The Younger Generation is the standard English title for GA 217, a cycle of thirteen lectures Rudolf Steiner gave in Dornach, Switzerland, between 3 and 15 October 1922. The original German subtitle names the work more fully as lectures on the spiritual and pedagogical question of youth, and the audience was itself young: members of the German youth movement who had come to the Goetheanum looking for an answer to a question they could feel but not yet name. The cycle is among the most personal and diagnostic of Steiner's late courses. Rather than expounding a system, he reads the inner condition of a generation born around the turn of the century and asks what it is they are actually searching for. This study guide introduces what GA 217 contains, where it sits in Steiner's larger output, and how its central ideas connect to the glossary terms drawn from it.
Place in Steiner's Work
By 1922 Steiner had been lecturing for two decades, and the first Waldorf school in Stuttgart was three years old. The educational courses of that period are usually addressed to teachers and to method. GA 217 is different in aim. Here Steiner speaks not about how to teach children but about the young adults who had survived the First World War and emerged from it spiritually homeless. The lectures belong to the same cultural moment as his social writings on the threefold order, yet their tone is intimate rather than programmatic. He is answering a generation that distrusts every inherited answer, and he does so by treating that very distrust as a symptom worth understanding.
The cycle therefore stands at the meeting point of three streams in his work: the diagnosis of modern consciousness, the educational mission, and the cultural critique of nineteenth-century materialism. It is best read alongside his accounts of the modern soul rather than as a manual. What makes it distinctive is the warmth of the address. Steiner, by then in his early sixties, repeatedly tells his listeners that although the years have gathered, he has not let himself grow old, and he speaks to their unspoken longing as one who shares it.
Two recurring contrasts mark the cycle's place in his thought. The first is his claim that Middle Europe had forgotten Goethe and adopted Darwin, even though, in his reading, Goethe had grasped at its root the living knowledge of metamorphosis that Darwinism only indicates from the outside. The second is a vivid image he borrows from his own recent visit to Oxford, where a graduate friend wore the gown and cap that custom required. Steiner uses that surviving medieval costume as a picture of a Western culture that still carries an older spiritual heritage, set against a Central Europe that discarded the outer form and leapt straight into a materialistic style of thinking. These contrasts let him situate the youth question inside a long history of how thought itself has changed.
Themes and Structure
The thirteen lectures move from cultural diagnosis toward a hopeful charge, and several threads recur across the whole cycle. The opening lectures set out what Steiner saw as the spiritual sickness of the late nineteenth century. He describes how a finely shaped written and spoken language gave way to what he calls the empty phrase or cliche, and how this loss of inner truth spread into convention and into mere routine. When words sound from the mouth without soul, he argues, people pass one another by and can no longer truly meet. The louder a society calls for social reform, he adds, the surer the sign that genuine social feeling has gone missing.
A second thread is the rise of standpoints. As the old century closed, everyone began to insist on a personal position, materialist or idealist or realist, and these hardened into what Steiner pictures as a thin crust of ice over cultural life. The younger generation, with hearts warm but not yet articulate, felt the ground give way beneath this ice. He frames the youth movement as that warmth breaking through a frozen surface, a longing to recover living truth, real human community, and courage of spirit.
Steiner illustrates the cost of this hardened thinking with a concrete case. He recalls the Swabian physician Julius Robert Mayer, who arrived at the idea of the conservation of energy from observations made on a long voyage, and whose 1844 treatise was dismissed as amateurish by the leading scientific journal of the day. Because Mayer kept speaking of his discovery wherever he went, his contemporaries judged him deranged and committed him to an asylum, only for a later generation to raise a monument to him. The point, for Steiner, is not the error but the manner of the judgment, made out of phrase, convention, and routine rather than from any living understanding. He turns the same lens on a famous quotation, noting that Goethe is remembered for the cliche of asking for more light when, by Steiner's account, the dying poet actually asked only that the shutters be opened, a truer and homelier word than the polished phrase that replaced it.
Running underneath both threads is Steiner's account of intellectualism. He traces how concepts that once welled up from inner life became abstract, then took fresh life only from outward nature through observation and experiment. The result, he says, is a kind of thinking bound to nature that can explain the animal in man but never the human being as such. In the closing lecture he gives this its most vivid image: modern thought as a dragon that has become external and now threatens to devour the soul from outside. Against it he sets the figure of Michael, or Saint George, as a living spiritual knowledge that can master the dragon in our own age rather than in legend alone.
Education enters the cycle as the live question of the day precisely because, Steiner observes, people talk endlessly about it only when they feel uneducated and insecure in themselves. The deeper task he names is not a new program but the rediscovery of a forgotten inner source, the spiritual current he associates with Goethe and with the medieval world from which Goethe grew. The cycle ends less as a conclusion than as a summons to open the shutters the older generation had closed.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
Several entries in the Thalira glossary draw directly on GA 217. Each one expands a theme the cycle develops and can serve as a doorway into the wider web of Steiner's vocabulary:
- The Younger Generation: the cycle itself and Steiner's reading of a postwar generation in search of inner truth.
- Phrase, Convention, Routine: the threefold cultural decay Steiner names in the early lectures as the death of living speech, of real meeting, and of warm community.
- Intellectualism: the abstract, nature-bound thinking that Steiner pictures as the dragon, and whose overcoming is the cycle's hidden goal.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of GA 217 at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the published English translation of the cycle lecture by lecture. For print editions and current translations, search the catalogue at SteinerBooks. When you read the lectures themselves, keep in mind that Steiner is speaking to a specific gathering on specific evenings in October 1922, so the warmth and the direct address are part of the meaning, not decoration around it.
Continue Your Study
To set GA 217 in a wider context, follow these paths through the library:
- Browse the full Steiner glossary to trace terms such as intellectualism and the empty phrase across other volumes where they appear.
- Return to the GA Work Library to find Steiner's educational and social lectures from the same period, which share this cycle's concerns.
- Read the entry on Intellectualism first if you want the single thread that runs from the opening diagnosis to the closing image of Michael and the dragon.