung und des Unternehmens Eden seit 1893, Frankfurt 1992, pp. 55-57. Baumgartner’s study is by no means an aggressively critical treatment of the topic; her brief overview of the role of biodynamics in helping to shape the Third Reich’s agricultural policy is measured and matter-of-fact. A much more detailed account can be found in Gunter Vogt’s 2000 study Entstehung und Entwicklung des ökologischen Landbaus im deutschsprachigen Raum. Many anthroposophists are nonetheless taken aback when this history is recounted, an indication of how insulated the latter-day anthroposophical movement often is from its own past.

61. The initiator of the Italian wing of the biodynamic movement, Luigi Chimelli, was an effusive admirer of Mussolini and of Fascism, particularly its environmental and programs. See for example Chimelli’s introduction to his translation of a major work on biodynamic agriculture: Giovanni Schomerus, Il metodo di coltivazione biologico-dinamico, Pergine 1934, particularly pp. xvii-xx.

62. For a perceptive examination of Darré’s evolving relationship to the biodynamic movement, and a compelling counterargument to Bramwell’s work, see Gesine Gerhard, “Richard Walther Darré – Naturschützer oder ‘Rassenzüchter’?” in Radkau and Uekötter, Naturschutz und Nationalsozialismus. Gerhard’s legitimate and welcome critique of Bramwell sometimes leads her to overemphasize Darré’s skepticism toward anthroposophy, and she gives relatively little attention to the extensive support for biodynamics provided by members of Darré’s staff, including not only figures such as Merkel and Halbe but even more powerful Nazi agricultural officials such as Hermann Reischle, Karl August Rust, and Rudi Peuckert.

63. Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century, London 1989, p. 204.

64. Ibid., p. 197. The ‘Battle for Production’ was Darré’s state-sponsored program to increase agricultural productivity. Initiated in 1934, its leading principle was “Keep the soil healthy!”

65. Wagner quoted in Bierl, p. 162.

66. Bramwell, Blood and Soil, Bourne End 1985, p. 179.

67. For more extensive discussion of the WSL and ultra-right anthroposophy see Janet Biehl’s “‘Ecology’ and the Modernization of Fascism in the German Ultra-right” in Biehl and Staudenmaier, Ecofascism, pp. 44-48.

68. Further information on Haverbeck and his milieu is available in several fine studies: Jonathan Olsen, Nature and Nationalism: Right-Wing Ecology and the Politics of Identity in Contemporary Germany, New York 1999; Richard Stöss, Vom Nationalismus zum Umweltschutz, Opladen 1980; and Volkmar Wölk, Natur und Mythos: Ökologiekonzeptionen der ‘Neuen’ Rechten im Spannungsfeld zwischen Blut und Boden und New Age, Duisburg 1992.

69. Haverbeck, Rudolf Steiner – Anwalt für Deutschland, Munich 1989.

70. Volkmar Wölk, “Neue Trends im ökofaschistischen Netzwerk” in Raimund Hethey and Peter Kratz, In Bester Gesellschaft, Göttingen 1991, p. 119.

71. Anthroposophist author Henning Köhler quoted in Bierl, p. 9.

72. For Erra’s collected essays on both Steiner and Scaligero see Enzo Erra, Steiner e Scaligero, Rome 2006. On Erra’s role in the post-war neo-fascist movement see Francesco Germinario, Da Salò al governo: Immaginario e cultura politica della destra italiana, Turin 2005, pp. 64, 78, 89-90, 95-96, 99; Daniele Lembo, Fascisti dopo la liberazione: Storia del fascismo e dei fascisti nel dopoguerra in Italia, Pavia 2007, pp. 74, 90-92, 112-16, 125, 129; Giuseppe Parlato, Fascisti senza Mussolini: Le origini del neofascismo in Italia, 1943-1948, Bologna 2006, pp. 177, 238, 298-99, 308; Adalberto Baldoni, La Destra in Italia 1945-1969, Rome 2000, pp. 296-98, 338-44, 361-62, 512-13; Franco Ferraresi, ed., La destra radicale, Milan 1984, 17-19, 27, 43, 194-96; Piero Ignazi, Il polo escluso: Profilo storico del Movimento Sociale Italiano, Bologna 1998, 41-44, 77-78, 116-19; Franco Ferraresi, Threats to Democracy: The Radical Right in Italy after the War, Princeton 1996, pp. 34, 210-13.

73. See e.g. these sympathetic accounts: Arianna Streccioni, A destra della destra, Rome 2000, pp. 63-64, 209; Luciano Lanna and Filippo Rossi, Fascisti immaginari: Tutto quello che c’è da sapere sulla destra, Florence 2003, pp. 20, 153-55; Piero Vassallo, Le culture della destra italiana, Milan 2002, pp. 90-92, 114-15, 128; for further background see Nicola Rao, Neofascisti: La destra italiana da Saloà a Fiuggi nel ricordo dei protagonisti, Rome 1999, pp. 39-43, 50-57, 67-72, 74-75, etc.; Rao, La fiamma e la celtica: Sessant’anni di neofascismo da Salò ai centri sociali di destra, Milan 2006, pp. 49-51, 58-63, 80-87, etc.

74. Wachsmuth, Werdegang der Menschheit, Dornach 1953; Wachsmuth, The Evolution of Mankind, Dornach 1961.

75. See for example Ernst Uehli, Nordisch-Germanische Mythologie als Mysteriengeschichte, Stuttgart 1965; Uehli, Atlantis und das Rätsel der Eiszeitkunst, Stuttgart 1957; Sigismund von Gleich, Der Mensch der Eiszeit und Atlantis, Stuttgart 1990; Gleich, Siebentausend Jahre Urgeschichte der Menschheit, Stuttgart 1987; Fred Poeppig, Das Zeitalter der Atlantis und die Eiszeit, Freiburg 1962.

76. Rudolf Steiner, Die Geschichte der Menschheit und die Weltanschauungen der Kulturvölker, p. 192.

77. Quoted in Bierl, p. 185. Bierl’s chapter on anthroposophist antisemitism includes many more examples of a similar nature.

78. Ludwig Thieben, Das Rätsel des Judentums, Basel 1991, pp. 164 and 174.

Reply to Peter Normann Waage, “Humanism and Polemical Populism”

“Anthroposophy and Ecofascism” has sparked a debate within Scandinavian humanist circles, with some authors like Peter Normann Waage lining up to defend anthroposophy as a harmless variant of humanism. 1 While we are encouraged by this long overdue debate, we are troubled by the degree of historical naiveté it has revealed. Waage’s perspective seems to represent a view that is fairly widespread among educated and well-intentioned people. We hope that we can contribute to a more accurate view of the political implications of anthroposophy by correcting several of the misconceptions exemplified by Waage’s reply. Although Waage has nothing to say about the article’s main topic, the systematic collusion between organized anthroposophy and the so-called “green wing” of German fascism, he does raise several issues that lie at the core of that collusion. Waage would have us believe that Rudolf Steiner was a principled anti-racist, that he opposed private property, rejected militarism and nationalism, and was a staunch adversary of Nazism.  These claims are not simply untrue; they betray a surprising unfamiliarity with Steiner’s published work and a profound misunderstanding of anthroposophy’s political history.

Nationalism

Let us begin, as Waage does, with the question of nationalism.  To the end of his life, Steiner was forthright in acknowledging his early and enthusiastic participation in pan-German agitation. In the autobiography he published shortly before his death, he had this to say about his years in Vienna before the turn of the century: “Now, I took an interested part in the struggle which the Germans in Austria were then carrying on in behalf of their national existence.” (Rudolf Steiner, The Course of My Life, New York 1951, p. 142) 2 Steiner’s autobiography provides ample testimony to his German nationalist convictions. The paragraph following the one quoted above refers to Steiner’s “friends from the national struggle,” and two pages prior he discusses the impact of Julius Langbehn’s infamous book Rembrandt als Erzieher on his thinking. 3 Steiner also notes that he briefly worked as editor of the Deutsche Wochenschrift, one of the leading German nationalist publications of the time.

But Waage need not have searched through Steiner’s autobiography for evidence of his early pan-German engagement, as Steiner’s collected works contain several dozen articles published in the German nationalist press between 1884 and 1890, with titles like “Die deutschnationale Sache in Österreich” (“The Pan-German Cause in Austria”). 4 The hard-line nationalist stance that Steiner adopts in these articles is extremist even by the standards of the 1880s; he attacks the mainstream nationalist parties as “un-German” and rejects any compromise with them. 5 Nor was this a mere youthful aberration; Steiner never disowned or regretted these writings. On the contrary, he emphatically re-affirmed his pan-German views in a series of articles at the turn of the century. 6

The striking thing about Steiner’s proud avowal of his nationalist activities is how utterly divorced from reality those activities were. There was, of course, no real “struggle for national existence” among Germans in the Habsburg empire – much less in Vienna itself – because there was never any serious threat to German predominance under the monarchy, and certainly not to their national existence. On the contrary, ethnic Germans were the undisputed administrative, economic, and cultural elite throughout the Austrian half of the far-flung multinational empire. Steiner’s involvement in pan-German efforts was based on chauvinism and ethnic prejudice. In light of Steiner’s long-standing attachment to a particularly virulent form of Great German nationalism, it is hardly surprising to see his attitude descend into outright national contempt with the advent of World War One. 7

Steiner gave dozens of lectures during the war (collected in the two volume Zeitgeschichtliche Betrachtungen) condemning what he termed “British, French, and Russian imperialism,” never for a moment mentioning German imperialism. These lectures portray Germany and Austria as innocent victims of the “West” and the “East” and are filled with indignant rejections of any criticism of German nationalism and militarism. They recycle the hoary myth of Mitteleuropa familiar to students of the German right. Steiner sketched in the details of this myth in his postwar writings; one might consult, for example, the lecture cycle Bewußtseins-Notwendigkeiten für Gegenwart und Zukunft (Dornach, 1967), where Steiner repeats the standard nationalist line about the special spiritual mission of the German people and warns that this unique “German essence” is being “alienated” by “Americanism” on the one side and “Russiandom” on the other (p. 408). Steiner goes on to explain that “fear of the spiritual is the characteristic element of Americanism” (p. 405), while describing the threat from “the East” as “socialism” and “bolshevism” (p. 407). This is a classic instance of the reactionary German paranoia of being trapped between the soulless West and the collectivist East, dressed up as spiritual insight. The same paranoia formed a crucial component of German fascism.

Waage notes that Steiner was a fervent opponent of Wilsonian self-determination, a fact which the article had already pointed out. This position, in itself, by no means indicates a fundamental hostility to nationalism; several of the leading lights of extremist German nationalism, such as Count Reventlow and Adolf Bartels, shared Steiner’s dim view of Wilson’s proposals. 8 More importantly, Waage fails to grasp why Steiner took this stance.  According to anthroposophy, the doctrine of national self-determination “is opposed to the divinely ordered course of evolution.” (Steiner, From Symptom to Reality in Modern History, London 1976, p. 12) Steiner considered this doctrine, in concert with the triumph of “British, French, and Russian imperialism” in World War One, responsible for the dismantling of the Habsburg empire, which he evidently viewed as a great loss for European civilization. Again and again Steiner argued that unlike other “national characters,” which are stuck in particularity, the German national character strives toward universalism, which in his eyes legitimated the German claim to predominance in Central Europe. For Steiner, Germany’s supposed spiritual advancement was the perfect excuse for imperialist expansion: “If one national civilization spreads more readily, and has greater spiritual fertility than another, then it is quite right that it should spread.” (Steiner, The Threefold Commonwealth, New York 1922, p. 183) 9

Antisemitism

Waage reminds readers of Humanist that Steiner “at the end of the century was involved in ‘the Association Against Anti-Semitism’.” Indeed, Steiner was a friend of Ludwig Jacobowski, an employee of the Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus (Society for Protection Against Antisemitism). The association with Jacobowski, however, does not speak well for Steiner’s confused attitude toward antisemitism. In fact, a look at Jacobowski’s writings on Jewish affairs shows that it was a familiar appeal to German nationalism which drew Steiner’s attention. Jacobowski advocated the “complete assimilation” of Jews to what he called the “German spirit,” and his best-known work, Werther der Jude, could be read as “an antisemitic text”  (Ritchie Robertson, The ‘Jewish Question’ in German Literature 1749-1939, Oxford 1999, p. 279). In a much-discussed pamphlet attacking a prominent antisemitic agitator, Hermann Ahlwardt, Jacobowski called Ahlwardt “un-German” (and also accused him of being a Social Democrat); the same pamphlet spoke of “an honorable anti-Semitism” in contrast to Ahlwardt’s variety, and declared in assimilationist-patriotic style that “a young Jewish generation is being prepared which is German and feels German.” (All quotes from Sanford Ragins, Jewish Responses to Anti-Semitism in Germany, 1870-1914, Cincinnati 1980, pp. 43-44)  Jacobowski also referred to some of the anti-Jewish arguments put forth by pan-German antisemites as “important and correct” (Jacobowski quoted in Fred Stern, Ludwig Jacobowski, Darmstadt 1966, p. 159). One of the leading scholars on the topic, Ismar Schorsch, describes Jacobowski’s position thus: “Anti-Semitism is indeed based upon fact and can only be overcome by a drastic ethical reformation of the entire Jewish community.” Schorsch comments: “The response to anti-Semitism of this alienated Jew [Jacobowski] was thus marked by extreme vacillation between criticism of his coreligionists and defiant reaffirmation of Judaism.” (Schorsch, Jewish Reactions to German Anti-Semitism, 1870-1914, New York 1972, pp. 47 and 95). Steiner himself emphasized Jacobowski’s exclusive commitment to German culture and believed that his friend had “long since outgrown Jewishness” (Steiner quoted in Moses and Schöne, editors, Juden in der deutschen Literatur, Frankfurt 1986, p. 200). This is hardly a convincing testament to Steiner’s pro-Jewish sympathies. 10

What Waage doesn’t mention is that throughout his life Steiner consorted with notoriously bitter antisemites and was by his own account on entirely friendly terms with them. The passages in Mein Lebensgang on his relationship with Heinrich von Treitschke, for example, are straightforwardly admiring of this towering figure on the German right, who was the foremost intellectual ally of militant antisemitism (Treitschke coined the Nazi slogan “The Jews are our misfortune”). Steiner never so much as mentions Treitschke’s infamous stance on the “Jewish question.” 11 The same is true of Steiner’s appraisals of other figures, whether positive or negative, including Haeckel and Karl Lueger, among others. In fact it is abundantly clear from Steiner’s own writings on the subject that he had an extremely rudimentary understanding of antisemitism and that he was himself beholden to a wide variety of antisemitic stereotypes, which he frequently broadcast to his followers. 12 On more than one occasion he expressed the wish “that Jewry as a people would simply cease to exist” (Steiner, Geschichte der Menschheit, Dornach 1968, p. 189 and elsewhere). This wish was consistent with Steiner’s categorical rejection of the Jewish people’s right to existence: “Jewry as such has long since outlived its time; it has no more justification within the modern life of peoples, and the fact that it continues to exist is a mistake of world history whose consequences are unavoidable. We do not mean the forms of the Jewish religion alone, but above all the spirit of Jewry, the Jewish way of thinking.” (Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Literatur, GA 32, p. 152) It would seem that Waage’s portrait of Steiner as a consistent opponent of nationalism and antisemitism is at odds with the facts.

Racism

Waage believes that Steiner “cannot justly be called a racist” and that anthroposophy’s peculiar philosophy of root-races constitutes “a sound anti-racist view.” To support these claims Waage tells us that “already in 1909” Steiner “stopped using” the terms “root race” and “Aryan.” Waage’s chronology is confused. 1909 is the year that Steiner published the collection Aus der Akasha-Chronik, his most thorough presentation of the root race doctrine in all its fantastic detail. This book, available in English under the title Cosmic Memory, remains to the present day a primary source for anthroposophy’s worldview, with no distancing whatsoever toward its racist elements. The editor’s foreword to the current edition, published in Dornach, doesn’t so much as mention the book’s racist content, much less try to explain it, contextualize it, or minimize it; and the Anthroposophical Society continues to officially designate the book one of the “fundamental anthroposophist texts” (Wolfram Groddeck, Eine Wegleitung durch die Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe, Dornach 1979, p. 16). Nor did Steiner himself ever renounce it; on the contrary, in 1925 he called Aus der Akasha-Chronik the “basis of anthroposophist cosmology” (Mein Lebensgang, original ed., p. 301). Today the book is still officially recommended for use by Waldorf teachers.

In 1910 – that is, after Waage claims Steiner had “stopped using” the terminology of root races and Aryans – Steiner gave the lectures in Oslo which served as the opening device for Anthroposophy and Ecofascism. The Norway lecture cycle on “national souls” was revised and edited by Steiner in 1918 and published in book form that same year. The term “root race” is used throughout this book. The fifth chapter, Steiner’s lecture in Oslo from June 12, 1910, is titled “The Five Root Races of Mankind”, and refers to the racial superiority of “the Aryans” (Steiner, The Mission of the Individual Folk Souls in Relation to Teutonic Mythology, London 1970, p. 106). 13 But Waage would no doubt complain that we have taken Steiner’s unequivocal words “out of context” if we did not go on to mention that the book also contains these curious sentences: “Since all men in their different incarnations pass through the various races the claim that the European is superior to the black and yellow races has no real validity. In such cases the truth is sometimes veiled, but you see that with the help of Spiritual Science we do after all light upon remarkable truths.” (ibid. p. 76)

Aside from the vexing question of just what that ominous reference to “veiled truth” is supposed to mean – do black and yellow skins “veil” an inner truth? – this passage can only be interpreted as anti-racist if one accepts the anthroposophist version of “Spiritual Science,” and the sentence makes no sense at all unless one believes in reincarnation. Moreover, any anti-racist interpretation of this passage is immediately contradicted by the context which Waage thinks Anthroposophy and Ecofascism systematically obscured. On the page directly before the above quote, Steiner prints a diagram showing Africa on the bottom, Asia in the middle, and Europe on top, and on the same page he explains that the “Negro race” is tied to humanity’s childhood, “the yellow and brown races” to adolescence, and Europeans to adulthood and maturity. Steiner then insists that this racially stratified hierarchy “is simply a universal law” and indeed a product of inescapable destiny: “The forces which determine man’s racial character follow this cosmic pattern. The American Indians died out, not because of European persecutions, but because they were destined to succumb to those forces which hastened their extinction.” (ibid. p. 76 — the very same page as the quote which to Waage represents “a sound anti-racist view.”)

Even setting aside Waage’s incomprehension of this particular text, he has simply misunderstood Steiner’s racial theory overall. For reasons he never explains, Waage believes that Steiner’s theory of reincarnation makes race peripheral. He is quite mistaken. In reality, Steiner taught that each individual soul must in the course of its spiritual evolution climb up the ladder of racial progress, from “lower races” to “higher races.” This racist nonsense is noxious enough, but Steiner exacerbated it by pointing out very explicitly which groups belonged to the “lower racial forms” and the “backward races” (Jews, Chinese, and blacks, for example) and which groups belonged to the “higher racial forms” and the “advanced races” (above all Germans, Nordic peoples, and “the great Aryan Root Race”). Steiner repeats these repugnant notions throughout his work. 14 According to anthroposophy, a soul that is unfortunate enough to incarnate in a “backward race” has only itself to blame. Very little effort is required to locate dozens of such passages within Steiner’s published writings. 15

Waage’s claim that Steiner definitively rejected the ideology of root races and Aryan supremacy is thus inaccurate; Steiner’s occasional trite phrases about the spiritual insignificance of race appear either naïve or disingenuous. 16 But have his anthroposophist followers managed to free themselves from their master’s xenophobic prejudices? 17 The article already offered numerous examples of the continuing virulence of racist thinking within contemporary anthroposophy, but let us examine one further instance which highlights Waage’s indefensible claims. One of Steiner’s early devout followers was Ernst Uehli, a teacher at the original Waldorf school and an officer of the Anthroposophical Society. In anthroposophist circles Uehli is regarded as an outstanding anti-fascist; Uwe Werner makes special mention of him as having been “extremely critical” of National Socialism (Werner, Anthroposophen in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, Munich 1999, 97).

In reality Uehli propounded an ugly version of anthroposophical racism, Aryan supremacism and antisemitism with a marked penchant for blood-and-soil ideology. In 1926 he published a book on “Nordic-Germanic Mythology” and dedicated it to the recently deceased Steiner, who is quoted and referred to constantly throughout the book. Uehli uses the terms “root races” and “Aryan” repeatedly (Ernst Uehli, Nordisch-Germanische Mythologie als Mysteriengeschichte, Stuttgart 1965, 134-144). Why would a close follower of Steiner continue to promote ideas that the master had supposedly renounced? But Uehli doesn’t content himself with simply repeating the anthroposophist orthodoxy on root races and Aryan superiority; he constructs a grand historical-evolutionary-racial narrative in which the two rival forces, separated throughout the millennia by their fundamentally different racial makeup, are “the Semitic and the Aryan peoples” (ibid. 144). Whereas “the early Germans were a people of nature” and thus pure and strong, “the Jews succumbed to Ahriman” (ibid. 147; “Ahriman” is the anthroposophist term for demonic forces that promote materialism). Alongside the world-historical struggle between the nature-loving Aryans and the materialistic and diabolical Jews, Uehli notes that there are still a few “primitive peoples that are dying out” as a result of cosmic necessity, since they are nothing more than the “decadent remnants” of an earlier root race (ibid. 135). 18

One might think that latter-day anthroposophists would be sensible enough to quietly ignore such repellent racist nonsense from their not so distant past. But in the year 2000 Uehli’s works were still part of the officially recommended curriculum for Waldorf teachers in both Germany and the United States. This fact sparked yet another public scandal around anthroposophist racism when a book of Uehli’s about Atlantis, evidently even more offensive than the one we’ve quoted, was brought to public attention in the spring of 2000. The German youth ministry responded by putting the book on its index of racist literature. If even German government bureaucrats have no trouble recognizing anthroposophy’s racist content, why does Waage stubbornly deny it? Anthroposophy’s ongoing racist legacy has led to public investigations in the Netherlands, Switzerland, France and Belgium as well. Limits of space prevent us from elaborating on this crucial topic, but interested readers can consult the outstanding treatment of the German case by Peter Bierl in his Wurzelrassen, Erzengel und Volksgeister. Die Anthroposophie Rudolf Steiners und die Waldorfpädagogik (Konkret Literatur Verlag, Hamburg 1999; 2nd ed. 2005).

Capitalism

Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of Waage’s reply is his emphatic contention that Steiner “was an opponent of the right to private property.” Indeed Waage is adamant that the article’s depiction of Steiner’s pro-capitalist views is “sloppy at best, untruthful at worst.” Curiously, Waage offers no supporting quotes from Steiner and cites no other literature to back up his interpretation, and some of his own paraphrases of Steiner’s views actually contradict his interpretation. 19 Steiner’s voluminous writings on economic subjects are often vague and occasionally opaque, and his position shifted multiple times; here as elsewhere, contradictions are the one consistent element. It is nonetheless possible to decipher his attitude toward private property. What Steiner opposed was the misuse of private property, not the institution itself. 20 He favored a peculiar mixture of private ownership and social conscience, whereby both individual capitalists and small groups of especially “talented” executives would manage private capital as a sort of trust for the ostensible good of the whole community (readers familiar with the disjointed economic doctrines of classical fascism will notice the parallels to the ideology of the Volksgemeinschaft or people’s community). Steiner insisted that the notion of abolishing capitalism was simply impossible and would mean abolishing social life as such; for him, “capitalism is a necessary component of modern life.” 21 The anthroposophist Walter Kugler, who works for the Rudolf Steiner Nachlaßverwaltung in Dornach (the administrators of Steiner’s published and unpublished works), describes Steiner’s position thus: “Each entrepreneur, that is each individual who wants to make use of his talents to satisfy the needs of others, will obtain capital for as long as he is able to make productive use of his talents.” (Kugler, Rudolf Steiner und die Anthroposophie, Cologne 1978, p. 165) Steiner himself wrote: “The entire ownership of capital must be arranged so that the especially talented individual or the especially talented group of individuals comes to possess capital in a way which arises solely from their own personal initiative.” (ibid.)

A central tenet of the Dreigliederung or ‘social threefolding’ doctrine, which Steiner emphasized again and again, was that the economic sphere must never be organized or managed democratically. 22 Accordingly, Steiner polemicized against socialism (not just its marxist variants) and explicitly rejected the socialization of property (not just nationalization). 23 He also had little use for labor unions. Within a full-fledged “threefold commonwealth” Steiner foresaw a spiritual meritocracy in which the “most capable” would be given effective control over economic resources, and he vehemently rejected the notion of tempering this arrangement through any kind of community oversight. He derided the idea of “transferring the means of production from private ownership into communal property,” as well as of socializing “the management of concentrated masses of capital,” and insisted that “the management of the means of production must be left in the hands of the individual.” (Steiner in ibid. 199, 200) Steiner was insistent on this point: “No-one can be allowed to return to economic forms in which the individual is tied to or limited by the community. We must strive instead for the very opposite.” (ibid. p. 201) In one work alone, the 1919 book Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage, he expressly and forcefully dismissed “communal property” and “common ownership” many times over.

Steiner’s interest in economic affairs arose as a reaction to the wave of working-class revolt that swept across Europe in the immediate aftermath of World War One. During this period numerous grassroots demands for socializing the factories were put forward in city after city. Steiner ridiculed all such proposals – “as if one could really socialize the various factories.” (ibid. p. 209) His own counterproposals were meant precisely to thwart this economic democratization from below. 24 In Steiner’s utopia, the economy was not to be run by the “hand-workers,” but rather by “the spiritual workers, who direct production.” (Threefold Commonwealth, p. xxxii; this is the original authorized English translation of Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage.) 25 And just how are these privileged spiritual workers to be chosen? “The spiritual organization will rest on a healthy basis of individual initiative, exercised in free competition amongst the private individuals suited to spiritual work.” (ibid. p. 158) Within this framework, “the spiritual life should be set free, and given control of the employment of capital” – indeed, an “absolutely free use of capital” (ibid. pp. 117, 126). “Private property,” for Steiner, “is an outcome of the social creativeness which is associated with individual human ability.” (ibid. p. 126) Shared ownership, in contrast, is an obstruction to this all-important creative unfolding of individual talent: “The individual cannot make his abilities effective in business, if he is tied down in his work and decisions to the will of the community.” (Steiner, Rudolf Steiner: Essential Readings, ed. Richard Seddon, Wellingborough 1988, p. 106) Given these thoroughly capitalist assumptions, Steiner’s conclusion comes as no surprise: “Really practical thought, therefore, will not look to find the cure for social ills in a reshaping of economic life that would substitute communal for private management of the means of production. The endeavor should rather be to forestall the ills that can arise through management by individual initiative and personal worth, without impairing this management itself.” (ibid.)

Moreover, when Steiner’s economic ideas were put into practice in the early 1920s by the Threefold Commonwealth League (Bund für Dreigliederung des Sozialen Organismus) in southwest Germany, it was very clear that he opposed a democratic organization of the affiliated factories – the Waldorf tobacco factory being the best known. The anthroposophist Hans Kühn wrote: “Democratization of the factories was something he [Steiner] opposed on principle. The manager had to be able to make his own arrangements without interference.” (Hans Kühn, Dreigliederungszeit. Rudolf Steiners Kampf für die Gesellschaftsordnung der Zukunft, Dornach, 1978 p. 52). Since leading anthroposophists have no trouble grasping this point, it is difficult to understand how Waage could mistake Steiner for an opponent of private ownership and capitalism. Steiner’s scheme was nothing more than an ‘enlightened’ version of private property under the benevolent control of a spiritual aristocracy. As such it forms the perfect economic counterpart to his mixture of radical individualism and elitism. It would be hard to explain the appeal of Steiner’s economic doctrines to aristocrats and industrialists – and these, after all, are the ones who responded most favorably to his proposals – if those doctrines had contained anything that threatened the profits of the powerful. 26

Nazism

Waage seems to have misunderstood Anthroposophy and Ecofascism as a version of the guilt by association argument: if some anthroposophists were Nazis and some Nazis were anthroposophists, this simpleminded reasoning goes, then the two groups must be identical. At the very least it should have been clear that the article dealt with one specific wing of the Nazi movement, the ecofascist tendency, a grouping which was controversial within the party as a whole. Waage’s failure to recognize this crucial distinction marks the very beginning of his reply, where he invents a “quotation” that never appeared in the article. Nowhere does the article assert “that Steiner was a Nazi,” much less that “anthroposophy is Nazism,” as Waage pretends. 27 He goes on to make several untenable claims about anthroposophy’s relationship to National Socialism: that there were no significant ideological parallels between the two worldviews, that the Nazis tried to kill Steiner in 1922 because he was a principled opponent of their political outlook, and that anthroposophist collaborators with the Third Reich were repudiated by organized anthroposophy after World War Two. Let us examine each of these claims in turn.

1. Ideological parallels. In addition to casting doubt on the article’s comparison of Steiner’s anti-French diatribes to Mein Kampf (we urge readers who share Waage’s skepticism on this point to read Hitler’s passages on France as Germany’s “mortal enemy” alongside Steiner’s passages on the same theme), Waage says that the description of similarities between the anthroposophist and the Nazi racial mythologies is “obviously unreasonable.” 28 This view is not shared by scholars of the topic. In the words of anti-fascist researcher Volkmar Wölk, “It is a short conceptual step from this position [Steiner’s root-race theory] to the racial doctrine of the Nazis.” 29 If Waage finds such politically conscious scholarship too critical, he may want to consult instead the work of historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, who wrote the entirely approving preface to Rudolf Steiner: Essential Writings and can hardly be suspected of harboring any bias against Steiner. Goodrick-Clarke’s respected work The Occult Roots of Nazism, one of the few books by a responsible scholar on a topic which is otherwise a playground for conspiracy theorists and amateur occultists, is a thorough analysis of “ariosophy,” another turn of the century Viennese offshoot of theosophy which took the Aryan myth even further than Steiner did and which had a direct influence on Hitler.

Goodrick-Clarke notes that in the late nineteenth century Steiner was involved in the Vienna theosophist circles which were the source of “the particular kind of theosophy which the Ariosophists adopted to their völkisch ideas.” (Occult Roots of Nazism, Wellingborough 1985, p. 29) He also emphasizes that “the very structure of theosophical thought lent itself to völkisch adoption.” (ibid. p. 31) In 1908, midway through Steiner’s tenure as the head of German theosophy, a German theosophist named Harald Grävell published a significant article in the major Viennese ariosophist journal. There Grävell “outlined a thoroughly theosophical conception of race and a programme for the restoration of Aryan authority in the world. His quoted occult sources were texts by Annie Besant, Blavatsky’s successor as leader of the international Theosophical Society at London, and Rudolf Steiner, the Secretary General of its German branch in Berlin.” (ibid. p. 101) In particular Grävell cited Steiner’s 1907 text Blut ist ein ganz besonderer Saft, “which reflected the theosophical interest in racist ideas.” (ibid. p. 242; Steiner’s text is available in English under the title “The Occult Significance of Blood.”) Goodrick-Clarke also shows that the ariosophists were influenced by nineteenth century Romanticism, Haeckel and Monism, just as Steiner was.

Does all this prove that Rudolf Steiner was personally responsible for shaping Hitler’s perverse worldview? Of course not, and the article made no such argument. What Goodrick-Clarke’s painstaking research does show is that the borders between anthroposophy proper and other versions of race mysticism and occult nationalism were exceedingly porous. Many of the far-right esotericist groupings of the interwar period drew on the root race doctrine which Steiner had done so much to promote, and this obscure body of ideas had an undeniable impact on Nazi thought. This point is borne out by numerous other scholars. James Webb writes: “there is absolutely no doubt that Hitler believed in a theory of occult evolution of a Theosophical type.” (Webb, The Occult Establishment, Chicago 1976, p. 313) Webb also documents, in detail, several important areas of overlap – race theory, Atlantis, Aryans, among others – between anthroposophy and theosophy on the one hand and the belief systems of the Nazi leadership, particularly Hitler, Himmler, and Rosenberg, on the other. 30

If such scholarship is still too “biased” for Waage, he might prefer to consult the work of Eduard Gugenberger and Roman Schweidlenka, who have many nice things to say about Steiner and in general present him as an honorable exception to the otherwise dismal political record of esotericist thinkers (see Gugenberger & Schweidlenka, Mutter Erde – Magie und Politik, Vienna 1987, pp. 135-145). But even these sympathetic commentators emphasize that “Steiner posited a strictly hierarchical evolutionary chain” based on the root race model, with “Germanic-Nordic” peoples at the top (ibid. p. 144). They go on to remark that in Steiner’s anthroposophy, his “own race and own culture appear as the currently highest stage of humanity’s spiritual development” (ibid. p. 145). Gugenberger and Schweidlenka themselves point out the obvious racism and justification of social injustice which anthroposophy thereby propagates under the guise of spiritual enlightenment. It is hence only to be expected that contemporary neo-Nazis draw substantially on Steiner’s teachings. 31

Ignoring all of this evidence, Waage nonetheless categorically denies the ideological parallels between anthroposophy and National Socialism, particularly its esoteric and environmentalist variants. To reassure readers of Humanist that we have not cited historical sources selectively, we urge those curious about this philosophical affinity to check our interpretation against the standard historiography on the Nazi worldview and its ideological origins. Even those works which mention Steiner and anthroposophy merely in passing, as one among many contributors to right-wing authoritarian demagoguery, will serve to correct Waage’s impression that Steiner was simply “a rational humanist.” 32

2. The 1922 incident. Waage writes that “Steiner himself was the victim of an attempted assassination by the Nazi movement in 1922” as proof that Steiner was a conscientious opponent of Nazism. Before reviewing this very revealing 1922 event, we must remark on the peculiar logic invoked here. If Waage thinks that the identity of a public figure’s assassin tells us something definitive about the victim’s identity, then he must conclude that Trotsky was not a Bolshevik and Rabin was not a Jew. Perhaps Waage also believes that Nazi leaders Ernst Röhm and Gregor Strasser were really anti-Nazi, since Hitler had them killed in 1934. But in fact this point is moot, because Waage gets the relevant details of the 1922 incident wrong in the first place. What actually happened in Munich in May, 1922, was that a group of right-wing thugs disrupted a large public lecture by Steiner and apparently tried to physically assault him after he had finished speaking, but were beaten back by Steiner’s supporters. To call this lecture-hall brawl an “attempted assassination” is unsubstantiated hyperbole, as there is no evidence that Steiner’s attackers intended to kill him. 33 Nor was there any direct involvement by “the Nazi movement”; anthroposophist sources indicate instead that Steiner’s would-be assailants belonged to a rival far-right outfit. 34 These facts are easily available in standard anthroposophist descriptions of the incident. 35 Waage’s overwrought version of the event is also flatly contradicted by anthroposophical eyewitness accounts. 36

Although anthroposophists frequently try to recast Steiner as an anti-Hitler martyr by pointing to the 1922 incident, the facts of the event do not support this interpretation. The confrontation took place at the Vier Jahreszeiten hotel, where Steiner chose to give his Munich speech. From 1919 onward this hotel was a notorious gathering point for Munich’s ultranationalist far right; it housed the headquarters of the Thule Society, one of the most militant völkisch groups, and was indeed owned by Thule members. 37 Some contemporary anthroposophists even claim that Steiner’s attackers belonged to the Thule Society. 38 But no matter who was in fact responsible for the aborted disruption of Steiner’s lecture, his own choice of venue is difficult to explain if one views Steiner simply as an anti-nationalist who abjured far right politics. Furthermore, several prominent Thule Society members had direct ties to Steiner and anthroposophy, including Rudolf Hess, anthroposophy’s chief ally during the Third Reich. 39

How are we to make sense of this convoluted situation? As we have already indicated, in the interwar period the organizational outlines of the reactionary nationalist-occult spectrum were thoroughly porous, with competing groups displaying a substantial overlap in membership and ideology. Anthroposophy was a part of this spectrum, as were several of the direct precursors to the Nazis. Goodrick-Clarke offers an illuminating example of this crossover: In 1923, immediately after moving to Germany, the Russian antisemitic conspiracy theorist and occultist Gregor Schwartz-Bostunitsch “became an enthusiastic Anthroposophist” (Occult Roots of Nazism, p. 170). By the end of the decade Schwartz-Bostunitsch had turned on anthroposophy, seeing it as yet another cog in the international occult conspiracy; he later became an officer in the SS. 40

Such examples are anything but isolated, as the literature on German esoteric politics shows. The constant intermingling of right-wing and esoteric groups is a major theme of Webb’s Occult Establishment, and the book includes a thoughtful exploration of both the overlaps and the mutual hostilities between Steiner and his followers and the militant völkisch forces. Webb concludes that “Steiner was not really alien to völkisch thought,” and shows that “the völkisch reaction [against Steiner] was an admission that both camps were operating on the same level. And a proportion of the völkisch rage came from the realization that here [in anthroposophy] was another vision of the universe which claimed to be ‘spiritual’.” (p. 290) The outbreak of hostilities between völkisch groups and anthroposophy was not due to fundamental differences between the two currents, but on the contrary to their marked ideological proximity – indeed it was precisely these basic ideological affinities which made them rivals in the first place. 41 Thus the lessons to be drawn from the 1922 incident point toward, not away from, the thesis of mutual influence by early Nazis and anthroposophists.

In addition to misrepresenting and misunderstanding the 1922 incident, Waage makes two further points about Steiner and the Nazis which he thinks are proof of Steiner’s anti-Nazi credentials: Steiner’s 1920 criticism of the misuse of the swastika, and Hitler’s 1921 criticism of Steiner’s harmful spiritual influence. Both of these claims rest on a basic incomprehension of the historical context. Waage quotes a brief remark by Steiner, made “already in 1920,” about “the beastliness that goes on in Germany under the swastika banners.” Waage gives an erroneous date for this quote; Steiner actually said these words on 10 September 1923 (see Rhythmen im Kosmos und in Menschenwesen. Wie kommt man zum Schauen der geistigen Welt? GA 350, p. 276), although he did make another revealing remark about the Swastika in 1920. 42 But mixed-up citations aside, it is unlikely that any comment on the use of the swastika in 1920 was directed against the Nazi party as such. That party was not officially formed until April, 1920, and remained minuscule and largely unknown for some time. Moreover, the Nazis did not adopt the swastika emblem until the summer of 1920, and the distinctive swastika banners were not designed until two years later (William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, New York 1960, 43-44).

In fact, when we checked the citation Waage gives, we found this: “This symbol [the swastika] which the Indian or old Egyptian once looked to when he spoke of his sacred Brahman, this symbol is now to be seen on the [Russian] ten thousand ruble note! Those who are making grand politics there know how to influence the human soul. They know what the triumphal procession of the swastika means – this swastika that a large number of people in Europe are already wearing – but they do not want to listen to that which strives to understand, out of the most important symptoms, the secrets of today’s historical development.” (Steiner, Geisteswissenschaft als Erkenntnis der Grundimpulse sozialer Gestaltung GA 199, p. 161; speech 27.08.1920) On the basis of Waage’s own citation, Steiner opposed the ostensible use of the swastika by the Bolsheviks; he makes no mention at all of the Nazis.

Still, is it not possible that Steiner was expressing a general hostility to the racist thinking associated even then with the swastika? That is similarly unlikely. Consider another of Steiner’s critical comments on the misuse of the swastika as a political symbol, this one from a lecture in Dornach in 1924: “The Asian cannot understand concepts like the European has; instead the Asians wants images. These abstractions, these concepts which the European has, the Asian does not want those, they hurt his brain, he does not want them. And a symbol like, for example, the swastika, this symbol – it was an ancient sun symbol – was present all throughout Asia. The old Asians still remember this. Certain Bolshevik politicians were clever enough, just like the German Völkischen, to use this ancient swastika as their symbol. This makes a much bigger impression on Asians than all of Marxism does. Marxism consists of concepts for thinking; that doesn’t make an impression on these people. But such a symbol, that makes an impression on these people.” (Steiner, Geschichte der Menschheit, p. 261) 43 It would be obtuse to describe a passage like this as an admonition against racist politics.

What of Hitler’s early criticism of Steiner? Waage quotes a 1921 article by Hitler which, in Waage’s rendering, accuses Steiner of “ruining people’s normal spiritual basis.” To take this brief remark as a considered rejection of Steiner’s philosophy is to misunderstand both the quotation and its broader context. Waage’s truncated quote gives the impression that the passage is a general denunciation of the deleterious effects of Steiner’s spiritual doctrines. In fact Hitler’s article from March 15, 1921 – the only recorded reference to Steiner in Hitler’s writings during Steiner’s lifetime – is directed not against Steiner, but against the German foreign minister Walter Simons. (See Adolf Hitler, Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905-1924, Stuttgart 1980, 348-353) Hitler mentions Steiner merely as a “friend” of Simons, evidently convinced that Simons was somehow influenced by Steiner. 44 As one might expect from a practiced demagogue, Hitler’s criticism of the foreign minister, and by extension of Steiner, bears little relationship to either figure’s actual politics. 45 Indeed anthroposophists at the time leveled the same charges at Simons as Hitler did. 46 Steiner himself, for that matter, unequivocally condemned Simons in extremely strong terms for the very same actions as Hitler did. 47 While Hitler’s rhetorical jibe shows contempt for Steiner, it tells us nothing about the conceptual continuities and discontinuities between their respective belief systems.

Hitler was generally impatient with would-be spiritual reformers like Steiner because he thought they distracted attention from the real struggle in the political realm. This scarcely indicates a fundamental philosophical hostility toward Steiner’s teachings; indeed Hitler frequently made similar criticisms of loyal Nazi party members. Consider distinguished historian George Mosse’s discussion of an analogous case, that of Steiner’s fellow cosmic spiritualist Artur Dinter: “Even as early as Mein Kampf Hitler severely criticized Volkish ‘religious reformers.’ Considering Hitler’s own view of nature mysticism and the ‘secret science,’ this might seem contradictory. However, his reasons for such criticism are illuminating. The Volkish leaders in general were in his eyes ‘sectarians’ who must be crushed by the true ‘movement,’ but specifically these reformers weakened the fight against the common enemy: Jewry. They scattered the forces that were needed to wage this battle. Basically, Hitler’s criticism of such men as Dinter was that they failed to focus their ideology on the Jews. This leads once more to our thesis that Hitler transformed the German revolution, of which many Volkish adherents dreamt, into an anti-Jewish revolution, and thereby concretized and objectified an ideology that had been too vague for the purposes of a mass movement. The spiritualist and theosophical ideas were thus relegated to the background and their adherents silenced or ignored.” (Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, New York 1964, pp. 306-307) 48 The historical record simply does not support Waage’s interpretation of the passing insults traded between Steiner and Hitler, and Waage’s interpretation is utterly incompatible with Steiner’s own quite explicit statements. When understood in their historical context, the sometimes nasty exchanges between Steiner and völkisch leaders, far from exonerating Steiner, actually provide further evidence of the extent to which he contributed to that “vague ideology” which Hitler later put into practice.

3. Repudiation of anthroposophist collaborators. Waage informs us that “the leader of the Steiner schools in Germany who held the schools open until 1941 with the approval of the regime, was after the war expelled from all Steiner schools.” Waage does not name this person, but the context makes clear that he must mean either René Maikowski or Elisabeth Klein, who led the negotiations with Nazi education officials to keep the Waldorf schools operating as long as possible. The notion that Klein or Maikowski were expelled from the Waldorf movement after the war is preposterous. Maikowski was the central figure in re-establishing the Hannover Waldorf school after the war, and Klein taught at the school from 1950 until 1965. 49 Both were very active in the broader Waldorf movement after 1945, publishing in its journals, helping establish new schools, and training other teachers. Both received emphatic support from anthroposophy’s headquarters in Dornach.

Waage would have his readers believe that open Nazi collaborators were unwelcome within organized anthroposophy after the war. The very opposite was the case. Günther Wachsmuth continued without interruption to occupy the highest office in international anthroposophy, despite his expressed admiration for the Nazis. Nor is there any record of measures against Erhard Bartsch, chief promoter of biodynamic agriculture, SS collaborator and Hitler fan. Many former Nazis went on to renowned anthroposophical careers after 1945, including Friedrich Benesch, Ernst Harmstorf, Heimo Rau, Gotthold Hegele, Werner Voigt, and Udo Renzenbrink. Even Uwe Werner, with his access to internal documents and his evident eagerness to include every last exculpatory detail imaginable, concedes that anthroposophists undertook no collective soul-searching after 1945: “Curiously, the anthroposophists did not discuss or describe in detail their behavior during the Nazi period directly after the year 1945.” (Werner, Anthroposophen in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, p. 2) Indeed he emphasizes that after the war anthroposophists “more or less consciously refused to revive controversies about the behavior of some anthroposophists during the Nazi period.” (ibid.) Werner does not note a single exception to this policy. He explicitly states that the only postwar recriminations of any kind “were certain barely expressed reservations about individuals.” (ibid. p. 364)

Far from pursuing a general reckoning with the Nazis in their midst, postwar anthroposophists got back to business as usual and stifled any discussion of the more sordid aspects of their past. To this day the vast majority of anthroposophists completely deny their extensive record of collusion with the Nazis. Nor is this record, as Waage suggests, a matter of a few wayward figures like Maikowski or Klein. 50 Werner’s work alone – quite against its author’s intentions – provides copious evidence of just how widespread this collusion was; in the course of the book he lists a range of named individuals who were both active anthroposophists and Nazi party members. He also inadvertently shows that the extent of the organizational and personnel overlap between the Anthroposophical Society and the Nazi party was significant enough to concern the anti-esoteric faction of the Nazis, and reveals that the anthroposophist leadership was willing to go to great lengths to protect the party members in its ranks (see, e.g., Werner p. 72). Obviously not a few anthroposophists wanted to remain Nazis in good standing. Moreover, anthroposophist loyalty to their Nazi comrades continued after the defeat of the Third Reich. Walter Darré’s lawyer at Nuremberg was the anthroposophist Hans Merkel; he remained a close confidante of the notorious racial theorist and former minister in Hitler’s cabinet until the end of Darré’s life. Merkel also helped defend Nazi war criminal Otto Ohlendorf. And after Ohlendorf was hanged for the murder of 90,000 Jews, the anthroposophist pastor Haverbeck presided at his funeral. Neither repentant nor rueful, postwar anthroposophists were at least consistent in their political allegiances.

Alas, mistakes such as these are not the worst of Waage’s errors. He appears to be entirely unfamiliar with even well-known aspects of the history of the anthroposophical movement during the Third Reich. Waage writes that “there was allegedly supposed to be a bio-dynamic garden” at the Dachau concentration camp. Allegedly? Supposed to be? We hope that Waage is not one of those anthroposophists who believes that there were ‘allegedly supposed to be’ gas chambers at Auschwitz. The biodynamic garden at Dachau was hardly “alleged,” it was very real, and it was overseen by an anthroposophist, Franz Lippert. It is discussed extensively in a very wide array of both anthroposophical and scholarly sources. 51 Indeed it is described at length in one of the sources Waage himself touts. 52 Waage’s complete ignorance of all of this easily accessible information is nothing short of astonishing. Waage has somehow managed to convince himself that Anthroposophy and Ecofascism presented a “simple” version of the history of anthroposophical entwinement with Nazism; this misunderstanding of the article appears to be based on Waage’s own starkly simplistic and startlingly uninformed conception of history. In reality, the history recounted in the article is highly complex and contradictory, and anthroposophists and their defenders would do well to recognize at long last the complexities and contradictions in their own past.

Anthroposophy Today

Waage devotes much of his reply to “Anthroposophy and Ecofascism” to issues that the article did not address, such as the benevolent activities of Waldorf schools in various countries around the globe. While it is difficult to see what these matters have to do with the relationship between anthroposophy and ecofascism, Waage seems to think they count as refutations of the article. He says that its “perfidious accusations” against anthroposophy are harmful to “teachers, pupils and parents” of Waldorf schools. We don’t understand how questioning the ideology of an ideologically oriented school can be harmful to anyone; surely it would be more harmful to leave the ideology unquestioned. 53 We hope that the lesson Waage learned at his Waldorf school is not that anthroposophists are always right and their critics always wrong. Our own experience, at any rate, is rather different. 54

Waage also makes much of the recent report by Dutch anthroposophists which purports to exonerate Steiner of the charge of racism. Incredibly, he takes this report as an example of anthroposophists grappling candidly with their compromised past. Waage himself admits that Steiner said a number of “absurdly grotesque and outrageous” things about blacks, Asians, native people, etc., but discounts these utterances because they were supposedly “marginal” to Steiner’s core beliefs. Waage does not seem to have reflected on the fundamental divergence between his own position, which is ethically incoherent, and the position staked out in the Dutch report, which is empirically incoherent. It would be one thing if the Dutch commission had concluded that, on balance, anthroposophy is not necessarily a racist doctrine. But this is not the conclusion the Dutch commission came to. Instead their report, as Waage himself notes, determined that “no race theory or racist views can be attributed to Steiner.” We repeat: in the commission’s opinion, which Waage appears to endorse, Rudolf Steiner held no racist views whatsoever, and his writings do not contain any race theory.55

Let us note, first, that this is a bold departure from previous anthroposophist apologetics, which imagined that Steiner’s racism was forgivable because it was a “product of its time” – an interesting argument in itself, since it can be used to justify so many twentieth century atrocities. 56 Until now, the anthroposophist attitude toward Steiner’s racism was: ignore it and it will go away. But with the Dutch report this stance of silent complicity has given way to one of pure and absolute denial. Rudolf Steiner, we are now told, never uttered a racist word in his life. We are dismayed that humanists would join in such a specious pretense. To claim that Steiner held no racist views is simply a sign of dishonesty, ignorance, or bad faith. A person who is free of racist views cannot possibly say things like “the Negro race does not belong in Europe,” “transplanting black people to Europe is horrible,” “the white race is the spiritually creative race,” and “concepts hurt the Asian’s brain,” and cannot conceivably call aboriginal peoples “degenerate,” “decadent,” and “stunted”. These statements admit of no non-racist interpretation. Steiner made each of these statements, and expressed similar sentiments over and over again, from a position of professed moral authority. To absolve such a practice is incompatible with humanist values.

But even this dismal instance of willful ignorance is surpassed by the belief that Steiner’s written works contain no racial theory. To appreciate just how intellectually threadbare this posture is, let us briefly recapitulate: Steiner was the chief public spokesperson for one of the largest branches of theosophy for a full decade. One of the primary original contributions theosophy made to the occult canon was the doctrine of root races. Steiner adopted the root race doctrine wholesale into anthroposophy. That comprehensive doctrine divides the human family into five root races (Wurzelrassen, sometimes also named Hauptrassen or Grundrassen, principal or primary races), with two more root races to appear in the distant future. Each root race is further stratified into sub-races (Unterrassen). These categories are biological (Steiner calls them “hereditary”) as well as spiritual. The racial classifications are not normatively neutral; they are arranged in ascending order of spiritual development, with the fifth root race, the “Aryan race,” and within that root race the “Germanic-Nordic sub-race,” at the top of the hierarchy. This hierarchy, in turn, is an integral component of the cosmic order. These ideas are explicitly laid out in great detail and with emphatic repetition in numerous books, pamphlets, articles and lectures written and published by Rudolf Steiner. Yet somehow, Waage assures us, they do not constitute a race theory.

To anyone who has tried to engage anthroposophists and their defenders in dialogue and critique, such dubious apologetics are all too recognizable. There is a growing group of voices that have raised challenging questions about anthroposophy’s political heritage, and these voices have for the most part not been met with an honest response. When faced with logic and fact, anthroposophy and its defenders have nowhere to turn but denial of what everyone else knows to be true. When confronted with public scrutiny and scholarly inquiry, anthroposophy and its defenders have no reply but derision and evasion. These are the familiar habits of sectarians and cultists, and they threaten to turn every attempt at critical debate into a travesty of reason. To participate in such a travesty is a form of self-deception and self-debasement unworthy of any humanist. Our hope is that a sober assessment of the historical entwinement of anthroposophy and ecofascism will challenge anthroposophists and their defenders to ask themselves if the belief system they admire can be extricated from this poisonous legacy. If it cannot, we hope they will have the courage to leave anthroposophy behind.

Notes:

1. Peter Staudenmaier, “Anthroposophy and Ecofascism”, Humanist (Oslo) 2/2000; Peter Normann Waage, “Humanism and Polemical Populism”, Humanist 3/2000. Waage’s essay may be found here:
http://uncletaz.com/waage/waagenglish1.html Readers unfamiliar with the context of this exchange may wish to consult Peter Zegers, “The Dark Side of Political Ecology”, Humanist 2/2000, and Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier, Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience, Edinburgh and San Francisco 1995 (Norwegian edition: Økofascisme: Lærdom fra Tysklands erfaringer, Porsgrunn 1997). In the context of the exchange with Waage in the journal Humanist, Peter Staudenmaier and Peter Zegers agreed to refer to Waage as a non-anthroposophist. Waage is in fact a longstanding and prominent Norwegian anthroposophist, writing for anthroposophical journals, editing anthroposophical periodicals, publishing books on anthroposophists with anthroposophical presses, translating Steiner’s work into Norwegian, and so forth. Readers surprised by this may wish to consult the celebratory profile of Waage in Das Goetheanum, June 2005.

2. In our original exchange, Waage claimed to be unable to find this passage in the Norwegian translation of Steiner’s autobiography. The sentence above is from the authorized English translation of the book. In the original the sentence reads: “Nun nahm ich damals an den nationalen Kämpfen lebhaften Anteil, welche die Deutschen in Österreich um ihre nationale Existenz führten.” (Rudolf Steiner, Mein Lebensgang, original edition Dornach 1925, p. 132) We offered our own translation thus: “At this time I was enthusiastically active in the struggles of the Germans in Austria for their national existence.” We also noted that the central phrase could be alternatively translated as “deeply sympathetic”. Existing anthroposophist translations support our reading and contradict Waage’s reading. The Italian edition of the book, for example, renders the passage as follows: “in quel tempo, prendendo io parte viva alla lotta che i Tedeschi avevano da sostenere in Austria per la loro esistenza nazionale” (Steiner, La Mia Vita, Milan 1937, p. 147). Since the original article cited the German edition of the book, and since Waage reads German and has access to Steiner’s collected works in the original, his insinuation that this quote was concocted strikes us as peculiar, to say the least.

3. Langbehn’s book was the bible of the right-wing nationalist völkisch movement, a forerunner to the Nazis, during the period of Steiner’s active involvement in pan-German circles. Steiner offers, of all things, a stylistic critique of the book, never once mentioning its aggressive antisemitism or its baleful political and cultural influence within German-speaking Europe. For Steiner’s further comments on the book, many of them remarkably positive, see Steiner, Kunstgeschichte als Abbild innerer geistiger Impulse, pp. 141-144. See also Steiner’s extremely positive remarks on Paul de Lagarde: Steiner, Aus schicksaltragender Zeit, pp. 224-225, and Steiner, Unsere Toten, pp. 82-92. For an overview of Langbehn’s impact see Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria, New York 1964, chapter 25; for an extraordinarily insightful analysis of both Langbehn and Lagarde see Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, Berkeley 1961; cf. also Doris Mendlewitsch, Volk und Heil: Vordenker des Nationalsozialismus im 19. Jahrhundert, Rheda 1988, pp. 74-115 on Langbehn and pp. 116-155 on Lagarde, as well as Ulrich Sieg, Deutschlands Prophet: Paul de Lagarde und die Ursprünge des modernen Antisemitismus, Munich 2007.

4. See Rudolf Steiner, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kultur- und Zeitgeschichte 1887-1901, Dornach 1966 (GA volume 31; “GA” refers to the Gesamtausgabe, Steiner’s collected works published by the Rudolf Steiner Nachlaßverwaltung in Dornach, Switzerland), pp. 111-120. These early nationalist articles from Steiner’s Vienna period are filled with prejudice against what Steiner called “the Slavic enemy” (GA 31, p. 116), and they demand that the political agenda of the Habsburg empire be set by “the exclusively national elements of the German people in Austria,” namely “the pan-Germans” (GA 31, p. 143). Waage cited this very same volume in his reply to the article; its contents seem to have escaped his notice.

5.  See GA 31, pp. 118-119 and 143-144, among others.

6. See, for example, GA 31 pp. 214-216 and 361-362, as well as the 1898 essay “Über deutschnationale Kampfdichter in Österreich” (“On Pan-German Poets of the Struggle in Austria”) in Rudolf Steiner, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Literatur1884-1902, Dornach 1971 (GA 32), pp. 448-449.

7. Waage claims that Steiner’s 1915 book Gedanken während der Zeit des Krieges (“Thoughts During Wartime”) does not advocate German militarism. In fact this book endorses the belligerent Central Powers in unambiguous terms: “The Germans could foresee that this war would one day be fought against them. It was their duty to arm themselves for it.” (GA 24, p. 321) On several occasions Steiner also spoke on the conspiracy against Germany by international Freemasonry and Theosophy: “I have drawn your attention to the demonstrable fact that in the 1890’s certain occult brotherhoods in the West discussed the current world war, and that moreover the disciples of these occult brotherhoods were instructed with maps which showed how Europe was to be changed by this war. English occult brotherhoods in particular pointed to a war that had to come, that they positively steered toward, that they set the stage for.” (Zeitgeschichtliche Betrachtungen. Das Karma der Unwahrhaftigkeit. Erster Teil. GA 173, p. 22). During the war, Steiner sought to establish a public relations operation in Switzerland to promote the cause of the Central Powers; see Christoph Lindenberg, Rudolf Steiner: Eine Biographie, Stuttgart 1997, p. 574.

8. See Ernst zu Reventlow, Politische Vorgeschichte des Großen Krieges, Berlin 1919; and Adolf Bartels, Rasse und Volkstum, Weimar 1920, chapter 25: “Die Ideale Mr. Wilsons”. This hostility is not surprising, since Wilson’s self-determination program presented a serious threat to German territorial claims; the break-up of the Habsburg lands along national lines was the death knell for ethnic German predominance in Eastern Europe. Contrary to Waage’s implication, Steiner’s invective against Wilson did not put him in pleasant political company.

9. It is strange that Waage chooses to see Steiner’s myopic emphasis on German national concerns as an attempt “to preserve a multicultural Central Europe,” since Steiner’s explicit model was an Austria-Hungary under German domination. Steiner himself was not the least bit shy about his personal allegiance, within the threatening “multicultural” milieu of the Habsburg empire, to what he called his “folk community.” He described himself as “German by descent and racial affiliation” and as a “true-born German-Austrian,” and explained: “In these decades it was of decisive importance for the Austro-German with spiritual aspirations that – living outside the folk community to which Lessing, Goethe, Herder etcetera belonged, and transplanted into a wholly alien environment over the frontier – he imbibed there the spiritual perception of Goethe, Schiller, Lessing and Herder.” (Symptom to Reality pp. 162, 163, 168) This is a conspicuously monocultural viewpoint, indeed a forthrightly ethnocentric one. Comparable passages abound throughout Steiner’s works; see e.g. his description of how the “German character” of Vienna was ruined by an unfortunate influx of Slavs (“das eindringende Slawentum”), which regrettably turned Vienna into an “international” and “cosmopolitan” city: Steiner, Soziale Ideen – Soziale Wirklichkeit – Soziale Praxis, GA 337a, pp. 240-241.

10. For further discussion of Jacobowski see the fine analysis by Jonathan Hess, “Fictions of a German-Jewish Public: Ludwig Jacobowski’s Werther the Jew and Its Readers” Jewish Social Studies Vol. 11, No. 2, Winter 2005, pp. 202-230. Cf. also Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, Baltimore 1986, p. 224; and Katherine Roper, German Encounters with Modernity, London 1991, pp. 153-157.

11. See also Steiner’s effusive passages about Treitschke in Steiner, Zeitgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, 109-118; as well as Steiner, Aufsätze über die Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus und zur Zeitlage, pp. 283-287; Steiner, Erziehungskunst (GA 295), pp. 74-75 and 83; and Steiner, Konferenzen mit den Lehrern der Freien Waldorfschule vol. 3 (GA 300c), pp. 31-32.

12. In our estimation, this is also true of the handful of articles that Steiner wrote for the Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus in 1901, in the aftermath of Jacobowski’s unexpected death. See GA 31, pp. 382-420.

13. In a second series of lectures in Oslo in 1921, collected under the title “The Future Spiritual Mission of Norway and Sweden,” Steiner explicitly re-affirmed his lectures on “national souls” from eleven years before. He did not in any way modify or repudiate their racist content; on the contrary, he renewed his emphasis on the special mission of “the Nordic spirit” (see Steiner, Nordische und Mitteleuropäische Geistimpulse, Dornach 1968).

14. Consider, as one example among many, the following passage, where Steiner explains to his followers the crucial contrast between racial progress and racial decadence: “All of you were once Atlanteans, and these Atlantean bodies looked very different, as I have already described. The same soul that was once in an Atlantean body somewhere is now in your body. But not all bodies have been prepared, in the way yours have been, by a small number of colonists who long ago migrated from the West to the East. Those who remained behind, who bound themselves up with their race, they degenerated, while the advanced ones founded new civilizations. The last stragglers on the way to the east, the Mongols, still retain something of the culture of the Atlanteans. In the same way, the bodies of those people who do not develop themselves in a progressive fashion will continue into the next era and will constitute the Chinese of the future. There will once again be decadent peoples. After all, the souls that inhabit Chinese bodies are those that will once again have to incarnate in such races, because they had too strong an attraction to that race. The souls that are today within you will later incarnate in bodies that come from people who work in the way I have indicated, and who beget the bodies of the future, just as the first colonists from Atlantis once did. And those who cling to the ordinary, who do not want to join with the movement toward the future, they will become fused with their race. There are people who want to stick to the familiar, who want nothing to do with progress; they refuse to listen to those who lead the way beyond the race to newer and newer forms of humanity.” Rudolf Steiner, Menschheitsentwickelung und Christus-Erkenntnis, Dornach 1981, p. 186. This, then, is what Waage calls “a fundamentally anti-racist viewpoint”.

15. For further examples see among many others Steiner, “The Manifestation of the Ego in the Different Races of Men” in Steiner, The Being of Man and His Future Evolution; Steiner, “Die Grundbegriffe der Theosophie: Menschenrassen” in Steiner, Die Welträtsel und die Anthroposophie; Steiner, “Farbe und Menschenrassen” in Steiner, Vom Leben des Menschen und der Erde; Steiner, The Apocalypse of St. John; Steiner, Grundelemente der Esoterik; Steiner, The Occult Significance of Blood; Steiner, Christus und die menschliche Seele,  pp. 92-93; Steiner, Über Gesundheit und Krankheit, p. 189; Steiner, Das Hereinwirken geistiger Wesenheiten in den Menschen, pp. 174-195; Steiner, Menschheitsentwickelung und Christus-Erkenntnis, pp. 243-245.

16. We suspect that this stubborn inability to recognize the plain meaning of Steiner’s words is related to Waage’s credulousness toward Steiner as a unique source of spiritual inspiration, rather than a historical figure. He even takes at face value Steiner’s patently insincere disapproval of his followers’ “blind obedience.” Every third-rate guru makes such cheerful disavowals of personal authority as a matter of course, because they are effective in disarming gullible recruits. More to the point, anthroposophists as a rule vehemently refuse to question their guru’s spiritual authority, and regard criticism of his unsavory political views as slander. That Waage should adopt this attitude himself is both unsettling and revealing.

17. Readers familiar with Steiner’s epistemology will find this question superfluous, as anthroposophy explicitly denigrates “criticism” and “judgement” while celebrating “reverent veneration” of ostensible spiritual virtues, and rejects “intellectual effort” in favor of “immediate spiritual perception.” (See Steiner, Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten? pp. 6, 32; and Aus der Akasha-Chronik p. 3) Short of schism or apostasy, anthroposophy simply offers no grounds on which its adherents might coherently revise or refute its inherited doctrines. For a judicious assessment of the anti-rational and authoritarian implications of Steiner’s teachings, see Sven Ove Hansson, “Is Anthroposophy Science?” Conceptus XXV no. 64 (1991). On Steiner’s contribution to the irrationalist cultural currents of his day, see Paul Forman, “Weimar Culture, Causality, and Quantum Theory” in Russell McCormmach, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences volume 3, Philadelphia 1971, pp. 11-12 and 105.

18. For similar passages see Ernst Uehli, Atlantis und das Rätsel der Eiszeitkunst, Stuttgart 1957; Uehli, Kultur und Kunst Ägyptens, Ein Isisgeheimnis, Dornach 1955; Uehli, Eine neue Gralsuche, Stuttgart 1921.

19. Much of this exceedingly odd aspect of Waage’s article seems to stem from his own political naiveté; Waage is in this respect a typical befuddled liberal-cum-‘progressive,’ unable to distinguish left from right. The high point of his confusion comes in his unintentionally humorous comparison of Steiner and Bookchin. Bookchin, who had nothing but contempt for Steiner’s repellent social doctrines, would have had a fine time skewering Waage’s misapprehension of both populism and polemic, one of Bookchin’s favorite rhetorical devices. Polemic lays bare precisely the kind of hopelessly confused political vision which Waage proudly claims as his own.

20. This fundamental aspect of Steiner’s social threefolding program is emphasized throughout the anthroposophical threefolding literature, a large body of work with which Waage appears to be unfamiliar. For one especially revealing explanation see Albert Schmelzer, Die Dreigliederungsbewegung 1919, Stuttgart 1991, pp. 78-79.

21. Steiner, Westliche und östliche Weltgegensätzlichkeiten, GA 83, p. 302. Steiner’s followers have sometimes extended this analysis into a veritable celebration of capitalism under threefolding auspices; see e.g. Folkert Wilken, Das Kapital (1976), Wilken, The Liberation of Capital (1982); and for an illuminating earlier idiom see Folkert Wilken, Grundwahrheiten einer organischen Wirtschaft (1934). Equally telling examples can be found in Roman Boos’ musings on ‘social threefolding’ as “cooperative capitalism” and on “capital as an instrument of freedom” in the Swiss anthroposophist journal Gegenwart March 1942; Boos, an early threefolding activist, attributes the same views to Steiner himself.

22. This basic notion is trumpeted throughout Steiner’s work, so much so that it is virtually impossible to see how Waage could have missed it, assuming he has read any of Steiner’s publications on ‘social threefolding.’ Steiner’s followers faithfully repeat the same mantra throughout the anthroposophical literature on the topic; for one of numerous examples see Oskar Hermann, “Wirtschaftsdemokratie: Ein Zerrbild der Dreigliederung” Anthroposophie March 30, 1930, pp. 98-100. Steiner himself put it most succinctly: “Um Gottes willen keine Demokratie auf wirtschaftlichem Gebiet!” Steiner, Vom Einheitsstaat zum dreigliedrigen sozialen Organismus p. 165.

23. Steiner did on occasion speak derisively of “the old capitalism,” especially before proletarian audiences, and he sometimes promoted what he called “true socialism.” But he strictly distinguished his own ill-defined notions from the various practical proposals that grew out of the vigorous social struggle against capitalism after the war. Steiner considered such programs for a democratic transformation of economic life to be aberrant forms of “hyper-radicalism, which can only make people unhappy.” (Steiner quoted in Karl Heyer, Wer ist der deutsche Volksgeist?, Freiburg 1961, 187) He insisted that anthroposophy alone offered a viable basis for societal reconstruction; indeed “All knowledge, especially social knowledge, must be based on anthroposophical knowledge.” (Steiner in ibid. 188)

24. Steiner firmly and repeatedly rejected the notion that the exploitation of labor arises “from the economic order of capitalism”; for him the problem “lies not in capitalism, but in the misuse of spiritual talents.” (Steiner, Der innere Aspekt des sozialen Rätsels, Dornach 1972, p. 82) His social vision was at times worthy of Thatcher or Reagan: “Individuals should gain advantage for themselves in the totally free struggle of competition.” (Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kultur- und Zeitgeschichte GA 31, p. 285)

25. Similar pronouncements can be found in many other publications by Steiner; see e.g. Steiner, Soziale Zukunft, Dornach 1977, pp. 165-66. These ideas are repeated throughout the threefolding literature; see among many other examples Ernst Uehli’s pamphlet Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus, Stuttgart 1922; Wilhelm Blume, “Vom organischen Aufbau der Volksgemeinschaft” in the journal Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus, July 1919; Emil Leinhas, “Kapitalverwaltung im dreigliedrigen sozialen Organismus” Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus February 1920. For a detailed overview of Steiner’s economic thought that partially diverges from our own, see Helmut Zander, Anthroposophie in Deutschland, Göttingen 2007, pp. 1301-22.

26. For better or worse, Waage is not alone in fundamentally misapprehending Steiner’s ‘social threefolding’ ideology. For a particularly egregious instance of left failure to understand Steiner, much less analyze his work and its political and economic significance, see the thoroughly credulous article by Guido Giacomo Preparata, “Perishable Money in a Threefold Commonwealth: Rudolf Steiner and the Social Economics of an Anarchist Utopia” Review of Radical Political Economics 38 (2006), 619-48. Preparata does at least manage to situate Steiner in the right gallery of economic charlatans, albeit backhandedly; not only is Preparata a fan of Steiner, but of Silvio Gesell as well, and even of the antisemitic theorist of “social credit,” C. H. Douglas. That this is what passes for radical economic thought in the twenty-first century is a dire sign indeed. For a very different view of both Steiner and Gesell see Robert Kurz, “Politische Ökonomie des Antisemitismus” Krisis 17 (1995), and for a critical analysis of Douglas see Derek Wall, “Social Credit: The Ecosocialism of Fools” Capitalism Nature Socialism 14 (2003). For early instances of anthroposophist enthusiasm for Gesell and Douglas see Owen Barfield, “The Relation between the Economics of C.H. Douglas and those of Rudolf Steiner” Anthroposophy: A Quarterly Review of Spiritual Science, vol. 8 no. 3 (1933), 272-285, and Heinrich Nidecker, Gesundung des sozialen Organismus nach den Vorschlägen von Rudolf Steiner und Silvio Gesell (Bern: Pestalozzi-Fellenberg-Haus, 1926). For context see Matthew Lange, Antisemitic Elements in the Critique of Capitalism in German Culture, 1850-1933 (Oxford: Lang, 2007).

27. Waage fabricated another “quotation” by leaving out three essential words, without ellipsis, from the sentence in the original version of the article. Here is the complete quote with the three words in brackets: Anthroposophy is “en åpenlyst rasebasert lære som foregriper [viktige elementer i] det nazistiske verdensbilde med flere tiår.” (Humanist 2/00, p 38). (Anthroposophy is “a blatantly racist doctrine which anticipated [important elements of] the Nazi worldview by several decades”.)

28. Quite apart from Waage’s evident lack of familiarity with Steiner’s published works, his puzzling remarks on Mein Kampf strongly suggest that he has simply never read the book. It would be preferable to view this as an instance of differing interpretations of the same text, but his stylistic evaluation – Waage opines that Hitler’s tome is full of “agitatorial fury” and the opposite of Steiner’s own “somewhat dry, long-winded style” – indicates that Waage may have only heard about Mein Kampf second hand, and never bothered to actually look at the work itself. Hitler’s style in Mein Kampf is, if anything, dry and long-winded. Even the compact edition of the book current during the Third Reich totals nearly 800 pages. Paragraph after paragraph plods on without a spark of fury. Were there perhaps no copies of Mein Kampf to be found at any libraries in Norway? Or did Waage simply not take the time to consult them?

29. Volkmar Wölk, “Neue Trends im ökofaschistischen Netzwerk” in Hethey and Katz, In Bester Gesellschaft, Göttingen 1991, 121. See also Wölk’s thorough study Natur und Mythos, Duisburg 1992, which examines in detail the relationship between anthroposophy and contemporary neofascist politics in Germany. For additional evidence of the striking parallels between the theosophical root-race doctrine and Hitler’s racial views, see Jackson Spielvogel and David Redles, “Hitler’s Racial Ideology: Content and Occult Sources” in Friedlander and Milton, Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual volume 3, Los Angeles 1986, and Jeffrey Goldstein, “On Racism and Anti-Semitism in Occultism and Nazism” in Livia Rothkirchen, Yad Vashem Studies XIII, Jerusalem 1979.

30. The Atlantis myth in particular played a significant role in this ideological cross-pollination. For background on Steiner’s lost-continent narrative, a central element in anthroposophy’s racial cosmology, see among others Franz Wegener, Das atlantidische Weltbild: Nationalsozialismus und Neue Rechte auf der Suche nach der versunkenen Atlantis, Gladbeck 2001; Arn Strohmeyer, Von Hyperborea nach Auschwitz, Cologne 2005; Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories, Berkeley 2004; L. Sprague de Camp, Lost Continents: The Atlantis Theme in History, Science and Literature, New York 1954; Joscelyn Godwin, Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival, London 1993; Burchard Brentjes, Atlantis: Geschichte einer Utopie, Cologne 1993; Richard Ellis, Imagining Atlantis, New York 1998; Paul Jordan, The Atlantis Syndrome, Stroud 2001; Klaus von See, “Nord-Glaube und Atlantis-Sehnsucht” in von See, Ideologie und Philologie, Heidelberg 2006, 91-117; Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “Atlantis and the Nations” Critical Inquiry, vol. 18 no. 2 (1992), 300-326; and Vidal-Naquet, The Atlantis Story, Exeter 2007. A fine analysis of esoteric versions of the Atlantis myth and its intertwinement with the Aryan myth can be found in Roberto Pinotti, “Continenti perduti ed esoterismo: prospettive tradizionali oltre il mito” in Pinotti, I continenti perduti (Milan: Mondadori, 1995), 306-56.   For a sense of just how seriously anthroposophists today continue to take the myth of Atlantis, which they insist is not at all a myth but quite real, see for example Andreas Delor, Kampf um Atlantis: Ein Beitrag zur anthroposophischen Atlantis-Diskussion, Frankfurt 2004.

31. Regarding Steiner’s influence on the present-day extreme right, see among others Gugenberger and Schweidlenka, p. 245; Stefanie von Schnurbein and Justus Ulbricht, Völkische Religion und Krisen der Moderne, Würzburg 2001, pp. 411-412; Peter Kratz, Die Götter des New Age, Berlin 1994, p. 288; and Helmut Reinalter, Franko Petri, and Rüdiger Kaufmann, Das Weltbild des Rechtsextremismus, Innsbruck 1998, p. 207. Alongside such neo-fascist and Aryan supremacist groups there is also the far right wing of contemporary anthroposophy around the recently deceased Werner Georg Haverbeck, for whom Steiner is of course the primary inspiration. For a detailed examination of this ultraright anthroposophist tendency, see Jutta Ditfurth, Feuer in die Herzen, Hamburg 1992, pp. 217-228, and Janet Biehl’s essay in Biehl and Staudenmaier, Ecofascism.

32. In addition to the numerous studies cited in the original article and the others quoted here, readers may consult the following: Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik, p. 57; Ulrich Linse, Barfüssige Propheten, p. 84; Martin Geyer, Verkehrte Welt, pp. 311-312; Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, p. 86; Gary Stark, Entrepreneurs of Ideology, p. 74; Richard Noll, The Jung Cult, pp. 50, 65, 77, 230; Puschner, Schmitz, and Ulbricht, Handbuch zur ‘Völkischen Bewegung’, pp. 127, 608; Hans Helms, Die Ideologie der anonymen Gesellschaft, pp. 278, 333-339; Uwe Ketelsen, Literatur und Drittes Reich, p. 105; Karl Robert Mandelkow, Goethe in Deutschland, pp. 193-199; Jens Mecklenburg, ed., Handbuch deutscher Rechtsextremismus, pp. 468-470, 709-710, 715-717, 727; Daniel Gasman, Haeckel’s Monism and the Birth of Fascist Ideology, pp. 70-73; Eduard Gugenberger and Roman Schweidlenka, Die Fäden der Nornen: zur Macht der Mythen in politischen Bewegungen, pp. 186, 250, 277, 390; Michael Burleigh, Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics from the Great War to the War on Terror, pp. 20-21, 29-30; Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, pp. 258-259. For context see above all Herman de Tollenaere, The Politics of Divine Wisdom: Theosophy and Labour, National, and Women’s Movements in Indonesia and South Asia, 1875-1947 (Nijmegen 1996), and Joscelyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment, Albany 1994.

33. Waage’s fanciful version of this event is contradicted by a wide variety of anthroposophist sources. Guenther Wachsmuth’s biography of Steiner, for example, describes the incident as an attempt by “a few hotheads, who had been confused by the usual untrue propaganda of our opponents, to disrupt the lectures with noise, turning out the lights, even personal threats to the speaker – methods which had become typical in that period of political chaos. It was only because he was protected by brave friends, especially [the anthroposophists] Dr. Noll and Dr. Büchenbacher, that Rudolf Steiner was kept safe from physical attack by these nasty fellows at his Munich lecture on May 15.” (Guenther Wachsmuth, Rudolf Steiners Erdenleben und Wirken, Dornach 1964, 470) Wachsmuth says nothing about an attempted assassination, and does not associate Steiner’s antagonists with the Nazis.

34. In contrast to Waage’s account, Uwe Werner writes: “On May 15, 1922, followers of Ludendorff [former general and competitor to Hitler for leadership of the Munich far right] planned to disrupt a lecture by Steiner in the Munich hotel Vier Jahreszeiten and provoke a melee. But Munich anthroposophists became aware of the plans beforehand and were able to react. Steiner was able to finish his lecture, and only afterwards was there a physical confrontation, in which the anthroposophists prevailed.” (Uwe Werner, Anthroposophen in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, Munich 1999, p. Werner, chief archivist at the Anthroposophical Society’s world headquarters in Switzerland, makes no mention of an assassination attempt or of the Nazis.

35. Christoph Lindenberg’s massive biography of Steiner, for example, provides a thorough account of the incident: Lindenberg, Rudolf Steiner: Eine Biographie, p. 770. Lindenberg says absolutely nothing about Nazis (or even Ludendorffers or indeed any völkisch agitators), much less about any assassination attempt; in fact Lindenberg does not mention any attempted physical attack on Steiner of any sort. Waage’s bizarre version of the event does, however, accord with the version promoted by anthroposophist and antisemitic conspiracy theorist Karl Heise, one of the more prolific crackpots in the history of the anthroposophical movement; see Heise, Der katholische Ansturm wider den Okkultismus, Leipzig 1923, p. 94. We urge skeptical readers to consult this tome by Heise (or any of Heise’s numerous works, for that matter) for a classic example of anthroposophist conspiracism in all its florid absurdity. Is this the kind of company that Waage generally prefers to keep?

36. See for example the memoir by Elisabeth Klein, who was not only present at the 1922 event but was on stage with Steiner; Klein’s thorough description says nothing about any attempted assassination or about Nazis or even right-wingers, merely reporting that a “hostile group” tried to “disrupt the lecture” (Elisabeth Klein, Begegnungen, Freiburg 1978, pp. 45-46). See also the comprehensive contemporary report by Paul Baumann, “Dr. Rudolf Steiners Vortrag in München,” Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus May 25, 1922, pp. 4-5, which does not mention the Nazis and says nothing at all about an assassination attempt or even an attempted physical attack on Steiner himself. In light of this extremely extensive, detailed, and credible counter-evidence, all from sources with impeccable anthroposophical credentials, it would be very interesting indeed to learn how Waage managed to reach the unfounded and fantastic conclusions stated in his article. Did he think historians would somehow fail to check his facts? More interesting still: Why exactly did he fail to check his own facts himself?

37. Aside from the Thule Society, other far-right groups that met at the Vier Jahreszeiten during this period include the pan-German Alldeutscher Verband and the antisemitic Hammerbund. (See Reginald Phelps, “‘Before Hitler Came’: Thule Society and Germanen Orden,” Journal of Modern History (Chicago) volume 25 number 3, p. 252.) The early anthroposophist and later dedicated Nazi Hanns Rascher was in contact with Rudolf von Sebottendorf, the founder of the Thule Society, in the mid-1920s and explored the possibility of cooperation with him; see Zander, Anthroposophie in Deutschland, p. 1573.

38. See, e.g., Gerhard Wehr, Rudolf Steiner, Freiburg 1982, 327. Wehr also reports a second-hand rumor that Steiner was “eighth or ninth” on a supposed right-wing hit list, but does not attribute these alleged assassination plans to any particular organization.

39. A further Thule Society member who later used his position in the Nazi hierarchy to support anthroposophical endeavors was Hanns Georg Müller. On Müller’s role in the Thule Society see Hermann Gilbhard, Die Thule-Gesellschaft, Munich 1994, pp. 243-247. Müller went on to become a functionary in the Reichsleitung of the Nazi party, and after 1933 was the chief official in charge of Nazi Lebensreform efforts. In these positions he actively supported anthroposophists, and the biodynamic movement in particular, publishing anthroposophical works through his publishing house and vigorously promoting biodynamic agriculture in his Nazi journal Leib und Leben. He additionally headed the Nazi organization Deutsche Gesellschaft für Lebensreform, in which anthroposophists such as Erhard Bartsch and Franz Dreidax played leading roles.

40. For further information on Schwartz-Bostunitsch and his relationship to anthroposophy see Michael Hagemeister, “Das Leben des Gregor Schwartz-Bostunitsch” in Karl Schlögel, ed., Russische Emigration in Deutschland 1918-1941, Berlin 1995, pp. 209-218. During a significant portion of the 1920s Schwartz-Bostunitsch was an anthroposophist, an ariosophist, a theosophist, a self-described “Christian occultist,” a member of Artur Dinter’s völkisch religious movement, and an active Nazi. His friend and mentor Karl Heise, meanwhile, was an anthroposophist, an ariosophist, an adherent of the esoteric-Aryanist ‘Mazdaznan’ movement, and a Nazi collaborator during the same period.

41. Some historians view anthroposophy as virtually part of the völkisch movement. Helmut Zander, for example, makes a compelling case that anthroposophy represents one of the chief embodiments within the occult spectrum of “the continuity of völkisch thought” (Zander, “Sozialdarwinistische Rassentheorien aus dem okkulten Untergrund des Kaiserreichs” in Uwe Puschner, Walter Schmitz, and Justus Ulbricht, Handbuch zur ‘Völkischen Bewegung’ 1871-1918, München 1996, p. 226). We urge readers who find our own arguments too “polemical” to consult Zander’s work, a model of scholarly balance which reaches conclusions similar to our own.

42. The quote from 1923, which Waage mistakenly dates to 1920, reads: “On some mountain paths . . . one finds these symbols, swastikas, which are causing so much mischief in Germany these days [mit denen heute in Deutschland so viel Unfug getrieben wird]. This swastika is worn by people who no longer have any idea that it was once a symbol which indicated to travelers: here are people who understand these things, who see not only with the physical eye but with the spiritual eye as well.” (GA 350 p. 276; lecture 10.09.1923) Even if Steiner’s comment were directed at the Nazis, it would be at most an irritated complaint, not a principled criticism.

43. The passage appears as follows in the English translation of the book: “Asians do not care for the kind of thinking we have in Europe. They want images, like the images you see in the monasteries of Tibet. Asians want images. The abstract notions Europeans have are of no interest to them, they make their heads hurt, and they do not want them. A symbol such as the swastika, the ancient sun cross, was widely known in Asia, and the old Asians still remember it. Some Bolshevik government people had the clever idea of making the ancient swastika their symbol, juts like the nationalists in Germany. This makes much more of an impression on the Asians than any anything by way of Marxism. Marxism is a set of ideas that have to be thought, and this does not impress them. But such a sign, that does impress them.” Steiner, From Beetroot to Buddhism, London 1999, pp. 228-229.

44. Here is the full passage: Hitler calls Simons “an intimate friend of the Gnostic and Anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner, a supporter of the threefold structuring of the social organism and whatever they call all of these Jewish methods for destroying the normal frame of mind of the peoples” (Hitler, Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905-1924, 350). Simons’ biographer has shown that the rumors of Steiner’s influence on Simons were based primarily on reports in the Berlin newspaper Vossische Zeitung; see Horst Gründer, Walter Simons als Staatsmann, Jurist und Kirchenpolitiker, Neustadt an der Aisch 1975, p. 64. These reports were officially denied at the time both by anthroposophists (statement by the Bund für Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus in Vossische Zeitung 3.5.1921) and by the Foreign Ministry (see Gründer, p. 64). In fact, Steiner’s disciples attacked Simons precisely for his ignorance of Steiner’s theories; see Ernst Boldt, Rudolf Steiner: Ein Kämpfer gegen seine Zeit, Munich 1921, p. 188.

45. Hitler’s article takes Simons to task for being insufficiently intransigent regarding post-war negotiations over the status of Upper Silesia. Despite Hitler’s typically exaggerated tone, his attack on Simons amounts to a disagreement over tactics, as the foreign minister was in fact the most hard-line member of the cabinet on the question of Upper Silesia (see Gründer, Walter Simons, pp. 153-156). Steiner’s own position was not at all inimical to German national interests in the province, as Peter Bierl’s analysis of Steiner’s engagement in Upper Silesia demonstrates (see Bierl, Wurzelrassen, Erzengel und Volksgeister, 125). Moreover, at the very same time as Hitler’s tirade against the foreign minister, anthroposophists assailed Simons in terms strikingly similar to Hitler’s own; see Boldt, Rudolf Steiner, p. 187. Thus Hitler’s sole public condemnation of Steiner is not only brief, parenthetical, and rather arcane, it is based entirely on a series of patently false assumptions about Steiner, his followers, and their politics. This does not, needless to say, constitute compelling evidence of either elementary incompatibility or enduring hostility between the Hitlerian and Steinerian visions of Germany’s mission.

46. In addition to the sources cited above, see e.g. Jürgen von Grone, “Mitteleuropäische Realpolitik” Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus August 13, 1921, pp. 2-3, which harshly criticizes Simons for capitulating to “Wilsonism” in the negotiations over Upper Silesia; and Friedrich Engelmann, Ist die Dreigliederung undeutsch? Stuttgart 1921, p. 10, which denounces Simons as a pliable tool of the Entente.

47. See Steiner, Die Anthroposophie und ihre Gegner (GA 255b), pp. 324-325; Steiner’s public lecture in Stuttgart from May 25, 1921. Here Steiner denies any influence on Simons and condemns his role in the Upper Silesia negotiations. See also the parallel passages in Steiner, Perspektiven der Menschheitsentwickelung (GA 204), pp. 123-124; lecture in Dornach, April 22, 1921. We cannot help wondering why Waage has ignored such sources.

48. For further background on Dinter see George Kren and Rodler Morris, “Race and Spirituality: Arthur Dinter’s Theosophical Antisemitism”, Holocaust and Genocide Studies vol. 6 (1991). During his anthroposophical period in the 1920s, Gregor Schwartz-Bostunitsch was also close to Dinter and belonged to his völkisch religious movement; see Hagemeister, “Das Leben des Gregor Schwartz-Bostunitsch” p. 212.

49. See e.g. René Maikowski, Schicksalswege auf der Suche nach dem lebendigen Geist, Freiburg 1980, pp. 167-188, and Werner, Anthroposophen in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, p. 450. Klein’s prominent contributions to post-war anthroposophical publications can be readily discerned from anthroposophical reference works, e.g. Götz Deimann, ed., Die anthroposophischen Zeitschriften von 1903 bis 1985, Stuttgart 1987. On a side note: those inclined to doubt our characterization of Waage himself as an anthroposophist may wish to consult the several references in Deimann’s volume to Waage as both contributor to and editor of anthroposophical periodicals.

50. In stark contrast to Waage’s evasiveness on the question of responsibility, one of the earliest analyses of Waldorf schools during the Third Reich warns against “dismissing the Waldorf movement’s deliberate proximity to National Socialism as a problem of personal mistakes and sympathies” (Achim Leschinsky, “Waldorfschulen im Nationalsozialismus”, Neue Sammlung: Zeitschrift für Erziehung und Gesellschaft vol. 23 no. 3, Stuttgart 1983, p. 272).

51. The biodynamic garden at Dachau was merely one of an entire network of biodynamic plantations established by the SS at various concentration camps. The scholarly literature on this topic extends back to the 1960s. Here is a sample: Enno Georg, Die wirtschaftlichen Unternehmungen der SS (Stuttgart 1963), for decades the standard historical work on SS economic enterprises, discusses the SS’s biodynamic agriculture sites at the concentration camps on pp. 62-66, with special attention to the Dachau operation. Further basic background on the SS biodynamic operations can be found in Peter-Ferdinand Koch, Himmlers graue Eminenz: Oswald Pohl und das Wirtschaftsverwaltungshauptamt der SS (Hamburg 1988), pp. 78-81 and 300-301. Walter Wuttke-Groneberg’s work on alternative medicine in the Third Reich also covers the Dachau biodynamic plantation thoroughly; see e.g. Wuttke-Groneberg, “Von Heidelberg nach Dachau” in Gerhard Baader and Ulrich Schultz, eds, Medizin und Nationalsozialismus (Berlin 1980), pp. 113-138, particularly the section “Die Heilkräuterplantage im KZ Dachau” pp. 116-120. See also Walter Wuttke-Groneberg, “Nationalsozialistische Medizin: Volks- und Naturheilkunde auf “neuen Wegen”” in Heinz Abholz, ed, Alternative Medizin (Berlin 1983), which in addition to very useful information on the role of anthroposophical medicine in the Third Reich also examines the SS biodynamic plantations on pp. 43-44.  Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn has thoroughly examined the topic in his work as well; see e.g. Wolschke-Bulmahn, “Biodynamischer Gartenbau, Landschaftsarchitektur und Nationalsozialismus,” Das Gartenamt 42 (1993), pp. 590-95 and 638-42. For yet another study see Robert Sigel, “Heilkräuterkulturen im KZ: Die Plantage in Dachau,” Dachauer Hefte 4 (1988). Last, there is a whole book on the SS biodynamic installations which discusses the Dachau garden at great length: Wolfgang Jacobeit and Christoph Kopke, Die biologisch-dynamische Wirtschaftsweise im KZ (Berlin 1999).

52. For the standard anthroposophist perspective on the biodynamic farm at Dachau and Lippert’s role see Werner, Anthroposophen in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, pp. 283-286 and 329-334. Another anthroposophical account is available in Arfst Wagner, “Franz Lippert und die Heilkräuterkulturen im KZ Dachau” Flensburger Hefte 32 (1991), pp. 54-55. For a much more historically informed account see Hermann Kaienburg, Die Wirtschaft der SS (Berlin 2003), pp. 771-855. On the biodynamic farm at the Ravensbrück concentration camp see Bernhard Strebel, Das KZ Ravensbrück: Geschichte eines Lagerkomplexes (Paderborn 2003), pp. 212-213.

53. For a helpful summary on this issue see Klaus Prange, “Curriculum und Karma: Das anthroposophische Erziehungsmodell Rudolf Steiners” in Mission Klassenzimmer: Zum Einfluß von Religion und Esoterik auf Bildung und Erziehung (Aschaffenburg 2005), pp. 85-100.

54. On a personal note, one of us, Peter Staudenmaier, was a student in Catholic schools for twelve years and has several priests in his family. Is he doing harm to himself or his relatives when he points out the various regressive, inhumane, and intolerant aspects of Roman Catholicism? If not, why can’t Waage bring himself to take the same simple and decent step?

55. In an odd attempt to provide “objective” confirmation of the Dutch anthroposophists’ conclusions, Waage directs our attention to two articles in the anthropsophist periodical Info3. Waage describes the authors, Wolfgang Ullmann and Jörn Rüsen, as “non-anthroposophists.” This claim is questionable in the case of Rüsen, who serves on the Advisory Board of the anthroposophist Novalis Institute. But no matter what the ideological orientation of these two expert witnesses for anthroposophy, their analyses of the Dutch report are remarkably naive (both articles can be found in Info3 12/98). Rüsen, who believes that racism is fundamentally incompatible with “the political culture of modern societies” (the world would certainly be a nicer place if that were true), employs the well-worn argument that anthroposophy is “a product of its time.” This raises the obvious question of why Rüsen continues to promote an obsolete philosophy. He also praises anthroposophy’s “conception of universal-historical development” without mentioning that this conception is explicitly organized along racial lines. Ullmann, for his part, does mention Steiner’s root race theory, but nevertheless affirms the Dutch report’s claim that anthroposophy contains no racial doctrine. This defies logic; Ullmann must believe either that the root race theory is not a part of anthroposophy, or that it is not a racial doctrine. Ullmann also makes the bizarre accusation that Steiner’s critics are trying to prevent a public discussion of anthroposophy, pointing in particular to the Grandt brothers, authors of the ill-fated Schwarzbuch Anthroposophie (The Black Book of Anthroposophy). Ullmann’s hypocrisy is breathtaking; it is in fact Steiner’s critics who have forced a public discussion of anthroposophy, while anthroposophists have done everything in their power to stifle this discussion. In 1997 Austrian anthroposophists sued the publishers of Schwarzbuch Anthroposophie and succeeded in prohibiting distribution of the book, thus making it inaccessible to scholars and the public. This case is merely one of several recent attempts by anthroposophists to use the courts to suppress informed public debate and to intimidate potential critics by driving small publishers to bankruptcy; see the thorough recounting of the various suits by Austrian anthroposophists in Gunnar Schedel, “Die sanften Zensoren,” Schwarzer Faden 3/99.

56. According to this reasoning, for example, the 1935 Norwegian sterilization law cannot be condemned, criticized, or lamented because, after all, it was a product of its time. American slavery would be similarly insulated from reproach on this view. Presumably the holocaust itself was merely a product of its time, so we should all just keep quiet about it.

Reply to Peter Normann Waage, New Myths About Rudolf Steiner

“The Steiner I know,” writes Peter Normann Waage, was the nicest guy you ever met. 1 He couldn’t possibly have said and done all those nasty things Staudenmaier and Zegers say he did. It’s just not like him. Why, look at all the other nice things he said! Look at all the wonderful work his followers do! Look at all the nice friends he had!

As frivolous as Waage’s arguments are, they point to a serious issue: the Janus face of anthroposophy. Steiner’s writings are an incoherent mix of contradictory ideas, which allows his epigones to pick and choose those elements that foster the progressive and enlightened image they wish to project. The Janus face of anthroposophy also allows its partisans to deflect any criticism, no matter how copiously substantiated, via the simple method of counter-presentation: when you show them all of the works Steiner produced outlining his esoteric theory of Aryan supremacy, they simply ignore them and point instead to other passages where Steiner preaches brotherhood and tolerance. 2 Although it requires a certain amount of willful naiveté, it is indeed possible to construct a universalist and ‘humanist’ Steiner out of bits and pieces of his pre-anthroposophist works like Philosophie der Freiheit, while ignoring all of the occultist and racist mature works like Aus der Akasha-Chronik, the book which Steiner designated as the “basis of anthroposophist cosmology”. 3

This method of counter-presentation has the unfortunate effect of reducing rational argument to a mere trading of isolated quotations back and forth. 4  Based on a combination of wishful thinking and denial, it leads to a primitive form of argument-by-definition: real anthroposophy is whatever Waage says it is. Myopically fixated on one side of the Janus face, he insists that the dozens of works by Steiner we cited, as well as the numerous other anthroposophist works we drew on, are somehow “atypical and eccentric”. By offering anthroposophists’ own words to readers, we have supposedly obscured “the whole tendency of the movement”. We gladly admit that we are unable to explain Steiner’s incoherence, and we have yet to encounter a defense of anthroposophy that tries to show how the several sides of the Janus face relate to one another. Our task all along has been to analyze and understand the frightening side of anthroposophy’s Janus face, the side which Steiner’s admirers desperately want to keep hidden. Our topic is not, of course, “the Steiner Waage knows,” but rather the Steiner he ought to get to know if he wants to be taken seriously in public discussions of anthroposophy’s politics.

That, after all, has been the subject of our exchange from the beginning. What is at issue is not the Steiner Waage knows, or indeed the romanticized versions of Steiner and his ideas that any given individual anthroposophist knows or imagines. What is at issue is the history of actually existing anthroposophy. Without adding unnecessarily to the rancor of this exchange, it is important to point out that Waage’s competence on this subject is limited – not because of his profession as a journalist and not because of his personal predilections as an anthroposophist, but simply because he has not taken the time to review the available sources. Heedless of this basic disparity between his position and ours, Waage reverses the reality and asserts that, as non-anthroposophists, we are unacquainted with ‘real’ anthroposophy based on the Steiner he knows. What he appears to mean is that we are insufficiently familiar with, not to mention insufficiently respectful toward, an idealized construct of “anthroposophy” as Waage himself envisions it. This may well be true, and is obviously irrelevant. Our arguments are not about Waage’s private conception of what anthroposophy ought to be; they are about what anthroposophy has actually been, as seen from the world outside its own narrow borders. He seems remarkably unwilling to step beyond those borders and look at anthroposophy as a historical phenomenon and an object of study. Waage’s role is that of a Believer railing against external inquiry into his cherished belief system.

Thus Waage, comfortable in his own anthroposophical certitudes and unaccustomed to non-anthroposophical perspectives on anthroposophy, repeats the same old refrain. He insists that we are spreading “myths” about Steiner. In order to tell myths from facts, one needs a basic familiarity with the published works of the figure in question (in this case, the writings and speeches of Rudolf Steiner), a knowledge of their historical context (the occult subculture and the Lebensreform or alternative lifestyles movement), and an understanding of their political affiliations (Austrian and German nationalism). Waage meets none of these requirements. He is ignorant of much of Steiner’s written work, as his peculiar claims about that work attest. He appears to know little about either the occult revival or the left-right crossover that characterized ‘alternative’ circles in turn of the century Central Europe. And he is completely oblivious to the history of German nationalism; Waage believes that the pan-German movement was engaged in “nation building” and that it uniformly advocated “a concentration of all German speaking people in one state”. 5  But Waage is not one to be deterred by historical facts; he is simply convinced, as an article of faith, that Steiner rejected nationalism. 6

This wishful thinking leads Waage to compound the already embarrassing errors from his first reply. He originally claimed that the passage from Steiner’s autobiography recalling his pan-German engagement didn’t exist. Now that he has finally managed to find this passage, he complains that we have mistranslated it. 7  This complaint is childish; our translation is, of course, entirely accurate, as anyone with access to a German-Norwegian dictionary can readily ascertain. 8  If Waage is still confused on this matter, he might wish to consult other passages where Steiner reminisces about his early pan-German activism, for example this one from 1900: “With even greater enthusiasm we dedicated ourselves to the rising pan-German movement.” 9  Or he could consult sympathetic anthroposophical biographies of Steiner which note that he became editor of one of the most militant Viennese pan-German journals, the Deutsche Wochenschrift, in 1888. 10  Or he could simply look up the several dozen articles Steiner published in the radical pan-German press in the 1880’s, which are collected in volumes 29, 30, 31 and 32 of the Gesamtausgabe (Waage repeatedly cites the latter two volumes, evidently without having bothered to read them). No-one familiar with these articles could possibly doubt Steiner’s wholehearted devotion to what he called “the pan-German cause in Austria.” (GA 31, p. 111.) Even if all of these sources had for some mysterious reason been unavailable to Waage, he could simply take a look at the very same sources he himself quotes, for example anthroposophist Christoph Lindenberg’s biography of Steiner, which discusses Steiner’s pan-German activism at length, provides extensive details and citations, and notes that “Steiner himself counted himself a member of this movement,” the pan-German movement in Austria. 11

Unaware of these basic facts about Steiner’s political background, Waage asks: “Is it a crime to be interested in the ‘national existence’ of a people?” — referring to the Austro-Germans. We recommend he peek inside a history book to determine whether the German community in Austria actually faced a “struggle for national existence” in the late nineteenth century. Robert Kann, for example, observes that German nationalism in Austria sought “the preservation and enhancement of a privileged position.” (Kann, The Habsburg Empire, New York 1973, p. 19) 12  John Mason writes that the Austro-Germans were “the leading national group in the Empire and exercised an influence out of all proportion to their numbers.” He notes that the Habsburg state “was thoroughly German in character”, that “[t]he official language of the Empire was German and the civil servants were overwhelmingly German”, and concludes: “Not only was the cultural life of Vienna almost exclusively German, but the capitalist class, the Catholic hierarchy and the press were also the preserve of the Austro-Germans.” (Mason, The Dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire 1867-1918, London 1997, pp. 10-11) 13  The young Steiner and his pan-German comrades were not engaged in “nation building,” as Waage imagines; they were engaged in an aggressively xenophobic defense of privilege and ethnic purity. 14  While there had been significant democratic impulses in 1848-era Great German nationalism, by the 1880’s in Austria these had given way to simple national self-interest and antagonism toward other ethnic groups, particularly the Slav peoples of the empire. Much of the impetus for the middle-class variety of nationalism which Steiner adopted came from a deep sense of cultural superiority and entitlement: Germans in Austria often perceived themselves as the bearers of civilization to their supposedly backward neighbors and fellow citizens. It was this potent sense of the “German mission” which drew Steiner so enthusiastically into pan-German nationalist circles.

Waage is also woefully uninformed about the history of German antisemitism and the variety of responses to it. 15  He thinks that Steiner’s friend Jacobowski was the “leader” of the Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus. In fact Jacobowski was merely an employee of the Verein; his work there was “no doubt more administrative and journalistic, and above all performed in order to support himself.” 16  His personal commitment was quite explicitly and emphatically not to Jewish concerns, but to German nationalism. 17  That is precisely what aroused Steiner’s admiration; in Steiner’s words, Jacobowski had “long since outgrown Jewishness”. 18  Waage also believes that a pro-assimilationist viewpoint was incompatible with outspoken antisemitism. 19  He would do well to acquaint himself with figures such as Stöcker, Treitschke, and Vacher de Lapouge, all of whom were both proponents of Jewish assimilation and vehement antisemites. 20  Unaware of this crucial background, Waage thoroughly misunderstands Steiner’s stance on the “Jewish question.” Indeed he flatly denies that Steiner wished to see the Jewish people disappear, simply ignoring Steiner’s unequivocal, repeated, and very explicit statements throughout his career. Steiner insisted quite emphatically that “the only proper thing would be for the Jews to blend in with the other peoples and disappear into the other peoples.” 21  His position was entirely clear: “the best thing that the Jews could do would be to disappear into the rest of humankind, to blend in with the rest of humankind, so that Jewry as a people would simply cease to exist.” 22  Before his turn to theosophy, Steiner demanded that Austrian and German Jews completely repudiate their Jewish identity in favor of a purely “German spirit” and “German culture,” which he considered superior to all others. In his mature anthroposophist phase, Steiner held that modern Jews were an obsolete remnant of a spiritually superceded race, the descendants of those hapless inhabitants of Atlantis who did not evolve into “Aryans.” He consistently singled out the Jews as his prime example of a people anachronistically attached to ethnic particularity, a stumbling block on the path of spiritual progress toward the “universal human”. 23

In both of his replies, Waage assiduously avoids mentioning Steiner’s theory of root races. This is a striking omission, and makes us wonder whether Waage is defending anthroposophy at all, as opposed to Steiner’s pre-anthroposophist individualism. Steiner’s esoteric racial doctrine is an essential element in the conceptual foundation upon which the entire edifice of anthroposophy is built, and latter-day anthroposophists have so far refused to confront it honestly. In particular, Waage seems to have missed the rather central fact that after his theosophical turn, Steiner relegated his earlier individualist position in favor of a comprehensive racial-ethnic-national classification system wherein each individual’s spiritual and cultural capacities are determined by and/or directly correlated to their “root race,” “people,” and “national soul.”

In his pivotal 1909 work Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten? Steiner wrote: “The human individual belongs to a family, a nation, a race; his actions in this world depend on his belonging to such a totality. [. . .] Indeed, in a certain sense individuals are only the executive organs of these family souls, racial spirits, and so forth. [. . .] Every individual gets his tasks, in the truest sense of the word, assigned by the family soul, the national soul, or the racial soul.” (Steiner, GA 10, Dornach 1961, pp. 199-200) 24  Toward the end of his life, Steiner again emphasized this crucial facet of anthroposophic thought: “One can only understand history and all of social life, including today’s social life, if one pays attention to people’s racial characteristics. And one can only understand all that is spiritual in the correct sense if one first examines how this spiritual element operates within people precisely through the color of their skin.” 25 Waage might consider taking at the very least a brief look at the existing scholarship on anthroposophical race theory; he will be surprised at what he’ll find there. 26

But let us return to the theme that sparked this debate in the first place: anthroposophy’s ambivalent disposition toward German fascism. In his last installment in this exchange, Waage finally comes right out and admits that he simply didn’t realize what the topic of the debate was. He writes: “Staudenmaier/Zegers ask for my comments on the connection between anthroposophy and the “green wing” of German fascism. This is one among many topics I have had to leave out.” Leave out? The connection between anthroposophy and the “green wing” of German fascism was after all the subject of “Anthroposophy and Ecofascism,” the article to which Waage was ostensibly replying. Was he genuinely confused about this all along? If so, what does it tell us about his obtuse apologia for anthroposophy’s fascist past? More unsettling still, what does it tell us about his vision of anthroposophy’s future?

Instead of addressing in even a cursory way the subject under discussion, Waage likes to keep referring to “the many anthroposophists who resisted Nazism.” In the course of his two replies he has yet to name a single example of an anthroposophist who joined the resistance to Hitler. The historical literature on anthroposophy’s relationship to National Socialism contains no such examples. Anthroposophy’s in-house historian Uwe Werner, who goes to great lengths to excuse anthroposophist collaboration with the Nazi regime, was unable to come up with a single instance of anthroposophists joining the resistance. Jens Heisterkamp, a prominent German anthroposophist, writes that “the anthroposophist movement did not produce any members of the Resistance.” 27 Undeterred by his limited knowledge of the historical context, Waage goes on to reject our characterization of Rudolf Hess as anthroposophy’s chief ally in the Third Reich. But there is no serious dispute on this point even among anthroposophist commentators. Werner’s book itself, which strenuously denies that Hess had any personal interest in anthroposophy, makes perfectly clear that Hess was the foremost protector and patron of anthroposophist activities. 28

In a last-ditch effort to show that Steiner’s political ideas were “directly opposed” to Hitler’s, Waage points to Steiner’s engagement in Upper Silesia. He couldn’t have chosen a worse example to make his case. Far from revealing Steiner’s universalist side, the anthroposophical intervention in Upper Silesia places Steiner and his followers squarely in the German nationalist camp. What Steiner advocated was temporary autonomy for the ethnically mixed province. While latter-day anthroposophists like to portray this as an anti-nationalist position, both the historical evidence and Steiner’s own pronouncements on the topic show that the very opposite was the case. Historians of the Upper Silesian conflict have long recognized that calls for “autonomy” were merely a smokescreen for nationalist agitation. Hans-Ake Persson writes: “A notion prevalent among both German and Polish nationals was that Upper Silesia should remain intact, since it was quite prosperous and was seen as an economic unit. Both groups were prepared to grant autonomy to the area. Up to this point the national groups were in agreement, yet they became unyielding when Upper Silesia’s state affiliation was to be determined. The historical region was to be preserved, while the decisive question was whether Silesia should answer to Berlin or Warsaw.” (Persson in Sven Tägil, Regions in Central Europe: The Legacy of History, London 1999, p. 223) And Elizabeth Wiskemann writes: “Many Germans hoped to save Upper Silesia from Poland by granting it autonomy within Germany.” However, she continues, “the Allies quickly rejected the autonomy idea — it would but create a German dependency, they considered.” (Wiskemann, Germany’s Eastern Neighbours, London 1956, p. 27) 29

In Steiner’s case, the plea for autonomy was intended to prevent the League of Nations from partitioning the province between Poland and Germany, which would have meant a loss of German territory. His public treatises appealed plaintively to “true German convictions” in Upper Silesia (see the pamphlet Aufruf zur Rettung Oberschlesiens, reproduced in GA 338, pp. 264-5), and his private sessions with Silesian anthroposophists emphasized that the very notion of a Polish state was “impossible” and “an illusion.” 30  Rejecting the internationally sponsored plebiscite as an affront to “the German essence,” Steiner argued that the situation demanded a spiritual solution, not a political solution. And the proper spiritual solution, of course, required “spiritual leaders” (geistige Führer), who could only come from Germany and Austria. 31  It is thus hardly surprising that anthroposophists involved in the Upper Silesian agitation simply assumed a natural German right to the province and lamented the eventual absorption of part of the territory by Poland. 32  In the words of the anthroposophist Karl Heyer, referring to the 1921 plebiscite on the future of Upper Silesia, “for the German there could be no other position than to vote in favor of Germany”. 33  This stance was repeatedly emphasized by anthroposophists and advocates of ‘social threefolding’ at the time. 34

Waage seems utterly unaware of this rather crucial fact. Once the plebiscite itself was no longer to be averted, Steiner and his followers adopted a very emphatic and forthright position in favor of voting for Germany in the referendum. In the days surrounding the League of Nations plebiscite, the editors of the threefolding newspaper declared unambiguously: “Now that the vote is taking place, the League for Social Threefolding needless to say takes the view that for every German there can be no other position than to vote for Germany.” 35  Two weeks later, the paper’s editors explained that their stance all along was to vote for Germany: “In light of the fact of the plebiscite, the League for Social Threefolding firmly adopted the position of voting for Germany when possible, and the leadership of the League answered categorically every time it was asked that every person eligible to vote in the plebiscite was of course duty-bound to vote and had to vote for Germany.” 36  In the eyes of Steiner and his followers, the anthroposophical approach of social threefolding was most appropriate to maintaining German hegemony in the region. Karl Heyer, for example, wrote in advance of the referendum: “The threefold solution to the Upper Silesian problem is better suited than any other for protecting Germany’s true interests in economic terms as well as in national terms and in state-political terms.” 37  An official statement from the League for Social Threefolding declared that social threefolding was the only way “to make it possible for Germany to escape from being strangled by the West, and to return to Germany its historical prestige.” 38  Similar statements abound within the anthroposophical literature from the period. 39  The League for Social Threefolding even published an announcement in the Frankfurter Zeitung, probably the most prominent newspaper in Germany at the time, on March 12, 1921 under the title “Social Threefolding and Upper Silesia” stating very explicitly that their position was to vote for Germany in the upcoming plebiscite.

Waage apparently believes that Steiner himself opposed this forthright advocacy of a German right to Upper Silesia. He is mistaken. Steiner’s stand on Upper Silesia confirmed his life-long conviction that German spiritual superiority entitled the Germans to territorial hegemony in eastern Europe. The anthroposophical editors of Steiner’s collected works spell this position out clearly, and verify with ample evidence that the position of the threefolding movement during the Upper Silesian campaign was indeed to vote for Germany. 40  Steiner’s followers themselves said the very same thing, quite unequivocally, about Steiner’s own stance at the time. 41  Many of Steiner’s own statements on the matter fully support this. Consider Steiner’s public lecture in Stuttgart about anthroposophy and social threefolding on May 25, 1921, where he once again countered the claims of critics of anthroposophy. Here Steiner said: “When things like this are put forth, it is no surprise to find people claiming that anthroposophy had shown its un-German and un-national aspect in its stance on the Upper Silesian question. Everybody who asked us for advice in that situation was told that whoever stands in our ranks should vote for Germany if the plebiscite comes. We never said anything different. We also said that the point is not this plebiscite, but rather establishing Upper Silesia as an integral territory that is inwardly united with the German spiritual essence.” 42

All of these facts are accessible to anyone who is willing to take the time to delve into Steiner’s works and place them into their historical context. For better or worse this task has largely been left to non-anthroposophists like us. And the further we explore Steiner’s teachings, the more insidious those teachings become. In the course of looking into Steiner’s paranoid views on World War I as a “conspiracy against German spiritual life,” for example, we came across an astonishing lecture on “the mission of white humankind” in which Steiner predicts “a violent battle of white people against colored people”. In this 1915 lecture to an anthroposophist audience in Stuttgart, Steiner explains that spiritual characteristics are tied to skin color and that non-white skin is a sign of spiritual defects that will be expunged in the coming race war. 43

Here Steiner contrasts “the European-American essence and the Asian essence,” asking: “How could people fail to notice the profound differences, in terms of spiritual culture, between the European and the Asian peoples. How could they fail to notice this differentiation, which is tied to external skin color!” (p. 35) He goes on to observe that “the Asian peoples” are beholden to the “cultural impulses of past epochs” while “the European-American peoples have advanced beyond these cultural impulses.” He then declares that it is a sign of “an unhealthy soul-life” when Europeans partake of these “lower” Asian impulses (p. 36). Steiner continues that the special role of the “Germanic peoples” is to integrate the spiritual and the physical through a “carrying down of the spiritual impulses” onto the physical plane and into the human body. “This carrying down, this thorough impregnation of the flesh by the spirit, this is characteristic of the mission, the whole mission of white humanity. People have white skin color because the spirit works within the skin when it wants to descend to the physical plane. That the external physical body will become a container for the spirit, that is the task of our fifth cultural epoch.” (p. 37) But when this task is imperfectly fulfilled, it leads to a spiritual defect which is marked by non-white skin. Steiner explains that “when the spirit is held back, when it takes on a demonic character and does not fully penetrate the flesh, then white skin color does not appear, because atavistic powers are present that do not allow the spirit to achieve complete harmony with the flesh.” (p. 38)

In order to prevent the victory of these demonic and atavistic powers that people of color embody, there will have to be a cosmic showdown between white people and non-white people. “But these things will never take place in the world without the most violent struggle. White humankind is still on the path of absorbing the spirit deeper and deeper into its own essence. Yellow humankind is on the path of conserving the era when the spirit will be kept away from the body, when the spirit will only be sought outside of the human-physical organization. But the result will have to be that the transition from the fifth cultural epoch to the sixth cultural epoch cannot happen in any other way than as a violent battle of white humankind against colored humankind in myriad areas. And that which precedes these battles between white and colored humankind will occupy world history until the completion of the great battles between white and colored humankind. Future events are frequently reflected in prior events. You see, we stand before something colossal that – when we understand it through spiritual science – we will in the future be able to recognize as a necessary occurrence.” (p. 38)

But Waage is unconcerned with breathtaking passages such as this, which show that anthroposophy’s racism is not a marginal afterthought but is intimately tied to its pretensions to “spiritual science.” Blissful in his ignorance, Waage continues to pretend that the evidence of Steiner’s racism is “thinner than air.” Instead of grappling with these obviously racist elements of Steiner’s doctrine himself, Waage attempts to shift the burden onto non-anthroposophists. 44  His plaintive remarks about misunderstanding Anthroposophy and Ecofascism raise a genuine concern, one that has bedeviled any number of anthroposophists outraged by our research. Waage writes of us: “If I have misunderstood them, they have to accept the responsibility.” We are glad to accept this responsibility. Anthroposophy and Ecofascism was not written for readers like Waage. It was not written for anthroposophists. It was not written for readers with limited interest in historical context, or readers who are easily swayed by appeals to sentiment. It was not written for those who feel compelled to defend Nazi collaborators, or who have dedicated their efforts to whitewashing racism and exonerating antisemitism. Those sorts of readers are bound to misunderstand critical arguments about anthroposophy. 45  The article was written instead for other readers. Above all, it was rather obviously written for non-anthroposophists. It was written for readers who understand what racism is and how it functions, who have an interest in informing themselves about the history of Nazism, and who do not find complex analysis of political ideas excessively difficult to follow.

Waage, for whatever reason, has had a notably hard time following our analysis. He thinks we have dismissed Steiner as a racist, and nothing more. He thinks we have labeled Steiner simply an antisemite, and nothing more. He thinks we have collapsed all anthroposophists into Nazis, and all Nazis into proto-environmentalists, and perhaps all environmentalists into esotericists. He thinks we have made claims about topics we have not addressed. He thinks we have failed to address topics on which we have written extensively. For example, he takes us to task for failing to comment on the report of the Dutch anthroposophist commission on Steiner and racism. We did in fact devote several pages to this topic in our original rejoinder, although they were cut from the version printed in Humanist. We very much hope readers will consult the full version of our earlier article for our views on this report and Waage’s reliance on it. But since Waage seems quite fond of the Dutch commission’s report, we are glad to comment further on its findings. 46

The Dutch report simply asserts that those anthroposophists who have interpreted Steiner’s teachings in a racist fashion have misunderstood Steiner – a convenient excuse which sheds no light whatsoever on the underlying reasons for the ongoing racism within organized anthroposophy. Aside from the irrelevant sections on contemporary discrimination law, the commission’s methodology is purely esoteric, and its annotations of the quotes from Steiner demand of the reader a suspension of critical faculties. Steiner’s supposed clairvoyance and his ideas about karma and reincarnation play an overwhelming part in their appraisal. This should come as no surprise, since all of the members of the commission belong to the Dutch Anthroposophical Society.

What is more seriously troubling is the commission’s insistence on purveying a race theory of their own. According to the Dutch report there are different human races with different physical, mental, cultural and spiritual capacities. The authors posit “great differences between the human races” (p. 206) and state that “people of below average development” must incarnate in “lower races” (p. 207). They also claim, for example, that technology was developed by the “Caucasian race” (p. 210). Moreover, the commission declares more than once that non-anthroposophists and people who do not share a spiritual conception of reality (“materialists” in their vocabulary) are simply incapable of judging Steiner’s work. This absurd stance obviously cancels whatever worth the study might have had for those outside the cult of Rudolf Steiner.

The commission’s own epistemological framework is astonishingly primitive, even by anthroposophist standards. In an effort to turn Steiner’s frequent unintelligibility into a virtue, they inform us that when Steiner contradicted himself over and over again he was simply trying to get at the truth from different angles. This is a foolish pretext for the commission’s failure to do any hermeneutic work of its own. A sympathetic reading of Steiner’s work is one thing, willful ignorance quite another – especially in light of the commission’s notorious ‘argument’ (really a mere assumption) that Steiner’s scattered anti-racist comments both absolve and negate his much more numerous racist remarks. To make this implausible claim stick, they would need to advance some interpretive agenda, some explanatory model for making sense of Steiner’s incoherence. But they never do so, leaving the Janus face entirely intact while simply avoiding one of its several sides.

Nor does the commission fare any better in its examination of the historical context. The Dutch report discusses both Blavatsky and Haeckel, the latter in some detail, and notes that Steiner’s theory of evolution was an amalgam of these two disconcerting pedigrees, but never says a word about either Blavatsky’s or Haeckel’s shameful politics. The continuities between Haeckel’s acute racism and nationalism and Steiner’s variations on the same theme are never addressed. Despite Haeckel’s acknowledged status as Germany’s foremost Social Darwinist in Steiner’s era, the commission claims that Steiner’s own theory is not a form of Social Darwinism because it does not posit a natural mechanism of evolution. Instead Steiner held that racial groups die out because, in the commission’s words, “a further development of the soul was no longer possible.” (p. 98) Why this repugnant version of spiritualized racism should be preferable to Haeckel’s ‘materialist’ version is a question the commission declines to consider. Having endorsed Steiner’s spiritual schema of racial decline and advance, the Dutch report makes various pathetic attempts to explain away even Steiner’s most obviously offensive rantings about “racial odors” or the link between blondeness and intelligence: anyone who considers such abysmal nonsense to be racist, the commission tells us, is simply trapped in materialist thinking.

Undoubtedly the most celebrated of the commission’s findings is that “only” eighty-three quotes by Steiner, out of a total output of 350 volumes, are potentially racist. 47  It goes without saying that a crudely quantitative approach is completely out of place here, but that is hardly the worst of the report’s troubles. 48  Contrary to the repeated implication that these excerpts represent insignificant marginalia, the quotes in question are central passages from Steiner’s principal works, on a crucial aspect of anthroposophy’s cosmology: racial categories as a reflection of spiritual hierarchies. They are also substantial and lengthy passages; a full third of the 147 Steiner quotes that the commission examines in detail are multiple paragraphs or multiple pages. But the most amazing thing about the Dutch report is what it omits. Whereas the commission evidently included every last supposedly anti-racist fragment from Steiner that they could dig up, they deliberately excluded all of his writings on the root-race theory. They justify this incredible step with the absurd presumption that when Steiner wrote about “root races” he really meant chronological epochs, not racial groups, a claim which is immediately belied, on grammatical grounds alone, by every sentence Steiner wrote on the topic.

More striking still is the omission of Steiner’s assorted antisemitic diatribes and his comparable fulminations against the French, English, Slavs, and so on. 49  And although the Dutch report reviews the development of Austrian pan-Germanism, and in the same chapter cites volume 31 of Steiner’s collected works, it never so much as mentions Steiner’s own pan-German propaganda that is so copiously represented in the same volume. Categorically ignoring this unequivocal and massive textual evidence, the commission repeats the ridiculous refrain that Steiner “rejected every form of nationalism.” (p. 93) This sort of conspicuous hypocrisy cannot possibly be due to mere sloppiness or selective reading; it is unmistakable evidence of bad faith and conscious deception. Last but scarcely least, the Dutch report miraculously fails to make any mention of several indisputably racist statements by Steiner that we have stumbled across in our own reading of his collected works, for example his crazed assertion that “concepts hurt the Asian’s brain” or his shocking discourse on non-white skin as a sign of spiritual imperfection and the consequent “violent battle of white humanity against colored humanity” that we quoted above. In both cases the report quotes, several times, the same volumes that contain these extraordinary sentences. How did such unambiguous passages manage to escape the learned commission’s attention?

The net result is a report that is both incomplete and incoherent: it excludes an enormous proportion of Steiner’s racist writings, while nevertheless reproducing dozens of other racist passages from his works, and still denies that a single racist statement ever issued from Steiner’s pen. In light of all of these easily recognizable shortcomings, whose severity is such that they cumulatively form a devastating indictment of the both the Dutch report and its authors, Waage’s esteem for this document is decidedly misplaced. To anyone who has tried to come to terms with Steiner’s teachings on race, Waage’s enthusiasm for the Dutch report merely confirms his hopelessly naïve approach to the subject. Despite the unabashedly exculpatory thrust of the tendentious study that Waage respects so highly, the report has led to a split in the Dutch Anthroposophical Society; the more fundamentalist faction has left the Society and is now trying to start a new one. This is hardly the sort of critical self-examination that the report was supposed to spark. Perhaps someday the closed world of anthroposophy will open itself up to honest scrutiny.

Until that day arrives, newcomers to anthroposophy will have to settle for the evasions and equivocations of those like Waage who hope to protect anthroposophist orthodoxy by sticking their heads in the sand. Waage’s apologetics perfectly embody the uncritical, unreflective and ahistorical approach to Steiner’s doctrines that we have unfortunately come to expect from anthroposophists and their defenders. Mistaking credulousness for respectfulness, Waage has done a distinct disservice to anthroposophists and non-anthroposophists alike. Although our exchange with Waage is finished, the debate on anthroposophy’s past and present is far from over. We are gratified to see that this debate has spread to Sweden, the United States, and beyond, and are also disappointed that it has frequently proven impossible to involve anthroposophists in a genuine dialogue because our arguments are so often met only with angry accusations and indignant denials. We hope that by illuminating the hidden sides of anthroposophy’s Janus face, we have given non-anthroposophists reason to question anthroposophy’s “progressive” credentials. And as independent critical inquiry into Steiner’s political legacy continues, we hope that interested readers will begin their own examination of that legacy.

Notes:

1. Waage’s “New Myths about Rudolf Steiner” can be found here: http://uncletaz.com/waage/waagenglish2.html

2. Many of the issues Waage raises in his latest reply have already been answered in the full version of our first response to him, “Anthroposophy and its Defenders,” as well as in the greatly shortened version of that essay published in Humanist 4/2000. We would once again like to urge readers to consult that essay for a much more detailed refutation of Waage’s arguments.

3. Steiner, Mein Lebensgang, Dornach 1925, p. 301. We can certainly understand that Waage would prefer to discuss The Philosophy of Freedom, but his contention that this early work is more central to anthroposophy than the mature anthroposophist works is clearly wide of the mark. The Philosophy of Freedom was published in 1893, eight years before Steiner’s turn to theosophy and twenty years before the founding of the Anthroposophical Society. Steiner’s attitude toward theosophy in the 1890s was scathingly critical; see e.g. his 1897 essay “Theosophen” in Steiner, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Literatur (GA 32), pp. 194-6, or the very similar essays from 1891 and 1892 in Steiner, Methodische Grundlagen der Anthroposophie (GA 30), pp. 493-495 and 510-511. A decade later, Steiner made these very same ideas, which in the 1890s he had so harshly criticized, the centerpiece of his mature anthroposophical teachings.

4. Consider, for example, Waage’s own preferred Steiner text, The Philosophy of Freedom, which Waage imagines to be the very foundation of “anti-racist engagement.” The book contains the following remarkable passage: “Each member of a totality is determined, as regards its characteristics and functions, by the whole totality. A racial group is a totality and all the people belonging to it bear the characteristic features that are inherent in the nature of the group. How the single member is constituted, and how he will behave, are determined by the character of the racial group.” Rather than digging around for some other Steiner quote that sounds nicer to Waage’s ear, why not simply deal straightforwardly with the problematic facets of Steiner’s thought?

5. The 1882 Linz Program, the founding manifesto of Austrian pan-Germanism, did not call for unification of Germany and Austria but for closer economic and political ties, including a customs union and a strengthened military alliance. One of the foremost divisions within the late nineteenth century pan-German movement was the rivalry between großdeutsch and kleindeutsch (greater German and lesser German) nationalists; this basic divide was further complicated by the fact that these two terms often had divergent meanings for pan-Germanists in Austria and in Germany. Although he was Austrian and thus a Habsburg subject, Steiner’s maudlin paeans to the Hohenzollern dynasty seem to indicate that his own sympathies were pro-Prussian. For historical context see the chapter on “Deutschnationalismus” in Albert Fuchs, Geistige Strömungen in Österreich 1867-1918, Vienna 1949; for a brief overview in English see Arthur May, The Hapsburg Monarchy 1867-1914, New York 1968, pp. 210-212.

6. This quixotic conviction appears to be, once again, anchored in a remarkable level of political naiveté. Regarding what he calls “the third way,” for example, Waage writes: “Do you become a fascist by searching for an alternative to American commercialism and Russian/Soviet collectivism?” He has evidently never even heard of the “Third Position,” one of the most potent streams within the contemporary neo-fascist scene. We would likely to gently suggest that he acquaint himself with it.

7. Without belaboring the point, or questioning Waage’s comprehension of German, it must be noted that several of his readings are simply inscrutable. Consider the passage from Steiner’s autobiography which refers, in Waage’s rendering, to Steiner’s “friends who, in connection with the national struggle, had come under the influence of anti-Semitism.” Is this something other than Steiner’s “friends from the national struggle”? If so, why is Waage unable to explain what that difference might be? To put the matter bluntly: Why did he waste a paragraph confirming our translation, apparently convinced that he was refuting it?

8. According to the Tysk blå ordbok (Third edition, Gerd Paulsen, Kunnskapsforlaget, Oslo 1998), “Anteil nehmen” means “ta del i” (to take part in). Our correct translation is confirmed by the authorized English translation of Steiner’s autobiography, which renders the passage thus: “I took an interested part in the struggle which the Germans in Austria were then carrying on in behalf of their national existence.” (Steiner, The Course of My Life, New York 1951, p. 142.) The Italian translation fully confirms this as well: “in quel tempo, prendendo io parte viva alla lotta che i Tedeschi avevano da sostenere in Austria per la loro esistenza nazionale” (Steiner, La Mia Vita, Milan 1937, p. 147); “prendere parte,” particularly with the modifier “viva,” means direct involvement and active participation. Moreover, the full version of our first reply to Waage clearly noted the possibility of alternative translations of this passage, so his suggestion that our translation was intentionally misleading is quite preposterous. Waage is also very confused about the edition of Steiner’s book cited in our reply; he now thinks that we quoted the “German pocketbook edition”. In fact, as anyone who cares to consult our original reply can plainly see, we cited the original 1925 edition of Mein Lebensgang. This is quite obviously not the same edition as the pocketbook version published sixty-five years later. We must ask again: How could Waage possibly have been befuddled about this?

9.  “Mit um so grösserer Begeisterung verschrieben wir uns der aufstrebenden deutsch-nationalen Bewegung.” Steiner, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kultur- und Zeitgeschichte 1887-1901 (GA 31), p. 361.

10. Gerhard Wehr, Rudolf Steiner, Freiburg 1982, p. 68; Wehr also notes somewhat laconically that Steiner’s “essays from this period betray certain sympathies for the pan-German movement in the Danube monarchy” (p. 82). For the historical context see the excellent treatment by Pieter Judson, “When is a diaspora not a diaspora? Rethinking nation-centered narratives about Germans in Habsburg East Central Europe” in Krista O’Donnell, Renate Bridenthal, and Nancy Reagin, editors, The Heimat Abroad: The Boundaries of Germanness (University of Michigan Press 2005).

11. Christoph Lindenberg, Rudolf Steiner: Eine Biographie, Stuttgart 1997, p. 61: “Steiner selbst rechnete sich zu dieser Bewegung,” namely the “deutsch-national” movement. Lindenberg further notes that “Steiner was active in this movement well beyond the usual level of involvement,” observing that Steiner served in a variety of official positions in a pan-German student organization (p. 62). Lindenberg’s biography also devotes an entire chapter to Steiner’s stint as editor of the pan-German newspaper Deutsche Wochenschrift; see chapter 9, “Der Redakteur — Ein Ausflug in die Politik”. For a description of the crucial role of the Deutsche Wochenschrift as the mouthpiece of radical German nationalism in Austria, see William McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria, New Haven 1974, pp. 201-206.

12. In another work, Kann traces the “tremendous ideological influence” of Austrian pan-Germanism on National Socialism (Kann, The Multinational Empire: Nationalism and National Reform in the Habsburg Monarchy 1848-1918, New York 1964, vol. 1 p. 98), and points to the pan-Germans’ “policy of national raving, charging any moderate national policy with betrayal of the cause of the German people” (p. 100). That description perfectly fits much of Steiner’s journalism in the 1880’s. Roger Chickering also describes one of the main ideological motifs of pan-Germanism: “Pan-Germans embraced the belief that the Aryans had stood at the top in the natural hierarchy of races and that the distinction of being the least polluted survivor of the Aryans belonged to the Germanic (or Nordic) race, of which the Germans made up the principal part.” (Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League 1886-1914, London 1984, p. 242)

13. These facts are very easy to find throughout the existing historical literature; for further examples see among others Jörg Kirchhoff, Die Deutschen in der österreichisch-ungarischen Monarchie, Berlin 2001.

14. Waage also puts in a good word for Steiner’s reactionary mythology of Mitteleuropa, rather incongruously comparing it to the trans-European “third way” movements during the cold war. The historically nonsensical comparison aside, Waage has misunderstood Steiner’s stance. The ideology of Mitteleuropa took various forms, but Steiner’s position clearly fit the criteria of what one historian calls “the nationalistic perspective of a German historical mission” (Lonnie Johnson, Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends, Oxford 1996, p. 169). Johnson remarks: “Frequently based upon the idea of German ‘colonization’ on the Continent, this version of Mitteleuropa appealed to a broad spectrum of radical conservatives, romantic Pan-Germans, and antimodern agrarianists in Wilhelmine Germany.” (ibid. p. 170) There is a substantial literature on this very question, and Waage would do well to familiarize himself with it; among other discussions of the political ramifications of Mitteleuropa ideology see Henry Meyer, Mitteleuropa in German thought and action 1815-1945 (The Hague 1955); Jörg Brechtefeld, Mitteleuropa and German politics: 1848 to the present (New York 1996); Fritz Fischer, Weltmacht oder Niedergang: Deutschland im ersten Weltkrieg (Frankfurt 1965), pp. 14-19, 45-49, 70-73; Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914-1918 (Cambridge 2004), pp. 86-87; David Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780-1918 (Cambridge 1998), pp. 362-63; Jürgen Elvert, Mitteleuropa: Deutsche Pläne zur europäischen Neuordnung 1918-1954 (Stuttgart 1999).

15. Once again, Waage has had an extraordinarily difficult time comprehending our argument on this point. He thinks we wrote simply that “Steiner was an antisemite.” In reality, from the beginning we have emphasized Steiner’s ambivalence toward Jews and his confused attitude toward antisemitism. Steiner’s stance on the “Jewish question” did not directly align him with Hitler, who sought the biological elimination of Jews, but with the mainstream of German antisemitism, which sought the cultural, ethnic, and spiritual elimination of Jews.

16. Itta Shedletzky, “Ludwig Jacobowski und Jakob Loewenberg” in Stephane Moses and Albrecht Schöne (ed.), Juden in der deutschen Literatur, Frankfurt 1986, p. 197. Emphasizing the same point, Jacobowski’s friend Anselma Heine wrote: “In order to earn a living, he [Jacobowski] continued to work in the office of a society dedicated to the preservation of Jewry. There as well he had long since been a mere assistant, no longer a believer.” (Heine quoted in Shedletzky, p. 200) This is fully confirmed by anthroposophist sources as well; see Walter Stoll, “Zur hundersten Wiederkehr des Geburtstages von Ludwig Jacobowski” Die Drei January 1968, p. 29. In the version of our earlier reply to Waage printed in Humanist 4/2000, we mistakenly reported that Jacobowski worked for the Vienna branch of the Verein. In fact, he worked for the parent organization in Berlin. For extensive background on the Verein and its attitudes toward Jewishness and antisemitism see Barbara Suchy, “The Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus” in Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 28 (1983) pp. 205-239 (see pp. 214-215 in particular on Jacobowski and Steiner), and Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 30 (1985), pp. 67-103; and Ismar Schorsch, Jewish Reactions to German Anti-Semitism 1870-1914, New York 1972, particularly chapter 3.

17. On Jacobowski’s passionate German nationalism, see Shedletzky, op. cit., and from a perspective sympathetic to Steiner, see Fred Stern, Ludwig Jacobowski, Darmstadt 1966. Both Shedletzky and Stern give ample evidence of Jacobowski’s super-patriotic rejection of his own Jewishness. Cf. also the superb article by Jonathan Hess, “Fictions of a German-Jewish Public: Ludwig Jacobowski’s Werther the Jew and Its Readers” Jewish Social Studies Vol. 11, No. 2, Winter 2005, pp. 202-230.

18. Steiner quoted in Shedletzky, p. 200. Neither of Steiner’s lengthy obituaries of Jacobowski mentions his Jewish origins (see Steiner, GA 32, pp. 92-104); instead they emphasize his devotion to “German spiritual life” (p. 92).

19. Indeed Waage’s whole understanding of assimilationism is historically oblivious, and as a consequence he has totally misunderstood the perspective of liberal assimilationist Jews, which was the exact opposite of Steiner’s stance. Liberal assimilationist Jews in Steiner’s era worked toward the preservation of Jewish identity within German society, while Steiner advocated the elimination of Jewish identity from German society. For basic treatments of the issue see among others David Sorkin, “Emancipation and Assimilation: Two Concepts and their Application to German-Jewish History” in Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, vol. 35 (1990), pp. 17-33; Michael Meyer, “German Jewry’s Path to Normality and Assimilation” in Rainer Liedtke and David Rechter (ed.), Towards Normality? Acculturation and Modern German Jewry, Tübingen 2003; Jehuda Reinharz, Fatherland or Promised Land: The Dilemma of the German Jew, 1893-1914, Ann Arbor 1975; Uriel Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany, London 1975; Alfred Low, Jews in the Eyes of the Germans, Philadelphia 1979; Donald Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany, Baton Rouge 1980; Paul Mendes-Flohr, German Jews: A Dual Identity, New Haven 1999; Hans-Joachim Salecker, Der Liberalismus und die Erfahrung der Differenz: Über die Bedingungen der Integration der Juden in Deutschland, Berlin 1999; Michael Marrus, “European Jewry and the Politics of Assimilation” Journal of Modern History vol. 49 (1977), pp. 89-109; Reinhard Rürup, “German Liberalism and the Emancipation of the Jews” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, vol. 20 (1975), pp. 59-68.

20. See Bruce Pauley, From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism, Chapel Hill 1992, pp. 29-30, and George Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism, Madison 1985, p. 61. On the general contours of assimilationist antisemitism see among others Paul Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, New York 1967, pp. 76-77; Kurt Lenk, ‘Der Antisemitismusstreit oder Antisemitismus der gebildeten Leute’, in Hans Horch (ed.), Judentum, Antisemitismus und europäische Kultur, Tübingen 1988; George Mosse, Germans and Jews, Detroit 1987, chapter 3; Roderick Stackelberg, Idealism Debased: From Völkisch Ideology to National Socialism, pp. 90-91; and Donald Niewyk, “Solving the “Jewish Problem”: Continuity and Change in German Antisemitism, 1871-1945”, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, vol. 35 (1990), pp. 335-370.

21. Steiner, “Vom Wesen des Judentums” in Steiner, Die Geschichte der Menschheit und die Weltanschauungen der Kulturvölker, Dornach 1968, p. 190.

22. Ibid., p. 189.

23. In a further striking instance of Steiner’s Janus face, his early and late antisemitic periods were separated by a brief phase in which he sincerely struggled to comprehend antisemitism as a social force and forthrightly condemned it. The half-dozen articles he published on the topic in the wake of Jacobowski’s death reveal a crude and confused approach to the problem; overall they constitute a well-intentioned but failed attempt to understand antisemitism. And while they criticize antisemitism, these articles simultaneously celebrate “the great cultural mission” of “the German people” (Steiner, GA 31, p. 418). These essays, which apologists like to seize on as if they represented Steiner’s considered views on the matter, were all published within a four month period in 1901. It is, once again, quite understandable that Waage prefers to focus on this aspect of Steiner, but such a skewed perspective is of no help in understanding Steiner’s biography or intellectual development. The handful of articles that he wrote during this time must be contrasted with his straightforwardly antisemitic works, such as this infamous declaration from 1888: “Jewry as such has long since outlived its time; it has no more justification within the modern life of peoples, and the fact that it continues to exist is a mistake of world history whose consequences are unavoidable. We do not mean the forms of the Jewish religion alone, but above all the spirit of Jewry, the Jewish way of thinking.” (Steiner, GA 32, p. 152) Remarkably, Waage himself quotes from this very same essay, Steiner’s adulatory review of Robert Hamerling’s antisemitic satire Homunkulus. Steiner’s essay concludes with a five-page attack on unnamed Jewish critics of Hamerling who are, according to Steiner, “necessarily prejudiced” and incapable of “an objective evaluation of the book” (p. 153). We suggest that any effort to fathom Steiner’s conflicted views on the “Jewish question” must take account of both sides of the Janus face.

24. In the authorized English translation of the book, the passage reads as follows: “The person belongs to a family, a nation, a race; his activity in this world depends upon his belonging to some such community. […] Indeed, in a certain sense the separate individuals are merely the executive organs of these family group souls, racial spirits, and so on. […] In the truest sense, everyone receives his allotted task from his family, national, or racial group soul.” Steiner, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, New York 1961, pp. 239-241.

25. Steiner, Vom Leben des Menschen und der Erde (GA 349), Dornach 1980, p. 52. The quote is from 1923.

26. We recommend, once again, above all Helmut Zander, “Sozialdarwinistische Rassentheorien aus dem okkulten Untergrund des Kaiserreichs” in Uwe Puschner, Walter Schmitz & Justus H. Ulbricht (eds.), Handbuch zur “Völkischen Bewegung” 1871-1918, Munich 1996. The patently racist aspects of Steiner’s teachings do not necessarily mean that all varieties of anthroposophy must be racist; instead they mean that contemporary anthroposophists need to come to terms with the unpleasant side of the Janus face if they want to avoid adopting racist assumptions into their belief system. Zander writes: “Steiner’s work is, in the final analysis, marked by an unsystematized ambivalence in which incompatible and contradictory elements remain side by side. Whether or not anthroposophy is interpreted in a racist manner thereby depends on the interests of the reader. The reception history offers evidence for both readings.” (p. 246) We have, of course, noted anthroposophy’s political ambiguity all along. Although Waage charges us with “extreme ill will” toward Steiner, our ill will is directed solely against the reactionary political implications of Steiner’s anthroposophy.

27. See Werner, Anthroposophen in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, Munich 1999, and Heisterkamp’s review of Werner’s book in Info3 April 1999. Since Waage’s field is journalism, not history, it would be unfair of us to hold him personally accountable for his unfamiliarity with the scholarship on anthroposophy during the Third Reich. But we do think he ought to take some responsibility for the numerous factual errors in his first reply. To choose just one example, Waage originally claimed that the Nazis tried to assassinate Steiner in 1922. After we showed this claim to be wildly inaccurate, Waage now retreats into quibbling with our description of the hotel where the 1922 incident took place. It is difficult to take his shifting position on this point seriously, since Waage plainly had no idea what he was talking about in the first place. We think it would make a genuine debate easier and more fruitful if anthroposophists and their defenders would take a moment to examine the historical evidence for our arguments before dismissing them.

28. For a fuller discussion of Hess’s personal relationship to anthroposophy, see Peter Staudenmaier, “The Art of Denying History” in Communalism 2008. Waage’s laughable contention that J. W. Hauer was the source of our arguments regarding Hess indicates that his grasp of the research on Hess is tenuous at best. Hauer spent his time harassing not just anthroposophists, but all religious groupings other than his own marginal sect. Not one of the numerous scholars who have confirmed Hess’s pronounced anthroposophist predilections draws on Hauer’s primitive propaganda in any way. On the 1941 campaign by Hess’s Nazi rivals to blame his unexpected flight to Britain on anthroposophical and other occult influences, see Kurt Pätzold and Manfred Weißbecker, Rudolf Hess: Der Mann an Hitlers Seite, Leipzig 1999, pp. 269-71; Hauer is not mentioned anywhere. Similarly, Rainer Schmidt’s account of the same events makes no mention of Hauer; see Schmidt, Rudolf Hess, Düsseldorf 1997. Himmler’s official log covering the Hess crisis does not refer to Hauer either; see Der Dienstkalender Heinrich Himmlers 1941/42, Hamburg 1999. For a thorough examination of Hauer’s relationship with anthroposophy see the fine study by Horst Junginger, Von der philologischen zur völkischen Religionswissenschaft: Das Fach Religionswissenschaft an der Universität Tübingen von der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zum Ende des Dritten Reiches, Stuttgart 1999. According to Junginger’s detailed account, Hauer did not depict Hess as an anthroposophist, but as a victim of anthroposophist machinations; see e.g. pp. 204-211. Junginger furthermore emphasizes Hess’s crucial support for and defense of anthroposophist projects in Nazi Germany; see e.g. pp. 202-204.

29. Such basic historical information is not difficult to locate. Readers who find Waage’s version of events plausible may wish to consult the following studies: F. Gregory Campbell, “The Struggle for Upper Silesia, 1919-1922” Journal of Modern History vol. 42 no. 3 (1970), 361-385; T. Hunt Tooley, National Identity and Weimar Germany: Upper Silesia and the Eastern Border, 1918 – 1922 (University of Nebraska Press 1997); Tooley, “The Polish-German Ethnic Dispute and the 1921 Upper Silesian Plebiscite” Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism 24 (1997), 13-20; Tooley, “German Political Violence and the Border Plebiscite in Upper Silesia, 1919-1921” Central European History vol. 21 no. 1 (1988), 56-98; Richard Blanke, “Upper Silesia 1921: The Case for Subjective Nationality” Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism 2 (1975), 241-260; Richard Tims, Germanizing Prussian Poland (Columbia University Press 1941); Ralph Schattkowsky, Deutschland und Polen von 1918/19 bis 1925, Frankfurt 1994, 48-94; Kai Struve, ed., Oberschlesien nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg: Studien zum nationalen Konflikt und seiner Erinnerung (Marburg 2003); Günther Doose, Die separatistische Bewegung in Oberschlesien nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Wiesbaden 1987); Waldemar Grosch, Deutsche und polnische Propaganda während der Volksabstimmung in Oberschlesien 1919 – 1921 (Dortmund 2002); Roland Baier, Der deutsche Osten als soziale Frage (Cologne 1980), 127-147.

30. Steiner, Wie wirkt man für den Impuls der Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus?, GA 338, Dornach 1986, p. 213.

31. ibid. pp. 226 and 234. These same 1921 lectures to Silesian anthroposophists, by the way, controvert Waage’s foolish claim that Steiner repudiated his 1915 work Gedanken während der Zeit des Krieges. For Steiner’s wholehearted re-affirmation of his earlier nationalist screed, see GA 338, pp. 228-9. We must also note, unfortunately, that Waage has misrepresented his own stated source on this point. Christoph Lindenberg’s 1997 biography Rudolf Steiner, p. 581, says more or less the opposite of what Waage claims it says. Here we read that after the war Steiner forcefully rejected criticism of his 1915 tract and insisted that the pamphlet had been correct; his post-war embarrassment at the possibility of it being republished stemmed solely, Lindenberg tells us, from the fact that in 1915 Steiner fully expected Germany to win the war. It is very difficult to see how Waage might have misunderstood Lindenberg’s account on this score. Steiner’s followers continued to promote Gedanken während der Zeit des Krieges after Steiner’s death; it is listed, for example, as one of the “basic works of Rudolf Steiner” in Karl Heyer, Wie man gegen Rudolf Steiner kämpft, Stuttgart 1932, and is reprinted in full in Roman Boos, ed., Rudolf Steiner während des Weltkrieges, Dornach 1933.

32. See, for example, Hans Kühn, Dreigliederungs-Zeit. Rudolf Steiners Kampf für die Gesellschaftsordnung der Zukunft, Dornach 1978, pp. 125-127.

33. Karl Heyer, Wie man gegen Rudolf Steiner kämpft, Stuttgart 1932, p. 84.

34. The Upper Silesian campaign brought to the fore the German cultural nationalist emphasis that had been part of Steiner’s social threefolding all along. Throughout 1920 and 1921 the threefolding newspaper Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus routinely carried articles with titles like “Der Ausverkauf Deutschlands” declaring that threefolding is the only path to “the salvation of the German Volk” and warning against allowing “our German Volk” to “fall prey to foreign influences” while emphasizing the spiritual differences between Slavs and Germans and propounding the German mission of bringing true enlightenment to Eastern European peoples and so on. The 1921 reporting on Upper Silesia in Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus, meanwhile, constantly ridiculed Polish claims in the territory and condemned German politicians for failing to take a hard line in the negotiations over the province. Once partition was decided, the threefolders thundered against its specifics, pointing out that the League of Nations plan meant the loss of significant German economic resources to Poland, all part of the West’s strategy of strangling Germany, in anthroposophists’ eyes. This is what Steiner’s theory looked like in practice.

35. “Zusatz der Schriftleitung”, Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus vol. 2 no. 38 (March 22, 1921) p. 3.

36. Die Schriftleitung, “Dreigliederung und Oberschlesien” Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus vol. 2 no. 40 (April 5, 1921), p. 3.

37. Heyer, “Der Weg zur Lösung der oberschlesischen Frage” Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus vol. 2 no. 31 (January 1921), p. 3.Heyer says nothing similar about Polish interests.

38. Bund für Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus, “Die Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus und die oberschlesische Frage”, Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus vol. 2 no. 36 (March 8, 1921), p. 4. The threefolders go on to write: “In the current situation, the Upper Silesian economy with its raw materials that are essential to the German economy can only be saved for German economic life if they are separated from political factors and made autonomous.” This was the driving force behind Steiner’s stance.

39. Prominent anthroposophist Roman Boos, for example, insisted that critics of social threefolding efforts in Upper Silesia were simply tools of the Entente promoting the anti-German spirit of the Versailles treaty. See Boos, “Wer verrät das Deutschtum?” Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus vol. 2 no. 38 (March 22, 1921), pp. 2-3. After the partition plan was put into effect, Ernst Uehli bemoaned the fact that failure to adopt a threefold solution had led to Germany’s loss of the economically precious portions of Upper Silesia: “Instead of threefolding, which would have meant saving Upper Silesia for Germany, the opposite is now taking place.” Uehli, “Ereignisse der Woche” Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus vol. 2 no. 49 (June 7, 1921), p. 2. Germany’s loss of part of Upper Silesia to Poland continued to agitate Uehli, who viewed this unfortunate outcome as a ruse by the “Western powers” to create for themselves a “mighty economic position” in Eastern Europe and thus stifle Germany’s rightful role there. Months after the League of Nations plebiscite, Uehli was still complaining: “A crucially significant part of German industry and raw materials is being given politically to bankrupt Poland.” Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus vol. 3 no. 18 (3 Nov 1921). A decade after the Upper Silesian campaign, Ernst von Hippel, a well-known anthroposophist, advocate of social threefolding, and fan of Nazism, looked back on the events of 1921, still outraged that a portion of the province went to Poland rather than Germany. After ranting about the Entente, Versailles, Wilson, the League of Nations, and especially the French, von Hippel characterized Poland as “an Asiatic despotism” and deplored the tragic fact that German populations were now forced to live under Polish rule. Ernst von Hippel, Oberschlesien, Königsberg 1931.

40. The anthroposophical editors write: “Silesian friends of Rudolf Steiner’s threefolding idea had tried to advocate social threefolding to a broad audience as a solution to the problem, in order to save Upper Silesia from the disastrous consequences of the plebiscite they had been forced into in 1921, but with the additional recommendation that in case the plebiscite occurred, the only possible vote was a vote for Germany.” (Rudolf Steiner, Die Verantwortung des Menschen für die Weltentwickelung, GA 203, Dornach 1989, p. 337) In another volume dedicated to the charges raised by various opponents of anthroposophy during Steiner’s lifetime, the editors provide a thorough summary of the Upper Silesian threefolding campaign. Here is what they write: “The threefolding league sought to postpone the decision about the final status of Upper Silesia and thus hoped to annul the plebiscite. With this step it hoped to create the possibility of realizing threefolding on a limited scale.” They then quote extensively from Steiner’s “Call to Save Upper Silesia,” and continue: “In case this ideal solution [full-scale social threefolding according to anthroposophist terms] should turn out to be unrealizable, and in case the plebiscite was thus to be carried out anyway, the representatives of the Threefolding League adopted a pro-German position, one which they naturally did not propagate to the outside world, for the sake of their preferred solution.” (Rudolf Steiner, Die Anthroposophie und ihre Gegner, GA 255b, Dornach 2003, pp. 555-556) Walter Kugler, director of the Rudolf Steiner Archive in Dornach, explicitly confirms this point; see pp. 12-13 in Kugler, “Polnisch oder Deutsch? Oberschlesien, ein Schulbeispiel für die Notwendigkeit der Dreigliederung” Beiträge zur Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe 93 (1986). Kugler emphasizes that the anthroposophist campaign in Upper Silesia always told residents to “vote for Germany” in the plebiscite, and moreover quotes Steiner saying the same thing.

41. Two years after the plebiscite, anthroposophists returned to the topic. In a February 1923 discussion with Steiner and other anthroposophists and threefolding activists, including those involved in the Upper Silesian campaign, anthroposophist Hans Büchenbacher reported: “During the struggles around the plebiscite in Upper Silesia, many anthroposophist public speakers in Germany presented threefolding as the peaceful solution and the only healthy solution to the problem, whereupon accusations of treason appeared in the press. Our speakers were able to rebuff these accusations. After all, they could simply point to the fact that if it came to a plebiscite, the threefolders would of course vote for Germany, and that Dr. Steiner himself said this clearly.” (Rudolf Steiner, Das Schicksalsjahr 1923 in der Geschichte der Anthroposophischen Gesellschaft, GA 259, Dornach 1991, p. 389) Steiner was one of the next participants to speak and did not in any way modify or correct or deny Büchenbacher’s unambiguous description, nor did any of the Silesian anthroposophist participants.

42. Rudolf Steiner, Die Anthroposophie und ihre Gegner, p. 328.

43. The lecture can be found in Rudolf Steiner, Die geistigen Hintergründe des Ersten Weltkrieges, Dornach, 1974 (GA 174b) pp. 30-54. As far as we have been able to determine, no English translation of this book has been published. The lecture in question, however, has been translated under anthroposophical auspices, but not made public; it circulates instead among anthroposophists in typescript form. A copy of the typescript can be found at the Rudolf Steiner Library in Ghent, New York, for example, under the following title: Rudolf Steiner, “The Christ-Impulse as Bearer of the Union of the Spiritual and the Bodily”, typescript marked “For Members of the Anthroposophical Society”, translated by M. Cotterell. In order for readers to be able to assess our translation of Steiner’s words in this instance, here is the central relevant passage as it appears in this anthroposophical translation: “And what is the characteristic that must particularly develop in this fifth culture-epoch? It is one that was kindled through the Mystery of Golgotha, namely that spiritual impulses have been led down right into the directly physically-human, that as it were the flesh must be laid hold of by the spirit. It has not yet happened. It will not happen till Spiritual Science has one day spread more widely over the earth and many more men bring it to expression in direct life, until, one could say, the spirit comes to expression in every movement of hand, of finger, in the most everyday affairs. But it was for the sake of bringing down the spiritual impulse that Christ became flesh in a human body. And the characteristic of the mission of white humanity in general is to carry down the spirit, to impregnate the flesh with the spirit. Man has his white skin that the spirit may work in the skin when it descends to the physical plane. The task of our fifth culture-epoch, prepared through the preceding four epochs, is to make the outer physical body a shrine for the spirit. We must acquaint ourselves with those cultural impulses which show the tendency to bring the spirit into the flesh, into everyday matters. When we quite recognise this, then we shall also be clear that where the spirit has still to work as spirit, where in a certain way it has to stay behind in its development — because in our time it should descend into the flesh — where it stays behind, takes a demonic character and does not completely permeate the flesh, there the white skin does not appear. Atavistic forces are present which do not let the spirit come into complete harmony with the flesh. In the sixth post-Atlantean Culture epoch the task will be to know the spirit as something hovering in the surroundings, to recognise the spirit more in the elemental world, because that epoch must prepare the knowledge of the spirit in the physical environment. That could not easily come about if ancient atavistic forces were not preserved which recognise the spirit in its purely elemental life. But these things do not enter the world without the most violent struggles. White humanity is still on the way to take the spirit more and more deeply into its own being. Yellow humanity is on the way to conserve that age in which the spirit is held away from the body, is sought purely outside the human physical organisation. This makes it inevitable that the transition from the fifth culture epoch to the sixth will bring about a violent struggle of the white and yellow races in the most varied domains. What precedes these struggles will occupy world-history up to the decisive events of the great contests between the white world and the coloured world.”

44. Waage’s peculiar insistence that critics of anthroposophy must adopt a properly reverential attitude toward Steiner before they dare to assess his public activities is typical of anthroposophist beliefs. This basic misunderstanding of the function of public debate is the reason Waage finds the notion of political critique so utterly foreign; witness in particular his dilettantish musings on the question of ecofascism. Waage is simply unable to imagine that an ecological activist could “confront the excrescences of the movement that he himself belongs to.” In authentic and intellectually vibrant social movements like the ecology movement, serious issues are discussed and debated openly, passionately, and honestly. Many ecological activists recognize that while topics such as ecofascism may be uncomfortable, a sincere dialogue on contentious matters is essential to any open civic endeavor. The anthroposophist movement, in contrast, seems nearly incapable of sustaining any informed debate on its own history. The various well-founded and historically researched political criticisms of anthroposophy that have been brought forward in the past decade and a half have provoked little more than defensiveness and denial, as if hiding from the facts would somehow make them go away. This is, indeed, the cardinal difference between a genuine social movement and a sectarian club based on cult-like devotion to its dubious guru: while the former thrives on open disputes over controversial issues, the latter dismisses any external political critique as malicious attacks by enemies of anthroposophy.

45. We are also taken aback by Waage’s evident contempt for his own readers, as expressed for example in his penultimate paragraph. He apparently believes that his readers are incapable of holding two ideas in their heads at once, that they cannot make rudimentary sense out of historically complex situations, and that they think a movement which contains some racists must consist of nothing but racists, and vice-versa. Unlike Waage, we expect more from our readers.  We believe that readers can comprehend complexity, ambiguity, and contradictory evidence. We also recognize that readers inclined to sympathize with anthroposophy will not welcome the task we ask of them. It is nonetheless our obligation to ask that they try.

46. The final report has yet to be translated into German or English. Since Waage only had access to the interim report, we will confine our remarks to that version. Our citations refer to the published German translation of the interim report, Anthroposophie und die Frage der Rassen, third printing, Frankfurt 2000.

47. Anthroposophie und die Frage der Rassen, p. 347. That leaves only 79 quotes from Steiner which the commission examined and judged unproblematic. According to the peculiar calculus of the Dutch Commission, 83 “potentially” racist passages alongside 79 “unproblematic” passages adds up to no racism whatsoever, indeed no race theory of any kind, in Rudolf Steiner’s work.

48. The Dutch commission’s “criticism” of the “potentially” racist quotes is sometimes just as disturbing as the quotes themselves. Of Steiner’s line “the white race is the race of the future, the spiritually creative race,” for example, they have only this to say: “The accuracy of these claims can be questioned.” (p. 323)

49. Several of Steiner’s antisemitic passages are included in the final version of the report, though they are not recognized as such.

Göran Fant says that he is unable to recognize the portrait of anthroposophy that I painted in my article “Anthroposophy and Ecofascism.” (1) I am not surprised that he found my portrait hard to swallow, since Fant is convinced that anthroposophy is by definition anti-racist and opposed to nationalist and right-wing politics. I cannot argue with Fant’s personal beliefs, but they are unfortunately incompatible with anthroposophy’s actual historical record. In the course of the several debates that have ensued since my article was first published, I have become increasingly aware that contemporary anthroposophists are often uninformed about the history of their own doctrine. As odd as it may seem to admirers of Steiner, who are inclined to view adherents of anthroposophy as authorities on anthroposophy, many anthroposophists simply do not know very much about Steiner’s teachings or about the development of the movement he founded. Like Fant, they thus find critical descriptions of anthroposophy’s history to be unbelievable, indeed virtually unintelligible. I would like to contribute to a more accurate view by responding to some of Fant’s claims. (2)

Fant says that anthroposophy is anti-authoritarian, anti-elitist, anti-racist, and apolitical. He complains about my article’s supposedly unorthodox method, and offers an alternative interpretation of the relationship between anthroposophy and Nazism. Let us examine each of these arguments in turn.

Authoritarianism

Fant’s statements about the character of anthroposophy are at odds with Rudolf Steiner’s precepts. In order to continue along the path of spiritual and racial advancement, Steiner taught, individuals must subordinate themselves to “the great leaders of humankind” (die großen Führer der Menschheit). If they fail to obey these leaders, their souls are condemned to spiritual and racial stagnation. (3) Anthroposophy is moreover based on an authoritarian epistemology which explicitly denigrates “criticism” and “judgement” while celebrating “reverent veneration” of ostensible spiritual virtues, and rejects “intellectual effort” in favor of “immediate spiritual perception.” (4) Contemporary anthroposophists’ uncritical attitude toward Steiner’s writings is further testament to this authoritarian framework. Fant may be too optimistic about the possibilities for “adapting Steiner’s texts to our time”; short of schism or apostasy, anthroposophy offers no grounds on which its adherents might coherently revise or refute its inherited doctrines. Furthermore, what Fant calls “the great, inspiring wholeness” of Steiner’s teachings depends entirely on anthroposophist credulity toward Steiner’s methods of occult revelation. Whatever the charms of this version of esotericism, such methods are irreconcilable with rational evaluation and independent confirmation. (5) In a judicious assessment of the anti-rational and authoritarian implications of the anthroposophic worldview, Sven Ove Hansson writes: “Steiner’s pronouncements are in practice never questioned in the anthroposophical movement, and very little of substance has been added to the doctrine after his death.” (6) An authoritarian disposition is virtually unavoidable in a movement that considers itself to be preserving a “secret science” (Geheimwissenschaft), one of Steiner’s original terms for anthroposophy. (7)

Elitism

Anthroposophy’s very nature as an esoteric worldview is predicated on the distinction between initiates and non-initiates, as well as on the notion of a ladder of knowledge which all initiates must climb step by step. (8) These are the characteristic marks of an elitist mindset. Steiner also held that the German cultural elite, as the most spiritually advanced segment of the “Aryan race,” had a special mission to redeem the world from materialism. In his own words, “If one national civilization spreads more readily, and has greater spiritual fertility than another, then it is quite right that it should spread.” (9) His theory of the unique cultural mission of the German people was matched by an elitist social doctrine. In his economic writings, Steiner emphasized that decisions must be made by “the most capable”; his “threefold society” was to be run not by the “hand-workers” but by “the spiritual workers, who direct production.” (10) And his racial theories, needless to say, were rigidly hierarchical and tied to anthroposophy’s elitist conception of spiritual progress: “Nations and races are merely the various stages of development toward pure humanity. A nation or a race stands higher the more perfectly its members express the pure, ideal human type, the more they have worked their way through from the transitory physical to the immortal supernatural. The development of humankind through reincarnation in ever higher national and racial forms is therefore a process of liberation.” (11) Even sympathetic observers note that Steiner’s anthroposophy aimed to create a “new spiritual elite”. (12)

Racism

I do not doubt that many anthroposophists today are opposed to racist prejudice. But this admirable orientation does not justify their refusal to confront their doctrine’s racist origins. The theoretical edifice of anthroposophy is built on the comprehensive historical-evolutionary-racial typology Steiner laid out in Cosmic Memory and elsewhere. The key to this typology is the root-race doctrine, which divides the human family into five root races (Wurzelrassen, sometimes also named Hauptrassen or Grundrassen, principal or primary races), with two more root races to appear in the distant future. Each root race is further stratified into sub-races (Unterrassen), a term which eventually gave way, in Steiner’s writings, to the more recognizable unit of the people or nation (Volk). These categories are biological (Steiner calls them “hereditary”) as well as spiritual. The racial classifications are not normatively neutral; they are arranged in ascending order of spiritual development, with the fifth root race, the “Aryan race,” and within that root race the “Germanic-Nordic” peoples, at the top of the hierarchy. This hierarchy, according to Steiner, is an integral component of the cosmic order.

Steiner’s book Cosmic Memory remains to the present day a primary source for anthroposophy’s cosmology, with no distancing whatsoever toward its racist elements. The editor’s foreword to the current edition, published in Dornach, doesn’t so much as mention the book’s racist content, much less try to explain or minimize it; and the Anthroposophical Society continues to officially designate the book one of the “fundamental anthroposophist texts.” (13) Nor did Steiner himself ever renounce it; on the contrary, at the end of his life he reiterated that Cosmic Memory contains the “basis of anthroposophist cosmology.” (14) Today the book is still officially recommended for use by Waldorf teachers. Its racial mythology is elaborated in extravagant detail in many other works by Steiner published by anthroposophical presses. (15)

Thus according to both Steiner and his latter-day followers, humanity’s very existence is structured around the stratified scheme of higher and lower races. (16) Nor is it the case, as Fant would have us believe, that in Steiner’s view these racial divisions “will soon totally disappear.” Steiner taught that the “Aryan race” will reign until the year 7893, six thousand years in the future. Occasionally he indicated that the final transcendence of racial categories would happen sooner, in roughly 1500 years – still an extraordinarily long time to wait for anthroposophy to shed its racial preoccupations. The Dutch anthroposophist commission on “anthroposophy and the race question,” on the other hand, reports that “according to Steiner, the word ‘race’ will no longer have meaning in 5,500 years.” (17)

It is also inaccurate and simplistic to say that Steiner gave the Aryan concept “quite another meaning than it later acquired in the Nazi era.” From the moment it was invented by European racial theorists in the nineteenth century, the notion of an “Aryan race” was bound up in the ideology of racial superiority. That Steiner himself shared this ideology is clear from his contemptuous references to blacks, Asians, aboriginal peoples, Jews, and other non-“Aryans.” Steiner’s version of Aryanism was in fact strikingly similar, even in detail, to that of leading Nazi racial theorists. Steiner divided the Aryan root race into five sub-races: Ancient Indian, Persian, Egyptian-Chaldean, Greco-Roman, and Germanic-Nordic. By comparison, Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg included the Indians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Germans and Scandinavians in the “Aryan race.” (18) Similarly, Arthur de Gobineau’s version of the “Aryan race” comprised Indians, Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Chinese, and Germans. (19) Richard Wagner held that the principal “Aryan” peoples were the Indians, Persians, Greeks, and Germans, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s conception of “the Aryans” was substantially similar to Steiner’s as well. The same is true for fascist esotericist Julius Evola’s variant of the “Aryan race.” Enthusiasts of anthroposophy would do well to familiarize themselves with the history of the Aryan myth. (20) Above all, they would do well to examine more closely the considerable continuities between Steiner’s description of the “Aryan race” and those put forward by leading racial theorists of the nineteenth century and their Nazi inheritors. (21)

In spite of all this evidence and context, Fant insists that “Steiner’s texts do not express any racism.” Two possible explanations for this remarkable conclusion are that Fant has not read Steiner’s racial writings, or that he has a notably limited understanding of racism. The latter possibility is strongly suggested by Fant’s example of “going out in the streets and slaughtering immigrants” as somehow typical of a racist mindset. He appears to believe that “well-meaning” people cannot hold racist views. (22) Fant has evidently never examined racism as a belief system or body of ideas. That these ideas continue to exert a powerful and pernicious influence in modern societies, without for the most part yielding directly murderous consequences, seems to have escaped his notice. Today’s naïve anthroposophists are the kinder, gentler counterpart to xenophobic thugs: not violent, not overtly discriminatory or prejudiced, indeed seemingly the opposite. That is why their potential role is so worrisome: to make ‘soft’ racism and ‘soft’ ethnocentrism socially acceptable in the heart of a materially comfortable but ideologically insecure middle class.

Many readers of “Anthroposophy and Ecofascism” seem to have taken umbrage at this theme; Fant is hardly alone on that score. Since anthroposophists today are frequently unfamiliar with Steiner’s racial teachings, they often find critical attention to these teachings offensive. The indignant response to my brief mention of the Krishnamurti affair provides a revealing example of this dynamic. It is certainly true that Steiner rejected the very possibility of another incarnation of Christ in the physical realm. The standard anthroposophical position that Krishnamurti’s ‘racial’ background played no role in Steiner’s aggravated reaction to the affair is nonetheless historically naïve. The fact that Krishnamurti was not white was a stumbling block for many theosophists at the time. (23) Carla Risseuw writes: “Many white-skinned members of the Order of the Star in the East needed time to digest the fact that the World Messiah (Krishnamurti) was not white.” (24) Roland Vernon’s study of the Krishnamurti affair notes that Steiner in particular “found untenable the notion of a Hindu boy being physically prepared for occupancy by the Lord Maitreya, and this representing a contemporary reincarnation of Christ.” (25) Steiner’s rivalry with the India-based leadership of the Theosophical Society played a crucial role in this development, and a fuller understanding of his reaction requires taking seriously Steiner’s statements about the racial-spiritual status of South Asians, the future direction of racial evolution, the spiritual significance of skin color, and the obsolete and inferior nature of Eastern spiritual traditions.

Steiner pointedly ridiculed the idea that a “Hindu lad,” as Steiner called Krishnamurti, could embody the Christ. According to Steiner, Hindus had long since played out their evolutionary function and were now leftovers of former spiritual grandeur, an anachronism trapped in decline. Krishnamurti was neither white, European, nor Christian, and thus failed Steiner’s test of adequacy for cosmic leadership. In 1911, in the midst of the acrimonious split from the Theosophical Society, anthroposophist Günther Wagner wrote that Steiner and his followers believed: “Since we are the most advanced race, we have the most advanced religion.” (26) It was thus a special affront to the anthroposophical mindset when the rest of the theosophical movement cast its lot with Krishnamurti, who was neither racially nor religiously suited to the role, in anthroposophist eyes. In the aftermath of the split, Steiner continued to insist on a forthrightly racial understanding of Hinduism. (27) He sharply contrasted “the Eastern school” of spirituality to his own “Western school” of esotericism, presenting the difference in racial terms: “But this oriental form of truth is worthless for us western peoples. It could only obstruct us and hold us back from our goal. Here in the West are the peoples who shall constitute the core of the future races.” And: “The dying races of the East still need the Oriental school. The Western school is for the races of the future.” (28)

For Steiner, “the soul life of the Orient” is not fully part of “normal human life,” as the spirituality of the East is “decadent” and “certainly in decline.” (29) He faulted English-speaking Theosophists for looking to India for “ancient Oriental wisdom” and for “borrowing completely from the oriental Indians,” whose springs of wisdom had long since run dry. According to Steiner, “the Oriental thinker” is not at the same level of development as “European spiritual culture,” and it is only in the West that the seeds of the future are to be found. (30) Steiner held that it is the task of “the German people” to spread “spiritual life,” which “the Oriental” has lost; Asians must now receive spiritual guidance from the Germans. Steiner attributed “the purest and cleanest form of thinking” to “the Germans,” who are indeed the carriers of “the future of humanity,” a future which can only be realized by “our own spiritual striving, not by borrowing from the Oriental.” (31) Steiner taught that “the European,” with his “natural endowment,” stands “a stage higher” than “the Oriental.” (32) The purported bodily differences between European and Asian peoples were central to his argument: “The methods by which oriental peoples attained access to the higher worlds in olden times have persisted through tradition and even today are still practiced over in Asia as a decadent form of Yoga, by men whose bodily constitution differs from ours in the West. Nothing of this kind could be beneficial to the West.” (33) Anthroposophists like Fant, as well as Steiner’s other admirers, could gain a better understanding of the impact of Steiner’s racial teachings by examining statements such as these.

Anthroposophy’s politics

Even if Fant’s claim that “anthroposophy is apolitical” were believable, it would hardly be reassuring; it is precisely this sort of naiveté toward the political implications of an all-encompassing quasi-religious worldview that is most troubling about contemporary anthroposophists. Historically speaking, moreover, many of Steiner’s followers, including prominent and institutionally central anthroposophists, have been actively involved in fascist politics. (34) In any case, my article did not argue that all anthroposophists are enthusiastic activists of the radical right, but that the consistent connections between anthroposophic beliefs and right-wing politics have been unmistakable since the doctrine first emerged a century ago. This persistent connection is a mainstay of current research on the European far right. In addition to the many sources cited in my article, interested readers may consult the following discussions of Steiner’s radical right followers:

Jonathan Olsen, Nature and Nationalism; Volkmar Wölk, Natur und Mythos; Peter Kratz, Die Götter des New Age; Reinalter, Petri, and Kaufmann, Das Weltbild des Rechtsextremismus; Bernice Rosenthal, The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture; Jahn and Wehling, Ökologie von rechts; Udo Sierck, Normalisierung von Rechts; Gugenberger and Schweidlenka, Die Fäden der Nornen: zur Macht der Mythen in politischen Bewegungen; Franz Wegener, Das atlantidische Weltbild: Nationalsozialismus und Neue Rechte auf der Suche nach der versunkenen Atlantis; Arn Strohmeyer, Von Hyperborea nach Auschwitz; Joscelyn Godwin, Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival; Gugenberger, Petri, and Schweidlenka, Weltverschwörungstheorien: die neue Gefahr von rechts; Eduard Heller and Maegerle, Thule: Vom völkischen Okkultismus bis zur Neuen Rechten; Klaus Bellmund and Kaarel Siniveer, Kulte, Führer, Lichtgestalten: Esoterik als Mittel rechtsradikaler Propaganda; Harald Strohm, Die Gnosis und der Nationalsozialismus; Jutta Ditfurth, Entspannt in die Barbarei: Esoterik, (Öko-)Faschismus und Biozentrismus; Richard Stöss, Vom Nationalismus zum Umweltschutz; Jens Mecklenburg, ed., Handbuch deutscher Rechtsextremismus; Gerhard Kern and Lee Traynor, Die esoterische Verführung; Claudia Barth, Über alles in der Welt – Esoterik und Leitkultur; and Christiansen, Fromm, and Zinser, Brennpunkt Esoterik. (35)

It is unacceptable to dismiss the virulent, widespread, and ongoing extreme right variant of anthroposophy as “some Germans from the thirties” and “a handful of ghosts of modern times.” (36)

Fant also tries to turn the recently deceased anthroposophist and right-wing extremist Werner Haverbeck into an enemy of anthroposophy, calling his adulatory biography of Steiner “a severe attack on anthroposophy” and a “total rejection of the anthroposophist movement.” Fant presents no evidence for this nonsensical claim, but simply asserts that since Haverbeck’s views on anthroposophy differ from Fant’s own, Haverbeck must by definition be anti-anthroposophy. More telling still, Fant claims that Haverbeck’s portrait of Steiner as a committed German nationalist is “an absurd distortion.” Haverbeck’s book Rudolf Steiner – Anwalt für Deutschland is indeed politically and morally appalling, but its depiction of Steiner’s nationalism is quite accurate, as the briefest familiarity with Steiner’s published writings shows.

During his Vienna years, Steiner was an active member of the deutschnational or pan-German movement in Austria. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century he wrote dozens of articles for the German nationalist press, which are reprinted in volumes 29, 30, 31 and 32 of his Collected Works (above all Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kultur- und Zeitgeschichte and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Literatur). (37) These pan-German publications are politically unambiguous, and they make a mockery of Fant’s naive assertion that nationalism always “bothered Steiner.” (38) Steiner’s German cultural nationalism, based on a chauvinist conviction of superiority and a sense of national mission as well as simple ethnic prejudice, became frantic with the onset of World War One, as his blustery wartime lectures testify (collected in Zeitgeschichtliche Betrachtungen and Die geistigen Hintergründe des Ersten Weltkrieges and elsewhere); and he re-affirmed his German nationalist line in his post-war lectures as well (see, for example, Bewußtseins-Notwendigkeiten für Gegenwart und Zukunft). Steiner remained unapologetic about his nationalist engagement to the end of his life, recalling his pan-German activism in his 1925 autobiography. It may be an uncomfortable fact for progressive anthroposophists to acknowledge, but the far-right Haverbeck had a more accurate understanding of Steiner on this question than the liberal Fant.

In the period since my original exchange with Fant, anthroposophy’s politics have not, alas, been clarified. The far-right inflection of Steiner’s teachings continues to gain adherents and publicity. (39) The case of Andreas Molau is particularly instructive in this regard. In the 1990s Molau was a prominent publicist on Germany’s far-right fringe, and after 2000 became active in the NDP, the major neo-Nazi party in Germany today. Molau also worked as a history teacher at a Waldorf school in the city of Braunschweig for eight years. He was fired (or, by some accounts, resigned) in 2004 when Molau’s official position in the NPD became public. (40) The chief concern for the administration of Molau’s Waldorf school was the possible impact of Molau’s party work on the school’s reputation; as the school’s principal told the media at the time: “This is a catastrophe for our image.” Molau’s Waldorf colleagues, meanwhile, claimed to have been unaware of his political involvements. (41)

Assuming this claim is true, it raises the obvious question of just how Molau’s fellow Waldorf teachers and staff managed not to know about his far-right affiliations for so long. Molau taught history and German (not, for example, math or music) at the same Waldorf school for eight years, and even after the NPD episode erupted into a public scandal, his Waldorf colleagues said they had viewed him as “left-liberal” and “a sympathetic oddball”; they were unanimously surprised to learn of his far-right political activities. But Molau had been a prominent figure on the radical right for a very long time, since the beginning of the 1990s, writing for a range of far-right publications under his real name; for several years he was even culture editor of Junge Freiheit, one of the most notorious of Germany’s extreme right wing journals (where among other things he published an article by another author denying the holocaust). (42) Molau’s openly apologetic biography of Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg was published in 1993. (43) Molau was moreover mentioned in readily available sources on the far right, such as the Handbuch deutscher Rechtsextremismus (handbook on German right-wing extremism) published in 1996. Yet none of Molau’s fellow Waldorf faculty, staff, or parents was aware of any of this information whatsoever. The incident speaks volumes about the level of political obliviousness that is apparently endemic at Waldorf schools today.

Even after leaving Waldorf employment, Molau continues to support Waldorf education strongly. In the immediate aftermath of his departure from the Braunschweig Waldorf school, he forcefully re-affirmed his ongoing esteem for Steiner and his own unchanged commitment to Waldorf pedagogy. He has since run in several campaigns as one of the NPD’s better-known politicians, and his election materials consistently highlight his experience as a Waldorf teacher. Within the NPD executive, Molau is responsible for educational policy. In 2005, as an NPD candidate, Molau was invited to speak at a Waldorf school in Berlin, where he quoted from Steiner’s book on the Mission of the Folk Souls, and declared that Waldorf pupils are “the ideal target audience for the NPD, because of Waldorf schools’ natural feeling for living authority and their cultivated inner connection with German culture.” The NPD put out a press release celebrating this Waldorf event as a breakthrough with youth. (44) In 2007, Molau announced his plan to open a Waldorf educational center under NPD auspices. With this new Waldorf project, the neo-Nazi politician hopes to show “the connection between the nationalist NPD ideology and the teachings of the founder of anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner.”

Fant presumably still believes that such incidents – repeated over and over again in the world of Waldorf, biodynamics, and anthroposophy – are merely isolated, marginal, insignificant anomalies that tell us nothing important about the ostensibly “apolitical” nature of anthroposophy. This pretense simply serves to protect and promote the ongoing infiltration of the far right within the anthroposophical milieu. The Molau case was not a fluke. In late 2004, in the wake of the controversy over Molau’s Waldorf career, the editor of the anthroposophical journal Info3 reported that “a whole array of private voices” within German anthroposophical circles had spoken up in support of Molau. In November 2004, a leading far-right newspaper, the National-Zeitung, published a pointedly sympathetic interview with Molau conducted by an even more famous right-wing extremist, Gerhard Frey. (45) Here Molau emphasized the conceptual affinities between anthroposophy and the contemporary German far right, while citing Steiner’s book The Philosophy of Freedom and touting the wonders of Waldorf education. Molau also noted the support and solidarity he had received from like-minded associates within the Waldorf movement. Molau’s parting of ways with the Braunschweig Waldorf school, in other words, has scarcely solved the problem. (46) Such incidents will continue to recur until anthroposophists finally face their history of far-right affiliations head-on.

“Staudenmaier’s method”

Fant is particularly exercised about what he calls my article’s method, suggesting several times that I misquoted my sources and complaining that I focused on topics he considers to be “peripheral” aspects of anthroposophy. I will gladly let readers draw their own conclusions about whether anthroposophy’s racial doctrines and its extensive history of collusion with fascist and neo-fascist politics constitute “peripheral phenomena.” Fant’s remarks on my use of sources, on the other hand, are mere innuendo; he does not challenge any of my actual citations or quotes. His preoccupation with method is somewhat puzzling, since my article was, if anything, methodologically boring and conservative. Anthroposophy and Ecofascism follows the standard procedure of providing historical background, quoting abundantly from anthroposophist sources, citing some of the critical literature on anthroposophy, and offering my own interpretations of the material while noting alternative interpretations. Readers familiar with some of these sources will recognize that my article, despite its polemical tone, is notably restrained in its argument. I deliberately avoided, for example, making extensive use of historian Anna Bramwell’s prodigious research on anthroposophy’s pro-fascist history, and I completely excluded all occult sources, including those that are damning toward anthroposophy. I also explicitly warned against the sort of guilt by association argument that Fant thinks I have indulged in. Fant’s evident discomfort with my research stems from its content, not from its polemical format. (47)

Indeed Fant appears to be troubled by the very phenomenon of historical analysis itself. He seems bewildered that non-anthroposophists might assess anthroposophist actions according to criteria different from anthroposophists’ own preferred standards. He is apparently unaware of how textual evidence functions outside of an occult framework – yes, Mr. Fant, historians really do need to choose sources that are “typical and representative,” no matter how uncomfortable this may sometimes be for esotericists – and he cannot seem to fathom how external observers could reach conclusions that diverge from his own. Fant thus insists that a critical appraisal of anthroposophy, no matter how copiously substantiated, is automatically suspect. He says, for instance, that my brief summary of Steiner’s lectures on “folk souls” is an “astonishingly unserious distortion.” According to Fant, these lectures are thoroughly anti-racist and intended to “inspire mutual understanding between the peoples.” I am scarcely the only non-anthroposophist to disagree with this simplistic assessment. (48)

The book is an openly ethnocentric argument for all peoples to accept the superiority of Steiner’s peculiar version of Christianity, refracted through a ‘Nordic’ lens, and to acknowledge the “future mission of [the] Teutonic Archangel.” (49) The theme of chapter three is “Formation of the Races,” while the theme of chapter four is “The Evolution of Races.” But the heart of the book is chapter six, titled “The Five Root Races of Mankind” (Steiner’s lecture in Oslo from June 12, 1910). Here Steiner reminds his audience of the racial superiority of “the Aryans,” helpfully explaining that he means “the peoples of Asia Minor and Europe whom we regard as members of the Caucasian race” (p. 106) before going on to discuss “the Caucasian race” for several more paragraphs (p. 107). For some reason Fant calls this two-page disquisition a “parenthetical passage.” For those who have an opportunity to read the text itself, with its unsettling references to “the peculiar character of the Semitic people” and so forth, Fant’s attempt to distract attention from the actual content of Steiner’s book is likely to remain unconvincing. But whatever sense anthroposophists might make of these lectures on the “mission” of “folk souls,” contemporary far-right racists do not concur with Fant’s reading. (50) They continue to promote Steiner’s book alongside other Aryan supremacist literature. (51)

Fant’s complaints about my article’s sources are especially questionable in light of his own careless use of sources. He writes: “Steiner warned already in 1920 about Nazism (GA 199 p. 161).” Here is the passage Fant cites: “This symbol [the swastika] which the Indian or old Egyptian once looked to when he spoke of his sacred Brahman, this symbol is now to be seen on the [Russian] ten thousand ruble note! Those who are making grand politics there know how to influence the human soul. They know what the triumphal procession of the swastika means – this swastika that a large number of people in Europe are already wearing – but they do not want to listen to that which strives to understand, out of the most important symptoms, the secrets of today’s historical development.” (52) Steiner denounces the use of the swastika by the Bolsheviks; he makes no mention at all of Nazism. That is not surprising, since the Nazi party was only formed a few months before Steiner’s speech, and had at the time a tiny membership; moreover, the distinctive Nazi swastika banners were not designed until two years later. (53) Nothing in this passage can meaningfully count as a “warning against Nazism.”

Fant employs similarly ahistorical reasoning in his discussion of anthroposophist Rainer Schnurre’s racist statements. He claims that I have presented “false quotations” from Schnurre, and somehow deduces that my source for these quotations must have been Jutta Ditfurth. The usual procedure in such cases is to provide accurate quotes from the figure in question so that readers may judge for themselves. But Fant gives us no quotes from Schnurre, only his own unsourced conjectures. (54) Moreover, a brief glance at my article will show that I do not quote or cite Ditfurth’s work anywhere in connection with Schnurre; rather, as clearly noted in my article, I quoted Schnurre’s racist pronouncements from Oliver Geden’s book Rechte Ökologie. Fant’s attempt to dismiss Geden as a “critic of anthroposophy” is frivolous; Geden is in reality a critic of right-wing ecology, and he can hardly be expected to ignore anthroposophy’s crucial contribution to this tendency. His book otherwise has no axe to grind with Steiner. Fant furthermore appears to believe that anyone who voices concern about the less savory aspects of anthroposophist politics must be a tool of sinister forces. The conspiratorial mindset so typical of anthroposophy has gotten the better of him in this instance; the suggestion that leftists like Ditfurth and Bierl are secretly in league with the far-right EAP is foolish. For someone so preoccupied with “method,” Fant’s own approach is dubious indeed. (55)

Anthroposophy and Nazism

Fant is convinced that “anthroposophy thinks radically opposite Nazism.” Not only was this view not shared by anthroposophist Nazis, it is not shared by several scholars of the topic. Volkmar Wölk, for example, writes of Steiner’s root-race theory: “It is a short conceptual step from this position to the racial doctrine of the Nazis.” (56) Wölk’s thesis is borne out in detail by James Webb’s pioneering research on anthroposophy’s relationship to other denizens of the occult-racist underground. (57) If Fant finds this sort of scholarship too “critical,” he may prefer to consult the work of historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, who can hardly be suspected of harboring a bias against Steiner. His respected book The Occult Roots of Nazism provides significant evidence on the mutual influence between early anthroposophists and early Nazis. (58) Similarly, the critical esotericists Eduard Gugenberger and Roman Schweidlenka, who are respectful toward Steiner, point out the “decisive influence” of the root-race doctrine on National Socialism. (59) Allow me to emphasize again: these are not the conclusions of “critics of anthroposophy,” but of fair-minded researchers who have carefully examined the historical record. To deny the ideological parallels between anthroposophy and National Socialism, particularly its esoteric and environmentalist variants, can only contribute to ignorance about fascism’s intellectual origins. (60)

I recognize that Fant’s expertise in the cultural history of the German right is limited, and I do not mean to dismiss his views as merely the product of insufficient familiarity with the relevant scholarship. I think that his perspective is, rather, the product of a widespread anthroposophist avoidance of uncomfortable historical facts. Much of what he has to say on the topic of anthroposophy and Nazism is a faithful repetition of the current accepted wisdom in anthroposophical circles. (61) He appears to have relied exclusively on a single source, Uwe Werner’s extended apologia for anthroposophist activities in the Third Reich, for all of his concrete assertions. But even Werner’s tendentious volume provides unambiguous evidence that directly contradicts Fant’s claims.

Fant writes, for example: “In 1922 the Nazis made an attempt to take [Steiner’s] life.” This claim is doubly untrue. The incident Fant refers to was not an assassination attempt, and the Nazis were not involved. But Fant need not take my word on the matter; he only needs to consult Werner’s book, which describes the incident thus: “On May 15, 1922, followers of Ludendorff planned to disrupt a lecture by Steiner in the Munich hotel Vier Jahreszeiten and provoke a melee. But Munich anthroposophists became aware of the plans beforehand and were able to react. Steiner was able to finish his lecture, and only afterwards was there a physical confrontation, in which the anthroposophists prevailed.” (62) The Ludendorffers were not Nazis (63), and a disrupted lecture is a far cry from attempted murder. (64)

Fant further contends that Werner’s book “shows that the absolute majority of anthroposophists radically opposed Nazism,” and that those who believed in “a combination of Nazism and anthroposophy” were “an utterly small number.” Werner’s book contains ample evidence to the contrary. It lists a range of individuals who were both active anthroposophists and members of the Nazi party and related Nazi organizations, and describes frequent instances of voluntary collusion with and ardent support for the Nazi regime. (65) Fant also claims that anthroposophist leaders who “compromised” with Nazi authorities “were ostracized by their colleagues after the war.” Werner’s book refutes this claim as well, noting that the most notorious of these figures continued to be actively involved in anthroposophist institutions, particularly the Waldorf movement, for decades after the war. Indeed Werner states outright that post-war anthroposophists, both internally and publicly, “consciously refused to revive controversies about the behavior of some anthroposophists during the Nazi period.” (66)

So much for Fant’s reliance on his fellow anthroposophist Werner. For some reason Fant accuses me of having “read Werner utterly selectively”; judging from his own arguments, Fant appears not to have read the book at all. This troubling lack of attention to historical detail is coupled with an equally troubling lack of concern with the ethical issues involved. Fant thinks it is “too simple” to say that collaboration with the Nazis was wrong. He prefers to view the actions of pro-Nazi anthroposophists as a “survival strategy.” If this is the best Fant can say for his forebears, that under Hitler they devoted themselves solely to their own survival and that of their doctrine, then I can add nothing to his verdict. (67)

Fant is also skeptical of my argument that a section of the Nazi leadership harbored strong sympathies for anthroposophy. My brief mention of Rudolf Hess seems to have particularly aroused his ire. He writes: “To describe Hess as a ‘practicing anthroposophist’ is of course absurd. The sources show clearly that even if he encouraged biodynamic agriculture, he at the same time strongly rejected its anthroposophical background.” Once again, Fant’s own chosen source provides significant counter-evidence. Werner’s book reproduces a 1937 memo from Hess’s associate Lotar Eickhoff (who joined the Anthroposophical Society after the war) which explicitly states Hess’s conviction that biodynamic farming cannot be separated from its anthroposophist foundations: “The Deputy of the Führer [i.e. Hess] is of the opinion that if one wants to preserve one aspect – like biodynamic agriculture – one cannot in any way separate it from its scientific basis and its scientific reinforcements, that is, from the work set down in Rudolf Steiner’s books and the Rudolf Steiner schools.” (68) Since Hess’s vigorous efforts on behalf of biodynamic agriculture are not in dispute, Fant’s conclusion that Hess nevertheless “strongly rejected its anthroposophical background” remains unsupported.

Fant’s view that Hess was not an anthroposophist himself, however, is one that I have come to share since the original exchange with Fant. I now think that Fant was right and that I was wrong on this question. The matter is worth examining in detail. At the time of the original exchange, I held that Rudolf Hess clearly fulfilled the criteria of a practicing anthroposophist, according to any but the narrowest definition. To support this contention, I noted the following points: Hess’s parents reportedly belonged to the anthroposophist Christian Community. (69) He structured intimate aspects of his personal life, including his diet and health care, around anthroposophist beliefs. (70) He told the British doctor who examined him after his flight to Scotland “that he had for years been interested in Steiner’s anthroposophy.” (71) Reports from the German intelligence services described Hess as a “silent patron and follower of the anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner.” (72) Above all, Hess consistently used his public position to promote anthroposophist endeavors, as detailed at length in Werner’s book. A remarkable range of scholars have explicitly confirmed Hess’s anthroposophist inclinations. (73)

My current view is that these factors indicate considerable sympathy on Hess’s part toward anthroposophy, and a more than passing personal interest in and active engagement with anthroposophical practices. Nevertheless, I now think that Hess’s personal preoccupations within the broad spectrum of occult beliefs and practices were inconsistent and incoherent to such a degree that there is little sense in affirmatively associating him with one particular esoteric tradition. (74) Hess’s dedication to biodynamic agriculture, on the other hand, was both enthusiastic and enduring. Several high-level members of his staff, moreover, had significant personal connections with anthroposophy. Hess himself is perhaps better viewed as more or less indiscriminately susceptible to the full range of Lebensreform, occultist, and völkisch predilections, which is exactly why he found biodynamics, Waldorf, and anthroposophy so congenial. Quite apart from whatever personal stake they may believe they have in the matter, I think that anthroposophists today would do well to acquaint themselves with the historical research on Hess and his decidedly sympathetic attitude toward anthroposophy. (75)

Overall, however, Fant has almost entirely avoided the primary subject of my article, and he thus simply ignores the record of anthroposophist collusion with both National Socialism and Italian Fascism. I think our exchange would have been more productive if Fant had addressed this central topic. It is scarcely one that concerns only “peripheral” figures within the anthroposophical movement. Aside from the Italian fascist anthroposophists I have mentioned above, from Martinoli to Calabrini to Scaligero and so forth, a remarkable variety of German anthroposophists were both active Nazis and well-known in anthroposophical circles. Ernst Harmstorf, for example, was an early and active participant in the anthroposophical movement, since the beginning of the 1920s (he took part in the famous “Christmas Conference” in 1923, for example), and became a prominent spokesman for anthroposophical medicine, particularly after 1945. Harmstorf joined both the Nazi party and the SA in 1933. Heimo Rau, meanwhile, was the son of anthroposophists, a Waldorf teacher from 1946 onward, and a respected anthroposophist after WWII. He was also a Nazi party member. Gotthold Hegele was a prominent anthroposophical physician after 1945. During his time as a medical student in the late 1930s, Hegele was a high-profile student leader and an active anthroposophist, as well as a Nazi student official and a member of the SA; in 1937-1938 Hegele was the head of the Office of Political Education of the National Socialist Student League in Tübingen. As with Hanns Rascher, Friedrich Benesch, and others, these figures are celebrated in standard anthroposophical reference works (which do not mention their Nazi affiliations), and are decidedly not peripheral to anthroposophists’ own self-portrait of their movement’s history. (76)

But there are many further examples. For instance, Max Babl was the head of the Anthroposophical Society branch in the city of Erfurt; he joined the Nazi party in 1933. Hermann Pöschel was the head of the Anthroposophical Society branch in the city of Plauen; he also joined the Nazi party in 1933. Otto Feyh was the head of the Anthroposophical Society branch in the city of Schweinfurt; he joined the Nazi party in 1940. Otto Thorwirth was head of the Anthroposophical Society branch in the city of Gotha; he remained a member of the Nazi party throughout the Third Reich. Hans Pohlmann was a longstanding anthroposophist who had known Steiner personally; he founded the second Waldorf school in Germany in 1922 and was head of the Anthroposophical Society branch in Hamburg and chairman of the local Waldorf school association. Pohlmann was also a Nazi party member. Hermann Mahle was a prominent Waldorf official in the 1930s and a member of the anthroposophical Christian Community. Mahle was also a Nazi party member, and headed the “National Socialist Parents Group” at the Stuttgart Waldorf school, which included 53 party members and 22 members of other Nazi organizations. Carl Grund was an anthroposophist since the 1920s and a prominent activist in the biodynamic movement. In the 1930s he worked as an official of the biodynamic farmers league and was one of the foremost spokesmen for biodynamic agriculture in Germany. Grund joined the Nazi party in May 1933 and joined the SA in November 1933. In 1942 he was made an SS officer, and was promoted to SS-Obersturmführer in 1943.

These are merely some of the more noteworthy examples. It is important to keep in mind that Nazi party membership alone is by no means the sole indication of active and enthusiastic participation in the Nazi movement. One of the more striking instances is the case of Georg Halbe. Halbe was a member of the Anthroposophical Society who did not join the Nazi party, as far as can be determined from the available documents. He was nevertheless a dedicated Nazi. From 1935 to 1942 Halbe belonged to Minister Darré’s staff in the Nazi agricultural apparatus, where he was particularly active in promoting biodynamic agriculture. His tasks included overseeing the “Blut und Boden” publishing house and helping produce the Nazi journal Odal, the chief mouthpiece for Darré’s blood and soil ideology. Halbe wrote extensively for other Nazi publications as well, including the Nationalsozialistische Landpost (National Socialist Rural Press), the journal Wille und Macht: Führerorgan der nationalsozialistischen Jugend (Will and Power, periodical of the Hitler Youth), and the SS journal Das schwarze Korps. After Darré fell from power in 1942, Halbe transferred to the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, and then in March 1944 he moved to Goebbel’s Propaganda Ministry, where he continued to work until the end of the war and the destruction of the Nazi state. It seems to me that anthroposophists today who do not harbor nostalgic sympathies for Nazism would be wise to acquaint themselves with this troubled history.

An honest historical reckoning of this sort still seems a long way off. One truly disconcerting example from Fant’s reply is his attempt to rehabilitate the SS functionary Franz Lippert as a “humanitarian.” I can only attribute this whitewash of Lippert’s activities at Dachau to a deeply misguided notion of “good Nazis.” Fant’s exclusive focus on the issue of Lippert’s personal behavior is profoundly wrongheaded in any case, as it ignores the much more significant fact that Lippert was a central figure in integrating anthroposophical principles of biodynamics into the criminal enterprises of the SS concentration camp system, but even just Fant’s arguments about Lippert’s individual behavior are historically uninformed and consequently distorted. Fant quotes several positive post-war reports about Lippert’s conduct in order to absolve him, but fails to place these reports into context. Fant also believes that Lippert was exonerated by “an allied de-Nazification commission.” This is a severe misunderstanding, and indicates unawareness both of the fundamental facts about Lippert’s specific case and of basic facts about post-1945 evaluations of Nazi collaborators overall. (77)

Lippert’s post-war hearing, which ended in acquittal in 1948, was not conducted by an Allied de-Nazification commission. It was instead part of the German civilian court system, the same system that produced thousands of acquittals and absolved an entire generation of Nazi officials and collaborators. (78) A thorough and perceptive study of this system is now available: historian Harold Marcuse’s book Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp (Cambridge 2001), the best single source on the post-war rehabilitation of Dachau guards and SS staff. I think Fant would do well to peruse chapter 3, “Good Nazis”, in particular. (79) The historical perspective provided by such studies is essential to understanding the salience of post-war claims that Lippert and other SS overseers had treated their prisoners kindly.

Marcuse describes the ways in which SS criminals were re-cast as “rescuers” after the war by the very same court system that acquitted Lippert (pp. 89-94, 104-5). He sharply contrasts these German civilian courts to the very different de-Nazification courts established and staffed by the allied authorities. The German civilian juries, known as “Spruchkammer,” routinely invoked the notion that SS officers who treated prisoners well were thereby less guilty, and on this basis these civilian juries on several occasions acquitted defendants who were complicit in multiple murders. Marcuse provides an extensive and thoughtful contrast of the two markedly different de-Nazification procedures on exactly this point: whereas the Allied-sponsored trials on the Nuremberg model explicitly rejected the notion that having treated prisoners kindly reduced the guilt of concentration camp officers, the German civilian courts embraced this notion wholeheartedly. In the appeals chamber that handled Lippert’s case, SS officers and other Nazi camp personnel got off very easily. According to Marcuse, “most of them were let off without so much as a verbal reprimand.” (p. 93) He continues: “by late 1947 the denazification program was no longer taken seriously [...] the chambers began rubber-stamping the remaining cases, releasing thousands of the heavily suspect internees without hearings in early spring 1948.” Marcuse characterizes this as “the wholesale release of heavily compromised Nazi activists.” (p. 94) (80)

Marcuse’s thorough study of Dachau, Lippert’s own camp, is hardly the only useful source on the topic Fant chose to address. Consider the fine analysis by Karin Orth, “The Concentration Camp SS as a Functional Elite” in Ulrich Herbert, ed., National Socialist Extermination Policies (New York 2000), pp. 306-336. Orth examines the post-war trials of mid-level SS officers from various concentration camps, particularly those in Germany proper, mentioning Dachau specifically (p. 328). Orth perceptively describes “the nimbus of the “decent” and “correct” SS officer, which was sworn to in numerous court statements” (p. 328). She continues: “Many surviving inmate functionaries testified on behalf of the SS men in order to divert attention from their own involvement in the crimes of the SS.” (p. 328) According to Orth’s study, some former inmates “believed that a subjective sense of justice demanded they testify that the indicted commander [...] was relatively “decent” and “correct” in his treatment of them and in comparison with their respective predecessors” (p. 328). Of the post-war trials of these SS officers from regular concentration camps, she writes: “only a fraction concluded with an official conviction.” (p. 329) This historical context is crucial to comprehending the case of Franz Lippert.

Fant’s admiration for Lippert is also difficult to reconcile with the historical evidence about conditions for the prisoners forced to work on Lippert’s biodynamic plantation. There is a wide variety of sources on this subject as well, many of them first-hand. While these sources do not tell us anything about Lippert’s personal comportment one way or the other, they do provide a broader perspective on the circumstances at the biodynamic plantation he oversaw. The official history of the Dachau concentration camp describes the plantation as a place “where so many thousands of prisoners labored in all weathers, and where a great many of them were shot or drowned in the ditches” – hardly a “humanitarian” enterprise. (81) Another thorough source describes the inmates as “slowly wasting away” on the plantation, and notes their high death rate. (82) Yet another historical analysis observes that “several hundred prisoners” died at the Dachau plantation. (83) Still another recalls the numerous prisoners who “labored and died under the supervision of brutal SS officers” at the plantation. (84)

Detailed and credible eyewitness testimony from former Dachau prisoners amply confirms this dire portrait of Lippert’s biodynamic plantation. One memoir by a former Dachau inmate offers a first-hand and quite harrowing account of work on the plantation. (85) Another memoir by a former inmate provides an even bleaker depiction of the plantation, noting that hundreds of prisoners “worked, suffered, and died” on the “fields of the notorious plantation”. (86) Yet another calls the plantation a “murder-pit” and “the terror of all the inmates.” (87) Such accounts are corroborated by further eyewitness testimony. A representative memoir by another former inmate states: “In Dachau the clergy were assigned to one of the hardest commandos, the plantation. Most of those who died in 1942/43 perished from the work methods that were required there.” (88) Similar conclusions are supported by ex post facto studies as well. (89)

This massive accumulation of evidence casts serious doubt on Fant’s version of events and on his defense of Lippert. But the very foundation of Fant’s stance regarding this matter is severely flawed. The desperate search for some sort of positive spin on this anthroposophist SS officer and concentration camp guard is all too revealing about anthroposophical attitudes toward their own compromised history during the Third Reich. Contrary to Fant’s depiction of him as a selfless protector of Nazism’s victims, Lippert was in fact personally committed to Nazism. He produced biodynamic pamphlets for the SS (90), and even his anthroposophist friends were taken aback by Lippert’s fervent devotion to the Hitler movement and its ideals. (91) Since anthroposophists are unable to point to a single figure from their ranks who actually joined the resistance to Hitler’s regime (92), they are reduced to pleading, a half-century after the liberation of the concentration camps, that at least the anthroposophist Lippert was nice to his prisoners. Soothing individual testimonies may salve the post-war anthroposophist conscience, but they cannot distract attention from the central fact that Lippert’s work was an integral part of the SS’s use of slave labor in promoting biodynamic agriculture. (93) Fant’s misjudgement of Lippert is a case study in anthroposophy’s evasion of its own history. (94)

Much of the rest of Fant’s reply to my article consists of un-confirmable assertions about the nature of Waldorf education and the role of various ethnic groups within contemporary anthroposophy. I do not consider myself competent to judge these claims, but they strike me as both irrelevant and implausible. (95) I must on the other hand agree with Fant that, compared to him, I have a “broad” definition of racism. Fant avers, for example, that “the word negro was quite neutral” in Steiner’s day. Racial terms are never neutral; when used in racist contexts, such as Steiner’s invective about blacks and other non-whites, they are terms of abuse and denigration. This is not a matter of “over-interpreting” Steiner’s unequivocal pronouncements, as Fant thinks, but of situating them within their historical and ideological context. While much of Steiner’s writing on racial themes is a re-working of standard occult cosmologies, there is no point in denying that he occasionally reverted to straightforward racism.

On a final sour note, Fant also repeats as fact the long discredited racist propaganda about “outrages of black soldiers against German women in the Ruhr.” Aside from mixing up the Rhine and Ruhr occupations (there were no colonial troops stationed in the Ruhr), Fant has been hoodwinked by an eighty-year-old misinformation campaign. (96) These rumors of “outrages” were not merely “exaggeratedly described,” as Fant would have it, they were an invention of German nationalist demagogues and were just as racist as the stories of similar “outrages” in the American South during the same period. (97) The patently spurious reports were already exposed in 1921 by German opponents of the racist propaganda (including feminists, socialists, and others), as well as by anti-racist journalists in other countries who simultaneously opposed the occupation. (98) The reports were investigated thoroughly by the Allied authorities at the time and explicitly and unequivocally repudiated. (99) If it is true, as Fant suggests, that such primitive German nationalist propaganda was the source for Steiner’s unconscionable statements about French colonial troops, it would scarcely mitigate Steiner’s racism. The most infamous of these propaganda pamphlets begins by decrying “the defilement of the white woman as such” and claims that “young girls have been dragged from the street in order to satisfy the bestial lust of African savages.” The pamphlet appeals to “women and men of the white race” to protest this “deepest disgrace that can befall a white woman.” It describes the colonial troops as “colored barbarians” with “animalistic instincts,” “blacks from the Ivory Coast of Africa whose language no-one can understand, who have barely learned a few scraps of French, savages from darkest Africa . . .” (100) This is the sort of thing that Rudolf Steiner evidently took at face value. It is doubly disconcerting that his followers continue to do so today. (101)

This last misstep on Fant’s part encapsulates our entire exchange. Innocent of any historical perspective on the events he describes, Fant is susceptible to the comforting myths propagated by his fellow anthroposophists. From his credulous point of view, a skeptical approach like mine appears as a frontal assault on anthroposophy as a whole. Yet my article was not an attack on anthroposophy in general, but an inquiry into the sinister side of its political consequences. The same historical arguments that I have put forward about the relationship between anthroposophy and ecofascism could just as well be advanced from a standpoint sympathetic to Steiner. Anthroposophy can, after all, be viewed as an attempt to bridge occultism and rationalism, the esoteric and the practical, mysticism and humanism. This attempt failed in interwar Germany because it ignored its own political context, and was consequently drawn into the orbit of mass barbarism. From this perspective, anthroposophy’s equivocal history during the fascist era is an object lesson in the perils of spiritualized politics. Its latter-day practitioners would do well to heed this lesson. (102)

For now, however, the lesson remains unlearned. In historical terms, anthroposophy is a relatively young body of ideas, one that still jealously guards its cherished self-understanding as an esoteric doctrine. If anthroposophy is to continue developing as a worldview and as a movement, then its practitioners will at some point inevitably have to engage in substantial re-interpretation of its founding texts. Once this process gets underway, anthroposophists will at last begin more or less systematically to filter out and neutralize the racism in Steiner’s works, in the same way that Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and others have attempted to re-interpret and defang the various narratives of divinely sanctioned ethnocentric violence that mar so many sacred scriptures. But anthroposophy has not yet reached this point; it is still in the stage of denial, of self-absorption, of circling the wagons against external scrutiny. This may be inevitable for esoteric doctrines; perhaps the transition to a mature, responsible engagement with anthroposophy’s origins can only take place once the esoteric gives way to the exoteric. In any case, anthroposophists who sincerely oppose racism would be well advised to lift their heads out of the sand and start wrestling with the less pleasant aspects of Steiner’s work.

Göran Fant is so taken with “the great, inspiring wholeness” of Steiner’s teachings that he has allowed his critical faculties to be incapacitated. For him, criticism of Steiner or of anthroposophy is simply a “smear campaign.” His unwillingness to come to terms with anthroposophy’s ambivalent legacy is typical of far too many contemporary anthroposophists. Indeed this defensive and evasive attitude seems to be most common among relatively liberal anthroposophists. There are many readily available sources that describe and analyze anthroposophy’s reactionary heritage; progressive anthroposophists have no excuse for continuing to ignore them. Fant’s reply exemplifies not so much the denial of history as the avoidance of history, the refusal to engage with a compromised past in a dignified and honest way. Until anthroposophists overcome this self-exculpatory abdication of moral responsibility, their claims to represent an enlightened and tolerant doctrine will remain insincere.

Postscript on Waldorf Education:

In view of the many intensely aggravated anthroposophist responses to my research, and in consideration of Göran Fant’s own position as a Waldorf teacher, it may be best to reiterate that I am not primarily a critic of Waldorf education as such, but a critical historian of the anthroposophical movement. My skepticism toward Waldorf stems largely from the unreflected negative elements within anthroposophy’s past and present. Since I am, however, an active supporter of and sometime participant in the alternative education movement, a number of readers have asked for my perspective on Waldorf schooling today. While my focus is on anthroposophy and Waldorf during the first half of the previous century, and particularly during the Third Reich, rather than on current trends, and while I am not especially familiar with the internal workings of Waldorf schools today, I do share a range of misgivings regarding Waldorf pedagogy. My concerns may be summarized as follows:

Much of the original Waldorf movement in Germany before 1945 flatly rejected, and in some cases openly ridiculed, a variety of central alternative pedagogical principles, such as: small class sizes and concomitant ample individual attention; an emphasis on the unique and changing character of each pupil as an individual; encouragement of critical skills and independent thinking; an international orientation; a focus on the self-actualizing and self-directed unfolding of each child’s individual potential; teaching that is child-centered rather than teacher-centered; democratic organization of curriculum, classroom practice, school structure, and so forth. The original Waldorf movement often defined itself against such alternative approaches to education, dismissing these approaches as un-German, spiritually unsound, and as decadent and damaging instances of “international reform pedagogy.”

According to the original Waldorf model, children are incompletely incarnated beings whose process of incarnation must be overseen by anthroposophically trained teachers. Waldorf pedagogy as established by Steiner is explicitly teacher centered, not child-centered, and the teacher is to have an expressly authoritarian role within the classroom. Children’s critical faculties are frowned upon and discouraged. Early Waldorf leaders also vehemently denounced individualism, calling it un-German and corrosive of authentic spirituality. The original Waldorf approach holds that every child is to be slotted into one of four temperaments, and that every child progresses through the same static stages of personal evolution based on Steiner’s occult theories, and that these stages and temperaments are marked by physiological characteristics, just as the level of spiritual development of every soul is marked by the ostensible racial and ethnic characteristics of the body it occupies. These doctrines and practices are central to Waldorf as it was originally conceived and implemented.

Such assumptions are, in my view, at odds not only with significant components of alternative education, but with virtually any responsible pedagogical approach. Along with authoritarian and developmentally inappropriate teaching methods, Waldorf class sizes are also a serious concern; the normal class size at the original Waldorf school in Stuttgart during Steiner’s lifetime was approximately 40 pupils, with some classes as high as 120 pupils, and in 1951 the average class size was over 50 pupils. These figures are not only sharply contrary to the basic orientation of the alternative education movement, they are significantly larger than in many other schools, public or private, both in North America and in Europe.

Waldorf’s peculiar pedagogical preoccupations sometimes extend well beyond such mundane matters, however. Consider, for example, the classical Waldorf response to left-handed children. In his conferences with the original Waldorf faculty, Steiner emphasized that left-handedness is unacceptable in Waldorf classrooms. Readers skeptical of this claim need merely consult the published conferences themselves, readily available in book form as Rudolf Steiner, Konferenzen mit den Lehrern der Freien Waldorfschule in Stuttgart; the series is available in English under the title Faculty Meetings with Rudolf Steiner. In the conference of May 25, 1923, for instance, Steiner declared left-handedness to be a “karmic weakness” (Steiner, Konferenzen mit den Lehrern der Freien Waldorfschule vol. 3, p. 58; see also vol. 2, p. 92 – the conference of May 10, 1922 – on the anthroposophical view of left-handedness in conjunction with temperament). In the conference of December 18, 1923, a teacher reported to Steiner that a certain pupil in the 7th grade wrote better with her left hand than with her right hand, and Steiner responded that the pupil must be told she may only write with her right hand (Steiner, Konferenzen mit den Lehrern der Freien Waldorfschule vol. 3, pp. 109-110; interested readers may also consult Rudolf Steiner, Die Erneuerung der pädagogisch-didaktischen Kunst durch Geisteswissenschaft, pp. 199-200). This coercive practice is inimical to a free and holistic education, which Waldorf claims to represent. Some latter-day Waldorf practitioners nonetheless continue to defend the practice.

A number of Waldorf schools today, in Germany and elsewhere, have modified several of these questionable features, and there is undoubtedly a wide spectrum of current Waldorf practices, with some schools hewing to a relatively orthodox heritage while others choose more freely from the broad palette of Steiner’s teachings. Some schools, at least, appear to have gone through a more or less deliberate process of deciding what to retain and what to discard from the array of traditional Waldorf precepts. Many of the features outlined above, however, are for better or worse a large part of what makes Waldorf distinctive among the various approaches to education represented today, alternative or otherwise. It seems to me that it would be sensible for those who wish to defend the positive aspects of Waldorf to take some notice of these problematic features, at the very least, and try to take these features into account when discussing Waldorf education as a whole.

Similar issues arise regarding a range of other characteristic Waldorf phenomena. While these particular questions may or may not apply at specific Waldorf schools, they remain typical components of the overall Waldorf approach. For example, a number of European Waldorf schools reject soccer and sex education on anthroposophical grounds, while some North American Waldorf schools reject black crayons. Many Waldorf teacher training programs are based on the notion of Waldorf teaching as a karmic mission. German Waldorf schools currently have an extraordinarily small percentage of ‘foreign’ and non-white students, in sharp contrast to public schools in Germany today. Such matters merit the attention of those who care about the viability, accessibility, and integrity of non-mainstream educational initiatives.

Perhaps the most serious concern raised by critics of Waldorf schooling today (many of them experienced Waldorf veterans) is that Waldorf schools are consistently evasive about the anthroposophical underpinnings of their pedagogy. Waldorf schools in general frequently downplay, deny, or obscure their anthroposophical origins, while providing prospective parents with uninformative and inaccurate depictions of anthroposophy. To an extent, this is an understandable reaction on the part of teachers, administrators, and admirers of a publicly visible institution that is based firmly on an esoteric worldview; the uneasy relationship between occult initiation and public outreach continues to bedevil the anthroposophist movement, whether in Waldorf contexts or biodynamic contexts or otherwise. Such factors may contribute to the unusually high rates of attrition and turnover at many Waldorf schools. The spiritual and/or religious character of anthroposophical beliefs also presents difficult legal issues for some Waldorf schools that depend on or desire public funding. Nonetheless, in secular societies it is particularly important for esoteric movements, paradoxical as this may seem on first glance, to be as straightforward as possible in openly proclaiming their wider aims and views, and to make their basic tenets readily available for external scrutiny. This is especially the case when the education of children is at stake.

An additional serious concern regarding Waldorf schooling is the possible role of anthroposophical teachings on race and ethnicity within Waldorf classrooms. On this score, there is conflicting evidence from Waldorf schools in different countries, and many Waldorf teachers and advocates appear to be simply unaware of Steiner’s racial teachings. This ignorance is at best a double-edged sword, and leaves the underlying problem unaddressed. Unfortunately, attempts at public discussion of this question frequently reveal an unsettling level of complacency toward racial thinking as such, and a lack of knowledge about what racism is and how it functions both historically and today, among enthusiasts and promoters of Waldorf education. The very issue of whether and to what extent the ongoing consequences of racial ideology continue to operate within Waldorf classrooms thus remains difficult to discuss, much less resolve.

Moreover, in many cases defenders of Waldorf – when they address the matter at all – insist that even if such instances occur, they do not indicate any sinister intentions on the part of Waldorf teachers or Waldorf thinkers. This response displays a distressingly naïve understanding of racism. Many forms of racist belief are not intentionally sinister, but are instead embedded in high-minded, benevolent, and compassionate orientations toward the world. It is this type of racist thought, whose historical heritage extends through the White Man’s Burden and many forms of paternalistic racial ideology, that may find a welcome home in some Waldorf schools and other anthroposophical contexts, where it can perpetuate its ideas about race under the banner of spiritual growth and wisdom. This kind of racist thinking spreads more readily precisely because it is not tied to consciously sinister intentions. Seeing through this kind of racism – which, furthermore, often has more widespread and more insidious effects on the real lives of real people than the intentionally sinister variety does – means paying attention to the background beliefs that animate a project like Waldorf, whether among its founding generation or today.

It is, alas, by no means historically unusual to find would-be do-gooders turning into evil-doers, and in the process inspiring a substantial public following, by failing to examine the foundational concepts behind their particular project, harmless as it may initially appear. The history of the Waldorf movement before 1945 presents a microcosm of this complicated process. Waldorf began with sincerely good intentions, and within less than a decade and a half after its inception the Waldorf movement found itself entangled in Nazism, with some Waldorf leaders offering enthusiastic endorsements of various aspects of the Nazi program. Reflecting on this history can help us better understand how good intentions, when wrapped around an unacknowledged and unexamined core of racial and ethnic values, can get swept up into something their founders and promoters did not envision and did not want.

Without dwelling on the details, it is important to recall that prominent anthroposophists and Waldorf spokespeople openly condemned the Weimar republic and endorsed the Third Reich. The fragile democratic system of the Weimar era was established by the opponents of Nazism and represented everything that the Nazis loathed. Several key founders of Waldorf were decidedly hostile to Weimar democracy, and some of them viewed democracy itself as an un-German aberration inflicted on Germany by its enemies. During the interwar period, many Waldorf leaders distrusted democracy and sympathized with national and authoritarian alternatives. The noticeable trend among early Waldorf activists and anthroposophists to denigrate the fledgling democracy in Weimar Germany does not stand out as one of Waldorf’s shining moments, and is particularly striking when viewed alongside the enthusiastic and publicly expressed support for the Nazi regime, over a remarkably long period, by significant elements within the Waldorf movement and the anthroposophical leadership.

For many Waldorf adherents, however, raising such issues even in a carefully contextualized and nuanced manner provokes extraordinary defensiveness; they evidently believe that historians who address such matters are simply fishing for scandal. This attitude is essentially the opposite of my own approach. In my view, neither historians nor anybody else should look to the past to find scandalous subjects in the first place. We ought to be looking instead for historically important themes that are relevant to the concerns of today. By that standard, the Waldorf movement’s history during the Third Reich deserves a good deal more attention than it currently receives, not less, and a good deal more informed and careful and critical attention as well.

It seems to me that this should be clear even to readers who have little specific interest in Waldorf but have a basic sense of twentieth century history. The Waldorf movement and the Nazi movement were almost exactly contemporaneous; they arose at the same time in the same place and with significant cultural and ideological overlap, and occasionally personal overlap as well. The same is true of other aspects of anthroposophy, from the biodynamic movement to the Christian Community. The details of these conflicted interrelationships are complex and sometimes contradictory. Regrettably, this complexity is not reflected in public presentations by today’s Waldorf representatives, and this does a conspicuous disservice to prospective Waldorf clients.

To readers who are supporters of Waldorf, or involved in Waldorf projects in some way, it may be important to say, explicitly and concisely, that the history of your movement under the Nazi regime is complicated and ambivalent, and is not in my view something that you or other Waldorf participants need to feel personally ashamed about. It is, however, something that you would do well to educate yourselves and your colleagues about. As matters stand currently, that will mean taking a skeptical view of the usual Waldorf claims about that historical period, and looking to non-Waldorf and non-anthroposophical sources for more thorough accounts of this part of Waldorf’s past.

I would be pleased if my research provided an opportunity for Waldorf admirers to ponder this contentious history and take its lessons seriously. What is worrisome about the
Waldorf movement’s continued failure to address anthroposophy’s racial legacy is not that Waldorf schools in the twenty-first century will start churning out little Hitler youths; what is worrisome is that Waldorf advocates and sympathizers may unknowingly help prepare the ideological groundwork for another unforeseen shift in the broader cultural terrain, in which notions of racial and ethnic superiority and inferiority could once again take on a spiritual significance that lends itself all too easily to practical implementation in a changed social and political context. For this reason among others, I strongly encourage those involved in Waldorf endeavors to take another look at the history of their movement and the doctrines at its core.

Notes:

1. Swedish anthroposophist Göran Fant’s essay “The Art of Turning White into Black,” a reply to my article “Anthroposophy and Ecofascism,” can be found here: http://hem.passagen.se/thebee/comments/PS/Fant1-eng.htm This exchange originally appeared in 2001. I revised the text of both “Anthroposophy and Ecofascism” and the present article in 2007.

2. Fant raises a number of issues that I cannot address here for reasons of space. A more thorough discussion of some of these issues may be found in Peter Staudenmaier and Peter Zegers, “Anthroposophy and Its Defenders,” as well as Zegers and Staudenmaier, “The Janus Face of Anthroposophy.” For an extremely thorough historical contextualization of anthroposophy, I highly recommend Helmut Zander’s comprehensive study Anthroposophie in Deutschland: Theosophische Weltanschauung und gesellschaftliche Praxis 1884 – 1945 (Göttingen 2007).

3. “People who listen to the great leaders of humankind, and protect their soul with its eternal essence, reincarnate in an advanced race. But he who ignores the great teacher, who rejects the great leader of humankind, will always reincarnate in the same race [. . .] Thus people have the opportunity either to reject the leader of humankind and become caught up in the being of a single incarnation, or to undergo the transformation into higher races, toward ever higher perfection.” (Steiner, Das Hereinwirken geistiger Wesenheiten in den Menschen, GA 102, p. 174) Steiner preached the same message of spiritual submission on more than one occasion: “We know, after all, that each person proceeds further on the course of the earth mission by following the great leaders of humankind, who decree the goals of humankind.” (Die Apokalypse des Johannes, GA 104, p. 90)

4. Steiner, Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten? (GA 10) pp. 21 and 46; and Aus der Akasha-Chronik (GA 11) p. 3. The first book is published in English under the title Knowledge of Higher Worlds, the second under the title Cosmic Memory. Here is an excerpt from the former book: “Our civilization tends more toward critique, judgement, and assessment, and less toward devotion, toward reverent veneration. Even our children criticize much more than they devotedly revere. But all criticism, all passing of judgement repels the powers of the soul to attain higher knowledge, just as devotional reverence develops these powers.” (GA 10 p. 21) Steiner already rejected criticism in his very first book; see Steiner, A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World Conception, New York 1978, 6. For a thoughtful analysis of the authoritarian elements in Steiner’s approach to occult knowledge see Zander, Anthroposophie in Deutschland pp. 608-612; throughout his book, Zander emphasizes Steiner’s authoritarian orientation.

5. For background on occult approaches to knowledge see among others Wouter Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1996), and Olav Hammer, Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age (Leiden 2001). For historical overviews see Kocku von Stuckrad, Western Esotericism: A Brief History of Secret Knowledge (London 2005); Corinna Treitel, A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern (Baltimore 2004); and Wouter Hanegraaff et al., Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (Leiden 2005).

6. Hansson, “Is Anthroposophy Science?” Conceptus XXV no. 64 (1991), p. 37. One of the earliest observers of the anthroposophist movement noted already in 1921 that “the followers of ‘anthroposophically oriented spiritual science’ swear by the teachings of their lord and master with blind fanaticism.” (Siegfried Kracauer, Aufsätze 1915-1926, Frankfurt 1990, p. 113) For first-hand confirmation of this observation see the remarkably similar 1908 comments by theosophist and later anthroposophist Ludwig Deinhard in Norbert Klatt, Theosophie und Anthroposophie: Neue Aspekte zu ihrer Geschichte, Göttingen 1993, p. 42.

7. This does not by any means indicate that anthroposophists are a monolithic group; they are on the contrary a notably fractious bunch, like the broader theosophical milieu overall. There are as many interpretations of anthroposophy as there are anthroposophists. Indeed anthroposophists sometimes can’t seem to agree on anything except denial of Steiner’s racism.

8. The seeds of Steiner’s elitist perspective, including the conception of a small group of “free spirits” acting as authorities whom others follow, can already be discerned in his early work The Philosophy of Freedom.

9. Steiner, The Threefold Commonwealth, New York 1922, p. 183.

10. ibid. p. xxxii.

11. Steiner, Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten? pp. 209-210. Here is how the passage appears in the authorized English translation: “For peoples and races are but steps leading to pure humanity. A race or a nation stands so much the higher, the more perfectly its members express the pure, ideal human  type, the further they have worked their way from the physical and perishable to the supersensible and imperishable. The evolution of man through the incarnations in ever higher national and racial forms is thus a process of liberation. Man must finally appear in harmonious perfection.” Steiner, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, New York 1961, p. 252. Terms like “higher racial forms” occur throughout Steiner’s writings, always linked to higher spiritual forms. This elitist racial scheme has frequently been adopted wholesale by later anthroposophists. A.P Shepherd, for example, writes that humankind has been “differentiated into races, at different cultural and moral levels.” (Shepherd, A Scientist of the Invisible. An Introduction to the Life and Work of Rudolf Steiner, London 1954, p. 103)

12. Perry Myers, The double-edged Sword: The cult of Bildung, its downfall and reconstitution in fin-de-siècle Germany (Rudolf Steiner and Max Weber), Oxford 2004, p. 97.

13. Wolfram Groddeck, Eine Wegleitung durch die Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe, Dornach 1979, p. 16.

14. Steiner, Mein Lebensgang, Dornach 1925, p. 301.

15. For further detailed statements of Steiner’s racial doctrines see for example Steiner, “Die Grundbegriffe der Theosophie: Menschenrassen” in Steiner, Die Welträtsel und die Anthroposophie; Steiner, “Farbe und Menschenrassen” in Steiner, Vom Leben des Menschen und der Erde; Steiner, “The Manifestation of the Ego in the Different Races of Men” in Steiner, The Being of Man and His Future Evolution; Steiner, The Apocalypse of St. John; Steiner, Grundelemente der Esoterik; Steiner, The Occult Significance of Blood; Steiner, Menschengeschichte im Lichte der Geistesforschung, 480-87; Steiner, Die okkulten Wahrheiten alter Mythen und Sagen, 37-39; Steiner, Kosmogonie, 246-48; Steiner, Menschheitsentwickelung und Christus-Erkenntnis, 244-246; Steiner, Aus den Inhalten der esoterischen Stunden, 115-116, 124-125, 169-170, 217-221; Steiner, At the Gates of Spiritual Science, 65-74, 96-103; Steiner, The Mission of the Individual Folk Souls in Relation to Teutonic Mythology, London 2005. It is difficult to credit Fant’s suggestion that all of these texts, and the dozens of others like them, published with the official anthroposophist imprimatur, are merely “falsified statements”.

16. A number of scholarly analyses of anthroposophical racial doctrine are readily available to interested readers. See above all Helmut Zander, “Sozialdarwinistische Rassentheorien aus dem okkulten Untergrund des Kaiserreichs” in Uwe Puschner, Walter Schmitz, and Justus Ulbricht, Handbuch zur ‘Völkischen Bewegung’ 1871-1918, Munich 1996; Zander, “Anthroposophische Rassentheorie: Der Geist auf dem Weg durch die Rassengeschichte” in Stefanie von Schnurbein and Justus Ulbricht, Völkische Religion und Krisen der Moderne, Würzburg 2001; Georg Schmid, “Die Anthroposophie und die Rassenlehre Rudolf Steiners zwischen Universalismus, Eurozentrik und Germanophilie” in Joachim Müller, Anthroposophie und Christentum: Eine kritisch-konstruktive Auseinandersetzung, Freiburg 1995; Peter Staudenmaier, “Race and Redemption: Racial and Ethnic Evolution in Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy” Nova Religio: Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions vol. 11 no. 3 (2008), pp. 4-36.

17. Anthroposophie und die Frage der Rassen, Frankfurt 2000, p. 132. Fant’s repeated reliance on this dissembling Dutch document is unfortunate; the commission’s work is little more than a whitewash, an elaborate exercise in hypocrisy. Only readers unacquainted with Steiner’s writings could be taken in by its comforting message. The fact that this report has gained the endorsement of a talented and respected historian like Jörn Rüsen indicates the powerfully disorienting effect of Steiner’s charisma on otherwise sober and informed minds. For a thorough review of the Dutch report, see Peter Zegers and Peter Staudenmaier, “The Janus Face of Anthroposophy.”

18. The only difference between Rosenberg’s version and Steiner’s is the absence of the “Egyptian-Chaldeans.” Rosenberg’s racial writings also refer to Ahriman, the Fenris Wolf, and other figures prominent in Steiner’s texts. See Alfred Rosenberg, Race and Race History, New York 1970, especially pp. 42-84.

19. See Gobineau: Selected Political Writings, New York 1970, pp. 142-3.

20. There is a very large literature on the topic; for a variety of viewpoints see Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge 1992); Thomas Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley 1997); Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (New York 2002); Vasant Kaiwar, “The Aryan Model of History and the Oriental Renaissance” in Vasant Kaiwar and Sucheta Mazumdar, eds., Antinomies of Modernity: Essays on Race, Orient, Nation (Durham 2003); Romila Thapar, “The Theory of Aryan Race and India: History and Politics” Social Scientist 24 (1996), 3-29; John V. Day, “The Concept of the Aryan Race in Nineteenth-Century Scholarship” Orpheus: Journal of Indo-European and Thracian Studies 4 (1994), 15-48; Peter van der Veer, “Aryan Origins” in van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton 2001), 134-157; Dorothy Figueira, Aryans, Jews, Brahmins: Theorizing Authority through Myths of Identity  (Albany 2003); Madhav Deshpande, “Aryan Origins: Brief History of Linguistic Arguments” in Romila Thapar, ed., India: Historical Beginnings and the Concept of the Aryan (New Delhi 2005), 98-156; Jim Shaffer and Diane Lichtenstein, “South Asian Archaeology and the Myth of Indo-Aryan Invasions” in Edwin Bryant and Laurie Patton, eds., The Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and Inference in Indian History (New York 2005), 75-104; George Hersey, “Aryanism in Victorian England” Yale Review 66 (1976), 104-113; Hans Hock, “Philology and the Historical Interpretation of the Vedic Texts” in Bryant and Patton, eds., The Indo-Aryan Controversy, 282-308; Thomas Trautmann, “Constructing the Racial Theory of Indian Civilization” in Trautmann, ed., The Aryan Debate (Oxford 2005), 84-105; Romila Thapar, “Some Appropriations of the Theory of Aryan Race Relating to the Beginnings of Indian History” in Trautmann, ed., The Aryan Debate, 106-128; Edwin Bryant, “Myths of Origin: Europe and the Aryan Homeland Quest” in Bryant, The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture (Oxford 2001), 13-45; J. P. Mallory, “Epilogue: The Aryan Myth” in Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans (London 1989), 266-72; Neil Macmaster, Racism in Europe 1870-2000 (New York 2001); Ruth Römer, Sprachwissenschaft und Rassenideologie in Deutschland (Munich 1989); Peter Becker, Wege ins Dritte Reich: Sozialdarwinismus, Rassismus, Antisemitismus und völkischer Gedanke (Stuttgart 1988);  Patrik von zur Mühlen, Rassenideologien: Geschichte und Hintergründe (Bonn 1979); Peter Robb, ed., The Concept of Race in South Asia (Oxford 1995).

21. For more of the substantial research on the history of the Aryan myth, and its theosophical inflections in particular, see Joan Leopold, “The Aryan Theory of Race”, Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 7 (1970), 271-297; Joan Leopold, “British Applications of the Aryan Theory of Race to India, 1850-1870” English Historical Review 89 (1974), 578-603; Peter Pels, “Occult Truths: Race, Conjecture, and Theosophy in Victorian Anthropology” in Richard Handler ed., Excluded Ancestors, Inventible Traditions (Madison 2000), 11-41; Gauri Viswanathan, “Conversion, Theosophy, and Race Theory” in Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton 1998), 177-207; Carla Risseuw, “Thinking Culture Through Counter-culture: The Case of Theosophists in India and Ceylon and their Ideas on Race and Hierarchy (1875-1947)” in Antony Copley, ed., Gurus and Their Followers: New Religious Reform Movements in Colonial India (Oxford 2000), 180-205; George Mosse, “The Occult Origins of National Socialism” in Mosse, The Fascist Revolution (New York 1999); Jeffrey Goldstein, “On Racism and Anti-Semitism in Occultism and Nazism,” Yad Vashem Studies 13 (1979), 53-72; Jackson Spielvogel and David Redles, “Hitler’s Racial Ideology: Content and Occult Sources,” Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual 3 (1986), 227-246; Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism (New York 1992); Stefan Arvidsson, “Aryan Mythology As Science and Ideology,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 67, no. 2 (1999): 327-54; Romila Thapar, “The Historiography of the Concept of ‘Aryan’” in Thapar, ed., India: Historical Beginnings and the Concept of the Aryan, 1-40; Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth (Chicago 1999), 76-95; Colin Kidd, “The Aryan Moment: Racialising Religion in the Nineteenth Century” in Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-2000 (Cambridge 2006), 168-202 and 237-246; Leon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth (New York 1974); Stefan Arvidsson, Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science (Chicago 2006). Oddly, Fant himself invokes the latter book, apparently believing it absolves his own historical blind spots.

22. Fant appears to be genuinely unaware of the lengthy legacy of paternalistic racism, as if the ideologies of the White Man’s Burden and the Civilizing Mission had never existed. He also believes that different peoples have “different folk souls,” another bit of racial mystification promoted by anthroposophists.

23. Important background on this question is available in Jill Roe’s study Beyond Belief: Theosophy in Australia 1879-1939 (New South Wales University Press, 1986).

24. Risseuw, “Thinking Culture Through Counter-culture,” 186.

25. Roland Vernon, Star in the East: Krishnamurti – The Invention of a Messiah (Palgrave 2001), 86.

26. 1911 letter from Wagner quoted in Klatt, Theosophie und Anthroposophie, 102. In 1910, one of the founders of the Italian anthroposophical movement,  Giovanni Colazza, similarly emphasized the importance of racial differences in distinguishing Western from Eastern forms of esotericism: “The desire to exclusively apply Indian methods in our time and to our race, means not taking into account the fact that evolution has considerably modified the potential of our organism, nor taking into account the new spiritual currents that have been introduced into the world.” (Colazza quoted in Michele Beraldo, “Il movimento antroposofico italiano durante il regime fascista” Dimensioni e problemi della ricerca storica 2002, p. 147) These distinctive features of “our race” and “our organism” were a decisive aspect of the supposed superiority of Europeans over Indians; from an anthroposophical perspective, “the peoples of the West represent an advance over the peoples of the Orient and must therefore follow a more elevated spiritual path.” (Carlo Paes, “Cronaca di Teosofia” Rassegna Contemporanea April 1912, p. 147)

27. In Life Between Death and Rebirth (1913) Steiner declared: “Consider Hinduism. Only those belonging to the Hindu race can be adherents of it.” He went on to say: “The best thing would be for Christians to teach Hinduism to the Hindus and then attempt to take Hinduism a stage further so that the Hindu could gain a point of contact with the general stream of evolution. We understand Christianity only if we look upon each individual as a Christian in the depth of his heart.” In Steiner’s view, ostensibly obsolete forms of spirituality such as Hinduism and Judaism were mere ‘ethnic religions’ that fell far short of the universal message of anthroposophy.

28. Steiner, Aus den Inhalten der esoterischen Schulen, Dornach 1995, pp. 221 and 227.

29. Steiner, Gedankenfreiheit und soziale Kräfte, Dornach 1971, p. 126.

30. Steiner, Gedankenfreiheit und soziale Kräfte, pp. 130 and 132. Steiner continued: “It is an example of decadence in the West, of abandonment of all the good spirits of European humankind, that there are many people today who seek to shore up their European spiritual life by absorbing the Oriental essence.” (137)

31. Steiner, Gedankenfreiheit und soziale Kräfte, pp. 141-42.

32. Steiner, “Die Völker der Erde im Lichte der Geisteswissenschaft” Die Drei December 1925, 652.

33. Steiner, “On the Reality of Higher Worlds.” For further examples of Steiner’s negative assessment of Asian spiritual traditions in European contexts see among others Steiner, Luzifer-Gnosis, 370-71; Steiner, Grundelemente der Esoterik, 108-115; Steiner, Westliche und östliche Weltgegensätzlichkeit, 226-39; Steiner, Christus und die menschliche Seele, 98-99; Steiner, Earthly and Cosmic Man; Steiner, Cosmology, Religion and Philosophy; Steiner, At the Gates of Spiritual Science; Steiner, “The Ancient Yoga Culture” in Steiner, The Mission of the Archangel Michael; and Marie Steiner’s Introduction to Universe, Earth and Man.

34. The classic case of Italian Fascism alone reveals quite a few notable examples. The foremost anthroposophist in early twentieth century Italy was Giovanni Antonia Colonna di Cesarò. Far from remaining “apolitical,” Colonna di Cesarò, a mystically inclined nationalist aristocrat, became a minister in Mussolini’s first cabinet, serving from 1922 to 1924, before turning against the Duce. The co-founder and Secretary General of the Italian Anthroposophical Society, Ettore Martinoli, was a militant Fascist throughout the entire Fascist era, and was particularly instrumental in helping administer the antisemitic campaign from 1938 onward. The Secretary of the Italian Group for Anthroposophical Studies, Luigi Calabrini, also belonged to the Fascist party, which he joined in May 1921, a year and a half before Mussolini came to power. The most prominent anthroposophist publicist in Italy in the 1930s and 1940s, Rinaldo Küfferle, was another outspoken fascist. And the best-known post-war Italian anthroposophist, Massimo Scaligero, was a major spokesman for “spiritual racism” within the fascist movement in the late 1930s and early 1940s, remaining active in neo-fascist politics after 1945 as well. The most recent anthroposophist on the Italian far right, finally, is Enzo Erra (see above all his hagiographic 2006 book Steiner e Scaligero), who was a youthful blackshirt in the last-ditch ultrafascist Italian Social Republic of 1943-45, and subsequently played a leading role within neo-fascist circles for decades. Latter-day anthroposophists like Fant, who would prefer to view fascism as anathema to everything anthroposophy stands for, might devote a bit more effort to contemplating this uncomfortable history soberly and taking its implications seriously.

35. Most of these works were available at the time of my original exchange with Fant; those that have subsequently appeared amply confirm the point. Consider merely the last work cited, by Ingolf Christiansen, Rainer Fromm and Hartmut Zinser, Brennpunkt Esoterik (Hamburg 2006). Section 3 of the book, titled “Rechtsradikalismus in der Esoterik” and authored by Fromm (pp. 149-235), analyzes right-wing radicalism in the contemporary esoteric scene in Germany. The chapter on the root-race theory is, aside from the discussion of Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine as the original source of the theory, almost entirely focused on anthroposophical works – all three of Fromm’s chief examples of this form of esoteric influence on the far right are anthroposophists. I very much encourage readers sympathetic toward Fant’s position to consult studies such as these. For further context, I highly recommend Herman de Tollenaere, The Politics of Divine Wisdom: Theosophy and Labour, National, and Women’s Movements in Indonesia and South Asia, 1875-1947 (Nijmegen 1996). Already in 1995, Fant’s fellow anthroposophist Arfst Wagner noted the strong far-right current within the anthroposophical movement, discussing for example a variety of anthroposophist seminars in the 1980s at which “a whole series of radical right functionaries” spoke; see interview with Wagner in die tageszeitung March 12, 1995, p. 12.

36. Strikingly, Fant has nothing at all to say about anthroposophist holocaust denial, a phenomenon he apparently does not find particularly troubling. For classic instances of anthroposophical holocaust denial, interested readers may consult Bernhard Schaub, Adler und Rose: Wesen und Schicksal Mitteleuropas (Aargau 1992) and Gennadij Bondarew, Anthroposophie auf der Kreuzung der okkult-politischen Bewegungen der Gegenwart (Basel 1996). This unpleasant trend is by no means a thing of the past; the online writings of anthroposophist Willy Lochmann are a very relevant current example. For further recent instances of holocaust denial and propagation of openly antisemitic conspiracy theories see the posts from Robert Mason, Michael Howell, Stephen Hale, Carol Canning, Bradford Riley, and other anthroposophists to various publicly accessible email lists such as the “Anthroposophy” list (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/anthroposophy/messages), the “Anthroposophy Tomorrow” list (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/anthroposophy_tomorrow/messages), the “Waldorf Critics” list (http://lists.topica.com/lists/waldorf-critics/read), etc. Anthroposophists’ repeatedly expressed “doubts” about the holocaust are a significant example of the “deflective negationism” diagnosed by scholarly analysts of the holocaust denial movement such as Florin Lobont and Michael Shafir; for background see Lobont, “Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial in Post-Communist Eastern Europe” in Dan Stone, ed., The Historiography of the Holocaust, New York 2004, and Shafir, “Denying the Holocaust where it Happened” in Ronit Lentin, ed., Re-Presenting the Shoah for the 21st Century, Oxford 2004. The ongoing open propagation of aggressively antisemitic conspiracy theories and holocaust denial propaganda under anthroposophist auspices demonstrates the futility of Fant’s head-in-the-sand approach: Simply ignoring the most disturbing aspects of the contemporary anthroposophical movement will not magically make them go away.

37. Steiner contributed numerous articles between 1884 and 1890 to the pan-German press in Austria, including the Deutsche Zeitung, the Nationale Blätter, the Freie Schlesische Presse, and the Deutsche Wochenschrift. The Nationale Blätter was the organ of the “Deutscher Verein” in Vienna, while the Freie Schlesische Presse was the organ of the “Deutscher Verein” in Troppau, a city in the Sudetenland. The Deutscher Verein was, by the 1880’s, one of the three major political organizations within the German nationalist movement in Austria (the other two were the Deutscher Klub and the Deutschnationaler Verein, both of which Steiner wrote about positively). Readers may consult William McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria (New Haven 1974) pp. 199-202 on the political development of the Deutscher Verein; McGrath notes that by the mid-1880’s the Deutscher Verein “placed the strongest emphasis on German nationalism” (p. 201), which was the major unifying factor of the group. The Deutsche Zeitung was “the organ of German nationalism in Austria” according to a standard history of the Austrian press: Kurt Paupie, Handbuch der österreichischen Pressegeschichte 1848-1959, Vienna 1960, p. 158. It was arguably the most prominent voice of German nationalist politics in the Habsburg empire until the rise of Schönerer and Lueger in the 1890’s. For background see among others Pieter Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire 1848-1914, Ann Arbor 1996, p. 169, and Hildegard Kernmayer, Judentum im Wiener Feuilleton 1848-1903, Tübingen 1998, pp. 284-86. Steiner also spent half a year as editor of the Deutsche Wochenschrift in Vienna (subtitle: “organ for the national interests of the German people”), one of the major Austro-German radical nationalist papers of the era. On the crucial role of the Deutsche Wochenschrift as the mouthpiece of radical German nationalism, see McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria, pp. 201-206; cf. Zander, Anthroposophie in Deutschland, pp. 1242-1245.

38. Steiner’s early pan-German articles routinely portray the Germans in Austria as threatened by “the onslaught from all sides” and denounce “Czech agitators” and “the evil Russian influence” while celebrating “the unity and capacity for resistance of the Germans” and insisting on “the cultural mission that is the duty of the German people in Austria” (Steiner, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kultur- und Zeitgeschichte pp. 112, 85, 69). He refers to the non-German peoples of Austria as “the enemy” (115) and asserts that “the non-German peoples of Austria must absorb into themselves that which German spirit and German work have created, if they are to reach the level of education which is a necessary prerequisite of the modern era,” and indeed proclaims: “if the [non-German] peoples of Austria want to compete with the Germans, they will above all have to make up for the developmental process which the Germans have gone through; they will have to learn the German culture in the German language” (112). Because the mainstream nationalist Austro-German Liberals, in Steiner’s view, had not insisted strongly enough that the Slavs subordinate their own cultures to German culture, “this forced the German people to form a party in which the national idea is paramount” (113). But even the new, more forthrightly nationalist party was a disappointment to Steiner; it did not do enough “for the national cause” (114). Steiner thus offers German nationalist politicians advice on how to struggle more effectively “against the Slavic enemy” who are marked by an “empty national ego” and “spiritual barrenness,” which is why the Slavs “would like nothing more than to annihilate the achievements of our European culture” (117). According to Steiner, “modern culture” has been “chiefly produced by the Germans.” He condemns not only any accommodation to non-German ethnic groups but indeed any cooperation with ethnically German parties that are insufficiently nationalist, calling these parties “un-German” (119). Steiner also fulminates against “the culture-hating Russian colossus” and excoriates the abuse of the Austrian state “for un-German purposes” (140). Portraying Czech demands for political participation as a direct threat to German cultural superiority, he exclaims: “The Slavs will have to live a very long time before they understand the tasks which are the duty of the German people, and it is an outrageous offense against civilization to throw down the gauntlet at every opportunity to a people [i.e. the Germans] from whom one receives the spiritual light, a light without which European culture and education must remain a closed book.” (141-142) He demands that the country’s political agenda be set by “the exclusively national elements of the German people in Austria,” namely “the pan-Germans,” and denounces the German Liberals for betraying their people: “If we must be ruled in an un-German fashion, at least our tribal brothers ought not to take care of this business. Our hands should remain clean.” (143) Instead of accepting ever more compromises with the uncultured Slavs, “truly national men” must pull together “to organize the people in a national manner” (144). As late as 1897 Steiner continued to repeat the same hard-line German nationalist stance: “The Slavs and the Magyars are a danger to the mission of the Germans; they are forcing German culture to retreat.” (214) He rails against “non-German elements” in Austria and regrets the ostensible loss of the Austro-Germans’ “privileged position within the monarchy” (215) while looking forward to the day when “the Germans of Austria regain the position of power which corresponds to their cultural level” (216). Such passages make clear how impervious to reason Steiner’s nationalism remained even well after his Vienna period. The Germans had hardly lost their privileged position within the Habsburg monarchy, and by the late 1880s, moreover, nearly all German political parties and social organizations, with the exception of the clerical parties Steiner so despised, had gone through a process of intense nationalist radicalization such that figures who a decade earlier had counted as strident nationalists were now seen to be ineffectual moderates. The young Steiner’s criticism of the Austro-German nationalist parties for not being nationalist enough thus reveals his own extremist stance.

39. In 2000, for example, one of the chief anthroposophical periodicals, Die Christengemeinschaft, published several articles by prolific far-right author and holocaust denier Gustav Sichelschmidt, a prominent fixture in hard-line German nationalist circles for many years. Sichelschmidt also published a number of articles in another central anthroposophist journal, Die Drei, in the 1960s and 1970s. Sichelschmidt’s numerous books specialized in xenophobic polemics against “foreigners” in Germany and vehemently rejected the idea of a multicultural society, while trumpeting the “mission” of the German people. For examples see among many others his 1981 book Deutschland in Gefahr, his 1992 book Der ewige Deutschenhaß, or his 1996 book Tanz auf dem Vulkan. The latter work, for instance, polemicizes against “obscure internationalists” who are defiling Germany by promoting “a multiethnic society,” denounces “foreign groups” and “one-world proponents” as “anti-German forces,” and insists that “the true mission of the Germans” is to redeem the world. The book also ridicules “the specter of the so-called holocaust,” which Sichelschmidt dismisses as a “lie” and mere “anti-German propaganda.” He excoriates “materialism” and cultural “decadence” in terms quite similar to Steiner’s own while constantly invoking Goethe, rails against “the Jewish lobby” and the Americanization of German life, and declares that supporters of western democracy are “murdering the soul of the German people.” In the same book, Sichelschmidt vehemently opposes allowing Germany to become a “multiethnic” country, or even permitting “different ethnic groups” to live in Germany. In light of all this, anthroposophists might consider asking themselves some pertinent and long-overdue questions, such as: What is it that made Sichelschmidt’s work appealing to anthroposophical editors and readers? And what is it that made anthroposophy appealing to Sichelschmidt? For a helpful overview in English of Sichelschmidt’s work see Jay Rosellini, Literary Skinheads? Writing from the Right in Reunified Germany (Purdue 2000), pp. 149-157 and 249.

40. According to some reports at the time, Molau quit his Waldorf job rather than being fired; see e.g. Jochen Leffers, “Ex-Waldorflehrer arbeitet künftig für die NPD”, Spiegel-Online, 29 October 2004.

41. See Andreas Speit, “Hätten wir seine Gesinnung erkennen können?” die tageszeitung October 1, 2005, p. 12.

42.  In addition to educational issues, Molau’s specialty as far-right publicist, and in particular at Junge Freiheit, was ecology and environmental politics as viewed from a right-wing extremist perspective. He is yet another example of an anthroposophically inclined ecofascist. On a side note: Walter Hiller, the executive director of the League of Waldorf Schools, published a brief article on educational policy in Junge Freiheit in 2001.

43. Andreas Molau, Alfred Rosenberg: Der Ideologe des Nationalsozialismus, Koblenz 1993, published by the far-right Verlag Siegfried Bublies.

44. Molau quoted in Stella Palau, “Waldorfschule lädt NPD ein” (NPD press release dated September 2, 2005), www.npd.de, accessed September 17, 2005.

45. The Molau interview appeared in the November 26, 2004 issue of the National-Zeitung, alongside an outspokenly positive sidebar about Steiner and Waldorf education.

46. Similar incidents revealing the same pattern, and pointing to the same still unlearned lesson, are by no means confined to Germany. Consider the example of Swiss anthroposophist Hans Krattiger. In 2002 the Anthroposophical Society expelled Krattiger, an important figure in the Swiss biodynamic movement, when his position as treasurer of the far-right party PNOS became public. Formal expulsion may make for an improved public relations image, but it does not address any of the underlying political, ideological, or historical factors. Indeed organizational membership is scarcely the sole or even primary index of ideological compatibility, much less practical cooperation. A mainstream biodynamic coalition, for instance, the Forschungsring für Biologisch-Dynamische Wirtschaftsweise, promotes the work of far-right biodynamic proponent and holocaust denier Ernst Otto Cohrs. Cohrs also worked with leading neo-Nazi Horst Mahler and the widow of Werner Haverbeck, Ursula Haverbeck-Wetzel, at the far-right para-anthroposophical Collegium Humanum in 2004.

47. Fant is hardly alone in taking a dim view of polemic as a genre. I consider this attitude fundamentally mistaken. Polemical argument has a lengthy and honorable pedigree. As an approach to philosophical disputation, polemic is traditionally understood as the contrary of apology; it is designed to unsettle received opinion on a given topic. That is exactly why my article was polemical. It was specifically calibrated to fit the existing state of public debate on anthroposophical racism at the time I wrote it, and was quite explicitly directed against the numerous apologies for Steiner’s racial theories that abound within the contemporary anthroposophical movement. Fant himself is a pertinent example of just this sort of apologia for anthroposophical racism. In my judgement, a deliberately polemical approach is what a responsible public intellectual is obliged to provide in such instances. In the context of debates like this, in popular forums and publications for general audiences, polemic is very much the appropriate critical framework and rhetorical choice. Needless to say, I do not follow the same approach in my scholarly work. Interested readers may find ample critical discussion of this topic in Olav Hammer and Kocku von Stuckrad, eds., Polemical Encounters: Esoteric Discourse and Its Others, Leiden 2007; for additional thoughtful reflection on the role of polemics and apologetics in public discussion of esoteric movements see Wouter Hanegraaff, “On the Construction of ‘Esoteric Traditions’” in Antoine Faivre and Wouter Hanegraaff, eds., Western Esotericism and the Science of Religion, Leuven 1998, pp. 11-61. Extensive background is available in Hubert Cancik, “Apologetik / Polemik” in Cancik, Gladigow and Laubscher, eds., Handbuch religionswissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe, Stuttgart 1990, pp. 29-37, and Theo Hettema and Arie van der Kooij, eds., Religious Polemics in Context, Leiden 2004.

48. The book has even spurred government action. In 2007, the German federal ministry for families considered placing Steiner’s Mission of the Folk Souls, along with The Being of Man and His Future Evolution, on its list of “literature that could be damaging to young people,” on the grounds that both books are racially discriminatory. The commission appointed by the ministry eventually decided that the books do indeed contain racist material, but did not place them on the index because the anthroposophist publisher agreed to re-publish new editions of both works with critical commentary on the racist content. I am personally skeptical toward these sorts of censorship procedures, among other reasons because they can make open public discussion of anthroposophical racism more difficult than it already is. As it happens, the publicity in Germany around the ministry’s inquiry helped raised the level of public discussion of anthroposophical racism, with extensive media attention to the issue. What has so far been absent is any noticeable reflection from anthroposophical quarters on the significance of this incident; and it will be very interesting to see just what the “critical commentary” looks like when the books are re-issued.

49. Steiner, The Mission of the Individual Folk Souls in Relation to Teutonic Mythology, London 1970, p. 19. The book was republished unaltered and without commentary by the Rudolf Steiner Press in 2005. The German edition is Steiner, Die Mission einzelner Volksseelen im Zusammenhang mit der germanisch-nordischen Mythologie.

50. For a particularly germane example of the contemporary far-right appropriation of anthroposophical ideas see Kerry Bolton, Rudolf Steiner & The Mystique of Blood & Soil: The Volkisch Views of the Founder of Anthroposophy, Paraparaumu 1999. This pamphlet, by a major conspiracy theorist and leading figure on the radical right scene, perfectly illustrates the continuing appeal of Steiner’s teachings to right-wing extremists. It received a very favorable review by an even more prominent neo-fascist leader, Troy Southgate. Along with Molau, Haverbeck, Sichelschmidt, Erra, and all the others mentioned here, Bolton and Southgate and their companions are merely a “handful of ghosts” in Fant’s eyes. This indifference toward the actually existing far right does not inspire confidence in the political perspicacity of progressive anthroposophists.

51. See Franziska Hundseder, Wotans Jünger: Neuheidnische Gruppen zwischen Esoterik und Rechtsradikalismus, Munich 1998, pp. 126-129; Eduard Gugenberger and Roman Schweidlenka, Mutter Erde – Magie und Politik: Zwischen Faschismus und neuer Gesellschaft, Vienna 1987, p. 245; and Bolton, Rudolf Steiner & The Mystique of Blood & Soil, as well as the case of neo-Nazi politician and Waldorf advocate Andreas Molau, discussed above.

52. Steiner, Geisteswissenschaft als Erkenntnis der Grundimpulse sozialer Gestaltung (GA 199), p. 161; lecture on August 27, 1920.

53. See William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, New York 1960, p. 44.

54. This facet of the article had a very illuminating epilogue. In 2005 – five years after Anthroposophy and Ecofascism originally appeared – Schnurre hired a Swedish attorney to threaten a libel lawsuit against the publishers of the Swedish translation of my article. The lawyer claimed he had “spoken to several persons who were present at the Schnurre seminar,” and these unnamed persons “did not recognize Schnurre’s words” as reported in my article. These supposed eyewitnesses were not only anonymous, their statements came eleven years after Schnurre’s 1994 seminar occurred. The incident is a classic example of anthroposophist efforts to intimidate critical scholars, and it provides among other things a fascinating instance of the gap between historical evidence and legal evidence: in stark contrast to these claimed ex post facto accounts by ostensible eyewitnesses, which suddenly emerged eleven years after the fact, I quoted from the extremely detailed minutes of Schnurre’s 1994 lecture taken directly by an audience member and published in Germany within a month of the lecture itself. To my knowledge, Schnurre never challenged those minutes, nor did he challenge three separate books and at least one article subsequently published in Germany which excerpt the published minutes extensively. Quite apart from the disingenuous nature of this legal ploy, there are thus excellent substantive reasons to prefer the minutes as a source over the supposed “witness statements.” Moreover, Fant’s notion that the quotes attributed to Schnurre are “quite contradictory to his conception of life” is entirely beside the point; even if this peculiar claim were true, and substantiated by Fant, or for that matter by Schnurre himself, it would plainly have nothing to do with whether Schnurre did in fact make the statements attributed to him, much less with whether those statements are racist. It is hardly uncommon to find anthroposophists who take their own views to be fundamentally anti-racist, when many non-anthroposophists consider these very same views to be flatly racist. I recommended at the time that Schnurre simply write a brief piece explaining his actual views on race, and then let all readers decide whether they consider these views racist. This recommendation, tellingly, went unheeded.

55. Fant’s essay contains a number of further errors that in my judgement do not merit extended consideration and have little to do with the substantive disagreements between us. These mistakes do, however, indicate the kind of nonchalance toward details, and the level of disregard for basic factual accuracy, that unfortunately characterize Fant’s half of our exchange. I recognize that Fant is a Waldorf teacher, not a trained scholar. Nonetheless, it isn’t all that hard to double-check the texts he invokes over and over again. To choose one otherwise insignificant example: In response to an observation of mine about Uwe Werner’s archival sources, Fant declares that only four of the archives listed in Werner’s book are anthroposophical. Fant’s figure is severely inaccurate; in reality, eight of the ten organizational archives and well over half of the twenty-four private archives listed by Werner are anthroposophical. Fant’s claim is thus wrong by a factor of five or more. These sorts of errors, many of them more or less inexplicable, are regrettably common in my debates with anthroposophists.

56. Wölk, “Neue Trends im ökofaschistischen Netzwerk” in Hethey and Katz, In Bester Gesellschaft, Göttingen 1991, p. 121. Additional evidence of the striking parallels between the theosophical root-race doctrine and Hitler’s racial views can be found in the works by George Mosse, Jeffrey Goldstein, and Jackson Spielvogel and David Redles cited above. I also recommend the recent study by Mattias Gardell, Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism, Duke 2003, as well as Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity, New York 2002.

57. See James Webb, The Occult Establishment, Chicago 1976, one of the first books to give serious attention to this topic. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke observes of this book: “By focusing on the functional significance of occultism in political irrationalism, Webb rescued the study of Nazi occultism for the history of ideas.” (Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism, New York 1992, p. 225)

58. Goodrick-Clarke wrote the entirely approving preface to Rudolf Steiner: Essential Writings. His early work on the connections between occultism and fascism has set the standard for responsible inquiry on the subject (though his later work displays increasingly apologetic tendencies). In addition to the material on Steiner in The Occult Roots of Nazism, see also the references to Karl Heise, Gregor Schwartz-Bostunitsch, and Max Seiling, all early anthroposophists, in the same book.

59. Gugenberger & Schweidlenka, Mutter Erde – Magie und Politik, p. 105.

60. For more extensive examination of these issues see Peter Staudenmaier, “Occultism, Race, and Politics in German-speaking Europe, 1880-1940: A Survey of the Historical Literature” European History Quarterly vol. 39 no. 1 (2009), pp. 47-70.

61. Such vernacular anthroposophical myths can pose serious obstacles to meaningful historical discussion between anthroposophists and non-anthroposophists. Consider the case of Nazi war criminal Sigmund Rascher, who performed infamous ‘medical experiments’ at Dachau involving atrocities against countless inmates. As I noted in “Anthroposophy and Ecofascism,” the anthroposophist company Weleda supplied biodynamic materials for these ‘experiments’. Since the historical circumstances are well known, anthroposophists generally no longer deny them, but insist instead that Weleda had no idea what its products were being used for. This is entirely possible, but of limited relevance in light of the much more significant fact that Weleda maintained ongoing business relationships with the SS and the Wehrmacht in order to keep Rascher supplied with the anthroposophical materials he requested for his ‘experiments’. In order to manufacture the biodynamic materials that Rascher ordered, for instance, Weleda was given special access to the SS’s own stock of petroleum jelly, a rare commodity in war-time Germany. (It is also worth noting that, unrelated to the Rascher experiments, SS leader and war criminal Otto Ohlendorf intervened on Weleda’s behalf when anti-anthroposophist Nazis threatened to shut it down; Weleda continued to operate straight through the entirety of the Third Reich.) The standard anthroposophist line on Rascher – whose father and uncle were both active anthroposophists and who attended the original Waldorf school – additionally holds that he had no connections whatsoever to anthroposophy as an adult. This is untrue. Sigmund Rascher was indeed personally hostile toward anthroposophy for much of his adult life, due not least to his severely troubled relationship with his father, and his correspondence from the late 1930s is often quite critical of anthroposophy. But the notion that he maintained no connections at all to anthroposophy is false. He was of course a Weleda customer during his time as an SS doctor at Dachau; he was on very good terms with his anthroposophist uncle; and his relationship with anthroposophist and fellow SS officer Franz Lippert was notably friendly. Rascher was furthermore a keen student of anthroposophist Ehrenfried Pfeiffer’s work on biodynamics, and even published an article on the subject in 1936.

62. Uwe Werner, Anthroposophen in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, Munich 1999, p. 8.

63. Throughout the 1920s both the Ludendorffers and the rival National Socialists, along with a plethora of other more or less marginal groups and tendencies, vied for leadership of the heterogeneous far-right scene in Munich, sometimes competing and sometimes coalescing in a shifting series of tactical alliances. On the complicated relationships between Ludendorffers and Nazis during the period see Bruno Thoss, “Ludendorff und Hitler 1920-1922” in Thoss, Der Ludendorff-Kreis 1919-1923, Munich 1978, pp. 249-261.

64. For an even milder account of the 1922 incident see the comprehensive contemporary report by anthroposophist Paul Baumann, “Dr. Rudolf Steiners Vortrag in München,” Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus May 25, 1922, pp. 4-5, which does not mention the Nazis and says nothing at all about an assassination attempt or even an attempted physical attack on Steiner himself. Compare also the similar description of the event in Christoph Lindenberg, Rudolf Steiner: Eine Biographie, Stuttgart 1997, p. 770.

65. My own research has identified many further anthroposophists who belonged to the Nazi party and its affiliated organizations. A non-comprehensive list of active anthroposophists who were members of the Nazi party, the SA, or the SS includes the following figures: Hanns Rascher, Friedrich Benesch, Franz Lippert, Otto Julius Hartmann, Eugen Link, Margarete Link, Wolfgang Schuchhardt, Werner Voigt, Udo Renzenbrink, Friedrich Kipp, Rudolf Kreutzer, Oskar Franz Wienert, Carl Fritz, Hugo Kalbe, Leo Tölke, Clara Remer, Heimo Rau, Gotthold Hegele, Otto Thorwirth, Ernst Harmstorf, Anni Müller-Link, Harald Kabisch, Max Babl, Hermann Pöschel, Hermann Mahle, Otto Feyh, Hans Pohlmann, Friedrich Mahling, Ernst Charrois, Josef Keinz, Eduard Meyer, Alfred Köhler, Hans Merkel, and Carl Grund. (For archival citations see Peter Staudenmaier, “Anthroposophen und Nationalsozialismus – Neue Erkenntnisse” Info3 July 2007.) Alongside these figures stand a series of more complicated cases such as Werner Georg Haverbeck, Johannes Werner Klein, Georg Michaelis, Els Moll, Georg Halbe, Max Karl Schwarz, Otto Ohlendorf, Alwin Seifert, Albert Friehe, Renate Riemeck, Hermann Reischle, Werner Priever, Karl Heise, Richard Karutz, Erhard Bartsch, Josef Schulz, Lotar Eickhoff, Johannes Bertram-Pingel, Ernst Blümel, Herman Weidelener, Paul Reiss, Friedrich Böhnlein, Gotthilf Ackermann, Max Rodi, August Wegfraß, etc. This is not “an utterly small number” of people, and many of these figures were anything but marginal to the twentieth century anthroposophical movement.

66. Werner, Anthroposophen in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, p. 3. This point is confirmed by anthroposophist Christoph Lindenberg, who in 1991 observed that “after 1945 there was no public mention of these events. Nowhere within anthroposophist publications can one find a serious voice of self-examination on the part of those who were too deeply involved with National Socialism.” (Lindenberg quoted in Arfst Wagner, “Anthroposophen in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus” Flensburger Hefte, Sonderheft 8 (1991), p. 74.)

67. Fant also challenged several further claims that appeared in the original version of Anthroposophy and Ecofascism and that I have removed from the revised version, including my brief reference to Marie Steiner’s sympathetic attitude toward Nazism. Unlike my perspective regarding Rudolf Hess, for example, these instances do not reflect a change of mind on my part; instead I have removed such personal references because they are inconsequential to my argument and merely distract anthroposophist readers from the substantive issues at hand. I would like to note, however, that this preoccupation with passing references to revered anthroposophical figures is unfortunately characteristic of anthroposophist responses to historical inquiry. Many anthroposophists appear to be much more concerned about the personal reputation of individual anthroposophists and the present status of esoteric celebrities than with basic aspects of historical accuracy and forthright engagement with the past. In my view, this is a decidedly misplaced emphasis. In any case, Fant asks, indignantly, for a source regarding Marie Steiner’s attitude toward Nazism. He may wish to consult the memoirs of anthroposophist Hans Büchenbacher, for example, which characterize Marie Steiner straightforwardly as “pro-Nazi”; see the excerpts from Büchenbacher in Info3 4/1999, pp. 16-19; cf. Helmut Zander, Anthroposophie in Deutschland, p. 249.

68. Werner, op. cit. pp. 214-215. Werner also notes that the written statement denouncing anthroposophy, requested by the Gestapo, was not signed by Hess but by the anti-anthroposophist Bormann. (p. 74)

69. Christine King, The Nazi State and the New Religions, New York 1982, pp. 43 and 232.

70. See Albert Speer, Erinnerungen, Berlin 1969, pp.133-134; Wulf Schwarzwäller, Rudolf Hess, London 1988, pp. 112-115; and Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel, Hess: A Biography, London 1971, pp. 64-66.

71. J.R. Rees, The Case of Rudolf Hess, London 1947, p. 35.

72. Walter Schellenberg, Memoiren, Cologne 1956, p. 160.

73. A comprehensive list would be too cumbersome for this forum, but interested readers may consult the following cross-section: James Webb, The Harmonious Circle (“Rudolf Hess was a devotee of Rudolf Steiner” p. 186); Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century (“Hess was a follower of Rudolf Steiner” p. 197); Detlev Rose, Die Thule-Gesellschaft (“Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy also influenced him [Hess]” p. 132); René Freund, Braune Magie? Okkultismus, New Age und Nationalsozialismus (Hess “admired anthroposophy and was secretly a follower of Rudolf Steiner” p. 68); Jacques Delarue, Geschichte der Gestapo (“Hess was interested in the doctrine of the anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner” p. 265); Hans Hakl, “Nationalsozialismus und Okkultismus” in Goodrick-Clarke, Die okkulten Wurzeln des Nationalsozialismus (Hess was “devoted to Rudolf Steiner’s ideas” p. 199); Joscelyn Godwin, Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival (Hess “ate biodynamic food and was interested in Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy” p. 52); Walter Wuttke-Groneberg, “Nationalsozialistische Medizin: Volks- und Naturheilkunde auf ‘Neuen Wegen’” in Heinz Abholz, ed., Alternative Medizin (on Hess’s “anthroposophical background” p. 33); Peter Longerich, “Hitler’s Deputy: The Role of Rudolf Hess in the Nazi Regime” in David Stafford, ed., Flight from Reality: Rudolf Hess and his Mission to Scotland (Hess was “profoundly interested in astrology, anthroposophy, the occult and related areas” p. 114).

74. A superb scholarly biography of Hess reports that as a young man he had no significant interest in the occult: Kurt Pätzold and Manfred Weißbecker, Rudolf Heß: Der Mann an Hitlers Seite, Leipzig 1999, p. 25. Such qualifications are important to keep in mind as a counter to overeager proponents of the misguided ‘Nazi occultism’ thesis. Pätzold and Weißbecker’s corresponding reflections on race and the occult (pp. 469-470) are also apposite; see as well pp. 270-271 and 509 on the ambivalent attitude of the Nazi leadership toward Waldorf schools and anthroposophy. In addition to the numerous sources cited above on the mature Hess’s interest in the occult, see also Rainer Schmidt, Rudolf Heß, Düsseldorf 1997, pp. 44, 46, 170, etc.; and cf. Treitel, A Science for the Soul, pp. 159, 213-17; Gardell, Gods of the Blood, p. 26; Joachim Fest, The Face of the Third Reich, New York 1970, p. 192; Marco Pasi, Aleister Crowley e la tentazione della politica, Milan 1999, p. 107, 132; and Robert Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer, Princeton 1999, pp. 256-57. For brief mention of Hess’s sympathy toward biodynamics see also Heinz Haushofer, Ideengeschichte der Agrarwirtschaft, Munich 1958, p. 270.

75. Peter Longerich, for example, discusses Hess’s occult and Lebensreform interests extensively (Longerich, Hitlers Stellvertreter, Munich 1992, pp. 111-113), noting in particular Hess’s positive interest in anthroposophy (p. 111).

76. For reasons I do not fully understand, this aspect of my original article has been the source of a remarkable level of indignation and vituperation on the part of anthroposophists, many of whom appear to believe that if some anthroposophists were Fascists and Nazis, then all anthroposophists must be Fascists and Nazis. I came to the topic of anthroposophy via my research on the ‘green wing’ of Nazism, and this connection was the subject of my “Anthroposophy and Ecofascism” article; it is scarcely surprising that anthroposophist Nazis loom large in such an analysis. Even non-anthroposophist readers have occasionally had difficulty making sense of this. Some took exception to my claim that anthroposophy’s political outlook has had a decidedly reactionary cast from the beginning, apparently finding that this claim sits uneasily alongside the prominent presence of anthroposophists in the Green movement and other progressive trends. Since this theme goes to the heart of my argument in “Anthroposophy and Ecofascism,” I will try to re-state my point: I think very many anthroposophists, today as in the past, are profoundly confused about politics and routinely mix together left-wing and right-wing viewpoints, and when they get involved in progressive efforts they often end up representing the least emancipatory and most conservative elements within those milieus. I further argue that this pattern is not accidental but flows from Steiner’s own reactionary political assumptions, outlined at some length in the present series of articles. Steiner himself is a classic example of the kind of left-right crossover in modern German culture that I study, which is exactly how I stumbled onto the topic of anthroposophy in the first place.

77. There is a considerable literature on the subject; see among others Joshua Greene, Justice at Dachau (New York 2003), and Jörg Friedrich, Die kalte Amnestie: NS-Täter in der Bundesrepublik (Frankfurt 1984).

78. The fact that Lippert’s hearing was part of the German civilian court process rather than the Allied de-Nazification proceedings is perfectly clear from Fant’s own preferred source; Werner’s Anthroposophen in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus refers repeatedly and unambiguously to a “Spruchkammerverfahren,” the term for the German civilian juries, not to an Allied de-Nazification commission. That Fant mixed up these two sharply contrasting venues is telling. The distinction is crucial to understanding the whole process of ‘denazification’ and its eventual failure. The Allies took an extremely skeptical view of the “Spruchkammer” and their notoriously lenient approach to figures like Lippert. For context see the chapter “Die deutschen Spruchkammern” in Clemens Vollnhals, Entnazifizierung (Munich 1999), pp. 259-338. For even more detail see the 700 page study by Lutz Niethammer, Entnazifizierung in Bayern (Frankfurt 1972), particularly chapter 5, “Das Spruchkammerverfahren und die Betroffenen”, pp. 538-652.

79. While Marcuse’s book appeared just after my original 2001 exchange with Fant, numerous other sources cited here were accessible at the time, and anyone interested in learning about the issues Fant himself raised cannot fail to have noticed them. In light of the immense scholarship on the matter, readers may well ask themselves if Fant perhaps really does believe, after all, that the post-war process of ‘denazification’ actually succeeded, rather than failed, and if he would extend the same admiration he expresses toward Lippert to the thousands of other active Nazis who got off scot-free after the war as well. The episode thus raises unpleasant questions. Are anthroposophists generally in the habit of promoting SS officers to the status of heroes? Does this have anything to do with anthroposophy’s equivocal record during the Third Reich? It would be a major step forward if progressive anthroposophists could bring themselves to grapple with such questions at last.

80. While allied-sponsored court procedures were considerably more rigorous than the German civilian hearings that exonerated Lippert and his fellow SS officers, even the American military trials at Dachau, focused on higher levels of responsibility, began to produce overwhelming acquittals, amnesties, and dropped cases by the late 1940s; see Ute Stiepani, “Die Dachauer Prozesse und ihre Bedeutung im Rahmen der alliierten Strafverfolgung von NS-Verbrechen” in Gerd Ueberschär, ed., Der Nationalsozialismus vor Gericht (Frankfurt 1999), pp. 227-39, and Robert Sigel, Im Interesse der Gerechtigkeit: Die Dachauer Kriegsverbrecherprozesse 1945–1948 (Frankfurt 1992).

81. Paul Berben, Dachau 1933-1945: The Official History, London 1975, p. 87.

82. Robert Sigel, “Heilkräuterkulturen im KZ: Die Plantage in Dachau”, Dachauer Hefte 4, 1988, p. 171.

83. Walter Wuttke-Groneberg, “Von Heidelberg nach Dachau,” in Gerhard Baader and Ulrich Schultz, eds, Medizin und Nationalsozialismus (Berlin 1980), pp. 113-138; quote at p. 119. See especially the section “Die Heilkräuterplantage im KZ Dachau” pp. 116-120.

84. Anne Harrington, Reenchanted Science (Princeton 1996), p. 188.

85. Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz, Die Mächtigen und die Hilflosen: als Häftling in Dachau (Stuttgart 1957), pp. 105-108.

86. Otto Pies, Stephanus Heute (Kevelaer 1951), p. 127.

87. Jean Bernard, Pfarrerblock Dachau (Munich 1984), pp. 89-90.

88. Hans Carls, Dachau: Erinnerungen eines katholischen Geistlichen aus der Zeit seiner Gefangenschaft 1941-1945 (Cologne 1946), p. 120. A few pages later Carls describes particular acts of sadism at the plantation (123).

89. For example, Reimund Schnabel’s book Die Frommen in der Hölle: Geistliche in Dachau (Frankfurt 1966) provides a study of clergy inmates at Dachau, who were assigned especially frequently to the labor battalion at Lippert’s biodynamic plantation. Schnabel describes the plantation on pp. 140-142. He notes that for some inmates the plantation was a relatively preferred work detail, while for others it was hellish, with dangerous and often deadly working conditions. In light of conflicting testimony from former prisoners, Schnabel concludes that “both the descriptions of extremely cruel working conditions and the reports of relatively comfortable activity are correct.” (p. 141) This is consistent with evidence from other concentration camps as well.

90. See e.g. Franz Lippert, Das Wichtigste in Kürze über Kräuter und Gewürze, Nordland Verlag, Berlin 1943.

91. See the testimony of Fritz Götte in Werner, Anthroposophen in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, p. 285.

92. In the words of the anthroposophist Jens Heisterkamp, “the anthroposophist movement did not produce any members of the Resistance.” (Heisterkamp’s review of Uwe Werner’s book in Info3 April 1999)

93. Lippert’s biodynamic plantation at Dachau was the preeminent component in the SS’s far-flung network of farms run along Steinerite lines, which also included Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and other concentration camps. The labor on these biodynamic tracts was performed by camp inmates. For an overview of this striking instance of the convergence of anthroposophy and Nazism, see the fine study by Wolfgang Jacobeit and Christoph Kopke, Die Biologisch-Dynamische Wirtschafstweise im KZ, Berlin 1999, which emphasizes the crucial role of the Dachau plantation. For further context on the SS biodynamic plantation system, the Dachau installation, and Lippert’s role, see also Hermann Kaienburg, Die Wirtschaft der SS (Berlin 2003), pp. 771-855.

94. There are many additional examples of this anthroposophical avoidance of history. Consider the case of Friedrich Benesch. Benesch (1907-1991) was a leading figure in the Christian Community, the forthrightly religious arm of anthroposophy, and one of the most prominent and influential anthroposophists of the post-war period. For thirty years, beginning in the 1950s, he was the head of the seminary in Stuttgart that trains the Christian Community’s priests. Benesch was also a fervent Nazi from the late 1920s onward. He was active in the radical nationalist and racist völkisch youth movement and belonged to the Artamanen, the infamous “blood and soil” group that produced several later Nazi leaders, including Himmler, Darré, and Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höß. In his 1941 dissertation Benesch wrote: “Since 1928 I have been a member of the National Socialist movement for renewal among the Germans in Romania.” (Friedrich Benesch, “Lebenslauf,” Die Festung Hutberg: Eine jungnordische Mischsiedlung, Halle 1941) From 1934 to 1945 Benesch was a leader in the extremist wing of the regional Romanian-German Nazi party. His father-in-law and mentor was the well-known Nazi theorist Hans Hahne. Benesch’s own teaching in the early 1940s strongly emphasized racial theory and vigorously propagated National Socialist principles. He joined the SS in 1939, and applied to work with the SS research institute, the Ahnenerbe, on a project about “Trees and forests in Aryan-Germanic spiritual and cultural history.” In 1941 he was appointed head of the Nazi party organization in his home county in Romania. Although this information was readily available for decades via both archival and published sources, Benesch’s anthroposophical colleagues never inquired into his biographical background, instead celebrating him as a greatly admired anthroposophical figure. It was not until 2004 that parts of the anthroposophical movement began at last to acknowledge Benesch’s Nazi past, after they were forced to confront the subject by a non-anthroposophist historian, Johan Böhm. Even today, efforts to downplay and deny Benesch’s lengthy activity as a committed Nazi militant continue within anthroposophical circles, a stunning instance of anthroposophy’s ongoing inability to come to terms with its own past. For background see Johan Böhm, Das nationalsozialistische Deutschland und die deutsche Volksgruppe in Rumänien 1936-1944 (Frankfurt 1985), pp. 41-42, 53, 138-139; Böhm, Die Deutschen in Rumänien und das Dritte Reich 1933-1940 (Frankfurt 1999), pp. 149, 272-273; Böhm, “Friedrich Benesch: Naturwissenschaftler, Anthropologe, Theologe und Politiker” Halbjahresschrift für südosteuropäische Geschichte, Literatur und Politik, vol. 16 no. 1 (May 2004), pp. 108-119.    In light of the extraordinarily long time it took for any of this information to penetrate anthroposophical consciousness, the obvious question that ought to concern Göran Fant and his associates is: How many other Friedrich Benesches are lurking within the ranks of twentieth century anthroposophy?

95. Things may, of course, be different in Sweden. Hakan Lejon’s book Historien om den antroposofiska humanismen (Stockholm 1997) argues that the Swedish anthroposophical movement has developed in tension between an esoteric pole and a humanist pole, with the latter taking precedence in recent decades. If this is true, it may help explain Fant’s distorted perspective on anthroposophy in other places and other times.

96. Fant is by no means the only anthroposophist to fall for this easily debunked racist propaganda. For a particularly conspicuous early example, see anthroposophist Karl Heyer’s racist reminiscences of the Rhineland occupation in Anthroposophie July 13, 1930; cf. also the remarkable racist imagery in the very same context in anthroposophist author Andrej Belyj’s work from the 1920s: Belyj, Im Reich der Schatten, Frankfurt 1987, pp. 48-64, as well as Richard Karutz, Vorlesungen über moralische Völkerkunde 3, Stuttgart 1930, pp. 19-28.

97. For an overview of the campaign to circulate these stories see Keith Nelson, “The ‘Black Horror on the Rhine’: Race as a Factor in Post-World War I Diplomacy” Journal of Modern History vol. 42 no. 4 (1970), pp. 606-627; Peter Martin, “Die Kampagne gegen die ‘Schwarze Schmach’ als Ausdruck konservativer Visionen vom Untergang des Abendlandes” in Gerhard Höpp, ed., Fremde Erfahrungen, Berlin 1996, pp. 211-224; Gisela Lebzelter, “Die “Schwarze Schmach”: Vourteile – Propaganda – Mythos” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 11 (1985), pp. 37-58; Robert Reinders, “Racialism on the Left: E.D. Morel and the “Black Horror on the Rhine”” International Review of Social History 13 (1968), pp. 1-28; Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, “”Tirailleurs Sénégalais” und “Schwarze Schande” – Verlaufsformen und Konsequenzen einer deutsch-französischen Auseinandersetzung (1910-1926)” in Janos Riesz and Joachim Schultz, eds., Tirailleurs Sénégalais, Frankfurt 1989, pp. 57-73; Joachim Schultz, “Die “Utschebebbes” am Rhein – Zur Darstellung schwarzer Soldaten während der französischen Rheinlandbesetzung (1918-1930)” in Riesz and Schultz, Tirailleurs Sénégalais, pp. 75-100; Clarence Lusane, “Black Troops and the Race Question in Pre-Nazi Germany” in Lusane, Hitler’s Black Victims, New York 2002. The definitive study of the topic is Christian Koller, “Von Wilden aller Rassen niedergemetzelt”: die Diskussion um die Verwendung von Kolonialtruppen in Europa zwischen Rassismus, Kolonial- und Militärpolitik (1914-1930), Stuttgart 2001. See also the recent volume by Iris Wigger, Die “Schwarze Schmach am Rhein”: Rassistische Diskriminierung zwischen Geschlecht, Klasse, Nation und Rasse, Münster 2007.

98. See e.g. “The Black Troops on the Rhine” The Nation March 9, 1921, p. 365; “Is the Black Horror on the Rhine Fact or Propaganda?” The Nation July 13, 1921, pp. 44-45. For an Afro-German women’s perspective see Oguntye, Opitz, and Schultz, Farbe Bekennen, Frankfurt 1992, pp. 49-52. See also B.T. Reynolds, Prelude to Hitler, London 1933, pp. 85 and 106, and J.E. Barker, “The Colored French Troops in Germany” Current History July 1921.

99. The official report on the matter by General Henry Allen was published in Germany in 1925; it dismantles the notion that non-white troops committed disproportionate crimes and exposes the German propaganda claims as false. The few incidents of actual wrongdoing by non-white troops were investigated and punished by the French authorities. See Schultz, “Zur Darstellung schwarzer Soldaten während der französischen Rheinlandbesetzung” pp. 79-80; cf. Keith Reynolds, Victors Divided: America and the Allies in Germany, 1918-1923, Berkeley 1975, p. 64; and Royal Schmidt, Versailles and the Ruhr, The Hague 1968, pp. 58, 118.

100. Quotes from Rheinische Frauenliga, Farbige Franzosen am Rhein: Ein Notschrei deutscher Frauen, Berlin 1920.

101. While all of the sources cited here controvert Fant’s credulous claims, perhaps the most effective antidote to this ongoing anthroposophist avoidance of history is available in Christian Koller’s comprehensive study from 2001: “Von Wilden aller Rassen niedergemetzelt”: Die Diskussion um die Verwendung von Kolonialtruppen in Europa zwischen Rassismus, Kolonial- und Militärpolitik (1914-1930). I urge any reader who is inclined to give Fant’s assertions the benefit of the doubt to consult Koller’s book. On the supposed “outrages” by non-white soldiers see e.g. pp. 203-205, 253-254, 292, 295-298; on the racist character of the propaganda Fant takes as fact see pp. 229-231, 244-245, 338-339; on German opposition against this propaganda at the same time that Steiner endorsed it, see pp. 231-235; on opposition by other anti-racists at the time see pp. 291-295, 298-300, 307; for racist endorsements of the German propaganda from outside Germany see pp. 301, 308, etc. Even setting aside this extremely thorough new research, and the myriad additional sources that were available well before Fant wrote his essay, and assuming that Fant knew nothing whatsoever about the history of this matter, an uncomfortably blunt question must be posed: Does Göran Fant believe that non-white soldiers are somehow more likely to commit “outrages” than white soldiers? Does such a belief have anything to do with anthroposophical views on race?

102. Some readers of Anthroposophy and Ecofascism have found its lessons difficult to learn because they apparently mistook it for a scholarly article meant for other historians rather than a popular treatment written for a lay audience. A word on this peculiar confusion may be in order here. The difference between scholarly publications and popular publications can sometimes be decisive, not just in terms of tone but in terms of content. That a number of anthroposophists took my article to be a scholarly publication indicates among other things just how far removed contemporary anthroposophy is from the world of scholarship. The distinctions between scholarly and popular approaches are central to the purposes my article was designed to fulfill. Consider a contrasting case: When my students hand in papers that refer, for example, to “nineteenth century misconceptions about race,” I will circle such phrases and recommend replacing them with something along the lines of “the conceptions about race that were predominant at the time.” This kind of circumspection is important from a historian’s perspective; it avoids making judgements about the past based on the standards of the present, and reminds us that present standards are just as open to revision as past ones were. In popular treatments, in contrast, there is nothing wrong with offering penetrating criticism of past figures and actions and ideas, particularly those with some significant connection to present debates; indeed this sort of criticism is one of the crucial strengths of popular writing. The widespread allergic reaction to my article among anthroposophists – who were, after all, hardly its intended audience – indicates that such criticism remains very much necessary.

The origins of ‘social threefolding’ lie in Steiner’s response to the First World War. Particularly during the early years of the conflict, Steiner was a fervent supporter of the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary), blaming the war on the English, French, and Russians and insisting that Germany and Austria were merely defending themselves against the evil machinations of their enemies. Steiner simultaneously offered a spiritual and supernatural interpretation of the war’s causes.1 Anthroposophists believed that the war would bring Germany the stature it deserved: world predominance in spiritual culture. 2 But the First World War did not conclude with the German victory its advocates expected, and the far-reaching social changes that swept Germany and Austria in the wake of the lost war spurred a re-assessment of anthroposophist priorities. This led to the emergence of Waldorf schools, biodynamic agriculture, and the distinctive anthroposophical approach to economics and politics that Steiner called ‘social threefolding’. Anthroposophist disillusionment at the outcome of the war centered on the notion that the unblemished German spirit had been failed by an inadequate array of societal institutions which needed to be revitalized through spiritual and national regeneration. 3

After the German defeat in November 1918, Steiner and his followers insisted that Germany was not responsible for the war. This claim became a central component of anthroposophy’s public profile during the Weimar era. 4 In some versions, the anthroposophist emphasis on German innocence was coupled with conspiracy theories about longstanding Western plans to destroy and dismantle the German and Austrian empires. Steiner himself declared already in 1914 that “this war is a conspiracy against German spiritual life.” 5 Some anthroposophists, with Steiner’s active support, included Freemasons and Jews within this ostensible anti-German conspiracy. 6 The principal anthroposophist argument was that the German people and the German spirit bore no responsibility for the war. 7 While the claim that Germany bore no war guilt has been decisively controverted by subsequent historiography on World War One, it was common enough in Germany at the time, not least as a reaction against the Versailles treaty. 8 Steiner’s invective against the treaty, as well as his polemics against Woodrow Wilson, the League of Nations, the English, French, Russians, and Americans, represent an esoteric version of resentments that were widespread among nationalist oriented circles in Germany and Austria in the interwar period. 9

Steiner’s stance toward the war and its aftermath was based in large measure on his vision of Mitteleuropa or central Europe, a term which in anthroposophist usage generally referred to those lands in which German cultural and spiritual life was seen as rightfully predominant, with the German-speaking territories of Austria, Switzerland and Germany at their core. 10 From this perspective, the post-war interference of the Western powers in what should have been Germany’s proper sphere of influence appeared as an affront to the spiritual mission of Mitteleuropa as a whole. Wilson’s doctrine of national self-determination, according to the anthroposophist viewpoint, was “opposed to the divinely ordered course of evolution.” 11 Steiner’s teachings were part of a broader German discourse of Mitteleuropa built around the assumption or aim of German hegemony on much of the continent, whether cast in political, economic, or cultural terms. 12 This concept, in Steiner’s worldview, was in turn closely related to the anthroposophical notion of Volksseelen or “national souls,” often referred to as “folk souls” in English-language anthroposophist publications. Steiner taught that each Volk or people has its own collective soul and guiding spirit to oversee the process of racial and ethnic evolution. The task of the national soul is to help steer each people toward its true spiritual mission. 13 The mission of the German people, in Steiner’s eyes, had been wrongly thwarted by the outcome of the war and the post-war order imposed by the victorious Western powers.

Steiner’s movement thus shared several of the chief preoccupations of the nationalist right in post-World War One Germany: war guilt, Germany’s honor, the fate of the eastern territories, the Allied occupation in the west, the status of the German people within Europe and its mission in the world. In some cases, anthroposophist views on these topics were expressed in racial or ethnic terms. 14 This thematic overlap between anthroposophy and right-wing and nationalist themes was an important factor in the anthroposophist movement’s complex relationship to the multifaceted cultural and political stream known as the völkisch milieu. 15 This contentious relationship provided the intellectual context for the emergence and unfolding of the theory of ‘social threefolding’ that Steiner began developing in 1917.

Steiner’s own term for this theory was “Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus,” the threefold structuring of the social organism, a formulation that highlights the organicist conception of society underlying the doctrine. 16 The theory of ‘social threefolding’ holds that society consists of three autonomous branches, the economic sphere, the political sphere, and the spiritual or cultural sphere. According to Steiner, the three realms are to be kept separate from one another, and each is subject to a different overarching principle: equality in the political realm, fraternity in the economic realm, and liberty in the cultural realm. Of these three, the cultural or spiritual sphere is paramount, and encompasses many of the activities and functions more commonly associated with the political sphere. 17 One crucial aspect of the ‘threefold social order’ is that neither the economic realm nor the cultural realm is to be organized democratically; democratic forms and procedures are permissible only in the somewhat attenuated political realm. Even within the political sphere, Steiner’s attitude toward democracy was often firmly negative; in October 1917, for instance, he ridiculed “democratic institutions” as mere tools of the “powers of darkness” who are always “pulling the strings” from behind the scenes. 18

The doctrines of ‘social threefolding’ inspired a short-lived anthroposophist social movement between 1919 and 1922. 19 But the path from theory to practice took several noteworthy turns. The rise and fall of the threefolding movement reveals significant features of the social beliefs, hopes, and anxieties underlying Steiner’s spiritual teachings. The earliest efforts to propagate a threefolding program came from mid-1917 to mid-1918, when German and Austrian forces controlled large swathes of territory in Eastern Europe. During this period of German hegemony on the Eastern front, Steiner addressed his initial threefolding proposals to a range of German and Austrian aristocrats and political and military leaders. His July 1917 memoranda to the Austrian emperor, the first formulation of Steiner’s threefolding theory, explicitly assume maintaining and even augmenting these territorial gains. 20 Anthroposophist efforts to persuade the Austrian Kaiser failed, and in January 1918 Steiner turned his hopes toward Prince Maximilian of Baden, who nine months later became the last Chancellor of Imperial Germany. 21 In a personal meeting with Prince Max, Steiner outlined his ‘threefolding’ ideas and presented them as anchored in his teachings on ‘national souls’; Steiner additionally sent the Prince a copy of his book on ‘national souls’. 22 These efforts to convince German leaders of the wisdom of social threefolding also failed.

When the unforeseen outcome of the war dashed anthroposophist hopes for realizing the threefold model, and widespread social and economic unrest thoroughly unsettled Germany and Austria, Steiner’s attention shifted to portraying social threefolding as an alternative to the various proposals for collectivization and socialization that abounded in the early stages of the fledgling Weimar democracy. Positioning his own proposals as a ‘third way’ between capitalism and Communism, Steiner devoted much of 1919 to promoting social threefolding to industrialists and business leaders as well as to proletarian audiences in the newly formed workers councils. 23 Even while courting mass support from workers, Steiner rejected democratization of the factories, and maintained that the economy was not to be run by the “hand-workers,” but rather by “the spiritual workers, who direct production.” 24 At the same time, the social threefolding movement claimed to represent the harmonization of workers’ interests and owners’ interests. 25 This approach yielded a contradictory catalogue of measures under the threefolding banner, with denunciations of “Anglo-American capital” vying for attention alongside condemnations of “socialist illusions,” while Steiner’s ideas were presented as “the path to the salvation of the German people.” 26 The resulting mélange of proposals resembled in some respects the variety of organicist and corporatist economic and political models current at the time. 27 What anthroposophists envisioned under the rubric of social threefolding ranged from vague utopias of an organic national community to straightforward calls for a völkisch state as a bulwark against the Western imposition of democracy. 28

The social threefolding movement reached perhaps its highest degree of public notoriety in the course of the acrimonious controversy over Upper Silesia in 1921. As part of the post-war settlement ordained by the Versailles treaty, the Allies organized a plebiscite in the ethnically mixed province to determine whether it should belong to Germany or Poland. 29 Steiner rejected this procedure as an illegitimate interference of foreign powers in the affairs of Mitteleuropa. Instead of a plebiscite, Steiner and his followers proposed applying the principles of threefolding, with their separation of economic from cultural and political functions, to Upper Silesia. This seemingly quixotic notion was one of many proposals floated in advance of the plebiscite, competing with separatist efforts, claims for provincial autonomy, and intensive nationalist propaganda on both German and Polish sides. 30 In January 1921 Steiner wrote a “Call to save Upper Silesia” on behalf of the League for Social Threefolding. 31 The text declared that the province should provisionally remain unaffiliated with either Germany or Poland, in the interest of “true German convictions,” until more auspicious conditions obtained. As Steiner later explained, the aim was “to establish Upper Silesia as an integral territory that is inwardly united with the German spiritual essence.” 32

This proposal initially received a somewhat sympathetic hearing among German communities in Silesia, while reactions from Polish Silesians were generally hostile. 33 In private sessions with threefolding activists in January 1921, Steiner emphasized that the very idea of a Polish state was “impossible” and “an illusion.” 34 Anthroposophist Karl Heyer argued that “the threefold solution to the Upper Silesian problem is better suited than any other to protecting Germany’s true interests in economic terms as well as in national terms and in state-political terms.” 35 In the weeks before the plebiscite, the League for Social Threefolding declared that social threefolding was the only way “for Germany to escape from being strangled by the West, and to regain Germany’s historical prestige.” 36 Anthroposophist viewpoints on Upper Silesia replicated longstanding German assumptions about cultural superiority and national identity.

The threefolding campaign in Upper Silesia nonetheless sparked bitter criticism from other Germans. Two weeks before the plebiscite, a harsh denunciation of the threefolding effort appeared in the Frankfurter Zeitung, accusing anthroposophists of betraying Germany and spreading “Polish propaganda,” charges which were subsequently aired in other parts of the press. 37 This response may have been due in part to a misunderstanding (critics of threefolding seem to have assumed, erroneously, that anthroposophists were urging abstention from the plebiscite), as well as to the fact that any proposals that smacked of autonomy were viewed by many Germans as treason. 38 Steiner’s caustic comments about the political condition of Prussia may also have played a role. The result was that anthroposophists were branded as insufficiently committed to German national integrity. 39

Such perceptions of the anthroposophist stance in the Upper Silesian conflict were wide of the mark. While protesting vociferously against the plebiscite as such, Steiner and his followers argued in favor of voting for Germany if the plebiscite occurred. 40 After the press attacks appeared, the League for Social Threefolding published an announcement in the Frankfurter Zeitung stating explicitly that their position was to vote for Germany in the upcoming plebiscite. In the days surrounding the plebiscite itself, the editors of the threefolding newspaper declared: “Now that the vote is taking place, the League for Social Threefolding needless to say takes the view that for every German there can be no other position than to vote for Germany.” 41 Two weeks later, the paper’s editors explained that their stance all along had been to vote for Germany: “In light of the fact of the plebiscite, the League for Social Threefolding firmly adopted the position of voting for Germany when possible, and the leadership of the League answered categorically every time it was asked that every person eligible to vote in the plebiscite was of course duty-bound to vote, and had to vote for Germany.” 42 Steiner himself endorsed this stance and continued to maintain it after the plebiscite was completed. 43

When the accusation of betraying Germany first surfaced in 1921, leading anthroposophists retorted that critics of threefolding efforts in Upper Silesia were simply tools of the West promoting the anti-German spirit of the Versailles treaty. 44 After the League of Nations partitioned the province in the wake of the plebiscite, the threefolding movement fiercely attacked the partition agreement and lamented the loss of German territory to the Poles. 45 In the words of Ernst Uehli: “Instead of threefolding, which would have meant saving Upper Silesia for Germany, the opposite is now taking place.” 46 Several figures who went on to become prominent anthroposophists fought in German paramilitary units in the Upper Silesian conflict as well. 47 From Steiner’s perspective, the unfortunate outcome of the Upper Silesian campaign meant that the German mission had once again been obstructed. The Upper Silesia episode confirmed Steiner’s disdain for the League of Nations, which he had opposed from the beginning, and strengthened his sense that Germany was trapped between the soulless West and the collectivist East. 48

If this is what social threefolding looked like in practice, what of the theory itself? Many of those interested in Steiner’s economic and political teachings find various elements of the theory inspirational, disregarding the historical form they actually took in Steiner’s day. 49 In this respect, admirers of anthroposophical economic thought may be comparable to latter-day fans of other would-be economic reformers such as Henry George in the United States, C.H. Douglas in Britain, or Silvio Gesell in Germany. Anthroposophists themselves have pointed out the affinities between Steiner’s work and the ‘social credit’ movement initiated by Douglas. 50 What they neglect to mention is that Douglas based his economic theories on the antisemitic forgery ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’. 51 In addition to such unpleasant company, social threefolding also displays significant parallels with the phenomenon of “producerism” that is perceptively analyzed in the excellent study by Chip Berlet and Matthew Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America (New York: Guilford, 2000).

While easily finding affinities with conspiracist, antisemitic, and right-wing worldviews, Steiner’s threefold commonwealth model frequently denounced grass-roots alternative economic approaches, whether in the form of economic democracy, non-statist socialism, councilist tendencies, worker self-management, or other radical efforts to counter capitalism. Many early anthroposophists viewed such efforts as dangerous versions of ‘materialism’ that threatened the spiritual emphasis of social threefolding. 52 Steiner’s own stance was often ambivalent and at times simply contradictory; many of his voluminous writings on economic subjects are vague, disjointed and occasionally opaque. His positions also shifted multiple times, and in some instances he told proletarian audiences one thing while telling owners and managers the opposite. Despite this built-in incoherence, it is possible to discern a more or less consistent standpoint in Steiner’s economic vision. In many ways, that vision represents a spiritual defense of capitalism, private property, market mechanisms, and elite control of production.

Steiner insisted that overcoming capitalism was simply impossible and would mean abolishing social life as such; for him, “capitalism is a necessary component of modern life.” 53 Rather than replacing capitalist institutions with more humane ones, Steiner favored a combination of private ownership and social conscience, in which individual capitalists and small groups of especially “talented” executives would manage private capital as a trust for the ostensible good of the whole community. These precepts bear comparison with several of the nebulous economic doctrines of classical fascism and its ideology of the Volksgemeinschaft or people’s community. As mentioned earlier, a central tenet of social threefolding is that the economic sphere must never be organized or managed democratically. In Steiner’s words: “For god’s sake, no democracy in the economic realm!” 54 Steiner thus railed against socialism (not just its Marxist variants) and rejected the socialization of property (not just nationalization). Within a full-fledged threefold commonwealth, Steiner foresaw a spiritual meritocracy in which the “most capable” would be given control over economic resources, and he vehemently rejected the notion of tempering this arrangement through community oversight.

Anthroposophist Walter Kugler describes Steiner’s position thus: “Each entrepreneur, that is each individual who wants to make use of his talents to satisfy the needs of others, will obtain capital for as long as he is able to make productive use of his talents.” (Kugler, Rudolf Steiner und die Anthroposophie, Cologne 1978, 165) Steiner himself wrote: “The entire ownership of capital must be arranged so that the especially talented individual or the especially talented group of individuals comes to possess capital in a way which arises solely from their own personal initiative.” (ibid.) Steiner derided the idea of “transferring the means of production from private ownership into communal property,” as well as of socializing “the management of concentrated masses of capital,” and insisted that “the management of the means of production must be left in the hands of the individual.” (Steiner in ibid. 199-200) Steiner was insistent on this point: “No-one can be allowed to return to economic forms in which the individual is tied to or limited by the community. We must strive instead for the very opposite.” (ibid. 201) In his fundamental work The Threefold Commonwealth from 1919, he forcefully dismissed “communal property” and “common ownership” several times over.

Steiner repeatedly rejected the notion that the exploitation of labor arises “from the economic order of capitalism”; for him the problem “lies not in capitalism, but in the misuse of spiritual talents.” 55 In Steiner’s view, “Individuals should gain advantage for themselves in the totally free struggle of competition.” 56 “Private property,” for Steiner, “is an outcome of the social creativeness which is associated with individual human ability.” 57 Shared ownership, in contrast, is an obstruction to this all-important creative unfolding of individual talent: “The individual cannot make his abilities effective in business, if he is tied down in his work and decisions to the will of the community.” 58 In Steiner’s utopia, “The spiritual organization will rest on a healthy basis of individual initiative, exercised in free competition amongst the private individuals suited to spiritual work.” 59 Within this framework, “the spiritual life should be set free, and given control of the employment of capital,” indeed an “absolutely free use of capital.” 60

When Steiner’s economic ideas were put into practice in 1919 and 1920 by the Threefold Commonwealth League in southwestern Germany, he made it very clear that he opposed democratic organization of the workplace. Anthroposophist Hans Kühn writes: “Democratization of the factories was something he [Steiner] opposed on principle. The manager had to be able to make his own arrangements without interference.” 61 In these respects, Steiner’s model amounts to an ‘enlightened’ variety of private property and hierarchical management under the benevolent control of a spiritual aristocracy. These teachings are perhaps best understood not as an alternative to established economic systems, but as a kinder, gentler version of current institutions, a form of capitalism with a human face. In combination with anthroposophical theories about race and ethnicity, and the complex historical relationship between anthroposophy and the politics of the far right, Steiner’s vision of a threefold commonwealth merits increased critical scrutiny from those seeking genuine transformation of the existing social, political, and economic order.

Notes:

1. See among others Rudolf Steiner, Die geistigen Hintergründe des Ersten Weltkrieges (Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1974), a collection of his wartime lectures in Germany, and Roman Boos, ed., Rudolf Steiner während des Weltkrieges (Dornach: Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag, 1933). Important context is available in Ulrich Linse, “‘Universale Bruderschaft’ oder nationaler Rassenkrieg – die deutschen Theosophen im Ersten Weltkrieg” in Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Dieter Langewiesche, eds., Nation und Religion in der deutschen Geschichte (Frankfurt 2001), 602-45, and Herman de Tollenaere, The Politics of Divine Wisdom: Theosophy and Labour, National, and Women’s Movements in Indonesia and South Asia, 1875-1947 (Nijmegen 1996), 156-60.

2. See the declaration of “Absichten und Ziele” on the first page of the premier issue of the anthroposophist journal Das Reich, April 1916; cf. Friedrich Lienhard, Deutschlands europäische Sendung (Stuttgart: Greiner & Pfeiffer, 1915); Karl Heise, “Der Krieg und seine Folgen” Zentralblatt für Okkultismus, November 1914, 213-16; Heise, “Kriegs-Visionen” Zentralblatt für Okkultismus, August 1917, 72-76.

3. For a detailed analysis see Helmut Zander, Anthroposophie in Deutschland: Theosophische Weltanschauung und gesellschaftliche Praxis 1884–1945 (Göttingen 2007), 1250-86.

4. See e.g. Steiner, Gedanken während der Zeit des Krieges (Berlin: Philosophisch-Anthroposopher Verlag, 1915); Steiner, Zeitgeschichtliche Betrachtungen (Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1978); Steiner, Aus schicksaltragender Zeit (Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Nachlaßverwaltung, 1959).

5. Steiner, Die geistigen Hintergründe des Ersten Weltkrieges, 27. For further instances of Steiner’s conspiracist interpretation of the war see Rudolf Steiner, Secret Brotherhoods and the Mystery of the Human Double (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2004). According to Steiner, occultist secret societies in the Entente countries had planned the war decades ahead of time; see Steiner, Zeitgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, 22, and cf.  Rudolf Steiner, Aufsätze über die Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus und zur Zeitlage (Dornach 1961), 321. For context see Matthew Stibbe, German Anglophobia and the Great War, 1914-1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2001).

6. Examples include Karl Heise, Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz, and Wilhelm von Heydebrand.

7. Anthroposophists continue to insist that Germany bore no responsibility for the First World War; see e.g. Jürgen von Grone, “Rudolf Steiners Handeln im Dienste Mitteleuropas” Die Drei April 1969, 80-90; Thomas Meyer, “Moltke, Steiner – und welche deutsche ‘Schuld’?” Der Europäer, May 2001, 9-10.

8. See Ulrich Heinemann, Die verdrängte Niederlage: Politische Öffentlichkeit und Kriegsschuldfrage in der Weimarer Republik (Göttingen 1983). For overviews of current scholarship on the origins of the war see Annika Mombauer, The Origins of the First World War: Controversies and Consensus (New York 2002); Mark Hewitson, Germany and the Causes of the First World War (Oxford 2004); Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914-1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2004); Annika Mombauer, “The First World War: Inevitable, Avoidable, Improbable or Desirable? Recent Interpretations on War Guilt and the War’s Origins” German History 25 (2007), 78-95.

9. On the responses of German intellectuals to the war see Wolfgang Mommsen, ed., Kultur und Krieg: Die Rolle der Intellektuellen, Künstler und Schriftsteller im Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich 1996); Suzanne Marchand, “Kultur and the World War” in Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1970 (Princeton University Press, 1996), 228-62; Helmut Fries, Die grosse Katharsis: Der Erste Weltkrieg in der Sicht deutscher Dichter und Gelehrter (Konstanz 1995); Kurt Flasch, Die geistige Mobilmachung: Die deutschen Intellektuellen und der Erste Weltkrieg (Berlin 2000). On German tendencies to view the war in spiritual and cultural terms see Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston 1989), 90-94.

10. See e.g. Steiner, Aus dem mitteleuropäischen Geistesleben (Dornach 1962); Steiner, Mitteleuropa zwischen Ost und West (Dornach 1982); Steiner, Nordische und mitteleuropäische Geistimpulse (Dornach 1982); Steiner, Die Forderungen der Gegenwart an Mitteleuropa (Dornach 1951); Steiner, Wesen und Bedeutung Mitteleuropas und die europäischen Volksgeister (Dornach 1980); Friedrich Rittelmeyer, “Deutschlands Erneuerung” Christentum und Gegenwart January 1920, 15-16; Wilhelm von Heydebrand, “Osten, Westen, und die Dreigliederung” Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus no. 34 (1920); Hans Helling, “Soll Deutschland sich amerikanisieren lassen?” Der Pfad September 1927; Hermann Heisler, Krieg oder Frieden (Stuttgart 1929); Klaus Petersen, Rudolf Steiner und der mitteleuropäische Kulturauftrag (Berlin 1961); Renate Riemeck, Mitteleuropa: Bilanz eines Jahrhunderts (Freiburg: Verlag Die Kommenden, 1965).

11. Rudolf Steiner, From Symptom to Reality in Modern History (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1976), 12.

12. For background see Henry Meyer, Mitteleuropa in German thought and action 1815-1945 (The Hague 1955); Jörg Brechtefeld, Mitteleuropa and German Politics: 1848 to the Present (New York 1996); Lonnie Johnson, Central Europe (Oxford University Press, 2002), 165-70; Jürgen Elvert, Mitteleuropa! Deutsche Pläne zur europäischen Neuordnung (1918 – 1945) (Stuttgart 1999); Richard Plaschka, ed., Mitteleuropa-Konzeptionen in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Vienna 1995); Peter Theiner: “‘Mitteleuropa’-Pläne im Wilhelminischen Deutschland” in Helmut Berding, ed., Wirtschaftliche und politische Integration in Europa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen 1984), 128-48; Wolfgang Mommsen, “Die Mitteleuropaidee und die Mitteleuropapläne im Deutschen Reich” in Mommsen, Der Erste Weltkrieg. Anfang vom Ende des bürgerlichen Zeitalters (Frankfurt 2004), 94-117. On the connotations of the Mitteleuropa idea in the context of World War One, see Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 86-87; Fritz Fischer, Weltmacht oder Niedergang: Deutschland im ersten Weltkrieg (Frankfurt 1965), 14-19, 45-49, 70-73; and David Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780-1918 (Oxford 1998), 362-63.

13. See Rudolf Steiner, The Mission of the Individual Folk Souls in Relation to Teutonic Mythology (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2005); Steiner, The Destinies of Individuals and of Nations (London 1986); Steiner, Die Seelen der Völker geisteswissenschaftlich betrachtet (Dornach 1929); Karl Heyer, “Vom Wesen der Völker und ihren Kulturmissionen: Der deutsche Geist” in Heyer, Menschheitsfragen der Gegenwart im Lichte anthroposophischer Welterkenntnis (Basel 1927), 71-95; Hans Erhard Lauer, Die Volksseelen Europas: Grundzüge einer Völkerpsychologie auf geisteswissenschaftlischer Basis (Vienna 1937); Karl Heyer, Wer ist der deutsche Volksgeist? und andere Beiträge zur Geschichte (Basel 1990); Herbert Hahn, Vom Genius Europas: Skizze einer anthroposophischen Völkerpsychologie (Stuttgart 1964); Gerard Klockenbring, Auf der Suche nach dem deutschen Volksgeist (Stuttgart 1989).

14. For overviews of Steiner’s racial and ethnic doctrines see Helmut Zander, “Anthroposophische Rassentheorie: Der Geist auf dem Weg durch die Rassengeschichte” in Stefanie von Schnurbein and Justus Ulbricht, eds., Völkische Religion und Krisen der Moderne (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2001), 292-341, and Peter Staudenmaier, “Race and Redemption: Racial and Ethnic Evolution in Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 11 (2008), 4-36.

15. For background on the völkisch movement see George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York 1964); Roderick Stackelberg, Idealism Debased: From völkisch Ideology to National Socialism (Kent State University Press, 1981); Uwe Puschner, Die völkische Bewegung im wilhelminischen Kaiserreich: Sprache, Rasse, Religion (Darmstadt 2001); and Uwe Puschner, Walter Schmitz, and Justus Ulbricht, eds., Handbuch zur ‘Völkischen Bewegung’ 1871-1918 (Munich 1996). For an anthroposophist perspective see Lorenzo Ravagli, Unter Hammer und Hakenkreuz: Der völkisch-nationalsozialistische Kampf gegen die Anthroposophie (Stuttgart 2004).

16. His primary text on the subject is Rudolf Steiner, Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage in den Lebensnotwendigkeiten der Gegenwart und Zukunft (Stuttgart 1919); original authorized English translation: Rudolf Steiner, The Three-fold Commonwealth (London 1922). See also Rudolf Steiner, In Ausführung der Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus (Stuttgart: Der Kommende Tag Verlag, 1920), and Steiner, Aufsätze über die Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus, available in abridged translation as Rudolf Steiner, The Renewal of the Social Organism (Spring Valley: Anthroposophic Press, 1985).

17. A detailed examination and critique of ‘social threefolding’ is available in Ilas Körner-Wellershaus, Sozialer Heilsweg Anthroposophie: Eine Studie zur Geschichte der sozialen Dreigliederung Rudolf Steiners unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der anthroposophischen Geisteswissenschaft (Alfter 1993); see also Helmut Zander’s thorough analysis in Zander, Anthroposophie in Deutschland, 1286-1356.

18. Rudolf Steiner, The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1993), 223; see also Steiner, Vom Einheitsstaat zum dreigliedrigen sozialen Organismus (Dornach 1983), and Steiner, Heilfaktoren für den sozialen Organismus (Dornach 1969). On the anti-democratic aspects of Steiner’s conception of politics see Zander, Anthroposophie in Deutschland, 1314-21 and 1695-96.

19. For anthroposophist accounts see Albert Schmelzer, Die Dreigliederungsbewegung 1919 (Stuttgart 1991); Hans Kühn, Dreigliederungs-Zeit: Rudolf Steiners Kampf für die Gesellschaftsordnung der Zukunft (Dornach 1978); Joachim Luttermann, Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus: Grundlinien der Rechts- und Soziallehre Rudolf Steiners (http://stabikat.sbb.spk-berlin.de/CHARSET=ISO-8859-1/DB=1/IMPLAND=Y/LNG=DU/LRSET=1/SET=1/SID=325eb299-0/SRT=YOP/TTL=1/MAT=/NOMAT=T/CLK?IKT=1008&TRM=%3C&cvtourl%3EFrankfurt 1990). An English-language introduction from a contemporary of Steiner can be found in the book by anthroposophist Ernst Boldt, From Luther to Steiner (London 1923).

20. Steiner’s memoranda were circulated among senior officials in the Austrian government through an influential adviser to Kaiser Karl of Austria; the adviser’s brother was a leading anthroposophist. The 1917 memoranda are reprinted in Steiner, Aufsätze über die Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus, 329-75, and Boos, ed., Rudolf Steiner während des Weltkrieges, 60-90; they denounce “Western” ideals of self-determination and democracy as the hegemony of the “Anglo-American race.” For a perceptive analysis see Zander, Anthroposophie in Deutschland, 1275-84. By early 1918, Steiner cast ‘social threefolding’ as the path to salvation from both “Anglo-Americanism” and Bolshevism. His overall stance remained consistent: “If one national civilization spreads more readily, and has greater spiritual fertility than another, then it is quite right that it should spread.” (Steiner, The Threefold Commonwealth, 183) In light of Steiner’s attacks on “Wilsonism,” it is important to recall that the original version of ‘social threefolding’ developed out of this particular historical situation, in which Germany and their Austrian allies had not only conquered vast portions of the East, but also seemed poised to win the war overall; American troops had yet to arrive on the continent, and Entente forces had suffered a series of significant defeats. The eastern territories were the primary bone of contention between advocates of Wilsonian self-determination and Steiner’s threefolding alternative. Shattered anthroposophist hopes of a new European order under German auspices go a long way toward accounting for the bitter tone of Steiner’s remarks regarding Wilson, and ‘Western’ democracy in general, once Germany had lost the war.

21. Max von Baden was a leading proponent of German “ethical imperialism” as a counter to Western democracy; see “Der ethische Imperialismus” in Prinz Max von Baden, Erinnerungen und Dokumente (Stuttgart 1928), 249-59.

22. Steiner, The Mission of the Individual Folk Souls in Relation to Teutonic Mythology. Steiner himself thus emphasized that his threefolding ideas depended on the ethnic-racial scheme propounded in this book.

23. See e.g. Steiner, Die soziale Grundforderung unserer Zeit (Dornach 1990); Steiner, Neugestaltung des sozialen Organismus (Dornach 1963); Steiner, Betriebsräte und Sozialisierung (Dornach 1989). In December 1918, anthroposophist Roman Boos declared that threefolding would save Germany from its two gravest threats: “from without, the armies of the Allies, and from within, the workers in revolt”: Nachrichten der Rudolf Steiner Nachlaßverwaltung 22 (1968), 17.

24. Steiner, Threefold Commonwealth, xxxii; cf. Hans Erhard Lauer, Ein Leben im Frühlicht des Geistes: Erinnerungen und Gedanken eines Schülers Rudolf Steiners (Freiburg 1977), 35.

25. See e.g. Steiner, Soziale Zukunft (Dornach 1977); Steiner, Der innere Aspekt des sozialen Rätsels (Dornach 1972); Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz, Politische Betrachtungen auf Grundlage der Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus (Stuttgart 1920); Ernst Uehli, Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus (Stuttgart 1920); Moritz Bartsch, Der dreigliedrige soziale Organismus: Eine Einführung (Breslau 1921); Roman Boos, Die Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus und der Staat (Stuttgart 1921).

26. See Steiner’s December 1919 essay “Der Weg zur Rettung des deutschen Volkes” in Steiner, Aufsätze über die Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus, 113-16; in English as “The Way to Save the German Nation” in Steiner, The Renewal of the Social Organism, 149-51. On occasion Steiner portrayed capital itself – as distinct from domination by foreign capital – as “the spiritual element within economic life.” Rudolf Steiner, Wie wirkt man für den Impuls der Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus? (Dornach 1986), 66.

27. For an anthroposophical perspective see Folkert Wilken, Grundwahrheiten einer organischen Wirtschaft (Zurich 1934). For background see Ralph Bowen, German Theories of the Corporative State (New York 1947), particularly 13-19 in on the notion of society as an organism; cf. Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik (Munich 1978), 199-201.

28. See e.g. Wilhelm Blume, “Vom organischen Aufbau der Volksgemeinschaft,” and Siegfried Dorfner, “Deutschlands Wiederaufrichtung,” in Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus no. 46 (1920). In a pamphlet published in December 1918, at the downfall of the Wilhelmine empire and the birth of the Weimar republic, anthroposophist E. A. Karl Stockmeyer called for erecting a “völkischen Staat,” an ethno-nationalist state, in Germany rather than submitting to “the democracy imposed on us by the West.” (Stockmeyer, Vom deutschen Volksstaat und von der deutschen Erziehung, Mannheim 1918, 14) In his July 1917 memoranda, Steiner characterized Western forms of democracy as “Anglo-American domination” over Mitteleuropa; see Steiner, Aufsätze über die Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus, 358. See also Roman Boos, “Deutchlands Platz an der Sonne” Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus, no. 4 (1919), which calls on German industrialists and workers to form a united front against “American capital”; Ernst Uehli, “Die deutsche Weltmission” Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus, no. 15 (1919); Uehli, “Zur Mobilisierung des deutschen Geistes” Das Reich April 1919, 7-10; Richard Seebohm, “Dreigliederung des sozialen Lebens” Die Tat February 1921, 832-39.

29. For context see F. Gregory Campbell, “The Struggle for Upper Silesia, 1919-1922” Journal of Modern History 42 (1970), 361-85; T. Hunt Tooley, National Identity and Weimar Germany: Upper Silesia and the Eastern Border, 1918 – 1922 (University of Nebraska Press, 1997); Ralph Schattkowsky, Deutschland und Polen von 1918/19 bis 1925: Deutsch-polnische Beziehungen zwischen Versailles und Locarno (Frankfurt 1994), 48-94; Kai Struve, ed., Oberschlesien nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg: Studien zum nationalen Konflikt und seiner Erinnerung (Marburg 2003).

30. Cf. Waldemar Grosch, Deutsche und polnische Propaganda während der Volksabstimmung in Oberschlesien 1919 – 1921 (Dortmund 2002); Günther Doose, Die separatistische Bewegung in Oberschlesien nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Wiesbaden 1987); T. Hunt Tooley, “German Political Violence and the Border Plebiscite in Upper Silesia, 1919-1921” Central European History 21 (1988), 56-98; Tooley, “The Polish-German Ethnic Dispute and the 1921 Upper Silesian Plebiscite” Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism 24 (1997), 13-20.

31. Steiner, “Aufruf zur Rettung Oberschlesiens” in Steiner, Aufsätze über die Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus, 461-66.

32. Rudolf Steiner, Die Anthroposophie und ihre Gegner (Dornach 2003), 328. For an anthroposophist account see Walter Kugler, “Polnisch oder Deutsch? Oberschlesien, ein Schulbeispiel für die Notwendigkeit der Dreigliederung” Beiträge zur Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe 93 (1986), 1-13.

33. See the press reports reproduced in Beiträge zur Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe 93 (1986), 20-32. There was evidently little anthroposophist presence in Upper Silesia itself; the threefolding campaign was largely waged from Breslau, in Lower Silesia. In addition, virtually none of the Silesian anthroposophists or threefolding advocates appears to have known Polish; according to anthroposophist Moritz Bartsch, one of the primary figures in the anthroposophist campaign in Upper Silesia, threefolding proponents had neither printed materials in Polish nor Polish speakers (ibid. 18). They perceived opposition primarily from Polish residents of the province, not from German residents; see the testimony from Bartsch, Hans Kühn and others in ibid., 14-17. Anthroposophist statements on Upper Silesia were consistently condescending toward the Polish population, as well as toward Polish political aspirations, even before the threefolding campaign got underway; see e.g. Ernst Umlauff, “Oberschlesien” Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus vol. 2 no. 10 (September 1920), 2-3, and Rudolf von Koschützki, “Zur oberschlesischen Frage” Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus vol. 2 no. 11 (September 1920), 3-4.

34. Steiner, Wie wirkt man für den Impuls der Dreigliederung, 213. According to Steiner, Poland ought to remain divided as it had been for the previous several centuries; he considered the Polish people, except where it was Germanized, to consist of a feudal aristocracy and an uncivilized peasantry. In his view: “It is not possible to reconstruct any kind of Poland, to create a Polish state. [...] You can build it up, but it will always collapse again. In reality there will never be a Poland for any longer period of time, because it cannot exist, because at the decisive moment Poland must be divided, so that the Poles can develop their talents. Hence this Poland will never exist, and to speak of Poland today is an illusion.” (212-13; cf. 245). “You see, precisely by studying the Polish essence, one can very accurately observe just how impossible it would be for a territory in such an exposed location [i.e. Upper Silesia] to vote in favor of simply entering the Polish element.” (202)

35. Karl Heyer, “Der Weg zur Lösung der oberschlesischen Frage” Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus vol. 2 no. 31 (January 1921), 3-4. Ernst Uehli, “Ereignisse der Woche,” ibid., 2, declares that it is simply “obvious” that Germany must retain Upper Silesia’s economic resources: “in order to survive economically, Germany needs Upper Silesian coal”; Uehli further insists that “this demand cannot be achieved through plebiscite” but only through social threefolding. Upper Silesia represented a crucially important industrial area and was part of Prussia before the plebiscite.

36. Bund für Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus, “Die Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus und die oberschlesische Frage” Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus vol. 2 no. 36 (March 8, 1921), 4. The statement goes on to explain: “In the current situation, the Upper Silesian economy with its raw materials that are essential to the German economy can only be saved for German economic life if they are separated from political factors and made autonomous.”

37. See Beiträge zur Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe 93 (1986), 38-39.

38. See Waldemar Grosch, “Deutsche und polnische Propaganda in der Zeit der Aufstände und des Plebiszits” in Struve, ed., Oberschlesien nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg, 63-95; Schattkowsky, Deutschland und Polen, 66-69 and 85-94; Tooley, National Identity and Weimar Germany, 57-62.

39. In an odd reversal, latter-day anthroposophists often make similar claims about the anthroposophist stance in the Upper Silesia struggle as those advanced by nationalist critics of anthroposophy at the time, insisting that Steiner’s posture was neutral, anti-nationalist, and a principled repudiation of ethnic politics; indeed his rejection of Wilsonian self-determination is frequently adduced as evidence of such a position. See e.g. Jens Heisterkamp, ed., Die Jahrhundertillusion: Wilsons Selbstbestimmungsrecht der Völker, Steiners Kritik und die Frage der nationalen Minderheiten heute (Frankfurt: Info3, 2002).

40. Steiner first raised this possibility as a sort of compromise at the beginning of January 1921 in his discussions with Silesian threefolding activists; some elements within the threefolding movement evidently reasoned that a victory for Germany in the plebiscite would allow anthroposophist efforts in the province to continue, while a victory for Poland would spell the end of such endeavors. Cf. Steiner, Wie wirkt man für den Impuls der Dreigliederung, 231-32; Kugler, “Polnisch oder Deutsch?”, 12-13. The editors of Steiner’s complete works observe: “Silesian friends of Rudolf Steiner’s threefolding idea had tried to advocate social threefolding to a broad audience as a solution to the problem, in order to save Upper Silesia from the disastrous consequences of the plebiscite they had been forced into in 1921, but with the additional recommendation that in case the plebiscite occurred, the only possible vote was a vote for Germany.” Steiner, Die Verantwortung des Menschen für die Weltentwickelung (Dornach 1989), 337.

41. “Zusatz der Schriftleitung” Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus vol. 2 no. 38 (dated March 22, 1921), 3; the plebiscite actually took place on March 20, 1921.

42. “Dreigliederung und Oberschlesien” Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus vol. 2 no. 40 (April 5, 1921), 3. Looking back on the Upper Silesia campaign a decade later, Karl Heyer wrote categorically that in the 1921 plebiscite “for the German there could be no other position than to vote in favor of Germany” (Heyer, Wie man gegen Rudolf Steiner kämpft, Stuttgart 1932, 84). In January 1921, some anthroposophists viewed German nationalist groups in Upper Silesia, particularly the Verband heimattreuer Oberschlesier, as potential sympathizers of threefolding; see Steiner, Wie wirkt man für den Impuls der Dreigliederung, 251. Tooley, National Identity and Weimar Germany, describes the Verband heimattreuer Oberschlesier as “the organization most closely related in the public mind with the German cause” (157) and says they “specialized in atrocity propaganda” against the Poles (158) and formed “the first paramilitary groups” (185). Tooley reports that mainstream pro-German organizations in Upper Silesia “often clashed with the nationalist VHO, which tended to emphasize rather than smooth over the ethnic conflict.” (160) According to Tooley, the VHO was “the most visible and most blatantly anti-Polish plebiscite group” (189).

43. In May 1921, for example, Steiner angrily denied “that anthroposophy had shown its un-German and un-national aspect in its stance on the Upper Silesian question. Everybody who asked us for advice in that situation was told that whoever stands in our ranks should vote for Germany if the plebiscite comes. We never said anything different.” (Steiner, Die Anthroposophie und ihre Gegner, 328; cf. 555-56) In February 1923 anthroposophist Hans Büchenbacher reported: “During the struggles around the plebiscite in Upper Silesia, many anthroposophist public speakers in Germany presented threefolding as the peaceful solution and the only healthy solution to the problem, whereupon accusations of treason appeared in the press. Our speakers were able to rebuff these accusations. After all, they could simply point to the fact that if it came to a plebiscite, the threefolding advocates would of course vote for Germany, and that Dr. Steiner himself said this clearly.” Rudolf Steiner, Das Schicksalsjahr 1923 in der Geschichte der Anthroposophischen Gesellschaft (Dornach 1991), 389.

44. Roman Boos, “Wer verrät das Deutschtum?” Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus vol. 2 no. 38 (March 22, 1921), 2-3. See also Friedrich Engelmann, Ist die Dreigliederung undeutsch? (Stuttgart 1921). Engelmann declares that social threefolding comes directly from “the German national soul” and that “only Germany” can bring social threefolding to fruition, “for the salvation of the whole world” (11).

45. In addition to emphasizing the spiritual differences between Slavs and Germans and propounding the German mission of bringing true enlightenment to Eastern Europe, the 1921 reporting on Upper Silesia in anthroposophist publications constantly ridiculed Polish claims in the territory and condemned German politicians for failing to take a hard line in the negotiations over the province. Examples include Ernst Boldt, Rudolf Steiner: Ein Kämpfer gegen seine Zeit (Munich 1921), 187-88, and Jürgen von Grone, “Mitteleuropäische Realpolitik” Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus, August 13, 1921, 2-3. Anthroposophists also railed against “Polish terror” in Upper Silesia; see e.g. Ernst Uehli, “Ereignisse der Woche” Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus April 5, 1921, 1.

46. Ernst Uehli, “Ereignisse der Woche” Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus June 7, 1921, 2. In Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus November 3, 1921, Uehli complains: “A crucially significant part of German industry and raw materials is being given politically to bankrupt Poland.” He claims that the “Western powers” imposed partition merely to create for themselves a “mighty economic position” in Poland. Such grievances are incompatible with historical research on the subject. Campbell, for example, writes that the provisions of the League of Nations partition plan “would allow the area to survive at least temporarily as an economic unit. Economic matters and minority disputes were to be handled by an ‘Upper Silesian Mixed Commission,’ to be composed equally of Germans and Poles as well as a neutral member. On the basis of population and territory, the boundary that was suggested by the League was as fair as any that had yet been proposed.” (Campbell, “The Struggle for Upper Silesia,” 384) Anthroposophists involved in the Upper Silesian campaign, however, assumed a natural German right to the province, and even long after partition were still bemoaning the absorption of part of the territory by Poland; see e.g., Kühn, Dreigliederungs-Zeit, 125-27, and Ernst von Hippel, Oberschlesien (Königsberg 1931); von Hippel characterizes Poland as “an Asiatic despotism,” denounces the French, English, Versailles, Wilson, and the League of Nations, and deplores the fact that German populations are now forced to live under Polish rule.

47. One prominent example is Max Karl Schwarz, who became one of the most active figures in the German biodynamic movement, particularly during the Nazi era; he was a commander of one of the German paramilitary Freikorps outfits that played a violent role in Upper Silesia.

48. For Steiner’s rejection of the League of Nations see e.g. Rudolf Steiner, “Der Weg in den Wirren der Gegenwart” Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus vol. 2 no. 20 (October 1920). On Mitteleuropa caught between East and West see e.g. Steiner, Bewußtseins-Notwendigkeiten für Gegenwart und Zukunft (Dornach 1967), which warns that the “German essence” is being “alienated” by “Americanism” on the one side and “Russiandom” on the other (408); according to Steiner, “fear of the spiritual is the characteristic element of Americanism” (405), while the threat from “the East” is “socialism” (407). See also Steiner, Die geistigen Hintergründe des Ersten Weltkrieges, 42-44; Steiner, Die Tempellegende und die Goldene Legende, 255-56; Steiner, Gegensätze in der Menschheitsentwickelung, 147-66.

49. For a recent example see Guido Giacomo Preparata, “Perishable Money in a Threefold Commonwealth: Rudolf Steiner and the Social Economics of an Anarchist Utopia” Review of Radical Political Economics 38 (2006), 619-48; Preparata is a fan of Silvio Gesell and C. H. Douglas as well.

50. For an early instance of anthroposophist enthusiasm for Douglas see Owen Barfield, “The Relation between the Economics of C.H. Douglas and those of Rudolf Steiner” Anthroposophy: A Quarterly Review of Spiritual Science, vol. 8 no. 3 (1933), 272-85. Barfield describes Douglas as “one of the few English writers who have quoted from The Threefold Commonwealth in their works. He has addressed a Group of the [Anthroposophical] Society at the London Headquarters. Moreover, several members of the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain have been personally interested in Social Credit for many years.” (272) Barfield continues: “What is capital? For answer one cannot do better than turn to the work of Major Douglas.” (275) Barfield depicts Douglas’s Social Credit scheme as the prime expression of Steiner’s general views on threefolding. The extensive overlap between anthroposophy and Social Credit is confirmed by the literature on Douglas’s movement; see e.g. John Finlay, Social Credit: The English Origins (McGill-Queens University Press 1972), 185, 232, 244. For Douglas’s approving view of Steiner’s threefolding principles see e.g. “The Control of Policy in Industry: Notes of a Lecture by Major C. H.
Douglas” The New Age vol. XXVII no. 6 (June 10, 1920), 85.

51. This is readily discernible from Douglas’s work itself. Part II of Douglas’s book Social Credit identifies the Protocols as a foundation stone of his argument, and that text was far from the bluntest statement of his position; interested readers would do well to peruse the endless stream of antisemitic invective that Douglas wrote for internal consumption within the Social Credit movement. There is an extensive literature on the Social Credit movement. C.B. Macpherson’s classic study Democracy in Alberta: Social Credit and the Party System (University of Toronto Press 1962) discusses Douglas’s antisemitism and his reliance on the Protocols at length (182-86), and makes very clear that Douglas’s antisemitic conspiracy theories were the basis of the entire Social Credit edifice; in Douglas’s mind, “the plot was a relentless Judaic conspiracy against Christian civilization” (183), and Douglas insisted “that the whole social credit movement be committed to the exposure of the plotters” (185). Macpherson observes: “There was some unwillingness within the movement to accept the theory of the Jewish world plot, but Douglas insisted that it was an integral part of social creditism.” (184) Another study points out: “Douglas social credit combined a conspiracy-based understanding of history with anti-Semitism [. . .] He believed a Jewish financial conspiracy was orchestrating world events ranging from the First World War to the Great Depression. The primary source of his ideas was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” (Bob Hesketh, Major Douglas and Alberta Social Credit, University of Toronto Press 1997, 5) As Hesketh notes, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were “the single most important influence” on Douglas’s Social Credit theories (17). Another study reports: “Douglas’s economic and political doctrines were wholly dependent on an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.” (Janine Stingel, Social Discredit, McGill-Queen’s University Press 2000, 13) For a recent critical analysis of Douglas’s ideas see Derek Wall, “Social Credit: The Ecosocialism of Fools” Capitalism Nature Socialism 14 (2003). On the German context see Matthew Lange, Antisemitic Elements in the Critique of Capitalism in German Culture, 1850-1933 (Oxford: Lang, 2007).

52. Examples include the July 1919 special issue of Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus, addressed to the workers’ councils, which condemns socialist tendencies; Oskar Hermann, “Wirtschaftsdemokratie: Ein Zerrbild der Dreigliederung” Anthroposophie March 30, 1930, 98-100; and the two-page supplement to issue no. 10 of Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus, dated September 5, 1919, which is devoted to distinguishing social threefolding from councilist tendencies; it declares threefolding to be “the mission of the German people.”

53. Steiner, Westliche und östliche Weltgegensätzlichkeiten (Dornach 1981), 302. Steiner’s followers have sometimes extended this analysis into a veritable celebration of capitalism under threefolding auspices; see e.g. Folkert Wilken, Das Kapital (1976), and Wilken, The Liberation of Capital (1982). Equally telling examples can be found in Roman Boos’ musings on social threefolding as “cooperative capitalism” and on “capital as an instrument of freedom” in the Swiss anthroposophist journal Gegenwart, March 1942.

54. Steiner, Vom Einheitsstaat zum dreigliedrigen sozialen Organismus, 165.

55. Steiner, Der innere Aspekt des sozialen Rätsels (Dornach 1972), 82. Cf. “Der Ausverkauf Deutschlands” Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus no. 28 (January 1920).

56. Steiner, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kultur- und Zeitgeschichte (Dornach 1966), 285.

57. Steiner, The Threefold Commonwealth, 126.

58. Steiner, Rudolf Steiner: Essential Readings, ed. Richard Seddon (Wellingborough 1988), 106. Steiner continues: “Really practical thought, therefore, will not look to find the cure for social ills in a reshaping of economic life that would substitute communal for private management of the means of production. The endeavor should rather be to forestall the ills that can arise through management by individual initiative and personal worth, without impairing this management itself.” (ibid.)

59. Steiner, The Threefold Commonwealth, 158.

60. Ibid., 117 and 126. Similar pronouncements can be found in many other publications by Steiner; see e.g. Steiner, Soziale Zukunft (Dornach 1977), 165-66. These ideas are repeated throughout the threefolding literature; see among numerous other examples Emil Leinhas, “Kapitalverwaltung im dreigliedrigen sozialen Organismus” Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus February 1920.

61. Kühn, Dreigliederungszeit, 52.

The infant Achilles, as myth would have it, was dipped in the river Styx to make him invulnerable to attack, leaving only his heel unprotected. According to Peter Hudis, this sole vulnerable spot corresponds to the western left’s failure to embrace and support one of the many competing ethnic nationalist paramilitary organizations in the ongoing Balkan wars, the Kosovo Liberation Army. But this myth, like all others, cannot withstand the scrutiny of reason. There is nothing unique about either the conflict in Kosovo or the international left’s ambivalent response to it, and those who have declined to adopt the cause of any of the belligerent parties have in fact chosen a position more principled and politically responsible than Hudis’ own. Indeed it is Hudis who reveals a chronic vulnerability, namely selective indignation, which ultimately proves his downfall. In the end, this would-be Achilles of the left shoots himself in the foot.

Hudis has a fine sense of outrage at those western leftists who were foolish enough to fall for the oldest trick in the book: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. He also does a better job than other enthusiasts of the KLA at examining the roots of the U.S./NATO bombardment, and I’m glad to see that he unequivocally condemns it.

But it’s a bit late for that, and his unwillingness to take any responsibility for contributing to the ideological groundwork that made the U.S./NATO assault possible in the first place gives his fine words a hollow ring. Even when Hudis focuses on the analyses put forward by other leftists, his outrage is frequently misplaced, and the moral underpinnings of his argument are vitiated by his own embrace of nationalist mythology. Moreover, his positions on such crucial topics as genocide fall to pieces at the level of basic logical consistency. Most disheartening of all, in my view, is his refusal to engage in any comparative analysis, historical or contemporary, of the sole ethnic conflict which seems to have caught his attention.

In this respect, Hudis’ argument resembles that of best-selling author Daniel Goldhagen, and his article stands a good chance of playing the same role that Hitler’s Willing Executioners did: to make people indignant for exactly the wrong reasons while feeding them a version of events that severely misunderstands the historical and political reality.1 In other respects, Hudis’ article bears a resemblance to the current fad of “liberation nationalism” within the European New Right. These similarities are unsettling to those of us who have argued for ten years for an understanding of the Balkan context which promotes the same philosophical goals to which Hudis pledges allegiance. Hudis’ analysis unfortunately stands in contradiction to his own stated goals.

Hudis opens by invoking the specter of a partitioned Kosovo. It isn’t clear what Hudis and other would-be Balkan partisans have against partition as such, though Hudis seems to give away his hand with the remark about northern Kosovo as a haven for Serb war criminals. Yes, it is that, but only because it is a haven—the only haven—for any and all Serbs in Kosovo, most of whom are not war criminals. That is, after all, the logic of partition. If Hudis is harboring illusions about a binational state in Kosovo, he ought to come out and say so. If not, what exactly would he prefer instead of partition? Simply expelling all Serbs from Kosovo? And perhaps all the Roma, Montenegrins, Macedonians, Jews, Turks, and other non-Albanians as well? It is hard to see how this would fit his image of “human liberation.” I’d also quibble with Hudis’ contention that the KLA “has been disarmed and dismantled under U.S. dictate and replaced by a Kosova Protection Corps”; the backbone of that Corps is, of course, KLA cadres. Tim Judah’s book Kosovo: War and Revenge says forthrightly: “To all intents and purposes, the KPC is the KLA in mothballs.”2

Hudis thinks the KLA is simply “a national liberation army” representing “an oppressed people.” If the world were this simple, we could all spare ourselves twenty-page articles and just cheer for the good guys and boo the bad guys. His real complaint against the rest of us confused and complacent leftists is that we failed “to support the KLA during the war,” which he takes to be synonymous with “support of the people of Kosova.” Part of the reason some of us refused to support the KLA before, during, and after the war is that the KLA do not represent an emancipatory alternative and do not deserve left support. They are a largely right-wing nationalist movement with reactionary aims, the product of a downward spiral of competing chauvinist nationalisms. The conditions through which Albanian nationalism re-emerged in the late 20th century reinforced its regressive aspects. The political roots of the KLA specifically—it was hardly the only nationalist outfit on offer in Kosovo—lie in two primary sources: a National-Bolshevik faction which has been agitating for a Greater Albania since the 1970’s, and former Communist Party apparatchiks who administered the province’s misery until they were replaced by otherwise identical Serb counterparts. To return to power and administer the same misery, but with a purified populace, is the goal of these KLA cadres. The group’s leadership is committed to ethnocentric supremacy, and their popular support rests on accumulated ethnic resentment. Their stated goal was not to defend Kosovar civilians against Serb attacks, but rather to “liberate” the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo, Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia (presumably their brethren in Albania proper are already liberated, a fact which might come as a surprise to many Albanian citizens).

This is a revanchist project which leftists should reject. The KLA’s unpleasant tactics, well beyond the standard killings of “collaborators” etc., aren’t really the point. Even if the group scrupulously heeded the rules of war, the fact remains that of all the organizations which emerged over the past decade to lay claim to Albanian Kosovars’ allegiance, the KLA is the one most at odds with leftist goals. Their program, their structure, and their practice should not be promoted or defended by radicals. While Hudis trots out Adem Demaci in support of his case, he neglects to note some salient facts. I share Hudis’ admiration for Demaci’s vision of a Balkan confederation (though not much of his admiration for Demaci as a political figure), but it would help readers to know that after trading charges of treason with Thaci’s faction, Demaci quit his post in the KLA when the Rambouillet treaty was signed and went into exile under threat of death from the KLA.3 He denounced the U.S./NATO bombardment as an assault on both Serbs and Albanians and called on the population of Kosovo to resist the allied attack. Thus even if Hudis’ argument might have made some dim sense before Rambouillet, it can’t possibly be applied to western leftists “during the war.”

But the problem with his position goes deeper than that: Hudis seems to relegate the recent outburst of Albanian Kosovar xenophobia to the status of a troubling and puzzling fluke, rather than the logical unfolding of the very same nationalist premises he implicitly endorses. He makes it sound as if Kosovar violence against Roma populations and other non-Albanians is the result of a recent power shift within the KLA’s orbit. That’s like pretending that Jim Crow laws were instituted just because the wrong party won an election. Already in August 1999, Human Rights Watch reported that “the most serious incidents of violence … have been carried out by members of the KLA.”4 Tim Judah notes that this pattern has persisted even after the formal demilitarization of the KLA. Neither Human Rights Watch nor Judah can be considered friends of the Serbs. The KLA’s victims include not only the numerous non-Albanian ethnic groups in Kosovo (including Muslim Slavs), but also Albanian Kosovars whose nationalist fervor is judged to be insufficiently ardent. This extends even to outspoken Albanian Kosovar nationalists like Veton Surroi, who has dared to condemn the anti-Gypsy and anti-Serb pogroms and has faced KLA death threats for his efforts.

The ongoing violence by Kosovar Albanians against sundry ethnic Others is the obvious and foreseeable outgrowth of a “national liberation” politics in the Balkans. This has been the case throughout the past decade in every region of former Yugoslavia, and is the reason why in this context national liberation movements cannot represent “human struggles for liberation.” I don’t see how it is possible to take seriously Hudis’ story about the “struggle for a multiethnic society in Bosnia.” This myth was already counterfactual when pro-interventionist western leftists dreamed it in the early 1990s, as the briefest familiarity with Alija Izetbegovic’s actual politics will attest.

There was an active struggle for a multiethnic society in Bosnia was in the early 1940s. But Bosnia’s secessionist wars in the early 1990s were the historical opposite, indeed the very negation, of that earlier movement. The obvious fact that Milosevic’s opportunistic embrace of Greater Serbian revanchism started the avalanche of chauvinism does not magically transform Izetbegovic and his nationalist cohorts into harbingers of universal tolerance, nor does it make Bosnian Serb nationalism somehow fundamentally different from all the other competing nationalisms in the area. The kernel of truth in Hudis’ revisionist mythology of the Bosnian civil wars is that the Bosnian Muslim nationalist forces were considerably less criminal in their methods than their Croat or Serb adversaries/allies. But those are hardly sufficient grounds for enlisting the active support of revolutionary internationalists. Our political forebears didn’t go to Spain in order to support the lesser of three evils, they went to defend and take part in a revolutionary transformation of society.

Hudis goes on to argue that “the notion that has long defined the response of many Westerners to events in the Balkans” is “that the problem is one of ‘ancient tribal rivalries’ between equally reactionary forms of nationalism.” But this isn’t one notion, it’s two distinct notions, and by no means do the two always appear in tandem. The first claim (ancient tribal rivalries) is a mere prejudice, and Hudis is right to condemn it. The second claim, however, is unfortunately true: each of the nationalist movements that have sprung up in the former Yugoslavia since 1990 have been equally reactionary and equally inimical to the goals Hudis espouses. Hudis doesn’t offer an explanation of why Bosnian or Kosovar nationalist strivings are supposed to be benign, much less emancipatory. He can’t content himself with pointing out that these two nationalisms were the underdogs within the existing array of forces at the time; if being on the losing end of interethnic border disputes were sufficient to command the active support of leftists worldwide, we’d all have to start choosing sides in Kashmir, Ossetia, and not a few other places as well. Hudis doesn’t notice the gaping hole this leaves in his argument. Where are his angry articles denouncing the passivity and indifference of western leftists to the struggles for human liberation in Nagorno-Karabakh? And which side was the “right” one in that case, anyway? It also won’t do to point toward the unique brutality of Serb chauvinism as grounds for taking up the KLA’s colors. If that is Hudis’ motivation, I’m sorry to say he’s picked the wrong conflict; Serbian butchery can’t hold a candle to Russia’s annihilation of the Chechens or to the organized barbarism in Angola or the fratricidal catastrophe in the Sudan.

The only possible remaining reason, as far as I can see, for urging leftists to hoist the flag of the KLA on our rickety pole is the straightforward plea that this outfit was the only one capable of offering the Kosovars any effective resistance to the onslaught of their former neighbors, the Serbs. After a certain point, coinciding with the loss of influence of Rugova and his allies in the Democratic League of Kosovo, this was indeed the case, and Hudis seems to suggest that this alone was sufficient reason to back the KLA. But if that were true, it would entail a crucial corollary: we would also have been bound, under Hudis’ logic, to actively support the Serbian paramilitaries in the Croatian Krajina, as well as the Ustashe units in parts of Bosnia, at earlier stages of the war.5 Those, I imagine, are consequences that Hudis would reject. But how can he? Either people under threat of expulsion and destruction have a right to defend themselves with whatever means they choose (and, according to Hudis, a concomitant claim on the solidarity of internationalists everywhere), or they don’t. Hudis can’t pick and choose where he wants to apply his principle, otherwise it stops being a principle. This intractable contradiction is on full display when Hudis bemoans “the failure of those on the Left who opposed U.S. actions to come to the support of the people of Kosova.” Which people of Kosovo? Hudis only wants us to support one of the several peoples of Kosovo, but he never bothers to tell us why we should make such an ethically perilous choice.

Or does he? Hudis believes that the Albanian Kosovars were facing genocide, as the Bosnians had before them, in his version of events. It is unpleasant and unseemly to have to dissect that curiously foreshortened analysis, but it is necessary to do so, since Hudis indicates that the threat of genocide is enough to overcome leftists’ longstanding and well-founded reluctance to step into the mire of competing nationalisms. Hudis complains that “Independent radicals such as Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and David McReynolds focused all their wrath on U.S. actions, to the point of denying that genocide was even at issue.” This is yet another conflation of distinct positions. If, say, Chomsky had believed that genocide was about to occur in Kosovo, he would still have focused his wrath on U.S. actions. This is a position he has held for decades, and whatever one thinks of it, it is unrelated to his stance on the question of genocide. I must also note that the phrase “all their wrath” is inaccurate; all three of the named figures publicly condemned Milosevic’s policies.

But let’s get right to the heart of what Hudis calls the “real point”: What counts as genocide, and has it been going on in the Balkans? Hudis adopts the definition codified in the 1948 UN convention on genocide, which in his words refers to “a systematic effort to cause serious bodily or mental harm to a national, ethnic, racial or religious group simply because of the nature of that group.” Various perceptive critiques of that formulation have been put forth over the years, but what is most striking in this instance is Hudis’ refusal to stick to his own definition. He constantly slides back and forth between this extremely broad formulation and the much narrower common sense understanding of genocide as the wholesale physical destruction of a people. Consider, for example, Hudis’ assertion that the Serbs intended to “slaughter” the Kosovars, or his invocation of “the massacre of hundreds of thousands [of Bosnians] through a carefully orchestrated campaign”—a figure which is, by the way, significantly inflated. The emotional import of Hudis’ claims depends entirely on the much more stringent standard of genocide, which is, moreover, the far more widespread interpretation of the term. It’s also worth reminding ourselves that popular media accounts of the Balkan conflicts consistently placed the Serb treatment of both Bosnian Muslims and Albanian Kosovars into the common-sense paradigm of genocide, explicitly and repeatedly aligning the Kosovars and Bosnians with the Jews, the Serbs with the Nazis, and Milosevic with Hitler.

But even if we grant Hudis his preferred broad definition, he still contradicts himself by ridiculing the notion that “the killing of a few dozen Serbs by Kosovars” might constitute genocide, forgetting that by his own definition this notion is self-evidently true. And he completely cancels whatever merit his position might have had by flatly asserting, immediately after offering the definition quoted above, that “By this or any definition, Serbia’s war against Bosnia from 1992-95 was clearly genocidal.” By any definition? The American Heritage College Dictionary defines genocide as “the systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group”. Webster’s College Dictionary defines it as “the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group”. The American Heritage Dictionary defines it as “the systematic, planned annihilation of a racial, political, or cultural group”. Those definitions represent the predominant conception of genocide. And by this definition, the activities of Serb paramilitary units during the Bosnian civil war were clearly not genocidal. But don’t take it from me, take it from Hudis himself, who describes “the tactic, perfected by Serb paramilitaries in Bosnia, of surrounding a village in U-shape formation, killing and raping those caught in it while forcing the rest of the remaining civilians to flee.” What sort of extermination campaign depends on mass expulsion as its chief tactic? Or does Hudis perhaps think that when SS Einsatzgruppen descended on Jewish communities in Russia they gave the residents 24 hours to leave?

Genocidal operations attempt to kill all of their victims. That’s what makes them genocidal. The infliction of widespread misery, forced exile, property destruction and targeted or even random killing is of a fundamentally different character from deliberate and total physical annihilation. The two forms of radical evil are different in principle (which is not to say that the one does not sometimes become a prelude to the other). Brutal mass expulsions and violent population transfers—what is now captured under the term “ethnic cleansing”—are commonplaces of the early stages of state building. There is, regrettably, nothing unusual about them. They have been repeated dozens of times in the last century alone, on a scale much more massive than anything that happened in Bosnia or Kosovo. Silesia, Prussia, the Sudetenland, Palestine, Pakistan, India, the Bosporus—were these, too, instances of genocide? What sense would it make to charge the Czechs with genocide against the Sudeten Germans (as quite a few rightwing Germans do)? And what would we then call the partition of the Indian subcontinent, or the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey—mutual genocide? If displacement and dispossession were the same thing as genocide, the word would lose most of its meaning and all of its moral force.

But Hudis’ argument isn’t merely historically naïve. It is incoherent in the context of the Balkans. He observes, accurately enough, that “the systematic nature of Serbia’s effort to ‘ethnically cleanse’ Kosova of over a million of its inhabitants would seem to meet the UN’s definition of genocide.” The problem is that the actions of every nationalist movement in the former Yugoslavia meet this definition. Both the KLA and the Bosnian Muslim nationalist leadership are guilty of genocide according to Hudis’ definition. That makes Hudis, by his own logic, an accomplice in genocide. This inability to think his own position through leads Hudis into self-parody. He decries “the sight of ‘independent’ radicals allying themselves, wittingly or not, with some of the most reactionary forces imaginable,” oblivious to the fact that this description fits himself considerably better than it does Chomsky, Zinn, McReynolds, or his other targets. Of this cast of characters, the only one who has explicitly endorsed any of the reactionary and violent nationalist forces involved is… Peter Hudis.

It might appear as if I’ve caricatured his position. But how else are we to make sense of it? Hudis thinks he is denouncing the KLA’s enemies, oblivious to the fact that his very formulations condemn the KLA as well. For example, Hudis’ own phrase “nationalist terror and widespread human rights violations” describe the KLA’s activities quite accurately. Or does Hudis think they’ve just been holding bake sales? Then there’s his phrase “a vulgar form of bandit capitalism, run by ex-apparatchiks from a Stalinist regime” – another deadly accurate depiction of the KLA’s background and current practices. Or how about this one: “The power of U.S. militarism has become so total and unrelenting that even anti-statist radicals are being drawn into apologizing for any force, no matter how reactionary, so long as it can be considered a bulwark against U.S. dominance.” Let’s read that sentence again, changing just one word: replace “U.S.” with “Serb”. Do we not then have a perfect characterization of Hudis’ own position? Or consider this sentence: “The radical critic, overcome with anger and frustration at the seeming absence of any subjective force capable of slowing down, let alone stopping, the U.S.’s drive for single world mastery, surrenders his ability to conceptualize a truly liberatory alternative and instead latches onto some existing political entity.” Substitute “Serbian drive for single mastery of the region” for “U.S.’s drive for single world mastery,” and once again you’ve got Hudis in a nutshell. Overwhelmed with fury at Milosevic’s murderous rampaging, Hudis has abandoned his critical faculties and thrown in his lot with a band of petty nationalist thugs, for no other reason than that they are fighting a stronger and meaner band of petty nationalist thugs. This is a shabby capitulation to the logic of nationalism, dressed up in revolutionary rhetoric. Hudis has moreover managed to project his own capitulation onto those who have, in fact, resisted it.

But it gets worse. Hudis’ fury blinds him to the elementary historical facts of the breakup of Yugoslavia. He fulminates against the “cantonization of Bosnia” while gloating approvingly over the prior cantonization of Yugoslavia. By what sort of logic can this position be sustained? His reference to “Bosnian soil” lays bare the aporia he has trapped himself in. Why exactly did some particular chunks of soil cease to be Yugoslav, and become Bosnian, upon the secession of Bosnia from the Yugoslav federation, and why did they not then become Serbian upon the secession of the Serb Republic from Bosnia? What possible principle could legitimate the first secession but not the second?

Hudis ratchets up his historical oblivion yet another notch with the genuinely bizarre claim that the U.S. “gave Milosevic carte blanche” from 1992 onward, indeed that Milosevic was “a virtual ally of the U.S. from 1995 to 1998.” Perhaps he has forgotten the U.S. bombing raids on Serb positions during the late phases of the Bosnian war, or the “cleansing” of the Krajina Serbs that was carried out with the direct involvement of the U.S. military, but I don’t think the belligerent parties have forgotten these incidents. Certainly the Croat high command would get a good chuckle at the thought of their buddies in the Pentagon backing Milosevic. This little fantasy seems to tie in neatly with Hudis’ portrait of Milosevic as the sole mastermind of Serb nationalist perfidy, pulling the strings from Belgrade. How does Hudis explain the ongoing bitter public acrimony between Belgrade and the leadership of the Krajina Serbs, the Bosnian Serbs, the Kosovo Serbs? What does he make of the economic embargo imposed by Milosevic on the Bosnian Serb Republic? The details of the war and its attendant diplomatic wrangling are inexplicable if one adopts the simplistic stance that Milosevic equals Serb nationalism as a whole.

Since Milosevic is in fact the major sponsor of Serbian irredentism, this sort of synecdoche is understandable, and I sometimes fall into it myself. But it is especially questionable in the context of Hudis’ broader rhetorical strategy; at this point simplification threatens to turn into falsification. In addition, Hudis’ one-dimensional account leaves both Slovenia and Tudjman’s Croatia (which was throughout the post-Yugoslav period more internally authoritarian and closer to traditional fascist political culture than Milosevic’s Serbia) completely off the hook. Any analysis of the breakup of Yugoslavia which does not put the timing, manner, and motivation of the Slovenian and Croatian secessions squarely at the center of the problem is doomed to tendentious mythologizing.

I share Hudis’ passionate insistence that “the real alternative to existing society” consists in “human struggles for liberation.” We part ways, however, on the question of just how those struggles manifest themselves in the Balkans today. Hudis sees them embodied in two particular national liberation movements (the Bosnian Muslims and the Kosovar Albanians), and perceives their utter negation in other particular national liberation movements in the same territory. This represents a failure of dialectical understanding as well as a failure of ethical judgement. Both failures can be encapsulated in the following question: What justifies the identification of human liberation with national liberation in this case? Why does Hudis ignore the massive and bloody evidence that, in the Balkans more than almost anywhere else today, a politics of national liberation is irreconcilable with human liberation? Indeed, that the attempt to pursue national liberation in this context led to the human catastrophe in the first place, and has brought liberation to no-one? The most confounding thing about Hudis’ line is that the necessarily barbaric consequences of a national liberation politics in post-Yugoslavia were entirely foreseeable from their very emergence, and have gotten steadily more inhumane and anti-liberatory at each stage in the unfolding crisis.

Hudis is enraged that, despite the overwhelming desire for independence on the part of the Albanian Kosovars, “many on the Left not only failed to extend even minimal solidarity with them, but even adduced arguments challenging the very concept of self-determination.” Perhaps Hudis has never before encountered left critiques of national self-determination. Or perhaps he has examined them and found them wanting.6 Even if the latter is the case, he has some explaining to do here. If leftists have a general duty to come to the support of threatened movements for self-determination, then Hudis himself failed the test on at least two occasions during the Balkan wars: the Serbs of Bosnia and the Serbs of the Croatian Krajina. Let’s take a brief look at the latter of those two cases, which is especially pertinent here because of its several direct tie-ins to the Kosovo conflict.

The Krajina Serbs voted in a referendum in May 1991 to secede from Croatia, just as the Kosovars did a few months later. In June 1991 (i.e. after the referendum on self determination) Croatia seceded from Yugoslavia. As far as I can tell from Hudis’ version of Yugoslav history, he endorses the later secession but not the prior one. Why? The Krajina Serbs’ voting patterns in local and regional elections indicate that they did not turn to Serbian nationalist politics until after Tudjman’s anti-Serb campaign within the Croatian lands was well underway. These facts are well documented and not in dispute. What does Hudis have to say about them? Why does he not berate himself for failing to stand up for self-determination? And this particular failure – in contrast to Kosovo, where the supposed failure was more than made up for by the hard work of the U.S. air force – had real and dire consequences. Some 200,000 Serbs left Croatia after the 1991 secession. They were unwillingly followed four years later by the entire Serb community of the Krajina, more than 150,000 people, which was “cleansed” by Croat and Bosnian forces (with the active participation of U.S. military personnel) in a little blitzkrieg officially dubbed “Operation Storm.” This brutal action was publicly endorsed by President Clinton, ostensible ally of Serb nationalist ambitions at the time. Misha Glenny calls the 1995 purge of the Krajina Serbs “the largest single exodus in Europe since the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans.”7

Glenny was right at the time, but now even the Krajina has been outdone by Kosovo: according to the Red Cross, just under 250,000 Serbs (along with many Roma) left Kosovo for Serbia between June and November 1999, thanks to NATO and the KLA. By the way, the Bosnian army took part in Operation Storm, in violation of international law, and committed war crimes, such as the shelling of a refugee caravan. At the time two Kosovar Albanians, Tom Berisha and Agim Ceku, were generals in the Croatian army. Ceku was one of the commanders of Operation Storm. He later became chief of staff of the KLA. And what do you suppose became of all those Krajina Serbs expelled from the territory they had lived in for centuries? The Belgrade authorities began resettling them in Kosovo. Thus did the downward spiral continue its fateful course.

Why does Hudis seem entirely uninterested in arresting that spiral? Why does he, rather, seem eager to continue it? Why didn’t News & Letters compare Operation Storm to the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto?8 Why are some self determination struggles more equal than others? What can possibly account for Hudis’ selective indignation? Turning back to his essay for answers to these vexing questions, we find Hudis ridiculing an eminently reasonable quote from Omar Dahbour about the contradictions inherent in state-building nationalisms. Dahbour’s logic is thoroughly compelling, but instead of responding to it Hudis poses what he takes to be a rhetorical question: “One wonders what would be the reaction if such reasoning were applied to the Palestinians or East Timorese.” “If”? Someone should let Hudis in on the fact that many anarchists and anti-nationalists—including a significant number of those active in Palestinian and Timorese solidarity work—apply this reasoning in all cases, rather than picking and choosing as he does. Someone might also point out to him that this principled rejection of statist nationalism hardly constitutes a challenge to “the very concept of self-determination,” but only to one of its most manifestly unsuccessful variants. Finally, someone might ask Hudis if he would have “failed to extend even minimal solidarity” to the Southern Confederacy had he been alive in 1860. Or whether he finds himself in solidarity with the Confederacy’s would-be revivalists today.

I can’t resist a quick aside about Hudis’ downplaying of the KLA’s involvement in drug running. As far as I’m concerned, making one’s living selling illicit substances is no more dishonorable than making one’s living selling licit ones, so the charge has never struck me as very important. But Hudis can’t get around the issue just by citing Green Left Weekly (which is as helpful, in this context, as citing Socialist Worker). The common understanding in Switzerland and Germany in the latter half of the 1990s was that Kosovar Albanians pretty much had a lock on Central Europe’s heroin trade. That doesn’t, of course, tell us anything about the KLA as such or about its sources of income. But the hypothesis isn’t farfetched, and it can’t count as an “incredible lie” unless Hudis can produce some sort of evidence that the KLA’s fundraisers have steadfastly avoided this lucrative option. Absent such counter-evidence, the hypothesis has motive, opportunity, and significant circumstantial evidence on its side. It might turn out to be false, but neither “incredible” nor a “lie.” (Readers may consult Judah’s book Kosovo, p. 70, for more on the Kosovar heroin dealing issue.)

Halfway through his article, Hudis at last mentions what would seem to be the obvious historical parallel to Kosovo: Ireland. But even this one he gets wrong in every important way. Instead of noting the unmistakable problems which Irish Republicanism raises for a straightforwardly national liberation politics applied to an ethnically mixed area (or does Hudis believe that the Ulster Protestants should simply be shipped back to Scotland en masse?), he directs our attention to the context of inter-imperialist rivalry in World War I. This analogy might have made sense if the Austrian or German air force had spent WWI sending air raids over the whole of the UK, thereby massacring civilians and destroying the country’s infrastructure. Hudis seems to have forgotten the crucial differences that separate a war between competing imperialist powers of roughly similar military and geopolitical strength from an all-out assault by the combined forces of the world’s major imperialist powers against one minor local imperialist state. The fact that England came out of WWI victorious ought to be enough to make the differences plain. Perhaps Hudis is unable to see the continuities between Desert Storm and Operation Storm, or between Iraq and Kosovo, but those who design and implement U.S. imperial strategy are acutely aware of them.

And at the end of the same paragraph, as if pulled by an inexorable force, Hudis falls yet again into special pleading: “radical critics of the air war failed to show sensitivity to or understanding toward the victims of ethnic cleansing.” Which victims of ethnic cleansing does he have in mind? The Krajina Serbs resettled in Kosovo? The Roma? The teenagers gunned down in a pool hall by the KLA in 1998? Why is it that Hudis can only keep one group of victims in his head at any one time? Does he believe that the other ethnic communities in Kosovo were all objective accomplices in the attempt to cleanse the Albanians? But hardly have we had time to ponder this mystery before Hudis confronts us with another one. Using Ian Williams as a stand-in, he intones, “There was a time when the Left supported liberation struggles by oppressed peoples.” Ah, for the good old days, when the oppressed were oppressed and the Left supported them. Just what “time” do Hudis/Williams have in mind here? The Boer war perhaps? What was the correct line of “the Left” then? Arms to the British? To the Boers? To the Zulus? Revolutionary defeatism? Or perhaps they’re thinking of more recent years—say, the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. Now, there, of course, we all supported… well, gosh, who did we support? The humanitarian intervention of the Vietnamese military? Or the only effective resistance to their imperialist encroachment, the Khmer Rouge? For all I know Hudis actually has an answer to that question, and can quote me the appropriate passages from Dunayevskaya’s pen in 1979.9

The point is that “the Left” has never affected a unified posture of abstract “support” in any challenging or complex international situation. Who ever “called for unconditional support for the IRA, for the ANC, for SWAPO” anyway? Can either Hudis or Williams come up with a single left organization that actually proclaimed its unconditional support for all three of those entities (much less for “hundreds of other acronyms”)? Even if they could, why should such a patently foolish stance have any claim on the rest of us? And what about all the left groupuscles in North America that, far from supporting the IRA or the ANC, denounced those organizations as bourgeois nationalists and instead extended their support to their rivals, such as the INLA and the PAC? These are not minor details. The history of western leftists’ relationships with national liberation struggles elsewhere in the world is filled with conflict, competition and complexity. Why does Hudis try to wish this all away in favor of a mythical left that unproblematically supported any and all would-be national liberators who happened to come along? That myth is not only wildly inaccurate, it’s downright frightening. If the left really had behaved in such an unconscionably naive fashion, it would be our duty today to overcome this simplistic and uncritical notion of “support.” But Hudis wants us to proudly reclaim it!

Would Hudis have been out in the streets in 1987 demanding arms for the Miskito Indians to defend themselves against the Sandinistas? Why not? Would he have volunteered on the side of the Argentine dictatorship in the Falklands war? Why not? Both faced vastly superior forces. Both had stronger claims to the particular chunks of soil under dispute than their adversaries. Has Hudis, heaven forbid, satisfied himself with a “less than total view” of these conflicts? But the truly deafening silence here is on Chechnya, a war which is structurally nearly identical to that in Kosovo and whose level of wanton bloodshed is immensely greater. Readers of Hudis’ article will not find a single reference to it. How can a “total view” of the wars in ex-Yugoslavia fail to take any notice of the concurrent wars being fought over precisely the same issues a couple hours flight to the east? This sort of elementary comparative analysis would make Hudis’ special pleading impossible. Or is it only wars which get lots of footage on the nightly news that are worthy of his dialectical contemplation? And once Hudis gets done with his withering analysis of the western left’s complacency and indifference on Chechnya, he’ll have to get started on the article about the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. And then there’s Sierra Leone… The guy’s got his work cut out for him.

Hudis wrote an essay about Kosovo, of course, not about all these other places. Why not just take it on its own terms? It would probably be preferable to do that, but Hudis makes it difficult by constantly berating other leftists for having supposedly missed the special nature of this one conflict. How can it be special if he doesn’t bother to place it in any comparative framework? To choose his own example, Hudis doesn’t even try to grapple with Chomsky’s wider argument in The New Military Humanism, which depends centrally on comparative examples like Colombia and the Kurds. Those situations would also seem to be ideal test cases for Hudis’ criterion of “support” for national liberation struggles, but he leaves them, and Chomsky’s treatment of them, unaddressed. How then can he lodge the charge of inconsistency against Chomsky? Given its overarching argument, with U.S. power and its attendant mystification at the center, Chomsky’s abstention regarding the KLA is no more inconsistent than his relative reticence to speak out on, say, Tibet. Yet the KLA is the only theme Hudis hammers away on—aside from his other favorite, Bosnia. Surely the KLA leadership’s direct involvement in ethnic cleansing in the Krajina is just as relevant in this context, but Hudis doesn’t have a word to say on the matter. Indeed one might think Hudis would feel a special obligation to include comparative examples in support of his case, since the political principle underlying that case is hardly uncontroversial from a radical point of view.

Hudis is particularly exercised about the thought experiment Chomsky offers about guerrilla attacks, supported by a foreign power, on the U.S. mainland seeking independence for Puerto Rico. Chomsky’s point—perfectly clear in the context of p. 31 of The New Military Humanism—is about the normal behavior of states in response to acts of aggression within their territory. It is neither an endorsement nor a criticism of that behavior, merely a device to expose the double standard which characterizes U.S. discourse on official enemies. Hudis mistakes it for an invitation to imagine what the response of U.S. anti-imperialists would be to such hypothetical attacks. Not surprisingly, the analogy can’t hold that weight, though now that Hudis has brought it up, it deserves examination, which I’ll get to in a moment. But first take a look at what Hudis does with this example. He claims that Chomsky, having supposedly misunderstood the import of his own analogy, uses it to “attack the supporters of Kosova independence.” No such attack is to be found on this or any other page of Chomsky’s book; he simply has nothing whatsoever to say on the topic of Kosovo independence or its supporters. In fact, in the quoted passage Chomsky takes no stance one way or the other even on the question of Puerto Rican independence, since it is immaterial to his thought experiment. Hudis not only misses that rather unsubtle point, but manages to radically misconstrue Chomsky’s larger claim about Serbia as an official enemy within mainstream U.S. discourse. He takes Chomsky’s description of Serbia as “one of those disorderly miscreants that impedes the institution of the U.S.-dominated global system” to be evidence that Chomsky has become “a virtual apologist for Milosevic.” This interpretation would be plausible if Chomsky did not in the same pages judge Milosevic in the harshest possible terms, or if he did not explicitly defend the logically consistent position that regimes which serve as impediments to U.S. domination are not themselves necessarily worthy of support (a position the budding state-builder Hudis might do well to study). But Chomsky does both of those things, thus Hudis’ interpretation collapses.

How about Hudis’ comparison between the Puerto Rican independence movement and the KLA? I suppose I should give him credit for at least introducing a comparative dimension to his analysis, even if backhandedly. But alas, this particular example doesn’t help his argument at all. The differences between the two movements are profound, and they embody the two basic options for a national liberation politics in today’s world. The KLA’s politics are, in the words of one of its experienced cadres, referring to a predecessor organization, “purely nationalist,”10 with no developed social program of any kind, much less an emancipatory one. Puerto Rican independentistas, in contrast, aren’t fighting for a separate country for its own sake, but rather as a necessary prerequisite of fundamental social change. An even more striking contrast is the attitude toward the colonial power: the KLA has no interest whatsoever in the conditions of life in Serbia proper, not even those of the large ethnic Albanian communities in Belgrade; indeed the KLA typically looks askance at these latter communities because of their suspicious cosmopolitanism. (It’s also worth noting that the continued and unmolested existence of these Albanian neighborhoods in Belgrade throughout the NATO bombardment, as well as afterwards, is further evidence that the Serbs’ intentions toward the Kosovars are not genocidal). Puerto Rican revolutionaries, on the other hand, have been actively involved in other left movements on the U.S. mainland for decades, and indeed two of the major independentista strongholds are not on the island but in Chicago and New York. What counterpart do these endeavors have within the KLA’s program or practice?

A further instructive contrast is offered by the Zapatistas (whose full name, of course, is the Zapatista Army of National Liberation—once again pointing to the widely divergent trajectories which national liberation movements can take). Far from pursuing a “purely nationalist” politics, the EZLN has from the very beginning insisted that the liberation of the peoples of Chiapas is inseparable from the fate of all other peoples in Mexico, indeed in the rest of the hemisphere. The Zapatista struggle points beyond merely national or ethnic self-interest; it points in both universal and emancipatory directions. The KLA does just the reverse, urging its base to look no further for its salvation than national unity and a homogenous population. This vision leaves little room for the hidden dynamic of “human liberation” which Hudis claims to discern within the KLA’s political logic.

Even his fall-back claim about the KLA’s crucial defensive role doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Hudis characterizes his favorite nationalist paramilitaries as “fighters against genocide in Bosnia and Kosova.” That formulation conveniently forgets about the active role played by KLA leaders in ethnic cleansing both in Croatia in 1995 and in Kosovo in 1999, just a year ago now. This ought to make Hudis more circumspect about equating support for the KLA with “a stand against ethnic terror.” If that is the stand Hudis really wants to take, then he’ll have to re-write his whole essay, since support for the KLA is flatly incompatible with a rejection of ethnic terror. Even Hudis concedes that Demaci’s vision of a multinational “Balkania” never found a receptive audience within the KLA. Indeed at other points in the article he obliquely admits the role of (some) KLA leaders in fomenting the anti-Serb and anti-Gypsy violence, but tries to avoid the obvious conclusion by pointing to the broad political composition of the group and its “left” elements. This is culpably naive. What does Hudis think Milosevic’s own bloc is made up of, for goodness sake? Or virtually any nationalist coalition, for that matter? The chief ideologist of the National Democratic Party, the major far-right organizational forum in Germany today, is a former instructor in the principles of Marxism-Leninism who was a member of the ex-Communist party until two years ago. This sort of crossover is a commonplace among reactionary nationalists.

Hudis’ ideological maneuvering on this score begs several fundamental questions. Why exactly did he choose to bet on the KLA’s horse, and not one of the other Albanian Kosovar nationalist movements that emerged in the 1990s, such as the Armed Forces of the Republic of Kosovo, for example? Merely because the KLA prevailed in the internal power struggle? The question becomes even more acute in the case of Bosnia, Hudis’ self-chosen test case. Izetbegovic’s SDA (Party of Democratic Action) had to marginalize the Muslim Bosnian Organization before it could consolidate its rule within the territory it held. Why was one up-and-coming national elite more worthy of Hudis’ support than the other? And what did Hudis have to say about the Republic of Western Bosnia, a breakaway anti-Izetbegovic Bosnian Muslim statelet in the Bihac region under the leadership of Fikret Abdic that was eventually crushed by the Bosnian army in tandem with the cleansing of the Krajina Serbs? (Abdic’s Muslim forces had depended on the military support of the Krajina Serbs; when the latter were routed by the combined Bosnian regulars and the Croats, it was all over for the short-lived Republic of Western Bosnia. Hudis and his companions prefer to forget these seemingly unusual but quite frequent alliances, precisely because of their significance to understanding the Yugoslav wars. To make the point bluntly: if the Serbs really were trying to implement a genocidal campaign against Bosnian Muslims, they were spectacularly inconsistent about it.)

Why didn’t Abdic’s enclave count as an instance of national self-determination by an oppressed people? And those are the easy examples, from Hudis’ perspective. Let’s try this one on him: the struggle of Bosnia’s Serbs for national self-determination. Serbs constituted a third of the population of Bosnia, living on a considerably larger proportion of the land mass of the province (to simplify somewhat: for reasons having to do with the urban/rural divide and the Ottoman legacy, Serbs populated much of the countryside of Bosnia while ethnic Muslims predominated in the cities and towns). The Serbs were the largest of the “national” groups in Bosnia who favored remaining in the Yugoslav federation after the secession of Slovenia and Croatia. When the Bosnian government declared its own independence from Yugoslavia, the Bosnian Serbs in turn declared an independent Serb Republic as their own preferred form of self-determination, with the eventual goal of re-uniting with a Greater Serbia. What, in Hudis’ eyes, would be the substantial differences between this movement for national self determination and that of the Albanian Kosovars? The revanchist attempt to claim as much territory as possible hardly distinguishes the Bosnian Serbs from the Kosovars, any more than the long-term goal of unifying with the larger ethnic state next door. So just what is it that prevented Hudis from coming to the support of the Bosnian Serb struggle for national self-determination? The fact that it employed savage methods wouldn’t be a meaningful answer, since Hudis does not outline any criteria for judging the actual behavior of national liberation movements but rather urges abstract “support” for them. Why was it absent in this case?

The problems with Hudis’ warped interpretive lens worsen the closer we look at the realities of the contemporary Balkans. What is his position on the self-determination of the Albanian communities in Macedonia (over a third of the population)? What about the Muslim Slavs of southern Kosovo? The Hungarian settlements scattered throughout southeastern Europe? How can we hope to make sense of these situations, much less come up with humane responses to them, by forcing them into the binary logic of national liberation? Even for liberals, even for reformists, for social democrats, for the blandest human rights centrists, it makes absolutely no sense to preach a national liberation politics in the former Yugoslavia, any more than it does in, say, Indonesia, or Fiji. For radicals to do so borders on delusional. There is no straightforward, unidirectional history of colonization here, but rather a complicated and multilayered legacy of empire and conquest which left behind fluid borders and dispersed ethnic communities. Closing our eyes to this situation won’t make it go away. But Hudis keeps his eyes firmly shut to these realities, all the while complaining about what other radicals aren’t seeing. Of Karel Kosik he huffs, “How could he forsake the effort to view reality from the vantage point of the mass subjectivity of the oppressed Albanians of Kosova?” For someone as steeped in Hegel as Hudis is, he appears to have entirely forgotten the crucial role of the dialectic of particular and universal. He might as well ask, how could we forsake to view reality from the vantage point of the mass subjectivity of the oppressed Lapps of Finland? Or the oppressed Quebecois? Or the oppressed Lombard Leagues of northern Italy? Or the oppressed Freemen of Montana? Or the oppressed Aryan Nations of Idaho, under attack by the FBI? Reducing our view of reality to a single vantage point is a rather undialectical notion.

Kosovo is not simply a case of one oppressed people facing off against its foes. Kosovo is a case of rival nationalisms, each with a measure of legitimate claim to at least some of the territory under dispute. But it’s more than that; it’s also a case of rival imperialisms—that of the U.S. and its NATO partners/surrogates on one side and that of Serbia on the other. And these two dynamics, which are already much too complex to be captured under a simplistic rubric of national liberation, are moreover superimposed on a historical and economic context which exacerbates both rivalries, a context which gave rise to the polarizing nationalist strivings in the first place. Why have the heirs of Trotsky forgotten the theory of combined and uneven development, which might have helped understand the background to the conflicts in Bosnia? Why have Marxists discarded their chief contribution to social analysis, the critique of political economy? It’s not as if the complexity of the Balkan situation is beyond human comprehension. But it will take more than paeans to the mass subjectivity of brave national warriors to formulate an emancipatory and just alternative to the violence and inhumanity that have engulfed the former Yugoslavia. The alternative explanation to the “ancient hatreds” line which Hudis rightly rejects is to diagnose the social factors that gave rise to the seemingly inescapable tide of nationalism among nearly all the constituent peoples of the old Yugoslav federation in the first place.11

But even those who do not subscribe to this particular etiology of the Balkan crisis should be able to see the hypocrisy built in to Hudis’ stance. His plea on behalf of the KLA is another version of the same enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend logic which he properly denounces when other leftists engage in it. Instead of trying to honestly confront the problem of nationalism, he celebrates it. Personally I don’t think that’s appropriate even in cases of clear-cut anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles, but we’ll leave that question aside. In any event it is plainly inappropriate in ex-Yugoslavia, where there is no straightforward correspondence of geography and demographics, much less an obvious solution to the problem of equitable distribution of formerly common resources. To apply a traditional politics of national liberation in this context of thoroughgoing national imbrication is to court disaster.

Hudis himself seems peripherally aware of this contradiction, as when he condemns the vile turn Mihailo Markovic took in the late 1980s toward “collaboration with ethnic chauvinism.” If Hudis weren’t guilty of the very same sort of collaboration, we might be able to take his anger at Markovic at face value. Hudis refers disparagingly to the infamous 1986 memorandum co-authored by Markovic, which, in Hudis’ words, “claimed that Serbs in Kosova were being subjected to ‘genocide’ by the Albanian minority and called on the central authorities to take strong action on behalf of Serb nationalist interests.” Aside from the puzzling reference to “the Albanian minority” (Kosovo’s population was more than 80 per cent Albanian at the time), Hudis fails to note that it was this memorandum that started the inflationary abuse of the term “genocide” in the Yugoslav context, a fact which puts him in the same lineage of nationalist demagogues as Markovic. And as despicable as the 1986 memorandum was, at least it raised the concerns of the Turkish and Montenegrin minorities in Kosovo, whom Hudis deems unworthy of any notice whatsoever. Last, we might note that Milosevic’s initial response to the memorandum was harshly negative; he called it “the darkest nationalism.” Milosevic’s rejection of nationalist propaganda is about as consistent as Hudis’.

Hudis wants to adopt the KLA’s purely nationalist project into the pantheon of “freedom struggles” over the last half century in Eastern Europe. When I gave public talks on the East European left back in the 1980s, I always made a point of distinguishing those dissident groups—in Yugoslavia as elsewhere—which displayed an emancipatory tendency from those which were merely restorative, pro-capitalist or nationalist in orientation. I argued that the western left should support the former and not the latter, except possibly on tactical grounds and on an ad-hoc basis. Hudis seems to grasp this distinction, since he uses it to rebut the free market myth-making of Bronislaw Geremek et al, and he draws our attention to the explicitly socialist trajectory of the Hungarian, Czech, and Polish uprisings. Why doesn’t this prompt him to inquire just what sort of socialist trajectory animates the KLA? Phrases like “rank and file Kosovars” suggest that Hudis has promoted the Kosovars from the status of a nation to that of a class, and invested them with all the historical hopes Leninists traditionally associate with such status. It is difficult to see what “liberatory dimension” the KLA opens up, or how it represents “new human relations freed from domination.” Hudis has chosen the wrong historical subject to carry his revolutionary aspirations.

The farcical thing about this tragic derailment of radical thought is that Hudis’ direct political forebears held a position diametrically opposed to the one he espouses now. The Johnson-Forest tendency (the name given to the far left current within the U.S. Trotskyist movement associated with C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya) refused to take sides in World War II. Perhaps Hudis considers this a colossal failing, and in hindsight the rest of us might agree with him. But within the context of the U.S. left in the 1940’s this principled opposition to all imperialisms, all militarisms, all expansive nationalisms stands out for its honesty and courage. It was an honorable stance, and consistent with the tendency’s political goals. Johnson-Forest also remained neutral in the Korean war; indeed they didn’t even support Tito in his split with Stalin—they insisted that neither side, neither ruling elite, should be supported by revolutionaries. And Tito was genuinely committed to a multinational politics in Yugoslavia. If that was all it took to enlist faraway militants onto your side, Dunayevskaya and James would have been Tito’s most forceful backers. Perhaps the clearest parallel to the choices facing leftists in the Balkans today, however, came in the course of a 1942 discussion within the Workers Party, to which the Johnson-Forest tendency belonged at the time. The discussion focused on Chinese resistance against the Japanese occupation, an onslaught considerably more savage than anything seen in Kosovo. In light of the nationalist and Stalinist leadership of the Chinese resistance, the Workers Party declined to support them because “with China taking part in the war on the ‘Allied’ side, the Chinese people’s struggle for national liberation had been completely subordinated to the imperialist aims of the ‘Allies’, and was, therefore, not supportable.”12 If Hudis is really as shocked as he affects to be that leftists could possibly hesitate before supporting a bona fide national liberation movement – especially one that has, whether he likes it or not, been subordinated to the imperialist aims of the U.S. – he might do well to re-acquaint himself with his own group’s history.

After we strip away the selective outrage and the question-begging rhetoric, there’s not a whole lot left to Hudis’ position. Disavowing even the superior wisdom of his mentor Dunayevskaya, he is reduced to one of those “romantic sympathisers with the sovereign independence of selected peoples” that Eric Hobsbawm discusses in Nations and Nationalism Since 1780.13 In that book, Hobsbawm contrasts earlier national struggles which were “typically unificatory as well as emancipatory” with more recent variants: “The current [1990's] phase of essentially separatist and divisive ‘ethnic’ group assertion has no such positive programme or prospect. This is demonstrated by the mere fact that, for want of any genuine historical project, it attempts to recreate the original Mazzinian model of the ethnically and linguistically homogenous territorial nation-state.”14 This view, and its applicability to the Balkans, is echoed by Miroslav Hroch, who argues that nationalism in Eastern Europe today is “a substitute for factors of integration in a disintegrating society. When society fails, the nation appears as the ultimate guarantee.”15

The task of leftists is not to promote superficial illusions such as these. Perhaps Hudis genuinely believes that triumphalist chauvinism in the guise of “national liberation” will bring justice, prosperity, and peace to Kosovo. Or perhaps he does not, but is trapped within a peculiar myopia inherited from the western left’s decades-long romance with faraway national struggles, and can’t bring himself to think outside of those restrictive and reductionist categories. This rethinking is long overdue. As Brian Walker notes, “Nationalism in the nineteenth century frequently went hand in hand with movements for democratization and the extension of rights and the creation of democratic constitutions. But few modern nationalisms have this progressive thrust and their projects of aligning political boundaries with the boundaries of particular ethnic communities seem—in a world where there are many more peoples than can practicably have states—inherently destructive and destabilizing.”16

In his analysis of the Balkans, Hudis has somehow missed the inherently destructive and destabilizing tendency of the national liberation approach he champions so vigorously. In contrast, skeptics like Bhikhu Parekh hold that “the very language of nationality, nationhood, and even national identity is deeply suspect. It cannot avoid offering a homogenized, reified, and ideologically biased abridgement of a rich, complex, and fluid way of life, and setting up false contrasts and impregnable walls between political communities. […] even well-intentioned liberals and socialists cannot theorize political life in that language without succumbing to its corrupting and pernicious logic.”17 Hudis seems to have succumbed.

But even for those leftists who do not share such skepticism toward the politics of national liberation, Hudis has little to offer. In its refusal to engage the historical specificity of the region and its many peoples, his analysis of Kosovo is a serious step backward from the insights of Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire, and many others into the dynamics of neocolonial oppression. It represents the self-refutation of the Leninist approach to self-determination—an approach which was already in an advanced stage of ideological decomposition—as well as of the underlying Marxian paradigm of oppressor nationalisms and oppressed nationalisms. Hudis’ enthusiasm for the KLA amounts to a purely defensive re-affirmation of national unity in the face of actual dispossession and denigration. To adopt such a stance today, in Kosovo more than anywhere else, is to abandon hope for human liberation, or even for fundamental social change.

Notes

1. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). Also see Norman G. Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn, eds., A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998); Robert R. Shandley, ed., Unwilling Germans?: The Goldhagen Debate (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Geoff Eley, ed., The Goldhagen Effect: History, Memory, Nazism—Facing the German Past (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).

2. Kosovo: War and Revenge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 300. Judah is the former Balkan correspondent for the Times of London and The Economist, and author of the 1997 book The Serbs: History, Myth, and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (Yale).

3. In the original version of this essay, I claimed that Demaci went into exile in Ljubljana in March 1999. This claim was inaccurate, as Hudis pointed out in his rejoinder.

4. Quoted in Judah, Kosovo, p. 290.

5. Ustashe refers to the fascist movement in power in Croatia during World War II, as well as to Croatian nationalist paramilitary units during the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

6. For a brief, incisive overview of historical left debates on this question, see Michael Löwy, Fatherland or Mother Earth? Pluto Press 1999. Löwy reaches conclusions opposite my own; I belong to the anti-nationalist tradition of Landauer and Luxemburg.

7. Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War (New York: Penguin, 1996, 3rd ed.), p. 284.

8. News & Letters is a Chicago-based paper for which Hudis writes. It is published by the News and Letters Committees, an organization that describes itself as Marxist-Humanist. During an earlier phase of the Balkan wars, the group compared the siege of Sarajevo to the Warsaw ghetto uprising. [The News and Letters group split in 2008, with Hudis, in my view, on the saner side of the split; his faction currently calls itself the Marxist-Humanist Tendency.]

9. Raya Dunayevskaya was the founder of the News and Letters Committees and the architect of its Marxist-Humanist philosophy.

10. Quoted in Judah, Kosovo, p. 106.

11. On this subject I recommend Susan Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1995) as an antidote to Hudis’ partial and partisan account. While Woodward would likely disagree with several of the arguments I’ve made here, her book is among the best recent scholarly treatments of the topic available in English.

12. Christopher Z. Hobson and Ronald D. Tabor, Trotskyism and the Dilemma of Socialism (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), p. 277.

13. E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 2nd ed.), p. 170.

14. Ibid.

15. Quoted in Hobsbawm, p. 173. See also Ernest Gellner, “Nationalism and Politics in Eastern Europe” New Left Review 189 (1991), 127-34.

16. Walker in Ronald Beiner, ed., Theorizing Nationalism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999) p. 160.

17. Parekh in Beiner, Theorizing Nationalism, p. 324.

Notes:

1. According to Misha Glenny, after the 1999 NATO bombardment the KLA imposed “a regime of intimidation and murder which provoked the departure of almost the entire Serbian minority population from Kosovo within weeks of the Albanians’ return.” (Glenny, The Balkans, New York 2000, p. 662) The International Crisis Group, a mainstream think tank financed by the US and the European Union, confirms that KLA cadres were chiefly responsible for this organized ethnic terror. The ICG concluded that ethnic cleansing under KLA leadership had actually intensified since the metamorphosis of the Kosovo Liberation Army into the Kosovo Protection Corps under NATO auspices. The experienced ethnic cleanser Agim Ceku was named commander of the KPC after the formal disbanding of the KLA. Ivo Daalder and Michael O’Hanlon report that the KPC is merely “camouflage for the KLA’s real intention of retaining some type of military organization and, in addition, of establishing political control in Kosovo.” (Daalder and O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo, Washington D.C. 2000, p. 178) As for the recent ethnic Albanian rebellion in Macedonia, the KLA was already claiming responsibility for attacks there as early as December 1997. The historical trajectory of the KLA confirms George Mosse’s observation that “only a thin line separates struggles for national liberation and ideas of national dominance.” (Mosse, Toward the Final Solution, Madison 1985, p. 39)

2. A further problem with Hudis’ position is that his chosen principles conflict with one another. A commitment to “national self-determination” and a commitment to a “multicultural society” are mutually exclusive when the national groups in question demand a monocultural society. But Hudis isn’t really committed to either one of these contradictory principles; his own arguments constantly betray both of them.  A consistent proponent of national self-determination can’t support independence for the Georgians but then reject independence for the Abkhazians, can’t support the secession of Azerbaijan but then reject the secession of Nagorno-Karabakh, and can’t support the secession of Bosnia-Herzegovina but then reject the secession of the Bosnian Serb Republic. And it is impossible to achieve a multicultural society by backing people who are explicitly opposed to it, such as Izetbegovic’s SDA or the KLA.  I am not particularly troubled by westerners who take a consistent line on the disintegration of Yugoslavia: those who supported both the Bosnian Serbs (or the Republic of the Serbian Krajina) and the Kosovar Albanians in their struggles for self-rule, and those who opposed both secessionist movements as forms of ethnic chauvinism.  While each position has shortcomings, they are at least logical and principled.  Hudis’ self-contradictory position, on the other hand, is illogical and unprincipled.  He violently condemns the Bosnian Serb desire for self-determination while naively celebrating its Kosovar Albanian counterpart.  National sovereignty isn’t a divisible value; you can’t respect it by granting it to one group while denying it to another.

3. There is no doubt that Milosevic’s opportunistic adoption of the rhetoric of Serb chauvinism was the spark that set off the final disintegration of federal Yugoslavia.  But to focus solely on this one factor while ignoring the context is the very definition of selective outrage.  The blame-it-all-on-Milosevic line obscures all of the other determinants of the catastrophe, including the role of western capital and its institutional gatekeepers in the economic devolution of Yugoslav society; the refusal of the Slovene and Croatian republics to shoulder their share of the federal budget; and inter-imperialist rivalries among the western powers, particularly between Germany and the U.S. Add to this the fact that the internal borders of each of the constituent republics of Yugoslavia had been deliberately designed to minimize ethnic concentration, especially in the case of the Serbs.  Moreover, according to the Yugoslav constitution, secession was to be pursued by mutual deliberation, not by unilateral fiat. Borders were to be changed only with the approval of the other republics. These guidelines were not mere legal formalities, they were the achievement of a mass struggle for a multiethnic society half a century earlier.  The secessions of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia during the early 1990’s were, among other things, a slap in the face of that struggle and its legacy.  It was the federal structure that offered protection, however imperfect, to ethnic minorities in all regions of Yugoslavia; once that structure disappeared due to ethnic separatism, so did the security of minority communities. To reduce this complex history to “Serb aggression” is a disservice to all of the peoples of former Yugoslavia.

4. Extremely adverse conditions, by themselves, are not reasonable grounds for the left to intervene.  The principle that the left’s duty is always to stand with the victims cannot be applied in cases of mutual victimization. The task of the left is not to back weaker national strivings against stronger national strivings, no matter how much mass support each may have. The task of the left is to try, when possible, to catalyze such strivings into a force for emancipatory social transformation. If a national movement aims merely toward its own hegemony, it isn’t a force for liberation, no matter how cruel its adversaries.  The notion that Serb behavior in Kosovo was especially savage is not just empirically untrue (as a glance toward Chechnya, Angola, Sudan, Kurdistan, and other conflicts will quickly show); it makes no sense to point toward this supposed “depth of oppression” as a reason for arming and championing the KLA. In the realm of competing nationalisms, history offers numerous examples of two contemptible forces battling for supremacy, neither of which deserved the support of the left. The fact that the Nazis destroyed Dollfuss and Schuschnigg and their Austro-fascist regime does not make these minor dictators, or the movements that backed them, worthy of support, nor does it transform their corporatist-authoritarian politics into a liberatory project.  In such cases, no matter how abominable the greater evil may be, it does not turn the lesser evil into a good.

5. Although Hudis is blissfully ignorant of this fact, even Izetbegovic realized the crucial importance of the Yugoslav federation in maintaining Bosnia’s territorial integrity. But after the secession of Slovenia and Croatia (with western encouragement), the Bosnian Muslim leadership shifted its stance and forced the secession of Bosnia (with western encouragement), knowing full well that this meant an end to any “multiethnic society” in their newly independent state.  Hudis has simply swallowed the official U.S. version of these events hook, line, and sinker.  Against this imperialist mythology, David Chandler writes: “Once independence [for Bosnia] had been recognized by the international community there was no longer an equitable basis for negotiations [among Bosnia’s ethnic communities]. The Muslim government claimed the mantle of international legitimacy and portrayed the Serb and Croatian autonomists as belligerents trying to undermine Bosnian independence and claim ethnic territory.  The United States publicly shared this view, arguing that the Europeans were wrong to try to negotiate a political solution between the representatives of the three main ethnic constituencies, and encouraging Izetbegovic to hold out against successive European and U.N. deals.” (Chandler, “Western Intervention and the Disintegration of Yugoslavia” in Philip Hammond and Edward Herman, Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis, London 2000, p. 25.) To avoid misunderstanding: I reject the nostalgic view of Yugoslav unitarism, from the late 1980’s onward, as a primarily or even genuinely ‘multicultural’ or ‘multiethnic’ project; in fact it was to a large extent a cover for increasing Serb hegemony within the federation.  Needless to say, this hardly means that secessionist alternatives were a preferable option from a ‘multicultural’ or ‘multiethnic’ perspective.  For better or worse, Serbia is the most multicultural country in the Balkans.  In 2001, tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians live in and near Belgrade, along with more than 100,000 non-Albanian Muslims.  Outside Belgrade, hundreds of thousands of Hungarians live in Serbia, along with substantial Croat, Roma (Gypsy), Montenegrin, Turkish, Romanian, Czech, Slovak, and Ruthenian communities.  Anybody who considers a “multicultural society” to be an overriding political goal that justifies massive military violence should light a little candle in memory of their faithful patron, Slobodan Milosevic.

6. In the 1990 election for the Bosnian presidency, Izetbegovic was defeated by Fikret Abdic. But Izetbegovic nevertheless maneuvered himself into the seat for an ostensible one year term, which was then supposed to rotate to Abdic.  At the end of the term Izetbegovic simply refused to step down.  His illegal usurpation of power did nothing, of course, to tarnish his reputation among western politicians and opinion makers.  According to Lenard Cohen, Izetbegovic was the leader of “the more militant and religiously nationalistic majority” of the SDA; the secular and moderate minority was forced out in 1990 and formed the Muslim Bosnian Organization. (Cohen, Broken Bonds: Yugoslavia’s Disintegration and Balkan Politics in Transition, Boulder 1995, p. 144).  Once in power, the SDA condemned mixed marriages, while Izetbegovic himself criticized Bosnian integrationists and touted “Muslim national consciousness” (see Cohen, p. 145 and 361).  Although the connection between military power and political power seems lost on Hudis, who would rather pay attention to the uncorrupted desires of “the masses,” it was always crucial to the Bosnian conflict.  Since “Moslems make up 99 percent of the Bosnian defense forces,” explained Bosnian Prime Minister Silajdzic in 1993, “it is natural that they form the government.” (Quoted in Cohen p. 281). So much for a “multiethnic struggle.”

7. There were, of course, alternatives to the Izetbegovic clique, Bosnian Muslim forces that really did represent a multiethnic project.  But Hudis dismisses them out of hand.  He calls Fikret Abic a “small-time warlord” with “a tiny political base” who “owed his existence to a bunch of local thugs”.  Abdic is not a particularly admirable character, but Hudis’ description of him fits Hudis’ hero Izetbegovic much better than it does Abdic. Abdic was a leading member of the Bosnian collective presidency until he was forced out by Izetbegovic’s faction, and he outpolled Izetbegovic in national election is 1990. (See Catherine Samary, Yugoslavia Dismembered, NewYork 1995, pp. 100-101) Abdic’s government in the Bihac enclave was elected as well.  Not only was he more popular than Izetbegovic, he consistently opposed Bosnian secession and pursued a genuinely multiethnic policy, which is precisely why the Sarajevo government so fiercely opposed Bihac.  Abdic “maintained close ties with both the Serbs and the Croats” and favored a confederal Bosnia instead of Izetbegovic’s highly centralized version (Cohen, p. 287). Only a remarkable combination of naïveté toward western press reports and deliberate disregard for logic could lead to Hudis’ conclusion that Abdic’s independent and multinational forces were a mere “bunch of local thugs” while the Sarajevo government — which in reality was nothing more than “a small coterie around Alija Izetbegovic” (Chandler in Hammond & Herman, p. 26) — represented a mass struggle for a multiethnic society.  Even Richard Holbrooke recognized that Izetbegovic merely “paid lip service to the principles of a multi-ethnic state.” (Holbrooke, To End a War, New York 1998, p. 97) Cohen remarks: “Izetbegovic endeavored to project evenhandedness toward his ethnic neighbors in Bosnia-Hercegovina, undoubtedly hoping to emerge as the primary political actor in the republic,” and refers to his “vague promises of a future multiethnic state” (Cohen, pp.15 and 242).

8. In the original version of this essay, I took Hudis to task for “mimicking the inflated figures he picked up somewhere about nearly 10,000 Muslim civilians in Srebrenica murdered by Serbs in one day.” I further claimed that the overblown figures on Muslim civilian casualties during the 1995 Serb siege of Srebrenica had not been corroborated. I now think I was mistaken to adopt this approach, even in the context of Hudis’ uncareful handling of casualty figures. In retrospect, after thorough investigations by several international agencies, Hudis was basically right and I was wrong about Srebrenica. Another decade from now, historical research may well revise further aspects of our dispute.

9. The numbers game is an inherently unpleasant undertaking, but if we must play it, we ought to play it properly. Hudis thinks I wrote that “no more than 20,000” people died in the Bosnian civil war.  In fact, I said that his own figure of “hundreds of thousands” was off by a factor of ten. This means that tens of thousands of people, in my view, were killed in Bosnia.  The most persuasive figures for the entire conflict have been put forth by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, whose 1996 annual report estimated total casualties in Bosnia at 30,000-50,000.  George Kenney arrived at a similar figure of 25,000-60,000 total fatalities. (See Kenney, “The Bosnia Calculation”, The New York Times Magazine 4/23/95) Kenney was, of course, an early advocate of harsh U.S. military action against the Bosnian Serbs.  Serious analyses of the Bosnian conflict do not corroborate Hudis’ claim of “hundreds of thousands” of deaths. [In 2009, reliable estimates of total civilian casualties in the Bosnian civil wars total around 55,000.]  Hudis similarly concludes that the U.N.H.C.R. estimate of 3 million “Bosnian” refugees somehow dwarfs the cleansing of the Krajina Serbs.  But the U.N.H.C.R. figure is a cumulative count covering four years of ongoing warfare, whereas the Krajina cleansing was a single incident accomplished in a matter of days.  The U.N.H.C.R. figure moreover refers to all war refugees, more than a third of them Serbs. Hudis also wonders why I neglected to mention the “expulsion of half a million Kosovar Albanians” during the NATO bombardment, as if these refugees were all fleeing Milosevic’s minions rather than Clinton’s missiles. Hudis has not only mixed up the Yugoslav infantry with the US air force, he has suddenly forgotten the whole point of the numbers game: According to the Red Cross, more than twice as many people (namely 1.2 million) were displaced in Serbia itself during the 1999 bombing. It seems odd that Hudis needs to be reminded of basic facts like these.

10. For a fine example of this sort of correction, see the first-hand account by German journalist Martin Lettmayer in Klaus Bittermann, ed., Serbien muss sterbien, Berlin 1994. Hudis is particularly exercised about my supposed ignorance of the literature on rape as an instrument of ethnic cleansing. I am, as it happens, familiar with a fair bit of this literature, and much of it is of high quality. But a portion of it is transparent propaganda entirely lacking in credible sourcing. Hudis can’t seem to tell the difference between solid reporting and nationalist fear mongering. Simone Veil and others criticized the more lurid and unfounded rape charges when they were originally publicized, and Amnesty International went to considerable lengths to counter this irresponsible wave of myth-making. Sylvia Poggioli has done an excellent job of sifting the wheat from the chaff in the literature on rape (as well as media reports of other atrocities), and her conclusions make a mockery of Hudis’ feckless agit-prop. (See Poggioli, “An N.P.R. Reporter on the ‘Disinformation Trap’ in Former Yugoslavia”, Extra! May/June 1994) Hudis might also want to take a look at the work of Yugoslav feminist organizations on the treatment of Serb women by Bosnian Muslim paramilitaries. Or he could review the “evidence of systematic rape of Serb women by Moslems” (Glenny, p.208). For example, Hudis’ buddies in the Bosnian government ran the camp at Celebici near Sarajevo, which according to the Hague tribunal was used for both rape and murder (see Sabrina Ramet, Balkan Babel, Boulder 1999, p. 286). Serbian opposition journalist Snezana Bogavac remarks: “Foreign media make distinctions according to which the Serbian side ‘rapes systematically’, while the others do so ‘sporadically’. Statements made by raped women from all sides do not offer evidence of any difference among the rapists from any of the sides.” (Quoted in Cohen, p.270)

11. Inflationary uses of the term ‘genocide’ are senseless in the context of the Yugoslav civil wars, where the chief form of barbarism has been not the annihilation of whole populations but territorially specific ‘ethnic cleansing’ campaigns. (The UN’s 1993 definition of ‘ethnic cleansing’ is “rendering an area ethnically homogenous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area.”) Maria Todorova, a keen analyst of western perceptions of the Balkans, observes that the 1948 Geneva Convention definition of genocide “is so unspecific, unquantifiable, and elastic that it easily dissolves into a synonym for any great war violence and renders the notion of genocide simply metaphysical (and hence trivial).” (Todorova, “The Balkans: From Invention to Intervention” in Willliam Joseph Buckley, ed., Kosovo: Contending Voices on Balkan Interventions, Cambridge 2000, p. 163). But Hudis still seems not to grasp what the word means in standard usage.  He now tells us that he thinks the Nazis committed genocide against the Russians.  The difference between hostile military occupation and genocide ought to be obvious from the fact that a Russian civilian caught behind German lines in WWII had a good chance of surviving the war, whereas any Jew found within German-held territory was doomed. The distinction is quite literally a matter of life and death. Hudis’ misuse of the term ‘genocide’ is not just ahistorical and inept, it is unnecessary to our debate. Others whose position on Bosnia was largely congruent with Hudis’, such as Stephen Shalom, have no trouble distinguishing between ethnic cleansing and genocide or recognizing that “what was going on in Kosovo before March 1999 was not even close to genocide.” (Shalom, “Reflections on NATO and Kosovo” New Politics, Summer 1999) The point can also be made thus: if the Serbs were engaged in ‘genocide’ in Kosovo in the latter half of 1998, then the KLA and its mass base were engaged in an equally grievous ‘genocide’ in the latter half of 1999, according to Hudis’ own definition.

12. To choose two of the more obvious examples: I did not write that the KLA as a whole participated in the cleansing of the Krajina Serbs, but that some of their leadership did (most notably Agim Ceku, top military commander of the KLA and now head of the Kosovo Protection Corps). I did not write that “The KLA was a drug-running operation”, but that available evidence indicates their fundraisers may have drawn on revenues from the European heroin trade. In my view, this question is of little consequence; the notion that “drug-running” is in itself objectionable is a bourgeois prejudice. My point about the K.L.A’s possible reliance on drug proceeds was not a criticism of the KLA, it was a criticism of Hudis’ refusal to acknowledge the real context within which the organization operates. His further remarks on this weighty matter are thoroughly muddled; he confuses the country of origin, Afghanistan, with the primary market, Europe, and he thinks I said that all Kosovar Albanians are directly involved in Swiss and German heroin distribution, despite the fact that the vast majority of Kosovar Albanians have never set foot in Switzerland or Germany.

13. See, for example, Justin Brown, “Balkans Twist: ‘Greater Albania’”, Christian Science Monitor 7/22/98 p. 1. Kosovar demands for a Greater Albania have a long history. They played a significant role in the 1981 uprising, and throughout the 1980s militant Kosovar Albanian leaders routinely used the term “ethnically pure” to describe the kind of Kosovo they sought, and referred to their own goal as “ethnic cleansing.” For numerous examples see Seth Ackerman and Jim Naureckas, “Following Washington’s Script: The United States Media and Kosovo” in Hammond and Herman, especially pp. 98-99, as well as the overview of other 1980s western media reports in Matthias Küntzel, Der Weg in den Krieg, Berlin 2000, pp. 21-23. The only time Greater Albania actually existed was under Fascist sponsorship during WWII. Kosovo, in particular, was the center of support for what the Nazis called a “racially pure” Great Albania. The same vision continues to inspire Kosovar Albanian patriots to this day; Rexhep Qosja, for example, prefers the terms “Ethnic Albania” (a phrase which was itself coined by the collaborationist National Front during WWII) or “natural Albania,” which will “include not only Kosovo, but also Western Macedonia and Albanian land, inhabited by Albanians, in Montenegro.” (Qosja in Robert Elsie, Kosovo: In The Heart of the Powder Keg Ny 1997, p.495) Parts of northern Greece are often included in this vision as well. According to Qosja, “Ethnic Albania is the union of Western Albania (the present-day Albanian state) and Eastern Albania (Albanian territory as yet unliberated).” (ibid., p. 498) The sort of “liberation” he has in mind is indicated by his compatriot Bujar Bukoshi, who refers to the ethnically cleansed Croatian Krajina as having been “liberated” (ibid., p.473). Alongside its pro-fascist inclination, Albanian nationalism has traditionally included a strongly anti-Serb thrust. In July 1945 Albanian nationalists assassinated Miladin Popovic, a Partisan leader in Kosovo, even though he publicly supported Greater Albanian plans. This unfortunate tendency continued throughout the 1990’s crisis; witness the contempt shown by the KLA toward the Serbian opposition, particularly its left elements.

14. Hudis is quite mistaken in seeing this question as particularly “troublesome” for the left. As I have pointed out several times, we have faced and continue to face quite a few other international questions, from the Caucasus to the Philippines, that are notably more troublesome than this one. But Hudis is a paragon of equanimity in the face of such trifles; he is only troubled by those select few questions that News and Letters has decided are of world-historical importance. Nor has the left “evaded” the question in Kosovo; the plethora of left responses to the “what should the Kosovars have done” query surely rank this issue among the most thoroughly debated since the collapse of the Soviet bloc. That Hudis categorically dismisses various left answers to this purportedly decisive question is another matter entirely.

15. Hudis’ argument on this point nonetheless leaves me confused. He is right that my source for placing Demaci in Ljubljana was an article on the KLA by ‘Rosa Liebknecht’ which was published in several different versions. But the International Viewpoint piece that Hudis refers to is not a simple translation of Liebknecht’s piece, it is a composite article incorporating material by Liebknecht, Samary, and Karadjis (whose position on the KLA is identical to Hudis’); and what he calls the “final paragraph” of Liebknecht’s piece is not in fact the final paragraph, either in the original German version or in the International Viewpoint version. Liebknecht’s original article in Junge Welt was quite enthusiastic about the KLA’s supposed early left orientation, which she thought had been replaced by a right-wing faction backed by NATO. Liebknecht called for support of Demaci’s line, as Hudis does. I am thus unsure what it is that Hudis thinks he is debunking. He also makes much of a Los Angeles Times interview with Demaci in which this “true patriot” gives a carefree impression, walking about Pristina without fear of possible KLA assassins. Since Pristina was controlled by the Serbs, not the KLA, at the time the interview was conducted, it is difficult to see what Hudis is getting at. In fact this interview explicitly confirms my point that Demaci left the KLA after Rambouillet and became a harsh critic of his sometime comrades. There are undoubtedly challenges involved in finding reliable information about Kosovo, but it is hard to escape the conclusion that Hudis is once again viewing facts through a selective lens.

16. Although Hudis goes to great lengths to obscure it, Tim Judah’s book on Kosovo clearly corroborates my point that the Enverists’ politics were “purely nationalist” despite their superficially left rhetoric. Here is the full passage that I originally quoted from Judah, up to the sentence that Hudis himself quotes: “Especially after 1981, these people [the Enverists] believed that the Albanians running the autonomous province were simply Serbian puppets and were angered that some Serbs did hold important jobs. Bardhyl Mahmuti, a member of one of these underground groups, recalls that, ‘It was not a question of ideology, rather Leninist theory on clandestine organizations.’ Not to mention the fact that making the right revolutionary noises secured at least a little help and money from Tirana. Xhafer Shatri, who spent eleven years in prison, says that despite their bombast the Enverist groups were in fact ‘purely nationalist’ but adds that ‘Albania was our only help.’ Part of the appeal of Enverism was that a purely nationalist cause could be wrapped up in terms of a fashionable radical leftism.” (Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge, New Haven 2000, p. 106) I have no idea why Hudis thinks I have misrepresented this passage; either Hudis has misunderstood it himself, or he thinks that the veteran Enverists did not bring their “purely nationalist” politics with them into the KLA.

17. Hudis explicitly eschews a comparative analysis of these conflicts, considering it an unreasonable demand on his intellectual energies. This makes it hard to take his indignation at the rest of the left seriously. International comparisons are essential to deciding where the left should focus its limited resources. Of the four “national independence movements” Hudis mentions in his opening paragraph (Kurds, Kosovars, Timorese, Chechens), the Kosovar struggle is the least likely candidate for left support, dominated as it is by the ethnic cleansers of the KLA. The Chechens fit Hudis’ own stated criteria (“depth of oppression” etc.) much better than the Kosovars; in East Timor, FRETILIN has longstanding and genuine ties to the international left; and the Kurds face a fundamentally different challenge from that of the Kosovars. Kurdish loyalties are divided, both politically and geographically, among several antagonistic rival groupings. Of these groups, the one that has most steadfastly resisted cooptation by the western powers, the PKK, has not had a secessionist position for years, much less a goal of forming a Greater Kurdistan. The very opposite is the case with the KLA: it is fervently dedicated to a Greater Albania no matter what the cost, and its sole claim to fame is that it made itself the willing accomplice of western imperialism.

18. Stranger still, Hudis seems to think I misconstrued Johnson-Forest’s stance on China. He surmises that I am “apparently unaware that the Johnson-Forest Tendency was a dissident faction in the Workers’ Party and that the point at issue in the latter’s resolution concerned not extending support to Chiang Kai-Shek.” I am, of course, well aware of both these things, as should have been obvious from my brief discussion of the matter. Since Hudis does not indicate that Johnson-Forest opposed Schachtman on the China resolution (and it would be news to me if they did), I am entirely mystified by his argument on this point. In my experience, this is unfortunately par for the course for the contemporary remnants of the New and Letters group. With each passing year, they seem to squander their originally impressive theoretical inheritance in increasingly gauche ways, a sad postscript to the memory of the brilliant revolutionaries who once inspired them. I think the exchange with Hudis would have been more fruitful if he had paid greater attention to the analyses elaborated by James, Dunayevskaya, and their comrades several generations ago.

19. For a fine overview of Indonesian separatist tendencies see Benedict Anderson, “Indonesian Nationalism Today and in the Future” New Left Review 235. Neither Sukarno’s nor Suharto’s Indonesia, nor Tito’s Yugoslavia for that matter, successfully solved the problem of interethnic disparities, of course, but they were indisputably multinational states. Ethnic separatist movements like those in Aceh and Kosovo are predicated on the rejection of this multinational character. Hudis cannot have his multiethnic cake and eat it too.

The most germane of these issues, to my mind, is the question of viewing other people’s struggles “from a distance,” as Hudis aptly puts it. I consider this distance to be a basic condition of our debate and one of its defining characteristics. Neither Hudis nor I lives in the Balkans (or in Indonesia, for that matter), nor is either of us an active participant in the social struggles being waged there. Our ‘involvement’ in these struggles is necessarily mediated by our distanced position, and our views of events in that faraway region are refracted through our sharply contrasting conceptions of internationalism. It is a serious error to try to collapse this distance or downplay its significance.

There is, of course, no reason to assume that geographical distance must entail political distance; international solidarity means, among other things, attempting to bridge the distance between different struggles in different contexts. It does not mean, and cannot mean, wishing away that distance or pretending that those contexts are immediately comparable. I fear that Hudis has forgotten this; his ruminations on Bosnia and Kosovo suggest that he believes he can move, through force of will alone, from a faraway land to never-never land. He imagines himself there in the thick of things in Trepca, in Sarajevo, in Pristina, and cannot comprehend how the rest of us can continue to look on “from a distance.” Where he sees revolutionary commitment, I see naïve romanticism; where I see responsible solidarity, he sees craven abstentionism. 1

Hudis takes pride in his revolutionary version of internationalism and chides me for adopting an insufficiently revolutionary stance. Within the limited context of western leftists’ responses to the Balkan civil wars, I confess that this is more or less accurate: I see little potential, at the current historic juncture, for a revolutionary solution to the post-Yugoslav crisis, and I am more than willing to settle for a humane non-revolutionary alternative that spares the region further senseless bloodshed and interrupts the downward spiral of competing nationalisms. I invite Hudis to reconsider the wisdom of an ostensibly revolutionary option that takes only one set of national aspirations into account. (While we’re at it, I also admit that my mind is not “glued on the idea of freedom,” and I hope that Hudis’ mind will become unglued soon, so that he can turn his attention to the real conditions of this noble idea.)

But our differences go beyond incompatible approaches to the necessary distance of transcontinental comradeship. We also have fundamentally contrary views on which sorts of conflicts demand which sorts of responses from the left. Hudis sees terrible things happening in a few select places around the globe and wants to jump in to stop the forces he thinks are perpetrating them. There are two reasons why this selective indignation is always politically misguided: it ignores all the other terrible things happening elsewhere (not least because it refuses to distinguish between localized conflicts and globally threatening conflicts), and it ignores the complexity of those few conflicts that it does focus on. Indeed, I do not think it is a caricature of Hudis’ position to say that he divides the world into good guys and bad guys who are conveniently identifiable by ethnic criteria. Thus when I lodge political criticisms against a group he has decided are the good guys, he thinks I am slandering an entire national community; and when I suggest a more nuanced view of the actions of the bad guys, he thinks I am an apologist for ethnic terror.

While a simple scheme of good guys versus bad guys certainly makes the moral dilemmas of revolutionary internationalism easier to solve, it is a form of acute self-delusion to think that such a scheme could be applied to the Balkan civil wars. The tale that Hudis tells of neatly separated victims and victimizers, oppressors and oppressed, is a tempting fiction unrelated to the realities of Bosnia and Kosovo. Leftists and internationalists need to resist this temptation if we want to engage in meaningful solidarity and if we want to help bring an end to victimization and oppression. 2

Aside from these basic political disagreements, there is much else that divides Hudis and me; we seem to inhabit “two worlds,” as he puts it, which have little in common. I think our approach to sources is the most telling of these differences. When I first agreed to respond to Hudis’ initial article, I decided to restrict myself to relatively uncontroversial sources. As far as factual claims go, I tried to rely on authors that I thought Hudis would not find politically objectionable; in this way I hoped, perhaps naively, to avoid the endless wrangling over reportage that marks so many left debates on the Balkans. But Hudis’ inexplicable remark that I “favorably” cited a book by Sabrina Ramet, whose political conclusions are obviously quite opposed to my own, has made me realize that my strategy was flawed from the start. (My characterization of Ramet’s book as “tendentious” seems to have escaped his notice.) Having failed to convey my implicit assumptions about secondary sources, let me make them explicit: I think it is a bad idea to draw information primarily or exclusively from figures with whom we find ourselves in agreement, and I consider it an important intellectual discipline to check empirical claims against a wide range of contrasting viewpoints. Unencumbered by any such epistemological compunctions, Hudis blithely declares that Misha Glenny is an unreliable source while Ivo Banac, of all people, is an objective observer, and that Anthony Borden’s calculations are trustworthy while George Kenney, of all people, is secretly on my side of the fence. I think those choices indicate a disregard for critical inquiry and a misjudgement of the issues at stake in our debate. 3

In light of this cavalier attitude toward a subject which continues to inspire more impassioned rhetoric than dispassionate analysis, Hudis’ final installment offers few surprises. Here we learn that he still believes “the people of Kosovo” includes only one ethnic group, that this group faced imminent physical destruction in 1998 and 1999, and that Serb peasants who have lived in Kosovo for centuries constitute a “colonizing power.” Hudis also promotes the historically remarkable view that Bosnian Muslim nationalism only emerged as a significant force in late 1993, and that even Izetbegovic was reluctantly forced into the nationalist camp after this time. All of this is foolishness, of course; Izetbegovic spent years in Tito’s prisons for his nationalist agitation, and his Islamic Declaration dates from 1970. The SDA hardliners, moreover, had gained the upper hand in Bosnia by the very beginning of the 1990’s. Similarly, Hudis invents a new, improved version of Demaci’s chronically inconsistent political line. I encourage anyone who shares Hudis’ mistaken impression that Demaci long ago abandoned ethno-patriotism to consult the full interview in Elsie’s book, as well as those with Qosja (the “father of the Albanian nation”) and Demaci’s other comrades. That the Kosovar Albanian national movement underwent a decade of political development between the decline of Enverism and the emergence of the KLA is obvious; that this development included a repudiation of militant nationalism is a figment of Hudis’ imagination.

Finally, carrying forward his regrettable campaign to debase his own political heritage, Hudis further mystifies the Johnson-Forest tendency’s history of opposition to national movements that align themselves with great power imperialism. We now learn that in Hudis’ eyes, anti-colonial revolutions, anti-fascist resistance struggles, and right-wing restorationist movements are all simply undifferentiated forms of “national liberation.” This latter category, in Hudis’ usage, appears to expand or contract to fit the occasion.

But all of this is to be expected of someone who believes that there are “only two sides to . . . the national struggle.” Beyond his simplistic black-and-white portrait of rather obviously multi-sided Balkan realities, Hudis makes a number of points that beg for explanation. Let us examine some of these revealing formulations. Here we find Hudis reduced to pleading that the KLA contained “some leftist tendencies,” hardly a ringing endorsement of his favored candidate for worldwide left support. Even if this claim were true, how would it contradict my argument that the KLA’s aims were utterly reactionary? The National Socialist German Workers’ Party also contained some leftist tendencies; I trust that Hudis will agree that the Nazi movement nevertheless had utterly reactionary aims. Next, he reminds us that “the figure of 200,000 war casualties [in Bosnia] has been cited by an innumerable number of commentators, journalists, and researchers inside and outside the Balkans.” Indeed it has. To Hudis, this means the figure must be accurate. After all, they wouldn’t print it if it wasn’t true. Has there ever been a more credulous revolutionary? Last, he thinks I wrote that Serb atrocities in Bosnia were “no worse” than Bosnian Muslim atrocities, and that I denied that the Serbs committed atrocities at Srebrenica. In fact I said neither of these things; instead I pointed out the one-sided nature of Hudis’ polemical approach.

On this topic, his analogy to holocaust revisionism is instructive. Hudis suggests that skepticism toward overblown claims of indiscriminate mass murder plays into the hands of those who deny that any crimes took place. I think he has it exactly backwards. To my mind, trumpeting sensationalistic figures makes it easier for the deniers and apologists to sow doubt and confusion when said figures are shown to have been hasty and disproportionate. Such uncareful handling of controversial claims certainly does no service to public understanding of the issues; it is a hindrance, not a boon, to responsible historical reconstruction of the events.

Consider the fact that in Anglo-American mainstream discourse, Bergen-Belsen and Dachau are readily identifiable while Belzec and Chelmno typically draw a blank – even though the first two camps played a marginal role in the holocaust while the latter two were integral parts of it. Hudis’ ill-conceived stance on war crimes in Bosnia is analogous to the role of those well-intentioned folks who repeat as fact the claim that the Nazis made soap out of their victims or that gas chambers operated at Dachau. These claims, although widespread, are not only untrue, they reveal a misunderstanding of the basic facts about the holocaust. When the goal is historical accuracy rather than moral posturing, then it is unexamined yet plausible claims that play into the hands of the deniers. I ask Hudis to read through our exchange again and see which one of us is denying atrocities.

The remaining points in Hudis’ final reply can be dealt with in short order. He asks, “Why have demands for a ‘Greater Albania’ actually receded in the recent period?” Because, naturally, they are increasingly ineffective in winning friends among the western ruling classes. He also asks what relevance my arguments regarding Kosovo might have to black freedom struggles in the U.S. The answer, of course, is none; that’s why the “faraway” aspect of our debate is crucial. And in a remarkable conclusion that once again invokes the distance factor, Hudis observes: “Viewed from afar, the U.S. is the most ‘multiethnic’ country on earth; yet it is also racist to its core.” Of course it is, and that’s just the point: ‘multiethnicity’ is, by itself, of little value as a normative criterion, whether in North America or in Southeastern Europe. 4

In the end, Hudis’ curious amalgam of Marxist-Leninism and identity politics yields peculiar results indeed. He misses the point of my arguments and misconstrues the consequences of his own. When leftists in the faraway west contemplate the killing fields of former Yugoslavia, we face a difficult set of choices. But we emphatically do not face the false choice that Hudis posits between two myopic perspectives: his own version, in which only one side bears any responsibility at all, and the equally simplistic notion that “all sides are equally to blame” (which is, needless to say, not at all my position). The choice is not between selective outrage and indiscriminate outrage, but between an approach that capitulates to the logic of competitive nationalism and one that steadfastly resists it. I hope that internationalists near and far will choose the latter.

Peter Staudenmaier

July 2001

Notes:

1. My own distance from the conflicts in former Yugoslavia is one reason I initially turned down the invitation to contribute to this volume. Like Hudis, I live in the Midwest of the U.S. and I speak no Balkan language; I am thus dependent on others for my information about the area. This mediated position prompted my original reluctance to engage in a public debate on Kosovo; who wants to read a couple of western leftists arguing about events in which they have played no role? In retrospect I recognize that distance, in itself, is not a good reason for American leftists to be shy about expressing their opinions on a conflict which has, for better or worse, occupied public attention in this country for a decade now. How Hudis comes to terms with his own distanced position remains a mystery to me; aside from his frequent assertion that those who disagree with him are either ignorant or pro-Serb (whatever that might mean), he has yet to explain why he privileges his own conclusions on people and movements that are indisputably far away.

2. This is one of many points in our exchange where more historical perspective might have improved Hudis’ argument. He seems entirely unaware of the role of atrocity propaganda in World War I, for example, not to mention the longstanding traditions of liberal imperialism and ostensibly humanitarian intervention. Similar stumbling blocks have arisen in discussions with Christopher Hitchens, Branka Maga_, and others with whom I have tried to debate these issues. Since there is little sense in charging figures like Hitchens or Maga_ with historical ignorance, it seems to me that an unexamined form of special pleading is once again at work here. It is also important to note that a number of anarchists have argued for a range of comparable positions in the wake of the Balkan wars; David Watson of the Fifth Estate journal is one of the more sophisticated spokespeople for this stance, casting anti-interventionists as Serb apologists. In my view, such arguments are no more persuasive today than they were in 1992.

3. In several instances the basic function of secondary sources seems to have eluded Hudis altogether. He is much exercised about my “method of falsification,” and his very first example of my ostensible duplicity is a fascinating microcosm of our entire exchange. Although I have explained it to him twice, he still thinks that in my first essay I quoted Tim Judah calling the KLA a purely nationalist organization. I relied on Judah’s book not for its political interpretations but because it offers a rich source of testimony from various Kosovar insurgents. The phrase “purely nationalist” is not Judah’s own; the quote is from Albanian Kosovar militant Xhafer Shatri, cited in Judah’s book. Hudis mistakenly attributes the quote to Judah himself, and furthermore accuses me of falsely applying these words to the KLA as an organization. But my original reference made perfectly clear that Shatri was speaking of an earlier group, not of the KLA; the connection to the KLA’s politics was obviously drawn by me, not by Shatri or Judah. Hudis may not like my logic, but there was nothing misleading about it. It is a common and perfectly sensible practice to rely on secondary sources for data, quotes, etc. and then draw different political conclusions from this material. I hope that readers of our exchange will have an opportunity to review the corresponding passages in Judah’s book and determine whether this episode reveals my penchant for falsification or Hudis’ peculiar approach to reading.

4. Some of Hudis’ latest contentions border on the absurd. If I read him right, he seems to be saying that a community which fails to produce Green parties or a sufficiently lively press forfeits the right to self-determination; and that Morillon, Annan, and the United Nations have joined the pro-Serb conspiracy. He continues to think in icons, not in concepts; witness his palpable excitement at the prospect of a street named after Trotsky. For good measure, Hudis tosses in the assertion that ethnic exclusivism is the consequence, not the cause, of partition. And he remains befuddled by the idea that other leftists might actually have the audacity to inquire into the history and objectives of a “mass movement” that has gained his seal of approval. Forgetting the distance that separates him from this mass movement, he confuses dismissal of his own unconvincing arguments with dismissal of the “people of Kosovo.”

This one line, spoken by a cartoon doe and absorbed by generations of children, epitomizes much that is wrongheaded and dangerous in North American environmentalist thought. “Man was in the forest” signifies, to Bambi and to the audience, that the mere presence of humans in a natural landscape is threatening and dangerous. The message this sends, the ideology it projects, is that human interaction with the natural world is by definition destructive. In much more subtle and sophisticated forms, this same notion animates an alarmingly large proportion of contemporary environmental activists. People as such are bad for animals and ecosystems alike.

Aside from revealing a thoroughly Disneyan contempt for historical and social specificity, this view is literally ecologically hopeless: the only choice it leaves us is despair. This view means that stemming and reversing the environmental crisis, and undertaking an ecological reconstruction of the devastation that “Man” has wrought, are simply impossible. If humans are per se hazardous to the earth, there is no point in trying to reshape societal structures or change environmental practices; habitat destruction, species loss, and a poisoned planet are just inevitable as long as we’re around.

Unfortunately, such misguided attitudes often reach their peak in the crucial issue of wilderness defense. Many environmentalists most active and militant in this arena—an immensely important one for the radical ecology movement as a whole—are inclined to portray wilderness as those regions that are untouched by human impact of any sort. In keeping with the patriarchal terminology of “Man’s” inevitable destructiveness, the notion of “virgin forests” propagates the false idea that the remaining large tracts of old-growth trees have reached their supposedly pristine state without any human influence, and that the best way to protect such areas is to reduce or eliminate all forms of human contact with them.

This perspective is not just historically naive; it also surreptitiously endorses the imperialist view of the North American continent put forth by the European conquerors. For these grand forests that today appear as wilderness were, of course, populated for millennia by indigenous peoples who left their mark in myriad ways on the landscape. In fact, the symbiotic relationships established between indigenous communities and the woodlands they lived in often enhanced, rather than detracted from, biodiversity. Far from representing some mythical untouched terrain, remaining old-growth forests should properly be seen as the product of particular human influences. (Of course, there are also many historical examples of indigenous practices that had dire environmental effects; the romantic image of native peoples as ecological saints is yet another, equally racist, myth.)

If we want to avoid this sort of historical ignorance, radical ecologists need to resist the tempting simplifications of Disney Ecology. In our engagement within environmental movements, in social struggles of various sorts, and in interactions with our coworkers and neighbors, we can offer an alternative to the ideology of humans-as-cancer. Social ecology’s insistence on the societal roots of environmental disruption, and the vision of social and ecological reconstruction it upholds, point to a fundamentally different way of understanding the ecological crisis and our possible reactions to it. Building on social ecology’s insights, radical environmental activists can help to create and promote a coherent alternative to Disney Ecology: an ecological humanism.

This won’t be a simple task, but it is a vitally important one. Several decades ago, when I first saw Bambi, the goal of environmentalists was to convince people of the seriousness, indeed the reality, of the ecological crisis. That struggle, of course, has not been definitively won, but it has shifted into a new phase. The challenge we face today is to formulate an appropriate analysis of and response to this crisis—one that is radical, emancipatory, and sustainable. Social ecology offers us the critical tools to help meet that challenge in the years to come.

In order to contest these views, and critically examine the philosophical and political presuppositions that underlie them, it is not necessary to defend or condone the exploitation of non-human animals in factory farms, cosmetics laboratories, and elsewhere. Much of the current industrialized manufacture of animal products is socially worthless and ecologically disastrous, as is to be expected in an economy organized around commodification and profit. Nor does the critique of animal rights entail the wholesale rejection of personal convictions or lifestyle choices. There are a number of legitimate reasons to abstain from eating meat or to oppose cruelty to animals.

This essay explores some of the illegitimate reasons for doing so. Such an undertaking is fraught with difficulties, not least of which is the strained sense of incredulity and indignation that critiques of animal rights almost invariably arouse. The topic leads onto tricky terrain, both ethically and politically, in part because it directly impinges on dietary predilections, a matter that is at once profoundly private and inescapably public. Although animal rights involves much more than vegetarianism or veganism, it does tend to exacerbate the seemingly inherent self-righteousness of food politics, where puritanism is often mistaken for radicalism.2

It is nevertheless essential to face such misgivings squarely, in the hope of provoking a more thoughtful debate on the merits of animal rights. I view animal rights thinking as a specific kind of moral mistake and a symptom of political confusion. Much like its ideological cousin, pacifism, the political and moral theory of animal rights offers simple but false answers to important ethical questions. At the risk of collapsing competing versions of animal rights theory into one monolithic category, I would like to consider several of these questions from a social-ecological perspective in order to show why much of the ideology of animal rights is both anti-humanist and anti-ecological, and why its reasoning is frequently at odds with the project of creating a free world.3

As an attempt to extend traditional ethical frameworks to non-human nature, animal rights is simultaneously much too ambitious and much too timid. It fundamentally misconstrues what is distinctive about humans and our relation to the natural world as well as to the realm of moral action, and at the same time treats “higher” animals anthropomorphically while completely ignoring the vast majority of creatures that make this planet what it is. But the problem with animal rights thinking goes deeper still. The very project of simply extending existing moral systems, rather than radically transforming them, is flawed from the start.

Many animal rights theorists readily acknowledge that mainstream western traditions of ethical thought are unsatisfactory, but they focus their criticisms on traditional morality’s supposed anthropocentrism. This is unconvincing; the primary problem with the mainstream western tradition is not that it promotes anthropocentric ethics, but that it promotes bourgeois ethics.4 The basic categories of academic moral philosophy are steeped in capitalist values, from the notion of ‘interests’ to the notion of ‘contract’; the standard analysis of ‘moral standing’ replicates exchange relations, and the individualist conception of ‘moral agents’ obscures the social contexts which produce and sustain agency or hinder it.

Yet these categories are the same ones that animal rights theorists ask us to apply to those creatures (some of them, anyway) that have typically been neglected by moral philosophy. In this way, animal liberation doctrine perpetuates and reinforces the liberal assumptions that are hegemonic within contemporary capitalist cultures, under the guise of contesting these assumptions. Indeed one of the chief reasons for the popularity of animal rights within radical circles is that it appears to offer an extreme affront to the status quo while actually recuperating the ideological foundations of the status quo.

Relying on a dubious analogy to institutionalized forms of social domination and hierarchy, animal rights advocates argue that drawing an ethically significant distinction between human beings and non-human animals is a form of ‘speciesism’, a mere prejudice that illegitimately privileges members of one’s own species over members of other species. According to this theory, animals that display a certain level of relative physiological and psychological complexity – usually vertebrates, that is, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals – have the same basic moral status as humans. A central nervous system is, at bottom, what confers moral considerability; in some versions of the theory, only creatures with the capacity to experience pain have any moral status whatsoever. These animals are often designated as ‘sentient’.

Thus on the animal rights view, to draw a line between human beings and other sentient creatures is arbitrary and unwarranted, in the same way that classical racism and sexism unjustly deemed women and people of color to be undeserving of moral equality. The next logical step in expanding the circle of ethical concern is to overcome speciesism and grant equal consideration to the interests of all sentient beings, human and non-human.5

These arguments are seductive but spurious. The central analogy to the civil rights movement and the women’s movement is trivializing and ahistorical. Both of those social movements were initiated and driven by members of the dispossessed and excluded groups themselves, not by benevolent men or white people acting on their behalf. Both movements were built precisely around the idea of reclaiming and reasserting a shared humanity in the face of a society that had deprived it and denied it. No civil rights activist or feminist ever argued, “We’re sentient beings too!” They argued, “We’re fully human too!” Animal liberation doctrine, far from extending this humanist impulse, directly undermines it.

Moreover, the animal rights stance forgets a crucial fact about ethical action. There is indeed a critically important distinction between moral agents (beings who can engage in ethical deliberation, entertain alternative moral choices, and act according to their best judgement) and all other morally considerable beings. Moral agents are uniquely capable of formulating, articulating, and defending a conception of their own interests. No other morally considerable beings are capable of this; in order for their interests to be taken into account in ethical deliberation, these interests must be imputed and interpreted by some moral agent. As far as we know, mentally competent adult human beings are the only moral agents there are.6

This decisive distinction is fundamental to ethics itself. To act ethically means, among other things, to respect the principle that persuasion and consent are preferable to coercion and manipulation. This principle cannot be directly applied to human interactions with animals. Animals cannot be persuaded and cannot give consent. In order to accord proper consideration to an animal’s well-being, moral agents must make some determination of what that animal’s interests are. This is not only unnecessary in the case of other moral agents, it is morally prohibited under normal conditions.

To grasp the significance of this difference, consider the following. I live with several people and a number of cats, toward whom I have various ethical responsibilities. If I am convinced that one of my human housemates needs to take some kind of medicine, it is not acceptable for me to force feed it to her, assuming she isn’t deranged. Instead, I can try to persuade her, through rational deliberation and ethical argument, that it would be best if she took the medicine. But if I think that one of the cats needs to take some kind of medicine, I may well have no choice but to force feed it to him or trick him into eating it.7 In other words, taking the interests of animals seriously and treating them as morally considerable beings requires a very different sort of ethical action from the sort that is typically appropriate with other people.

The failure to account for this salient feature of moral conduct is one reason why so many proponents of animal rights are hostile to humanist values. But an equally serious failing of animal rights thinking is its obliviousness to ecological values. Recall that on the animal rights view, it is only individual creatures endowed with sentience that deserve moral consideration. Trees, plants, lakes, rivers, forests, ecosystems, and even most creatures that zoologists classify as “animals”, have no interests, well-being, or worth of their own, except inasmuch as they promote the interests of sentient beings. Animal rights advocates have simply traded in speciesism for phylumism.8

Thus even on its own terms, as an attempt to expand the circle of moral consideration beyond the human realm to the natural world, animal rights falls severely short. But the problem is not merely one of inadequate scope. The individual rights approach, with its concomitant view of interests, suffering, and welfare, cannot be reconciled with an ecological perspective. The well-being of a complex functioning ecological community, with its soils, rocks, waters, micro-organisms, and animal and plant denizens, cannot be reduced to the well-being of those denizens as individuals. The dynamic relationships among the constituent members are as important as the disparate interests of each member of the ensemble.

To focus on the interests of singular animals (and on the small minority of sentient ones at that), and to posit a general duty not to harm these interests or cause suffering, is to miss this ecological dimension entirely.9 Conflicting interests are part of what accounts for the magnificent variety and complexity of the natural world; the notion of granting equal consideration to all such interests is incoherent in evolutionary as well as ecological terms. This would remain the case even in a completely vegetarian society populated solely by organic subsistence farmers; food cultivation of any sort means the systematic deprivation of habitat and sustenance for some animals and requires the continuous frustration of their interests. Extending the individual rights paradigm to sentient animals simply obscures this fundamental facet of terrestrial existence.10

Animal rights thus degrades, rather than develops, the humanist impulse embodied in liberatory social movements, and its basic philosophical thrust is directly contrary to the project of elaborating an ecological ethics. As a moral theory, it leaves much to be desired. But what of its political affiliations and its practical implications? Here as well skepticism is in order.

All factions in the animal rights camp appear to share a profound faith in the revolutionary potential of purchasing decisions and consumer choices: If enough people stop buying meat, factory farms will go out of business. This commitment to consumer politics is a classically voluntarist approach to social change which further highlights animal liberation’s debt to liberalism. It also reveals an elementary misunderstanding of the structure of capitalist economies.11

Even within the narrow confines of ‘ethical shopping’, however, an animal rights perspective frequently confuses the relevant issues. Instead of investigating the social and ecological conditions under which bananas and coffee, for example, reach shopping carts and kitchen tables in Seattle and Stockholm, the myopic focus on sentience asks us to cast a suspicious eye on locally raised free-range poultry.

This regressive shift from the political economy of food production to the pangs of conscience of individual consumption is testimony to the underlying class bias and cultural insularity that run throughout much of the animal rights tendency. Animal rights takes the range of nutritional choices typical of a narrow socio-economic stratum and elevates it to a universal virtue, while stigmatizing the sources of protein commonly available to economically deprived urban communities, rural working class families, and peasants in the global south.12

The unexamined cultural prejudices embedded deep within animal rights thinking carry political implications that are unavoidably elitist. A consistent animal rights stance, after all, would require many aboriginal peoples to abandon their sustainable livelihoods and lifeways completely. Animal rights has no reasonable alternative to offer to communities like the Inuit, whose very existence in their ecological niche is predicated on hunting animals. An animal rights viewpoint can only look down disdainfully on those peasant societies in Latin America and elsewhere that depend on small-scale animal husbandry as an integral part of their diet, as well as pastoralists in Africa and Asia who rely centrally upon animals to maintain traditional subsistence economies that long predate the colonial imposition of capitalism. These are not matters of “taste” but of sustainability and survival.

Forsaking such practices makes no ecological or social sense, and would be tantamount to eliminating these distinctive societies themselves, all for the sake of assimilation to standards of morality and nutrition propounded by middle-class westerners convinced of their own rectitude. Too many animal rights proponents forget that their belief system is essentially a European-derived construct, and neglect the practical repercussions of universalizing it into an unqualified principle of human moral conduct as such.13

Nowhere is this combination of parochialism and condescension more apparent than in the animus against hunting. Many animal rights enthusiasts cannot conceive of hunting as anything other than a brutal and senseless activity undertaken for contemptible reasons. Heedless of their own prejudices, they take hunting for an expression of speciesist prejudice. What animal rights theorists malign as ‘sport hunting’ often provides a significant seasonal supplement to the diets of rural populations who lack the luxuries of tempeh and seitan.

Even indigenous communities engaged in conspicuously low-impact traditional hunting have been harassed and vilified by animal rights activists. The campaign against seal hunting in the 1980’s, for example, prominently targeted Inuit practices.14 In the late 1990’s, the Makah people of Neah Bay in the northwestern United States tried to re-establish their communal whale hunt, harvesting exactly one gray whale in 1999. The Makah hunt was non-commercial, for subsistence purposes, and fastidiously humane; they chose a whale species that is not endangered and went to considerable lengths to accommodate anti-whaling sentiment.

Nevertheless, when the Makah attempted to embark on their first expedition in 1998, they were physically confronted by the Sea Shepherd Society and other animal protection organizations, who occupied Neah Bay for several months. For these groups, animal rights took precedence over human rights. Many of these animal advocates embellished their pro-whale rhetoric with hoary racist stereotypes about native people and allied themselves with unreconstructed apologists for colonial domination and dispossession.15

Such examples are far from rare. In fact, animal rights sentiment has frequently served as an entry point for rightwing positions into left movements. Because much of the left has generally been reluctant to think clearly and critically about nature, about biological politics, and about ethical complexity, this unsettling affinity between animal rights and rightwing politics — an affinity which has a lengthy historical pedigree — remains a serious concern.

While hardly typical of the current as a whole, it is not unusual to find the most militant proponents of animal liberation also espousing staunch opposition to abortion, homosexuality, and other purportedly ‘unnatural’ phenomena. The “Hardline” tendency, which in the 1990’s spread from North America to Central Europe, is perhaps the most striking example.16 But the connections to reactionary politics extend substantially further. The recent Russian youth group “Moving Together”, an ultranationalist and sexually repressive organization, has made animal protection one of the central planks in its platform, while the Swiss “Association Against Animal Factories” wallows in antisemitic propaganda. In Denmark, the only party with a designated portfolio for animal concerns is the anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party, while the far-right British National Party boasts of its commitment to animal rights. The contemporary neofascist scene in Europe and North America has shown an abiding interest in the theme as well; over the last decade many “National Revolutionaries” and “Third Positionists” have become actively involved in animal rights campaigns.17

Although this widespread overlap between animal liberation politics and the xenophobic and authoritarian right may seem incongruous, it has played a prominent role in the history of fascism since the early twentieth century. Many fascist theoreticians prided themselves on their movement’s steadfast rejection of anthropocentrism, and the German variant of fascism in particular frequently tended toward an animal rights position. Nazi biology textbooks insisted that “there exist no physical or psychological characteristics which would justify a differentiation of mankind from the animal world.”18 Hitler himself was zealously committed to animal welfare causes, and was a vegetarian and opponent of vivisection. His lieutenant Goebbels declared: “The Fuhrer is a convinced vegetarian, on principle. His arguments cannot be refuted on any serious basis. They are totally unanswerable.”19 Other leading Nazis, like Rudolf Hess, were even stricter in their vegetarianism, and the party promoted raw fruits and nuts as the ideal diet, much like the most scrupulous vegans today. Himmler excoriated hunting and required the top ranks of the SS to follow a vegetarian regimen, while Goering banned animal experimentation.

The list of pro-animal predilections on the part of top Nazis is long, but more important are the animal rights policies implemented by the Nazi state and the underlying ideology that justified them. Within a few months of taking power, the Nazis passed animal rights laws that were unprecedented in scale and that explicitly affirmed the moral status of animals independent of any human interest. These decrees stressed the duty to avoid causing pain to animals and established extremely detailed and concrete guidelines for interactions with animals. According to a leading scholar of Nazi animal legislation, “the Animal Protection Law of 1933 was probably the strictest in the world”.20

A 1939 compendium of Nazi animal protection statutes proclaimed that “the German people have always had a great love for animals and have always been conscious of our strong ethical obligations toward them.” The Nazi laws insisted on “the right which animals inherently possess to be protected in and of themselves.” 21 These were not mere philosophical postulates; the ordinances closely regulated the permissible treatment of domestic and wild animals and designated a variety of protected species while restricting commercial and scientific use of animals. The official reasoning behind these decrees was remarkably similar to latter-day animal rights arguments. “To the German, animals are not merely creatures in the organic sense, but creatures who lead their own lives and who are endowed with perceptive facilities, who feel pain and experience joy,” observed Goering in 1933 while announcing a new anti-vivisection law. 22

While contemporary animal liberation activists would certainly do well to acquaint themselves with this ominous record of past and present collusion by animal advocates with fascists, the point of reviewing these facts is not to suggest a necessary or inevitable connection between animal rights and fascism.23 But the historical pattern is unmistakable and demands explanation. What helps to account for this consistent intersection of apparently contrary worldviews is a common preoccupation with purity. The presumption that true virtue requires repudiating ostensibly unclean practices such as meat eating furnishes much of the heartfelt vehemence behind animal rights discourse. When disconnected from an articulated critical social perspective and a comprehensive ecological sensibility, this abstentionist version of puritan politics can easily slide into a distorted vision of ethnic, sexual, or ideological purity.

A closely related trope is the recurrent insistence within animal rights thinking on a unitary approach to moral questions. Rightly rejecting the inherited dualism of humanity and non-human nature, animal rights philosophers wrongly collapse the two into one undifferentiated whole, thus substituting monism for dualism (and neglecting most of the natural world in the process). But regressive dreams of purity and oneness carry no emancipatory potential; their political ramifications range from trite to dangerous. In the wrong hands, a simplistic critique of ‘speciesism’ yields liberation for neither people nor animals, but merely the same rancid antihumanism that has always turned radical hopes into their reactionary opposite.

Rather than positing a static, one-dimensional moral landscape populated by humans and animals facing one another on equal terms, those drawn to animal rights ought to consider a more complex alternative: a variegated ethical viewpoint that encompasses a social dimension and an ecological dimension without conflating the two. Such an approach recognizes the crucial continuity between humankind and the rest of the natural world while respecting the ethically significant distinctions that mark this continuum. Incorporating a dialectical view of natural processes and entities, this alternative perspective comprehends the breathtaking abundance, sophistication, and diversity of life forms and living communities on the earth as an occasion for awe and as valuable in themselves.

The dynamic which generated this wondrous profusion of life can be understood as a dialectic of cooperation and competition.24 Humans are the first creatures capable of transcending this dialectic, which gave rise to us, by consciously advancing the moment of cooperation – that is, by structuring our interactions with each other and with other creatures along mutually beneficial lines. This cooperative potential has two distinct components: one interhuman and social, and the other interspecific and ecological.

Within the social sphere, the potential for cooperative relations is, in an important sense, universal. While it would be naïve to suppose that contradictory interests will disappear in a free society, there is no ‘natural’ reason for the persistence of large-scale social competition. In regard to the rest of the biosphere, on the other hand, this cooperative potential is notably circumscribed. It is not just impossible to eliminate competition among organisms over resources, habitats, and so forth; the very notion is profoundly incompatible with the basic parameters of living systems. The potentials for cooperation between humans and other animals are thus more modest and more particular.

An ecologically and socially credible effort to take animal interests seriously will dispense with the notion that killing and harm are wrong per se, and will surmount the dichotomy of sentient vs. non-sentient beings by integrating a concern for animal welfare into an inclusive appreciation for the well-being of whole ecological communities. In practice, this would likely result in a revival and refinement of the custom of humane treatment of animals, accompanied by the insight that cultivating humanist values is a component of, rather than a hindrance to, this endeavor. People will not consistently treat animals humanely until people — all people — are treated humanely.

None of these ethical potentialities can be realized, however, as long as we continue to replicate social institutions built around domination and hierarchy. Overcoming those structures will require a revolutionary transformation, ethically as well as politically. This momentous historical goal can only be reached by a movement that reclaims, not rejects, the uniquely human capacity for freedom. In their present form, the philosophy and politics of animal rights cannot guide us toward this goal.