BETWEEN OCCULTISM AND FASCISM: ANTHROPOSOPHY AND THE
POLITICS OF RACE AND NATION IN GERMANY AND ITALY, 1900-1945
Peter Staudenmaier, Ph.D.
Cornell University 2010
https://ecommons.cornell.edu/bitstream/handle/1813/17662/Staudenmaier%2C%20Peter.pdf
The relationship between Nazism and occultism has long been an object of popular
speculation and scholarly controversy. This dissertation examines the interaction
between occult groups and the Nazi regime as well as the Italian Fascist state, with
central attention to the role of racial and ethnic theories in shaping these
developments. The centerpiece of the dissertation is a case study of the
anthroposophist movement founded by Rudolf Steiner, an esoteric tendency which
gave rise to widely influential alternative cultural institutions including Waldorf
schools, biodynamic agriculture, and holistic methods of health care and nutrition. A
careful exploration of the tensions and affinities between anthroposophists and fascists
reveals a complex and differentiated portrait of modern occult tendencies and their
treatment by Nazi and Fascist officials.
Two initial chapters analyze the emergence of anthroposophy’s racial doctrines, its
self-conception as an ‘unpolitical’ spiritual movement, and its relations with the
völkisch milieu and with Lebensreform movements. Four central chapters concern the
fate of anthroposophy in Nazi Germany, with a detailed reconstruction of specific
anthroposophical institutions and their interactions with various Nazi agencies. Two
final chapters provide a comparative portrait of the Italian anthroposophical movement
during the Fascist era, with particular concentration on the role of anthroposophists in
influencing and administering Fascist racial policy.
Based on a wide range of archival sources, the dissertation offers an empirically founded
account of the neglected history of modern occult movements while shedding new light
on the operations of the Nazi and Fascist regimes. The analysis focuses on the interplay
of ideology and practice, the concrete ways in which contending worldviews attempted
to establish institutional footholds within the organizational disarray of the Third Reich
and the Fascist state, and shows that disagreements over racial ideology were embedded
in power struggles between competing factions within the Nazi hierarchy and the Fascist
apparatus. It delineates the ways in which early twentieth century efforts toward spiritual
renewal, holism, cultural regeneration and redemption converged with deeply regressive
political realities. Engaging critically with previous accounts, the dissertation raises
challenging questions about the political implications of alternative spiritual currents and
counter-cultural tendencies.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Biographical Sketch iii
Acknowledgements iv
Preface: From Spiritual Science to Spiritual Racism viii
Introduction: Racial Politics in the Modern Occult Revival and the Rise of Fascism 1
1. Germany’s Savior: Rudolf Steiner and the Esoteric Meaning of Nation and Race 56
2. The Politics of the Unpolitical: German Anthroposophy in Theory and Practice,
1913-1933 112
3. Accommodation, Collaboration, Persecution: Anthroposophy in the Shadow of
National Socialism, 1933-1945 181
4. The German Essence Shall Heal the World: Ideological Affinities Between
Anthroposophy and Nazism 257
5. Education for the National Community? The Controversy over Waldorf Schools
in the Third Reich 305
6. The Nazi Campaign against Occultism 354
7. Anthroposophy and the Rise of Fascism in Italy 410
8. Italian Anthroposophists and the Fascist Racial Laws, 1938-1945 446
Conclusion: Occultism and Fascism in Historical Perspective 500
Bibliography 526
PREFACE
From Spiritual Science to Spiritual Racism
This is a study of an unusual movement in an unusual time. It deals with topics
that are difficult to define precisely, and it takes issue with a variety of scholarly and
popular interpretations of several controversial themes. It is both a historical account
of an under-examined chapter in the history of fascism and the history of occultism, as
well as an extended argument about the relevance of unorthodox beliefs about race.
Rather than attempting a comprehensive overview of occult tendencies during the
fascist era, it focuses on one central case study, a movement known as anthroposophy.
Founded by Rudolf Steiner in the early years of the twentieth century, anthroposophy
has become renowned in different parts of the world for its efforts on behalf of
alternative education, holistic health care, organic farming and natural foods,
environmental consciousness, and innovative forms of spiritual expression, among
other causes. At the root of anthroposophy, located on the border between religion and
science, lies an elaborate esoteric philosophy based on Steiner’s teachings. A widely
influential figure in occult circles who was raised in Austria, lived most of his adult
life in Germany, and died in Switzerland, Steiner imparted an international character
to his movement while grounding it firmly in German cultural values. In contemporary
German contexts anthroposophy is recognized as “the most successful form of
‘alternative’ religion in the [twentieth] century.”1
Outside of Germany, the term ‘anthroposophy’ and the name Rudolf Steiner
will be unfamiliar to many readers. Even those who have some experience with the
public face of anthroposophy – through Waldorf schools, biodynamic farming,
1 Stefanie von Schnurbein and Justus Ulbricht, eds., Völkische Religion und Krisen der Moderne:
Entwürfe “arteigener” Glaubenssysteme seit der Jahrhundertwende (Würzburg: Königshausen &
Neumann, 2001), 38.
ix
Camphill communities, Weleda or Demeter products, and so forth – are sometimes
surprised to learn that these phenomena are manifestations of an esoteric worldview. If
the external trappings of anthroposophy are not always widely recognizable, its occult
underpinnings are still less well known. Many anthroposophists today are
apprehensive about ‘occult’ vocabulary, though Steiner and the founding generation of
the movement used it freely. For Steiner’s present followers, what is often important
about anthroposophical principles is not so much their historical pedigree but their
practical application, and anthroposophists have earned respect for their contributions
to pedagogical reform or their commitment to ecological sustainability or their work
with developmentally disabled children and adults. By placing these activities and the
ideas that inspired them into historical perspective, this study will show how
complicated and conflicted their development was, in ways which may alter our
understanding of their present image.
My reconstruction of this contested history will not provide an exhaustive
account of anthroposophy in Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy, and inevitably it will not
do full justice to the complexities involved. One primary task will be to trace the
circuitous path that led from ‘spiritual science’ to ‘spiritual racism.’ Steiner described
anthroposophy as a “spiritual science,” staking a claim which his followers took very
seriously and endeavored to expand and establish as an alternative to what they
viewed as the shortcomings of mainstream science. At the heart of this ambition was
the belief that materialism had degraded scientific thought, and indeed all of modern
culture, and that a thoroughgoing spiritual renewal was necessary in order to revive
humanity’s relationship with both the natural and supernatural worlds.
Anthroposophist efforts in this direction took a wide variety of forms in many
different fields, but the central focus here will be on esoteric conceptions of race and
nation. By the time Germany and Italy embarked on a world war and elevated racial
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principles to centerpieces of their regimes, some of Steiner’s followers had gone from
exploring spiritual science and spiritual renewal to propagating “spiritual racism” as
the solution to the modern crisis. The factors that took them down this unforeseen road
did not reflect the trajectory of the anthroposophist movement as a whole, but making
sense of the evolution of occult racial thought under fascism entails understanding the
transition from spiritual renewal to spiritual racism in its starkest form.
The interpretation proposed here is premised on the idea that anthroposophy
embodied a contradictory set of racial and ethnic doctrines which held the potential to
develop in different directions under particular political, social, and cultural
conditions. In spite of anthroposophists’ insistence that their worldview was
‘unpolitical,’ my argument will identify an implicit politics of race running throughout
their public and private statements, a body of assumptions about the cosmic
significance of racial and ethnic attributes that shaped their responses to fascism.
Many of Steiner’s followers considered their own views to be anti-nationalist and antiracist, and there was no straight line that led inexorably to the extreme and explicit
formulations of spiritual racism. What emerged were racial and ethnic stances that
were frequently ambiguous and multivalent but that in several cases found a
comfortable home in fascist contexts precisely because of their spiritual orientation,
one that did not deign to concern itself directly with the distasteful realm of politics.
The resulting history reveals the limits of a spiritual renewal approach to individual
and social change, and of an unpolitical conception of new ways of life, even with the
loftiest of aspirations. For some anthroposophists, such discourses of enlightenment
and emancipation became bound up with authoritarian aims.
These developments did not take place in a vacuum. Anthroposophy was part
of a broader stream of ‘life reform’ movements that held considerable appeal in early
twentieth century Germany and brought together tendencies which seem like strange
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bedfellows today, such as groups combining vegetarianism and holistic spirituality
with Aryan supremacy. One way to understand cultural and political phenomena like
these is as instances of left-right crossover, a recurrent pattern in Steiner’s era.2
Much
of what made occult racial thought so volatile derived from this fusion of left and
right. Similar dynamics emerged in other parts of Europe as well, and fed into the
diffuse discontent with modern social life which helped pave the way for the rise of
fascism. This combination of modern and anti-modern sentiments is characteristic of
several of the movements examined here. A leading scholar of fascism’s history has
recently argued for “seeing both the European occult revival that produced Theosophy
and Anthroposophy, and the ‘life reform movement’ which cultivated alternative
medicine, neo-paganism, and yoga, not as symptoms of a peculiarly German malaise,
but as local manifestations of pan-European forms of social modernism bent on
resolving the spiritual crisis of the West created by materialism and rationalism.”3
Particularly in English-speaking contexts, the historical background to such
trends is not always well known. The juxtaposition can be jarring when ideas that
seem more at home in a New Age retreat than a fascist dictatorship are traced back to
their sources. For scholars interested in the history and politics of esotericism, it is
important to allow space for heterodox beliefs, even when those beliefs have a
compromised past. The task is to understand movements like anthroposophy and try to
make historical sense of them, not to marginalize or denigrate them as irredeemably
tainted by their unacknowledged origins. It is also important to maintain a sense of the
2
On left-right crossover in the reform milieu and counter-cultural and non-conventional circles see
Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1866-1918 vol. I (Munich: Beck, 1990), 152-53, 564, 586,
772-73, 788-89, 828-32, and with reference to alternative spiritual groups George Williamson, The
Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 287-88.
3 Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler
(London: Palgrave, 2007), 258. For reasons explained in the Introduction, the problematic concept of
the ‘modern’ will play an important role in this study as one of the unavoidable basic terms of the
discussion, despite its disadvantages.
xii
countervailing possibilities and potentials latent within these heterodox movements,
even while noting the political naiveté and historical oblivion they sometimes display.
The seductive character of fascist culture and politics and the longing for a new and
revitalized world led more perspicacious contemporaries astray as well, and the path
that turned from spiritual science to spiritual racism was not built by occultists alone.
Rather than an indictment of the follies of esoteric wisdom seeking, the history
recounted here can serve as a reminder of the ambiguities of modernity in both its
unconventional and familiar forms.
Examining the fortunes of occult ideas and movements in Nazi Germany and
Fascist Italy not only reveals unexpected aspects of occultism; it also brings to light
important features of Nazism and Fascism themselves. My analysis gives critical
attention to institutional factors in both the German and Italian contexts and shows the
extent to which debates over racial theory were embedded in power struggles between
competing factions within the Nazi hierarchy and the Fascist apparatus. The
polycentric nature of the National Socialist bureaucracy and its hybrid of party and
state offices went hand in hand with fundamental and longstanding disputes between
different agencies, and between different groupings within the same agencies, about
central components of Nazi doctrine. Like Fascist race thinking, Nazi racial thought
was far from homogeneous, and the intricate interplay of institutional exigencies and
ideological affinities sometimes yielded unanticipated consequences for Nazi officials
and esoteric organizations alike. Similar dynamics applied to the concept of the
German nation. Even stronger disagreements arose in areas where anthroposophists
played a prominent part, including the role of alternative medicine, organic
agriculture, and non-traditional schooling within Nazism’s new order. The ensuing
clashes among disparate elements in the Nazi leadership illuminate an often
overlooked facet of Hitler’s regime.
xiii
By focusing on the fate of a relatively small group devoted to idiosyncratic
beliefs, and by approaching the matter from the margins rather than the center and
from the bottom up as much as from the top down, a changed viewpoint begins to
emerge that offers new ways of understanding esoteric ideas as well as fascist policies,
practical pursuits as well as committed worldviews. This study challenges a number of
perspectives that still find proponents in some scholarly quarters and in public
consciousness. It challenges the image of the Nazi regime as a totalitarian monolith
and shows instead how polycratic it was, with Hitler’s lieutenants often enough
working at cross purposes to one another. It challenges the notion that the crucial
relationship between occultism and Nazism was one of ideological influence and looks
instead at the complex institutional frameworks within which these ideologies were
embedded, and the complicated relationships that emerged from them. It challenges
the belief that Nazi officials simply rejected occultist groups across the board, as well
as the belief that the Nazis themselves were fundamentally indebted to occult precepts
or practices. It challenges the conclusion that Italian Fascism reluctantly adopted racist
measures at the insistence of its Nazi ally, and provides a detailed examination of less
familiar but highly influential variants of Fascist racial thought. Finally, it challenges
the assumption that esoteric race theories were an anachronism or pre-modern or antimodern and explores the degree of engagement between occult thinkers and modern
scientific and cultural trends.
In addition to offering an alternative perspective on previous interpretations,
this study introduces several new themes that have not received significant historical
attention before. It provides the first extended analysis of the relation between
anthroposophical race doctrines and Nazi and Fascist policies, and explores the
multiple affiliations linking anthroposophists to other occult tendencies and to various
political predispositions. It delineates the tenacious opposition to esoteric groups
xiv
within the Nazi security apparatus and deciphers the underlying reasons for this
institutional animosity. It highlights the relevance of racial and ethnic tenets for
Steiner’s followers and their project of spiritual renewal, presenting anthroposophist
arguments in their own original terms. It investigates the degree to which
anthroposophists succeeded in making common cause with Nazi and Fascist
functionaries across a number of fields, ideologically as well as practically. It shows
that Waldorf schools, biodynamic agriculture, and other esoteric endeavors found
admirers in unlikely places, and affords an alternative view of anthroposophy’s past
as well as its present. It poses provocative questions about the unexamined history of
spiritual reform movements as well as underappreciated aspects of fascism’s rise and
fall.
These are controversial questions, and a historically contextualized account
can help to forestall both guilt-by-association reasoning and ex post facto apologetics.
A careful and clearly circumscribed investigation of one branch of the modern occult
revival in the fascist period provides an opportunity to explore the subject in detail
while remaining responsive to broader historical and intellectual concerns. But a
sustained focus on anthroposophy as a case study of the interaction between
occultism and fascism also presents definite limits. It is difficult to identify any single
esoteric tendency that would be representative of the extraordinarily variegated occult
spectrum as a whole, and my analysis does not assume that Steiner’s movement can
stand in for the entire modern occult scene. What makes anthroposophy a meaningful
exemplar of these broader phenomena is its relatively mainstream status within the
panoply of esoteric groupings, an important counterpoint to the marginal image of the
occult overall. Much of this study revolves around the contrasts and tensions between
anthroposophist self-conceptions and the perception of their ideas and activities by
others, whether sympathetic or hostile. Steiner presented his teachings as an inclusive
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alternative worldview, a systematic approach offering answers to questions in all
areas of life, and this ambitious undertaking won anthroposophy enthusiasts as well
as enemies. Anthroposophy’s history can be seen as an instance of a larger contest
between esoteric hopes and political possibilities, allowing us to assess occultism as a
historical subject in its own right rather than an easily dismissed oddity, a peripheral
and fleeting phase from a bygone era, or a mysterious object of speculation and
fantasy.
The widespread perception of some sort of connection between National
Socialism and the occult, both considered to lie at the outer limits of historical
comprehension, feeds the suspicion that there must be a hidden link between them.
But the links were rather ordinary, and can be explained not through the apparent
deviance and oddness of occultism, but through its commonness and popularity, by its
participation in and influence by central cultural currents of the era. The consoling
thought of fascism and occultism as eruptions of irrationality, as little more than a
counterfeit of modern reason and social progress, depends on a simplified view of a
complex history; it forgets that “the myths which fell victim to the Enlightenment
were themselves its products.”4
This dialectical intertwinement of myth and
enlightenment is central to the unusual manner in which the relationship between
occultism and fascism unfolded, at a time when both were on the rise. Spiritual
science gave way to spiritual racism not merely through the devious designs of fascists
or the oblivious dreams of occultists, but through the attempt to realize goals which
still seem alluring and noble in our own time. Recognizing the multifaceted nature of
this history can help to comprehend both its emergence and evolution in the previous
century and its implications for today.
4 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2002),
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