Colonial consciousness: Rudolf Steiner's Orientalism and German cultural identity

In: Journal of European studies, Band 36, Heft 4, S. 389-417

Abstract

Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), founder of Anthroposophy and the Waldorf schools, is one of many German intellectuals who have turned to the Orient in pursuit of poetic and philosophical inspiration, and religious rejuvenation. In my paper I argue that Steiner's turn to the East is an attempt to reconstitute religious norms as a modernized, secular religion, and I show how Steiner's thought manifests a different kind of colonial discourse from the one found in state-oriented Orientalism. Steiner sought to create a new 'universal' religion for mankind, and hence a colonialism based on a psychological type purportedly outside race, class and ethnicity. Yet Steiner's occult science and the underlying Orientalism upon which he built it implicitly represent a discourse which designates Western cultural traditions as superior. As a result, Steiner's analysis of the Bhagavad Gita can be approached most likely as a source for redefining a German national identity not necessarily tied to visions of the Enlightenment state and a reconstituted understanding of human beings. Though Steiner was certainly a well-meaning humanist and would-be humanitarian, his Orientalism selectively interprets and recontextualizes cultural meaning with biased discursive purposes and thus naturalizes a colonialist world-vision in a more subtle way than assumed for Western, and more specifically German, forms of colonialism.