«World Spirit, where art thou?»

«World Spirit, where art thou?» – In the circle of literary modernism, Berlin workers and the theosophical society

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A keynote by Walter Kugler, held on January 27, 2025, at the Goetheanum.

When Steiner turned his back on Weimar after completing his editorial work in 1897 and moved to Berlin to take over the editorship of the Magazin für Literatur, he already had his commitment to modernism in his luggage: ‘I had already been thinking for some time about bringing the intellectual impulses to the contemporaries in a magazine, which I thought should be brought to the public of the time. I did not want to ‘fall silent’, but to say as much as was possible to say.’ (Mein Lebensgang, chap. XXIV) The years around the turn of the century were to be eventful. Steiner would soon become a teacher at the workers' training school founded by the socialist Wilhelm Liebknecht and at the same time take on tasks in the German section of the Theosophical Society and inspire a steadily growing number of listeners with his regular public lectures in the Architektenhaus.