REFERENCES
TO THE FOURTH GERMAN EDITION
The basis for the text: The course was taken
down in short-hand by the professional shorthand writer Helene Finckh
(1883–1963) and then written out in longhand. The Stuttgart lecture
of October 28, 1922, which is included as the eighth lecture, was probably
taken down by participants. There is no shorthand report.
For the
first edition (manuscript of lectures 1–6) the material was arranged
by the curative eurythmist Elisabeth Baumann-Dollfus.
For the second
edition (manuscript of lectures 1–6, with the addition of lecture
7) the first publication was revised by Isabella de Jaager.
For the
third edition (first edition in the complete works) the publisher, Dr.
Hans W. Zbinden, used Helene Finckh's original shorthand notes as a
reference.
The present
(fourth) edition is an unaltered impression of the third edition, the
only additions being the summary of the contents and the subject index.
Concerning lectures 7 and 8:
The lecture
of April 18, 1921, which was included as the seventh lecture of this
course, was given in connection with the so-called second doctors' course
and is contained in the volume “The Spiritual Scientific Aspect
of Therapy”. In that context Rudolf Steiner refers to this lecture
by saying “After a short pause we shall continue by going more
in the direction of eurythmy.”
The lecture
given in Stuttgart on October 28, 1922, and which has been included
in this course as the eighth lecture, was given in connection with the
“Medical Week” held in Stuttgart from October 26–28,
1922, (see “Anthroposophical Approach to Medicine”). The
lecture has been published in the present volume only, however.
How the course came about and the ladies to whom the abbreviations
“Frau B. and Frl. W.” refer:
Frau B.
is Elisabeth Baumann-Dollfus (1895–1947) who actively participated in
the development of eurythmy as from the summer of 1913. Later on she
was the first eurythmy teacher at the Independent Waldorf School in
Stuttgart, and she was an active member of the curative eurythmy
course.
Frl. W. is
Erna van Deventer, née Wolfram (1894–1976), one of the first
eurythmists, and, together with Elisabeth Baumann, an active member
of the curative eurythmy course. In a memorial essay of the year 1961
in the periodical “Blätter für Anthroposophie” she
makes the following reference to it:
“I
have two rather faded pieces of paper in front of me; one is a small
drawing of the curve of Cassini and the other is a postcard dated February
1921 from Dr. Roman Boos
[ 1 ]
in Dornach. Two modest
pieces of paper, and yet they are almost the only visible testimonies
of the events that led up to the curative eurythmy course that Dr. Steiner
gave in Dornach in the Spring of 1921 alongside the second doctors'
course.
If I want
to go back in memory to the time when Dr. Steiner gave the first
therapeutic eurythmy exercises I have to go much further back than 1921.
As early as 1915 and even earlier Dr. Steiner gave me, and probably other
eurythmy teachers too, in answer to our questions, various eurythmy
exercises for speaking, and hints for using in special cases we had
encountered in towns all over Germany. The expression curative eurythmy
did not even exist then, and Dr. Steiner called these exercises
“therapeutic” eurythmy and said that these arose out of the
Greek Mysteries. This remark will perhaps show how earnest Dr. Steiner
was even at that time about healing by means of eurythmy movements, and
it will also show how deeply it was impressed upon the consciousness of
us still very young teachers that “healing” is connected
with “holy”,
and that our movements in this therapeutic eurythmy would really have
to be carried by “the will to heal” if we wanted to achieve
any success with this therapy. (Dr. Steiner did not coin the expression
“the will to heal” until later; it was actually on the occasion
of our asking him for advice, in 1923–24, whereupon he entered into
our problems and gave the course for young medical students.)
Anyone
who worked with Dr. Steiner in any way will remember that everything
he gave was in answer to a question, a wish, or sometimes even a vague
aspiration that came his way. It was the same with curative eurythmy.
For instance two children with speech defects were brought to him, and
he gave what we would later on have called “curative eurythmy
exercises”. In 1919 I met a child with curvature of the spine.
Dr. Steiner entered
into my questions very thoroughly and gave me the help I warned. I could
give lots more examples like this. Yet at the same time I myself was
also learning, in the course of giving lessons, to observe people, and
I learnt to unite the various phenomena I observed in a person, and
to become aware of how many people actually in the numerous eurythmy
courses round about were in need of help.
... During
those years I often met Elisabeth Baumann-Dollfus, who was also one
of the first eurythmists, and a deep love for the work we shared united
us for many years. In 1919, after the end of the First World War, we
encountered one another again when the Waldorf School was being founded.
So we began to exchange our experiences, she being a teacher at the
Waldorf School where she worked with Dr. Schubert's remedial class,
and I being a eurythmist who in the course of the year gave eurythmy
courses in almost all the big towns in Germany, and I had the privilege
when I was in Stuttgart of standing in for Frau Baumann at the Waldorf
School when she was ill. We each had much joy in the other, because
we were aware of our common bond. We were both searching for the same
thing, and what were we looking for? The healing element in
or behind eurythmy!
This was
one of the threads of destiny that hound us together. The other one
was my engagement and marriage to H.A.R. van Deventer, who was himself
a doctor, and who approached eurythmy from a background of medicine
with the same enthusiasm that we approached medicine from a background
of eurythmy. And what gave rise to it? The natural science course in
Stuttgart at Christmas 1920/21.
Frau Baumann
and I went to this course — more as visitors really — since
we could not understand a lot of what Dr. Steiner was saying, and as
eurythmists we hardly even belonged to that enlightened gathering of
students and scholars! But — even if we did not understand it
all with our intellect — our enthusiasm for the astronomical drawings
made up for it. And one day Dr. Steiner drew something on the blackboard
that made us fall on top of one another and nearly jump into the air,
and that was the curve of Cassini.
This was
the external occurrence that we needed to make us aware that
the paths of the stars and the flow of forces within us, both
sprang from the same source! For this curve of Cassini that Dr. Steiner
was now describing in connection with natural science and astronomy,
why, we eurythmists knew it too! As early as 1915, in the White Room
of the old Goetheanum, Dr. Steiner had given four to six eurythmy teachers
a series of lessons, and on this occasion he taught us “children's
forms, good for children and young people from the age of three to eighty,
to stop their thoughts scattering”. Those were his words, and one
of these forms was the curve of Cassini, to the words “We will
seek one another, we feel near one another, we know one another
well”.
In 1915
we young people did not have the least idea why he gave this form as
a pedagogical exercise, in fact we hardly knew the “Why” of
any of the eurythmy teaching material — and to be honest do we
know it that much better today? And yet it should be our task to pass
not only the exercises but also the “Why” on to our successors.
The only way to do this seems to be that in the eurythmy of the future
we must separate truth from error, and the source of eurythmy from a
watering down of it.
This experience
of “recognizing” such an apparently insignificant form was
what drew me to Elisabeth Baumann and what caused her and my husband
to sit together for hours discussing the problem “If this form
which Dr. Steiner was illustrating in the natural science course is
so important for both macrocosmic man and microcosmic man, then does
not everything given us in eurythmy come from the same source, and should
it not be applicable for healing?” For just as with the curve of
Cassini, we had also over the years learnt about the cosmic
and the human healing effect of vowels, for instance AUM. Our
experience of the curve of Cassini was really only the corner-stone
of the building of our surmises and experiences in the realm of
eurythmy!
But how
was it to be done? How were we to acquire a knowledge of “therapeutic
eurythmy”? What we knew up till then — Elisabeth Baumann
and I — were only small building stones that Dr. Steiner had given
us on occasion. Through the fact that my husband supported us in our
ideas, as a doctor — he had done quite a lot of eurythmy himself
and could understand and support our endeavours from both the medical
and the eurythmic side — this gave us courage to ask Dr. Steiner
whilst he was still in Stuttgart whether he would like to teach us a
kind of therapeutic eurythmy in a systematic way just like he had taught
us ordinary eurythmy. Dr. Steiner was very kind, looked at us somewhat
astonished at our bold plans, and said he would discuss the matter further
with my husband in Holland, and then we would hear.
And thus
it happened. Dr. Steiner was in Holland at the beginning of 1921, and
as my husband had a strong connection with our work through his medical
studies, he had a good deal of opportunity to talk with Dr. Steiner.
Frau Baumann was in Stuttgart at the time and I was in Breslau, but
we had both set down our wishes very clearly in writing and sent them
to my husband (He was still my fiance then). At any rate I)r. Steiner
asked him one day in Holland “Do you actually have some eurythmists
who would really put their backs into therapeutic eurythmy?” —
to which my husband replied “Yes indeed, two at present, Frau Baumann
and my future wife”. “Then we can start with it” said
Dr. Steiner, and instructed my husband to do the necessary organizing.
This brings
me back to the beginning, for the little drawing was the “curve
of Cassini” which came from an evening's discussion with Dr. Steiner,
and the faded postcard from Roman Boos was his announcement from Domach
to say that the “Curative Eurythmy Course” (Dr. Steiner had
now coined the name) was due to take place in Dornach at the beginning
of April, along with the second doctor's course, that was also due to
be given then.
In an
article for the periodical “Beiträge zu einer Erweiterung
der lleilkunst nach Geisteswissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen” (1971,
volume 4) headed “Curative Eurythmy: 1921–71. Its Origins,
Development and Task” she describes the following:
During
the second doctors' course, from April 12 to 17, 1921, Dr. Steiner gave
the curative eurythmy course in six lectures, for doctors, and also
for eurythmists who had been training for more than two years. Not one
of us could imagine what the course would be like! Dr. Steiner stood
on the platform, and Frau Baumann and 1, sitting on two chairs in front
of it, felt very uncomfortable, for we had instigated the situation,
and in the meantime, from February till April, we had heard no word
from Dr. Steiner as to how he would establish this new branch of medical
science with the likes of us, who had not the slightest preparatory
training in the realm of medicine!
We certainly
did not have the necessary knowledge for curative eurythmy work —
would it not have been much more practical and sensible for Dr. Steiner to
have chosen a small group of doctors for this work? Or did Frau Baumann
and I, being eurythmists, really bring something with us out of our
past that seemed important to him? In the instructions he gave me shortly
after the course, about the training necessary for curative eurythmy,
I had my answer.
He answered
our question by saying “The prerequisite for the curative eurythmy
profession is that you first of all know the whole foundation of artistic
eurythmy, in theory and practice. You must he capable of performing
a dramatic poem on the stage, for example “der Zauberlehrling”
(sorcerer's apprentice) by Goethe, and carry out all the eurythmic
indications for word meaning and sentence construction, with all the
forms and postures you have learnt. Not until you have mastered all the
aspects of artistic eurythmy are you ready to change over to curative
eurythmy. He made it clear to us that we would first of all have to
master all the possibilities
of artistic eurythmy, be able to find them in the cosmos as the forces
of the planets and the fixed stars, then in their reflection in human
speech and music, then through movements of the human body itself, and
in this way we would get to know the human being, that is, ourselves,
as beings who reflect macrocosm and microcosm in our own body. Not until
we had grasped our situation and task would we be able to advance from
the periphery of eurythmy to the centre of the healing aspect of eurythmy.
Yet “first of all you must know the periphery, and then you can
move on to the centre of man!” What a perspective for us, who had
already been actively engaged in artistic and pedagogical eurythmy for
eight years, though more in a practical way, and by learning from doing
it rather than filling it with our consciousness. The vowels, consonants,
parts of speech, rhymes — how much more significant they now appeared
to be!
...What
a eurythmist should know was also clearly defined by Dr. Steiner telling
me what and how I would have to learn from my husband's textbooks, the
“Spalteholz”
[ 2 ]
and the textbook by Professor Broesicke
[ 3 ]
of Breslau.
Dr. Steiner
told us this shortly after the curative eurythmy course, so that it
was with a deep feeling of responsibility that we took our departure
from Dornach.
Notes:
1. Head of the Dornach
administration at that time.
2. Prof. W. Spatcholz of the
University of Leipzig, February 1914
3. Prof. Dr. Gustav Broesicke,
Breslau 1920
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