Anthroposophy and Ecofascism 106

Peter Staudenmaier writes in Paragraph 33 of Anthroposophy and Ecofascism:

Though Steiner tried to make inroads within working class institutions, his outlook was understandably not very popular among workers. The revolutionaries of the 1919 Munich council republic derided him as "the witch doctor of decaying capitalism." [Footnote: Cited in Peter Bierl, Wurzelrassen, Erzengel und Volksgeister: Die Anthroposophie Rudolf Steiners und die Waldorfpädagogik, Hamburg 1999, p. 107] Industrialists, on the other hand, showed a keen interest in Steiner's notions. Soon after the revolutionary upsurge of workers across Germany was crushed, Steiner was invited by the director of the Waldorf-Astoria tobacco factory to establish a company school in Stuttgart. Thus were Waldorf schools born.

It appears that Peter Staudenmaier cannot even cite works favorable to his own position properly. The sentence from which Peter Staudenmaier has drawn his statement "The revolutionaries of the 1919 Munich council republic derided him as 'the witch doctor of decaying capitalism'" runs as follows:

Ziemlich treffend ist die Warnung, die im selben Monat [August, 1919] in der von Kurt Eisner gegründeten Münchner Neuen Zeitung erschienen. Unter dem Titel Der Seelendoktor des verelendenden Kapitalismus wurde die Dreigliederung zerpflückt und Steiner-Anhänger als Personen beyeichnete, die nach 'alkoholfreier Umnebelung schmachteten'. (107)

In English:

Quite appropriate is the warning that appeared the same month [August, 1919] in the Munich-based newspaper "Neuen Zeitung", founded by Kurt Eisner. Under the headline "The soul-doctor of misery-causing capitalism", threefolding was torn apart and Steiner's followers described as people who 'yearn for an alcohol-free haze.'

Getting "witch-doctor" out of Seelendoktor ( soul-doctor) requires taking considerable creative license with the original, and the word verelendenden does not translate to 'decaying' ('misery-causing' is probably the closest approximation – the word is a creative adjective construction based on the root elend – meaning misery). Nor is it clear how this article is supposed to represent all or any of the revolutionaries of the 1919 Munich council. The author or authors of the article are not listed in Bierl's text, only the founder of the paper, Kurt Eisner, who was assassinated in February 1919, six months before the article was published. So either Peter Staudenmaier has additional sources he has failed to cite on the particulars of the article whose title he has mistranslated, or he has simply made an unsupported logical leap and simply assumed that because of the paper in which it was published, it must therefore be an official position of the entire Munich council.

There are further problems with this paragraph, which I will detail tomorrow.