Rudolf Steiner, Life and Work (Vol.5) (Hbk)

Book 5 of Peter Selg’s comprehensive 7-volume biography of Rudolf Steiner

“Any dependence of the spiritual life on the economic life and on the public life must cease. The spiritual life must stand on its own ground. Then it will be able to give to the economic life and to the public life what neither of them can give to the spiritual life. This is immensely important! We can become fully human only when we work on the basis of an independent spiritual life.” —Rudolf Steiner (Polarities in the Evolution of Mankind)

Following the widespread destruction of World War I, Europe in 1918 was faced with political, economic, and social chaos, especially in Germany. In volume 5 of his seven-volume biography of Rudolf Steiner, Peter Selg focuses on the three years following the “Great War” and Steiner’s efforts to help restructure society in a way that might avoid a recurrence of such a terrible calamity in the future. He saw the root sociopolitical and spiritual causes of the devastation and sought to change the flawed worldviews and impulses that led to the hubris behind the World War.

Rudolf Steiner thus began to concentrate on various means to renew and invigorate society, both through immediate measures—especially in his plan for a “threefold social order”—and through the new form of pedagogy that came to fruition with the Waldorf education movement. Steiner saw that a renewed form of education was necessary to the development of peaceful and healthy social conditions in the future. This education was intended to help children grow into responsible, free, and imaginative adults.

This was a time of intense work for Rudolf Steiner, including a full schedule of travel and lectures, reaching out to political leaders, training teachers for the new schools, and working with theologians and ministers toward religious renewal.

About the Author

Peter Selg was born in 1963 in Stuttgart and studied medicine in Witten-Herdecke, Zurich, and Berlin. Until 2000, he worked as the head physician of the juvenile psychiatry department of Herdecke hospital in Germany. Dr. Selg is now director of the Ita Wegman Institute for Basic Research into Anthroposophy (Arlesheim, Switzerland) and professor of medicine at the Alanus University of Arts and Social Sciences (Germany). He lectures extensively and is the author of numerous books, many of which have been published in English.

Margot M. Saar studied at the Universität des Saarlandes, at Open University, UK, and at Institut für Waldorfpädagogik Witten Annen, Germany. She is an experienced translator and interpreter in specialty fields (education, medicine, philosophy, anthroposophy, homeopathy, anthroposophic medicine, general science). She has been a foreign language teacher at Michael House School Derbyshire, UK, a teacher of foreign languages and philosophy, exam officer, and upper school mentor at Michael Hall School, East Sussex, and translator of technical manuals and legal contracts, international correspondence, office management at Hüls Troisdorf AG Witten Germany. Margot has translated numerous books for SteinerBooks, including Peter Selg’s 7-volume biography of Rudolf Steiner.