Edwin Kreulen, the education editor for the Dutch daily TROUW, 

attended a Waldorf school. Looking back, he has written:

According to page 1 of my [Waldorf] exercise book, all races originate from a kind of primeval man, who lived ten thousand years ago in the central continent of Atlantis.

..."With the first Southern races, the natural forces of earth and sun have worked to blacken their skins. With the Northern races, the inner forces of light became stronger, which made them whites ... The races became stuck at different stages in their development from childhood to old age." 

Then comes a classification, linking the black race to childhood, the brown race to a fourteen year old, and the whites to all ages.

...According to the exercise book, each race corresponds to a part of the human body. Senses and brains are linked to whites, metabolism to blacks. And only the white person has a straight face. E.g., the yellow race has "slanted eyes, a hollow face, flat nose, and coarse black hair."

Next, the exercise book discusses all races individually ... 

"All negroes still keep a childish expression on their faces for a long time. The lips are shapeless and thick, the nose somewhat flat and not yet grown up in a sense ... [Negroes'] stories, their views on the world and creation are somewhat childish. In childish simplicity they worship their gods." The chapter on the black race concludes: "After being dominated for centuries, the negroes are now developing on their own; however, this goes with big problems and bloody wars."

...At a certain point, my defense of the school changes into pure anger. How dare they indoctrinate me with this? 

— Edwin Kreulen, 

"My Education Toward Racism", 

TROUW, February 4, 1998 

[http://waldorfcritics.org/active/articles/EducationRacism.html]

Some of the teachers at the Waldorf school I attended openly expressed racist beliefs. [See "I Went to Waldorf".] They did so when addressing my all-white class; they were more circumspect when addressing classes that included non-white students. Today my old school proudly tells the world that one of its graduates, who is black, has been extremely successful in his chosen career; and the school, quite accurately, says this graduate supports his alma mater. The point the school evidently thinks it is making is that there can be no taint of racism in a school that accepts students from all races and treats them well.

But there is no denying the presence of racist beliefs in Anthroposophy, nor — if you can trust me and others who have reported racist episodes in Waldorf schools — can there be much doubt that Anthroposophical racism does arise, at least occasionally, within Waldorf schools. A black Waldorf student who is shielded from Anthroposophical doctrines about blacks may "benefit" from the circumspection of his teachers, but he may also be misled about some fundamental Anthroposophical beliefs.

True-blue Anthroposophical Waldorf teachers probably try to treat all their students well, regardless of race or nationality. But this does not mean they think all races and nationalities are equal. In fact, the Waldorf worldview asserts that races and nations stand at varying levels of spiritual development; some are distinctly lower than others. The black race is generally deemed to stand at the lowest level and the white race at the highest. Waldorf teachers do not, as a result, think they should mistreat black students. But all Waldorf teachers who accept Anthroposophical tenets about race necessarily consider black students to be less evolved, less spiritually advanced, and generally less intelligent than their white classmates. No amount of dissembling, and no degree of kindness shown to black students, alters this reality. Racism is embedded in Anthroposophical thinking [see, e.g., "Embedded Racism"], and it surfaces — at least occasionally — inside Waldorf schools [see, e.g., "N-Word"]. 

— Roger Rawlings

The following is excerpted from the archive

of the defunct website CHASE

(Challenging Anthroposophy and Steiner Education).

The archive remains open.

http://chaseukinfoarchive.wordpress.com/sanitised-steiner-texts-some-examples/

Steiner’s texts and recorded lectures contain content that is racist and anti-Semitic. English published translations have been cleansed of his more overt racist and anti-Semitic material ... CHASE gives two examples ... Both of the examples of English sanitisation of Steiner texts were published by Rudolf Steiner Press, London. The Rudolf Steiner Press is the publishing arm and a subsidiary of the UK national society for Anthroposophy, the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain.

...The first example of sanitisation involves an entire chapter of the original being expunged from the English translation of the same work. The English translation is of Steiner’s book ‘From Beetroot to Buddhism’ (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1999). It omits the chapter which when translated would be titled “The Essence of Jewry”. The chapter appears in the original German text as a chapter titled “Vom Wesen des Judentums”. The omitted chapter, about twenty pages long, when translated would contain these two passages:

> “This discussion that I have just described to you took place before The Great War of 1914 to 1918, you see. The fact that people no longer want the great universal-human principles, but prefer to segregate themselves and develop national forces, that is exactly what lead to the great war! Thus the greatest tragedy of this 20th century has come from what the Jews are also striving for. And one can say that since everything the Jews have done can now be done consciously by all people, 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. That is what would be ideal. This ideal is still opposed, even today, by many Jewish habits – and above all by the hatred of other people. That is what must be overcome.”

> “Today all aspects of the Jews are dominated by racial qualities. Above all they marry among themselves. They see the racial qualities, not the spiritual. And this is what must be said in reply to the question: has the Jewish people fulfilled its mission within the evolution of human knowledge? It has fulfilled it; for in earlier times one single people was needed to bring about a certain monotheism. But today spiritual insight itself is necessary. Therefore this mission has been fulfilled. And therefore this Jewish mission as such, as a Jewish mission, is no longer necessary in evolution; instead the only proper thing would be for the Jews to blend in with the other peoples and disappear into the other peoples.”

...The second example of sanitisation of English translations of Steiner texts is another one where an entire chapter of the original book is absent from the English translation of it. The book concerned is Steiner’s book ‘From Limestone to Lucifer’ (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1999). The omitted chapter if translated would be titled “Color and the Races of Mankind” and is about sixteen pages long. If translated into English it would contain the following passages:

> “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.”

> “We here in Europe call ourselves the white race. If we go over to Asia, we have mostly the yellow race. And if we go over to Africa, there we have the black race. Those are also the original races. Everything else living in these regions is based on migration. Thus when we ask which race belongs to which part of the earth, we must say: the yellow race, the Mongols, the Mongolian race belongs to Asia, the white race or the Caucasian race belongs to Europe, and the black race or the Negro race belongs to Africa. The Negro race does not belong to Europe, and the fact that this race is now playing such a large role in Europe is of course nothing but a nuisance.”

> “Let us look first at the blacks in Africa. These blacks in Africa have the peculiar characteristic that they absorb all light and all warmth from space. They take it in. And this light and warmth cannot penetrate through the whole body, because after all a person is always a person, even if he is black. It does not penetrate through the whole body, but lingers on the surface of the skin, and the skin itself thus turns black. So a black in Africa is therefore a person who absorbs as much warmth and light as possible from space and assimilates it within himself. In this way the energies of the cosmos affect the whole person. Everywhere he takes in light and warmth, everywhere. He assimilates it inside of himself. There must be something there that helps him in this assimilation. Now you see, what helps him in this assimilation is his rear-brain. In the Negro the rear-brain is therefore especially developed. It goes through his spinal cord. And this is able to assimilate all the light and warmth that are inside a person. Therefore everything connected to the body and the metabolism is strongly developed in the Negro. He has, as they say, powerful physical drives, powerful instincts. The Negro has a powerful instinctual life. And because he actually has the sun, light, and warmth on his body surface, in his skin, his whole metabolism operates as if he were being cooked inside by the sun. That is where his instinctual life comes from. The Negro is constantly cooking inside, and what feeds this fire is his rear-brain.”

> “Very few inventions have been made in Asia. They can assemble things, but as for inventions themselves, that is, that which arises from experience with the external world, the Asians cannot do this. [...] This sort of independent thinking which Europeans develop in dealing with their surroundings, the Asians do not have this. The Japanese will therefore follow all the European inventions, but they will never think up something on their own.”

> “Thus it is really very interesting: on the one hand there is the black race, which is the most earthly. When this race goes toward the West, it dies out. Then there is the yellow race, in the middle between the earth and the cosmos. When this race goes toward the East, it turns brown, it attaches itself too much to the cosmos and dies out. The white race is the race of the future, the spiritually creative race.”

The following is excerpted from

"Steiner Waldorf Schools Part 3. 

The problem of racism"

at DC's Improbable Science

[http://www.dcscience.net/?p=3853]

[A]dherence to Anthroposophy and aspects of this pedagogy can lead teachers to make decisions about individual children based on race and disability, which many people would consider to be outright discrimination.

...We can’t afford to be ignorant or to accept Steiner schools on their own terms. The history of Anthroposophy and thereby Steiner Waldorf education is essential reading. That history contains a warning, and we ignore this at our own risk.

...Steiner’s drawing of the “evolution of humankind” through the various stages – Hyperborea, Lemuria, Atlantis — from lower to higher forms (fish to reptiles to mammals etc.), with the top three categories marked “apes,” then (American) “Indians,” then at the very top “Aryans.” Steiner’s 1907 lecture refers to both apes and Indians as “decadent side branches” of evolution.

Pervasive racial assumptions run throughout Rudolf Steiner’s work. Anthroposophy itself is : “built around a racial view of human nature arranged in a hierarchical framework,” and Steiner’s doctrine awards a higher or lower place in the spiritual evolution of mankind for certain races, with their attendant characteristics.

...For those [of Steiner’s followers] who believe they are developing clairvoyant faculties in pursuit of Anthroposophy’s "Higher Worlds", Steiner’s racist doctrines, existing within an anthroposophical structure of reincarnation and karma, can be seen as essentially benevolent and redemptive.

...One of the most authoritative writers about Anthroposophy in English is American historian Peter Staudenmaier. His recent Ph.D. in modern history, written at Cornell, concerns Anthroposophy in Germany and Italy from 1900 to 1945. A fluent German speaker, Staudenmaier had access to Steiner’s untranslated work as well as to original archive material. He stresses that Steiner’s prolific output can be internally contradictory, enabling supporters to claim that anthroposophical race doctrine is incidental or misunderstood. But nevertheless, there’s a dominant and explicable theme, owing much to Steiner’s occult interpretation of German nationalism. Steiner’s attitude to Jewishness is an example of insular preoccupations:

“The nature of Steiner’s hostility to Jewishness was thus both ordinary and anomalous; it incorporated the common misconceptions of the era and simultaneously transcended these within the peculiar framework of ‘occult science’. It was not so much hatred or fear of Jews that animated Steiner’s mature anti-Semitism, but ignorance of contemporary Jewish life, of modern Jewish culture and history, as well as a myopic commitment to German spiritual superiority. What Steiner did know about Judaism, moreover, was generally refracted through a Christian and Germanocentric lens.” [Peter Staudenmaier, “Rudolf Steiner and the Jewish Question’” (Leo Baeck Inst. Yearbook, 2005).]

...“Steiner’s doctrine of racial evolution is more than a biological appendage to his spiritual cosmology. For Anthroposophy as for Theosophy, evolution is the link between the human and the divine, it is a process supervised by higher powers and a vehicle for the soul’s elevation and purification. The guiding thread throughout Steiner’s race mythology is the motif of a small, racially advanced group progressing into the next era while the great mass of backward populations declines. In the current era, the dominant race is the Aryan race, which evolved out of a small number of specially advanced colonists from Atlantis. In Steiner’s words: “Ever since the Atlantean Race began slowly to disappear, the great Aryan Race has been the dominant one on earth.”

...Though potentially spiritually ‘enlightened’ to the initiate, Steiner’s views on race remain reprehensible:

“The white population, then, represent normal human beings who continue to progress, while Asians and Africans are abnormal peoples who were not as capable of evolving. Statements like these can be found throughout Steiner’s works, and may reflect the prejudices prevalent among educated Europeans of his era. Perhaps the most instructive instances are Steiner’s various statements about black people. Addressing the first generation of Waldorf teachers in 1923, Steiner responded to a question about teaching French with the following remarks:

“The French are committing the terrible brutality of moving black people to Europe, but it works, in an even worse way, back on France. It has an enormous effect on the blood and the race and contributes considerably toward French decadence. The French as a race are reverting." [Peter Staudenmaier, “Race and redemption: Racial and Ethnic Evolution in Rudolf Steiner’s  Anthroposophy”, (Nova Religio 2008).]

...Anthroposophy impacts on real children. Ray Pereira noticed the racist overtones in his child’s ‘Steiner stream’ in an Australian school:

“Mr Pereira, who is from Sri Lanka, said his concerns about Steiner’s racist beliefs were realised when his children were not allowed to use black or brown crayons because they were 'not pure.' He said Steiner teachers at the state-run school recommended they not immunise their children because it would lead to the 'bestialisation of humans.'”

Two years ago, at an established English Steiner school now applying for Free Schools funding; a British couple were alarmed when their 12 year old daughter (who’d been at the school for a year) told them a German teacher had read out the word ‘nigger’ from a book of poems, a standard text in Steiner schools. The mother reports that the teacher did not agree with the children that this is a racist word, indeed it was her daughter who was punished for refusing to back down. As a foster parent for many years and a mentor for Kids’ Company, the mother concerned is used to dealing with challenging situations but the school’s response to this incident (amongst others) shocked her. The staff seemed not to take the family’s concerns seriously and delayed taking action. Looking online for information on Steiner schools’ policies regarding racism, the mother discovered that in the book HOW TO KNOW HIGHER WORLDS, by Rudolf Steiner (an edition last published 2008, Anthroposophic Press), a book on which one of the school trustees was basing workshops, there is an account of ‘reincarnation through the races’: 

“Peoples and races are after all, merely different developmental stages in our evolution toward a pure humanity. The more perfectly that individual members of that race or people express the pure, ideal human type – the more they have worked their way through from the physical and mortal to the super sensible and immortal realm – the ‘higher’ this race or nation is.”

In a formal meeting with the school, the father, who is black, calmly read aloud a quote from Steiner which stated that: “the black man is the child of the races.” There was no response from those present, presumably the trustees convinced themselves it was outside the remit of the discussion. The couple were shown the school’s discrimination document. But they report that when they asked the school’s Education Coordinator if he believed in Steiner’s doctrine of the reincarnation of the soul through racial hierarchies, he reddened with anger and refused to answer.

This critical Steiner mother notes an obvious inconsistency. In reply to a trustee’s defence that individuals chose which bits of Steiner to believe:

“I asked her, how they could do that when Steiner received his knowledge clairvoyantly – if it all came from the spirit world surely it was all true? I also said I didn’t believe that’s where he got his knowledge, unless the spirit world itself is racist.”

The child involved is now at school elsewhere. Her family arranged for a racism awareness day to be conducted at the Steiner school; this is required of every educational setting.

In response to Waldorf supporters’ claims that their teachers are simply not capable of racism and that Steiner schools are both enlightened and benign, Peter Staudenmaier writes:   

“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.”

Staudenmaier is a historian, not primarily a critic of Steiner Waldorf education. But a knowledge of the history of the anthroposophical movement is essential if we are to make any sense of the difficulties the schools face today:

“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.”

AFTERWORD

by Peter Staudenmaier

I.

Steiner's 1923 lecture “Color and the Races of Humankind” can be found in VOM LEBEN DES MENSCHEN UND DER ERDE (Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1993); it was excised from the English translation of the book. Steiner begins the lecture by reaffirming the central importance of race to a proper understanding of spiritual reality:

“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.” (p. 52)

He then provides an overview of the various racial groups on the earth, offering definite instruction about which races belong where:

“When we ask which race belongs to which part of the earth, we must say: the yellow race, the Mongols, the Mongolian race belongs to Asia, the white race or the Caucasian race belongs to Europe, and the black race or the Negro race belongs to Africa. The Negro race does not belong to Europe, and the fact that this race is now playing such a large role in Europe is of course nothing but a nuisance.” (pp. 52-53)

Steiner then embarks on an extended disquisition on the distinctive features of each race, complete with drawings to illustrate their physiological and mental differences. He reports that black people are distinguished by their “rear-brain,” yellow and brown people by their “mid-brain,” and white people by their “fore-brain,” adding that black people are marked by a powerful “instinctual life,” yellow and brown people by a potent “emotional life,” and white people by a highly developed “intellectual life.” (p. 58) Steiner goes into considerable detail about black people in particular:

“Let us look first at the blacks in Africa. These blacks in Africa have the peculiar characteristic that they absorb all light and all warmth from space. They take it in. And this light and warmth cannot penetrate through the whole body, because after all a person is always a person, even if he is black. It does not penetrate through the whole body, but lingers on the surface of the skin, and the skin itself thus turns black. So a black in Africa is therefore a person who absorbs as much warmth and light as possible from space and assimilates it within himself. In this way the energies of the cosmos affect the whole person. Everywhere he takes in light and warmth, everywhere. He assimilates it inside of himself. There must be something there that helps him in this assimilation. Now you see, what helps him in this assimilation is his rear-brain. In the Negro the rear-brain is especially developed. It goes through his spinal cord. And this is able to assimilate all the light and warmth that are inside a person. Therefore everything connected to the body and the metabolism is strongly developed in the Negro. He has, as they say, powerful physical drives. The Negro has a powerful instinctual life. And because he actually has the sun, light, and warmth on his body surface, in his skin, his whole metabolism operates as if he were being cooked inside by the sun. That is where his instinctual life comes from. The Negro is constantly cooking inside, and what feeds this fire is his rear-brain.” (p. 55)

Steiner continues his series of racial contrasts by examining the ostensible differences between Asians and Europeans, claiming unconditionally that “Europe has always been the starting point for everything that develops humanity in relation to the external world”; Steiner goes on to say that Asians are incapable of making technological discoveries on their own or using European inventions properly. He then asserts without qualification: “Very few inventions have been made in Asia. They can assemble things, but as for inventions themselves, that is, that which arises from experience with the external world, the Asians cannot do this.” After offering what he takes to be a humorous anecdote about Asian technological ignorance, Steiner summarizes:

“This sort of independent thinking which Europeans develop in dealing with their surroundings, the Asians do not have this. The Japanese will therefore follow all the European inventions, but they will never think up something on their own.” (p. 59)

Steiner then states categorically that genuine creativity comes from the capacity of “the white race” to explore and inhabit all parts of the globe; indeed for Steiner, “The whites are the ones who actually develop humanity in themselves.” (p. 62)

Steiner presents these claims about racial difference as a set of objective spiritual facts, meant to impress upon his audience the need for mutual understanding and interracial cooperation, based on recognition of the “natural dispositions” that mark each racial group. At the conclusion of the lecture, Steiner offers a synopsis of his racial teachings:

“On the one hand there is the black race, which is the most earthly. When this race goes toward the West, it dies out. Then there is the yellow race, in the middle between the earth and the cosmos. When this race goes toward the East, it turns brown, it attaches itself too much to the cosmos and dies out. The white race is the race of the future, the spiritually creative race.” (p. 67)

This closing passage sums up the lecture and provides a précis of Anthroposophical thinking on race: the black, brown, red, and yellow races all have their special character and their special role to play, but at this stage of cosmic development they are dying out, whereas the white race continues to move forward into the racial future.

These are the sorts of doctrines that Waldorf spokespeople continue to defend today.

II.

Steiner's lecture "The Occult Significance of Blood" discusses the purported differences between "civilized" peoples (colonizers) and "uncivilized" peoples (the colonized), with particular attention to the ostensibly racial contrasts between these kinds of people, which he claims is reflected in their blood. Steiner further distinguishes between two different kinds of "uncivilized" peoples: those that are advancing evolutionarily and those that are regressing evolutionarily. He argues that the European colonizers need to discern which kind of "uncivilized" people is which, in order make the process of colonization and "civilization" more effective. This is the context within which he raises the issue of intermarriage and exogamy.

It is crucially important to remember that "intermarriage" in colonial circumstances usually meant violent sexual coercion of women from colonized groups by European men. Throughout the history of European colonialism, many native cultures were destroyed by colonists "intermarrying" with native populations and absorbing what they saw as the more desirable elements into their own colonial cultures. This is a common aspect of colonialism as such. The same notion formed a central motif in Steiner's racial and ethnic theories: The assimilable elements of backward and archaic groups get taken up into forward-moving groups, while the stragglers die out.

This background helps account for Steiner's ambivalent viewpoint on exogamy or intermarriage. "The Occult Significance of Blood" posits an "evolutionary trade-off," in the words of a latter-day Anthroposophist, between endogamy and exogamy, and indeed the basic conception of such polarities and trade-offs runs throughout the text. These ideas are heavily indebted to several of the chief strands within 19th century racist thought. The belief that specific racial traits are carried in the blood and that particular ethnic and racial groups are either advancing or declining evolutionarily was one of the core assumptions of racist thinking in Steiner's day.

To put it in simple terms: What Steiner says in this text is that the colonizers need to determine what evolutionary level particular colonized peoples occupy and what their evolutionary trajectory is (progressing or regressing), in order to know how to civilize them, and that when colonizers interbreed with some "savage" peoples, this will cause the colonized peoples to die out, because their blood can't handle it. Steiner's point is that the colonial imposition of "civilization" onto distant populations will succeed if the colonizers pay attention to the racial constitution of the colonized peoples, and that the racial-evolutionary status of "savage" peoples, reflected in the structure of their blood, is the decisive criterion for determining whether or not the colonizers should interbreed with the colonized.

Steiner delivered the lecture, in Berlin, right in the middle of Germany's genocidal campaign against the Herero and Nama peoples in the German colony of South-West Africa, during the run-up to the famous "Hottentot election" in which German colonialism was a central contested issue. Much of Steiner's lecture presents standard theosophical teachings about the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body, the relationship between the "I" and the blood, the intertwinement of macrocosm and microcosm, and so forth. The most widely discussed sections of the text are the ones dealing with what Steiner calls "the race question." Those are also the sections of the text that have been repeatedly altered or deleted in published English translations of the work. What gets lost in such whitewashed translations is, among other things, Steiner's equation of black people as such with barbaric savages.

In my view, however, the more important elements in the text concern Steiner's argument that the colonizing civilized Europeans must determine whether the unfortunate savage peoples and races are on the up-grade or down-grade of evolution, so that the colonizers will know how to introduce civilization to these benighted alien races. This notion is crucial to Steiner's theory of racial and ethnic evolution overall. It is especially striking in the German context of 1906 and 1907.

Steiner's lecture is silent about the aggressive violence of colonialism, right in the midst of a genocidal German colonial campaign; it equates black people with utterly barbaric savages and claims that some non-European peoples are on the down-grade of evolution; it says that some non-Europeans had to perish as soon as colonists came to their particular parts of the world; and so forth. None of this seems to register on many Anthroposophist readers.

In some ways, this is a specific instance of a broader Anthroposophical phenomenon, namely reading into Steiner's text what Anthroposophist readers would like to find there. Readers who consider Anthroposophy a source of spiritual wisdom face particular temptations when the content of a given Steiner text departs from the Steiner that they know and love; in many cases they understandably want to read the text in a way that makes it more compatible with what drew them to Anthroposophy in the first place. That gets especially tricky when race comes up, not least because what counted as offensive and strange regarding racial statements has shifted markedly over the past century. In my experience, Anthroposophically inclined readers do not often keep such basic considerations in mind.

Even if latter-day Anthroposophist interpretations of "The Occult Significance of Blood" were accurate, however, the conclusions many Anthroposophists draw from their preferred reading would remain false, due in part to a historically naive approach to the text. The notion that authors who endorse intermarriage and "blood mixing" must be antiracist, as numerous Anthroposophists appear to believe, is quite false. Such claims reflect a lack of awareness of basic historical information about the development of racist thought. To choose merely the most obvious counter-example: Arthur Gobineau is often considered the father of racist ideology. His racial theory was based on the interplay between two drives, a "law of attraction" and a "law of repulsion," both of which contributed to either racial advance or racial decline. To simplify somewhat, the idea was that "higher" races properly go around the world conquering and colonizing and mixing their stock with "lower" races, which spreads civilization, but when the "higher" races spread themselves too thin, then racial decline and eventual disaster is certain. In other words, the idea that proponents of intermarriage must be antiracist is completely wrong and a striking instance of historical naiveté.

Finally, one further crucial factor which many Anthroposophists today entirely overlook is that a number of Anthroposophists historically have explicitly opposed intermarriage between different racial and ethnic groups. Indeed several of Steiner's most prominent followers, including leading Anthroposophist race theorists of the first half of the twentieth century, firmly rejected racial intermarriage and "blood mixing," above all Richard Karutz in Germany and Massimo Scaligero in Italy. Their understanding of Steiner on this point was evidently rather different from the one currently popular among Steiner's admirers today. Other Anthroposophists who openly opposed this sort of interracial and inter-ethnic mixing include Karl Heise and Zviad Gamsakhurdia.

Here is an item from the Waldorf Watch News page.

I quote from an online posting,

then I offer a response.

[Image: Rudolf Steiner, 

"Menschheitsentwickelung und Christus-Erkenntnis”, page 245.]

This schematic shows human evolution proceeding 

from Atlantis to modern Europe.

Two decadent racial groups branch off, 

failing to evolve properly.

Entwickelung der Menschheit : Development of Mankind

Atlantier: Resident of Atlantis (Atlantean)

Europäer: European

Dekadente Abzweigung: decadent branching

Affengeschlecht: apes (or ape species)

Indianer: Indian. 

(Steiner viewed American Indians as an extreme case

 of racial backwardness: 

He deemed Indians to be virtually 

— and, in his view, appropriately — extinct.)

• ◊ •

The "Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Median (BPjM) ("Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons") examined 2 books by Rudolf Steiner for ‘racist content’ and decided that the content of the books is racist. 

To understand the BPjM´s importance and function here's its self-portrayal, quote: 

..."We are an official administrative authority of the German government ... Our task is to protect children and adolescents in Germany from any media that might contain harmful or dangerous contents. This work is authorized by the ‘Youth Protection Law’ ... Media monitored by us are, among others: videos, DVDs, computer games, audio records and CDs, print media and internet sites. Objects are considered harmful or dangerous to minors if they tend to endanger their process of developing a socially responsible and self-reliant personality. In general, this applies to objects that contain indecent, extremely violent, crime-inducing, anti-Semitic or otherwise racist material...." 

More in the article by Andreas Lichte: http://www.ruhrbarone.de/waldorf-schools-rudolf-steiner%E2%80%99s-books-are-%E2%80%9Can-incitement-to-racial-hatred%E2%80%9D-says-bpjm/

[7-31-2011    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/waldorf-critics/message/20272]

◊

Waldorf Watch Response:

The books examined are SPIRITUAL-SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE OF THE HUMAN BEING and THE MISSION OF INDIVIDUAL FOLK-SOULS IN CONNECTION WITH GERMANIC-NORDIC MYTHOLOGY.

The report includes such judgments as “The content of the book [by Rudolf Steiner] is, in the opinion of the board of 12 representatives, considered in part [to be] an incitement to racial hatred, respectively as discriminating on grounds of race.“

Some of the statements made by Steiner that the report holds up as examples of racist thinking are these:*

◊ “But the people, who underdeveloped their “I”-being [that is: their “ego”], who were exposed too much to the effects of the sun, they were like plants: they deposited under their skin too many carbon-like elements and became black. This is why the negro is black.”

◊ “[T]he completely passive soul of the negro is in completely abandoned to the environment, to the exterior physique…”

◊ “[T]hey are the ones who so denied their ‘I’ that it turned them black, because the exterior forces that come from the sun to the earth simply turned them black.”

◊ “The African location corresponds to those forces of the Earth which imprint on people the features of childhood…”

Writer Andreas Lichte adds this Steiner statement:

◊ “The white race is the race of the future, the race that works creatively on the spirit.”

◊

* I have done some light editing; the original translations into English were somewhat stilted and unclear. 

— R.R.

Here is a collection of quotations 

posted by Peter Staudenmaier in October, 2011

[http://groups.yahoo.com/group/waldorf-critics/message/21678].

I have trimmed it slightly and added the 

names of publishing houses, dates of publication, 

and GA numbers.

"[C]onsider how different the natural abilities, how different the talents of the individual races are. The one race stands at the level of what we call the highest civilization, while the other stands at what appears to be the most primitive, subordinate level of civilization. This may make it seem odd to us that the human being, who after all has a unified nature, can appear in such a different and imperfect form. People often feel that it is an injustice of nature that some are doomed to an existence in a race that stands far below, while others are raised up to an apparently perfect race. ... [H]uman souls proceed through the different races ... [O]ne is not condemned to live only in a primitive race while another stands at the highly developed stages of racial existence. Each of us passes through the different racial stages, and the passage signifies a progressive development for the individual soul. One who appears today as a member of the European race went through different races in earlier times, and will in later times proceed through races other than ours. The races appear to us as steps in a teaching process, and this variety takes on coherence and purpose." — Rudolf Steiner, DIE WELTRÄTSEL UND DIE ANTHROPOSOPHIE (Rudolf Steiner Verlag 1985), GA 54, pp. 132-3. 

◊

"Each person proceeds through race after race. Those that are young souls incarnate in the races that have remained behind on earlier racial levels. In this way, the races and souls that live around us take on a physical and spiritual structure. Everything makes sense, everything becomes clear and explicable. We are moving closer and closer to the solution of this puzzle and we can realize that in the future we will have other epochs to go through, we will have other paths to follow than the ones made by race. We must be clear about the difference between soul development and racial development. Our own souls once lived within the Atlantean race, and they then developed themselves upward to a higher race. That gives us an image of the evolution of humankind up until our time. In this way we can comprehend how to justify the principle, the core principle of universal brotherhood without regard to race, color, status, and so forth. I will explain this thought in particular later. Today I simply wanted to show how the same essence appears in different forms, and in fact in a much more correct sense than natural science would have us believe. Our souls march from one level to the next, which is to say from one race to the next, and we come to know the meaning of humanity when we examine these races." — Rudolf Steiner, ibid. pp. 153-4. 

◊

"If we want to understand this, we must carefully distinguish between race development and soul development. The two must not be confused. A human soul can develop itself in such a way that it incarnates in a particular race within a given incarnation. If it acquires certain capacities in this incarnation, then in a later incarnation it can incarnate in a different race." — Rudolf Steiner, CHRISTUS UND DIE MENSCHLICHE SEELE (Rudolf steiner Verlag, 1997), GA 155, p. 92. 

◊

"That is the reason why there were fewer and fewer descendants in the subordinate races and more and more descendants in the higher races. Thus the lowest strata of the European population gradually died out. This is a very definite process which we must understand. The souls evolve further, the bodies die away. We must therefore carefully distinguish between soul development and race development. The souls then appear in bodies that descend from higher races." — Rudolf Steiner, ibid. p. 93.

◊

"People who listen to the great leaders of humankind, and preserve their soul with its eternal essence, reincarnate in an advanced race; in the same way he who ignores the great teacher, who rejects the great leader of humankind, will always reincarnate in the same race, because he was only able to develop the one form. This is the deeper meaning of Ahasver [the “wandering Jew”], who must always reappear in the same form because he rejected the hand of the greatest leader, Christ. Thus each person has the opportunity to become caught up in the essence of one incarnation, to push away the leader of humankind, or instead to undergo the transformation into higher races, toward ever higher perfection. Races would never become decadent, never decline, if there weren't souls that are unable to move up and unwilling to move up to a higher racial form. Look at the races that have survived from earlier eras: they only exist because some souls could not climb higher." — Rudolf Steiner, DAS HEREINWIRKEN GEISTIGER WESENHEITEN IN DEN MENSCHEN (Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1984), GA 102, p. 174. 

◊

"All of you were once Atlanteans [i.e., you lived on Atlantis], 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 (Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1981), GA 100, p. 186. 

◊

"We have before us in the American race [i.e., Native Americans] a primitive aboriginal people that has remained far, far behind [...] But the Europeans have ascended to a higher level of culture, while the Indians have remained behind and become decadent. One must always pay attention to this evolutionary process. It can be described as follows. In the course of millennia our planet transforms itself, and this transformation also demands a development of humankind. Those side branches that no longer fit in to current conditions become decadent. Thus we have an upright evolutionary trunk as well as side branches which decay." — Rudolf Steiner, ibid., p. 244.

◊

"[T]he characteristic of the mission of white humanity in general is to carry down the spirit [from the higher worlds], 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 ... [W]here 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, taking a demonic character and does not completely permeate the flesh, there the white skin does not appear ... [The next evolutionary] epoch must prepare the knowledge of the spirit in the physical environment ... 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 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. Future events are reflected in manifold ways in the events that precede. We are standing in fact, viewed in the light of spiritual science, before something colossal that must necessarily come about in the future." — Rudolf Steiner, "The Christ-Impulse as Bearer of the Union of the Spiritual and the Bodily", typescript "For Members of the Anthroposophical Society", translated by M. Cotterell; the original is in Rudolf Steiner, DIE GEISTIGEN HINTERGRÜNDE DES ERSTEN WELTKRIEGES (Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1994), GA 174b, pp. 37-38. 

◊

"Recently I went into a bookstore in Basel and found an example of the latest publishing agenda: a Negro novel, just as the Negroes in general are entering into European civilization step by step! Everywhere Negro dances are being performed, Negro dances are being hopped. But we even have this Negro novel already. It is utterly boring, dreadfully boring, but people devour it. I am personally convinced that if we get more Negro novels, and give these Negro novels to pregnant women to read during the first phase of pregnancy, when as you know they can sometimes develop such cravings, if we give these Negro novels to pregnant women to read, then it won’t even be necessary for Negroes to come to Europe in order for mulattoes to appear. Simply through the spiritual effects of reading Negro novels, a multitude of children will be born in Europe that are completely gray, that have mulatto hair, that look like mulattoes!" — Rudolf Steiner, ÜBER GESUNDHEIT UND KRANKHEIT (Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1997), GA 348, p. 189.

◊

"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." — Rudolf Steiner, VOM LEBEN DES MENSCHEN UND DER ERDE - ÜBER DAS WESEN DES CHRISTENTUMS (Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1961), GA 349, p. 52. 

◊

"We here in Europe call ourselves the white race. If we go over to Asia, we have mostly the yellow race. And if we go over to Africa, there we have the black race. Those are also the original races. Everything else living in these regions is based on migration. Thus when we ask which race belongs to which part of the earth, we must say: the yellow race, the Mongols, the Mongolian race belongs to Asia, the white race or the Caucasian race belongs to Europe, and the black race or the Negro race belongs to Africa. The Negro race does not belong to Europe, and the fact that this race is now playing such a large role in Europe is of course nothing but a nuisance." — Rudolf Steiner, ibid., pp. 52-53. 

◊

"Let us look first at the blacks in Africa. These blacks in Africa have the peculiar characteristic that they absorb all light and all warmth from space. They take it in. And this light and warmth cannot penetrate through the whole body, because after all a person is always a person, even if he is black. It does not penetrate through the whole body, but lingers on the surface of the skin, and the skin itself thus turns black. So a black in Africa is therefore a person who absorbs as much warmth and light as possible from space and assimilates it within himself. In this way the energies of the cosmos affect the whole person. Everywhere he takes in light and warmth, everywhere. He assimilates it inside of himself. There must be something there that helps him in this assimilation. Now you see, what helps him in this assimilation is his rear-brain. In the Negro the rear-brain is therefore especially developed. It goes through his spinal cord. And this is able to assimilate all the light and warmth that are inside a person. Therefore everything connected to the body and the metabolism is strongly developed in the Negro. He has, as they say, powerful physical drives, powerful instincts. The Negro has a powerful instinctual life. And because he actually has the sun, light, and warmth on his body surface, in his skin, his whole metabolism operates as if he were being cooked inside by the sun. That is where his instinctual life comes from. The Negro is constantly cooking inside, and what feeds this fire is his rear-brain." — Rudolf Steiner, ibid., p. 55. 

◊

"Thus it is really very interesting: on the one hand there is the black race, which is the most earthly. When this race goes toward the West, it dies out. Then there is the yellow race, in the middle between the earth and the cosmos. When this race goes toward the East, it turns brown, it attaches itself too much to the cosmos and dies out. The white race is the race of the future, the spiritually creative race." — Rudolf Steiner, ibid., p. 67. 

◊

"We are within the great Root Race of humanity that has peopled the earth since the land on which we now live rose up out of the inundations of the ocean. Ever since the Atlantean Race began slowly to disappear, the great Aryan Race has been the dominant one on earth. If we contemplate ourselves, we here in Europe are thus the fifth Sub-Race of the great Aryan Root Race." — Rudolf Steiner, THE TEMPLE LEGEND: Freemasonry and Related Occult Movements (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1985), p. 201.

◊

"The ancestors of the Atlanteans lived in a region which has disappeared, the main part of which lay south of contemporary Asia. In theosophical writings they are called the Lemurians. After they had passed through various stages of development the greatest part of them declined. These became stunted men, whose descendants still inhabit certain parts of the earth today as so-called savage tribes. Only a small part of Lemurian humanity was capable of further development. From this part the Atlanteans were formed. Later, something similar again took place. The greatest part of the Atlantean population declined, and from a small portion are descended the so-called Aryans who comprise present-day civilized humanity. According to the nomenclature of the science of the spirit, the Lemurians, Atlanteans and Aryans are root races of mankind." — Rudolf Steiner, COSMIC MEMORY: Prehistory of Earth and Man (SteinerBooks, 1987), pp. 45-46. 

◊

"Each root race has physical and mental characteristics which are quite different from those of the preceding one.” For this reason, “there are always populations which show different stages of development living beside each other on earth.” — Rudolf Steiner, ibid., p. 46. 

◊

"The race may fall behind; the community of people may remain backward, but the souls progress beyond the several races. If we wish to form a true conception of this we must say that all the souls now living in bodies in civilized countries were formerly incarnated in Atlantean bodies. A few developed there in the requisite manner, and did not remain in Atlantean bodies. As they had developed further they could become the souls of the bodies which had also progressed further. Only the souls which as souls had remained backward had to take bodies which as bodies had remained at a lower stage. If all the souls had progressed, the backward races would either have decreased very much in population, or the bodies would be occupied by newly incoming souls at a low stage of development. For there are always souls which can inhabit backward bodies. No soul is bound to a backward body if it does not bind itself to it. The relation between soul-development and race-development is preserved to us in a wonderful myth. Let us imagine race following race, civilization following civilization. The soul going through its earth mission in the right way is incarnated in a certain race; it strives upward in this race, and acquires the capacities of this race in order next time to be incarnated in a higher one. Only the souls which sink in the race and do not work out of the physical materiality, are held back in the race by their own weight, as one might say. They appear a second time in the same race and eventually a third time in bodies in similarly formed races. Such souls hold back the bodies of the race." — Rudolf Steiner, THE APOCALYPSE OF ST. JOHN (Anthroposophic Press, 1993), p. 80. 

◊

"Look at the colours to be found in Asia, from the Negroes to the yellow races. Hence you have bodies that are sheaths for every possible level of soul, from the completely passive Negro soul entirely given up the outer world of physical existence, to the other levels of passive souls in every possible part of Asia. Various characteristics of the evolution of the Asiatic and African peoples will now be comprehensible to you: they present various combinations of surrender to the environment and the external manifestation of ego-feeling. So fundamentally we have two groups of people representing combinations: those on European soil, forming the root stock of the white population, who had predominantly developed the feeling of personality [...] On the other hand there are those peoples in Asia with passive, self-effacing natures in whom just this passivity expresses itself in the highest degree. This makes the people dreamy, and the etheric body penetrates very deeply into the physical body. That is the fundamental difference between the European and the Asiatic peoples." — Rudolf Steiner, THE BEING OF MAN AND HIS FUTURE EVOLUTION (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1981), pp. 120-121.

Here is a message I posted at the Waldorf Critics list early in 2022

[https://groups.io/g/waldorf-critics/message/32645].

I have edited it slightly for use here:

Hi, all.

I'd like to toss in a few comments on the crucial question of racism in Anthroposophy.

1. Steiner's followers tend to look upon him as one of the greatest spiritual masters of all time — perhaps the  greatest ever. Likewise, they tend to look on his books and lectures as virtually holy texts. For this reason, Anthroposophists rarely disagree with Steiner about anything important. So, when some Anthroposophists today disavow Steiner's racial teachings, we need to reach for the salt. Bear in mind, Anthroposophists have a long history of misleading outsiders and keeping secrets from them. When, today, some of Steiner's followers publicly repudiate Steiner's racial teachings, we need to accept the possibility that they are perfectly sincere. But we also need to bear in mind the possibility that they are continuing the long history of Anthroposophical dissembling.

2. Steiner claimed that virtually all of his "discoveries" came through his use of exact clairvoyance. This includes his "discoveries" about human evolution, including the idea that humans evolve upward by ascending through a hierarchical series of racial forms. As Peter Staudenmaier has said, Steiner's racial teachings lie very near the heart of his overall body of work. This poses a challenge for his adherents. If Steiner was wrong about human evolution and race, then he may have been wrong about very nearly everything. Indeed, this is more than probable, since the capability Steiner claimed to rely on — clairvoyance — is almost certainly bunk. There has never been a proof that clairvoyance exists. Consider what this means. If Steiner was not clairvoyant, then virtually everything he said and wrote based on his claimed clairvoyant powers is cast into doubt. Anthroposophy then threatens to come crashing down, along with all of its extensions — including Waldorf education. (No clairvoyance = Anthroposophy is baseless = Anthroposophical enterprises, including Waldorf education, are baseless.) Disavowing Steiner's teachings on any important matter is thus extremely dangerous for his followers, whether or not they recognize this.

3. Steiner has become widely known, these days, as having been a racist. Some of the people involved in the discussions here — including Peter Staudenmaier, Sharon Lombard, Dan Dugan, Margaret Sachs, and others — have played important roles in publicizing Steiner's racism. A pall has thus been cast over Steiner and his works. Almost every sensible person alive today considers racism a terrible evil, and almost all of them wish to clear themselves of any allegation that they may be racists. People who run Waldorf schools, or biodynamic farms, or Anthroposophical medical clinics, etc., may think they can easily defend themselves and their work by simply announcing that they deplore Steiner's racial teachings. They may think they can do this while continuing to affirm Steiner's pronouncements on virtually all other subjects. But things are not so simple. To repeat: Steiner's views about human evolution, which include his racial teachings, constitute a central pillar of Anthroposophy. If this pillar collapses, the whole edifice may crash. Steiner's admirers are kidding themselves if they think they can repudiate Steiner's racism while preserving the rest of his teachings. It comes back to the key issue of clairvoyance. Steiner's professed clairvoyant powers were bogus — they produced nothing but falsehoods, such as his teachings about race. Once we see this, we see how virtually all of Anthroposophy and virtually all of its extensions are false. (No clairvoyance = Anthroposophy is baseless = Anthroposophical enterprises, including Waldorf education, are baseless.) The only sensible response is to reject them.

I'm glad to see the current discussion here on the wc list, and I would certainly be glad if all of Steiner's followers genuinely repudiated his racial teachings. But I think we all need to look below the surface of this discussion to recognize profound implications that might otherwise be ignored.

Salutations,

Roger