Memories of Rudolf Steiner by Ludwig Graf Polzer-Hoditz. Chapter 2

  

MEMORIES OF RUDOLF STEINER

by Ludwig Graf Polzer-Hoditz

Chapter 2

I was fortunate in being born in an environment where the German intellectual life of the eighteenth century was still vigorous. It filled me with a burning enthusiasm. Goethe, Schiller, Anastasius Grün, Hamerling, and Grillparzer, Beethoven, Mozart, Schumann, and Schubert, were the presiding geniuses of my youth. My soul was thus made more sensitive to the weaning of the spirit in time and space. I had the impulse to seek the spiritual background of the world, and the urge to find the inner meaning of life grew ever stronger. The heroes of a departed intellectual age were there to act as awakeners for spiritual duties of the new age. They pointed to ways which lead to spiritual goals, to cosmic ends. Their call, coming at first so quietly, was hardly noticeable. In the intellectual tenor of the German mind, the other nations merged their peculiarities and gifts as if they were seeking a mutual synthesis that would lead to the fellowship of the world. This merging of the different nations was nowhere to be felt more strongly than in Austria. One did not then feel oneself within the confines of a narrow and uniform nationality. People rubbed shoulders with everybody and accommodated themselves to all differences. One lived as a citizen of the world, and one’s home was as a hearth that was pleasing to everyone. English and French were learnt so that it was possible to appreciate the plays of Shakespeare, as well as the novels of Alexandre Dumas, George Sand, and Dostoievski and Tolstoi were studied, too. One felt oneself in communion with the East and the West.

Even though I was not conscious of the fact in my youth, it was an inner experience and an axiomatic truth that Austria would have to be created even if she did not exist. One was a member of this group of nations called Austria, one could feel its many-sided nature, which was unifying and harmonizing. One realized that one formed a spiritual part of what the world order itself would require. This was the environment from which I could understand that Austria must needs be created, if she were not already in existence.

This state of mind was not present in those circles into which, however involuntarily, I was officially introduced. A nightmare took possession of my soul; it created fear and killed all joy in life. When I was already at school I realized that the method of instruction there was not designed to bring the essential truth of the world to mankind and that it must be found by another method. Though I could not clearly formulate it, my feeling was that people were trying deliberately to stifle the wisdom of the world. I felt something arise in me that was contrary to the trend of development of the world and worked against it. Later came my military career and the barracks; but fate was kind, which was due to the fact that I lived in the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. For the Empire was not so very earnest in its political endeavours to hinder the harmonizing task of the nation from developing. As I later, with full consciousness, saw the real anti-social nature of the life about me, I felt as a prisoner; the shadows grew dark, and I understood better that from this atmosphere one could, as an Austrian, say with certainty “Austria will collapse.”

When I had the good fortune to meet Rudolf Steiner, I felt as one awakened, as if the prison doors were opened and the chains loosed. I came to understand that freedom is an essential part of man, and that the physical must be supplemented by the spiritual.

Rudolf Steiner had his home in this European centre where the nations lived together so curiously mixed; where Austria, the centralized Empire, had played such an important role for so many centuries. As his father was an employee of the Austrian Southern Railway, he spent his childhood days in Lower Austria. His home was near to the Austrian-Hungarian frontier, so he could watch both nations in his early youth.

Rudolf Steiner used to recount how the region where he lived in his youth was like an image of all Europe and had a reserve of natural treasures, and how here abounded almost all that Europe produced and needed.

In this legend-haunted region East and West have met to try and reach an understanding for thousands of years. Here it is where the Babylonian king, Gilgamesh, ended his travel to the West, and where nowadays people of all nations came for mutual comprehension the one of the other.

The rise of the last centuries was a rise in darkness, and through the final catastrophe to chaos. Rudolf Steiner, placed through his own fate even in his early youth in a country which has watched the earliest attempt of uniting East and West, tried all his life to work for this end. He not only revealed the surrounding mysteries, but also showed the way to knowledge from darkness to light.

During the course of my reminiscences I can only refer briefly to the life-work of Rudolf Steiner, and in particular to those episodes in which I took a personal part, and also I shall describe the task that he allotted me, in my studies.

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Source: https://rsarchive.org/OtherAuthors/Polzer-HoditzLudwig/MemoriesOfRudolfSteiner/Chapter_II.html

Ludwig Graf Polzer-Hoditz played a central part in the development of the anthroposophical movement from 1911 to 1925. He was a personal friend of Rudolf Steiner and one of his closest helpers. As such, these memoirs present a first-hand impression of Rudolf Steiner in daily life.

In 1913, Rudolf Steiner called him to Dornach so that he could be present at the laying of the foundation stone of the first Goetheanum. In 1917, Graf Polzer-Hoditz, whose brother Arthur was the Prime Minister and a personal friend of Kaiser Karl of Austria, belonged to a small circle to whom Rudolf Steiner gave the first indications regarding the Threefold Social Order.

As a member of Austrian aristocracy, Graf Polzer-Hoditz was very influential in cultural and political circles of the times, thereby enabling him to work for social reform during and after World War I. The Count was present at the burning of the first Goetheanum in 1922-23 and was also given special responsibility for the then newly-founded School of Spiritual Science in 1924. He vividly relates his memories of his travels with Rudolf Steiner and those who participated in the early anthroposophical movement.