What anthroposophism means to my family and what it meant to Clara and Ernst Lehrs

It feels very much as if it belongs to the New Age. It’s a little creepy when you read works by and about Rudolf Steiner and he uses word such as the “astral body” and the “etheric body” and he talks of his own reincarnation that actually should have happened somewhere in the United States in 2002. I find myself asking where is that ten or eleven-year old and what is s/he doing now? Do I really believe this happens?

And yet. If one takes out the strange language, a lot of what Steiner says in his various lectures, particularly those about education, makes an awful lot of sense. 

The first Waldorfschule, as Steiner schools are known in Germany, was built at Stuttgart. Ernst Lehrs taught there. He and Clara Lehrs built a house nearby which offered accommodation to students during the week. Later that house, the very house after which this blog is named,   would accommodate and protect a class of disabled children with severe learning difficulties. In 1973 I visited the school. The family of my mother-in-law’s best friend attended. I was taken there by the two daughters of the well-known architect, Gűnter Behnisch. Being an award-winning architect does not preclude you from sending your children to a Steiner School. Not many private schools are tolerated in Germany. The Steiner education system is.   

Nothing seemed particularly strange at the school. It was in a leafy suburb of Stuttgart.  As far as I could tell, it taught the normal range of subjects in quite small classes. I’ve been in British education system since 1974 – until 2006 at secondary level and now in higher education. What I and others consider good practice – as opposed to some crazy tick-box hurdles – always seems to line up with what happen in the Steiner schools. The latter don’t seem to have any tick-box craziness.          

My mother-in-law, Renate Edler, attended the Michael Hall Steiner School in London and during World War II was evacuated with them to Minehead. I tell her story in my novel Potatoes in Spring in my blog of the same name. My husband’s parents considered Steiner education for him and we also considered it for our children. In the end, because we all wanted out children to remain in the main stream, because we didn’t know how we would pay the fees and because of the practicalities of getting the children to school, we decided against it.

Ernst Lehrs had fought in World War I.  He became an officer. He came home disillusioned with society. He continued his studies in the natural sciences and obtained his doctorate in 1923.  But he found some of the experiments he had to do tedious and meaningless, despite the excitement in physics at the time because of the discoveries of Albert Einstein and Max Planck. Steiner offered him a spiritual perspective and a common sense approach to science.

Clara Lehrs was born into a Jewish family. She and husband Ernst became protestant at the beginning of the 20^th century. She also became an anthroposophist later and her faith in this sustained her through many of the horrors of the Holocaust. She was resistant at first. She couldn’t quite believe what Steiner offered and it was most likely her intimate relationship with her son that persuaded her to help him and the organisation generally. By the time she was living amongst the Rexingen Jews towards the end of her life she was wholly convinced and used her own faith to help others.                                 

   

A few physicists and anthroposophists in the 1920s

Many changes about the way we look at physics came to a head in the 1920s. Albert Einstein was consolidating his theory of relativity. Ernest Rutherford helped us to understand about the fundamental make-up of matter. Max Plank and Albert Einstein were questioning some previous assumptions how radioactivity and light behaved. Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding. The most important even in 20^th century science happened in the 1920s – quantum mechanics was born. Throughout the 1920s Robert Millikan confirmed that “cosmic radiation” existed. Towards the end of the 1920s Ernest Orlando Lawrence conceived the cyclotron. Possibly rocket science, both the discipline and the word, were also born at this time. Werner Heisenberg, already a scholar when quantum mechanics appeared in the early 1920s, by then was working towards his principle of uncertainty.

The Lehrs family rubbed shoulders with these physicists. Käthe was taught by Einstein and by the man she later married, Hans Edler. Rudi and Ernst would have come across some of the others as they pursued their studies in Berlin and Jena. Ernst Lehrs found himself at a conference in Stuttgart with Edwin Schrődinger. Schrődinger worked in Stuttgart for a while  and attended the same conference as Lehrs. Anthroposophism met head on with physics.

Rudolf Steiner, anyway, became well known for his clarity of vision. Physics was almost becoming mystical. Steiner seemed to concede that what the physicists were claiming was naturally true – and had been all along. We may these days find his lecture “Concerning Electricity” somewhat naïve. But for war-damaged and by-the-new-physics-confused Ernst Lehrs, and several other young men of his generation, Steiner was offering that something extra and a sense of home. By February 1923 he was forming his youth movement of which Ernst would become a part. We should remember that Steiner also had studied maths and physics and was particularly interested Goethe’s scientific papers, especially those dealing with colour.   

What most impressed Ernst Lehrs was the invitation from Steiner to think intuitively rather than discursively. The physicists anyway were turning the known and trusted science on its head and in fact suggesting something less natural and a little more esoteric. Why not, then, trust a master of spiritual matters more? At least he was one grounded in scientific discipline.   

World War II took its toll. Käthe used most of energy in getting herself and her daughter away from Germany but still kept an interest in science which she passed on to her daughter. Einstein went to America in 1933, where he found respect for relativity and never came back to Germany. Hans Edler became involved in designing the doodle-bug and the V2. British and American scientists built the first atom bomb. Ernst Lehrs, prevented from teaching in a German school because of his Jewish blood, went to Holland and then England as an anthroposophist rather than as a scientist.