Rudolf Steiner

Childhood and education

Steiner's father, Johann(es) Steiner (1829–1910), left a position as a gamekeeper in the service of the House of Hoyos in Geras, Austria, to marry one of the Hoyos family's housemaids - Franziska Blie (1834–1918), a marriage for which the count had refused his permission. Johann became a telegraph operator on the Southern Austrian Railway, and at the time of Rudolf's birth was stationed in now-Donji Kraljevec in the Međimurje (Muraköz) region of the Kingdom of Hungary, Austrian Empire. In the first two years of Rudolf's life, the family moved twice, first to Mödling, near Vienna, and then, through the promotion of his father to stationmaster, to Pottschach, located in the foothills of the eastern Austrian Alps in Lower Austria.

Steiner entered the village school, but following a disagreement between his father and the schoolmaster, he was briefly educated at home. In 1869, when Steiner was eight years old, the family moved to the village of Neudörfl and in October 1872 Steiner proceeded from the village school there to the realschule in Wiener Neustadt.

In 1879, the family moved to Inzersdorf to enable Steiner to attend the Vienna Institute of Technology, where he enrolled in courses in mathematics, physics, chemistry, botany, zoology, and mineralogy and audited courses in literature and philosophy, on an academic scholarship from 1879 to 1883. He completed his studies and the requirements of the Ghega scholarship satisfactorily. In 1882, one of Steiner's teachers, Karl Julius Schröer, referred Steiner to Joseph Kürschner, chief editor of a new edition of Goethe's works. Kürschner asked Steiner to become the edition's natural science editor, a truly astonishing opportunity for a young student without any form of academic credentials or previous publications. Before attending the Vienna Institute of Technology, Steiner had studied Immanuel Kant, Fichte and F. W. J. Schelling. According to Gary Lachman, "the general consensus on Goethe's scientific musings as this point was that they were useless as science and dreary as literature; in truth, no one else wanted the job of editing them."

Political engagement and social agenda

Steiner became a well-known and controversial public figure during and after World War I. In response to the catastrophic situation in post-war Germany, he proposed extensive social reforms through the establishment of a Threefold Social Order in which the cultural, political and economic realms would be largely independent. Steiner argued that a fusion of the three realms had created the inflexibility that had led to catastrophes such as World War I. In connection with this, he promoted a radical solution in the disputed area of Upper Silesia, claimed by both Poland and Germany. His suggestion that this area be granted at least provisional independence led through a misunderstanding to his being publicly accused of being a traitor to Germany. The attack was based upon the misunderstanding that Steiner would have stated that Germans have to abstain from the referendum deciding the fate of that piece of land. He promptly informed the newspaper that that was not his intention. He originally meant that independence allowed that region to remain under the German sphere of influence.

Steiner opposed Wilson's proposal to create new European nations based around ethnic groups, which he saw as opening the door to rampant nationalism. Steiner proposed, as an alternative:

'social territories' with democratic institutions that were accessible to all inhabitants of a territory whatever their origin while the needs of the various ethnicities would be met by independent cultural institutions.

Two Marxist–Leninist German politicians say Steiner was racist and reactionary.