Daniel Hindes

Continuing my commentary on the 17th paragraph of Peter Staudenmaier'sAnthroposophy and Ecofascism.

In his footnote, Peter Staudenmaier cites Rudolf Steiner's writing to support his contention. Here's what Steiner says on page 32 of Aus der Akasha-Chronik. This English translation taken from the online Rudolf Steiner eLib and Archive where the reader can find the whole book.

"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. If one imagines that two such root races preceded the Lemurians and that two will succeed the Aryans in the future, one obtains a total of seven. One always arises from another in the manner just indicated with respect to the Lemurians, Atlanteans, and Aryans. Each root race has physical and mental characteristics which are quite different from those of the preceding one. While, for example, the Atlanteans especially developed memory and everything connected with it, at the present time it is the task of the Aryans to develop the faculty of thought and all that belongs to it."

The key phrase in German is:

"Er wurde zu verkümmerten Menschen, deren Nachkommen heute noch als sogenannte wilde Völker gewisse Teile der Erde bewohnen."

I would translate this as:

"These languished, and their descendants inhabit certain parts of the earth as the so-called wild peoples to this day."

The word "verkümmerten" is the adjectival form of the intransitive verb "verkümmern." In the dictionary it is defined as: of growth: to become stunted; of muscles: to atrophy; of plants or talents: to wither, wilt; of people: to languish (Langenscheidts Handwörterbuch Deutsch-Englisch, Berlin 1996, p. 1396). I feel that the adjective "languish" best fits the meaning of the original, though it is difficult to work into the flow of an the English. In German you can "become languish people" but in English it doesn't work. So as a translator, you either have to drop the "become" ("wurde zu") because it is implicit in the activity of languishing, or you keep the word "become" and go for a more active adjective. The translator, one Karl E. Zimmer, opted for the phrasing "became stunted men," which I disagree with.

The statement that aboriginal peoples are devolving into apes I find nowhere in Peter Staudenmaier's cited source (which I have printed in its entirety below in my comments on Peter Staudenmaier's footnote 8) and is completely foreign to Steiner's Anthroposophy. Steiner's actual statement is: "These [the declining remnants of the Lemurian civilization] languished, and their descendants inhabit certain parts of the earth as the so-called wild peoples to this day." There is nothing about apes. Even Peter Staudenmaier's use of the word "degenerate" is a mistranslation, as we have seen. "Verfall" means "degeneration" only in biological contexts. When speaking of cultures or civilizations, it means "decline." Steiner did not say that they physically degenerated; he said that their culture declined.

In this paragraph we have here another fabrication and a mistranslation. Of course this is really the only way to make Steiner into a racist, but it is sad to see it being done so deliberately here.

Steiner, a cosmopolitan humanist renowned for his calls for a universal brotherhood of man and the overcoming of racial and ethnic prejudice, is here depicted on the flimsiest pretenses as a heartless spiritualistic racist. Steiner deplored the treatment of Native Americans by the Europeans, yet a comment he made explaining their genetic susceptibility to diseases – a point today well established – is here offered as evidence of his callous disregard for their suffering and even overt racism. The quote offered here is greatly helped by some context. Steiner wrote:

"The Native American population did not die out because this pleased the Europeans, but because the Native American population had to acquire such forces as lead to their dying out."* 

This sentence does not make a lot of sense on its own. It is part of a larger thought that Steiner expressed over several pages on how the geography of the earth influenced the formation of racial characteristics in past epochs. (In the present time, indeed for the last 10,000 years, the task of humanity has been to overcome racial divisions, according to Rudolf Steiner. ) In the west, said Steiner, the forces that lead to the overcoming of the influence of racial characteristics are strongest, and this he tied to the physical weakness behind the death of so many Native Americans. Though not explicitly mentioned in this context, this weakness was immunological, as research from the last 40 years has indicated. Steiner strongly deplored the behavior of the Europeans towards the Native Americans, but the simple fact remains that most of the inhabitants of the Americas in 1491 would not have survived the contact with Europe even if not a single one was murdered directly at the hands of a white man. Steiner intuited this even though the science of his day had no concepts to express why.

* Translation by the author. In the original:  

"Nicht etwa deshalb, weil es den Europäern gefallen hat, ist die indianische Bevölkerung ausgestorben, sondern weil die indianische Bevölkerung die Kräfte erwerben mußte, die sie zum aussterben führten."

Steiner, Rudolf. Die Mission Einzelner Volksseelen. Dornach: Verlag der Rudolf Steiner-Nachlassverwaltung, 1962. (GA 121, page 75).

Peter Staudenmaier writes in Paragraph 17 of Anthroposophy and Ecofascism:

Steiner didn't 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 are "dying out of their own nature." 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 humans whose progeny, the so-called wild peoples, inhabit certain parts of the earth today." (Footnote: Rudolf Steiner, Aus der Akasha-Chronik, Basel 1955, p. 32.)

This straw man, an unrecognizable Steiner, is further abused here, relegated to a pupil of Blavatsky who allegedly promulgated every nasty thing she ever wrote. Steiner's relationship to Blavatsky is a complex subject, but while many notice at a superficial glance that there are indeed similarities, a simple teacher-pupil relationship posited from their chronological succession does not find support in any in-depth investigation.

Having set up the claim with a number of misrepresentations and some fabricated source material, Peter Staudenmaier then concludes: "The affinities with Nazi discourse are unmistakable." This is hardly surprising, and simply a sad indication of the level of Peter Staudenmaier's scholarship.

It is not in the least surprising that Peter Staudenmaier would rely on Treher as a source. Treher's self-published attempt at retroactively psychologizing both Hitler and Steiner in one volume was not taken seriously in 1966 (hence its failure to find a publisher) and is no more convincing today. The supposition that concentration camps are the logical culmination of Rudolf Steiner's life work is one of the vilest perversions of everything that Steiner stood for that I have yet encountered.