Der Kommende Tag was the Stuttgart joint-stock company Rudolf Steiner chaired from 1920 to 1923, built to carry the economic impulse of the threefold social organism.
Der Kommende Tag in Anthroposophy is the joint-stock company founded in Stuttgart in March 1920 for the promotion of economic and spiritual values, the most ambitious practical attempt to realize the economic sphere of Rudolf Steiner's threefold social organism. The company gathered a bank, farms, industrial works, a publishing house, a scientific research institute, and the Clinical-Therapeutic Institute under one associative roof, with Steiner chairing the supervisory board and Emil Leinhas serving as general manager. German hyperinflation and the indifference of leading economic circles forced retrenchment, and the company's crisis runs through the whole of 1923, recorded in GA 259, The Fateful Year of 1923. Steiner resigned the chairmanship in May 1923 to return to purely anthroposophical work, insisting that the enterprise be treated so that it would not lose its reputation. Its pharmaceutical work continued in what became Weleda, and the Waldorf School it helped carry lives on worldwide.
Der Kommende Tag, in English The Coming Day, was anthroposophy's economic flagship: shares purchased by members financed laboratories, workshops, farms, and the early Waldorf School. Its full name promised the promotion of economic and spiritual values, and its fate tested whether associative economics could survive inside a collapsing German economy. The 1923 protocols show Steiner defending the company's good name while withdrawing from its administration.
In Steiner's Own Words
One would be to close the Waldorf School; the other would be to pay out all the sums that have been paid in for shares. We must be clear about the consequences of everything. It is easy to make speeches, but we in the Society have institutions that must continue to function. Therefore it is not an easy matter when I have to address each individual member. You can't close the Waldorf School! You can't buy back the shares! But these are the real foundations for such an action. If I were now forced to do so, it would mean that nothing would remain of the old Anthroposophical Society but these real institutions. The “Kommende Tag” must be treated in such a way that it does not lose its reputation; the Waldorf School must continue to exist.
What it Means Today
The clearest way to see Der Kommende Tag today is through the company that outlived it. In 1921, while the Stuttgart holding still stood, its pharmaceutical laboratories and the parallel Swiss venture Futurum AG in Arlesheim gave rise to Weleda, co-founded by Rudolf Steiner, the physician Ita Wegman, and the chemist Oskar Schmiedel. When Der Kommende Tag was wound down in the mid 1920s, the remedies work continued under the Weleda name, and that firm now produces anthroposophic medicines and natural cosmetics from Arlesheim for markets in dozens of countries.
The pattern matters more than the survival story. The holding tried to bind banking, industry, agriculture, science, and publishing into one associative body, and the German hyperinflation of 1922 and 1923 crushed the experiment before it could mature. What persisted were the organs with a living cultural task: the medicines, the school, the publishing. Thalira's synthesis: Der Kommende Tag shows that in Steiner's economics capital behaves like seed grain, so when the surrounding soil fails, only what is planted directly in spiritual and cultural work germinates again, which is why the balance sheet died in Stuttgart while the pharmacy still lives in Arlesheim. For readers weighing ventures in ethical banking or social enterprise, the 1923 protocols read as a sober casebook: Steiner never disowned the company, he defended its reputation while separating the Society's spiritual work from company administration, a distinction any founder dividing mission from management still has to draw.
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