Herr Doktor has rambled

This is the first volume of Rudolf Steiner's controversial work "The Karma of Untruthfulness". The work contains lectures by Steiner held at Dornach in Switzerland in December 1916 and January 1917. Steiner was the founder and leader of the Anthroposophists, a new religious movement. Its international head office was (and still is) located at Dornach.

In the lectures, Steiner expressed strong support for the Central Powers in World War I. In fact, he blamed the entire war (including the German invasion of neutral Belgium) on Great Britain, especially the British foreign secretary Grey. After the German defeat and the spread of Anthroposophy to Britain and other Allied nations, Steiner's pro-German stance became an acute embarrassment, and his lecture series was therefore virtually classified by the leadership at Dornach. Steiner died in 1925, but his widow Marie von Sivers didn't hand over the lectures to the Dornach archives until 1948, and even then access was strictly limited. Even when "The Karma of Untruthfulness" was finally published, it was in German only, with an English translation lagging behind with several decades. The present edition (2005) is the second English-language translation, and the first which wholeheartedly endorses Steiner's anti-British stances and conspiracy theories about secret Masonic brotherhoods plotting the war, etc.

The relevant material on World War I can be found in the second volume, and in the 12th lecture of the first volume. The rest of the first volume is almost bizarrely rambling and nearly unreadable. It deals with many other issues apart from the war, including Norse mythology, Thomas More's "Utopia", 19th century dynastic wrangles in Serbia, etc. People interested in Steiner's take on the Great War might perhaps be advised to skip the first volume entirely, and only purchase the second.

For more on this subject, see my review of the second volume elsewhere on this site.