In the Mystery Plays he is known as Felix Balde, and is a metamorphosis of the "Man with the Lamp" in Goethe's fairy-tale.
It has often been remarked that the emergence of Rudolf Steiner from a rural family background reflected to some extent the destiny of mankind in the second half of the nineteenth century, rather as the advancing hand of a clock mirrors the passage of time. During his childhood and youth he was surrounded by the world of nature, but even then the early signs of a rising technical civilisation entered unobtrusively but decisively into his life.
At Pottschach and Neudörfl his parents lived in the stationmaster's house outside or right on the edge of the village, so that the family was somewhat isolated from the other villagers. This part of the Austrian Southern line ran through an unspoilt region where the railway still represented an innovation that was revolutionising people's lives. The big moment of the day was always when the train came in or left! The elders of the village - the mayor, the parson and the schoolmaster - would gather for the occasion. And for the stationmaster's children, too, the most important room in the building was where father sat by his morse transmitter, receiving and passing on the telegraphic messages.
The makeshift homes which the railway company provided for its employees were not intended for a settled existence. Rudolf Steiner's father was constantly being moved from one part of Lower Austria to another, so that the boy's home was constantly changing.
There was something symbolic about this, reminiscent of the way humanity has to be uprooted, when nature withdraws before the advance of civilisation.
Circumstances were such that Rudolf Steiner as a young lad experienced this transition in a very acute form. This had to do with the profound sympathy he felt for his father in all that the latter went through emotionally. In The Story of My Life he says of his father that he was not happy in his work: "He saw the work of the railway as his duty, but he had no love for it. ... Sometimes he was on duty for three days and nights at a stretch. Then he would have 24 hours off. There was nothing colourful about his life. It was a dismal grey."
This was not easy for "one with a passionate nature that was easily aroused, especially when he was a young man."
How had the father come to take up this work? The answer takes us to a turning-point, a dramatic climax, in the life of this man of peace and goodwill. His own father--Rudolf Steiner's grandfather--had been a forester all his life. His whole existence was bound up with the life of the forest, which for him meant the immense undisturbed forests north of the Danube, stretching away to the Czech border and known to this day as the Waldviertel. He was responsible for one of the big areas of forest belonging to the Hoyos family.
The whole ambition of Rudolf Steiner's father was to follow the same career. He had the job of gamekeeper, which led on to the position of forester, in the same part of the Waldviertel. The forest was his home, his world; and it was there that he would have liked to spend his whole life.
But a difficulty arose which finally compelled him to leave his native forest. He became engaged to a girl, who was also in the service of the Hoyos family at Schloss Horn, south of his own district of Geras. In those districts the old ideas of serfdom were not yet extinct, and it was on this basis that the Count was able to forbid the marriage.
It seems that the young couple waited patiently for a long time, hoping their master would change his mind. In the end the rift came suddenly, when Johann was already 32 and his fiancée 27.
No doubt approaching destiny - later to be known as Rudolf Steiner - was helping, from another world, to bring things to a head.
At short notice Johann Steiner, who had now decided to marry, had to leave his beloved forest and look around for another job. What he found was work as telegraph operator on one of the new stretches of railway that were coming into existence everywhere and creating a sudden demand for workers.
After a short time in Styria, possibly as a trainee, Johann Steiner was appointed station telegraph operator in a remote spot far away on the Croatian border.
It was a long way from his forest home in fact, one might say "right out of the world." He was married in May, 1860, and in February, 1861, Rudolf was born.
It was with dramatic violence that destiny thrust these quiet people into a homeless existence, when they left the life of the woods for the new world that was developing so rapidly with technical progress.
All the time the growing lad could feel the homesickness which gnawed at his father's soul, sometimes causing him real distress. To the end of his days the older Steiner never really got over the change. It was natural that when in the nineties he was able to retire, he and his wife went back to the Waldviertel which was their home.
In 1879, when Rudolf Steiner had finished at the Realschule in Wiener Neustadt at the age of 18, the Austrian Southern line kept its promise to his father to move him nearer Vienna to facilitate the son's further education. The family left Neudörf for the rail way town of Inzersdorf on the southern outskirts of Vienna, where the Southern line originally came to an end.
From there the young student was able, once term started, to go in every day to his lectures. Even before that, during the summer holidays before lectures began, he often went into Vienna. This was how the meeting with Felix the herb-gatherer, which was to mean so much to him, came about:
That is how I came to know an ordinary working man, who happened to go into Vienna every week on the same train as myself.Seeing him with this rural eccentric in the streets of Vienna, people would look round at them, as Felix shared his spiritual treasures with the young man, treasures that mankind has gradually lost on its odyssey through time. In the autobiographical lecture given on February 1st, 1913, at the conference marking the foundation of the Anthroposophical Society, Rudolf Steiner touched on the story of the herb gatherer:
He collected medicinal herbs in the country and sold them in Vienna to the chemists shops. We became close friends. When he spoke of the spiritual world, one realised that it was from experience, a man of deep integrity and devotion, though no scholar. True, he had read a good deal of mystical literature, but what he said was quite uninfluenced by this reading.
This was the direct product of his soul-life, in which there was an elemental creative wisdom. . . . It was as though his personality was nothing but a mouthpiece for some spiritual being that spoke from occult worlds. With him it was possible to look deep into the secrets of nature.
On his back he carried his bundle of herbs, but in his heart he carried the spiritual gifts he received from nature as he gathered his plants....
So in time I began to feel as though I was in contact with a soul from distant times, who possessed an instinctive knowledge of the past, uninfluenced by civilisation, science and present-day ideas. (The Story of my Life, pp. 39-40.)
In my first year at college, something quite special had already happened . . . a strange personality crossed my youthful path . . . despite scanty education, there was deep understanding and wisdom.Obviously the lively intercourse which Rudolf Steiner had with Felix did not take place only in the streets of Vienna, as they went from the South Station to the centre of the city. The two of them would sometimes go out together in the woods on early morning expeditions in search of herbs.
"Felix," who lived with his peasant family in a remote and lonely little village in the mountains, had his room packed with occult and mystical literature and was himself deeply imbued with such wisdom.
Everywhere in the neighbourhood of his home he collected plants of all kinds and could explain their essential nature and occult origins. There were tremendous occult depths in the man. It was remarkable what one could discuss with him, going with him on his lonely journeys. . . .
The first scene of the first Mystery Play (The Portal of Initiation) shows Felix Balde replying to Benedictus's "Your every word is more precious to me than I can say," with "It was impertinence that made me so talkative when you did me the honour of letting me accompany you on our mountain walks."
And in the rough draft, where the characters still bear the same names as in the Goethean fairytale, the "Lily" says to the "Man with the Lamp":
"He told me how he went round with you collecting herbs and how you led him into remote places, where rare flora were found growing on soil so thin that it barely covered the rock . .
On one occasion Rudolf Steiner visited Felix in his cottage in the place he called a "quiet mountain village". It was on June 22, 1919, in Stuttgart that he came to speak of this, when describing Felix once again:
There is a spot in Lower Austria from which the view of the mountains, especially at sunset, is very fine, as you look south towards the Lower Austrian Schneeberg, the Wechsel and the northern fringe of the Styrian mountains. Here there is a small unassuming cottage with the following inscription over the door: In Gottes Segen ist alles gelegen ("With the blessing of God all things are good"). I have only once been in that house, and that was as a young man. There were no outward pretensions about the man who lived there. His occupation was to go about collecting medicinal herbs, and his house was crammed with them.-"Social and Pedagogical Questions in the Light of Spiritual Science", Lecture 7
Once a week he packed up the herbs in a knapsack and travelled with them on his back to Vienna.
At that time . . . I had to follow the same route; we used to travel together to the South Station and then walk along the road leading into the Wieden district of Vienna.
This man's speech had a quite different ring from that of most people. When he spoke of the leaves on the trees or of the trees themselves, but more especially when he spoke of the marvellous intrinsic properties of his medicinal herbs, it became apparent how closely this man's soul was bound up with the whole spirit of that part of the countryside.
He was in his own particular way a great sage...
Apart from the herbs with which his little cottage was crammed, he had quite a library of notable books of all kinds--which had this in common, that their principal features were related to the principal features and fundamental character of his own soul. He was not well off. There was not much money to be made from the trade in herbs, which had been collected in the mountains- -in fact very, very little. But his face bore an expression of deep contentment and he possessed great wisdom.
Everything Dr. Steiner said about the herb-gatherer suggested that there was some mystery surrounding his personality. It was particularly after he became well-known as Felix Balde and was seen on the stage in the mystery plays in that guise, merging with Goethe's " Man with the Lamp" that he became a veritably mythical figure.
The question of discovering some actual place where Felix had lived and whether anything could still be traced about the man himself was therefore approached with some hesitation.
However, some friends did try to find out where the herb-gatherer had lived and what his name was in real life. For a long time it was definitely understood that his name was Felix Krakotzki and that he lived in Münchendorf, a quiet village near Laxenburg in the Hungarian Plain south of Vienna. This is the report I had in my hands in the forties: "Count Polzer, Dr. Emil Hamburger and Dr. Walter Johannes Stein were in Münchendorf in 1919. A cobbler called Scharinger said Felix took messages to Vienna for a textile firm and collected herbs. He was the only person they found who had known Felix. He spoke of Felix as "a jolly fellow and a great one for telling jokes in the inn. He had two sons, one of whom rented a farm near Münchendorf in 1919. The other was a gamekeeper on the estate of Count Hoyos near Gutenstein."
These three friends, leading figures in the Anthroposophical Society, intended to follow up their enquiries in the church registers but gave up on being told that all particulars had been destroyed.
I was never able to understand their being put off so easily. Why, I wondered, did they not try and get in touch with one of the sons, who were said to be still alive? In 1950 I had the opportunity to visit Münchendorf myself. Unfortunately my visit had to be a very short one, as I had risked going without a passport into what was at that time still the Russian zone. I thought I might trace something not only of Felix but of Johannes Wurth, the village schoolmaster in Lower Austria, to whom Dr. Steiner had, without giving his name, made some striking allusions in the year 1919.
Down in one of the back cottages of the village I came across a headmaster's widow, then aged ninety. These villages are built in the Hungarian manner.
They consist of rows of single-storey houses stretching to right and left along the main street. On passing through the gateway of one of these low buildings you find yourself in an alley at right angles to the main street; and here there are once again cottages to right and left.
The old lady had quite a lot to say about Johannes Wurth. although he had died as far back as 1870. She herself was a headmaster's daughter and had married her father's predecessor. Before long she was telling me of the detailed record which her father had kept of events in Münchendorf. This chronicle had recently disappeared. She encouraged me to have a search for it and gave me the names of several very old villagers, who would be able to help me. We should be sure, she thought, to find everything there that we needed..
Finally I asked her about the herb-gatherer, Felix. She remembered him at once: "Yes, old Felix, he often used to come over to us in the evenings, Sundays especially; and after that he would sit in the inn with the men from the village." When I asked where he would have come from, at first she could not say. After a time she said she thought he must have come from Laxenburg.
This was the first hint that Münchendorf was not after all the home of the herb-gatherer. But all further enquiries undertaken by friends at that time were fruitless.
During the years that followed, interest grew in Felix, and in the unresolved questions relating to his life. It turned out that the church registers for Münchendorf as well as for Laxenburg and the immediate surroundings had beem preserved intact; but there was no trace of anybody called Felix Krakotzki. There was one point on which all who took part in these enquiries were in agreement:
Münchendorf in no way fitted the description Dr. Steiner gave of Felix's home. In the first place it was not a "mountain village " as it lay in the broad plain known as the "Wiener Becken". Secondly, there was surely no question there of seeing the mountains clearly of which Dr. Steiner had spoken, the wonderful formations of the Schneeberg, Rax and Wechsel in their sunset colouring.
No further progress was made until the beginning of 1958, when preparations were under way for bringing out the Pädagogische Seminar lectures given by Dr. Steiner in 1919 at the foundation of the Waldorf School. A clue emerged that had been overlooked.
In previous editions sentences had often been omitted, if they were not easy to read in the original notes. It now turned out that one such sentence referred to the home of the herb-gatherer:
Recently I had occasion to explain that the man Felix lived in Trumau.It suddenly became clear that Dr. Steiner had himself said where Felix lived-at Trumau. Nobody had taken in this fact before.
The name of the old cobbler, who knew the archetype of Felix Balde, was Scharinger from Münchendorf. Felix is still a living tradition in those parts. All the characters to be found in my Mystery Plays are actual individuals.
Trumau is only 6 km. south of Münchendorf and has just the same character.
The publication of this passage from the Pädagogische Seminar threw into sharp relief the whole question of how Münchendorf had
ever come to be regarded as Felix's home; also why those friends who were in Münchendorf in 1919 had dropped their enquiries with such astonishing alacrity. The fact was that they were not really in Münchendorf on account of the herb-gatherer. They were there primarily for something quite different.
In the lecture given by Dr. Steiner in Stuttgart on June 22, 1919, referring to the visit he had once paid to Felix's humble home, he had gone on to speak of another visit he had paid. The impression given was that both took place in the same village, if not in adjoining cottages:
When speaking of the visit I paid to my good friend Felix in his little cottage, I had to think of how at the same time I looked up the widow of the schoolmaster in her home. Although her husband had died some years before, I Visited her because this Lower Austrian schoolmaster was a most interesting person. His widow still had the fine library he had assembled. There one could find all that German scholarship had collected and recorded about the German language and the content of myths and legends, for the invigoration of the German people. Until his dying day the opportunity never came for this solitary schoolmaster to emerge into the limelight.
It was
only after his death that extracts from his literary remains were published.
But I have still not been able to see the leogthy journals
kept by this lonely schoolmaster, in which are to be found pearls of wisdom. I do not know what has become of them.
Among the audience at this lecture were some of the leaders and principal speakers in the movement for the Threefold Common-wealth, then in full swing. The audience also included those who were being considered for the College of Teachers in the Waldori School, Stuttgart, prior to its foundation. Among them was the enthusiastic but temperamental Dr. Walter Johannes Stein.
It will have been especially DI. Stein who took Dr. Steiner's reference to the notebooks of the schoolmaster in Lower Austria as a request to procure these for him. After the lecture he may well have gone up to Dr. Steiner with the words: " We shall get hold of these journals for you, Hert Doktor." Dr. Steiner must have told him that the schoolmaster's name was Johannes Wurth and that his last home was Münchendorf.
It was therefore the journals of Johannes Wurth, who died in 1870, that Dr. Stein, Dr. Hamburger and Count Polzer were looking for in those weeks that followed the conference-and not for Felix the herb-gatherer. They were successful. When lectures were resumed in Stuttgart, they were able to hand over to Dr. Steiner the comprehensive four-volume journal. (The entries proved to be less rewarding than had been expected. Copies of them are to be found in Dornach.) When the friends proudly handed over their find, they were also able to report that they had come across traces of the herb-gatherer in Münchendorf.
reference to the chance discoveries which these friends had made of traces of Felix occurred in the course of the same seminar lecture in which Dr. Steiner mentioned the name, Trumau. This lecture was not given until August 26, 1919. When Dr. Stein and the others were in Münchendorf, they must have been under the impression that Felix's surname was Krakotzki.
When Dr. Steiner mentioned Trumau, he had obviously wanted to correct the impression that Felix, like Johannes Wurth, had lived in Münchendorf. For some reason or other no attention was paid to this allusion at the time. Probably the name of the village was not taken in. At any rate, it was not recorded accurately in the shorthand notes.
When this allusion came to light and was clearly deciphered recently, I asked friends to see to it that the enquiries which had proved fruitless in Münchendorf were followed up in Trumau.
The first result was that Dr. Steiner's description of the place as a quiet mountain village, and of the view away to the mountains in the south, seemed to suit Trumau no better than Münchendort.
Nor. could the name Krakotzki be traced among the lists of in-habitants, though names of Czech or Polish origin were to be found there, as in Münchendorf and throughout the surrounding countryside.
I became more and more inclined to think that we were not ma in of enquiries, so dealin Feel i Pould detra te to
the nythology that had grown-up around the personality of the herb-gatherer—a mythology justifed by the marvellous soul qualities which he had undoubtedly possessed. The consequence was that when I had to go to Vienna for a fortnight in the autumn of 1958, I had given up all thought of continuing my search for traces of Felix.
My first morning in Vienna was unexpectedly free. I went out to Mödling for the sake of the view from those hills; and thus to renew my experience of the landscape's unique character. In front ot me lay the western end of the broad Hungarian plain, known as the "Wiener Becken". If you wish to understand Vienna, you must get to know this country. Rudolf Steiner has connected the fact that so many musicians lived and composed in Vienna with the character of the Wiener Becken, which is a veritable geological storehouse.]
The hills above Mödling belong to the "Wiener Wald", which stretches away to the west of the Hungarian plain, forming a northern spur of the Alps. These would be the mountains Dr.
Steiner was referring to, the Hohe Wand, Schneeberg, Rax and
Wechsel, that could be seen from Felix's home suffused in the evening light.
To the east, the flat Wiener Becken is bounded by the Rosalie and Leitha Mountains, which form the foothills of the range that eventually, north of the Danube, turns into the Carpathians. The Hungarian plain between the Wiener Wald and the Leitha Mountains is formed by an ancient subsidence. A deep and extensive cleft must have come into existence there in Atlantean—or maybe even in Lemurian-times. This will have been submerged, so that a kind of sea-water flooded the whole triangular area between the limestone complex of the Alps and the Carpathians and extended far into Hungary. South of where Vienna now stands, the waters dried up, giving the area its characteristic geology. Even to-day the district seems possessed of an imperishable secret that fills one with a sense of wonder.
It was misty when I stood on the hills above Mödling. The outlines of the hills and mountains in the east could be sensed rather than actually seen; yet the special character of the countryside made itself felt.
I was already on my way home when, in Traiskirchen, near Baden, I came across a signpost saying: "Trumau 5 Km." The idea of making this little digression attracted me, as I had never been in Trumau. That was the end of the resolution I had half mace not to follow up any further the history of Felix the herb-gatherer.
A quite unpretentious village, lying among flat green fields in this vast plain, Trumau had a strange fascination for me. I felt that never before had I experienced the hidden secret of the Hungarian plain so distinctly.
On entering the village, I was at once directed to an old farmer, named Hörbinger, who was said to be an authority on local history.
When he emerged from his low-built steading, covered from head to foot in dirt, he at once agreed that he knew a house in the village with the inscription over the door: In Gottes Segen ist alles gelegen.
He thought the house had needed buttressing and was therefore completely altered. However, he let himself be bundled into the car without any cleaning up in order to show us the house. There was in fact nothing left of the inscription; and it turned out afterwards that Felix had not lived there. Then the farmer had an idea:
"Old Steinhauser lives just round the corner. He is 93 and must have known the fellow you are looking for. He is practically stone deaf and a bit weak in the head, but there is no harm in paying him a visit."
The old man, pitifully shrivelled and bent, was sitting over his midday meal with his family. The room was very small. I sat down next to him and shouted one or two questions into his ear.
He kept asking again and again, cupping his ear right up against my mouth: "Hey? Hey?" it was obvious he could understand
nothing. Then suddenly a strange thing happened: the old man let his head fall right forward and, long drawn-out, as though echoing from a deep well, these words emerged: "Aye, old Kogutzki, his name was Felix."
Now we suddenly had a name to go on. Our friend Hörbinger exclaimed in astonishment: "Yes, old man Kogutzki's grave is in the churchyard." It was getting quite exciting. Back we went to the car and off to the churchyard. We could not find the grave at once, but then another farmer was able to help us—by now the whole village was involved - and immediately by the gate on the right, a little hidden in the corner, we found the words: " Here lies Felix Koguzki, died 1909 in his 76th year." Now we knew that Felix was born in 1833. We had certainly got on to the tracks of the herb-gatherer.
A few minutes later we were sitting round the table in the inn with quite a crowd of old men. The air buzzed with jokes and anecdotes, mostly concerned, however, not with Felix but with his sons, with whom these old farmers had grown up. At the office of the parish council we were able (although it was not a working day) to ascertain from documents that Felix Kogutzki had five sons, of whom one of the survivors was actually in Vienna.
One thing emerged fairly soon from the old men's gossip round the table. Although it was known for a fact that Felix's principal occupation had for long been that of herbalist (Dürrkräutler), it transpired that in the course of time he had to try to earn a living in many different ways, especially as his boys grew older. He wore out the soles of his shoes travelling as agent for various businesses: and both he and his wife took work in the factories. At weddings he accompanied the dancing on his accordion and sometimes acted as organist in the church.
One of the old men called Felix a "scholar". He did not mean that Felix had had any higher education or had been to a university,
Jacob's sons used to say of their brother Joseph: "Behold this dreamer cometh!" In spite of the peculiar regard felt for him and the esteem in which he was held by the people of Trumau, by and large they had no feeling that there was anything very special about Felix.
strangely enough, everybody maintained that Felix and his family did not live in a mean little cottage, but in a large well-bulft house that belonged to the "castle". It turned out later that Felix did in fact move in the year 1883, after the birth of four of his children, into the bigger house. On the first floor of this house we were shown the room, admittedly not very spacious, which served for a long time as living-room and bedroom for the family of seven.
In spite of these poor living conditions, Felix succeeded in starting
his sons off in steady middle-class professions._ Of the two oldest, Felix Anton became a forester and Anton Felix a bookseller.
Immanuel, the youngest, also became a forester, while the middle one, Gottfried, became an official in the Vienna criminal courts.
By now it had gone 2 o'clock, as it was nearly midday when we got to Trumau. I had to be in Vienna at a quarter to four, so that we had to leave these good people, with whom a very friendly understanding had grown up. As we started on our hurried journey home, there was a happy conclusion to our exciting morning's discoveries. The sun broke through the mist and all of a sudden we could see far away to the south, in very faint outline, the Schneeberg, with its characteristic rounded summit, as well as the long line of the Hohe Wand. This proved to us that Dr. Steiner's description of the southern mountains, which he could see from Felix's house in the evening light, did in fact apply to Trumau, despite all appearances to the contrary. The fleeting fairylike glimpse of the distant mountains convinced me that we were here dealing with a matter of special significance in Dr. Steiner's life.
In Vienna, on the following day, the problem was to find Richard Kogutzki, Felix's second youngest son. We finally discovered him in Floridsdorf, an out-of-the-way industrial suburb, to which he had alvag jet ed to yea jokini say. he people of huma
(der Linken), because he had tried unsuccessfully as a young man to study law-i.e., to become a "doctor of the right" or "of law" (der Rechte).
We found a pathetic little man of 76, emaciated and bent with worry, but with bright eyes. At first I had to support him with my arm, as he had difficulty in moving
and finally, when I had shown him the passage about his father in Dr. Steiner's Story of My Life, he pranced about the room like a small child.
His wife had died only a few weeks before and his connection with her had been, and in fact still was, a very close one. She copied pictures, and the charming manner in which she did this, and the deep feeling she brought to the task, as well as to her original landscapes, made one profoundly conscious of her presence.
The walls of the room in which he lived were covered with her pictures.
To begin with I simply let old Richard Kogutzki tell his own story. At first he had difficulty in finding words to express what he meant. One could see that, although his life had derived a sense of security from his father's remarkable qualities, he had never really been fully conscious of them. Probably he had never given much thought to his father's astonishing personality, or to its
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Thank you for this opportunity to get to know what Emil Bock wrote about those experiences in dear Rudolf Steiner's life.
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