Biography in the Mirrors of the Biographers, or Writing the Life of Rudolf Steiner – Empirical Facts, Polemical Insinuations, and Imaginative Insights
Publication information:
Abstract
In this lecture we narrate how Steiner’s two major autobiographical texts – My Life’s Course, serialized in the pages of the Goetheanum from December 1923, and the lecture given in February 1913 to the newly-founded Anthroposophical Society – were responses to malicious public polemics. We further explore how both writings color his reception until today, among readers and scholars of all hues. Seeing Steiner and his community as co-shapers of historical processes, rather than as mere victims – their opponents’ commitment to violence notwithstanding – we then zoom out to show how third-party descriptions of Steiner’s person and companions, from the 1890s and steadily through until after Steiner’s death, stamped him as an arriviste, whose popular challenge to dominant knowledge systems was well worth opposing. Aware that knowledge about anthroposophy and Steiner is created out of the societal positions of adherents, opponents, and researchers – and mindful that all research positions consist of privilege and oppression in unequal measures – we conclude by returning to our opening question: How are understandings of Steiner and his work formed in the mirror of biographical imaginations?
Presenter Biography
Aaron French and Henry Holland have been researching and writing for three years on a new biography, under contract with State University of New York Press: Modernity's Provocateur: The Young Rudolf Steiner and the Rebirth of Outsider Philosophy (scheduled for publication 2027). This follows Aaron's published monograph Max Weber, Rudolf Steiner, and Modern Western Esotericism: A Transcultural Approach (Routledge, 2025). Henry, an accomplished scholarly translator and editor, who has also been a Translation Fellow at Yale University's Fortunoff Archive of Holocaust Testimonies, first published in this field in 2023, in German Studies Review, on "Overlapping Epistemologies in the Thought and Lives of Ernst Bloch and Rudolf Steiner." This will be followed by an extended chapter on "Anti-Racist and Racist Agency in the Work and Thought of Rudolf Steiner and the Anthroposophical Movement," for the Bloomsbury Handbook of Steiner-Waldorf Education (postprint, scheduled 2026), ed. Jo Fraser-Pearce, to which Aaron is also contributing an important chapter on " Max Weber and Rudolf Steiner: Sociological Contemporaries." Parallel to the numerous peer-reviewed articles Aaron has published on the history and present of anthroposophy and western esotericism, and his regular YouTube outreach work on the same subjects, Henry writes regularly for perhaps the only essayistic and edited magazine on Nietzsche today, NietzschePOParts. With Aaron's position in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen, and Henry based in Hamburg in northern Germany, the two don't have far to travel to embark on further field trips. These journey through still unmapped territory regarding the perennially intriguing and contested subject of their biography.