GA 51, published in English as "Schiller, and Our Times" and gathered under the archive title "Philosophy, History and Literature," collects the lectures Rudolf Steiner gave to adult students at the Workmen's Educational School in Berlin during the years he directed its teaching. Most of the surviving material was spoken in 1904 and 1905, with one earlier evening on Shakespeare dating from May 1902. The volume is not a single argument but a set of related courses: an opening study of Shakespeare, a ten-part survey of the history of the Middle Ages, a nine-lecture cycle titled "Schiller and Our Times," and shorter addresses given to the Giordano Bruno Association on truth, monism, and the unity of the world. Across roughly two dozen sessions the recurring subject is the growth of the free human personality, traced through drama, medieval history, and the aesthetic philosophy of Friedrich Schiller.
Place in Steiner's Work
These talks belong to the period just before Steiner's public teaching turned fully toward spiritual science. He was still lecturing on literature, history, and philosophy to working men and women who wanted a serious education they had been denied, and the tone here is that of a cultural historian rather than an esotericist. Yet the concerns that would define his later path are already visible. The question he keeps returning to, how the individual soul frees itself from inherited tradition and finds a new inner center, is the same question that animates his books on knowledge and freedom.
Because the volume was assembled from notes taken by listeners, some of them without shorthand training, the texts vary in completeness. The Shakespeare lecture in particular survives only as a condensed record, its seven pages of typescript standing in for what was once a much fuller evening. This makes GA 51 valuable less as polished prose than as a window onto how Steiner taught ordinary audiences, building bridges from familiar works of art toward the deeper history of human consciousness.
It also helps to remember who sat in front of him. The Berlin Workmen's School served labourers and craftspeople, many of whom worked long days before coming to hear an evening lecture. Steiner did not talk down to them. He assumed that a factory worker could follow an argument about Greek tragedy, medieval law, or Kant's theory of duty, and he framed high culture as something that belonged to everyone rather than to a schooled elite. That democratic conviction gives the volume a warmth and directness not always present in his later, more technical courses.
Themes and Structure
The Shakespeare evening argues that the greatness of the plays lies in character rather than moral thesis. Steiner reads Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth as living individuals whom the poet allows to act from their own nature, and he links this achievement to the Renaissance discovery of the single human personality as something worth portraying for its own sake.
The medieval cycle then follows that discovery through history. Steiner contrasts Greek culture, built on conquest and on a low estimate of ordinary work, with the Germanic, Celtic, and Slavic peoples whose inner life valued the hero who fails outwardly yet keeps an upright soul. Where the Greeks and Romans admired the victor favoured by fortune, these northern peoples gave their sympathy to figures such as Siegfried and Roland, honouring courage in suffering rather than outward success. Out of this feeling for the worth of the person he traces the rise of the free cities, whose citizens counted for what they made of themselves rather than for any inherited title, the reform movements that stirred before Luther through Wycliffe and the Hussites, and the long approach to what he calls the modern consciousness of freedom. He ends the cycle with a striking claim, borrowed from Hegel, that history itself is the progress of humanity toward the consciousness of freedom.
The heart of the book is the Schiller cycle, delivered in Berlin between January and March 1905 to mark the centenary of the poet's death. Steiner sets Schiller between two currents of the eighteenth century: the mechanistic materialism of the French thinkers, who reduced the soul to matter, and the longing for personal freedom awakened by Rousseau. He reads Schiller's medical dissertations, his friendship with Goethe, his Wallenstein, and above all the "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man." In those letters Schiller seeks a middle ground between raw sense and rigid moral law, and Steiner presents beauty as the bridge between them. Where Kant made duty stand against inclination, Schiller wanted the two reconciled; in Steiner's phrasing he wanted passion so cleansed that it could become identical with duty. Beauty becomes a means of raising the human being to a higher form of existence.
He wanted passion to be so cleansed that it could become identical with duty.
Steiner also connects this aesthetic vision to the ancient origins of drama. He recalls how Greek tragedy grew out of the mystery cults, where the suffering and rising of the god was set before the spectator so that watching it could purify and ennoble the soul. The catharsis that Aristotle described, so long debated by later scholars, becomes for Steiner a memory of this older sacred function of the stage. Schiller, in this reading, was trying to give modern people something of the same experience, an art that lifts rather than merely entertains, so that the watcher stands before a work with an almost impersonal, godlike calm and sees an objective image of the world.
The closing Giordano Bruno addresses turn from art to knowledge, taking up the unity of the world, the relation of truth and science, and the meeting of monism with a spiritual view of nature. Named for the Renaissance philosopher who paid with his life for his vision of an infinite cosmos, this association drew Steiner into questions about how thought and perception combine to give us reality. Together the four groups of lectures move from a single dramatist to the whole sweep of European culture, and back again to the inner life of the person who must now find meaning without the old supports of tradition.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
One entry in the Thalira glossary draws directly on this volume. Follow the link below to study the term in depth, with its sources and cross references:
The Schiller cycle is the natural home for this entry, since nine of the volume's lectures are devoted to his life, his plays, his worldview, and his enduring meaning for later readers.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of these lectures for free at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the English translations of the Shakespeare, medieval history, and Schiller material along with the original German. For printed and scholarly editions, search the publisher catalogue at SteinerBooks. Because the volume gathers several distinct courses, it is worth reading each cycle on its own terms rather than as one continuous book.
Continue Your Study
To place this volume within Steiner's wider output and see how its themes connect to other lectures and writings, explore these paths:
- Browse the full Thalira glossary to see how the concept of the free personality links to Steiner's later spiritual science.
- Return to the GA Work Library to find study guides for neighbouring volumes on philosophy, art, and the life of the soul.
- Read the entry on Friedrich Schiller to follow the aesthetic and moral ideas that this cycle develops at length.