Among the volumes of Rudolf Steiner's collected works, The Course of My Life (GA 28) holds a singular place: it is his autobiography, the only sustained account he ever gave of his own biography in his own words. The book is not a lecture cycle but a written prose narrative, composed serially in the closing years of his life. Steiner began it in late 1923 and continued it as a weekly installment in the periodical Das Goetheanum, and the work was left incomplete at his death in March 1925. Across its thirty-eight chapters he traces his path from a childhood at small Austrian railway stations through his student years in Vienna, his Goethe scholarship in Weimar, his Berlin period as a literary editor, and finally into the years when he became a public teacher of anthroposophy. The core subject is not external events for their own sake but the inner development of a way of knowing, told so that readers can see how the man and the spiritual science he founded belong to one continuous life.
Place in Steiner's Work
Most of Steiner's collected works are transcribed lectures, given to audiences and only later set into print. GA 28 is different. He wrote it himself, deliberately, and he wrote it late, after the founding of the Anthroposophical Society and after the first Goetheanum had been destroyed by fire. That timing matters. By 1923 his life and teaching had become the subject of public dispute, and people were drawing conclusions about supposed reversals in his thinking. He states at the outset that he took up the narration chiefly to set a true light, by an objective written account, on the consistency between his life and the cause he had fostered.
He is also candid that writing it ran against his temperament. It had been his habit, he says, to let the matter at hand decide what he would say and do, rather than to draw attention to his own personality. The personal element, in his view, ought to show itself through how a person speaks and acts, not through conscious attention to the self. He undertakes the account only because friends had pressed it on him and because the false judgments seemed to him to warrant a reply. This reluctance shapes the tone of the whole book, which stays sober and reflective rather than confessional.
This gives the autobiography an unusual function within the corpus. It is the personal counterpart to his philosophical books, such as his theory of knowledge and his account of freedom, and to the long arc of lecture cycles. Where those works present ideas, GA 28 shows where the ideas came from and how one biography carried them. The reader who has met a given concept in a lecture can return here to find the lived occasion behind it: a question first felt at a railway station, a difficulty worked out over years of editing, a friendship or an antagonism that sharpened a thought. For anyone wanting to understand the shape of Steiner's entire output, this volume is the connective tissue, the thread on which the rest can be strung.
It is worth noting what the book is not. It is not a systematic doctrine, and Steiner does not pause to argue his positions here. Anyone seeking the content of anthroposophy as a body of teaching should look to the dedicated works; GA 28 supplies the human frame around them. Read in that spirit, it answers a question the other volumes cannot: why this particular person came to think and teach as he did.
Themes and Structure
The book moves chronologically, and its thirty-eight chapters fall into clear life-phases. The early chapters describe a boyhood spent at small railway stations in Lower Austria and at a Hungarian border village, where the young Steiner felt drawn both to the machinery of the line and to the surrounding mountains and forests. He recounts an early and persistent question about the difference between what the senses show and what stands behind them. As a boy he could enter the friendly village mill and watch the miller at work, but a nearby factory was closed to him, and that closed door became for him an image of the limits of ordinary understanding and a spur to cross them. Such small scenes are chosen for what they reveal about the inner life, not for their incident.
A central section concerns Goethe, and it is the longest sustained theme in the book. Commissioned to edit Goethe's natural-scientific writings for a major German literary edition, Steiner spent years interpreting Goethe in Goethe's own way. He describes this labour as the school in which his own knowledge slowly matured, and he says plainly that the task, set by destiny, slowed his own development but deepened it, forcing him to strive inward rather than simply set down his own perceptions. He read Goethe not as a poet who dabbled in science but as a thinker who held living ideas, images alive in the form of thought rather than abstractions. Goethe, he writes, stood within the spiritual when he spoke of nature, yet refrained from describing the spiritual world directly; Steiner saw his own task as carrying that knowledge one step further, toward an explicit grasp of the spirit itself.
The Vienna and Berlin chapters widen the circle to take in the intellectual figures of the age. He writes of his encounter with the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose first book he read with a mixture of fascination and resistance. He loved the style and the boldness, he says, but mistrusted the way Nietzsche treated the deepest problems without consciously immersing his soul in them; Nietzsche seemed to him one of the most tragic figures of the time, a casualty of the scientific age. He also describes his years editing a literary weekly magazine in Berlin, an old journal founded in the year of Goethe's death, and his immersion in the artistic and literary currents of the eighteen-nineties, including his contact with the circle of younger writers gathered around the Free Literary Society.
The later chapters turn to his public work. He describes how a lecturing audience formed of people who found satisfaction neither in the scientific world-view nor in the traditional creeds, and how this audience grew as he gave them what they sought. The closing chapters move toward the early life of the Society he led, and here the narrative draws so near to the present that, by his own admission, he must choose carefully which names to mention. The book breaks off in these years, unfinished. Throughout, Steiner keeps the focus inward. External episodes are reported, but always as occasions for an inner step, so that the work reads as the biography of a developing cognition as much as of a man.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
The Thalira glossary draws on GA 28 as a primary source for several entries. This volume serves as a hub for the following terms, each of which cites it directly:
Because the autobiography is told in Steiner's own voice, it is an unusually direct witness for these entries: the biographical facts of his life, the nature of his early association with organized Theosophy, and his considered reading of Nietzsche all trace back to passages in this book.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of GA 28 at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the complete English translation alongside the original German. Print editions can be found through SteinerBooks, the principal English-language publisher of Steiner's works.
Continue Your Study
This study guide is one entry point. To go further:
- Browse the Thalira glossary to follow the key terms above into their own detailed entries, each cross-linked to the volumes that ground it.
- Use the biographical thread of GA 28 as a map: read the Rudolf Steiner entry first for the life in outline, then return to the autobiography for the inner account in his own words.
- Compare Steiner's self-account with his early philosophical works, so that the ideas you meet in the lectures can be traced back to the biography that produced them.