Memories of Rudolf Steiner by Ludwig Graf Polzer-Hoditz. Chapter 10

         

MEMORIES OF RUDOLF STEINER

by Ludwig Graf Polzer-Hoditz

Chapter 10

In the second half of the year 1917 a very interesting karmic friendship began for me with Graf Otto Lerchenfeld of Koefering and his family. Graf Otto Lerchenfeld was a dear, faithful Anthroposophist, who made many sacrifices for the movement. His wife was devoted to him, and although she had been brought up in orthodox religion, Anthroposophy gave her insight and understanding. She was sufficiently broadminded and reasonable to sympathize with her two daughters in their desire to devote themselves to Anthroposophy. She sent her youngest daughter, in spite of the opposition from her circle of acquaintances, to the Waldorf School at Stuttgart which was founded by Rudolf Steiner with the financial support of Emil Molt. Knowing the difficulty of the circumstances one can only admire this independent and courageous attitude.

In May 1917 my wife and I were able to overcome peer difficulties at Salzburg and to attend some lectures in Munich. At that time I had a long talk with Rudolf Steiner in which he made me realize the seriousness of conditions in the world. I told him that my brother had been made Kabinettsdirector by the Emperor, and had his full confidence; that the Emperor was most anxious for peace and that there seemed a possibility of using these circumstances for showing a way to secure real peace. I remember Rudolf Steiner being very sceptical and disapproving of a separate peace for Austria, about which there was a great deal of talk at that time, as it would not prevent the success of the aims of the Entente nor their intention to shatter the Hapsburg dynasty. He said that the war was the heavy karma of materialism which did not originate in science, but that scientific materialism was the consequence of that materialism which had been spread during the last centuries by the different religious sects. Men who were gradually losing all consciousness of the gods could not regain any real link with the spiritual world through religious confessions which had nothing to do with real religion. Since the development of natural science, humanism had been endeavouring to build a bridge between science and religion, but this dualism gave to the churches which were becoming more and more engrossed in matters of external organization, a better possibility of control. They did not want to accept faith as a preliminary step to spiritual knowledge.

During this talk I glimpsed for the first time the great change that was to come to a world unprepared for it, a world in which men were still working, even in scientific circles, with thoughts which had already led events to absurdity. I did not anticipate then that twenty years later the mental state of men would be still less sound and even more confused than at that time. Such a thought would have been unendurable in those days. It was only gradually that I could get accustomed to this descent into sub-nature, into the sub-human.

Up to this time I had not read the Dornach lectures of December 1916 to January 1917, at which I was not able to be present. Only towards the second half of the year were they sent to me by Rudolf Steiner. So it was only in this private talk that I heard something about the facts of this evil occultism working behind the outer events.

On July 10, 1917, in the afternoon, I received a telegram at Tannbach: “Could you come Friday for a few days to Berlin. Greetings. Rudolf Steiner.”

It was Tuesday. To make the necessary arrangements to go to Berlin was not easy at such short notice. Besides requiring a passport and visa, retired officers had to obtain permission through the military authorities from the Government. Fortunately, Graf Rudolf Meran was governor of Upper Austria. We had been friends at Graz in our youth and his wife was my wife’s cousin. I went to him that afternoon, settled all that was necessary and the next day I travelled to Vienna with his recommendation to the German Consulate, to obtain the German visa, arriving at Berlin on Friday morning. Rudolf Steiner welcomed me with the words: “You will not guess why I asked you to come.” I answered: “I suppose it is in connection with many talks I was privileged to have with you on current events at the time of the Balkan war and also afterwards.” Rudolf Steiner then told me that Graf Lerchenfeld had taken the initiative and had come to him for advice as to how Middle Europe could find an honourable way out of the war. He said to me as well: “Graf Lerchenfeld wanted to arrange a meeting of some prominent men with me, but for various reasons they all asked to be excused.”

Rudolf Steiner had of course left Lerchenfeld free to invite anyone he thought likely to be able to do something. As far as I remember, the following were asked: Prince Lichnowsky, the last German Ambassador in London before the war, Graf Bernstorff, the last German Ambassador in Washington, Director-General Bassin of the Hamburg-Amerika Line, Herr Felix Harden, Editor of Zukunft. I am not quite sure whether Herr Rathenau had been asked. My invitation came direct from Rudolf Steiner.

On the very day of my arrival Rudolf Steiner began to acquaint me with the idea of the Threefold Social Organism which, as he said, must not remain mere literature, but would have to be advocated by an authority recognized by the world if it were to be effective in the cause of peace. The following days were spent in receiving this personal instruction. Then Rudolf Steiner gave me the typewritten Memorandum which he had composed. This Memorandum was published by my brother in the appendix of his book Kaiser Karl. Dr. Roman Boos also published it in his book Rudolf Steiner während des Weltkrieges, as Memorandum B. This first Memorandum has been mixed up, as regards time, with the second one, which Rudolf Steiner gave me especially for my brother. I kept a diary of these events of July 1917, and was therefore obliged to correct the information supplied by Graf Lerchenfeld for Dr. Boos’s book, in the journal Anthroposophie, Vol. XVI, No. 2 (January—March, 1934).

Meanwhile, on July 16th, Graf Lerchenfeld had gone to Munich in order to prepare for an interview with Graf Bernsdorff. On July 18th, Rudolf Steiner and I joined him there. The interview was arranged for July 19th, in the afternoon, at the Eden Hotel. Graf Bernsdorff arrived, but the interview did not succeed in rousing him to activity. Rudolf Steiner and I returned to Berlin on July 20th. During the night of July 21st/22nd, Rudolf Steiner wrote a second Memorandum. This too was meant for my brother. Rudolf Steiner said to me: “What I have written here may serve your brother as Foreign Minister at Brest-Litowsk as a foundation to voice such ideas as an expression of the will of Middle Europe. There are many spiritual centres scattered in Russia. They would understand and this could become an effective instrument for peace; for the East has always had an ear for the ideas of Middle Europe.”

Rudolf Steiner meant really that my brother should try to become Foreign Minister instead of Graf Czernin and said with special emphasis: “If the Austrian Emperor advocated this, Prince Bismarck’s words might become true again: "When the Emperor of Austria mounts his horse, all his peoples will follow him." At the time Rudolf Steiner believed strongly in Austria’s chance. When he saw that this responsibility was making me restless and anxious, he said with the greatest kindness: "Do not upset yourself. One must be able to see even nations ruined. If what I have explained to you as a possibility of salvation does not come to pass, a series of catastrophes will ensue. Things that cannot be achieved through reasonableness must inevitably come to pass in the last resort through tremendous upheavals when they are demanded by the will of the world.”

When bidding me goodbye, Rudolf Steiner said: "Use these two Memoranda exactly as you think best.”

Rudolf Steiner’s intervention in these affairs was not an intervention from the side of the Anthroposophical Society, for direct politics is not one of its tasks. It was the action of individuals who had asked Rudolf Steiner for advice. Apart from Graf Lerchenfeld and myself no other anthroposophist participated in this affair. At the beginning, other members did not even know of the attempt.

While I was in daily contact with Dr. Steiner in Berlin at that time, my friend Walter Johannes Stein also came there, as if by chance, to discuss his thesis for a degree with Dr. Steiner. Stein was on active military service and was in uniform. In those days it was very difficult for civilians to take documents over the frontier. Stein offered to take the typewritten Memorandum over the frontier for me, without knowing its contents. The second, handwritten Memorandum I took myself. Stein said to me jokingly — but there was devotion and utter readiness to help in his words: “If the worst comes to the worst, I can swallow it!” This attitude pleased Rudolf Steiner; and he remarked how favourably this young anthroposophist compared with someone else who had just lately visited him. This meeting in Berlin with Stein was the beginning of further destiny in common, which, with a few interruptions, has continued to the present time.

The terms of the Memorandum were adapted to the position of the war and to foreign politics, and the Threefold Social Organism was only briefly indicated. This was often misunderstood by the old mode of thinking. It was imagined, for example, that the proposed economics administration was to legislate as well, whereas all that was intended was association for the purposes of easier economic conditions in an ever-widening field of free trade, because economics and industry do not thrive under hierarchical organization or political legislation. Neither was the representation of the cultural life meant to issue laws and regulations or to organize questions of culture from the political point of view. In the sense of the Threefold Social Organism, its task was to give new impulses and substance in the cultural life. Today, School Reform, for example, is as a rule confined to matters of organization, and guiding principles are laid down from a political centre. Little thought is given to raising the science of education itself to a higher level. In the free spiritual life, therefore, there would be continual competition — which is not right in the economic life — without men being forced into any group through political, ecclesiastical, or economic compulsion. Everyone would be free to let their children be educated by those in whom they had confidence. Men are farthest of all today from understanding the duties of the political or “equity” state, although the people of Middle Europe have many qualities which would enable them to do so. The investigation of human rights — which should determine the laws — is still a very unknown field, because hitherto it has only been a question of political, economic, and intellectual prerogatives.

The Memorandum of 1917 addressed itself to the insight of the then ruling powers — the Emperors — who could still have done a great deal with strength and certainty of aim. Before the forum of the listening world, such thoughts, even if only gradually, must have been effective; they could not have been committed to oblivion again, for mankind is ultimately organized for truth. Bolshevism in its varied and tarnished forms could not have worked so destructively. Only in this way would it have been possible to paralyse the Bolshevism which, steeped by the West in abstract intellectualism, was staged in Russia with the help of Ludendorff.

On Sunday, July 22nd, I left Berlin, Dr. and Frau Dr. Steiner coming with me to the station. The evening of July 23rd, I went with my brother, whom I met at Vienna, to Reichenau, and on July 24th, I gave him the first as well as the second Memorandum which had been written for him especially, and which I had copied myself by hand from Rudolf Steiner’s original. On July 26th I was received by the Minister’s President, Dr. Seidler, who had been recommended by my brother for this position and who at that moment was at logger-heads with the foreign Minister, Graf Czernin.

My brother, in his book Kaiser Karl, records his high opinion of the Memorandum. From that time onwards, intrigues started against him. They were instigated from many quarters, led by Graf Czernin, some wrongly informed German officers and politicians, some Austrian German Nationals, and especially Hungarians. Therefore my brother felt disinclined to make things still more difficult through the Memorandum, and only gave it to the Emperor after his retirement. The Emperor said then to his Adjutant-General, Freiherr von Marterer: “Graf Polzer has been torn from me by all kinds of intrigues.”

I do not want to reproach my brother — nor have I ever done so — for not making every effort to utilize this close relationship with the Emperor for the fulfilment of this plan. Fate determined it otherwise, but one had to see whether this possibility would prove favourable.

As a last counsel at his retirement, my brother gave the Emperor the Memorandum. What was the real spiritual background of this attempt and counsel? The Spirit of the Hapsburg stock was the power which held the Austrian peoples together. It worked through the individuals of the Hapsburg family. (Rudolf Steiner once pointed out that this Spirit was of the hierarchical order of Folk-Spirits.) If it had been possible for the Hapsburg Spirit, through the personality of Emperor Karl, to come to an understanding with the Spirit of the Age (Michael), the transition into the new Age would have been possible without any fundamental catastrophe.

At that time my brother rejected the idea of trying to become Foreign Minister but told me later that if he had received the Memorandum in May instead of July, he would have accepted the appointment. This delay of three months shows the tremendous tragedy of fate in these events. But it also shows the watchfulness of a world-power which to the very end sets itself in opposition to what must and will come to pass in the next centuries.

It was, of course, too difficult for my brother to grasp the tremendous significance of these ideas, without anthroposophical training. But it would not be right to say that the situation in 1917 demanded previous understanding of the "Threefold Social Order" on the part of great numbers of higher officials and politicians. It would have been sufficient for the Emperor and his responsible advisers to act vigorously. The thing would then have been set going, although naturally not without resistance. Then other people would have felt, through the beneficial results and spiritual impulse, that here was something which provided a true and hopeful prospect for the future. The endless deception and ever-increasing misery would not have prevailed in Middle Europe. Those who understood would not have been the same as those who were in power under the old regime of party politics, but this very fact would have been like a kind of world-justice after the catastrophe of the war. Even if things came to the worst it would have been better to fail in a cause that would inevitably have shown beneficial effects later on than to allow Middle Europe to be made into a mere colony, into militarized groups, and men into the wage-slaves of an Anglo-American world power.

But the greatest danger for the highly differentiated peoples of Middle Europe, in whom there are spiritual and cultural possibilities for the future, does not lie only in economic need but in the forcing upon them from the West and South of mechanized modes of thought which attract anti-social lusts for power, brutality, and crime. The tragedy of Middle Europe is, therefore, not economic poverty, which is perhaps more beneficial than wealth, but the conscious, systematic ruin of the faculties of soul and spirit in the individual. True, the complete extermination of such faculties is no longer possible. Rudolf Steiner has preserved humanity from this fate. In the last resort, even if only after many catastrophes, the needs of a group of younger people will show the way of the Spirit and its consequences in life.

The time which has elapsed and Rudolf Steiner’s further teachings have given me deeper insight into those events of nearly twenty years ago. The demonic powers to which mankind is succumbing more and more had a sensitive organ of perception for the genuinely Christian faculties of the peoples of Middle Europe — faculties which denote such a menace to these demonic powers. This was proved clearly in the events and intrigues of the year 1917.

Those who have deeper sensitivity for the threads of destiny and the needs of the future and are without spiritual bias can be aware that the events described in the book Kaiser Karl are pregnant with destiny. Although these two individuals whom destiny brought so close together realized this only to a small extent, their estimation of it was different from that of the so-called “official” authorities. The latter considered themselves so clever and superior that some through their superficiality and others through their philistinism became tools for the destruction of Middle Europe. More to blame than the Emperors for the ruin of the Central Powers, these materialistic representatives of the ruling Christian and social bodies knew how to preserve themselves, in the interests of the enemy, at the expense of the peoples. They lent themselves to ideas that came now from the West, now from the East, and were futile for Middle Europe; they bowed down to these ideas after they had allowed the fighting to go on so long that exhaustion made the people easy victims. This was in the interest of all those who, even in opposing camps, were working for a world democracy led by materialism and described in high-sounding phrases. They were the people who hastened to attribute the blame for the war to the Central Powers and to oppose what Rudolf Steiner said in mitigation of this verdict — which would have exposed the occult machinations by which, even if at times unconsciously, they allowed themselves to be led.

From the very beginning of his reign Emperor Karl can be said to have been a prisoner of those Powers which caused the war in order to have the whole economic life of Europe in their hands. It was for this purpose too that the small Middle European States were formed.

The first means for paralysing the Emperor for fulfilment of what the future demanded was the coronation in Hungary. My brother had advised against this. This union stood in the way of any plans for renewal and change that were still a possibility. So the young Emperor had a noose around his neck from which he could not escape by the means accessible to him, and which always obstructed him. If we look with an open mind and with intelligence at the real task of the Emperor we can see that this oath of union was its out-and-out antithesis. It was, moreover, insincere in its very substance, an impossible amalgamation of divine Grace and democracy. It was irreconcilable with divine Grace and irreconcilable with the spiritual necessities of the time. To cut this Gordian knot with presence of mind and a free, divinely-inspired courage, quite a different attitude of spirit and soul, with wide horizons, would have been required.

All this more or less secret and petty play for gain and transfer of territory ought never to have played a part. The time for territorial rule is over, although the childish game continues even now on the ground of obscurities and untruths for which pitiable “legal” reasons are adduced. Attempts are actually made to establish them for “all time.” But history is no legal problem. Man’s lack of spirituality prevents him from understanding this; therefore catastrophies will have to be the teachers. All these old conceptions bear the mark of death and their subjection to its power on their foreheads. The coronation was nothing but an unhealthy medley of political and ritualistic catch-words behind which there was no pillar of spirituality. One catch-word supported the other and hindered all freedom of action.

This account of the problem of Middle Europe in connection with the Emperor and my brother has somewhat encroached upon time, and I will now continue with my memories of Rudolf Steiner from July 1917 onwards.

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

The Count in 1937

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.