In His Studio—Rudolf Steiner’s Illness
October 1, 1924 to March 30, 1925—“A sudden end [to the September courses]: Rudolf Steiner’s illness set in. The situation changed completely. I left the clinic to nurse Dr. Steiner with no idea of the difficulties to come,” wrote Ita Wegman years later.[1]
On Tuesday, September 30, 1924, she sent urgent telegrams to her medical colleagues Ludwig Noll and Eberhard Schickler, asking them to come to Arlesheim to support the clinic during her absence, and for Noll to help her with Rudolf Steiner’s treatment. One day later, on October 1, Steiner bid farewell to House Hansi: “I’m going up [to the studio] for two days,” he told Helene Lehmann. In the end, Steiner was ill for six months and never returned from his studio in the Carpentry Workshop. Helene Lehmann remembers: “He comforted me when I looked frightened.”
The day before, September 30, Marie Steiner-von Sivers traveled to Germany for a week-long tour with the Goetheanum Eurythmy Ensemble. Seeing Steiner’s state of health, she didn’t want to go. On October 2, he let her know that he’d moved for his treatment and care: “So, I’m here and will stay only as long as necessary.”
The First Days of Treatment
Steiner didn’t go to Ita Wegman’s Clinical Therapeutic Institute in Arlesheim. He went to his room at the Goetheanum, the room he knew so well, where he’d worked for nearly ten years—his “sculptor’s studio,” where many works and very important conversations had taken place. He went to the site of the wooden sculpture of Christ. Six months later, he died next to it. He had only just managed to finish the six parallel courses in September—70 lectures, 400 individual discussions, and countless other activities,2 including the short address on the day before Michaelmas—then his forces were exhausted. “[With the September courses], it was as if Rudolf Steiner set himself to do everything he could to still achieve some things spiritually,” wrote Ita Wegman. He did it out of a “sense of duty to higher powers,” he wrote to Marie Steiner-von Sivers from his studio on October 6. In the weeks that followed, he emphasized again and again that he could summon the forces for the courses in September just fine, but not for the endless personal concerns, worries, and wishes of the members.
With a handwritten notice attached to the bulletin board in the Carpentry Workshop on October 2, Rudolf Steiner canceled the upcoming lectures that had already been announced; a week later, on October 10 (and soon afterwards in the members’ News Sheet in the weekly Das Goetheanum), he called for an end to any and all speculation by members about his state of health, to all “rumor-mongering in anthroposophical circles.” He hoped that through the “uniquely sacrificial care of my dear friend Ita Wegman and her faithful helper Dr. Noll,” it would soon be possible to return to “physical activity, without which, unfortunately, the spiritual cannot work upon the Earth, at least to a certain extent.” Then he added, “But in the end, everything must be perceived according to destiny (karmically).”
This text is an excerpt from an article published in the (online exclusive) Goetheanum Weekly. You can read the full article on the website. If you are not yet a subscriber, you can get to know the Goetheanum Weekly for 1 CHF./€.
1) Peter Selg, Rudolf Steiner, Life and Work, vol. 7: 1924–1925: The Anthroposophical Society and the School for Spiritual Science (Great Barrington, MA: SteinerBooks, 2019); Peter Selg, Rudolf Steiners Atelier [Studio]: Die letzte Lebenszeit—The Final Years (Arlesheim: Ita Wegman Institut, 2019), dual-language edition.
Title image Rudolf Steiner’s studio, carpenter’s workshop at the Goetheanum. Photo: Walter Schneider