by Philipp Blom
Sad prophet: Rudolf Steiner, one of
many visionaries of the day.
Anthroposophical teachings, which relegated the harsh, rigid social reality to an insignificant secondary plane, and explained the world in terms of a mystical struggle between Christ and the forces of evil incarnated by Lucifer and the Persian godhead Ahriman, were an attractive way of fleeing social constraint and the loss of orientation that many people felt during this time. The rush of technology and fast machines, after all, was nothing but Ahriman’s materialistic way of bringing immortal souls into his power. Anthroposophy had an answer to everything, and many intellectuals with a mystical bent who remained unsatisfied by wordly knowledge found its attraction irresistible. Andrei Bely fell under Steiner’s spell (his friend, the glorious Viacheslav Ivanov, succumbed to the crusty spiritual charms of Madame Blavatsky), and his influence extended into the works of the German poet Christian Morgenstern, the Russian composer Alexander Skriabin, the Swedish Nobel Laureate Selma Lagerlöf, the conductor Bruno Walter and the painter Piet Mondrian. Another, more distant admirer was Bertha von Suttner, the peace activist, who mentioned Steiner in several publications. For several years Steiner was based in Berlin, where his connections extended deep into the heart of Wilhelminian society. He was a personal friend of the chief of the general staff, Count Helmuth von Moltke (a cousin of the disgraced former governor of Berlin, Kuno von Moltke), and admired by members of the Kaiser’s government, such as its last chancellor, Prince Max von Baden.
With its ideas of historic destiny and its racist overtones, Steiner’s teaching was congenial not only to those seeking a higher truth beyond rationality, but also to the thinking of men with a conservative German background. Behind all the pyrotechnics of reincarnation, Christology and spirit realms, his philosophy of history was solidly Hegelian, a vision of progress through struggle, culminating inevitably in the dominance of a Christian, European, Aryan and, more particularly, German civilization. Along with dialectics and determinism Steiner had also imported Hegel’s ideas about the merits of other races, which were seen as representing previous stages of human development.
Opinions like these showed Steiner to be not so much a genuine initiate as a true child of his time and of his rural Austrian background. Some of his works appeared original and innovative, while others were trite and clearly borrowed. His artwork, held in the greatest reverence by his followers, was atrocious. The anthroposophical system was based on a generous amalgam of Indian mysticism, a sublimated Catholic Christianity, an expressionist aesthetic and an almost animist idea of a natural world inhabited by hidden forces close to the German, Nietzschean cult of life. All this was heavily seasoned with Hegel, with Goethe’s grandeur and rhetoric, plus a sprinkling of Kantian methodology.
Sceptical minds attending his lectures found this stew unpalatable. Hermann Hesse declared them to be ‘indigestible’; Franz Kafka reflected after one of Steiner’s lectures that he was ‘very good with words’ but also had ‘the makings of a pied piper’; and Albert Einstein scoffed: ‘the man has never heard of non-Euclidian geometry! Extra-sensual experiences! What nonsense! You have to use at least one of your senses to experience anything!’ Even a more sympathetic observer and former friend, the socialist Rosa Mayreder, wrote with obvious puzzlement: ‘I cannot understand the effect he has on people. He appears, dressed like a priest, black, buttoned up … and speaks monotonously with too much pathos and overblown effect, like a preacher. What he says can be classified in three categories: witty aphorisms taken from his wide reading, empty talk based on stock phrases, and incomprehensible hints at extra-sensory capabilities …’
The School of Life
Surveying the European scene, it is striking how unequal the interest in alternative visions of life and future was. Intense in Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia, it was much smaller in Britain and almost non-existent in France. The spread of alternative education is a case in point.
Once again, Germany with its relatively uniform, state-controlled education system, tops the table. Wilhelm’s Reich was a fertile breeding ground for methods of raising and teaching children. The phenomenally influential book The Century of the Child by the Swedish educationalist Ellen Key appeared in 1900 and was quickly translated into several languages. By 1909 it had sold more than 30,000 copies in Germany alone. Key saw children differently from most teachers and educators. Children had a right to a loving and honest upbringing without hypocrisy, constraint and physical punishment, she wrote, to an education in independence and freedom of judgement. ‘The fundamental condition for the shaping of an individual consciousness is ... to give a child the certainty of conscience to go against a general opinion, a common custom, or a familiar emotion.’ Current education, Key continued, was ‘murdering souls’, moulding children’s spirits into cowards by brutalizing and boring them. In a world in which many schoolmasters behaved like drill sergeants and the role model for schools was the army, this claim rang out like a cannon shot.
Calls like Key’s were heard by diverse educational reformers in the Reich. The conservative Hermann Lietz founded no fewer than four schools in Germany, while his pupil and later rival Gustav Wyneken made many enemies with his pamphlets against the teaching of classics and established canons, and created an experimental school based on the idea of a ‘youth culture’ of honesty and comradeship. Inspired by a similar disgust with the inhuman rush of modern life, Paul Geheeb founded two schools, the second of which, the Odenwaldschule (1910), proved extraordinarily influential. In other European countries, similar initiatives included the 1907 opening of the Casa dei Bambini by the Italian Maria Montessori, an anarchist Modern School founded in 1901 by Francisco Ferrer in Barcelona, and the orphanage Dom Sierot in Warsaw, a project of the wise and courageous Janusz Korczak. The orphanage was administered by the children themselves, who made all decisions - ranging from budgeting and curriculum to discipline - in their own, democratic parliament. In 1942, despite being offered false papers to flee the country, Korczak was murdered in Treblinka together with ‘his’ children, whom he would not abandon.
One of the most successful and most forward-looking of these school projects was the private girls’ school founded by Eugenie Schwarzwald (1872-1940) in the heart of Vienna. Wealthy, full of self-confidence and a true intellectual (she held a doctorate from Zurich University), Schwarzwald wanted to offer children an inspiring alternative to her own dreary education and so created a curriculum reflecting the world-view of Vienna’s artistic avant-garde, whose main exponents frequented her famous salon, and some of whom she persuaded to teach at her school. Adolf Loos taught architecture here; Arnold Schönberg lectured the children on music. Only the painter Oskar Kokoschka presented a problem with the authorities. He did not possess an official teaching licence and was therefore barred from teaching by the ministry. When Schwarzwald protested that he was a genius, the minister coolly replied: ‘Genius is not allowed for by regulations.’
A wealthy and intelligent woman participating energetically in Vienna’s intellectual life raised the hackles of several men, particularly the caustic and misogynist Karl Kraus, pilloried her mercilessly and almost obsessively in his journal Die Fackel. In the small world of the salons the two often crossed paths, and a conciliatory Eugenie once remonstrated with Kraus that he never seemed to remember her and would never greet her. ‘You must excuse me, Madam,’ came the reply, ‘I thought you were that dreadful Schwarzwald woman.’
In Britain the situation was much more sedate. For those in a position to choose, there had always been private schools, but the ethos enforced in these institutions fostered anything but a new, utopian world. For those with diverging ideas about education, there was a selection of faith-based schools such as those run by Quakers and Catholics. Closest to the reform movement on the Continent, and indeed an inspiration to many later schools, was Abbotsholme, founded in 1889 by the Scotsman Cecil Reddie, and Bedales, founded in 1893 by John Haden Badley as an answer t
o Victorian educational strictures.
The brilliant Stephen girls who were to become the epicentre of the Bloomsbury circle had, incidentally, never been to school at all. They were educated at home by their father, who gave them the run of his library, one of the finest in the country, which fact provides another small insight as to why there was a lack of utopian gurus and groups in England. The English alternative vision of the future, it seems, was essentially private and domestic. Grand Answers were viewed with amusement and distrust. Both Yeats and Shaw, the two London intellectuals most implicated in a mystical way of seeing the world, were Irishmen.
If a comparison with France is not really possible with regard to education, this fact is in itself significant. There were no private experimental schools in France for the simple reason that they were illegal. In 1905 and 1906 the country lived through the climax of its long battle between Church and Republic, which had ended with a near-fatal knockout for the former. Until then, many schools had been financed by the state but administered by the Catholic Church. With the passing of the bill of Separation of Church and State, however, this situation changed overnight. All schools in the Republic were now financed and administered by the state and staffed with reliable teachers trained according to Republican ideals. Alternative visions of education had no place in this new world.
Compared with its neighbour across the Rhine, France showed generally remarkably little enthusiasm for social, educational or spiritual utopias. The socialists were an important force (the pacifist engagement of Jean Jaurès springs to mind) and Paris was an obligatory station on the itinerary of every prophet and charlatan who lived, but life reform, naturism, occultism and anthroposophy had only a small following among the French themselves. Perhaps the bitter social divisions of the preceding generation go some way towards explaining this. The brutal suppression of the Paris Commune in May 1871 had not only given the conservative government an opportunity to round up ideological enemies of all stripes and either imprison or exile them, it had also left a deep scar in the nation’s psyche, a wound torn open again by the Dreyfus case. Now healing and unity under the banner of the Republic were required.
Not everybody went along with this, of course. Paris still had its legendary Bohème, a magnet for artists and eccentrics from around the world, but a gaggle of unconventional people did not add up to a vision of the future. Even those who genuinely sought alternative ways of life did so as an aesthetic or intellectual project, not as a rejection but as an adornment. André Gide through his hedonistic homosexuality, Anatole France through closely argued humanistic tracts and novels, the novelist Pierre Loti, perhaps, through celebration of life as an orientalist fantasy. There was not a single barefoot prophet or vegan redeemer of the world in sight. A vegan in Paris? The thought seems blasphemous.
The turn-of-the-century visionaries had in common that they found the present wanting not in superficial aspects but in a fundamental way which only a total rethinking of civilization could address, a radical reimagining of society and what it meant to be human. By turns joyful and cruel, Dionysus rose against the suffering Christ, Life against Science, Nature against Convention, the voice of the blood against the voice of reason, and sex against anything that would stand in its way. Inherited structures could no longer provide adequate answers to the rush of life, to the new social realities created by urban, industrial societies, consumerism, and the new self-confidence of women.
9
1908: Ladies with Rocks
At every opportunity they [men] insist on their superiority over women, cling to this fearful idea - it is the last resort of the poor wretch at the bottom of pile - for, if woman were not more stupid than he himself, who would be? - Grete Meisel-Hess
The women on the steam launch moored opposite the Houses of Parliament were in a boisterous, defiant mood as they issued their invitation to the members of the House having tea on the terrace. ‘Hyde Park 21 June’ read one of the posters held up for the parliamentarians to read. ‘Members of Parliament Specially Invited’ another. By megaphone the issuers of the invitation promised the bemused men that there would be no arrests made and that they would have plenty of police protection.
Their kind invitation fell upon deaf ears. A police boat unsuccessfully attempted to catch the intruders, and it is unlikely that any of the men on the terrace of the House of Commons even considered having a look at the goings-on on that June day. They missed a gigantic spectacle: approximately half a million people, more according to some sources, the largest physical gathering of people recorded so far, a vast sea of bodies massed in the centre of the capital. Here, on the ten platforms erected throughout the park, speakers were addressing the crowds under the watchful gaze of the organizer of the event, ‘General’ Flora Drummond, resplendent on horseback and in uniform, while forty matching bands played throughout the area to entertain the crowds. It was much like any official Edwardian occasion, but there was also one important difference: the majority of the half-million people (including the formidable General Drummond with her epaulettes and riding crop), the speakers, the members of the bands, the orderlies and organizers, were women, and they had come to demand the vote.
It was an occasion designed to impress and silence critics. The organizers, members of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), were experts at staging events guaranteed to attract publicity. In addition to the forty female bands in their grand outfits with double-breasted uniform jackets and drum majors, tens of thousands of women had appeared dressed in the Union colours of white, green and purple. They had made their way to Hyde Park in seven orderly processions from Euston Station, Trafalgar Square, the Victoria Embankment, the Chelsea Embankment, Kensington High Street, Paddington and the Marylebone Road, carrying 700 banners of 8 x 3 feet, as well as ten huge silk banners and thousands of flags. Shop windows had been decorated in WSPU colours and displayed posters demanding votes for women, buses had been transformed into mobile advertising platforms, and among the marchers converging in London were Labour leader Keir Hardie, George Bernard Shaw, the novelists Israel Zangwill and Thomas Hardy, and Amy Catherine Wells, the wife of another visionary writer, H. G. Wells. The London Daily Chronicle estimated the crowds at about 300,000; The Times at 250 to 500,000; and the journal Votes for Women trumpeted triumphantly: ‘It is no exaggeration to say that the number of people present was the largest ever gathered together on one spot anywhere in the world.’
Not all those who had chosen this warm Sunday afternoon to come to Hyde Park were devoted to the cause of women’s suffrage, indeed, many - and perhaps most - were out for a good time, as the suffragist speaker Helen Fraser recorded in her diary: ‘The 21st was very wonderful. It was successful and yet not entirely satisfactory - the crowd was about half a million ... at three platforms there was much rowdyism ... At mine, we had a splendid hearing. It seemed to me, however, that the vast mass of people were simply curious - not sympathetic - not opposed. Simply indifferent.’
Politically appealing or not, the Hyde Park meeting had succeeded beyond the suffragists’ wildest dreams. Prime Minister Asquith had long dismissed calls for women’s suffrage with the argument that he simply did not believe that many women were interested in it and it would be ridiculous to make so important a change just to appease a handful of radicals. Women, he had claimed, were simply not meant for the cut and thrust of political power: ‘their natural sphere is not the dust of politics, but the circle of social and domestic life…The inequalities…we should fight against and remove are the unearned privilege and the artificial distinction which man has made ... not the indelible differences of faculty and function by which Nature herself has given diversity and richness to human society.’ Not so, the suffragists had angrily riposted, and set themselves an ambitious goal: if 67,000 men congregating in Hyde Park in 1867 had been sufficient to topple a Reform Bill aimed at suppressing the right of political assemblies on public spaces, then they would double that number to demonstrate widesprea
d support for their campaign.
The Vote and Working Women
The 1908 Hyde Park meeting came at a turning point for the British suffragist movement, not the largest but certainly the most spectacular of all women’s rights pressure groups in Europe and the United States. After more than a decade of patient work, of handing out flyers, lobbying MPs, collecting tens of thousands of signatures, submitting petitions, fundraising, marching and holding meetings all over the country, frustration and fury were taking over from principled enthusiasm. The movement reached its spectacular apex in pre-War London, but it was not born in the capital. It descended upon the seat of government from the mill towns in the North.
The votes for women campaign had its roots in women’s rights activism and writing, from Mary Wollstonecraft in the late eighteenth century onwards, but it was the spinning and weaving industry in and around Manchester, Huddersfield, Bradford and Salford that gave these demands the necessary social weight to grow into a popular movement. More than any other industry, textile manufacture employed a high proportion of women, often in excess of half of the workforce. Around 1900, for example, three quarters of unmarried women in Blackburn, Burnley and Preston were employed, and one third carried on after marriage - a picture that contrasts starkly with northern English mining areas in which most work was done by men and was better paid than factory jobs, a pattern accompanied by a much more conservative outlook among the workers, who liked their wives to stay at home, and who typically had the largest families of all working people.
