The Aesthetics of Rudolf Steiner and Spiritual Modernism by Jennie Louise Cain A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Germanic Languages and Literatures) in the University of Michigan 2016 Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Frederick Amrine, Co-Chair Associate Professor Kerstin Barndt, Co-Chair Associate Professor Andreas Gailus Professor Elizabeth Sears DEDICATION for Mira and Devika ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to my committee members, who have inspired and supported me all of these years at Michigan: Frederick Amrine, Kerstin Barndt, Andreas Gailus and Betsy Sears. It would have been impossible for me to pursue this topic without Frederick Amrine’ s deep and extensive knowledge of Rudolf Steiner and without his ability to patiently guide me to relevant concepts and works within Steiner’ s oeuvre of over four hundred volumes. I am especially thankful to Fred for his keen intellect and his exhortations to try to see the bigger picture. I owe a debt of gratitude to Kerstin Barndt for her continual prompting to think critically, the conscientiousness with which she closely read many drafts of my work in various states of disorder, and for her warm encouragement every step of the way. During the final months, Kerstin’ s guidance has been invaluable. Andreas Gailus provided critical feedback at various stages and I also appreciate Betsy Sear’ s detailed and insightful written feedback during the final stage of writing. There are two people especially worthy of acknowledgement for their part in contributing to my growth as a teacher and a scholar. Hartmut Rastalsky helped me to discover the joy of teaching, has been an amazing mentor and has provided thoughtful feedback on my teaching as well as on fellowship and award applications. I also wish to thank Christian Clement for creating the online resource Rudolf Steiner Online Archiv that enabled me to easily access many texts by Steiner. iii During my years here I have benefitted greatly from the highly skilled and dedicated administrative staff in the German department, including Sheri Sytsema- Geiger, Nancy Blasch, Rachelle Grubb, Jen White and Gitta Killough. Thanks are owed to each of them for guiding me and my colleagues through important administrative procedures. I am especially grateful to Jen White for the many needed reminders, pieces of practical advice and, above all, for all of our talks in her office that helped break up the monotony of dissertation writing. Multiple institutions have supported my education as a scholar and a teacher. These include the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature, the Rackham Graduate School, the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching, and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD). I am thankful for the generous fellowships that enabled research in the US and in Germany and for many helpful seminars on aspects of research and teaching. At the University of Michigan, I am indebted to my classmates and friends for their personal and intellectual support. To Seth Howes, Sara Jackson and Solveig Heinz I owe thanks for their mentorship. I also wish to acknowledge my classmates Biz Nijdam, Nick Heckner, Hannah McMurray, Emma Thomas, Ariana Orozco, Michael André, Simon Walsh and Claire Insel for their camaraderie and feedback on my work. To Kathryn Sederberg I owe special thanks for her friendship and support, for her fine editing skills, and for helping to keep me sane in graduate school. iv Over the course of my life there have been a number of wonderful teachers whose passion and skill helped shape me. I thank my class teacher Frances Vig for her creativity and unbridled enthusiasm and my high school teacher Ed Vaitones for sparking a special interest in German. I wish to recognize Dr. Hans Michael Speier and Dr. Christine Geffers-Browne, two especially inspiring professors at the summer master’ s program held at Middlebury College. I also wish to thank Dr. Jochen Richter, long time director of the summer program, and the many other teachers and staff there who made this program an intensive and truly exceptional educational experience. To Dennis Klocek, director of the Consciousness Studies program, I owe thanks for igniting interest in further study of Goethe and of Steiner. The late Dr. John Mohan, professor of Russian literature and my favorite teacher at Grinnell College, will always be remembered for his love of literature and his cornball humor. Finally I wish to extend my deepest thanks to my family. My parents, Beth and Roger, have always been so loving and supportive in all of my eclectic pursuits. I thank my dad for the way he has always modeled a love of ideas and an interest in spiritual practice. A very special thanks goes to Mira’ s and Devika’ s two beloved grandmothers —”Oma” and “Dadiba”—who have gone above and beyond in their support of me and my family by babysitting and also living with us for substantial periods here and even in Germany. Thanks to them, I was able to finish the PhD with the peace of mind that my little girls were in the best of hands. I also want to thank v caregivers who have become part of our extended family by loving our girls as their own: Areli Hernandez, SandraSartori, Mary Eldridge and Laura Ganzel. Finally I want to thank my best friend and husband Hirak Parikh for his companionship, encouragement, and technical support and for keeping a cool head during moments of crisis. Above all, Hirak helped me maintain the perspective that the dissertation is just one stage of life. I look forward to the many years ahead with you! vi TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii LIST OF FIGURES viii ABSTRACT ix INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 Rudolf Steiner’ s Goethean Symbolism and his Influence on Wassily Kandinsky’ s Theory of Abstraction 37 CHAPTER 2 Against Mimesis: Steiner’ s Theory of the Evolution of the Arts in Dialogue with Wilhelm Worringer’ s Abstraktion und Empathie and Alois Riegl’ s Kunstwollen 110 CHAPTER 3 The first Goetheanum Building and Steiner’ s Vision of Peace and Internationalism 174 CONCLUSION 247 BIBLIOGRAPHY 256 vii LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE 1: THE FIRST GOTHEANUM 186 FIGURE 2: STEINER’ S PAINTED MOTIFS OF THE ARCHETYPAL FIGURES OF THE SEVEN POST-ATLANTEAN CULTURES WITH A SERIES OF COLUMNS AND THE LARGE CARVED WOODEN SCULPTURE DER MENSCHHEITSREPRÄSENTANT BELOW. COLORED DRAWING BY VAN BEMMELEN. 235 FIGURE 3: CROSS-SECTION OF DOMES FROM A MODEL. 239 FIGURE 4: THE MAIN HALL WITH THE AUDIENCE AREA BELOW AND THREE OF THE COLUMNS WITH THEIR CAPITALS. 240 FIGURE 5: A CLOSE-UP OF THE SECOND COLUMN 242 FIGURE 6: A CLOSE-UP OF THE THIRD COLUMN 243 FIGURE 7: THE THIRD AND FOURTH COLUMNS 244 viii ABSTRACT Around 1900, a wave of European artists and intellectuals turned to spiritual themes and modes of thought to reform a society perceived as dominated by rationalism, materialism and mimetic art. My dissertation places at the center of this movement Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925)—the Austrian philosopher, artist, architect, pedagogue and social reformer. I trace Steiner’ s influence on canonical modernists and show that his writings are deeply resonant with contemporary developments in the visual arts, art theory and architecture. In Chapter One, I examine the influence of Steiner’ s theory of dematerialization on Wassily Kandinsky’ s conception of abstraction. While exploring significant points of connection between both thinkers, I argue that Steiner ultimately does not aim for abstraction but instead for a return to the phenomenological world in an immersive mode characteristic of Goethean thought. In Chapter Two, I bring Steiner’ s art historical theory into dialogue with the writings of the German art theorist Wilhelm Worringer and the Austrian art historian Alois Riegl. I argue that both Steiner and Riegl conceive of the history of art as the expression of a collective aesthetic drive, what Riegl calls Kunstwollen, and that Worringer and Steiner understand “abstraction” in philosophical rather than periodic terms. Chapter Three turns to Steiner’ s first Goetheanum building, placing it in the context of Expressionist architecture on the one hand and anti-war responses to the First World War on the other. I bring Steiner’ s theory of the first Goetheanum as promoting peace into conversation with three contemporaneous thinkers and projects: Bruno Taut and his Glashaus Pavilion from ix 1914; the German fantasy writer and illustrator Paul Scheerbart; and Sigmund Freud’ s 1915 anti-war text “Zeitgemäßes über Krieg und Tod.” My project makes three interventions into the field of modernism studies. First, by considering Steiner’ s place within Expressionism, it adds to the heterogeneity of this movement. Second, it contributes to the neglected subfield of what I call “spiritual modernism,” arguing that the spiritual was never historically “excluded” from the modern. Finally, my dissertation broadens our understanding of modernism by complicating traditional binaries such as religious/secular and pre-modern/modern. x INTRODUCTION At the turn of the twentieth century, many German-speaking writers, artists, architects and art theorists felt that European society was in great need of cultural transformation after decades of rapid industrialization and urbanization. Observing the modern and increasingly secular society around them, they regarded their epoch as plagued by fragmentation, over-rationalization, mechanism, “materialism” and mimetic art. The dramatic changes in European society were noted by many well known modernist thinkers. In his essay from 1903 “Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben,” German philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel (1858-1918) argued that society had become increasingly dominated by a calculating spirit: “Der moderne Geist ist mehr und mehr ein rechnender geworden.”1 In a similar vein, in 1917 German sociologist and economist Max Weber (1864-1920) gave a lecture to future scientists in which he argued that the increase in specialization within academe and rationality within greater society had led to the “disenchantment of the world” (“die Entzauberung der Welt”).