Wishing you a joyful Christmas – with an appeal for your support

Dear supporters of the Goetheanum,Dear members of the General Anthroposophical SocietyOur time asks for initiative and commitment! With this appeal we invite you to participate in supporting the Goetheanum.

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While moving events continue to take place around the globe in celebration of Waldorf 100, the anthroposophical movement in France is confronted with horrendous public attacks. In Sweden, the anthroposophic hospital and therapy centre in Järna had to close down. Faced with these events, the Goetheanum as an independent School of Spiritual Science with its different Sections is trying to continue on its inner course and be the heart organ that promotes cooperation in all directions. We hope for new strengthening with the help of the new leadership of the General Anthroposophical Section, consisting of Constanza Kaliks, Claus-Peter Röh and Peter Selg (The spiritual human being), who will take up their new duties at Easter 2020.

Basic funding and special challenges

The Goetheanum as a School of Spiritual Science with a large stage continues to rely on your voluntary support for these activities as members who share the responsibility for the anthroposophical impulse. The contributions of each member constitute the basic funding, which it is the duty of the by now 36 country societies on five continents to procure.

However, in order to balance the budget, we need additional donations of one million Swiss Francs every year. If we encounter unexpected expenses – as we did this year, the financial situation can quickly become critical: in 2019 an unbudgeted sum of 580,000 Swiss Francs had to be made available for maintaining the building and the campus; 330,000 of that alone were needed to bring the huge interior wooden doors in the West of the Goetheanum, which close off the stairwell as one fire section, up to date so that they meet current fire protection regulations. A special expert assessment and considerable technical input were required in order to retain the design of these doors. Supporting us here according to your means would be one form of active members’ support as we approach Christmas.

A second way of doing this is slightly unusual and has to do with a request concerning your own immediate environment: in July 2020, the Goetheanum Leadership and Stage would like to present to the public four cycles of Goethe’s Faust Parts 1 and 2 as a key to the «drama of modern humanity» that we are experiencing today. Postcards advertising this event have been produced and can be distributed now. Tickets will be available from December (see also fluid processes).

Faust: an inner wake-up experience

With Faust as an artistic stage experience we would like to help as many people as possible to achieve an inner awakening, in the sense of Goethe’s words to Eckermann on 25 January 1827, «More I did not intend. Let the crowd of spectators take pleasure in the spectacle; the higher import will not escape the initiated.»¹

Come to the premiere or attend one of these weekends and participate in this nine-hour gesamtkunstwerk, or make others, particularly younger people, around you aware of it, so that they can have such a – potentially biographically important – experience in the Goetheanum’s Main Auditorium.

Hoping for your active involvement in this sense and wishing you a joyful Advent and Christmas period. | Justus Wittich, treasurer, on behalf of the Executive Council and Leadership at the Goetheanum

Christmas

In the deep ground of our soul

lives, sure to triumph, spirit sun;

true powers of the feeling mind

can sense this in the inward life

of winter; and heart’s springing hope

sees sun spirit’s victory shine

in the blessed light of Christmas: as

an image of the highest life

in deep winter’s darkest night.

Rudolf Steiner for Sophie Stinde, 23 December 1913
Source Rudolf Steiner: Christmas. In Introductory Reader, Forest Row 2012, p. ii, tr. Matthew Barton

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